Category: Leftism and Political Correctness

Helen Thomas Disgraces Herself

Good riddance to this superannuated leftist gasbag.  Former mayor of NYC, Ed Koch, delivers a just and fitting verdict:

Helen Thomas, 89, who is of Lebanese descent, claims to be a professional journalist. As such, she is subject to professional standards. Her statement that Jews should “get the hell out of Palestine” and go back to "Poland and Germany" is clear evidence that she is no longer in control of her emotions and cognitive powers and that she cannot carry out the impartial obligations of a journalist. She has disgraced herself.

Jews have lived in the area known in modern times as the British Mandate of Palestine, for thousands of years and up to the present time. Indeed, Israelite civilization goes back to the Patriarchs Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, as well as to King David and King Solomon. We Jews spring from the loins of those patriarchs. The State of Israel sits where the Jewish Kingdoms of Judea and Israel reigned thousands of years ago.

Referring to the Israeli boarding of the Mavi Marmara, she spoke wildly of a “deliberate massacre, an international crime,” and said the U.S. response was “pitiful.” See here.  Thomas is  a fool of no consequence, but what is truly troubling is to observe leftist collaboration with Islamists.  An amazing phenomenon.  I take a stab at analysis in The Converse Callicles Principle: Weakness Does not Justify.

Addendum (8 June):  From Helen of Oy!:

Anti-Semitism: With the state of Israel facing an existential threat, journalism's grand dame advocates ethnic cleansing as a Mideast solution. Liberal intolerance has come out of the closet.

The "retirement" of Helen Thomas comes as no surprise. Neither did the remarks that prompted it. She's expressed such sentiments before, and her brethren in the White House press corps, which salivates over any politically incorrect utterance from the right, let her get away with it.

She got away with it for the same reason those on the left from Bill Maher to Keith Olbermann get away with similar over-the-top sentiments. It depends on whose political ox is being gored. Tea Partyers who oppose the policies of the first black president are racists. Genuine bigots on the left are celebrated. (emphasis added)

Once again the leftist double standard in action.

The Essence of Progressivism

From George F. Will, The Limits of the Welfare State:

Lack of "a limiting principle" is the essence of progressivism, according to William Voegeli, contributing editor of the Claremont Review of Books, in his new book "Never Enough: America's Limitless Welfare State." The Founders, he writes, believed that free government's purpose, and the threats to it, is found in nature. The threats are desires for untrammeled power, desires which, Madison said, are "sown in the nature of man." Government's limited purpose is to protect the exercise of natural rights that pre-exist government, rights that human reason can ascertain in unchanging principles of conduct and that are essential to the pursuit of happiness.

An excellent article.  Read it all.

Thanks to the Left: Balkanization, Tribalism, Civil War

For more than two centuries, individuals with diverse backgrounds have come together to form a national ‘melting pot’ and harmonious society sustained by allegiance to the country and its founding principles. But today’s open-ended mass migration, coupled with the destructive influences of biculturalism, multiculturalism, bilingualism, multilingualism, dual citizenship, and affirmative action, have combined to form the building blocks of a different kind of society—where aliens are taught to hold tightly to their former cultures and languages, balkanization grows, antagonism and conflict are aroused, and victimhood is claimed at perceived slights. If a nation does not show and teach respect for its own identity, principles, and institutions, that corrosive attitude is conveyed to the rest of the world, including newly arriving aliens. And if this is unchecked, the nation will ultimately cease to exist.
Mark Levin, Liberty and Tyranny: A Conservative Manifesto, (New York: Threshold Editions, 2009), pp. 160-161.  Here.

Are Immigration Laws Discriminatory?

Liberals routinely complain that immigration laws such as the recently enacted Arizona Senate Bill 1070 are 'discriminatory.'  This is nonsense, of course, but it is important to understand why.

1.  Let's start with the very notion of discrimination.  Discrimination as such is neither good nor bad.  In this respect it is like change.  Change as such  is neither good nor bad: there is change for the good and change for the bad.  Change for the good is improvement, but not all change is improvement.  (Obama take note.)  Similarly, there is justifiable discrimination and unjustifiable discrimination.  As a matter of fact we all discriminate all the time.  When you refuse to eat rotten food and insist on fresh, you are discriminating.  When you forbid your children from associating with crackheads, you are discriminating.  When you sort arguments into the valid and the invalid, you are discriminating.  When you accept the true and reject the false, you are discriminating.  Such discriminations are obviously justifiable.  But that is to understate the point.  Anyone who fails to discriminate between people with whom it would be dangerous for his children to associate and those with whom it would not be dangerous is  guilty of dereliction of parental duty. Discrimination is not only in a vast range of cases permissible; it is obligatory.

2.  The same goes for laws.  Every law discriminates against those who either do or fail to do the actions either proscribed or prescribed by the law.  A law that proscribes the operation of a motor vehicle while intoxicated discriminates against drunk drivers. Is that a problem?  Of course not.  Discrimination in cases like these is obviously justifiable. 

3.  So there is a clear sense in which SB 1070 is discriminatory:  it discriminates against those who are in the country illegally.  Now I hope our liberal pals are not opposed to 1070 for its being discriminatory in this sense.  Presumably, what they will say is that it 'targets' Hispanics and discriminates against them unjustifiably.  But this is a false and scurrilous allegation.  It does not 'target' Hispanics, it targets illegal aliens.  Of course, the vast majority of illegal aliens in the Southwest are Hispanics.  But that is irrelevant.  The objection to them is not that they are Hispanic, but that they are illegal.

It takes a little subtlety of mind to understand this, but not that much.  Suppose someone said that drunk driving  laws are unjust because they disproportionately affect those of Irish extraction.  You would of course respond that if they are the ones who are doing most of the drunk driving, then it only right that they should be the ones who disproportionately suffer the penalty.  You would point out that, even if it is true that most drunk drivers are Irish, the objection to them is not that they are Irish, but that they are drunk drivers.

4.  1070 does not unfairly 'target' Hispanics despite the barrage of lies emanating from the Left.  So what are liberals/leftists really opposed to? They are opposed to the very notion of national sovereignty and national borders.  They simply do not want border control.  But being  mendacious, they will not come out and clearly state that.  So they use weasel phrases like 'comprehensive immigration reform' which either mean nothing or are code for amnesty and open borders. 

Cardinal Mahony, nAZi Hunter

When I first landed in Arizona, way back in 1991, I noticed bumper stickers that read, 'Do AZ I do.'  Well, if you do AZ I do, does that make you a nAZi?

Apparently, Cardinal Roger Mahony,  Catholic Archbiship of Los Angeles, thinks so: "I can't imagine Arizonans now reverting to German Nazi and Russian Communist techniques whereby people are required to turn one another in to the authorities on any suspicion of documentation."  Go read his entire post.  It's beneath refutation.  Yet another clear proof that the Roman church is on the skids.

I would advise my Catholic friends to consider what you are supporting when you support this church.  What matters in life is truth, not any old corrupt institution that claims to have it.  You should be skeptical of all institutions, while acknowledging the good that they have done and can do. They are easily corrupted.  Like the houses where I live,  they either have termites or they will get them.

What you have to understand about religious leftists like Mahony is that they have two religions, their nominal religion and the 'religion' of leftism.  And the second usually trumps the first.

Arizona SB 1070: The Threat is Stronger than the Execution

Eine Drohung ist stärker als eine Ausführung is a saying often attributed to grandmaster Aron Nimzovich.  (On the correctness of the attribution, chess aficionados will find interesting this piece by Edward Winter.)  It occurred to me this morning that the maxim also applies to SB 1070, about which I have said quite a bit of late. (Scroll down.) The law doesn't go into effect until July 29th, and already illegals are leaving the state in significant numbers.  See here, and here.

In the 1070 case, not only is the threat stronger than the execution, the perceived threat is stronger and far more effective  than the real threat.  But liberals, in their preternatural obtuseness, have only themselves to blame for this.  By egregiously and willfully misrepresenting the law, by their hyperbole and hysteria,   they are bringing about the very effect — the attrition of lawbreakers — that the framers of the law intended!  Way to go!

Another thing I get a kick out of  is the call to boycott, not merely the Grand Canyon State, but the Grand Effing Canyon herself.  Don't these nimrods understand that it is a national park and that revenues lost will be lost, not to Arizona, but  to the federal government that liberals want ever to expand?  The fewer visitors to the Grand Canyon the better.  More solitude for me and mine.

I'll bet the shade of old 'Cactus Ed' Abbey is having a good laugh over this.

Is Hegel Guilty of ‘Epochism’?

Hegel In these politically correct times we hear much of racism, sexism, ageism, speciesism, and even heterosexism. Why not then epochism, the arbitrary denigration of entire historical epochs? Some years back, a television commentator referred to the Islamist beheading of Nicholas Berg as “medieval.” As I remarked to my wife, “That fellow is slamming an entire historical epoch.”

The names of the other epochs are free of pejorative connotation even though horrors occurred in these epochs the equal of any in the medieval period. Why then are the Middle Ages singled out for special treatment? This is no mean chunk of time. It stretches from, say, the birth of Augustine in 354 A.D. , or perhaps from the closing of the Platonic Academy in 529 A. D., to the birth of Descartes in 1596, albeit with plenty of bleed-through on either end: Greek notions reach deep into the Middle Ages, while medieval notions live on in Descartes and beyond.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) counts as an epochist. When he comes to the medieval period in his Lectures on the History of Philosophy, he puts on his “seven-league boots” the better to pass over this thousand year period without sullying his fine trousers. (Vol. III, 1) Summing up the “General Standpoint of the Scholastics,” he has this to say: “…this Scholasticism on the whole is a barbarous philosophy of the finite understanding, without real content, which awakens no true interest in us, and to which we cannot return.” “Barren,” and “rubbishy” are other terms with which he describes it. (Vol. III, 94-95)

The politically correct may wish to consider whether the descendants of Hegel should pay reparations to the descendants of Thomas Aquinas, et al.

Arizona Senate Bill 1070

Arizona Senate Bill 1070 "requires a reasonable attempt to be made to determine the immigration status of a person during any legitimate contact made by an official or agency of the state or a county, city, town . . . if reasonable suspicion exists that the person is an alien who is unlawfully present in the U.S."  See here and here for the full text.

That illegal aliens and those who profit from them should object to this legislation comes as no surprise.  But it does come as a bit of surprise to find native Arizonan Victor Reppert, who to my knowledge neither employs, nor defends in courts of law, nor otherwise profits from illegal aliens, saying this at his blog:

Police in our state have now been given the authority to demand papers on anyone of whom they have a reasonable suspicion that they are illegal aliens. The trouble is, about the only reason for suspicion that I can think of that someone is in the country illegally is if they have brown skin, or speak Spanish instead of English, or English with an Mexican accent.

I'm afraid Victor isn't thinking very hard.  He left out the bit about " during any legitimate contact made by an official . . . ."  Suppose a cop pulls over a motorist who has a tail light out. He asks to see the motorist's driver's license.  The driver doesn't have one.  That fact, by itself, does not prove that the motorist is an illegal alien; but together with other facts (no registration, no proof of insurance, speaks no English . . .) could justify an inquiry into the motorist's immigration status.  Hundreds of examples like this are generable ad libitum.

S. B. 1070 is a reasonable response  to the Federal government's failure to enforce U. S. immigration law.  Border control is a legitimate, constitutionally-grounded function of government. (See Article I, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution.)  When the Feds fail to uphold the rule of law, the states, counties, etc. must do so.  If you don't understand why we need border control, I refer you to my longer piece, Immigration Legal and Illegal.

According to one 'argument,' Arizona Senate Bill 1070 disproportionately targets Hispanics and is objectionable for that reason.  That's like arguing that the RICO statutes disproportionately target Italians.  I don't know whether people of Italian extraction are disproportionately involved in organized crime, but if they are, then that is surely no valid objection to the RICO statutes.  The reason Hispanics will be disproportionately affected is because they disproportionately break the immigration laws.    The quota mentality is behind this 'argument.'