Maverick Philosopher

Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

Category: Leftism and Political Correctness

  • Latest Lunacy from Planet Left: The Right to a Vacation

    Political disagreement has become 'planetary':  Right and Left occupy different planets. The proliferation of 'rights' is a central feature of Planet Left.  If it were April Fool's Day I'd suspect the following of being a bad joke.  But I fear it is not:  The European Union has declared travelling a human right, and is launching a…

  • Old Radicals’ Rest

    Do old leftists ever die, or do they just fade away — into a red sunset? Some reds end up at Sunset Hall near MacArthur Park in Los Angeles.

  • Anti-Tea Party Bias in the New York Times

    The usual left-wing tilt of the NYT's Tea Party coverage is not so egregious in this recent piece.  But even when they try to be fair they can't seem to pull it off.  The piece opens with the following sentence: The Tea Party Movement is a diffuse American grass-roots group that taps into antigovernment sentiments.…

  • The Lefty Lexicon

    A U.K reader writes, You may find this a useful aid for the political side of your blog : The Lefty Lexicon. Certain departments of my university are rife with political bias . It was quite the wake-up call  when I heard that my class-representative had been charged with the racist card by one of…

  • More Slander and Scumbaggery from the Dems: Steve Cohen D-TN

    All these leftist haters have is the race card.  Unbelievable.

  • The Racism Charge: The Left’s Attempt to Shut Down Debate

    In The Faith of a Liberal, Morris Raphael Cohen writes that "The touchstone that enables us to recognize liberalism is the question of toleration . . . ." Now if toleration is the touchstone of liberalism, there is nothing liberal about contemporary liberals.  They should therefore not be called 'liberals' but leftists.  There is nothing tolerant…

  • Leftist Terms of Abuse

    Here is a partial list of terms liberals/ leftists apply to virtually every idea or action or person with which or with whom they differ: RacistSexistXenophobic  HomophobicIslamophobicImperialistBigotedIntolerant

  • The Left’s Hatred of Conservative Talk Radio

    The qualifier 'conservative' borders on pleonasm: there is is scarcely any talk radio in the U.S. worth talking about that is not conservative.  This is part of the reason the Left hates the conservative variety so much.  They hate it because of its content, and they hate it because they are incapable of competing with it: their…

  • Should Conservatives Take the High Road When Opposing the Left?

    This just over the transom from a regular reader: Your recent, small quip about the possibility of accusing liberals of racism had me curious of something. Clearly you think that many on the left use unfair or unjust means of persuasion (Attempting to label their opponents as racists, for example.) And I've often heard it…

  • Living Right While Thinking Left

    Liberals who have amounted to something in life through advanced study, hard work, deferral of   gratification, self-control, accepting responsibility for their actions and the rest of the old-fashioned virtues are often strangely  hesitant to preach those same conservative virtues to those most in need of them. These liberals  live Right and garner the benefits, but…

  • Trotsky’s Faith

    The last days of Lev Davidovich Bronstein, better known as Leon Trotsky, prime mover of the October 1917 Russian Revolution, are the subject of Bertrand M. Patenaude's Trotsky: The Downfall of a Revolutionary (HarperCollins, 2009).  It held my interest from the first page to the last, skillfully telling the story of Trotsky's Mexican exile, those who…

  • Progressives and the Growing Dependency Agenda

    A must-read from the pen of George Will.  And here is a balanced discussion of the Tea Party movement by the blogging biker, Mike Valle.

  • More Fun With Alienans Adjectives and an Application

    My bathroom sinks are made of faux marble, which is to say that they are not made of marble: false marble is not marble.  So faux and 'false' function here as alienans adjectives. Similar cases: false gold, falsies, false friend.  But 'false' in 'false teeth' is not an alienans adjective: false teeth are teeth just…

  • Liberal Condescension

    Why are liberals so condescending?  Especially when they are so frightfully wrong about so frightfully much?  Gerard Alexander's WaPo article is an outstanding piece of analysis.  Liberal disdain is expressed "in the form of four major narratives about who conservatives are and how they think and function."

  • Innumeracy at the Highest Levels?

    Barack Obama claims to have visited 57 U. S. states.  He also claimed that he had one more to go and that he wasn't allowed by his staff to visit Hawaii or Alaska.  Does he really think there are 60 states?  Of course not.  Let's be charitable.  The man was very, very tired and he…