Category: Leftism and Political Correctness

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 got confused.  He said '57' instead of '47.' 

But here's the thing.  Had George Bush or Ronald Reagan or any conservative made this mistake, liberals would have seized upon it as proof of stupidity.  This says something about liberals.  For a liberal, conservatives are stupid no matter how much intelligence they display, and liberals are the opposite no matter how much stupidity they manifest, for example, the stupidity of thinking that one can spend one's way out of debt.

So who is really stupid?

What Explains the Hard Left’s Toleration of Militant Islam?

From 1789 on, a defining characteristic of the Left has been hostility to religion, especially in its institutionalized forms. This goes together with a commitment to such Enlightenment values as individual liberty, belief in reason, and equality, including equality among the races and between the sexes. Thus the last thing one would expect from the Left is an alignment with militant Islam given the latter’s philosophically unsophisticated religiosity bordering on rank superstition, its totalitarian moralism, and its opposition to gender equality.

So why is the radical Left soft on militant Islam?  The values of the progressive creed are antithetic to those of the Islamists, and it is quite clear that if the Islamists got everything they wanted, namely, the imposition of Islamic law on the entire world, our dear progressives would soon find themselves headless. I don’t imagine that theylong to live under Sharia, where ‘getting stoned’ would have more than metaphorical meaning. So what explains this bizarre alignment?

Continue reading “What Explains the Hard Left’s Toleration of Militant Islam?”

I’m a Racist Because I Disagree with You?

Then you are a racist for disagreeing with me. For I have a race too.  I'm a sexist because I dissent from your opinion?  Then you are a sexist for disagreeing with me.  For I have a sex too.  I'm an ageist because I don't buy your point of view?  Then you are an ageist for disagreeing with me.  For I have an age too.

And one more thing.  It is your liberal-left adherence to the double standard that make it impossible for you to 'get it.'

The Jockstrap Bomber

That's what I call him.  Michael Medved call hims the ding-a-ling bomber.  Whatever he and his ilk are called, they need to be stopped, and political correctness be damned.  Alan Dershowitz makes some suggestions in Stopping the Next Underwear Bomber.  Here is one of his excellent points:

Nor have we learned enough from the near successes of the shoe and underwear bombers. In both cases, we should have acted as if they had succeeded. That they did not had absolutely nothing to do with our security, but rather with a factor over which the would-be terrorists had complete control, namely improving the effectiveness of their explosive triggers. Imagine what the reaction would have been if hundreds of Detroit-bound passengers had been murdered. That is what the reaction should now be to this near-catastrophe.

Continue reading “The Jockstrap Bomber”

How the Left Sees the Right

David Horowitz, Left Illusions: An Intellectual Odyssey (Spence, 2003), p. 273:

The image of the right that the left has concocted — authoritarian, reactionary, bigoted, mean-spirited — is an absurd caricature that has no relation to modern conservatism or to the reality of the people I have come to know in my decade-long movement along the political spectrum — or to the way I see myself. Except for a lunatic fringe, American conservatism is not about "blood and soil" nostalgia or conspiracy paranoia, which figure so largely in imaginations that call themselves "liberal," but are anything but. Modern American conservatism is a reform movement that seeks to reinvent free markets and limited government and to restore somewhat traditional values. Philosophically, conservatism is more accurately seen as a species of liberalism itself — and would be more often described in this way were it not for the hegemony the left exerts in the political culture and its appropriation of the term "liberal" to obscure its radical agenda.

I've bolded the crucial thought. Note the qualifier 'modern American.' One of the reasons the original neocons (Norman Podhoretz, Irving Kristol, et al.) called themselves such was to differentiate their classically liberal position from the leftism into which liberalism was transmogrifying. Of course, there is much to discuss here. There is a paleocon element in contemporary American conservatism to which Horowitz is perhaps not sufficiently attending. But this is a huge topic . . . .

‘Merry Xmas’

When I was eight years old or so and first took note of the phrase 'Merry Xmas,' my piety was offended by what I took to be the removal of 'Christ' from 'Christmas' only to be replaced by the universally recognized symbol for an unknown quantity, 'X.' But it wasn't long before I realized that the 'X' was merely a font-challenged typesetter's attempt at rendering the Greek Chi, an ancient abbreviation for 'Christ.' There is therefore nothing at all offensive in the expression 'Xmas.' Year after year, however, certain ignorant Christians who are old enough to know better make the mistake that I made when I was eight and corrected when I was ten. See here.

It just now occurs to me that 'Xmas' may be susceptible of a quasi-Tillichian reading.  Paul Tillich is famous for his benighted definition of 'God' as 'whatever is one's ultimate concern.' Well, take the 'X' in 'Xmas' as a variable the values of which are whatever one wants to celebrate at this time of year. So for some, 'Xmas' will amount to Solsticemas, for burglars Swagmas, for materialists Lootmas, for gluttons Foodmas, for inebriates Hoochmas, and for ACLU extremists Antichristianitymas.

Bilingual Education and the Left’s Diversity Fetish

My mother was born near Rome and didn't come to the United States until she was ten years old. She quickly learned English, she became completely fluent, and she spoke without an accent. But I wonder what would have happened if there had been a bilingual education program in place in the New York schools and she had been forced to participate in it. I think the answer is obvious: she would have had more difficulty learning English and she would not have learned it as well as she did.

And that fact would have impeded her assimilation. So why is there any support for bilingual education? It is a foolish idea on the face of it, and it harms those it is supposed to help.

Related articles
Tribal America
Undocumented Injun

Diversity and the Quota Mentality

Liberals emphasize the value of diversity, and with some justification. Many types of diversity are good. One thinks of culinary diversity, musical diversity, artistic diversity generally. Biodiversity is good, and so is a diversity of opinions, especially insofar as such diversity makes possible a robustly competitive market place of ideas wherein the best rise to the top. A diversity of testable hypotheses is conducive to scientific progress. And so on.

Continue reading “Diversity and the Quota Mentality”

A Common Liberal Fallacy: The Diachronic Red Herring

Much opposition to contemporary political conservatism involves a curious argumentative fallacy that I shall dub the Diachronic Red Herring. A liberal succumbs to this fallacy when he (i) appeals to the past accomplishments of liberalism to justify contemporary liberalism while ignoring the ways in which contemporary liberalism has come to occupy extreme positions; and (ii) criticizes contemporary conservatism by bringing up past failings of conservatives while ignoring the fact that contemporary conservatism accepts many of the advances of paleo-liberalism.


Continue reading “A Common Liberal Fallacy: The Diachronic Red Herring”

Mangan’s Blog Has Been Removed

If you try to access Dennis Mangan's weblog you receive the message: Sorry, the blog at mangans.blogspot.com has been removed.  (HT: Malcolm Pollack)  If you were to ask me to speculate I would say that the forces of political correctness have something to do with this.  I quit using the Blogger/Blogspot platform almost six year ago, and I don't understand why people stick with it, apart from the fact that it is free.  Note the link to "report abuse" and "objectionable content" at the top of the Blogger homepage.  You can bet that idiots in great numbers will abuse this link, idiots who do not appreciate the good old classically liberal values of toleration, open inquiry, and free speech.

For more discussion of the Mangan case, see Malcolm Pollack's post Thoughtcrime, and a post by Laurence Auster. 

UPDATE (5:15 PM):  Mangan informs me that he is back in the saddle, here, at Typepad.

UPDATE (4 December):  I see that Mangan's old blog has been restored by the powers that be.  Interestingly, if you Google 'Mangan's' you are shown a link to his Racial Consciousness.  It  is but speculation on my part, but I should think that it is posts like this that certain people find objectionable, and that got him blacked out,  if only temporarily.

Go read the post and ask yourself if there is anything in it that a reasonable person could find 'hateful' or 'racist' or sufficiently objectionable to warrant censure.  If you answer in the affirmative, then you brand yourself as hopelessly obtuse, both morally and intellectually.