Maverick Philosopher

Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

Category: Leftism and Political Correctness

  • Green Fascism

    By not tuning into the Stupor Bowl yesterday, I missed some great commercials.  Here is one of them.  Ignore the bit about the Audi. The Tim Tebow pro-life ad seems to have stirred up some inane controversy, which fact prompts the question:  How many proctologists does it take to bring the average leftist loon's head…

  • Haiku Commentary on Marx’s 11th Thesis on Feuerbach

    The Marxist Nowhere Man Attempts to change What he does not understand.

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • Hallmark of the Left: The Double-Standard

    Here.

  • 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…

  • Does Poverty Cause Crime?

    You've heard me say more than once that poverty no more causes crime than wealth causes virtue.  Heather MacDonald provides empirical confirmation in A Crime Theory Demolished.  Lawlessness has fallen while joblessness has risen.

  • 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…

  • ‘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…

  • Addicted to Food?

    Can one be addicted to food? If yes, then I am addicted to exposing liberal nonsense. What I have said more than once about the non-addictiveness of tobacco can be applied mutatis mutandis to food 'addiction':

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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)…

  • 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…

  • The Climate Science Isn’t Settled

    Three questions: Is global warming occurring?  Is is anthropogenic?  Is it sufficiently serious to warrant massive action?  There is no good reason to think that all three questions have an affirmative answer.  Here is an article by Richard S. Lindzen, professor of meteorology at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. What is truly disturbing in all this is the…