Category: Leftism and Political Correctness

Some Things I Look For in a Movie: A Rant

1. No mindless 'action.' No race and chase, crash and burn. I am not a robot, so I don't want to watch a movie made by  robots about robots for robots.

2.  No gratuitous sex, violence, and offensive language. I have no objection to sex, violence, and bad language as such. There is a time and place for each.  I would have no problem, for example, with blowing a home invader to Kingdom Come where he is more likely to receive justice than here below from a criminal justice system lousy with tolerate-anything liberals.  But sex, violence and bad language  ought not be thrown in for no reason or just to titillate or offend in the manner of the adolescent (whatever his age) who thinks it cool to append the F-ing qualifier to every F-ing word.   Example: the opening scenes of Titanic.

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Diversity and Divisiveness

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.

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Cash For Clunkers

The lunkheads of the Left really outdid themselves when they dreamed up this new wealth redistribution scheme.  An acquaintance of mine told me of his son who turned in a 1989 Ford pickup with over 200, 000 miles on the odometer, a  vehicle worth $50 according to my friend, a former mechanic, and received $4,500 of taxpayers' money, not to mention a dealer rebate on the purchase of a new car.  Nice deal, eh?  Our ever-expanding socialist government brokers a transaction in which some of us get to steal from the rest of us.  It is crazy both morally and economically.  But the people will lap it up along with panem et circenses, 'free' health care, and what all else.  They will lap it up until there is nothing more to lap up and the republic goes the way of ancient Rome.  For more on this depressing topic, take a gander at Michael Barone's Cash for Clunkers: Not the First Time.  Something similar was tried in my beautiful State of Arizona.  I think of poor Barry Goldwater, rolling around in his grave.

The White House Beer Summit

Negra_modelo

So what's on tap?  If Officer Crowley shows up with a sixpack of Negra Modelo, will he be accused of racism by Professor Gates?  After all 'negra' might remind someone of 'nigger.'  Not long ago the use of the word 'niggardly' cost a man his job because it reminded some fools of 'nigger.'  I am not making this up.  I wish it were only a bad joke.  But it is not, and it shows the depths of liberal-left lunacy.  But if Crowley were to contribute a sixpack of Coors, then he would no doubt be a Nazi: the patriarch of the Coors clan rejoiced under the first name, 'Adolph.'  And that might remind some fool of Adolf Hiter.  In the Leftist Playbook, Hitler is evil incarnate, but Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot are not to be mentioned.

Actually, mixing Negra Modelo with Coors might be just the solution.  You'd have your dark and your light blended together, 'integrated' if you will.   And therefore dark.  Just like Obama: half black, half white, and therefore black.  You see, in 'racist America,' where no black person has a chance — unless he is an Affirmative Action hire at Harvard University, or President, or Secretary of State — when a person is both black and white, then he is black.  The first black president?  Black + White = Black?  Lefty logic for you.

Of Black Holes and Political Correctness: If You Take Offense, Is That My Fault?

Suppose a white person uses the phrase 'black hole' in the presence of a black person either in its literal cosmological meaning or in some objectively inoffensive metaphorical sense, and the black person takes offense and complains that the phrase is 'racially insensitive.' Actual case here. Compare that with a case in which a white person uses 'nigger' in the presence of a black person.

I have just marked out two ends of a semantic spectrum. 'Black hole' used either literally or in some not-too-loose analogy to the literal meaning — as in 'black hole' used to refer to a windowless office — cannot be taken by any rational person as a racial slur. For 'black' in 'black hole' has nothing to do with race. But 'nigger' used by a white person is a racial slur.

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Ten Questions for Supporters of ‘ObamaCare’

The following piece by Dennis Prager is required reading.  It's so good I herewith reproduce the entire article.  The threat to liberty posed by the Obama administration is unprecedented.  Do your bit to oppose it and stand up for what is right, assuming you actually care about yourself and your country. 

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A Right to Health Care?

Food, shelter, and clothing are more important than health care in that one can get along for substantial periods of time without health care services but one cannot survive for long without food, shelter, and clothing. Given this plain fact, why don’t the proponents of ‘free’ universal health care demand ‘free’ food, shelter, and clothing? In other words, if a citizen, just in virtue of being a citizen, has a right to health care, why doesn’t the same citizen have the right to what is more fundamental, namely, food, shelter, and clothing?

Why isn't health care a commodity in the way that automotive care is? If I want my car to run well, I must service it periodically. I can either do this myself or hire someone to do it for me. But surely I have no right to the free services of an auto mechanic. Of course, once I contract with a mechanic to do a specified job for a specified sum of money, then I have a right to his services and to his services being performed correctly. But that right is contingent upon our contract. You could call it a contractually acquired right. But I have no right to free automotive services just in virtue of the fact that I own a car. So why is it any different with my body? Do I have a right to a colonoscopy just in virtue of my possession of a gastrointestinal tract?

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An ‘Epidemic’ of Drunk Driving?

If you are a conservative, don't talk like a liberal. A while back I heard an otherwise intelligent C-Span presenter speak more than once of "an epidemic of drunk driving." But an epidemic, by definition, is an outbreak of a contagious disease in excess of what might normally be expected. To describe drunk driving as an epidemic, therefore, is to imply that it is a disease, which is precisely what it is not. Drunk driving is a freely chosen  act. Use of 'epidemic' in connection with drunk driving aids and abets the cockeyed liberal view of the world according to which well-nigh every type of negative behavior is a disease.

Words mean things. Language matters. Don't talk like a liberal unless you are one.

Are You a Liberal? Take This Test

The following statements in boldface are taken verbatim from Dennis Prager's Are You a Liberal?  I comment briefly on each in turn. Mirabile dictu, it turns out I am not a liberal! I could make of each of these items a separate post. (And you hope I won't.) I don't want to hear anyone complain that I am not arguing my points. I argue plenty elsewhere on this and my other sites. In any case, that is not my present purpose.

How many of the following do you believe?  The more you believe the more liberal you are.

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On Profiling

Do all liberals lack common sense? No, but many of them do. If you are a liberal and oppose criminal profiling, then I say you lack common sense.

It is obvious that only certain kinds of people commit certain kinds of crimes. Suppose a rape has occurred at the corner of Fifth and Vermouth. Two males are moving away from the crime scene. One, the slower moving of the two, is a Jewish gentleman, 80 years of age, with a chess set under one arm and a copy of Maimonides' Guide for the Perplexed under the other. The other fellow, a vigorous twenty year old, is running from the scene.

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Is Greed the Engine of Capitalism?

The Financial Times reports on a piece of silliness from the Pope:

Pope Benedict XVI on Tuesday condemned the “grave deviations and failures” of capitalism exposed by the financial crisis and issued a strong call for a “true world political authority” to oversee a return to ethics in the global economy.

One mistake the good Pontiff is making is to confuse capitalism and capitalists.  One who cannot see the difference may fallaciously conclude that the greed of some capitalists is rooted in capitalism.  Here is a post from a while back that counters the notion:

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The Medical-Industrial Complex, Part II

Part I is here.

The liberal-leftist animus against corporations is undoubtedly excessive, as is their pollyannish trust in Big Government solutions to every problem under the sun; but this should not blind us to corporate irresponsibility especially when the corporate types work hand-in-hand with liberals to 'medicalize' the ordinary difficulties of life.

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The Medical-Industrial Complex

No doubt you have heard of ADD. Recently I learned of a new medical condition known as ADHD: attention deficit hyperactive disorder.

What could be called the medical-industrial complex is a curious alliance of soft-headed liberals eager to invent diseases and celebrate their 'victims' and money-grubbing corporate types out to turn a quick buck. Liberals invent the diseases and syndromes, while the big pharmaceutical companies supply the drugs for their alleviation. Compliant shrinks and medicos write the prescriptions and serve as go-betweens while Big Government programs divert tax dollars from legitimate uses to enrich the doctors and drug companies.

Jacques Maritain on Right and Left

Before one is a conservative or a liberal ideologically, or by party affiliation, one is a conservative or a liberal temperamentally, or by disposition. My suspicion is that temperament is a major if not the main determinant of political commitments. First comes the disposition, then come the theoretical articulation, the arguments, and the examination and refutation of the arguments of adversaries. Conservatism and liberalism are bred in the bone before they are born in the brain.

If this is so, it helps explain the bitter and intractable nature of political disagreement, the hatreds that politics excites, the visceral oppositions thinly veiled under a mask of mock civility, the mutual repugnance that goes so deep as to be unlikely to be ascribable to mere differences in thinking. For how does one argue against another's temperament or disposition or sensibility? I can't argue you out of an innate disposition, any more than I can argue you out of being yourself; and if your theoretical framework is little more than a reflection at the level of ideas of an ineradicable temperamental bias, then my arguments cannot be expected to have much influence. A certain skepticism about the role and reach of reason in human affairs may well be the upshot. Pointing to this skepticism I betray my own conservative bias. For surely one of the differences between conservatives and leftists is that conservatives are sober where leftists are sanguine about the power and role of reason in the transforming of society.

I recently found a beautifully pithy formulation of the difference between Left and Right in Jacques Maritain's The Peasant of the Garonne (1968, tr. De Brouwer):

The pure man of the left detests being, always preferring, in principle, in the words of Rousseau, what is not to what is. [footnote by J.M.: "What is not is the only thing that is beautiful," said Jean-Jacques Rousseau. And Jean-Paul Sartre: "The real is never beautiful."] The pure man of the right detests justice and charity, always preferring, in principle, in the words of Goethe (himself an enigma who masked his right with his left), injustice to disorder. Nietzsche is a noble and beautiful example of the man of the right, and Tolstoy, of the man of the left. (pp. 21-22.)

Maritain is of course speaking of ideal types. No sane political philosophy could be purely leftist or purely rightist in the above senses. But it is useful to have the extremes of the spectrum so clearly delineated, especially since political opponents love to paint each other as extremists.