(Cross-posted at my FB page where comments are allowed.)
You will recall how Galileo got in trouble with the Inquisition. But now the Roman Catholic Church is a spent force culturally speaking and, under the 'leadership' of Bergoglio, is busy accommodating itself to the Left, which is now the arbiter of what is 'correct' and 'permissible.'
This philosopher asks: Could it be racist if it is true?
The Left responds: It cannot be true, because it is racist, and it is racist since it implies that we are not all equal as a matter of empirical fact.
Note what has happened. Christianity taught the equality of persons as sons and daughters of the Supreme Person. The Left jettisons the metaphysical foundation and misunderstands the normative claim about equality as a factual claim.
The Left goes only half way with the death of God. They reject God, but not the equality that makes sense only if God exists. This incoherence fuels their opposition to scientific research that contradicts the leftist equality axiom. And so Dr. Watson, despite his accomplishments, must be banned to scientific Siberia.
Science must play the handmaiden to leftist ideology just as philosophy and science had to play the handmaiden to theology in the Middle Ages and a long time thereafter.
These people. They have to be stopped. They’re ruining life. Who wants to work for a company where you can become an internal pariah for standing by your old friend? Who wants to work in a neurosis-ridden hamster cage where you have to be afraid that the internal mob will turn on you for having the “wrong” opinion? Who wants to get involved in helping out at your local school when ideologically-charged activists rush in to politicize everything?
[. . .]
UPDATE: A reader who grew up in communist Czechoslovakia writes:
It may look like Communism but it isn’t. It’s worse. Nobody, and I mean nobody (perhaps with one notable exception of a very decent guy, actually), believed the communist propaganda drivel. I don’t recall anybody fainting at the thought of imperialist ‘diversants’ sneaking across the border, revanchists hiding in their closets. It was a mechanism to control, brutalize and destroy and both the brutes and the brutalized understood it as such. Our current situation is somewhat unique. We actually have a large class of people who take this garbage at face value. That’s scary.
The #MeToo movement is revolutionary feminism. Like all revolutionary movements, it favors summary justice. Since April 2017, more than 200 men have been publicly accused of some form of sexual offense, ranging from rape to inappropriate language. A few of these men seem likely to have committed crimes and are being prosecuted accordingly — notably the Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein. But #MeToo seems to have created a single catch-all crime, in which rape, assault, clumsy passes, and banter are elided into one.
With a few exceptions, reputations have been destroyed and careers ended without due process. "I believe her" are the fateful words that, if uttered by enough people, perform the roles of judge and jury.
Sexual harassment is bad, no question. And yet a much bigger threat to women's rights is largely ignored by Western feminists. As my wife likes to point out, verse 2:282 of the Koran states that a woman's testimony is worth only half of a man's testimony in court. (Some people want the opposite to apply in Ford v. Kavanaugh.) Wherever sharia law is imposed — from the armed camps of Boko Haram or ISIS to the sharia courts found in most Muslim-majority countries — it is women who lose out. Do Senate Democrats care? No. When my wife testified on this subject last year, they literally ignored her.
Read it all. I mean it. It gets even better! If you've seen Ferguson in action on C-Span or on Fox you know he is tops -- assuming you have my level of good judgment.
Everyone is buzzing today about the revelation of the three academics—James Lindsay, Helen Pluckrose, and Peter Boghossian—who placed over a dozen complete hoax articles with various premier “cultural studies” or “identity studies” academic journals. All three professors, it should be noted, consider themselves left of center, as does Alan Sokal, the New York University physicist who placed a hoax article about the supposed subjectivity of physics in the postmodernist journal Social Text 20 years ago.
There are termites everywhere, undermining the foundations of sanity, reason, and moral decency. There is Bergolio and his bunch in the Roman church; the lamestream media is infested with the little buggers; the academic world is lousy with leftists; the deep state is corrupt to the core; Big Tech is inimical to free speech; the Democrat Party is the party of slander and senselessness, and Hillary is on the loose. It's a stinking lousy mess all around.
When I was a young man knockin' around in the years between college and graduate school I worked at various jobs. For a time I was an exterminator for Pan American Pest Control out of Santa Monica, California. The boss wanted to set me up in the business but I had my sights set higher. I fancied philosopher a higher calling than bug killer.
It occurs to me now that I am still working in pest control and fumigation. But on the ideal, as opposed to the real, plane. I am out to exterminate willful stupidity, groupthink, the misuse of language, political correctness . . . .
The pulling down and defacing of statues by the cultural Left has now spread from the states of the onetime Confederacy to the West Coast. There, Democratic politicians in alliance with various leftist activists are removing what we are told are offensive images from public view.
This iconoclastic fury has spread from removing statues of Columbus from municipal buildings and parks to dismantling memorials and plaques put up to honor Spanish missionaries. The attack on missionary settlers is justified by citing their use of native Indian labor as well as the more questionable claim that they forcibly converted the native inhabitants to Catholicism.
The missionaries who are now being dishonored created much of the Hispanic culture embraced by Latino minorities, including their language and majority religion. Latinos may have Aztec or Mayan blood, but they are also descended from Spaniards and took on much of a recognizably Spanish way of life.
Has that miserable termite Bergoglio spoken against this? Or is he too busy worrying about straws in the ocean? Defund the evil-doers.
Have you ever wondered why the Catholic bishops oppose border control? It is pretty clear: they think they can keep their organizational hustle going if plenty of illegal Hispanics are allowed to flood in. Am I being fair? Do some research and decide for yourself.
Defund the cultural polluters! They understand money if nothing else. Dreher:
Christine Fair is a Provost’s Distinguished Associate Professor at Georgetown University, and a troubled person, judging by her Twitter feed. For example:
Look at thus chorus of entitled white men justifying a serial rapist’s arrogated entitlement. All of them deserve miserable deaths while feminists laugh as they take their last gasps. Bonus: we castrate their corpses and feed them to swine? Yes. https://t.co/tT7Igu157y
Read it all, as Rod would say. If you can stomach it.
I regularly speak of the destructive Left. There is no exaggeration in that. Whether they intend it or not, leftists promote policies that are destructive. They attack merit, for example, bizarrely considering it to be 'racist.'
For example, there is the case of New York Mayor, Bill de Blasio, who has proposed to do away with Stuyvesant High School's entrance exam. Why is it 'racist'? Well, Asians do better than anyone else, better than whites who do better that Hispanics, who do better than blacks. Here is the composition of the incoming class:
Asian — 613 White — 151 Hispanic — 27 Black — 10
There is no proportional representation! A lack of diversity! And therefore it's 'racist'!
But seriously now, how can it be racist if it is true? Answer me that one.
Full Disclosure: I am not now and never have been Asian. (And I am on record as denying the possibility of race change.) If Asians are better at math than whites, that's just the way it is. We conservatives respect reality, a reality that is no social construction but lies beyond all of our talk with its mewling and pining, wishing and whining. We conservatives stand our ground, that ground being the terra firma of antecedent reality, to cop a beautiful line from Richard M. Weaver (1910-1963):
It is my contention that a conservative is a realist, who believes that there is a structure of reality independent of his own will and desire. He believes that there is a creation which was here before him, which exists now not just by his sufferance, and which will be here after he is gone. This structure consists not merely of the great physical world but also of many laws, principles, and regulations which control human behavior. Though this reality is independent of the individual, it is not hostile to him. It is in fact amenable by him in many ways, but it cannot be changed radically and arbitrarily. This is the cardinal point. The conservative holds that man in this world cannot make his will his law without any regard to limits and to the fixed nature of things . . . . The conservative I therefore see as standing on the terra firma of antecedent reality; having accepted some things as given, lasting and good, he is in a position to use his effort where effort will produce solid results. (Quoted from Fred Douglas Young, Richard M. Weaver 1910-1963, University of Missouri Press, 1995, pp. 144-145.)
It ought to be self-evident that we ought to promote excellence, but it is not self-evident to destructive leftists. I do not say that diversity is no value at all. But in this case it ought to be obvious that merit trumps diversity.
I want you people to realize that if you vote for Democrats you are voting for this sort of Bozo de Blasio insanity, and a lot of other insanity to boot. But is it really insanity? Or is it worse?
I am toying with what I will call the Leftist Trilemma: leftists are either stupid/insane or ignorant/uneducated or willfully evil.
Jacques comments on yesterday's Shelby Steele entry:
Shelby Steele is clearly right about the Left's need for hate objects (as a source of power) but I think he is wrong to say this is "a death rattle". Or at least I'm skeptical. We've already been through so many phases of this same dynamic, and it hasn't yet killed the Left or even slowed it down. On the contrary, it seems to me that as their stories of evil Republicans and evil white men (etc) become ever more absurd the fanaticism and power of Leftists grows. For example, the Tawana Brawley story was utterly absurd even at the time. Any reasonable person would have regarded the story as highly dubious, even before all the decisive evidence of lies was available. And yet the absurdity of the story--even its demonstrable falsity--didn't do anything to convince Leftists that their campaign against "white supremacists" was mistaken. As far as I can tell the absurdity of the story did nothing to harm Al Sharpton's career. Similarly, it was obviously absurd to believe that Trayvon Martin was a victim of white racism, or a white supremacist, or whatever. There was, at the very least, enough evidence from the very beginning for any reasonable person to suspend judgment--to doubt that Trayvon was just an innocent little child victim, to doubt that George Zimmerman had any racial motivation, etc. But that also did nothing to stop the Left, and seems on the contrary to have emboldened them in their endless campaign against "racism" and "racists".
I agree. Trayvon Martin was no victim of white racism. He was no Emmett Till. The boy brought about his own death. If Martin had been taught, or rather had learned, to control himself he would most likely be alive today. But he wasn't or didn't. He blew his cool when questioned about his trespassing in a gated community on a rainy night. He was no child on the way to the candy store. By all appearances he was up to no good. He punched a man in the face and broke his nose, then jumped on him, pinned him down, did the 'ground and pound' and told him that he was going to die that night. So, naturally, the man defended himself against the deadly attack with deadly force. What Zimmerman did was both morally and legally permissible. If some strapping youth is pounding your head into the pavement, you are about to suffer "grave bodily harm" if not death. What we have here is clearly a case of self-defense. The verdict of acquittal for Zimmerman was clearly correct. Only a blind ideologue could fail to understand this.
Does race enter into this? In one way it does. But not in the way leftists think say. Blacks as a group have a rather more emotional nature than whites as a group. (If you deny this, you have never lived in a black neighborhood or worked with blacks, as I have.) Martin's lack of self-control got him killed. He couldn't keep a lid on his mindless hatred of the "creepy-assed cracker." White-on-black racism did not enter into it at all. So, while self-control is important for all, the early inculcation of self-control is even more important for blacks. I suspect Shelby Steele would agree.
And I think this is true of almost all their hate objects. Remember when Ronald Reagan was supposed to be a neo-Nazi, a right-wing dictator, a woman-hater...? Wasn't it obvious in the '80s that these ideas were false, indeed preposterous? Or the idea that Richard Nixon was some kind of uniquely vile criminal--as opposed to Ted Kennedy, for example, or JFK or Bill Clinton? Or the idea that Mitt Romney--Mitt Romney, that pathetic liberal squish--was some kind of hard-right authoritarian bent on destroying women and minorities? Or what about the utterly absurd idea of "white privilege" or "microaggression" or "transgenderism"? These things are demonstrably false or simply incoherent, but it only took a few years for all of them to be nailed down as the central principles of a new moral code that no one in human history had ever even imagined.
Of course you are right about all of this.
In all of these cases, and a zillion others, the Left's hatred was totally divorced from any kind of realistic adult assessment of reality. And yet it has never made any difference. It's never set them back significantly, and instead what generally happens is that their deranged absurd demonstrably false narrative ends up being entrenched as the only mainstream reasonable opinion within a few years at most.
So I'd propose an additional hypothesis to explain this phenomenon:
The absurdity of the story is part of its appeal. Leftists derive self-esteem from their (supposed) ability to understand problems that regular people can't understand, and their (supposed) deep concern for victims. It makes them feel intellectually and morally superior to regular people, and they are addicted to that high. The more seemingly absurd the theory, the more brilliant and sensitive and complicated you must be in order to really 'get' it--and, of course, the more it will repel the dumb rednecks and normies, who don't get it and can't be in the club. And this in turn strengthens them as a mass movement. They control the institutions and media, so they're able to reach an ever-growing audience of new people who also want to feel good about themselves, superior to the hated white male conservative Other. By contrast, a more rational and realistic assessment of the world offers little to these people--no special social status and opportunities for preening and validation, no sense of being exalted above the dumb masses.
What needs explaining is the uncontrolled, largely inarticulate, animal rage of the Left. (e.g., Robert de Niro: Fuck Trump!) Steele's hypothesis is that the Left is raging because it is losing its power and moral authority due to the drying up of sources of legitimate moral indignation. The civil wrongs were righted. And so leftists have traded in righteous anger for mindless hatred. In order to hold on to its power the Left is inventing bogus sources of moral outrage.
Jacques speak of an "additional hypothesis," but is he trying to explain the same phenomenon, the Left's hyperbolic rage? Or a different phenomenon, the need leftists have to feel superior to Hillary's "deplorables"?
It looks like the explananda are different and so are the explanantia. The rage and the need to feel superior, on the one hand, and the the lust for power and the concoction of pseudo-intellectual gobbledygook, on the other.
Finally, if this line of thought is reasonable, it makes me wonder whether Steele is perhaps being a bit naive about the Left's track record. Did the Left really "rescue America" from "the great menace of racism"? Is the story since the 60s really one of "the greatest moral evolutions ever"? I suspect that this whole hallowed narrative might be not so different, ultimately, from the Left's current stories about Trayvon and Michael Brown "the gentle giant", or this ridiculous thing about Judge Kavanaugh's high school sins. Maybe they've been telling absurd lies all along--just as they lied about the USSR, for example. Maybe "racism" in the past was a far more ambiguous phenomenon--not something that needed to be simply eradicated using essentially totalitarian methods, but something that needed to be moderated, understood in its context and judged more realistically. Take lynching, for example, one of their favorite mythologies. Who was being lynched, and why? Lots of blacks, but lots of whites too. Maybe the reason was mainly that blacks were committing a disproportionate number of murders and rapes. Maybe the reality of lynching was about as complex and ambiguous as the reality of so-called "racial profiling". And the same goes for their other narratives--about women, immigrants, sex and so on. I would expect that in 50 years people will have been trained to believe in the "great menace" of "heterosexism" or "microaggressions" or "hate speech" on the internet. Maybe they'vealways been crazy.
"Lots of blacks, but lots of whites too." Here I need some references. Lot of whites were lynched? By whom?
It is true that blacks are disproportionately more criminally prone than whites. (And since it is true, this statement cannot be dismissed as racist. A statement whose subject matter is race is not eo ipso a racist statement.) I hope Jacques is not suggesting that the extra-judicial lynching of blacks was justified by their disproportionate engaging in rape and murder.
I differ from Jacques in that I hold that the original Civil Rights movement was basically on the right track, and that Steele, while he exaggerates, is right to point this out. We should not conflate that movement with the insane leftism of the present day.
In the '60s, the Left acquired its power and moral authority when it fought the good fight against racism and segregation and for civil rights. Those battles were fought and they were won. But power is intoxicating and those who came into it in those years of ferment desired to hold on to it and expand it. The power proved to be not only intoxicating but corrupting. Nothing new, of course: power tends to corrupt, absolute power . . . . You know the Lord Acton riff.
To maintain their power, leftists needed to find additional sources of menace to the nation's moral legitimacy. Steele (emphases added):
The greater the menace to the nation’s moral legitimacy, the more power redounded to the left. And the ’60s handed the left a laundry list of menaces to be defeated. If racism was necessarily at the top of the list, it was quickly followed by a litany of bigotries ending in “ism” and “phobia.”
The left had important achievements. It did rescue America from an unsustainable moral illegitimacy. It also established the great menace of racism as America’s most intolerable disgrace. But the left’s success has plunged it into its greatest crisis since the ’60s. The Achilles’ heel of the left has been its dependence on menace for power. Think of all the things it can ask for in the name of fighting menaces like “systemic racism” and “structural inequality.” But what happens when the evils that menace us begin to fade, and then keep fading?
It is undeniable that America has achieved since the ’60s one of the greatest moral evolutions ever. That is a profound problem for the left, whose existence is threatened by the diminishment of racial oppression. The left’s unspoken terror is that racism is no longer menacing enough to support its own power. The great crisis for the left today—the source of its angst and hatefulness—is its own encroaching obsolescence. Today the left looks to be slowly dying from lack of racial menace.
[. . .]
Today’s left lacks worthy menaces to fight. It is driven to find a replacement for racism, some sweeping historical wrongdoing that morally empowers those who oppose it. (Climate change?) Failing this, only hatred is left.
Hatred is a transformative power. It can make the innocuous into the menacing. So it has become a weapon of choice. The left has used hate to transform President Trump into a symbol of the new racism, not a flawed president but a systemic evil. And he must be opposed as one opposes racism, with a scorched-earth absolutism.
[. . .]
Yet the left is still stalked by obsolescence. There is simply not enough menace to service its demands for power. The voices that speak for the left have never been less convincing. It is hard for people to see the menace that drives millionaire football players to kneel before the flag. And then there is the failure of virtually every program the left has ever espoused—welfare, public housing, school busing, affirmative action, diversity programs, and so on.
For the American left today, the indulgence in hate is a death rattle.
Absolutely: Solidarity with Marine Le Pen! You do not have to agree with her politics to be revolted by what the French state is trying to do to her, and why. Even Jean-Luc Melenchon, the far-left French politician, is defending her here. Le Pen posted documentary evidence of actual ISIS atrocities, in an attempt to demonstrate that there is no comparison between ISIS and her political party. So now, in France, simply posting images of actual, real-life events may be evidence of criminal insanity. (emphasis added)
Do you not see where this is going? Do you not see why it must be stopped cold?
The Soviet Union used to declare dissidents criminally insane and imprison them in psychiatric units. And now the same sort of thing is manifesting in the West, by those who want to preserve liberalism at all costs. Those who challenge the regime, even with facts and images, will be taken to court and forced to submit to tests to prove that they are not criminally insane.
A breathtaking irony: the French state is doing this to silence those who criticize barbarians who would destroy liberalism.
It 's coming to our shores. Mark my words. Is that an alarmist thing to say? I sincerely hope so! But just look at the behavior of our own leftist scum in the Democrat Party. They are now hard at work undermining the presumption of innocence, a bedrock principle of Anglo-American law and morality.
Some examples of this supposedly offensive content include pictures of children developing in the womb and even simple ultrasound images of babies — like the ones that expectant parents hang on their refrigerator doors.
Twitter's actions suggest it’s OK for Planned Parenthood to tweet that a woman has a right to an abortion, but when I tweet and try to promote that a baby has a right to life, Twitter considers that inflammatory.
Twitter's actions suggest it's fine for Planned Parenthood to tweet that taxpayers who don’t want to fund the nation’s largest abortion chain are "extremists," but when I tweet that there are alternative options to Planned Parenthood, Twitter calls that an offensive violation of policy.
And you are still a Democrat? Please be aware of what you are voting for when you vote Democrat.
In an interview with Playboy Magazine very shortly before his death from a heart attack in 1972 at the age of 63, which interview is part of a declassified FBI file, the man Maritain asked to pray for him declared that he would unhesitatingly choose hell over heaven:
PLAYBOY: Having accepted your own mortality, do ·you believe in any kind of afterlife?
ALINSKY: Sometimes it seems to me that the question people should ask is not “is there life after death?” but “Is there life after birth?” I don't know whether there’s anything after this or not. I haven’t seen the evidence one way or the other and I don't think anybody else has either. But I do know that man’s obsession with the question comes out of his stubborn refusal to face up to his own mortality. Let’s say that if there is an afterlife, and I have anything to say about it, I will unreservedly choose to go to hell.
PLAYBOY: Why?
ALINSKY: Hell would be heaven for me. All my life I’ve been with the have-nots. Over here, if you’re a have-not, you’re short of dough. If you’re a have-not in hell, you’re short of virtue. Once I get into hell, I’ll start organizing the have-nots over there.
PLAYBOY: Why them?
ALINSKY: They’re my kind of people.
I enjoyed the delicious incoherence of Alinsky's first response.
This is a repost from 1 April 2014. I was reminded of it by a missive from Spencer Case who rightly complains about a more recent bit of related academentia. But if I link to it, you won't read what I have to say below. I will talk about the latest outrage perhaps tomorrow.
.....................................
This is not an April Fool's joke.
Blind review is a standard practice employed by editors of professional journals and organizers of academic conferences. The editor/organizer removes the name of the author from the manuscript before sending it to the referee or referees for evaluation. My present concern is not whether this is a good practice, although I believe it is. I am concerned with the phrase that describes it and whether or not this phrase can be reasonably found offensive by anyone. There are those who think that the phrase is offensive and ought to be banned. Shelley Tremain writes,
For the last few years, I have tried to get the APA [American Philosophical Association] to remove the phrase “blind review” from its publications and website. The phrase is demeaning to disabled people because it associates blindness with lack of knowledge and implies that blind people cannot be knowers. Because the phrase is standardly used in philosophy and other academic CFPs [Calls for Papers], it should become recognized as a cause for great concern. In short, use of the phrase amounts to the circulation of language that discriminates. Philosophers should want to avoid inflicting harm in this way.
Let's consider these claims seriatim.
1. "The phrase is demeaning to disabled people . . . " Well, I am a disabled person and the phrase is not demeaning to me. As a result of a birth defect I hear in only one ear. And of course there are innumerable people who are disabled in different ways who will not find the phrase demeaning.
2. " . . . because it associates blindness with lack of knowledge and implies that blind people cannot be knowers." This is not just false but silly. No one thinks that blind people cannot be knowers or that knowers cannot be blind. Or at least no sane person thinks that.
Besides, it makes no sense to say that a phrase associates anything with anything. A foolish person who is precisely not thinking, but associating, might associate blindness with ignorance, but so what? People associate the damndest things.
To point out the obvious: if the name has been removed from the manuscript, then the referee literally cannot see it. This is not to say that the referee is blind, or blind with respect to the author's name: he could see it if it were there to see. 'Blind review' means that the reviewer is kept in the dark as to the identity of the author. That's all!
3. ". . . it should become recognized as a cause for great concern." Great concern? This is a wild exaggeration even if this issue is of some minor concern. I say, however, that it is of no concern. No one is demeaned or slighted or insulted or mocked or ridiculed by the use of the phrase in question.
4. ". . . use of the phrase amounts to the circulation of language that discriminates." One could argue that the practice of blind review discriminates against those who have made a name for themselves. But that is the only discrimination in the vicinity. I said at the top that this post is no joke. What is risible, however, is that anyone would find 'blind review' to be discriminatory against blind people.
5. "Philosophers should want to avoid inflicting harm in this way." This presupposes that the use of the phrase 'blind review' inflicts harm. This is just silly. It would be like arguing that the use of 'black hole' inflicts harm on black people because its use associates blacks with holes or with hos (whores).
In the early-to-mid '80s I attended an APA session organized by a group that called itself PANDORA: Philosophers Against the Nuclear Destruction of Rational Animals. One of the weighty topics that came up at this particular meeting was the very name 'Pandora.' Some argued that the name is sexist on the ground that it might remind someone of Pandora's Box, which of course has nothing to do with the characteristic female orifice, but in so reminding them might be taken as a slighting of that orifice. ('Box' is crude slang for the orifice in question.) I pointed out in the meeting that the name is just an acronym, and has nothing to do either with Pandora's Box or the characteristic female orifice. My comment made no impression on the politically correct there assembled. Later the outfit renamed itself Concerned Philosophers for Peace ". . . because of sexist and exclusionary aspects of the acronym." (See here)
Muslims are well-known for their iconoclasm, hostility to the arts, and destruction of cultural artifacts. Leftists are like unto Muslims in this regard too.
The trouble with iconoclasm is that all parties can play the game.
Mass-murdering communist regimes are responsible for some 94 million deaths in the 20th century. Why not then destroy all the statues and monuments that honor the likes of Karl Marx, V. I. Lenin, Fidel Castro and all others who either laid the foundations for or carried out mass murder?
You understand, of course, that I am not advocating this. For one thing, the erasure of history would make it rather more difficult to learn from it. For another thing, there would be no end to it. Why not destroy the Colosseum in Rome? You know what went on there.
Or how about St. Robert Bellarmine, S. J. ? Should paintings and statues of him be destroyed? He had a hand in the burning at the stake of the philosopher Giordano Bruno! According to Wikipedia:
Bellarmine was made rector of the Roman College in 1592, examiner of bishops in 1598, and cardinal in 1599. Immediately after his appointment as Cardinal, Pope Clement made him a Cardinal Inquisitor, in which capacity he served as one of the judges at the trial of Giordano Bruno, and concurred in the decision which condemned Bruno to be burned at the stake as a heretic.[5]
Better known is the fact that Bellarmine is the man who hauled the great Galileo Galilei before the Inquisition.
Calling all philosophers and scientists! To your sledge hammers and blow torches!
And then there are the paintings, statues, etc. of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., plagiarist and adulterer. Yes, King plagiarized (portions of) his Boston University dissertation.
Anyone with sense should be able to understand that high merit worthy of honor can exist alongside deep character flaws.
There is no need to multiply examples. You should be getting the point along about now.
Abbie Hoffmnan [Hoffman] famously wrote a book titled Steal This Book. What greater compliment could an author hope for than to have his or her book stolen? Jeffrey Kessen, may his tribe increase, quotes from a recent FaceBook post by someone who, in 1983, stole my book, Kant's Theory of Mental Activity, from a library! That is infinitely better than a positive review.
This is disgusting but typical of lefties. Here is a guy who is all for socialism, but praises a jackass who steals a piece of public property.
But if there is no respect for public property now, why think there will be after the installation of socialism? Fools like Hoffman and Wolff think that after the glorious revolution 'bourgeois morality' with its stricture against theft will be superseded and we will all live in mutually supportive harmony. That's utopian nonsense, as if the Revolution will bring about a "fundamental transformation" of human nature. It is quasi-religious, idolatrous nonsense to boot as if the New Man will emerge with the secular socialist eschaton. U-topia is Nowheresville for the Nowhere Man.
Socialists have no appreciation of what is called in social science the tragedy of the commons:
The tragedy of the commons is a term used in social science to describe a situation in a shared-resource system where individual users acting independently according to their own self-interest behave contrary to the common good of all users by depleting or spoiling that resource through their collective action.
Private property is not only the foundation of individual liberty, it also helps insure that things get taken care of. And please note that if I maintain my property everyone around me benefits as well. This includes my house and my cars.
Thus my well-maintained private property redounds to the benefit of the public. It won't be my car that drops a muffler that hits Mike the motorcyclist in the face causing him to crash. It won't be my properly maintained house that causes your property values to decline.
Am I against public libraries? Of course not. I'm for public libraries and open stacks. I support them with the real estate tax I pay. A little socialism never hurt anybody. But if a thing is good, more is usually not better. Socialism is like whisky in this respect.
The trouble with leftists is that they undermine the very 'bourgeois morality' that needs to be practiced if socialism to any degree is to work in the first place.
We need more mockery and condemnation of leftists. Don't you agree?
Conservatives take a sober and realistic view of the world and the people in it. They are reality-based, and put no faith in utopian schemes. Like good Aristotelians, they take the actualities of the present and the past as a reliable guide to what is possible, rather than the future-oriented fabrications of a high-flying reason cut loose from experience. They admit the reality of evil and the corruption of human nature. Liberals and leftists, by contrast, tend to believe that people are basically good and that it is only extraneous factors that corrupt them. Evil has no purchase in reality for them but is merely a word we apply to those whose beliefs and values differ from ours.
Immanuel Kant wisely wrote of the "crooked timber of humanity of which no straight thing has ever been made." For liberals and leftists, however, the warpage is not inherent in the timber but comes from without, from contingent social arrangements that can and must be changed.
People who live this delusion sometimes come to a very bad end. Performance artist Pippa Bacca is a case in point. She and a friend hitchiked from Italy to the Balkans to the Middle East in wedding dresses to promote global harmony. Just three weeks into the trip she was raped and murdered in Turkey by a driver who offered her a ride.
The refusal to face reality is a mark of the leftist who prefers his u-topian view of the world to the world.
Leftists play the Frame Game. For example, they frame the gun issue as if if they want gun control and conservatives don't. This is a piece of utter mendacity and they must know it. Everyone apart from criminals wants gun control. The issue is not whether, but how much and of what kinds.
Another example is the framing of the abortion question as merely a reproductive rights or women's rights or women's health issue. That too is a piece of utter mendacity of the extreme sort that one would expect from Hillary herself.
More later. Think about this 'frame game' business and find more examples.
. . . there seem to be no limits of logic or sanity on what a 'liberal' will maintain. The latest lunacy is the politically correct prohibition of the phrase 'as you know.' You must not say this because it might make a snowflake feel inadequate.
Permit me to explain why some of us use the phrase in question.
We use it out of civility and because we understand human nature. People don't like to be told things. If I tell you that the first ten amendments to the U. S. Constitution are called the Bill of Rights, you might think I am talking down to you or lecturing you or suggesting that you are ignorant. The prefatory 'as you know' gives you the benefit of the doubt. You either know or you don't know. If you know, he you may respond, "Of course." If you don't know, you may admit that you were ignorant of the point or you may remain silent.
'As you know' is a phrase that contributes to civil discourse. But civility is a conservative virtue and it is perhaps too much to expect a leftist to understand it or its value.
Civility demonstrated. Comity enhanced.
To feel slightly inadequate for not knowing something is not bad but good. But persuading people of this in this Age of Feeling may prove difficult. The purpose of life is not to feel good about oneself. The purpose of education is not to inculcate in students self-esteem but to teach them something so that they will have legitimate grounds for self-esteem.
The Left is destructive in many ways and on many fronts. We of the Coalition of the Sane must oppose them in many ways and on many fronts.
On the language front we must never bow to their foolish innovations but must proudly speak and write standard English.
If they take offense, then point out to them that their offense is inappropriately taken. If a black person objects to 'black hole' or 'niggardly,' then explain their meanings and how any offense taken is wrongly taken.
Say this to leftists: "You are free to speak and write in any silly way you like, but only so long as you allow us to speak and write standard English."
But leftists are a hostile and vicious bunch, unteachable and impervious to reason. So keep in mind my 2010 aphorism:
It is not reasonable to be reasonable with everyone. Some need to be met with the hard fist of unreason. The reasonable know that reason's sphere of application is not limitless.
Herein the germs of yet another argument for Second Amendment rights. Those rights are the concrete back-up to all the others.
Trump delivers and the Left loses its mind. Victor Davis Hanson:
The economy is growing at rates that we have not seen in over a decade. Unemployment, especially minority joblessness, is at a historic low. Even The stock market is at record highs. The United States is now the world’s largest producer of oil, natural gas, and coal. Consumer and business confidence is at a near all-time high.
NATO is re-calibrating its military contributions to increase defense spending. North Korea has stopped talking about nuking our West Coast. The Iranian theocracy is panicking after the end of the Iran Deal. There have not been any incidents this year of Iranian hazing of U.S. ships. China is scrambling to find ways to readjust its lopsided trade surpluses induced by commercial cheating and dumping. Never has a Republican president appointed and had confirmed more conservative and stellar judges. The National Security team of Pompeo, Bolton, Mattis, and Haley is perhaps the most skilled since World War II.
. . . the Raging Bull of the HollyWeird Left, Robert De Niro, would be in a concentration camp along with Sleazy Rider Peter Fonda and the sick comedienne Kathy Griffith.
And if Trump were a Nazi, would he be tight with the NRA, defender of Second Amendment rights?
But of course for the Left the smear is everything and it doesn't matter whether one is actually talking sense.
"Starbucks may have appeased progressives with its social-justice workshops and open-bathroom policy, but such moves have failed to caffeinate the company’s bottom line."
The SPLC smears individuals and groups it differs with by labeling them as some form of "hater": "racist," "white supremacist," "extremist" and the like. That it is cited and even relied upon by The New York Times, Facebook, Amazon, Google, CNN and others, and that Apple gave the organization a million dollars, is testimony to the moral state of mainstream media and corporate culture in America today.
[. . .]
Any organization that labels Ayaan Hirsi Ali -- the extraordinary Somali-American woman who devotes her life to fighting for oppressed women, especially in the Islamic world -- an "extremist," as the SPLC has done, is not a moral organization. No wonder it just agreed to pay Muslim reformer Maajid Nawaz $3.4 million and issued a retraction for smearing him as an "anti-Muslim extremist."
This kind of behavior should surprise no one. Since Stalin labeled Trotsky, the ideological leader of Soviet communism, a "fascist," the left (not liberals, to whom the left is as opposed as it is conservatives) has libeled its opponents. Without lying about its opponents, there would be no left.
Here is another statement from [Saul Alinsky's] Rules for Radicals: “We are always moral and our enemies always immoral.” The issue is never the issue. The issue is always the immorality of the opposition, of conservatives and Republicans. If they are perceived as immoral and indecent, their policies and arguments can be dismissed, and even those constituencies that are non-political or “low-information” can be mobilized to do battle against an evil party.
In 1996 Senator Bob Dole — a moderate Republican and deal-maker — ran for president against the incumbent, Bill Clinton. At the time, Dick Morris was Clinton’s political adviser. As they were heading into the election campaign, Clinton — a centrist Democrat — told Morris, “You have to understand, Dick, Bob Dole is evil.” That is how even centrist Democrats view the political battle.
Because Democrats and progressives regard politics as a battle of good versus evil, their focus is not on policies that work and ideas that make sense, but on what will make their party win. Demonizing the opposition is one answer; unity is another. If we are divided, we will fail, and that means evil will triumph. (emphasis added)
A good recent example of how, for the Left, the issue is never the issue is the furor over the separation of the children of illegal immigrants from their parents. Why are 'liberals' apoplectically concerned about the separation of the children of criminals from their parents? Because the issue is not the issue. That is, the issue is merely a means to the end of more power. They have no objection to the use of State power in separating children from criminal parents when the ones affected are citizens.
This meme bears the title 'Hypocrisy.' But it is worse than hypocrisy. And it is not correctly called a double standard. Leftists, liberals, progressives -- whatever you want to call them -- don't share our values and standards. They use them against us in the approved Alinskyite manner.
In an entry bearing the charming title WTF? Robert Paul Wolff expresses astonishment at his commenters' discussion of anti-natalism:
I have to confess that blogging is weird. It has its pleasures, but from time to time the conversation here takes a genuinely strange turn. Anti-natalism? Seriously? With all the challenges that face us, with the disaster that is American politics, with the signs, at long last, of a grassroots progressive surge, we are talking about anti-natalism?
Look, far be it from me to stifle discussion. When you are done, I will go on talking about the world.
From this outburst one can see that for the leftist activist, the political is everything. One is not talking about the world if one is talking about the value of life and the morality of procreation. For the Stoned Philosopher, questions about life and death, meaning and value, God and the soul, pale into insignificance in comparison to the political squabbles of the day.
Our sane, conservative appreciation that the political is a limited sphere leaves us at a political disadvantage over against leftists for whom the political is the only sphere.
A retromingent is an animal that urinates backwards.
Posturing as 'progressive,' the leftist pisses on the past, seeking to erase its memory by destroying monuments and redacting the historical record. There is no piety in the leftist, no reverence. Try using those words at a Manhattan or Georgetown cocktail party and see what happens.
This political retromingency helps explain the leftists' lack of respect for language.
Cultural appropriation is not a glitch of American life. It's a feature. It's part of what makes the country great. We take your culture, we get rid of the oppression, the mass murder, the slavery, the intransigent poverty and the endless internecine wars. We keep the pasta and the funny hats, and occasionally we dress up as you on Halloween. It's a good deal for everyone.
I think I'll make me a curry tonight, thereby paying tribute to Indian cuisine. I love Indian food. Americans who find it too hot are culinary pussies. They need to get out of their gastronomical ghettos and celebrate diversity. My curry might not turn out as good as a gen-u-ine Indian curry, but then again it might turn out better.
Klavan is being combative above, but it is well-justified punch-back against willful and vicious stupidity of the sort that leftist lunkheads specialize in dishing out. Cultural appropriation is good: blacks on the bottom could improve their lot by 'acting white,' by appropriating those bourgeois values that Amy Wax was recently waxing enthusiastic over, and rightly so.
I engage in cultural appropriation every day. Why just this morning I read a bit from the Old Testament. Am I a Jew? And then I prayed the Ave Maria in Latin with special emphasis on the beautiful Ora pro nobis peccatoribus, nunc et in hora mortis nostrae.
Am I a Roman?
Is English your native tongue? No? Then by what right do you speak OUR language? You are engaging in cultural theft!
An Italian told me that there is no dish in Italy called pollo alla marsala. But there ought to be as you will readily agree after you've tasted mine.
David Rubin, who describes himself as gay, pro-choice, and classically liberal, explains why 'progressives' are in fact regressive. (A point I have made many times.) A Prager U video under five minutes in length.
Trigger Warning! The video contains vicious, racist, incendiary content sure to melt snowflakes. Richly deserving of being 'demonetized' by Google if it hasn't been already. [Irony off]
Rubin, like so many others including Tucker Carlson, makes the standard mistake of conflating race with skin color.
There it is, reader. There is the “cultural Marxism” that you hear so much about, and that so many on the left deny. It is in the Marxist principle that there is no such thing as truth; there is only power.
Lenin understood this well. This is the meaning of his famous dictum, “Who, whom?” In Lenin’s view, co-existence with capitalism was not possible. The only question was whether or not the communists will smash the capitalists first, or the other way around. One way of interpreting this is to say that the moral value of an action depends on who is doing it to whom.
This is why it is pointless for us conservatives and old-school liberals to stand around identifying contradictions and hypocrisies in how the progressives behave. They don’t care! They aren’t trying to apply universal standards of justice. They believe that “universal standards of justice” is a cant phrase to disguise white heterosexist patriarchal supremacy. They believe that justice is achieving power for their group, and therefore disempowering other groups. This is why it’s not racist, in their view, to favor non-whites over whites in the distribution of power. This is why they don’t consider it unfair to discriminate against men, heterosexuals, and other out-groups.
The third paragraph is exactly right. Why did it take me so long fully to appreciate this? To accuse leftists of double standards as I have done and as many conservative do is to fail to understand that they don't accept our standards and values.
They will use things like “dialogue” as a tactic to serve the long-term strategy of acquiring total power. Resisting them on liberal grounds is like bringing a knife to a gun fight. The neoreactionaries have seen this clearly, while conservatives like me, who can’t quite let go of old-fashioned liberalism, have resisted it.
I have resisted it because I really would like to live in a world where we can negotiate our differences while allowing individuals and groups maximum autonomy in the private sphere. I want to be left alone, and want to leave others alone. This, I fear, is a pipe dream. Absent a shared cultural ethos, I can’t see how this is possible. I hate to say it — seriously, I do — but I think that today’s conservatives (including me) are going to end up as neoreactionaries, just as today’s old-school liberals are going to end up as progressives, because the forces pulling us to these extremes are stronger than any centrism.
Unfortunately, our politics is becoming increasingly 'centrifugal.' In the "widening gyre," "the centre cannot hold." (Yeats) Rod is right: many of us conservatives are moving in the neoreactionary direction. You could say that we are becoming 'radicalized' by the insanity of our leftist enemies.
Why then is Dreher so bloody hard on Trump, when he is all we've got? In a war you have to take sides. Push has come to shove, and shove may come to shoot. So you'd better be ready. Trump stands with the NRA and the NRA with Trump. And as Dreher is aware, you don't bring a knife to a gunfight.
Addendum (5/6) Dreher is wrong when he says that the denial of truth is a Marxist principle. It is not. It is a culturally Marxist principle. Marx fancies his dialectical materialism a science. Marx, Engels, and Lenin are not precursors of post-modernism. So it is wrong for Dreher to suggest in the second paragraph quoted above that V. I. Lenin denies objective truth. On the contrary, he upholds the objectivity of truth in Materialism and Empirio-Criticism.
Addendum (5/7) Edward comments:
I don’t entirely agree. In The Communist Manifesto section II the authors consider the objection that there are certain eternal truths, such as Freedom, Justice etc ‘that are common to all states of society’, but Communism abolishes all such eternal truths.
Their reply concedes the objection, or rather denies the existence of any ‘eternal truth’ except the historical existence of class antagonisms ‘that assumed different forms at different epochs’. The commonality of these forms is simply ‘the exploitation of one part of society by the other’. These common forms, i.e. the supposed eternal truths, such as Freedom, Justice etc, will completely vanish with the total disappearance of class distinctions.
This is a large topic, Ed. But I would insist that on a charitable reading of Marx, he is not a relativist about truth. He may be setting the stage for POMO, but he himself is not a POMO man. On the page before the page about Freedom and Justice (p. 102 in my Pelican paperback) we are told that man's consciousness, his ideas, views, and conceptions "changes with every change in the conditions of his material existence, in his social relations and in his social life." Marx is asserting this as TRUE and is exempting it from the changes in material existence. He is not countenancing the possibility that a change in material and social conditions could bring it about that his version of materialism is false. The Commie Manifesto is littered with assertions like these, assertions that are intended to be TRUE. Old Karl is trying to get at the TRUTH about the human condition.
To your reply that ‘Marx fancies his dialectical materialism a science’. Correct, but dialectical materialism is the science of class antagonism. That is the only ‘eternal truth’. All the rest, i.e. Freedom, Justice are simply a form that class antagonism takes at different epochs.
No, not the only eternal truth. What about the one I gave above? And all the others, e.g., the one about religion being an opiate, the sigh of the oppressed creature, which implies that there is no God and no soul and no post-mortem existence, that these are all fictions that keep people from achieving happiness here on earth?
Surely Marx would not say that God existed in Medieval times but does not exist today. He would say that God never existed.
Note also that it cannot be an 'eternal truth' that there will always be class struggle, but that until the classless society is achieved history is the history of class struggle.
After reading the Manifesto, I am thinking about the various ‘No True Scotsman/Marxist’ apologetics for Marxism that we see from time to time. E.g. Marxist/Leninism not true Marxism, Pol Pot not true Marxism, Cuba Venezuela etc. It seems to me that previous brutalist regimes have interpreted the Manifesto pretty well. Look at its 10 points carefully. Abolition of private property, justified on the grounds that for the proletariat (read ‘99%’), there is no property at all, and that it is the property of the bourgeoisie (read ‘1%’) that must be seized. Bringing the means of production, communication and transport into the hands of ‘the State’. Centralisation of credit by means of a national bank etc etc.
Right. The hard Left is Communist in inspiration. The bastards never give up. One has to read the Manifesto to know what they are up to, and what we are up against.
There are two reasons the left labels most conservatives and all Trump supporters “white supremacists,” “neo-Nazis” and “racists.” One is to defeat conservatives without having to defeat conservative ideas. The other is to instill fear: Speak out and you will suffer the consequences.
[. . .]
It is becoming more and more common for leftist mobs to gather in front of a conservative’s home, scream epithets at the conservative’s family members and vandalize the home. Just last week, the Associated Press reported: “Protesters are targeting the northern Virginia home of the National Rifle Association’s top lobbyist . . . Chris Cox . . . as well as his wife’s nearby decorating business. . . . Libby Locke, a lawyer for the Cox family, said the vandalism included spraying fake blood and defacing the home with stickers.”
One hopes that the solution to leftist scumbaggery won't require a 2A invocation.
We would like to think well of our fellow citizens. But most on the Left are making it impossible. They are not, in the main, good people. It is time to face reality and realize that many of our 'fellow citizens' are domestic enemies.
'Feral' is precisely the word for this disgusting leftist. The vile specimen cannot seem to distinguish between being foul-mouthed and being funny. There is no humor in what she said. Succeding as a scum bag, she fails as a comedienne.
She actually joked about abortion in the crudest terms imaginable. "Don't knock it if you haven't tried it." And then something about knocking the baby out. But she missed the one pun in the vicinity, 'being knocked up' as a slang phrase for 'being pregnant.'
Even the left-wing 'journalists' present thought Wolf's trangressivity excessive.
Reading your posts lately, the following thought struck me. I wonder if it's struck you, and if you'd agree:
Identity politics is a misleading name for the recent catastrophic turn in so-called progressive politics. For what it actually aims at primarily is the *destruction* of traditional modes of identity, which are, loosely speaking, summarised by the slogan "faith, flag and family". What it replaces those with is of secondary importance to that central mission.
That's why the obvious contradictions, and vicious internecine rivalries, on the left seem not (with certain honourable exceptions) to lead to anything approaching the self-doubt and ideological re-evaluation that conservatives assume - logically from their own frame of reference - that they ought. For it simply doesn't matter to the contemporary leftist that his preferred categories are flimsy and self-contradictory. They're only a means to an end; a solvent to be applied to the older forms of identity and self-understanding.
On which account, it would be far more truthful to reckon it "anti-identity politics".
(I might also add that we should therefore avoid the trap of playing up too much the individualism that, rightly understood, is central to much conservative thought, to the point of downplaying those old and authentic attachments - and so allowing the left to pose, utterly falsely, as the champions of community and relational life.)
With heartfelt thanks for the stimulation to thought, not to say sheer enjoyment, that your blog continues to provide.
My kind reader is suggesting that left-wing politics is destructive of traditional forms of identity and therefore best understood as anti-identity politics rather than as identity politics.
I see matters differently. There is an identity politics of the Left and an identity politics of the Right. This became obvious to me when, after objecting to the tribalism of blacks, Hispanics, and other racial/ethnic groups, and after calling for a transcending of tribalism, I was countered by certain alt-rightists/neo-reactionaries who reject any such transcending and think that what is needed is a white tribalism to oppose tribalisms 'of color.' See If I'm a Racist, then You're a Tribalist! (56 good comments).
As I see it, there is nothing inherently leftist or rightist about identity politics in the way political correctness is inherently leftist. (Anyone who is politically correct is by definition a leftist.) So what is it to be identity-political? I suggest that it is to take one's primary self-identification to be a tribal identification, an identification in terms of race, ethnicity, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, religion, disability, socio-economic class, or some combination of these.
In a separate post I hope to clarify and develop this suggestion.
The right to private property is another thing leftists don't understand, unless it is their private property.
Albert Camus, Notebooks 1951-1959, tr. Ryan Bloom, Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2010, p. 177:
The Revolution is good. But why? One must have an idea of the civilization one wishes to create. The abolition of property is not an end. It is a means.
This is foolish. Private property is the foundation of individual liberty. The problem is not private property, but too few people owning property, property they have worked for, and thus value and care about. I include among private property the means for the defense of life, liberty, and property against assorted malefactors from unorganized criminals to rogue elements in the government.
Contemporary liberals support separation of church and state, and so do I. But they have no problem with using the coercive power of the state to impose leftist ideology. Now leftism is not a religion, pace Dennis Prager (see article below), but it is very much like one, and if you can see what is wrong with allowing contentious theological doctrines to drive politics, then you ought to be able to see what is wrong with allowing the highly contentious ideological commitments of leftism to drive politics, most of which revolve around the leftist trinity (Prager) of race, gender, and class.
If "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion . . . ," as per the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the U. S. Constitution, then it ought to make no law that establishes the quasi-religion of leftism.
Even more important than separation of church and state these days is separation of leftism and state.
This is a large topic; for today, just one example of what I am getting at.
It is a tenet of contemporary liberalism that opposition to same-sex 'marriage' is 'discriminatory' and that opponents of it are 'bigots.' Now this is both obtuse and slanderous for reasons we supplied in earlier entries. But liberals have a right to their opinions, even if it is to be wished that they would give some thought to the corresponding obligation to form correct opinions. Be that as it may, liberals have a right to their benighted views, and we ought to tolerate them. After all, we too are liberals in a much older, and a defensible, sense: we believe in toleration, open inquiry, free speech, individual liberty, etc. And we are liberal and self-critical enough to countenance the possibility that perhaps we are the benighted ones.
But toleration has limits.
What we ought not tolerate is the sort of coercion of the individual by the state that we find in the case of the Washington State florist who refused to sell floral arrangements to be used at a same-sex 'marriage' ceremony. This woman has no animus against gays, and had sold flowers to the homosexual couple. But she was not about to violate her own conscience by providing flowers for a same-sex event. As a result she was sued by the Washington State attorney general, and then by the ACLU.
Now do you see what is wrong with that?
The state says to the individual:
You have a right to your religious and philosophical beliefs, but only so long as you keep them to yourself and don't allow them to be expressed in your relations with your fellow citizens. You may believe what you want in the privacy of your own mind, but you may not translate your beliefs into social or political action. But we are free to translate our leftist 'theology' into rules and regulations that diminish your liberty.
What then becomes of the "free exercise of religion" spoken of in the First Amendment? It is out the window. The totalitarian state has taken one more step in its assault on the liberty of the individual.
The totalitarian state of the contemporary liberal says to the individual: you have no right to live your beliefs unless we allow you to; but we have every right to impose our leftist beliefs on you and force you to live as we see fit.
Here are some home truths that cannot be repeated too often:
We are not the property of the state.
Our rights and liberties do not come from the state, but are logically antecedent to it, inscribed as they are in the very nature of things.
We do not have to justify our keeping of what is ours; the state has to justify its taking.
You say you're for it? Would you still be for it if I could show you that it is virtually certain that you will end up among the centrally planned and not among the central planners?
In light of that crime spike London’s mayor, Sadiq Khan, has laid down the law. “No excuses,” he declared the other day on Twitter. “There is never a reason to carry a knife. Anyone who does will be caught, and they will feel the full force of the law.”
Britain imposes strict gun control. It also imposes absurdly strict knife control. The government forbids carrying a knife in public “without good reason, unless it has a folding blade with a cutting edge 3 inches long or less.”
Take note: Lock-back knives — the kind in which the blade locks in the open position, to prevent accidental folding while the knife is being held, and thus lacerated fingers — are verboten no matter the blade length. Lock-backs “can include multi-tool knives — tools that also contain other devices such as a screwdriver or can opener.” And a “good reason” for carrying a knife includes using the knife for work, or perhaps “historical reenactment or religious purposes.” Not, say, self-defense, or just because a knife sometimes comes in handy.
Just a few years ago in France, Islamic radicals sympathetic to ISIS stormed the offices of Charlie Hebdo, a French satire magazine, and murdered the employees. Thankfully, in this country, the leftwing mob has not made the leap to taking the lives of those they disagree with. For now, at least, they are content just to ruin lives and businesses.
What we are seeing is an American Culture Revolution, unleashed by a narrow-minded group of leftists who have more in common with Mao than Washington. They have become dominant in the American media and have systematically purged conservative voices from the air and print. Conservative thought is more and more relegated to a ghetto and should any prominent conservative try to leave the ghetto, the leftwing mob will take action to destroy them. Liberals like Chris Cuomo can have a show on CNN attacking a variety of conjured conservative straw men under the veneer of objective news, while a conservative like Kevin Williamson cannot even write columns in The Atlantic.
The result will increasingly be that fringe ideas grab hold of people's imagination. The left has continually reduced the window of what topics are acceptable to those they agree with. Those ideas, in turn, change constantly depending on what group wakes up feeling oppressed on a particular day. They have exiled credible conservative voices, claiming that the most mainstream and innocuous are as racist and bigoted as the alt-right fringe. And if there is no difference between the two, more and more will gravitate to the truly extreme through emotional appeal. The left's insistence on determining who is reasonable on the right will only help bolster the most unreasonable voices on both sides.
Kevin Williamson is a NeverTrumper, which is never good, and Nick Gillespie lays into him effectively here, for failing to appreciate the libertarian accomplishments of Trump.
A sound conservatism incorporates some libertarian ideas even if the Libertarian Party is a 'losertarian' joke and the libertarian worldview taken in toto is a disaster. Open borders? Legalize drugs? Ron Johnson and the boys certainly do smoke a lot of dope.
You might be interested to know that a Canadian university recently had a job ad that might be even worse than the one you mentioned from the University of California at San Diego:
. . . candidates shall demonstrate a capacity for collegial service and a commitment to upholding the values of Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion as it pertains to service, teaching, and research activities.
So not only will the successful applicant spit out Far Left idiocies in class but, in addition, he'll make sure that his philosophical research demonstrates his commitment to Far Left idiocies. It's okay to argue that God doesn't exist, or that no one knows that the external world exists, or that Bruce Jenner is a woman. It's not okay to argue that Equity, Diversity and Inclusion are questionable ideals. It's not even okay to hold on to a few shreds of dignity by just ignoring the topic. No. The successful applicant will demonstrate his commitment to these idiotic "values" in published work.
They didn't explain how to do that if you only do research on vagueness or compatibilism, say. I'm guessing it would be enough, for now, to choose the right kinds of examples. Maybe if you wanted to illustrate some point about vagueness you could say this: "Satumbo is counting the pink hairs around Bruce's pierced nipple, in Arabic..." Or if you were writing about compatibilism: "Suppose that Sally is trying to decide whether ze will come out as genderqueer on Facebook. Suppose ze has a higher-order desire not to desire to come out..." I don't know. Just guessing. Maybe in the future it won't be okay to write about these topics at all, since they make it hard to demonstrate one's Far Left commitments.
Are you thinking of applying for a faculty position at the University of California at San Diego? As part of your application you will be required to submit a statement detailing your work on behalf of diversity and inclusion.
A bit more evidence that the universities of the land have become leftist seminaries.
It is a curious development. The private universities in the United States founded by religious orders have almost all been stripped of their religious character. It survives only as window dressing. But the move has not been in the direction of ideological neutrality, but toward a substitution of leftist indoctrination for religious indoctrination.
The public universities too have become seed beds of leftism, at least in the non-STEM disciplines.
The sad upshot is that indoctrination dominates inquiry in all the institutions of so-called 'higher' education in the land. There are a few holdouts, of course, and again I am speaking of the non-STEM fields, or most of them: climate science has become highly ideologized.
So I don't think it is an exaggeration to say that university is dead. It is dead in its idea, in its classical understanding.
Part of what killed it is the levelling consequent upon the foolish notion that everyone can profit from university studies. But that is a large separate topic.
Articles of mine urging the defunding of NPR. Should the NRA receive tax monies? Of course not. Then why should organs of leftist propaganda - - and in the case of Planned Parenthood, propaganda and butchery -- get them?
But there are too many pussy-wussies among the GOP ever to stop these outrages.
As I have said before, we need the separation of Leftism and State.
You don't publicly flaunt what NPR and Todd wrote because you're an atheist or agnostic; you do it because you're entirely severed from your civilizational inheritance. The old joke is that Nietzsche respected God enough to kill Him. To respect Him enough to kill Him, you have to know something about Him - as nineteenth-century atheists certainly did. Today we have know-nothings, cut off not so much from scripture but from all that derives therefrom . . . .
There is no wisdom on the Left and no common sense. Dennis Prager is a prominent purveyor of common sense. So if you don't know what it is you can learn it from him. Here is a sample:
It should be clear that this whole preoccupation with Trump’s past sex life has nothing to do with morality and everything to do with humiliating Trump — and, thereby, hopefully weakening the Trump presidency — the raison d'etre of the media since he was elected. Here’s one proof: The media rightly celebrate, as we all do, Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. as one of the moral greats of the 20th century despite reports of his having committed adultery on numerous occasions. [I would add that he also plagiarized portions of his Boston University dissertation.]
Likewise, the media and the Left idolized Sen. Ted Kennedy, regularly referring to him as the “Lion of the Senate.” Yet Kennedy was notorious for his lechery — far more so than Trump. Typical Ted Kennedy behavior, as described in New York magazine, was when he and then-fellow Democratic Sen. Chris Dodd “participated in the famous ‘waitress sandwich’ at La Brasserie in 1985, while their dates were in the bathroom.”
John F. Kennedy remains the most revered of Democratic presidents in the modern era. Yet we now know he routinely had affairs in the White House in his wife’s absence and had the Secret Service provide him advance notice of her return.
And, by the way, if sexual infidelity invalidates the character and, therefore, the worthiness of a politician, why doesn’t it invalidate the character and worthiness of an editor at The New York Times or The Washington Post? Why aren’t their sex lives investigated? They have, after all, more influence than almost any politician.
A Double Standard or an Alinskyite Tactic?
One mistake I have corrected in my own political thinking -- thanks in part to Malcolm Pollack and 'Jacques' -- is the tendency to confuse the double standard with a hard-Left Alinskyite tactic the name of which, if it has one, I don't know.
Suppose you and I are politically opposed but agree on certain values or standards. We are, for example, both strongly committed to free speech and open inquiry. But your behavior suggests a tacit commitment to "Free speech for me but not for thee." This is an example of a double standard. The moniker is infelicitous in that there are not two standards but one; what makes the standard 'double' is that it is inconsistently applied. While sincerely professing a commitment to free speech you tend to take it more seriously in your own case and less seriously in the cases of those with opposing views. You really do accept the value of free speech; it is just that you have a hard time in the heat of conflict applying it fairly and consistently to all parties.
But there is something far worse than the double standard.
The most vicious and mendacious type of leftist will feign an interest in our conservative standards and then use them against us. In many cases they don't even feign the interest.
The sex business referenced above is a good example. Leftists do not value chastity, sexual purity, traditional marriage (as opposed to same-sex 'marriage'), marital fidelity. Talk of lust as a deadly sin is a joke to them. They have a pronounced libertine wobble and are entirely too 'sophisticated' for the above. They celebrate 'alternative sexual lifestyles.' Bestiality is not a grave sin but something to joke about (Al Franken).
Since they do not share our standards when it comes to sexual behavior, it is a mistake to accuse them of a double standard when they pillory Trump while giving Teddy a pass. The truth is, they see politics as war and will do anything to win including using our standards against us while mocking those very standards.
The same with free speech. The Alinskyite hard Left doesn't give a damn about free speech except insofar as they can use it it to destroy free speech. These tactics are at least as old as V. I. Lenin, and people need to be aware of them.
Our political opponents on the Left are not fellow citizens but domestic enemies and the sooner we admit this fact the better.
As for Teddy Boy's waitress sandwich, you can read about it here.
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