NEW:Joe Rogan goes off on liberalism, says he was a liberal his whole life but can no longer support their cause because it has “gone full communist.”
Rogan is wide awake ?
“I was very left-leaning… at the end of the day, I’m way more left than I am right. But California went nuts, man.”
“It’s gone like full communist. It’s out of its fucking mind. And their approach to law enforcement is so insane. It’s so insane.”
“The no cash bail, the letting people out for committing violent crimes, not stopping people for stealing.”
Yep, the progressive Left has become [I say become sarcastically] a cult. Joe Rogan is right…
BUT this “shamming/excommunication/cult-like,” etc… aspect of the Left has always existed. HOOVER has a great article on the removal and truncating of history by Stalin called “Inside Stalin’s Darkroom”. And the first few books I read on the subject that alerted me to the move by Democrats and the Left to censor speech were:
Illiberal Education: The Politics of Race and Sex on Campus (1991)
The Shadow University: The Betrayal of Liberty on America’s Campuses (1999)
The Betrayal of Liberalism: How the Disciples of Freedom and Equality Helped Foster the Illiberal Politics of Coercion and Control (1999)
The Dark Side of the Left: Illiberal Egalitarianism in America (2003)\The New Thought Police: Inside the Left’s Assault on Free Speech and Free Minds (2003)
In other words, Joe Rogan is late to the Party and is only now [partially] realizing that the Party and ideals he supported is the foundation for radical censorship and the curtailing of freedom and the source of tyranny.
I wanted to include a comment that someone made along with my response:
I used to be a republican most of my life until these past 6 or 7 years or so. After trump and the magot cult I’ll never go republican again.
MY RESPONSE:
Trump curtailed regulation and government policy more than Reagan. We still have a long way to go… like shutting down [completely] the Department of Education, for instance. But we need someone closer to Javier Milei in office… but on a related note: libertarian economist Milton Friedman voted Republican almost his entire life, as does libertarian Thomas Sowell after leaving Marxism. Jason, be part of the base of the GOP that pushes us towards freedom and [God willing] limited government.
The same thing happened to my Forest Service initial attack crew back in 2001. We had a 5’0″ 100lbs female who wanted on our crew. We had physical standards tests we had to pass. One was a simple three mile “hike” around a high school track with a mere 45lbs and our line gear. She was simply too small and not strong enough to make the time. Our overhead wanted more female representation so they passed her anyway. All summer long she was given the cushy assignments, all while being paid the same as the rest of us. It put us a person down all summer. It also created divisions within our crew. A rookie who got to do all the easy stuff while my squad of ass-kickers had to work even harder because we were a person short (no pun intended).
I was a fireman for over 35 years I worked with several woman, most of them did not have the upper body strength to do the job. Also these were younger women. At 35 years old and cannot pass the physical exam she will be pretty much useless on the scene. She will be a burden to her fellow firefighters she will most likely transfer to a job outside of operations where she won’t have to physically fight fires. She will put other people’s life in danger because she cannot do the job, she sounds like a very selfish and self-centered person.
This comes by way of HOTAIRand makes clear that whatever the left touches, it destroys:
This promises to turn into a sticky wicket for the New York City Fire Department. One of their upcoming graduates is going to be accepted into the ranks and go to work as a firefighter despite having failed a grueling physical test multiple times. This comes as a result of recent changes to the city’s criteria for how graduates are scored.
Rebecca Wax, 33, is set to graduate Tuesday from the Fire Academy without passing the Functional Skills Training test, a grueling obstacle course of job-related tasks performed in full gear with a limited air supply, an insider has revealed.
“They’re going to allow the first person to graduate without passing because this administration has lowered the standard,” said the insider, who is familiar with the training.
Upon graduation, Wax would be assigned to a firehouse and tasked with the full duties of a firefighter. Some FDNY members are angry.
“We’re being asked to go into a fire with someone who isn’t 100 percent qualified,” the source said. “Our job is a team effort. If there’s a weak link in the chain, either civilians or our members can die.”
…..[she] failed to complete… climbing in full gear while carrying heavy equipment, rescuing victims in zero visibility, breaking down doors, and doing it all while breathing oxygen from a tank on a limited timer….
This brings to memory two quotes that bring the point home, a point that a reader on my FaceBook blog pointed out:
“Hopefully the first person she has to LIFT out of a burning building will be a feminist…because obviously it will not matter, that she is unqualified.”
If there is indeed a social revolution under way, it shouldn’t stop with women’s choice to honor their [own] nature. It must also include a newfound respect for men. It was New York City’s firemen who dared to charge up the stairs of the burning Twin Towers on September 11, 2001. The death tally of New York City’s firefighters was: men 343, women 0. Can anyone honestly say you would have wanted a woman coming to your rescue on that fateful day?
Suzanne Venker & Phyllis Schlafly, The Flipside of Feminism: What Conservative Women Know — and Men Can’t Say (Washington, D.C.: WND Books, 2011), 181-182.
Here is the “CS LEWIS” of politics:
There is a Liberal sentiment that it should also punish those who take more than their “fair share.” But what is their fair share? (Shakespeare suggests that each should be treated not according to his deserts, but according to God’s mercy, or none of us would escape whipping.)
The concept of Fairness, for all its attractiveness to sentiment, is a dangerous one (cf. quota hiring and enrollment, and talk of “reparations”). Deviations from the Law, which is to say the Constitution, to accommodate specifically alleged identity-group injustices will all inevitably be expanded, universalized, and exploited until there remains no law, but only constant petition of Government.
We cannot live in peace without Law. And though law cannot be perfect, it may be just if it is written in ignorance of the identity of the claimants and applied equally to all. Then it is a possession not only of the claimants but of the society, which may now base its actions upon a reasonable assumption of the law’s treatment.
But “fairness” is not only a nonlegal but an antilegal process, for it deals not with universally applicable principles and strictures, but with specific cases, responding to the perceived or proclaimed needs of individual claimants, and their desire for extralegal preference. And it could be said to substitute fairness (a determination which must always be subjective) for justice (the application of the legislated will of the electorate), is to enshrine greed—the greed, in this case, not for wealth, but for preference. The socialistic spirit of the Left indicts ambition and the pursuit of wealth as Greed, and appeals, supposedly on behalf of “the people,” to the State for “fairness.”….
….But such fairness can only be the non-Constitutional intervention of the State in the legal, Constitutional process—awarding, as it sees fit, money (reparations), preferment (affirmative action), or entertainment (confiscation)….
….“Don’t you care?” is the admonition implicit in the very visage of the Liberals of my acquaintance on their understanding that I have embraced Conservatism. But the Talmud understood of old that good intentions can lead to evil—vide Busing, Urban Renewal, Affirmative Action, Welfare, et cetera, to name the more immediately apparent, and not to mention the, literally, tens of thousands of Federal and State statutes limiting freedom of trade, which is to say, of the right of the individual to make a living, and, so earn that wealth which would, in its necessary expenditure, allow him to provide a living to others….
…. I recognized that though, as a lifelong Liberal, I endorsed and paid lip service to “social justice,” which is to say, to equality of result, I actually based the important decisions of my life—those in which I was personally going to be affected by the outcome—upon the principle of equality of opportunity; and, further, that so did everyone I knew. Many, I saw, were prepared to pay more taxes, as a form of Charity, which is to say, to hand off to the Government the choice of programs and recipients of their hard-earned money, but no one was prepared to be on the short end of the failed Government pro-grams, however well-intentioned. (For example—one might endorse a program giving to minorities preference in award of government contracts; but, as a business owner, one would fight to get the best possible job under the best possible terms regardless of such a program, and would, in fact, work by all legal and, perhaps by semi- or illegal means to subvert any program that enforced upon the proprietor a bad business decision.)*
Further, one, in paying the government to relieve him of a feeling of social responsibility, might not be bothered to question what in fact constituted a minority, and whether, in fact, such minority contracts were actually benefiting the minority so enshrined, or were being subverted to shell corporations and straw men.†
* No one would say of a firefighter, hired under rules reducing the height requirement, and thus unable to carry one’s child to safety, “Nonetheless, I am glad I voted for that ‘more fair’ law.”
†As, indeed, they are, or, in the best case, to those among the applicants claiming eligibility most capable of framing, supporting, or bribing their claims to the front of the line. All claims cannot be met. The politicians and bureaucrats discriminating between claims will necessarily favor those redounding to their individual or party benefit—so the eternal problem of “Fairness,” supposedly solved by Government distribution of funds, becomes, yet again and inevitably, a question of graft.
David Mamet, The Secret Knowledge: On the Dismantling of American Culture (New York, NY: Sentinel Publishing, 2011), 116-117, 12
And here is some good commentary by JULIE BOROWSKI:
…The young woman couldn’t complete the job-related obstacle course in that allotted amount of time. She only completed the course once after multiple attempts and it took her 22 minutes.
She failed and she shouldn’t be graduating.
This shouldn’t be about sparing feelings.
Look, nothing against her personally. Being a firefighter clearly isn’t for everyone. It’s physically demanding work. A firefighter who doesn’t meet the stringent physical standards could put other firefighters and civilians in harm’s way.
This comes at a time when the fire department is under pressure by Mayor de Blasio to hire more women. They have even gone so far as making the FST test easier to avoid sex discrimination lawsuits.
Unbelievable….
….It doesn’t help them that the FDNY is hiring women who, frankly, aren’t capable of performing the job because they didn’t pass the test. I’m sure the 44 female firefighters in New York City aren’t too pleased about their work being devalued.
Physical fitness tests are not sexist. It is sexist to hire someone based on their gender, though.
I thought of the following Thomas Sowell excerpt via a Facebook discussion regarding illegal immigrants/immigration. Stephanie C. said the following:
Does anyone here know how many undocumented people live in SCV? [JUMP TO MORE DIRECT ANSWER] Seems like many people are assuming that if your Hispanic they must be undocumented. I hope people know that’s not the case.
California has the highest illegal immigrant population comparing states. And so the assumption of calling into question one’s “status” may be a logical leap in assumption. Which is why I thought of this Sowell portion of a book I just finished. Here is my Facebook response, followed by an excerpt from the aforementioned book (with a quick set-up for it):
I guess that would be another side-effect [harm] done by the open-borders people. Small companies wanting to hire legal aliens but not having the training or knowledge to know the difference, and so they stay away from them entirely. I just finished a Thomas Sowell book entitled, “Discrimination and Disparities,” and this short/concise book really opened up the consequences of actions.
For instance, businesses is black communities are apprehensive in hiring young black men. Businesses that do background checks hire more young black men than the national average. Businesses that do not do background checks stay away from this demographic.
The Democrats in many of these impoverished areas start campaigns or the largely Democrat city council say that doing background checks is bigoted and targets black workers. Racist in other words, the card overused as of late.
So they force these companies to cease-and-desist. And so these companies offering work experience, communication skills, a sense of pride in ones work, etc., are all thrown to the wayside….. these companies that would and did hire large quantities of young black men stay away from the demographic.
I will forego the posting of what Discrimination 1 and Discrimination 2 are, but the main point easily extracted herein is that Leftist Democrats (“Progressives”) stop background checks in employment due to a [wrongly] perceived targeting of black youth. And so this is yet another example of a problem CREATED through Leftist legislation and then used (black unemployment) to keep said demographic in a state of anger and voting for who will give hand-out and not who will allow the market to create opportunity. I believe the leadership of the Democrat Party has this in mind when doing stuff like this, the general Left leaning population just wants to feel good about their position (SEE QUOTE A).
Another example of a problem CREATED by Democrats and then used in a political manner to rile up it’s base against Trump and the GOP is the immigration battle in sanctuary states is this:
Here is the Sowell excerpt as promised…. FINALLY:
To take an extreme example of Discrimination 1b, for the sake of illustration, if 40 percent of the people in Group X are alcoholics and 1 percent of the people in Group Y are alcoholics, an employer may well prefer to hire only people from Group Y for work where an alcoholic would be not only ineffective but dangerous. This would mean that a majority of the people in Group X— 60 percent in this case— would be denied employment, even though they are not alcoholics.
What matters, crucially, to the employer is the cost of determining which individual is or is not an alcoholic, when job applicants all show up sober on the day when they are seeking employment.
This also matters to the customers who buy the employer’s products and to society as a whole. If alcoholics produce a higher proportion of products that turn out to be defective, that is a cost to customers, and that cost may take different forms. For example, the customer could buy the product and then discover that it is defective. Alternatively, defects in the product might be discovered at the factory and discarded. In this case, the customers will be charged higher prices for the products that are sold, since the costs of defective products that are discovered and discarded at the factory must be covered by the prices charged for the reliable products that pass the screening test and are sold.
To the extent that alcoholics are not only less competent but dangerous, the costs of those dangers are paid by either fellow employees who face those dangers on the job or by customers who buy dangerously defective products, or both. In short, there are serious costs inherent in the situation, so that either 60 percent of the people in Group X or employers or customers— or all three groups— end up paying the costs of the alcoholism of 40 percent of the people in Group X
This is certainly not judging each job applicant as an individual, so it is not Discrimination I in the purest sense of Discrimination Ia. On the other hand, it is also not Discrimination II, in the sense of decisions based on a personal bias or antipathy toward that group. The employer might well have personal friends from Group X, based on far more knowledge of those particular individuals than it is possible to get about job applicants, without prohibitive costs.
The point here is neither to justify nor condemn the employer but to classify different decision-making processes, so that their implications and consequences can be analyzed separately. If judging each person as an individual is Discrimination 1a, we can classify as Discrimination 1b basing decisions about groups on information that is correct for that group, though not necessarily correct for every individual in that group, nor necessarily even correct for a majority of the individuals in that group.
A real-life example of the effect of the cost of knowledge in this context is a study which showed that, despite the reluctance of many employers to hire young black males, because a significant proportion of them have criminal records (Discrimination 1b), those particular employers who automatically did criminal background checks on all their employees (Discrimination 1a) tended to hire more young black males than did other employers.1
In other words, where the nature of the work made criminal background checks worth the cost for all employees, it was no longer necessary to use group information to assess whether individual young black job applicants had a criminal background. This made young black job applicants without a criminal background more employable than before.
More is involved here than simply a question of nomenclature. It has implications for practical policies in the real world. Many observers, hoping to help young black males have more employment opportunities, have advocated prohibiting employers from asking job applicants questions about a criminal record. Moreover, the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has sued employers who do criminal background checks on job applicants, on grounds that this was racial discrimination, even when it was applied to all job applicants, regardless of race.2 Empirically, however, criminal background checks provided more employment opportunities for young black males.
[2] Jason L. Riley, “Jobless Blacks Should Cheer Background Checks,” Wall Street Journal, August 23, 2013, p. All; Paul Sperry, “Background Checks Are Racist?” Investor’s Business Daily, March 28, 2014, p. Al.
Here is an excerpt from Jason Riley’s piece mentioned in footnote #2 above, via HOT AIR:
On the contrary, an October 2006 study in the Journal of Law and Economics, “Perceived Criminality, Criminal Background Checks, and the Racial Hiring Practices of Employers,” found that “employers that check criminal backgrounds are in general more likely to hire African Americans,” according to Harry Holzer of Georgetown University and his two co-authors. “[T]he adverse consequence of employer-initiated background checks on the likelihood of hiring African Americans is more than offset by the positive effect of eliminating statistical discrimination.” These researchers surmise that employers who can screen for prison records are less likely to rely on prejudice when hiring.
Blacks aren’t the only beneficiaries. Analyzing “employer willingness to hire other stigmatized groups of workers (such as workers with gaps in their employment history),” they found the same pattern. The results, they wrote, “suggest that in the absence of background checks, employers use race, gaps in employment history, and other perceived correlates of criminal activity to assess the likelihood of an applicant’s previous felony convictions and factor such assessments into the hiring decision.”
This is with thanks to BLACK PIGEON SPEAKS! Using the numbers below and the idea (fact really) that the largest population of illegal immigrants live in California, I would say California illegal population is at least 13% of Cali’s population. It wouldn’t be unreasonable to say, then, that it could be as high as 20% (so 2-of-every-10 residents). Here are some other factoids:
Most undocumented immigrants are from Latin America. Nationwide, 78% of undocumented immigrants are from Latin America—a slight majority (52%) come from Mexico alone. Most of the others (13%) are from Asia, although Africa and Europe also account for hundreds of thousands of undocumented immigrants in the US. The Pew Research Center (PRC) estimates that as of 2014, 71% of California’s undocumented population was Mexican-born.
This is over double estimates compiled by the Department of Homeland Security, which claims 11.1 million illegal aliens live in the US.
The paper’s abstract outlines some of the reasons why their estimate is both higher, and better than the current government statistics:
We apply standard operational principles of inflows and outflows to estimate the number of undocumented immigrants in the United States, using the best available data, including some that has only recently become available. We generate a lower bound for the number of undocumented immigrants using conservative parameter values that underestimate inflows and overestimate outflows.
Our lower bound is close to 17 million, 50% higher than the most prominent current estimate of 11.3 million, which is based on survey data and thus different sources and methods. Standard parameter values generate an estimate of 22.8 million undocumented immigrants, twice as large as the current estimate.
Conservatives have argued for well over a decade that the number of illegal immigrants is widely underestimated by the government, and think tanks which base their calculations on government data—finally academics are beginning to take an independent look at the problem.
But the fact that the paper needed to be written at all highlights an insidious problem: we really don’t know how many illegal immigrants live in the US. With that in mind, I think it’s worth surveying the research on the topic—at the very least I’ll be able to give you some context for the broader debate….
This is a great article via the WALL STREET JOURNAL. I clipped the base of the article as it might not be viewable at WSJ’s website. A great and insightful read (h-t to Dennis Prager):
When a mob at Vermont’s Middlebury College shut down a speech by social scientist Charles Murray a few weeks ago, most of us saw it as another instance of campus illiberalism. Jonathan Haidt saw something more—a ritual carried out by adherents of what he calls a “new religion,” an auto-da-fé against a heretic for a violation of orthodoxy.
“The great majority of college students want to learn. They’re perfectly reasonable, and they’re uncomfortable with a lot of what’s going on,” Mr. Haidt, a psychologist and professor of ethical leadership at New York University’s Stern School of Business, tells me during a recent visit to his office. “But on each campus there are some true believers who have reoriented their lives around the fight against evil.”
THESE BELIEVERS ARE TRANSFORMING THE CAMPUS FROM A CITADEL OF INTELLECTUAL FREEDOM INTO A HOLY SPACE—WHERE WHITE PRIVILEGE HAS REPLACED ORIGINAL SIN, THE TRANSGRESSIONS OF CLASS AND RACE AND GENDER ARE CONFESSED NOT TO PRIESTS BUT TO “THE COMMUNITY,” VICTIM GROUPS ARE WORSHIPED LIKE GODS, AND THE SINNED-AGAINST ARE SUPPLICATED WITH “SAFE SPACES” AND “TRIGGER WARNINGS.”
The fundamentalists may be few, Mr. Haidt says, but they are “very intimidating” since they wield the threat of public shame. On some campuses, “they’ve been given the heckler’s veto, and are often granted it by an administration who won’t stand up to them either.”
ALL THIS HAS BECOME SOMETHING OF A PREOCCUPATION FOR THE 53-YEAR-OLD MR. HAIDT. A LONGTIME LIBERAL—HE RAN A GUN-CONTROL GROUP AS AN UNDERGRADUATE AT YALE—HE ADMITS HE “HAD NEVER ENCOUNTERED CONSERVATIVE IDEAS” UNTIL HIS MID-40S.
[…..]
“What we’re beginning to see now at Berkeley and at Middlebury hints that this [campus] religion has the potential to turn violent,” Mr. Haidt says. “The attack on the professor at Middlebury really frightened people,” he adds, referring to political scientist Allison Stanger, who wound up in a neck brace after protesters assaulted her as she left the venue.
The Berkeley episode Mr. Haidt mentions illustrates the Orwellian aspect of campus orthodoxy. A scheduled February appearance by right-wing provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos prompted masked agitators to throw Molotov cocktails, smash windows, hurl rocks at police, and ultimately cause $100,000 worth of damage. The student newspaper ran an op-ed justifying the rioting under the headline “Violence helped ensure safety of students.” Read that twice.
Mr. Haidt can explain. Students like the op-ed author “are armed with a set of concepts and words that do not mean what you think they mean,” he says. “People older than 30 think that ‘violence’ generally involves some sort of physical threat or harm. But as students are using the word today, ‘violence’ is words that have a negative effect on members of the sacred victim groups. And so even silence can be violence.” It follows that if offensive speech is “violence,” then actual violence can be a form of self-defense.
Down the hall from Mr. Haidt’s office, I noticed a poster advertising a “bias response hotline” students can call “to report an experience of bias, discrimination or harassment.” I joke that NYU seems to have its own version of the morality police in Islamic countries like Saudi Arabia. “It’s like East Germany,” Mr. Haidt replies—with students, at least some of them, playing the part of the Stasi.
How did we get here, and what can be done? On the first question, Mr. Haidt points to a braided set of causes. There’s the rise in political polarization, which is related to the relatively recent “political purification of the universities.” While the academy has leaned left since at least the 1920s, Mr. Haidt says “it was always just a lean.” Beginning in the early 1990s, as the professors of the Greatest Generation retired, it became a full-on tilt.
“Now there are no more conservative voices on the faculty or administration,” he says, exaggerating only a little. Heterodox Academy cites research showing that the ratio of left to right professors in 1995 was 2 to 1. Now it is 5 to 1.
The left, meanwhile, has undergone an ideological transformation. A generation ago, social justice was understood as equality of treatment and opportunity: “If gay people don’t have to right to marry and you organize a protest to apply pressure to get them that right, that’s justice,” Mr. Haidt says. “If black people are getting discriminated against in hiring and you fight that, that’s justice.”
Today justice means equal outcomes. “There are two ideas now in the academic left that weren’t there 10 years ago,” he says. “One is that everyone is racist because of unconscious bias, and the other is that everything is racist because of systemic racism.” That makes justice impossible to achieve: “When you cross that line into insisting if there’s not equal outcomes then some people and some institutions and some systems are racist, sexist, then you’re setting yourself up for eternal conflict and injustice.”
Perhaps most troubling, Mr. Haidt cites the new protectiveness in child-rearing over the past few decades. Historically, American children were left to their own devices and had to learn to deal with bullies. Today’s parents, out of compassion, handle it for them. “By the time students get to college they have much, much less experience with unpleasant social encounters, or even being insulted, excluded or marginalized,” Mr. Haidt says. “They expect there will be some adult, some authority, to rectify things.”
Combine that with the universities’ shift to a “customer is always right” mind-set. Add in social media. Suddenly it’s “very, very easy to bring mobs together,” Mr. Haidt says, and make “people very afraid to stand out or stand up for what they think is right.” Students and professors know, he adds, that “if you step out of line at all, you will be called a racist, sexist or homophobe. In fact it’s gotten so bad out there that there’s a new term—‘ophobophobia,’ which is the fear of being called x-ophobic.”
That fear runs deep—including in Mr. Haidt. When I ask him about how political homogeneity on campus informs the understanding of so-called rape culture, he clams up: “I can’t talk about that.” The topic of sexual assault—along with Islam—is too sensitive.
It’s a painfully ironic answer from a man dedicating his career to free thought and speech. But choosing his battles doesn’t mean Mr. Haidt is unwilling to fight. And he’s finding allies across the political spectrum.
[….]
Following the Middlebury incident, the unlikely duo of Democratic Socialist Cornel West and conservative Robert P. George published a statement denouncing “campus illiberalism” and calling for “truth seeking, democracy and freedom of thought and expression.” More than 2,500 scholars and other intellectuals have signed it. At Northwestern the student government became the first in the country to pass a resolution calling for academic freedom and viewpoint diversity.
[….]
He offers this real-world example: “I think that the ‘deplorables’ comment could well have changed the course of human history.”
Dennis Prager comments on a case where a disgruntled woman has to ruin it for everyone else. And yet… people still vote Democratic.
____________________________________
For more clear thinking like this from Dennis Prager… I invite you to visit: http://www.dennisprager.com/ ~ see also: http://www.prageruniversity.com/
…One argument holds that we can reject what we consider outdated because we already reject a host of other Torah laws, such as capital punishment for violating the Sabbath or for cursing one’s parents.
But this argument is not compelling. It is one thing not to put a Torah punishment into practice and quite another to declare that a Torah sin is no longer a sin. I am unaware of any Jewish precedent for declaring that an act that the Torah condemns in its strongest terms is now completely acceptable.
Another argument holds that if the Torah knew what we “know” today, e.g., that homosexuality is genetic, the Torah would never have condemned it.
This argument is emotionally compelling – how can we oppose a condition that isn’t chosen? But it is not logically compelling.
First, no one – certainly not the Torah – opposes a condition; it is only behavior that is opposed. To cite a heterosexual example, virtually all people, especially men, are genetically programmed to be adulterers. Monogamy is not nature’s plan. Thus, the Torah only bans adultery, not an adulterous nature.
Second, we have only scant evidence that homosexuality is genetically inherited, and even that scant evidence is related only to male homosexuals, not to lesbians. Most lesbians acknowledge that their homosexuality is not genetic, and most evidence suggests that most lesbians became homosexual because of psychological conditioning, e.g., poor relations with her parent(s) or abuse by a man.
Third, even if homosexuality were genetic, this would have little impact on how we should view it. We have come to believe that there are genetic markers for alcoholism, yet we continue to regard it as a disease. Likewise, as painful as it is to say, the inability of a man to enjoy sex with a woman must be regarded as a flaw in what may otherwise be a superb human being. To understand this, a better analogy may be to deafness. It is better to be born with hearing than to be born deaf, yet no one considers deafness a moral flaw. So, too, heterosexuality is better than homosexuality, but homosexuality is not a moral flaw – a homosexual is as likely to be a kind and decent person as anyone else. The analogy is even more precise because there are many leaders of the deaf community who are offended by any suggestion that hearing is better than deafness – so much so that they oppose the cochlear implant, a surgical procedure that can give hearing to deaf children, on the grounds that it implies that hearing is superior to deafness.
We live in a time of radical egalitarianism – everything is equal, nothing may be regarded as superior to anything else. But Judaism is radically non-egalitarian – it constantly declares that some things are better than other things. One such declaration is that it is far better for men and women to sexually bond than for men and men or women and women to do so. Yet, to teach this basic tenet of Judaism – that society should hold opposite-sex love as its ideal – is to be labeled intolerant, bigoted, closed-minded, and homophobic….
Jason Riley, author of “Please Stop Helping Us,” joins John to explain how well-intended government program have damaged blacks in America.
“If we are to be mothered, mother must know best…. In every age the men who want us under their thumb, if they have any sense, will put forward the particular pretension which the hopes and fears of that age render most potent. They ‘cash in.’ It has been magic, it has been Christianity. Now it will certainly be science…. Let us not be deceived by phrases about ‘Man taking charge of his own destiny.’ All that can really happen is that some men will take charge of the destiny of others…. The more completely we are planned the more powerful they will be.”
[….]
“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth. Their very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be ‘cured’ against one’s will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals. But to be punished, however severley, because we have deserved it, because ‘ought to have known better,’ is to be treated as a human persons in God’s image.”
C.S. Lewis, God in the Dock (Grand Rapids, MI: W.B. Eerdmans, 2002), 292 (Full text).
…“The word redskin has a relatively innocent history. As Smithsonian linguist Ives Goddard has shown, European settlers in the 18th century seem to have adopted the term from Native Americans, who used ‘red skin’ to describe themselves, and it was generally a descriptor, not an insult.”
So, then, what’s so bad about the name Redskins?
Slate Argument One: “Here’s a quick thought experiment: Would any team, naming itself today, choose “Redskins” or adopt the team’s Indian-head logo? Of course it wouldn’t.”
Response: There are many teams with names that wouldn’t be adopted today. Who would name a team the “Red Sox,” “White Sox,” “Packers,” “Dodgers,” “Forty-Niners,” “Steelers,” or, for that matter, “Yankees?”
Slate Argument Two: “While the name Redskins is only a bit offensive, it’s extremely tacky and dated — like an old aunt who still talks about ‘colored people.’ … “
Response: Since Slate dismisses the term “colored people” as “tacky and dated,” why doesn’t it call on the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (the NAACP), to change its name?
Slate Argument Three: “Changing how you talk changes how you think. … Replacing ‘same-sex marriage’ with ‘marriage equality’ helped make gay marriage a universal cause rather than a special pleading.”
Response: It’s nice to have at least one left-wing source acknowledge how the left changes language to promote its causes. When more and more people began to suspect that global warming was not about to bring an apocalypse, and that, at the very least, it is in a pause mode, the left changed the term to “climate change.”
The “marriage equality” substitution for “same-sex marriage” is just one more example of dishonest manipulation of English.
Orwellian manipulation of language by the left would be reason enough to oppose dropping “Redskins,” a nearly 80-year-old tradition venerated by millions.
Argument Four is the key argument, offered by the Atlantic, in its support of Slate:
Response: “Whether people ‘should’ be offended by it or not doesn’t matter; the fact that some people are offended by it does.”
This is classic modern liberalism. It is why I have dubbed our age “The Age of Feelings.”
In classic progressive fashion, the Atlantic writer commits two important errors.
First, it does matter “whether people ‘should’ feel offended.” If we ceased using all arguments or descriptions because some people feel offended, we would cease using any arguments or descriptions. We should use the “reasonable person” test to determine what is offensive, not the “some people are offended” criterion.
On a recent broadcast of my radio show, I played excerpts of winning songs from the recent Eurovision Contest. One of them was from Hungary, and after I announced the Hungarian title, I jokingly translated it as “Let’s invade Romania.”
A man called up, and in unaccented English said he was of Hungarian stock and that I should apologize for offending him and Hungarians generally. I told him that his taking offense at a harmless joke was his problem, not what I said.
Teaching people to take offense is one of the left’s black arts. Outside of sex and drugs, the left is pretty much joyless and it kills joy constantly. The war on the “Redskins” name is just the latest example.
Second, it is the left that specializes in offending: labeling the Tea Party racist, public cursing, displaying crucifixes in urine, and regularly calling Republicans evil (Paul Krugman, in his New York Times column last month, wrote that the Republican mindset “takes positive glee in inflicting further suffering on the already miserable.” For such people to find the name “Redskins” offensive is a hoot.
[….]
The logo of the National Hockey League team, the Ottawa Senators, features a helmeted male senator of the Roman Empire. In the name of not offending the transgendered and of gender equality, the left will one day find that offensive, too; and demand that the logo feature a helmeted female as well.
….Additionally, there’s no credible data to show Native Americans are seething over the team’s name, either. A survey done by the Annenberg Public Policy Center in 2003 and 2004 found that 90 percent of Native Americans were not offended by the Redskins name.
The clamor for a name change appears to be coming from a relatively small number of politically liberal Native Americans, and from white liberals in the media. It could turn into a dangerous and slippery slope. For if the Redskins are pressured to change their name, shouldn’t the Cleveland Indians change theirs as well? What about the Kansas City Chiefs, Atlanta Braves, and the many high schools and colleges that use Native American-themed nicknames? While we’re at it, let’s coerce Notre Dame to change its nickname as well. “Fighting Irish” is demeaning to our Irish-American brothers and sisters….
Newsmaxlists some other orgs that will cease using it as well:
…In response to Slate’s announcement, New Republic editor Franklin Foer Tweeted on Thursday that his publication would follow suit.
The liberal magazine Mother Jones said on Friday it would also avoid using the name.
Other newspapers, websites and sports writers have taken similar stands, including The Washington City Paper, Washington online site DCist.com, the Kansas City Star newspaper and football writers at the Buffalo News and the Philadelphia Daily News.
The National Congress of American Indians, an advocacy group, said Slate.com recognized “the derogatory origins and nature of the team’s name.”
Representatives for the team declined to comment about the decisions by Slate and the other media organizations, but team owner Daniel Snyder recently told the newspaper USA Today, “We’ll never change the name. It’s that simple. Never. You can use all caps.”…
A young man [A childhood friend of one of my sons] who does not agree with my viewpoints on some issues (many issues in fact) still is open minded enough to ask a serious question expecting some serious input to continue his thinking on the matter. Learning should not become stagnant, but should be a lifelong adventure. This person is doing just that, in the least trying to understand the opposing viewpoint. For this I laud him.
Here is the question:
✌“Out of curiosity, what are your thoughts on affirmative action?”
Here is my response:
Not a big fan at all. It is interesting, I just finished a book entitled, “Wrong on Race: The Democrat Party’s Buried Past,” and at the end of the book he gave some ideas that the Republicans could spearhead some ideas to end racial preferences altogether. One is (and I don’t know how much I like his ideas… but at least he is being innovative) that blacks would not have to pay Federal Income Tax for a generation or two, and then all race based programs could be ended… and we could truly be a color blind society. At least as the government is concerned. (You will never be able to change human nature and its depravity.)
A book I highly recommend (and is relatively short) that help zero in on this topic is a book by Thomas Sowell, “Civil Rights: Rhetoric or Reality?” It is a bit dated but there are timeless ideas in it. A more academic study is his book, “Affirmative Action Around the World: An Empirical Study,” by Sowell. (Although I haven’t read the book, I trust Walter Williams input from his newest book [on my 2013 reading list]: “Race and Economics: How Much Can Be Blamed on Discrimination?“).
Again, two books easily digested that should be read by the serious student that are short and full of timeless wisdom:
I look at it like this. Let’s say you have a law firm and many of your cases are with Hollywood moguls and you have even had a couple of your lawyers argue before the Supreme Court. You need lawyers that know their law and have a record of academic achievement. You go to Harvard, Yale, Cambridge, etc. to pull from the pool new Lawyers. Walking around are future graduates with signs around their necks that say:
★ I got into ______________ because I competed and scored higher than most on my SATS and was near the top of my undergraduate classes;
★ I got into ______________ because my parents or grandparents gave millions of dollars to their alma mater;
★ I got into ______________ because I am black.
(By-the-by, I used the example of a rich privileged “white” student because I know this person views much of the world through the lenses of the liberal trinity, that is: race, class, gender. I used an example he would agree with, so if “a” is true [rich privileged kid], why isn’t “b” true [poor privileged kid].) I would be just as skeptical of the uber-rich kid who has parents building wings in the university as I would about a person getting in due to affirmative action. And if you ran a business that by nature [all] are competitive, you are looking for people who can be the best.
Not only does this hurt the workforce, but it hurts the educational system as well. To wit, I just uploaded a 5-minute blurb from Thomas Sowell. It is worth listening to:
Here is likewise a short audio with Larry Elder making some key points in a 6-minute audio. What this shows is that like with many “feelings based” policy, the people harmed are the intended target of help.
I finished off my thinking with David Mamet, an ex-progressive, explaining the idea of feelings based laws:
There is a Liberal sentiment that it should also punish those who take more than their “fair share.” But what is their fair share? (Shakespeare suggests that each should be treated not according to his deserts, but according to God’s mercy, or none of us would escape whipping.)
The concept of Fairness, for all its attractiveness to sentiment, is a dangerous one (cf. quota hiring and enrollment, and talk of “reparations”). Deviations from the Law, which is to say the Constitution, to accommodate specifically alleged identity-group injustices will all inevitably be expanded, universalized, and exploited until there remains no law, but only constant petition of Government.
We cannot live in peace without Law. And though law cannot be perfect, it may be just if it is written in ignorance of the identity of the claimants and applied equally to all. Then it is a possession not only of the claimants but of the society, which may now base its actions upon a reasonable assumption of the law’s treatment.
But “fairness” is not only a nonlegal but an antilegal process, for it deals not with universally applicable principles and strictures, but with specific cases, responding to the perceived or proclaimed needs of individual claimants, and their desire for extralegal preference. And it could be said to substitute fairness (a determination which must always be subjective) for justice (the application of the legislated will of the electorate), is to enshrine greed—the greed, in this case, not for wealth, but for preference. The socialistic spirit of the Left indicts ambition and the pursuit of wealth as Greed, and appeals, supposedly on behalf of “the people,” to the State for “fairness.”….
….But such fairness can only be the non-Constitutional intervention of the State in the legal, Constitutional process—awarding, as it sees fit, money (reparations), preferment (affirmative action), or entertainment (confiscation)….
….”Don’t you care?” is the admonition implicit in the very visage of the Liberals of my acquaintance on their understanding that I have embraced Conservatism. But the Talmud understood of old that good intentions can lead to evil—vide Busing, Urban Renewal, Affirmative Action, Welfare, et cetera, to name the more immediately apparent, and not to mention the, literally, tens of thousands of Federal and State statutes limiting freedom of trade, which is to say, of the right of the individual to make a living, and, so earn that wealth which would, in its necessary expenditure, allow him to provide a living to others….
…. I recognized that though, as a lifelong Liberal, I endorsed and paid lip service to “social justice,” which is to say, to equality of result, I actually based the important decisions of my life—those in which I was personally going to be affected by the outcome—upon the principle of equality of opportunity; and, further, that so did everyone I knew. Many, I saw, were prepared to pay more taxes, as a form of Charity, which is to say, to hand off to the Government the choice of programs and recipients of their hard-earned money, but no one was prepared to be on the short end of the failed Government programs, however well-intentioned. (For example—one might endorse a program giving to minorities preference in award of government contracts; but, as a business owner, one would fight to get the best possible job under the best possible terms regardless of such a program, and would, in fact, work by all legal and, perhaps by semi- or illegal means to subvert any program that enforced upon the proprietor a bad business decision.)*
Further, one, in paying the government to relieve him of a feeling of social responsibility, might not be bothered to question what in fact constituted a minority, and whether, in fact, such minority contracts were actually benefiting the minority so enshrined, or were being subverted to shell corporations and straw men. †
————————————————————–
*No one would say of a firefighter, hired under rules reducing the height requirement, and thus unable to carry one’s child to safety, “Nonetheless, I am glad I voted for that ‘more fair’ law.”
† As, indeed, they are, or, in the best case, to those among the applicants claiming eligibility most capable of framing, supporting, or bribing their claims to the front of the line. All claims cannot be met. The politicians and bureaucrats discriminating between claims will necessarily favor those redounding to their individual or party benefit—so the eternal problem of “Fairness,” supposedly solved by Government distribution of funds, becomes, yet again and inevitably, a question of graft.
David Mamet, The Secret Knowledge: On the Dismantling of American Culture (New York, NY: Sentinel Publishing, 2011), 116-117, 122, 151, 154.
Gary Harrington, the Oregon man convicted of collecting rainwater and snow runoff on his rural property surrendered Wednesday morning to begin serving his 30-day, jail sentence in Medford, Ore. “I’m sacrificing my liberty so we can stand up as a country and stand for our liberty,” Harrington told a small crowd of people gathered outside of the Jackson County (Ore.) Jail.
Several people held signs that showed support for Harrington as he was taken inside the jail.
Harrington was found guilty two weeks ago of breaking a 1925 law for having, what state water managers called “three illegal reservoirs” on his property. He was convicted of nine misdemeanors, sentenced to 30 days in jail and fined over $1500 for collecting rainwater and snow runoff on his property…Harrington says he is not diverting the state’s water — merely collecting rainwater and snow melt that falls or flows on his own property.
Harrington has vowed to continue to fight the penalty, stating that the government has become “big bullies” and that “from here on in, I’m going to fight it.”
If we are to be mothered, mother must know best. . . . In every age the men who want us under their thumb, if they have any sense, will put forward the particular pretension which the hopes and fears of that age render most potent. They ‘cash in.’ It has been magic, it has been Christianity. Now it will certainly be science. . . . Let us not be deceived by phrases about ‘Man taking charge of his own destiny.’ All that can really happen is that some men will take charge of the destiny of others. . . . The more completely we are planned the more powerful they will be.
[….]
Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth. Their very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be ‘cured’ against one’s will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals.
