Deconstructing "Progressive " thought

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Remember when sending your paycheck to the government was only a joke?

http://www.cnbc.com/id/39265847

UK Proposes All Paychecks Go to the State First
Published: Monday, 20 Sep 2010 | 7:57 AM ET
Text Size
By: Robin Knight
CNBC Associate Web Producer

The UK's tax collection agency is putting forth a proposal that all employers send employee paychecks to the government, after which the government would deduct what it deems as the appropriate tax and pay the employees by bank transfer.

The proposal by Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs (HMRC) stresses the need for employers to provide real-time information to the government so that it can monitor all payments and make a better assessment of whether the correct tax is being paid.

Currently employers withhold tax and pay the government, providing information at the end of the year, a system know as Pay as You Earn (PAYE). There is no option for those employees to refuse withholding and individually file a tax return at the end of the year.

If the real-time information plan works, it further proposes that employers hand over employee salaries to the government first.

"The next step could be to use (real-time) information as the basis for centralizing the calculation and deduction of tax," HMRC said in a July discussion paper.

HMRC described the plan as "radical" as it would be a huge change from the current system that has been largely unchanged for 66 years.

Even though the centralized deductions proposal would provide much-needed oversight, there are some major concerns, George Bull, head of Tax at Baker Tilly, told CNBC.com.

"If HMRC has direct access to employees' bank accounts and makes a mistake, people are going to feel very exposed and vulnerable," Bull said.

And the chance of widespread mistakes could be high, according to Bull. HMRC does not have a good track record of handling large computer systems and has suffered high-profile errors with data, he said.

The system would be massive in terms of data management, larger than a recent attempt to centralize the National Health Service's data, which was later scrapped, Bull said.

If there's a mistake and the HMRC collects too much money, the difficulty of getting it back could be high with repayments of tax taking weeks or months, he said.

"There has to be some very clear understanding of how quickly repayments were made if there was a mistake," Bull said.

HMRC estimated the potential savings to employers from the introduction of the concept would be about £500 million ($780 million).

But the cost of implementing the new system would be "phenomenal," Bull pointed out.

"It's very clear that the system does need to be modernized… It's outdated, it's outmoded," Emma Boon, campaigner manager at the Tax Payers' Alliance, told CNBC.com.

Boon said that the Tax Payers' Alliance was in favor of simplifying tax collection, but stressed that a new complex computer system would add infrastructure and administration costs at a time when the government is trying to reduce spending.

There is a further concern, according to Bull. The centralized storage of so much data poises a security risk as the system may be open to cyber crime.

As well as security issues, there's a huge issue of transparency, according to Boon.

Boon also questioned HMCR's ability to handle to the role effectively.

The Institute of Directors (IoD), a UK organization created to promote the business agenda of directors and entreprenuers, said in a press release it had major concerns about the proposal to allow employees' pay to be paid directly to HMRC.

The IoD said the shift to a real-time, centralized system could be positive as long as the burden on employers was not increased. But it added that the idea of wages being processed by HMRC was "completely unacceptable."

“This document contains a lot of good ideas. But the idea that HMRC should be trusted with the gross pay of employees is not one of them," Richard Baron, Head of Taxation at the IoD, said in the release.

A spokesperson for Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne was not immediately available for comment.

 

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History. There are still people who will speak for the dead:

http://news.stanford.edu/news/2010/september/naimark-stalin-genocide-092310.html

Stalin killed millions. A Stanford historian answers the question, was it genocide?

When it comes to use of the word "genocide," public opinion has been kinder to Stalin than Hitler. But one historian looks at Stalin's mass killings and urges that the definition of genocide be widened.
Jack Hubbard

In his new book, historian Norman Naimark argues that the definition of genocide should include nations killing social classes and political groups.

BY CYNTHIA HAVEN

Mass killing is still the way a lot of governments do business.

The past few decades have seen terrifying examples in Rwanda, Cambodia, Darfur, Bosnia.

Murder on a national scale, yes – but is it genocide? "The word carries a powerful punch," said Stanford history Professor Norman Naimark. "In international courts, it's considered the crime of crimes."

Nations have tugs of war over the official definition of the word "genocide" itself – which mentions only national, ethnic, racial and religious groups. The definition can determine, after all, international relations, foreign aid and national morale. Look at the annual international tussle over whether the 1915 Turkish massacre and deportation of the Armenians "counts" as genocide.

Naimark, author of the controversial new book Stalin's Genocides, argues that we need a much broader definition of genocide, one that includes nations killing social classes and political groups. His case in point: Stalin.

The book's title is plural for a reason: He argues that the Soviet elimination of a social class, the kulaks (who were higher-income farmers), and the subsequent killer famine among all Ukrainian peasants – as well as the notorious 1937 order No. 00447 that called for the mass execution and exile of "socially harmful elements" as "enemies of the people" – were, in fact, genocide.
Central State Archives of Photo, Audio, and Video Documents of Ukraine named after G. S. Pshenychnyi Kulaks being dispossessed.

A dispossessed kulak and his family in front of their home in Udachne village in Donets'ka oblast', 1930s.

"I make the argument that these matters shouldn't be seen as discrete episodes, but seen together," said Naimark, the Robert and Florence McDonnell Professor of Eastern European Studies and a respected authority on the Soviet regime. "It's a horrific case of genocide – the purposeful elimination of all or part of a social group, a political group."

Stalin had nearly a million of his own citizens executed, beginning in the 1930s. Millions more fell victim to forced labor, deportation, famine, massacres, and detention and interrogation by Stalin's henchmen.

"In some cases, a quota was established for the number to be executed, the number to be arrested," said Naimark. "Some officials overfulfilled as a way of showing their exuberance."

The term "genocide" was defined by the 1948 United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. The convention's work was shaped by the Holocaust – "that was considered the genocide," said Naimark.

"A catastrophe had just happened, and everyone was still thinking about the war that had just ended. This always occurs with international law – they outlaw what happened in the immediate past, not what's going to happen in the future."

In his book, he concludes that there was more similarity between Hitler and Stalin than usually acknowledged: "Both chewed up the lives of human beings in the name of a transformative vision of Utopia. Both destroyed their countries and societies, as well as vast numbers of people inside and outside their own states. Both, in the end, were genocidaires."

Central State Archives of Photo, Audio, and Video Documents of Ukraine named after G. S. Pshenychnyi Shipment of grain from the Chervonyi Step collective farm to a procurement center, Kyivs'ka oblast', 1932. The sign reads 'Socialists' bread instead of kulak's bread.'

Shipment of grain from the Chervonyi Step collective farm to a procurement center, Kyivs'ka oblast', 1932. The sign reads 'Socialists' bread instead of kulak's bread.'

All early drafts of the U.N. genocide convention included social and political groups in its definition. But one hand that wasn't in the room guided the pen. The Soviet delegation vetoed any definition of genocide that might include the actions of its leader, Joseph Stalin. The Allies, exhausted by war, were loyal to their Soviet allies – to the detriment of subsequent generations.

Naimark argues that that the narrow definition of genocide is the dictator's unacknowledged legacy to us today.

Accounts "gloss over the genocidal character of the Soviet regime in the 1930s, which killed systematically rather than episodically," said Naimark. In the process of collectivization, for example, 30,000 kulaks were killed directly, mostly shot on the spot. About 2 million were forcibly deported to the Far North and Siberia.

They were called "enemies of the people," as well as swine, dogs, cockroaches, scum, vermin, filth, garbage, half animals, apes. Activists promoted murderous slogans: "We will exile the kulak by the thousand when necessary – shoot the kulak breed." "We will make soap of kulaks." "Our class enemies must be wiped off the face of the earth."

One Soviet report noted that gangs "drove the dekulakized naked in the streets, beat them, organized drinking bouts in their houses, shot over their heads, forced them to dig their own graves, undressed women and searched them, stole valuables, money, etc."
L.A. Cicero Historian Norman Naimark

Historian Norman Naimark

The destruction of the kulak class triggered the Ukrainian famine, during which 3 million to 5 million peasants died of starvation.

"There is a great deal of evidence of government connivance in the circumstances that brought on the shortage of grain and bad harvests in the first place and made it impossible for Ukrainians to find food for their survival," Naimark writes.

We will never know how many millions Stalin killed. "And yet somehow Stalin gets a pass," Ian Frazier wrote in a recent New Yorker article about the gulags. "People know he was horrible, but he has not yet been declared horrible officially."

Time magazine put Stalin on its cover 11 times. Russian public opinion polls still rank him near the top of the greatest leaders of Russian history, as if he were just another one of the powerful but bloodthirsty czars.

There's a reason for Russian obliviousness. Every family had not only victims but perpetrators. "A vast network of state organizations had to be mobilized to seize and kill that many people," Naimark wrote, estimating that tens of thousands were accomplices.

"How much can you move on? Can you put it in your past? How is a national identity formed when a central part of it is a crime?" Naimark asked. "The Germans have gone about it the right way," he said, pointing out that the Germany has pioneered research about the Holocaust and the crimes of the Nazi regime. "Through denial and obfuscation, the Turks have gone about it the wrong way."

Without a full examination of the past, Naimark observed, it's too easy for it to happen again.

Toward the end of his life, Stalin may have had another genocide in his crosshairs. We'll never know whether the concocted conspiracy of Jewish Kremlin doctors in 1952 would have resulted in the internal exile of the entire Jewish population. Whatever plans existed ended abruptly with Stalin's death in March 1953, as rumors of Jewish deportations were swirling.

One of Stalin's colleagues recalled the dictator reviewing an arrest list (really, a death list) and muttering to himself: "Who's going to remember all this riff-raff in ten or twenty years' time? No one. … Who remembers the names now of the boyars Ivan the Terrible got rid of? No one. … The people had to know he was getting rid of all his enemies. In the end, they all got what they deserved."

Who remembers? If Naimark has his way, perhaps we all will: "Every family had people who died. I'm convinced that they need to learn about their own past. There'll never be closure, but there will be a reckoning with the past."

 

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Another view of how the "Progressives" operate. From experience I know that the sudden reveal ("When I was in Afghanistan..." or similar statements) has about the same effect as dropping a grenade in the room; "they" have been chatting about war crimes, pipelines across Afghanistan or whatever with the implicit assumption that everyone in the room thinks and feels the same way. When confronted by a differing opinion or factual evidence,they are unhinged, they literally react as if it never occured to them that there are different opinions or what they are saying is not backed by factual evidence.

Since most "Progressive" tropes are based on the idea of "group" rights and enforced by group think, the sudden appearance of large numbers of people who do not fit their definitions of patterns of belief must be very unsettling:

http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/%E2%80%98please%E2%80%99-and-%E2%80%98thank-you%E2%80%99-said-the-left%E2%80%99s-bogeyman/?singlepage=true

‘Please’ and ‘Thank You,’ Said the Left’s Bogeyman

Posted By David Steinberg On October 4, 2010 @ 12:00 am In Uncategorized | 8 Comments

When perhaps not intending to be wildly profound, William Safire defined [1] “bogeyman” — or perhaps “boogey-,” pronounced either with a long or short vowel, fully dependent upon whether or not you were William Safire — as:

    A monster, evil spirit, hobgoblin, or chimera racing through our language, used by nefarious alarmists to frighten small children and innocent voters.

He wrote that definition in 2004, long before the present de-closeting of conservatives. However, it did come a well-worn 100 years after the founding of Progressivism, that contemporary religion which believes utopia comes about following an End of Days defeat of the shadowy yet paste-colored Libertarians. Safire’s column having no other political content, I like to think he dropped an Easter egg referral to one of his core political understandings, which may have been the following:

    Progressives, leftists, liberals, fascists, Islamists, statists, Jersey teachers’ unions — really, anyone who thinks they deserve a bit more of your stuff — use the tactic of winning over adherents by claiming the existence of a Bogeyman.

Indeed, there is no greater impetus behind the long-term survival of these ideologies. I hope not to understate it: you simply cannot support the taking of another’s Natural Rights without convincing yourself — or being convinced at the point of a firearm — that the other does not deserve them, or cannot be trusted with them.

No Bogeyman, no liberalism.

Being as you likely are alive, or perhaps Undead (we’ve got a guy like that here), you have lived quite a while aware that you are the Left’s monster in the closet. Never mind that, objectively, your behavior, ethics, even dress are more closely suited for — and as threatening as — a Shabbas bagel brunch rather than their assumed Klan rally (and yes, they always think Klan rally). For a horror story did arise and spread in this country, and you were the ones assumed to be horrible. Whether due to mythmaking — a legitimate trade among some Marxist-born ideologies — or due to whatever human tendency is responsible for these sorts of things, you have always been expected to be deficient by the Left.

In what manner? Pick one:

    – The right is poor and isolated and ignorant … the right is wealthy and greedy, uncharitable.

    – The right ascribes to backward, dated theology … the right no longer correctly interprets their noble religions.

    – The right wants to mandate individual behavior … the right wants to hide in the Appalachians, behavior unconstrained.

The Left has believed all of this for a century, despite the conflicting claims (presumably explained away by the Right’s being too deficient to understand its own conflicted behavior). But a century! How has this oatmeal of a myth existed for so long, and especially now, amongst a free press and a technological tipping point in information access?

Two reasons:

    A: It will never matter how much liberty and access some people have – we’re human, and some choose to behave horribly and will continue to do so. Human nature isn’t perfected via wi-fi.

    B: The Left has never seen you. Literally.

This doesn’t only refer to Leftists currently alive. No Leftist has seen you gather in numbers like this, in America, since Leftist was invented. By this hottie:

(picture of Karl Marx)
[2]

The Republican National Convention? Entirely political/ruling class. The Left has seen the conventions, but they are not you.

The Marches For Life represent alignment with a single issue, a key one but only one, and the Left generally is not even aware that the marches occur: the marches are you, but the Left has not seen them.

And really, that’s about it. I cannot find evidence of a conservative, limited government, Natural Rights rally rivaling the size of any coordinated Tea Party day — either the D.C. gatherings, or the days of multiple rallies throughout the country — since Marx.

Tyranny is nothing more than belief in a lie, though a rather big one, and tyranny ends along with the lie, and that is happening now. It’s a hysterical, unattractive process watching adherents of tyranny having their religion challenged, a process involving papier-mache puppets [3] and scrotal inflation [4]. But to understand the Left’s unhinged, uncomprehending reaction to the Tea Parties is to know that the lie is dying, that the Bogeyman is out of the dark and he looks nothing like they were told.

They have never seen you, and this is important to understand. Do not draw parallels to 1994, or 1980, or any other revolutionary year. Now is not like that. It is rarer, and you deserve the pleasure of appreciating what you are now alive to see.

Article printed from Pajamas Media: http://pajamasmedia.com

URL to article: http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/%e2%80%98please%e2%80%99-and-%e2%80%98thank-you%e2%80%99-said-the-left%e2%80%99s-bogeyman/

URLs in this post:

[1] defined: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/01/magazine/01ONLANGUAGE.html

[2] Image: http://pajamasmedia.com/files/2010/10/Karl-Marx-1.jpg

[3] papier-mache puppets: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bread_and_Puppet_Theater

[4] scrotal inflation: http://zombietime.com/hall_of_shame/

 

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Progressives fall into the pit of their own arrogance. As Glenn Reynolds (Instapundit) suggests, these people are not educated, rather they are "credentialed", hence their inability to recognize basic facts of American history, or even do a quick Google search to fact check (although if they were to use Wikipedia for fact checking, they would have a nasty surprise):

http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/hubris-nemesis-and-partying-like-its-1773/?singlepage=true

Hubris, Nemesis, and Partying Like It’s 1773
The hunters get captured by the game.
October 21, 2010 - by Neo-Neocon

When Sarah Palin told a Tea Party crowd last Monday that it wasn’t time yet to “party like it’s 1773,” segments of the left such as Kos’s founder Markos Moulitsas chortled at her supposed stupidity. Their kneejerk assumption was that Palin was so ignorant that she didn’t even know the date of early events in the American Revolution. But since it was actually the Boston Tea Party (1773) to which she was referring, it was Sarah who had the last laugh.

Yes, it’s a funny story. But it has a serious side — and contains a lesson for the left, if they could ever learn it. The message is this: if you misunderestimate (Bush’s word) your opposition, that’s a form of hubris. And when hubris arrives, can nemesis be far behind?

But the left has such a low opinion of Sarah Palin’s intelligence and knowledge that they frequently assume not only that she is ignorant of the more subtle details of history that are easily grasped by leftist intellectuals, but that she lacks even the sort of basic information about American history that used to be taught to every grade school student.

That is a mistake of epic proportions, not only because Palin might surprise them by coming across better than they have come to expect, but because it can lead them directly to the sort of pitfalls that lie in wait for those who make such arrogant assumptions. Just a drop of respect for Palin’s knowledge — or, at the very least, her speechwriter’s and/or fact checker’s–would have led them to take a mere moment to research her 1773 reference. That effort would have been quickly rewarded. But their certainty led them to make automatic assumptions, and then directly into an embarrassing error.

Donald Rumsfeld (remember him?) once said that there are:

    … known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns — the ones we don’t know we don’t know.

It’s those unknown unknowns that tend to lead to the deepest trouble. For Palin’s critics, the significance of the year 1773 was just such an unknown unknown. The idea that Sarah Palin might be subtle enough to make a pun about “party” and “Tea Party” (not that it’s all that subtle, but they don’t even give her credit for that much wit), and that she also knows something about history that they don’t know, is simply incomprehensible to them. Therefore they fell into the trap.

Was it actually a deliberate lure? There’s been a bit of speculation in the blogosphere that Palin may have made the reference as bait, knowing that it would be irresistible to some. And maybe she did; after all, she’s a wily hunter.

Neo-Neocon is a New England-based blogger.

 

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On the origins of Political Correctness:

http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/political-correctness-and-the-thought-police/?singlepage=true

Political Correctness and the Thought Police

Posted By Gary Wickert On November 1, 2010 @ 12:00 am In Culture, Free Speech, History, Opinion, Politics, Race Issues, Religion | 3 Comments

It’s hard to define political correctness, but like pornography, you know it when you see it. Some say it is a social philosophy that strives to ensure nobody will ever be offended by anything, ever. Wikipedia [1] defines it as a term which “denotes language, ideas, policies, and behavior seen as seeking to minimize social and institutional offense in occupational, gender, racial, cultural, sexual orientation, disability, and age-related contexts.” Merriam-Webster [2] defines it as “conforming to a belief that language and practices which could offend political sensibilities — as in matters of sex or race — should be eliminated.” No matter what you call it, one thing is certain. For decades now, the perceived orthodoxy of political correctness has been eating away at the institutions which have made America great — precisely as it was intended to.

Long-time liberal Juan Williams [3] was recently fired from his position with National Public Radio for saying what many Americans think. “When I get on a plane, I got to tell you, if I see people who are in Muslim garb and I think, you know, they are identifying themselves first and foremost as Muslims, I get worried. I get nervous,” Juan said on Fox News. Never mind that Juan was simply admitting to a personal feeling he has experienced in a post-9/11 world, it cost him his job. Being afraid of Muslims on a plane is perhaps a bit ridiculous, as clearly most Muslims are not terrorists. But some are. Most pit bulls don’t attack when you pet them either, but that doesn’t mean you’re not cautious around them. It’s hard to tell the good ones from the bad ones, until it’s too late. And is Williams’ nervousness any more ridiculous than a fear of flying — the safest form of travel known to man? I agree with very little that Juan Williams has to say, but I will defend to the death his right to say it without fear of the Political Correctness Gestapo kicking in his door.

Juan’s comment was not much different than when Jesse Jackson [4] said, “There is nothing more painful to me … than to walk down the street and hear footsteps and start thinking about robbery, then look around and see somebody white and feel relieved.” Jesse, of course, was merely admitting the same politically incorrect truth President Obama [4] volunteered years later on March 18, 2008, about his own white grandmother who he claims once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street. The Thought Police are merely the latest tool in the left’s assault on free speech and free minds. And once you learn and understand the origin of political correctness, you realize it is a powerful and effective tool being used to fundamentally transform America — one worthy of resisting.

My earliest memories of this social cancer in its earliest stages was when I was admonished by one of my law school professors that airline stewardesses and stewards were properly called “flight attendants.” Shortly thereafter, I recall being admonished for referring to African-Americans as “blacks.” Indians became Native Americans. The crippled became disabled, midgets became little people, and the retarded became mentally ill. Frankly, I think being called “ill” would be the more offensive choice here, but that is just the political correctness in me.

Proponents of political correctness argue that they wish to bring unconscious biases into awareness, allowing us to make a more informed choice about our language and making us aware of things different people might find offensive. The year 2010 A.D. has become 2010 C.E. and “bias guidelines” now govern what will be in our children’s textbooks.

The language police literally ban even the mere vocalizing of certain words — even words which sound like the forbidden words. Despite its common, non-racist use today in both literature and pop culture, Dr. Laura Schlessinger [5] was forced to publicly apologize for a non-offense reference to the “N-word.” Shortly thereafter she resigned and ended her 35-year long radio career, saying, “I want to regain my First Amendment rights.”

Any utterance of the word “whore” is apparently banned now, too, after Democrat Jerry Brown and a staffer used it in reference to California gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman. It is now simply the “W-word [6].”  I guess what Jerry Brown truly meant to say was “comfort woman.” After the disgrace of what happened to Juan Williams, we apparently also have the “M-word.” Also banned is the “F-word” referring to homosexuals. We’re quickly running out of letters.

Entire lexicons have been forced into retirement. The term “gay” has been hijacked from the English language. The word “fairy” can no longer be used to refer to a petite airborne humanoid with mystical powers. White trash is still referred to as white trash, however. Washington, D.C.’s black mayor, Anthony Williams, gladly accepted the resignation of his white staff member, David Howard [7], because Mr. Howard uttered the word “niggardly” — a term meaning spendthrift — in a private staff discussion about funding. Dallas city officials have apparently also removed the term “black hole” from permissible use after Commissioner Kenneth Mayfield [8] found himself guilty of talking while white. Mayfield observed that the bureaucracy “has become a black hole” for lost paperwork, whereupon fellow Commissioner John Wiley Price took great offense, shouting, “Excuse me!” That office, the black commissioner explained, has become a “white hole.” Seizing on the outrage, Judge Thomas Jones demanded that Mayfield apologize for the “racially insensitive analogy.”

I refuse to believe that Native Americans could legitimately take offense at the name “warriors,” or that they have cornered the market on a word used by the Greeks, Romans, Africans, and Germans to describe courageous soldiers. The word refers to anybody who fights with courage and strength — from cancer patients to the Marines. But sure enough, when I returned home to Wisconsin after practicing law in Houston for 20 years, the Marquette Warriors [9] had been forced to change their name.

As is usually the case, however, it wasn’t the Native American people who were complaining about the sports team names or mascots. It was a handful of liberal activists, mostly non-Native Americans. In 2002, the Peter Harris Research Group conducted a poll [10] asking if high school and college teams should stop using Indian nicknames. Eighty-one percent of Native American respondents said “no” and 83% said teams should not stop using Indian nicknames, mascots, characters, and symbols. The poll also found that 75% of Native Americans don’t think the use of these team names and mascots “contributes to discrimination.” But now we have the Marquette Golden Eagles — a bird which tears apart young martens, foxes, marmots, rabbits, and mice, and even scavenges off of dead animal carcasses in the road during the winter months. Enter PETA.

Political correctness seems harmless enough at first glance. After all, it simply seeks to avoid offending certain segments of our society, right? It is seemingly just a few innocent code words: tolerance, social justice, economic justice, peace, reproductive rights, sex education and safe sex, safe schools, inclusion, diversity, and sensitivity. While I have no doubt that many liberals genuinely think policing our words and thoughts helps lift society in some well-intentioned way, the origins of political correctness acutely reveal that it is actually a powerful tool for those wishing to divide our country and destroy the America we know.

In 1923 [11], followers of György Lukács and other Marxists joined forces with the Communist Party of Germany to establish the Institute of Social Research in Frankfurt. When the Nazis came to power in Germany, the members of the Frankfurt School fled. Most came to the United States and many became influential in American universities. The Frankfurt School’s studies combined Marxist analysis with Freudian psychoanalysis to form the basis of what became known as “critical theory” — destructive criticism of the main elements of Western culture, including Christianity, capitalism, authority, the family, patriarchy, hierarchy, morality, tradition, sexual restraint, loyalty, patriotism, nationalism, heredity, ethnocentrism, convention, and conservatism. Sound familiar? It should. It’s the Democratic Party platform.

Lukács instituted a radical sex education program [12] in Hungarian schools. Hungarian children were instructed in free love, sexual intercourse, the archaic nature of middle-class family codes, the out-datedness of monogamy, and the irrelevance of religion, which deprives man of all pleasures. Women, too, were called to rebel against the sexual mores of the time. Lukacs’ advocating of “cultural terrorism” was the precursor of what would later become known as political correctness — the most powerful tool of the American Left.

These critical theorists knew that traditional American beliefs and the existing social structure would have to be destroyed and substituted with a “new thinking” that would become as much a part of basic social consciousness as the old one had been. Their theories took hold during the 1960s, when the Vietnam War opened raw nerves and created an opportunity for infiltration. In stepped political correctness and its hidden agenda. Over the years it grew, and now even the most fundamentalist of conservatives among us cow-tow to the Thought Police.

Today, if you say out loud that giving condoms to middle school students is a bad idea, you are labeled a religious zealot. If you utter the once-assumed truth that marriage should be between a man and a woman, you are homophobic. If you agree with the Arizona immigration law, you are considered a bigot. Nobody likes to be called these names. So many people simply give up and remain reticent — silent out of fear of “offending” a vocal minority and as evidence of how “tolerant” they really are. Like dutiful frogs sitting in the proverbial pot of water, the temperature keeps rising, and we keep sitting there. If you can get the opposition to silence itself, you are half way to victory. The comprehensive and detailed control of all ideas, beliefs, and statements is one of the signature features of all totalitarian [13] regimes.

Far too many Americans have forgotten the lesson they learned as children about sticks and stones. In a country overly sensitive about far too many things, where people are offended at the slightest joke or benign comment, political correctness is accomplishing its goal — not the stated purpose of protecting people from hurt feelings, but a much more insidious purpose: the silencing of political opposition and free speech.

It’s time to recognize political correctness for what it is: a tool of those wishing to destroy America and a doctrine which holds forth the proposition that it is entirely possible to pick up a turd from the clean end.

Article printed from Pajamas Media: http://pajamasmedia.com

URL to article: http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/political-correctness-and-the-thought-police/

URLs in this post:

[1] Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_correctness

[2] Merriam-Webster: http://www.aolsvc.merriam-webster.aol.com/dictionary/political%20correctness

[3] Juan Williams: http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-31749_162-20020302-10391698.html

[4] Jesse Jackson: http://newsbusters.org/blogs/mark-finkelstein/2008/03/18/msm-must-investigate-could-jesse-jackson-be-obamas-grandmother

[5] Dr. Laura Schlessinger: http://thecelebritycafe.com/feature/dr-laura-apologizes-using-n-word-air-08-13-2010

[6] W-word: http://hoguenews.com/?p=12323

[7] David Howard: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/local/daily/jan99/district27.htm

[8] Kenneth Mayfield: http://townhall.com/columnists/JonahGoldberg/2008/07/12/the_black_hole_of_extreme_political_correctness

[9] Marquette Warriors: http://www.wisn.com/news/3963252/detail.html

[10] poll: http://newsbusters.org/node/3538

[11] 1923: http://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2005_docs/PC2.pdf

[12] radical sex education program: http://www.nodnc.com/modules.php?name=news&file=article&sid=685

[13] totalitarian: http://www.conservapedia.com/Totalitarian

 

[Kirkhill]

Thucydides,

Given the number of highly educated Baby Boomers (of a certain age) railing against us morons that don't appreciate their greatness (Obama, Clinton, Gore, Kerry, Heinbecker, Miller, Fowler - Iggy's sensibly keeping quiet but his supporters aren't) it seems that there may not be much need to further deconstruct progressive thought, except in a forensic sense, as they themselves seem to be deconstructing.

I think though, I will give my fellow, though highly credentialled and thus arguably superior, baby-boomers the benefit of the doubt and adopt their tactics.  Coming from such well-educated sources they must be a proven cure.

The next time that I run into a balky customer that decides he likes my competitor's product I will jump on his desk, berate him for being an ignoramus that doesn't understand the scientific beauty of my solution and accuse him of being religious.  I am confident that that will improve my sales no end.  Consider the expert quality of the examples I am being given.

 

[a_majoor]

I have changed my mind about that sales job for you..... ;D ;D ;D

 

[a_majoor]

U of T demonstrates how the "Progressive" world view continues by accepting and publishing an anti-Semetic "master's thesis". If that can pass supposedly critical scrutiny, imagine what else is being passed , praised and supported by these institutions:

http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/u-of-toronto-posts-anti-semitic-tripe/?singlepage=true

U. of Toronto Posts Anti-Semitic Tripe
The school accepts and posts a revolting master's thesis.
November 19, 2010 - by P. David Hornik
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The University of Toronto has accepted and posted a master’s thesis called “The Victimhood of the Powerful: White Jews, Zionism, and the Racism of Hegemonic Holocaust Education.” As the title might insinuate, it is actually an anti-Semitic screed displaying the lowest academic standards.

The author, a young Canadian Jewish woman named Jennifer Peto, gives the psychological background of her views in the introduction:

    I had been attending Orthodox Jewish schools since kindergarten and all along I had been questioning the worldview that was being presented to me. In the first grade, after having been told that I could not play the lead in our school play because I was a girl, I decided that god was either sexist or nonexistent.

It’s worth pausing over this. The “logic” is clearly that of a six-year-old girl; yet Ms. Peto considers it worth presenting in her thesis!

She continues:

    Over the years, both my atheism and my feminism only grew stronger within the sexist, gender-normative and heterosexist educational institutions I was forced to attend. That all these values were reinforced at home only made me more convinced of my own beliefs.

It all came to a head when she was 15 and a history teacher in her “private Jewish high school in Toronto” appeared to praise Baruch Goldstein, the American Israeli who massacred 29 (Ms. Peto gives the number as 50, but why quibble in a master’s thesis) Palestinians in Hebron in February 1994.

When Ms. Peto questioned the teacher’s attitude, he “became enraged” and sent her to the principal’s office. This led her for the first time to “start questioning” the Zionist attitudes that had been instilled in her. These included the belief that “all Palestinians were violent terrorists who wanted to kill all Jews, just like the Nazis had tried to do.”

Of course, intelligent Jews in today’s world do not think that, and in the context of a mature mind — let alone an academic thesis — it is not an issue at all. And as Werner Cohn notes:

    All sections of world Jewry, with only tiny exceptions in very restricted ultra-religious circles, reacted with shame and horror at the deeds of Baruch Goldstein. Why didn’t it occur to Ms. Peto to examine … the record of world Jewry’s reaction to Goldstein?

The answer is that she had already embarked on her thrilling rebellion, and wasn’t about to be deflected — and isn’t to this day — by mere facts and reasoning. No, after a while she:

    … began to read about the history of Palestine, [and] started to understand the violence that was necessary to establish the Israeli state. … The Second Intifada began shortly thereafter, which only accelerated my shift from supporter of Israel to Palestine solidarity activist.

So now it was Palestinians murdering Jews, over and over again, en masse. Ms. Peto was launched on her path! After all, she was “already an outcast in the Jewish community, and estranged from my family for being atheist, queer, gender-queer, feminist, and generally outspoken in a highly normative, Orthodox setting.” Revenge is sweet!

From now on the epiphanies came one after another. Among them: Israel is an apartheid state based on ethnic cleansing! Ashkenazi Jews in the United States, Canada, and Israel all take part in privileged “whiteness” and, hence, in oppression and genocide of “people of color” — even when these Ashkenazi Jews try to impart lessons about tolerance based on the Holocaust!

As Ms. Peto goes on to explain, after World War II “Jews and other European ethnics [in the United States] became integrated into the white middle-class.” Notwithstanding “the myth that American Jews succeeded simply because of hard work,” they were now “firmly on the white side of the black/white divide in the United States.”

And yet, because “seeing themselves as part of an oppressive white majority was like seeing themselves as goyim” (that phrase quoted from a scholar named Eric Goldstein), Jews, according to Ms. Peto, turned the focus to their own ethnicity instead. That enabled them to “enjoy the privilege of whiteness, while still feeling like an oppressed minority that is not complicit in American racism.”

What a clever trick. It came in handy for disguising the phenomenon of “Jewish racism” — a phrase Ms. Peto uses 21 times (as noted by the blogger Elder of Ziyon) in the course of this very nasty master’s thesis.

Could such cunning, nefarious people be trusted even when running the March of Remembrance and Hope — an outfit that takes non-Jewish students on tours of death-camp sites in Poland to, as its website says, “teach … about the dangers of intolerance … and to promote better relations among people of diverse cultures”? One shouldn’t be so naïve as to think so!

No, while “the MRH does not mention Israel in their literature … it is nonetheless a Zionist project” (clever indeed!). And it is in including Muslim students in the trips to Poland that the MRH’s “Zionist politics … actually becomes more visible.”

How so? The subtle aim is to produce:

    … a particular “good” Muslim subject. This “good” Muslim subject engages in Holocaust education, celebrates liberal values of tolerance and even uses the teaching of the Qur’an to promote these Western, liberal ideals.

And this — in a manner that’s left unexplained:

    … also produces the “bad,” intolerant Muslim subjects who do not engage in Holocaust education and by virtue of this non-involvement further prove their anti-Semitism which marks them as the enemies of civilization that must be attacked and destroyed.

So, after all, it’s a plot enabling Jews to attack and destroy more enemies of civilization!

And if the MRH is evil to such an extent, what of the March of the Living, a program that brings only Jewish students to Poland? Even worse!

In Ms. Peto’s telling, the MOL is “an entirely Eurocentric” project because it deals with Ashkenazi Jewish suffering in the Holocaust. “Herein lies [a] racist element of the MOL … the erasure of Sephardic and Mizrachi Jewish identity.”

This is tripe of the worst order, not least because many non-Ashkenazi Jews suffered in the Holocaust including the near-total destruction of communities in France, the Netherlands, and the Balkans. But for Ms. Peto:

    It would be quite interesting and important to learn about how non-European Jewish youth experience this trip. Without first-hand accounts, I can only hypothesize their discomfort at being forced to identify with Ashkenazi Jewish history.

“Only hypothesize,” indeed. By this method, one can pretty much pass off any nonsense as academic work.

University of Toronto, are you listening?

And not only is the MOL a means for Ashkenazi Jews to “erase” non-Ashkenazi Jews; it enables them to do the same to the Holocaust victims themselves! These become, you see, “a racialized other to the participants on the MOL,” where:

    … young, white Jewish participants encounter a Jewish Other, one who, unlike them, is excluded from whiteness and is subject to racialized violence. The MOL is structured in such a way that participants are meant to simultaneously identify with and reject the racialized Jewish Other in the degenerate spaces of Poland.

But enough of this garbage. One might ask: where was Ms. Peto’s thesis adviser, Prof. Sheryl Nestel, in all this?

Apart from the fact that the thesis is wretchedly written, with more use of the first-person singular than a therapy session, why did  Nestel let her student cite only a thin gruel of crackpots like Norman Finkelstein, Ilan Pappé, Adi Ophir, and Marc Ellis, with no sign at all of ever having subjected herself to the challenge of a few dissenters from the Line? Why did Nestel approve such expression of blatant, subjective viciousness toward Jews and Israel?

The answer is that Nestel — herself an adherent to the regnant academic trends with publications like “Mapping Jewish Dissent: Jewish Anti-Occupation Activism in Toronto” — was most likely cheering Ms. Peto on.

And what of the University of Toronto? Does it want its name as a leading academic institution to be associated with a disgrace like Jennifer Peto’s thesis?

P. David Hornik is a freelance writer and translator living in Beersheva. He blogs at http://pdavidhornik.typepad.com/

 

[a_majoor]

What the Left is becoming:

http://dyn.politico.com/printstory.cfm?uuid=614D156E-0B19-FA2C-D0D7D6DB76388F79

How Liberalism self-destructed
By: Joel Kotkin
November 19, 2010 04:29 AM EST

Democrats are still looking for explanations for their stunning rejection in the midterms — citing everything from voting rights violations and Middle America’s racist orientation to Americans’ inability to perceive the underlying genius of President Barack Obama’s economic policy.

What they have failed to consider is the albatross of contemporary liberalism.

Liberalism once embraced the mission of fostering upward mobility and a stronger economy. But liberalism’s appeal has diminished, particularly among middle-class voters, as it has become increasingly control-oriented and economically cumbersome.

Today, according to most recent polling, no more than one in five voters call themselves liberal.

This contrasts with the far broader support for the familiar form of liberalism forged from the 1930s to the 1990s. Democratic presidents from Franklin D. Roosevelt to Bill Clinton focused largely on basic middle-class concerns — such as expanding economic opportunity, property ownership and growth.

Modern-day liberalism, however, is often ambivalent about expanding the economy — preferring a mix of redistribution with redirection along green lines. Its base of political shock troops, public-employee unions, appears only tangentially interested in the health of the overall economy.

In the short run, the diminishment of middle-of-the-road Democrats at the state and national level will probably only worsen these tendencies, leaving a rump party tied to the coastal regions, big cities and college towns. There, many voters are dependents of government, subsidized students or public employees, or wealthy creative people, college professors and business service providers.

This process — driven in large part by the liberal attachment to economically regressive policies such as cap and trade — cost the Democrats mightily throughout the American heartland. Politicians who survived the tsunami, such as Sen. Joe Manchin in West Virginia, did so by denouncing proposals in states where green policies are regarded as hostile to productive local industries that are major employers.

Populism, a traditional support of liberalism, has been undermined by a deep suspicion that President Barack Obama’s economic policy favors Wall Street investment bankers over those who work on Main Street. This allowed the GOP, a party long beholden to monied interests, to win virtually every income segment earning more than $50,000.

Obama also emphasized an urban agenda that promoted nationally directed smart growth, inefficient light rail and almost ludicrous plans for a national high-speed rail network. These proposals appealed to the new urbanist cadre but had little appeal for the vast majority of Americans who live in outer-ring neighborhoods, suburbs and small towns.

The failure of Obama-style liberalism has less to do with government activism than with how the administration defined its activism. Rather than deal with basic concerns, it appeared to endorse the notion of bringing the federal government into aspects of life — from health care to zoning — traditionally controlled at the local level.

This approach is unpopular even among “millennials,” who, with minorities, represent the best hope for the Democratic left. As the generational chroniclers Morley Winograd and Michael Hais point out, millennials favor government action — but generally at the local level, which is seen as more effective and collaborative. Top-down solutions from “experts,” Winograd and Hais write in a forthcoming book, are as offensive to millennials as the right’s penchant for dictating lifestyles.

Often eager to micromanage people’s lives, contemporary liberalism tends to obsess on the ephemeral while missing the substantial. Measures such as San Francisco’s recent ban on Happy Meals follow efforts to control the minutiae of daily life. This approach trivializes the serious things government should do to boost economic growth and opportunity.

Perhaps worst of all, the new liberals suffer from what British author Austin Williams has labeled a “poverty of ambition.” FDR offered a New Deal for the middle class, President Harry S. Truman offered a Fair Deal and President John F. Kennedy pushed us to reach the moon.

In contrast, contemporary liberals seem more concerned about controlling soda consumption and choo-chooing back to 19th-century urbanism. This poverty of ambition hurts Democrats outside the urban centers. For example, when I met with mayors from small, traditionally Democratic cities in Kentucky and asked what the stimulus had done for them, almost uniformly they said it accomplished little or nothing.

A more traditional liberal approach might have focused on improvements that could leave tangible markers of progress across the nation. The New Deal’s major infrastructure projects — ports, airports, hydroelectric systems, road networks — transformed large parts of the country, notably in the West and South, from backwaters to thriving modern economies.

When FDR commissioned projects such as the Tennessee Valley Authority, he literally brought light to darkened regions. The loyalty created by FDR and Truman built a base of support for liberalism that lasted for nearly a half-century.

Today’s liberals don’t show enthusiasm for airports or dams — or anything that may kick up some dirt. Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Interior Deanna Archuleta, for example, promised a Las Vegas audience: “You will never see another federal dam.”

Harold Ickes, FDR’s enterprising interior secretary, must be turning over in his grave.

The administration would have done well to revive programs like the New Deal Works Progress Administration and Civilian Conservation Corps. These addressed unemployment by providing jobs that also made the country stronger and more competitive. They employed more than 3 million people building thousands of roads, educational buildings and water, sewer and other infrastructure projects.

Why was this approach never seriously proposed for this economic crisis? Green resistance to turning dirt may have been part of it. But undoubtedly more critical was opposition from public- sector unions, which seem to fear any program that threatens their economic privileges.

In retrospect, it’s easy to see why many great liberals — like FDR and New York City Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia — detested the idea of public-sector unions.

Of course, green, public-sector-dominated politics can work — as it has in fiscally challenged blue havens such as California and New York. But then, a net 3 million more people — many from the middle class — have left these two states in the past 10 years.

If this defines success, you have to wonder what constitutes failure.

Joel Kotkin, author of “The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050,” is distinguished senior fellow in urban futures at Chapman University.

 

[Kirkhill]

I've just finished reading a book that I recently came into possession: a 1913 edition of John Galt's "The Provost".

John Galt is John Galt of the Canada Lands Company, Galt and Guelph Ontario and a prolific author.  His son was Alexander Galt of Confederation and Lethbridge, Alberta.

He came from Irvine, Ayrshire, in Scotland and he had a "radical" "liberal" bent.

The Provost is a position in many Scottish towns broadly equivalent to mayor, in the same sense that the Governor-General is broadly equivalent to a president.  Mayors and presidents are generally elected officials.  Provosts and Governors-General were traditionally appointed to the position by the Crown's authority.

"The Provost" describes the rise of a young chap on the make who sets up a clothing store for the smart set in Irvine and then cajoles his way on to a position with the town council.  He then finagles his way up through various offices to the position of Provost.  All along the way he manages to use various public funded projects to ensure that his own interests are furthered - donations of town land, free walls to enclose them, free houses built by the contractor refurbishing the church....minor gratuities no more than his due for the exemplary and impartial service he rendered the community.

Unfortunately he gets caught up in the tenor of the times and has to negotiate the democratizing tendencies of the American and French revolutions and the subsequent Napoleonic wars. One of the most powerful influences, interestingly enough, were the militias - or Volunteers.  The early volunteers were called out by the Crown to repel marauding Frenchmen at the time of the French Revolution.  The second set of Volunteers forced themselves on the Crown at the time of the Napoleonic Unpleasantries.  The government was not  particularly grateful to have bunches of organized and armed commoners scattered around the country.  They might be inclined to reconsider their offers to the Crown and act in their own interests.  So the Crown did a Ralph Klein.  On perceiving a parade it ran hard to get to its accustomed position of leadership at the front.

The sharp young commoner, th Provost, piked up on this strategy and soon discovered that democracy could be a marvellous thing.  It opened up many new tactical channels which could be used to advantage.  Consequently he managed to retain his position as Provost and continued claiming town lands, getting them walled at the towns expense and ultimately organizing his retirement party and his pension.  The book was written in 1821.

It seems to me that damall has changed.  Those in power strive to stay in power.  If staying in power means joining the opposition, so be it.  Once on the Board you can redirect the institution to your advantage.  Ultimately the label the institution carries bears no resemblance to the intentions of the originators.  It becomes a haven for the powerful.

Or, in the words of that inveterate shape changer, Henry III of Navarre, the protestant Basque who wanted to become  King Henry IV of France, "Paris is worth a Mass" - thus founding that highly principled Bourbon dynasty of which the Stewarts were so fond.

 

[a_majoor]

"I can" is good. "You must" is the use of force:

http://hotair.com/archives/2010/11/27/when-i-can-becomes-you-must/

When “I Can” Becomes “You Must”


Breitbart’s news site has an interesting article about how nearly 2000 very rich people are lobbying the Democrats to raise taxes on “the rich”, defined as those people who make over $250,000 a year. Laying aside the issue of whether a small business owner who reports that income on an individual tax return (and there are quite a few of those folks) is “rich, I’d like to issue a challenge to the wealthy letter-signers who feel it’s okay to force other people to live under their moral code.

According to the article, there are 1,911 rich progressives in two separate groups who want the tax increases to happen. Now, the Obama administration reckons that if we don’t raise taxes, it will “cost” the national treasury about $680 billion dollars over the next decade, or $68 billion a year. So I did a little quick math and found that if each of those 1,911 rich progressives would pony up $35,583,464.20 each year for the next ten years, then hundreds of thousands of small business owners and, yes, even evil wealthy layabouts will get to keep their money and use it as they see fit.

You might ask me, “Jimmie, why should just 1,911 people bear the burden of the rich in this country, who just keep getting richer?” Well, I’ll tell you. See, the issue here is not “shared sacrifice” or whether “the rich” pay “their fair share”, as determined by someone else. We already know that the wealthiest among us pay far more than their fair share of taxes every year. If you are making more than $250,000 a year, you’re already carrying more of the freight than you should, if we’re talking about “fairness”.

The real issue is the difference between “I can” and “You must”. Let me pull a couple or three quotes from the story to illustrate my point.

“I think the country’s in trouble,” [Guy] Saperstein [the organizer of one of the letter-writing efforts] told AFP. “In hard times, the top strata who have done fabulously well need to sacrifice a bit, and it’s not much of a sacrifice… We have among the lowest tax rates of any industrialized democracy.” [...]

Philippe Villers, a French-born US businessman who founded Computervision in the 1960s and now heads Grain Pro, says he signed the letter even though it would mean higher taxes for himself.

“I don’t think (extending the tax cuts for the wealthy) are fair or in the interest of building a strong economy,” he said. [...]

“I’ve had a good run over the last few years. There’s no question that others now deserve to share in that prosperity,” said…Jeffrey Hayes, president of Stratalys Research & Consulting.

Similar comments have come from Warren Buffett, the investment guru who ranks among the world’s richest individuals.

“I think that people at the high end — people like myself — should be paying a lot more in taxes. We have it better than we’ve ever had it,” Buffett said in an ABC News interview.

Now, these statements may or may not be true, but what is clear is that each of them feel that they are doing quite well financially and should pay higher taxes. If you sat down with each of them and showed them how much it would take to offset the desired tax increase, I have no doubt they certainly could write that check every year. Ben and Jerry’s, whose founders are among the most vocal proponents of the tax increase, grossed between $200 million and $500 million last year. I’m sure that they could take a chunk of that money and put it toward their stated goal of pushing “new models of economic justice” quite easily. Buffet himself has pledged to give away 99 percent of his wealth to philanthropic causes. What’s another few million among the billions he has?

But they won’t and I’ll tell you why. They have “I can” confused with “You must”. This confusion is at the very heart of the progressive mindset. Folks like Saperstein and Buffet believe that because they can easily weather a big tax increase, everyone else has to, or it wouldn’t be “fair”. But what is fairness if it is coerced? How is it fair to force someone else to contribute to the “moral good” only in the way you believe such a contribution should happen? They are not asking the President to tax them more as much as they are asking him to tax everyone more, otherwise their letter would have gone to the IRS instead and had several large checks attached to it.

Ultimately, these millionaires illustrate more about the central conceit of progressivism than they do fairness of “social justice”. They can pay more in taxes, but they won’t until they make everyone around them pay more, too. But that’s not fair, friends, and we all know it.


Jimmie runs The Sundries Shack and has his own very entertaining podcast called “The Delivery”. He is also an amateur musician, an aspiring composer, an unrepentant geek and an avid fan of Twitter. This article is cross-posted there.

 

[a_majoor]

This needs no coment: http://dmefat.blogspot.com/2010/08/despotism-made-easy_24.html

 

[a_majoor]

The way the "Left" goes silent on things like "honour killing" and other human rights abuses is very disturbing. What do they believe will happen to society or to them should a resurgent militant Islam come to dominate our society or world?:

http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/showdown-with-evil-the-unholy-alliance-between-islamic-jihad-and-utopian-socialism/?singlepage=true

The ‘Unholy Alliance’ Between Islamic Jihad and Utopian Socialism
A review of Jamie Glazov’s Showdown With Evil.
December 5, 2010 - by David Solway
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We recall that old parlor game: if you could take ten books with you to a desert island, what would they be? Obviously, the list is something of a “moveable feast” and may be modified as our tastes and intellectual needs change over the years, but this is a time in which certain books have become essential to our understanding of the tumultuous era we live in. Jamie’s Glazov’s Showdown With Evil, a selection of FrontPage interviews that he has conducted for the site over the last eight years, is one of those “desert island” books, meant to illumine and accompany us in discretionary solitude.

Of course, in today’s wired (or wireless) world, which is also a world in which a “terrorist event” can detonate anywhere and at any time, there are really no more desert islands where one can disregard the burdens and confusions of the real world and pretend that one is not implicated in history. There is no doubt an Internet café on Bouvet Island and a terrorist lurking about on Tristan da Cunha. The world we now experience has banished solitude and turned it into a nostalgic reminiscence, leaving us awash in information and susceptible to the unpredictable irruption of violence. This is one of the principal tenets of Glazov’s politically incorrect chrestomathy, a book which is a “body of learning.” But although there may be no more islands where we can retire from the turmoil of the world, there are introspective oases we can find here and there in books like this one.

On the one hand, Showdown With Evil applies to specific contexts now very much in the news. For example, it is especially timely in the light of the Oklahoma amendment prohibiting the introduction of Shari’a law and CAIR’s legal suit to block its implementation. It is also relevant for anyone intent on clarifying the issues involved in the ongoing controversy over the Ground Zero mosque or the debate over the selective voyeurism of airport screening techniques. But in a larger sense, it supplies a panoptic overview of the preeminent struggle of the modern age between a resurgent and supremacist Islam and a deeply conflicted West whose survival instinct is being ruthlessly probed and tested.

The book is divided into eight sections, grouped under umbrella titles: “Obama’s Destructive Path,” “Unholy Alliance,” “The Religion of Peace,” “The Terror War,” “The Evil Empire,” “Leaving the Faith,” “The Titans,” and a concluding interview with the interviewer himself, “Looking to the Future of Freedom,” each prefaced by a brief introduction. Richard Perle provides a short but compendious foreword in which he signals the major themes of the collection, namely, the apology for Islam promoted by the useful idiots of the day who are “drawn almost entirely from the Left,” the “parallels between the Left’s indifference to Soviet totalitarianism then and Islamic fundamentalism now,” and the emotion-fraught journey of important contemporary thinkers from the stultifying and destructive ideology of the Left, aka “the political faith,” to a more discerning, open, and realistic perspective on the political and cultural world.

The authors/interviewees collected between the book’s covers constitute a veritable Who’s Who of significant voices: Norman Podhoretz, Christopher Hitchens, William F. Buckley Jr., Natan Sharansky, Victor Davis Hanson, Phyllis Chesler, Andrew McCarthy, Theodore Dalrymple, Kenneth Levin, Robert Spencer, and Andrew Klavan, to mention only a few. Unlike so many in the liberal media, they do not crouch before the facts. A particularly resonant phrase from Hanson’s offering might have served as a premonitory epigraph: “there are no easy solutions, as is always true when the postmodern meets the premodern.” But of course, there are difficult solutions proposed throughout the collection, if we are prepared to attempt them.

The interviews locate themselves in the volatile intersection between the past and the future (otherwise known as the present continuous), and between what McCarthy calls “the fever swamps of the Left” and the promise of the restoration of political sanity. With the exception of Dalrymple’s chapter on the fallacy of opiate addiction treatment, they prize apart the “unholy alliance” between Islamic jihad and utopian socialism, that is, between true barbarism and false sophistication, with the latter enabling the former. In so doing, these “essays” — for that is how they often read — furnish us with a map leading us out of the cognitive wilderness we currently inhabit. Indeed, there is much here to profit the reader along a tonal spectrum of virtuoso performances, from the passionate sobriety of David Horowitz to the bracing indignation of Brigitte Gabriel to the jabbing irreverence of Ann Coulter.

Himself an author of distinction — his United in Hate: The Left’s Romance with Tyranny and Terror makes a critical addition to our understanding of the Leftist pathology — Glazov is also an exceptional interviewer, knowing when to ask a leading question (Buckley calls him “a very pleasant extortionist”) and when to introduce an explanatory comment or append a modest rebuttal. For although Glazov and his FrontPage guests share a common political philosophy, these encounters are not always smooth sailing, occasionally requiring Glazov’s prodding or amplification and supplementing the exchange with a modicum of dramatic tension. But, no less sensitive to the interviewer’s art, Glazov knows when to recede and allow his subject free rein to expand on the issues under discussion.

The result is a volume that acquaints us with the ideas of some of the major figures on the political scene today. At the same time, these ideas develop seamlessly across the diverse sections of the text, since the various themes being addressed are, for the most part, inter-related and reflect one another’s abiding concerns.

Singularity and continuity thus work hand in hand, giving us a book that is doubly compelling and in the process whetting the appetite for a sequel. I can see Showdown With Evil as the first in a series, an initial installment in what Umberto Eco has aptly called the Encyclomedia, the alignment of digital packages with the standard currency of print. The Net makes for fast and sloppy reading whereas the book, as Eco says, encourages us “not only to receive information but also to speculate and reflect about it.” Eight years worth of interviews, with more to come, afford a cornucopia of material awaiting transfer from screen to page and from evanescence to fixity.

Jamie Glazov is to be commended for advancing a necessary dialogue between writer and reader and — who knows? — perhaps contributing to a much-desired and long-awaited slowdown of evil.

David Solway is a Canadian poet and essayist. He is the author of The Big Lie: On Terror, Antisemitism, and Identity, and is currently working on a sequel, Living in the Valley of Shmoon. His new book on Jewish and Israeli themes, Hear, O Israel!, has just been released by Mantua Books.

 

[a_majoor]

Ever wonder why it is so hard to talk to "Progressives?"

http://pajamasmedia.com/eddriscoll/2010/11/30/the-ghost-in-the-machine/

The Ghost in the Machine

Closed loops, then…

    A closed system has three peculiarities. Firstly, it claims to represent a truth of universal validity, capable of explaining all phenomena, and to have a cure for all that ails man. In the second place, it is a system which cannot be refuted by evidence, because all potentially damaging data are automatically processed and reinterpreted to make them fit the expected pattern. The processing is done by sophisticated methods of causistry, centered on axioms of great emotive power, and indifferent to the rules of common logic; it is a kind of Wonderland croquet, played with mobile hoops. In the third place, it is a system which invalidates criticism by shifting the argument to the subjective motivation of the critic, and deducing his motivation from the axioms of the system itself. The orthodox Freudian school in its early stages approximated a closed system; if you argued that for such and such reasons you doubted the existence of the so-called castration complex, the Freudian’s prompt answer was that your argument betrayed an unconscious resistance indicating that you yourself have a castration complex; you were caught in a vicious circle. Similarly, if you argued with a Stalinist that to make a pact with Hitler was not a nice thing to do he would explain that your bourgeois class-consciousness made you unable to understand the dialectics of history…In short, the closed system excludes the possibility of objective argument by two related proceedings: (a) facts are deprived of their value as evidence by scholastic processing; (b) objections are invalidated by shifting the argument to the personal motive behind the objection. This procedure is legitimate according to the closed system’s rules of the game which, however absurd they seem to the outsider, have a great coherence and inner consistency.

    The atmosphere inside the closed system is highly charged; it is an emotional hothouse…The trained, “closed-minded” theologian, psychoanalyst, or Marxist can at any time make mincemeat of his “open-minded” adversary and thus prove the superiority of his system to the world and to himself.

– Arthur Koestler, via David Foster of the Chicago Boyz blog.

… And Now:

    “If you can somehow force a liberal into a point- counterpoint argument, his retorts will bear no relation to what you’ve said — unless you were in fact talking about your looks, your age, your weight, your personal obsessions, or whether you are a fascist. In the famous liberal two-step, they leap from one idiotic point to the next, so you can never nail them. It’s like arguing with someone with Attention Deficit Disorder.”

– Ann Coulter, via John Hawkins’ article at Townhall, “The 25 Best Quotes About Liberals.”

 

[a_majoor]

The meltdown of Progressiveism is drawing lots of interesting comment and analysis. Of course, what may come after the collapse of Progressiveism is hard to say, in the chaos of a sudden collapse of the Social Welfare State (animated as it is by Progressive ideals) we may see a desperate turn to the "man on the white horse" rather than the rebuilding of "Classical Liberal" principles:

http://pajamasmedia.com/eddriscoll/2010/12/11/rage-inside-the-machine/?singlepage=true

Rage Inside the Machine
December 11, 2010 - by Ed Driscoll

Back in mid-2008, Jim Geraghty spotted the white-hot anger that Obama-supporting “progressives” aimed towards Hillary Clinton, her husband Bill, Hillary-supporting Geraldine Ferraro, and even Hillary’s voters in the presidential primaries, and wondered just what was going on. This was only a year and half after the left attempted to sandbag Joe Lieberman, going so far as to picture him in blackface at the Huffington Post, just six years after nominating him to be Al Gore’s veep. And it was months before Sarah Palin became a household name, in part because of the left’s wrath being directed at her. One expects the tolerant, progressive, diversity-obsessed left to cling bitterly towards its anger to conservatives, but not towards each other — and certainly not with this level of vitriol.

As Jim wrote on Friday, the Angry Left, having turned on the man they elected to the White House, came full circle this week:

    Once you start marinating in this nastiness, it starts to seep into how you think and speak, and perhaps you can’t turn it off. It is now defining the Left. Michael Moore. Bill Maher. Joy Behar. It didn’t just stay in the grassroots and celebrities; it came to the halls of Congress with Alan Grayson.

    We on the right hated Hillary Clinton back in the 1990s. Then the 2008 campaign comes along, Hillary is perceived to be the less liberal candidate than Obama, and suddenly Air America’s Randi Rhodes is calling her a “big [f-word]ing whore.” This is Hillary Clinton we’re talking about. Ten years earlier, almost every Democrat in America loved her, and we were the ones calling her names. But once she’s not their preferred choice, they can turn on her and denounce her in the same tone they would use to denounce a conservative Republican.

    And now, finally, it comes full circle. Now they’re sneering at Obama. Their guy. The guy whom they adored, perhaps as much as any party has ever adored its leader, in 2007 and 2008. Now they say, “[F-word] him.”

    Hey, pal, that’s the President of the United States. Show some respect.

    (How did it come to the point where we have to be the ones to demand that?)

And of course, concurrent with that fire and brimstone rage is the desire to create messianic figures out of perfectly ordinary politicians — witness first the transformation of Al Gore from Bill Clinton’s vaguely wonkish veep and robotic board-stiff failed presidential candidate in 2000 to The Goracle, maaan, followed in very short succession by the deification of political neophyte Barack Obama. This early 2008 quote from JournoList founder Ezra Klein hints at the frenzy to come throughout that year:

    Obama’s finest speeches do not excite. They do not inform. They don’t even really inspire. They elevate. They enmesh you in a grander moment, as if history has stopped flowing passively by, and, just for an instant, contracted around you, made you aware of its presence, and your role in it. He is not the Word made flesh, but the triumph of word over flesh, over color, over despair. The other great leaders I’ve heard guide us towards a better politics, but Obama is, at his best, able to call us back to our highest selves, to the place where America exists as a glittering ideal, and where we, its honored inhabitants, seem capable of achieving it, and thus of sharing in its meaning and transcendence.

But why has what was once called “liberalism” gone so far off the rails? How did an ideology which prides itself outwardly on coolness and a Holden Caulfield-inspired hatred of hypocrisy work itself into a constant fever pitch, vibrating back and forth between judging everything from the binary prism of SUX and ROX?

One reason is that the underlying ideology itself, whose roots were forged in the 19th century, is now increasingly sclerotic. As James Piereson noted in Camelot and Cultural Revolution, American liberalism retracted slightly in the 1950s, tamping down its revolutionary fervor, cementing its hard-won gains from the first half of the century, and attempting to create the patina of a timeless and permanent ideology. That form of establishment liberalism was of course all too quickly shattered, as Piereson noted, by the assassination of JFK by a Marxist revolutionary, and would be increasingly usurped by the New Left of the late 1960s, whose much more punitive worldview Obama has marinated in throughout his life.

But as with liberalism of the 1950s, the New Left is now very much the establishment themselves. And a movement that sees itself as avant-garde is now the very definition of garde.

To put it mildly, this sort of cognitive dissonance can cause tension.

Which brings us to Ronald Radosh’s new post at PJM, in which he explores The New Republic and “the Crisis of The American Intellectual: Can the Old Liberal Stalwart Play a Role in Today’s World?”:

    A few years ago, [incoming New Republic editor Richard Just] participated in some of the meetings held to create an American version of the Euston Manifesto, which TNR publicized, and of which Just was a co-author and signer. (The full American manifesto can be found here.) As the American authors of what began as a British endeavor explain:

        The statement was a defense of liberal democracy and human rights as well as a rejection of anti-Americanism, anti-Semitism, and terrorism.

    Regarding the British one as a “turning point in contemporary intellectual and political debates,” the American supporters came up with their own domestic version.

    Unfortunately, the high hopes its framers had came to naught. Its influence was virtually nil. In Europe, rather than have a great effect, the climate of anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism, especially in London where Euston originated, has only become worse.

    The problem that Just and TNR have, however, is one brilliantly addressed by Walter Russell Mead in his latest important blog post on “The Crisis of the American Intellectual.” Read argues that the reason today’s intellectuals are ill-equipped to play a major role in addressing what we must do about today’s issues goes way beyond Just’s hopes that liberalism questions itself and its own favored exponents of the doctrine.

    As Mead explains, “the United States is stuck with a social model that doesn’t work anymore.” Mead writes that the problems go beyond the erosion of our cultural model, the problem of the deficit, and the problems of international competition, all of which he thinks can be dealt with. The problem is nothing less than the Weltanschauung of the American intellectual class.

    * * *

    Instead, he argues that they are “backward looking and reactionary.” By that he means they are stuck in the old Progressive era notion of “progress” and I would add the vision of statist socialism favored by many on the Left. First, Mead addresses ideology:

        Since the late nineteenth century most intellectuals have identified progress with the advance of the bureaucratic, redistributionist and administrative state. The government, guided by credentialed intellectuals with scientific training and values, would lead society through the economic and political perils of the day. An ever more powerful state would play an ever larger role in achieving ever greater degrees of affluence and stability for the population at large, redistributing wealth to provide basic sustenance and justice to the poor.  The social mission of intellectuals was to build political support for the development of the New Order, to provide enlightened guidance based on rational and scientific thought to policymakers, to administer the state through a merit based civil service, and to train new generations of managers and administrators. The modern corporation was supposed to evolve in a similar way, with business becoming more stable, more predictable and more bureaucratic.

    And this, to get back to the problem facing TNR, is still the perspective most of its editors hold. They think the “administrative, bureaucratic state,” as Mead defines it, can still be handled via regulatory measures. Hence their defense of and support of the disastrous ObamaCare, which outgoing editor Foer mentions as one of the magazine’s most important efforts. As Mead writes so powerfully, “if our society is going to develop we have to move beyond the ideas and institutions of twentieth century progressivism.” Its promises have dissolved, and its “premises no longer hold.” This goes against the grains of many of our best intellectuals, Mead claims, an observation justified by reading many of TNR’s own writers and editors when they write about domestic issues.

    For America to prosper, Mead argues:

        Power is going to have to shift from bureaucrats to entrepreneurs, from the state to society and from qualified experts and licensed professionals to the population at large.

And good luck with the left adopting that remarkably open model in the near future, especially when the current iteration of what was called progressivism, having been eclipsed by the adaptability of the modern, open, technologically savvy society, is angrily attempting to turn the clock back on freedom, entrepreneurship, and in many cases, technology itself.

 

[a_majoor]

It is all about power. The Internet allowed people to disintermediate news, economic activity and political activity, reducing the power of centralized organizations and leading to massive reordering of the political and economic landscape. The old powers that be are fighting back by trying to control the internet. (I might note that on the Future Military Technologies thread, there are many examples of high bandwidth wireless technologies with long range and coverage that might allow a Samizdat Internet to develop. Net anonymity software, P2P filesharing, servers in the back of vans and other means to evade the Internet censors will also flourish)

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703886904576031512110086694.html?mod=rss_opinion_main

The Net Neutrality Coup
The campaign to regulate the Internet was funded by a who's who of left-liberal foundations.
By JOHN FUND

The Federal Communications Commission's new "net neutrality" rules, passed on a partisan 3-2 vote yesterday, represent a huge win for a slick lobbying campaign run by liberal activist groups and foundations. The losers are likely to be consumers who will see innovation and investment chilled by regulations that treat the Internet like a public utility.

There's little evidence the public is demanding these rules, which purport to stop the non-problem of phone and cable companies blocking access to websites and interfering with Internet traffic. Over 300 House and Senate members have signed a letter opposing FCC Internet regulation, and there will undoubtedly be even less support in the next Congress.

Yet President Obama, long an ardent backer of net neutrality, is ignoring both Congress and adverse court rulings, especially by a federal appeals court in April that the agency doesn't have the power to enforce net neutrality. He is seeking to impose his will on the Internet through the executive branch. FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski, a former law school friend of Mr. Obama, has worked closely with the White House on the issue. Official visitor logs show he's had at least 11 personal meetings with the president.

The net neutrality vision for government regulation of the Internet began with the work of Robert McChesney, a University of Illinois communications professor who founded the liberal lobby Free Press in 2002. Mr. McChesney's agenda? "At the moment, the battle over network neutrality is not to completely eliminate the telephone and cable companies," he told the website SocialistProject in 2009. "But the ultimate goal is to get rid of the media capitalists in the phone and cable companies and to divest them from control."

A year earlier, Mr. McChesney wrote in the Marxist journal Monthly Review that "any serious effort to reform the media system would have to necessarily be part of a revolutionary program to overthrow the capitalist system itself." Mr. McChesney told me in an interview that some of his comments have been "taken out of context." He acknowledged that he is a socialist and said he was "hesitant to say I'm not a Marxist."

For a man with such radical views, Mr. McChesney and his Free Press group have had astonishing influence. Mr. Genachowski's press secretary at the FCC, Jen Howard, used to handle media relations at Free Press. The FCC's chief diversity officer, Mark Lloyd, co-authored a Free Press report calling for regulation of political talk radio.

Free Press has been funded by a network of liberal foundations that helped the lobby invent the purported problem that net neutrality is supposed to solve. They then fashioned a political strategy similar to the one employed by activists behind the political speech restrictions of the 2002 McCain-Feingold campaign-finance reform bill. The methods of that earlier campaign were discussed in 2004 by Sean Treglia, a former program officer for the Pew Charitable Trusts, during a talk at the University of Southern California. Far from being the efforts of genuine grass-roots activists, Mr. Treglia noted, the campaign-finance reform lobby was controlled and funded by foundations like Pew.

"The idea was to create an impression that a mass movement was afoot," he told his audience. He noted that "If Congress thought this was a Pew effort, it'd be worthless." A study by the Political Money Line, a nonpartisan website dealing with issues of campaign funding, found that of the $140 million spent to directly promote campaign-finance reform in the last decade, $123 million came from eight liberal foundations.

After McCain-Feingold passed, several of the foundations involved in the effort began shifting their attention to "media reform"—a movement to impose government controls on Internet companies somewhat related to the long-defunct "Fairness Doctrine" that used to regulate TV and radio companies. In a 2005 interview with the progressive website Buzzflash, Mr. McChesney said that campaign-finance reform advocate Josh Silver approached him and "said let's get to work on getting popular involvement in media policy making." Together the two founded Free Press.

Free Press and allied groups such as MoveOn.org quickly got funding. Of the eight major foundations that provided the vast bulk of money for campaign-finance reform, six became major funders of the media-reform movement. (They are the Pew Charitable Trusts, Bill Moyers's Schumann Center for Media and Democracy, the Joyce Foundation, George Soros's Open Society Institute, the Ford Foundation, and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.) Free Press today has 40 staffers and an annual budget of $4 million.

These wealthy funders pay for more than publicity and conferences. In 2009, Free Press commissioned a poll, released by the Harmony Institute, on net neutrality. Harmony reported that "more than 50% of the public argued that, as a private resource, the Internet should not be regulated by the federal government." The poll went on to say that since "currently the public likes the way the Internet works . . . messaging should target supporters by asking them to act vigilantly" to prevent a "centrally controlled Internet."

To that end, Free Press and other groups helped manufacture "research" on net neutrality. In 2009, for example, the FCC commissioned Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet and Society to conduct an "independent review of existing information" for the agency in order to "lay the foundation for enlightened, data-driven decision making."

Considering how openly activist the Berkman Center has been on these issues, it was an odd decision for the FCC to delegate its broadband research to this outfit. Unless, of course, the FCC already knew the answer it wanted to get.

The Berkman Center's FCC- commissioned report, "Next Generation Connectivity," wound up being funded in large part by the Ford and MacArthur foundations. So some of the same foundations that have spent years funding net neutrality advocacy research ended up funding the FCC-commissioned study that evaluated net neutrality research.

The FCC's "National Broadband Plan," released last spring, included only five citations of respected think tanks such as the International Technology and Innovation Foundation or the Brookings Institution. But the report cited research from liberal groups such as Free Press, Public Knowledge, Pew and the New America Foundation more than 50 times.

So the "media reform" movement paid for research that backed its views, paid activists to promote the research, saw its allies installed in the FCC and other key agencies, and paid for the FCC research that evaluated the research they had already paid for. Now they have their policy. That's quite a coup.

Mr. Fund is a columnist for WSJ.com.

 

[a_majoor]

The Green agenda gets results alright:

http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2010/12/manmade_famine_in_america.html

Manmade famine in America
Thomas Lifson

It seems inconceivable, but people in America are going hungry en masse due to a famine caused by political authorities. Fresno, California is not yet a sister city of Kiev, Ukraine, but the two cities, capitals of rich agricultural regions, share a history of mass hunger caused by central governments indifferent to the suffering of their people, in the pursuit of ideological goals. Investor's Business Daily explains:

Fresno is the agricultural capital of America. More food per acre in more variety can be grown in the fertile Central Valley surrounding this community than on any other land in America - perhaps in the world.

Yet far from being a paradise, Fresno is starting to resemble Zimbabwe or 1930s Ukraine, a victim of a famine machine that is entirely man-made, not by red communists this time, but by greens.

State and federal officials, driven by the agenda of environmental extremists, have made it extremely difficult for the valley's farms, introducing costly environmental regulations and cutting off critical water supplies to save the Delta smelt, a bait fish. It's all driving the economy to collapse.

In the southwest part of the Central Valley, water allotments as low as 10% of normal have created a visible dust bowl. The knock-on effect can be seen in cities like Fresno, where November's unemployment among the packers, cannery workers and professional fields that make agriculture productive stands at 16.9%.

So bad is the economy, due to federal water restrictions, that almost a quarter of local families are going hungry in Fresno:

Local newspapers and Fresno County officials are trying to rally Facebook users to vote for Fresno in a corporate contest sponsored by Wal-Mart for $1 million in charity food donations for the hungry. Fresno, a city of 505,000, has taken the national lead because 24.1% of Fresno's families are going hungry.

The destruction of the agricultural economy of America's most productive region is yet another example of federal policies literally destroying America's productive capacity. To be sure, the Fresno famine is not causing mass starvation, merely hunger.  But this is America, and destroying jobs and agricultural capacity is a shameful initiative of government.

 

[a_majoor]

A breif discussion of Anarchism:

http://moelane.com/2011/01/01/rsrh-blackshirts-on-the-march/

Blackshirts on the march.

I have to take issue with the title of Richard Fernandez’s article on the coming, temporary rise of anarchism within the Left (“The Crusade of Innocents“): there’s nothing particularly innocent about the anti-globo anarchist blackshirt Left.  Then again, there’s nothing particularly ‘anarchistic’ about those fools, either: if you want proper anarchism (not to mention a more moral one) go look up the more… committed… anarcho-capitalist libertarians, who at least have the saving grace of not routinely going out and throwing Molotov cocktails at the police.

Aside from the title, the article is worth reading, though: Fernandez argues that the anarchist blackshirt Left is used by more ‘mainstream’ hard Leftists to scream the slogans and throw the bombs that the latter do not quite dare scream and throw on their own.  Once that is accomplished, the blackshirts will be put back into their box, whether they like it or not: it’s not an accident that Fernandez compares that group to the Red Guards that were instrumental in implementing Mao’s Great Leap Forward Backward. As Fernandez put it:

Anarchists will eventually discover, as George Orwell found in Catalonia, that they principally exist in order to prove spontaneity within the Left, to be those wisps of volatile material that flare for a brief moment and fall to the ground as forgotten ash. Their historical role is to signally sacrifice themselves for an impossible dream and be martyred with very much regret.  That and nothing more.

Fortunately, we have as of yet avoided incendiary devices being a part of American protests – largely because the American wing of the anti-globo movement will abruptly cease to exist as an organized entity once they start using them, and the anti-globos know it -  and things will have to get a lot worse before we ‘enjoy’ European-style conditions over here. I still feel obligated to point this story out because it’s important to understand something about the Activist Left: to wit, that the Activist Left is so alienated from the common mass of humanity that they think that blackshirt anarchists actually reflect an expression of populist sentiment.  Put more bluntly, when the Activist Left thinks ‘populist’ they conjure up the mental image of a group of twentysomething unwashed creeps in balaclavas who simultaneously reek of patchouli oil and Rage Against the Machine.

And now you know why the Activist Left hates the Tea Party.  Not just because the Right linked up with the libertarians and almost-casually put together a true populist movement that started electing Senators, Congressmen, and Governors in its first showing: that’s offensive to the fake populists on the Activist Left, to be sure, but not frightening.  What frightens them is due to a failure of imagination or understanding on their part: because they have no true understanding of what actual populists look like, the Activist Left’s equate their child’s flattery and slave’s imitation with the real thing – and thus get terrified when they see the Tea Partiers being allowed to operate on their own without top-down controls.  If the Activist Left allowed the anti-globos that kind of freedom there’d swiftly be blood on the streets – and Republicans getting elected in San Francisco and Seattle in the next election.  So clearly the GOP leadership is being insanely reckless.

Yes, I know and you know that the Tea Party is generally made up of folks who make it a point of honor to leave protest sites in the same condition in which they found them.  This is about perception of reality, not actual reality, remember?

Moe Lane

PS: See also Instapundit – note that the nomenclature issue is why I call the damfools ‘blackshirts.’  Well, that and the fact that it gives professional antiwar types fits, froths, and the galloping staggers.

 

[a_majoor]

Propagandists who manipulate the legacy media to promote the "narrative" and supress other voices:

http://thevailspot.blogspot.com/2011/01/journolist-membership.html

The JournoList Membership
Here is a long list of those people who belonged to JournoList and the news organizations they were/are employed by.  POLITICO.com has a number of them...which shows just how far left Politico has gone.  When it was launched it was a centrist new reporting organization, but it has become yet another MSM style mouth peice for the left.  The shooting last week in Tucson is merely another nail in it's MSM leftist coffin.

JournoList: 151 Names Confirmed (with News Organizations)
Source List Included
07/29/2010
BuckeyeTexan
Posted on Thursday, July 29, 2010 2:25:42 PM by BuckeyeTexan

1. Spencer Ackerman - Wired, FireDogLake, Washington Independent, Talking Points Memo, TheAmerican Prospect
2. Thomas Adcock - New York Law Journal
3. Ben Adler - Newsweek, POLITICO
4. Mike Allen - POLITICO
5. Eric Alterman - The Nation, Media Matters for America
6. Marc Ambinder - The Atlantic
7. Greg Anrig - The Century Foundation
8. Ryan Avent - Economist
9. Dean Baker - The American Prospect
10. Nick Baumann - Mother Jones
11. Josh Bearman - LA Weekly
12. Steven Benen - The Carpetbagger Report
13. Ari Berman - The Nation
14. Jared Bernstein - Economic Policy Institute
15. Michael Berube - Crooked Timer, Pennsylvania State University
16. Brian Beutler - The Media Consortium
17. Lindsay Beyerstein - Freelance journalist
18. Joel Bleifuss - In These Times
19. John Blevins - South Texas College of Law
20. Sam Boyd - The American Prospect
21. Ben Brandzel - MoveOn.org, John Edwards Campaign
22. Shannon Brownlee - Author, New America Foundation
23. Will Bunch - Philadelphia Daily News
24. Rich Byrne - Playwright
25. Jonathan Chait - The New Republic
26. Lakshmi Chaudry - In These Times
27. Isaac Chotiner - The New Republic
28. Ta-Nehisi Coates - The Atlantic
29. Michael Cohen - New America Foundation
30. Jonathan Cohn - The New Republic
31. Joe Conason - The New York Observer
32. Lark Corbeil - Public News Service
33. David Corn - Mother Jones
34. Daniel Davies - The Guardian
35. David Dayen - FireDogLake
36. Brad DeLong - The Economists’ Voice, University of California at Berkeley
37. Ryan Donmoyer - Bloomberg News
38. Adam Doster - In These Times
39. Kevin Drum - Washington Monthly
40. Matt Duss - Center for American Progress
41. Gerald Dworkin - UC Davis
42. Eve Fairbanks - The New Republic
43. Henry Farrell - George Washington University
44. Tim Fernholz - American Prospect
45. Dan Froomkin - Huffington Post, Washington Post
46. Jason Furman - Brookings Institution
47. James Galbraith - University of Texas at Austin
48. Kathleen Geier - Talking Points Memo
49. Todd Gitlin - Columbia University
50. Ilan Goldenberg - National Security Network
51. Arthur Goldhammer - Harvard University
52. Dana Goldstein - The Daily Beast
53. Andrew Golis - Talking Points Memo
54. Jaana Goodrich - Blogger
55. Merrill Goozner - Chicago Tribune
56. David Greenberg - Slate
57. Robert Greenwald - Brave New Films
58. Chris Hayes - The Nation
59. Don Hazen - Alternet
60. Jeet Heer - Canadian Journolist
61. Jeff Hauser - Political Action Committee, Dennis Shulman Campaign
62. Michael Hirsh - Newsweek
63. James Johnson - University of Rochester
64. John Judis - The New Republic, The American Prospect
65. Foster Kamer - The Village Voice
66. Michael Kazin - Georgetown University
67. Ed Kilgore - Democratic Strategist
68. Richard Kim - The Nation
69. Charlie Kireker - Air America Media
70. Mark Kleiman - UCLA The Reality Based Community
71. Ezra Klein - Washington Post, Newsweek, The American Prospect
72. Joe Klein - TIME
73. Robert Kuttner - American Prospect, Economic Policy Institute
74. Paul Krugman - The New York Times, Princeton University
75. Lisa Lerer - POLITICO
76. Daniel Levy - Century Foundation
77. Ralph Luker - Cliopatria
78. Annie Lowrey - Washington Independent
79. Robert Mackey - New York Times
80. Mike Madden - Salon
81. Maggie Mahar - The Century Foundation
82. Dylan Matthews - Harvard University
83. Alec McGillis - Washington Post
84. Scott McLemee - Inside Higher Ed
85. Sara Mead - New America Foundation
86. Ari Melber - The Nation
87. David Meyer - University of California at Irvine
88. Seth Michaels - MyDD.com
89. Luke Mitchell - Harper’s Magazine
90. Gautham Nagesh - The Hill, Daily Caller
91. Suzanne Nossel - Human Rights Watch
92. Michael O’Hare - University of California at Berkeley
93. Josh Orton - MyDD.com, Air America Media
94. Rodger Payne - University of Louisville
95. Rick Perlstein - Author, Campaign for America’s Future
96. Nico Pitney - Huffington Post
97. Harold Pollack - University of Chicago
98. Katha Pollitt - The Nation
99. Ari Rabin-Havt - Media Matters
100. Joy-Ann Reid - South Florida Times
101. David Roberts - Grist
102. Lamar Robertson - Partnership for Public Service
103. Sara Robinson - Campaign For America's Future
104. Alyssa Rosenberg - Washingtonian, The Atlantic, Government Executive
105. Alex Rossmiller - National Security Network
106. Michael Roston - Newsbroke
107. Laura Rozen - POLITICO, Mother Jones
108. Felix Salmon - Reuters
109. Greg Sargent - Washington Post
110. Thomas Schaller - Baltimore Sun
111. Noam Scheiber - The New Republic
112. Michael Scherer - TIME
113. Mark Schmitt - American Prospect, The New America Foundation
114. Rinku Sen - ColorLines Magazine
115. Julie Bergman Sender - Balcony Films
116. Adam Serwer - American Prospect
117. Walter Shapiro - PoliticsDaily.com
118. Kate Sheppard - Mother Jones
119. Matthew Shugart - UC San Diego
120. Nate Silver - FiveThirtyEight.com
121. Jesse Singal - The Boston Globe, Washington Monthly
122. Ann-Marie Slaughter - Princeton University
123. Ben Smith - POLITICO
124. Sarah Spitz - KCRW
125. Adele Stan - The Media Consortium
126. Paul Starr - The Atlantic
127. Kate Steadman - Kaiser Health News
128. Jonathan Stein - Mother Jones
129. Sam Stein - Huffington Post
130. Matt Steinglass - Deutsche Presse-Agentur
131. James Surowiecki - The New Yorker
132. Jesse Taylor - Pandagon.net
133. Steven Teles - Yale University
134. Mark Thoma - The Economists' View
135. Michael Tomasky - The Guardian
136. Jeffrey Toobin - CNN, The New Yorker
137. Rebecca Traister - Salon
138. Tracy Van Slyke - The Media Consortium
139. Paul Waldman - Author, American Prospect
140. Dave Weigel - Washington Post, MSNBC, The Washington Independent
141. Moira Whelan - National Security Network
142. Scott Winship - Pew Economic Mobility Project
143. J. Harry Wray - DePaul University
144. D. Brad Wright - University of NC at Chapel Hill
145. Kai Wright - The Root
146. Holly Yeager - Columbia Journalism Review
147. Rich Yeselson - Change to Win
148. Matthew Yglesias - Center for American Progress, The Atlantic Monthly
149. Jonathan Zasloff - UCLA
150. Julian Zelizer - Princeton University
151. Avi Zenilman - POLITICO

 

[a_majoor]

1984 was supposed to be a warning, not a "how to" manuel:

http://generalbrock.wordpress.com/2011/01/19/30000-school-children-recorded-as-racists-and-homophobes-for-life/

30,000 school children recorded as racists and homophobes for life
January 19, 2011 by generalbrock

It seems that recently, progressives are no longer content just having their agendas’s ‘accepted’ by society. More and more, they are going out of their way to find people that disagree with their agenda, and either punish them through quasi-legal methods or attempts to label them as a racist, homophobic, or any of the other dreaded ‘isms’.

The troubling part of this trend, is that they aren’t going after the skinheads or insanely fanatical religious groups in society, but people who have legitimate concerns, or even moral reservations. Whether you’re a marriage commissioner in Saskatchewan, or someone that opposes unfettered immigration – they will find you and punish you for your non-progressive views.

And the methods are becoming far more complex these days, from operations that resemble a sting, to online campaigns to discredit and even destroy a person’s life. Many progressives on the left spout nonsense that would be qualified as hate speech, if anyone on the right dared mutter it in a dark alleyway.

Britain has found a new way to ferret out the non-progressives in society – record their remarks starting at pre-school and keep them in registry. Not only are these remarks kept on file from a very young, but they will follow you for the rest of your life. This registry of remarks can be accessed by any future employer, university or other interested parties.

So calling someone ‘gaylord’ at age four, can now haunt you for life, thanks to the progressive’s campaign of stamping out childhood. Now many would say ‘surely only the most severe of incidents would be recorded’, but in 2008-9 alone, almost 30,000 homophobic or racist incidents were recorded.

Figures for the year 2008-9 were obtained under the Freedom of Information Act by the civil liberties group, the Manifesto Club.

They show 29,659 racist incidents reported by schools to local education authorities in England and Wales. Of these, 10,436 were at primary schools and 41 at nursery schools

At one primary, teachers filled out an incident form after three Year Four pupils, aged eight or nine, told a classmate he was ‘gay’ and could not play with them.

It’s terrifying how quickly Britain is headed towards a complete Orwellian state, with Canada following right behind. There is something sick in a society that brands children as thought criminals.