Posts Tagged ‘reality’

The Reclusive Leftist weighs in

Posted: January 18, 2011 by datechguy in blogs, internet/free speech
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One of days I must have the Reclusive Leftist on my show on the subject of Sarah Palin and the left. We disagree on almost everything else but she has been willing from day one to call out her fellow leftists on Palin Derangement syndrome.

I finally had a chance to take a peek at her blog to see what she had to say about the last week and she wrote a series of post that confirmed her dislike of the right but were as honest as the day was long.

She started on the 9th:

As soon as I heard the news Saturday and read an online article (forget where) with the gleanings from the guy’s various communiques, that was my impression. Mind control, grammar, the possible constitutional ramifications and/or mind control of said grammar, strange obsessions with the currency and its frightening message to trust in God, nonsensical ramblings: it could be a page out of Vaslav Nijinksy’s diary. It’s not just the content, but the style. Classic paranoid schizophrenia.

So imagine my surprise when I checked in on the news later last night and saw that Sarah Palin had been blamed for the shooting.

In the post she insults the tea party but that doesn’t stop her from seeing nonsense for what it is.

Later that same day she reminds us of some of the non violent memes of the lefts opposition to Sarah Palin and says:

That’s right. He was busy calling for Hillary Clinton’s death and then, when Clinton was over, foaming at the mouth about

Palin hunt image via the reclusive leftist

Sarah Palin. Lots of people were foaming at the mouth about Sarah Palin. There was the “art” exhibit in New York inviting people to play at shooting her with a rifle. She was hung in effigy in Los Angeles. Sandra Bernhardt said she should be raped, and not a few other people gleefully called for her death.

Was there any outrage about this at the time? Only from people like me, who were running around with our hair on fire, screaming to our allegedly “progressive” brethren and sistren “UR DOIN IT WRONG!!!!!” Everybody else seemed to think it was just fine. After all, Sarah Palin really did deserve to be raped and murdered and shot and lynched because she’s a foul c*** who needs to die, so what was wrong with saying so? Lighten up, bitch. What are you, a secret Republican?

And again she is the reclusive leftist so she makes it clear what she thinks of Sarah Palin’s political positions:

Sarah Palin is a Republican. That’s all. She’s just a silly rightwing Republican. The country’s crawling with them. Look, they’re all around you! They’re your county supervisors, state senators, congresspeople, governors, and former presidents. Remember Bush? Remember Reagan? Sarah Palin didn’t invent any of this stuff. She didn’t invent any of the ideas or any of the rhetoric. She certainly didn’t invent extremist violence, nor does she seem to be in any way connected with that kind of thing. She’s just an ordinary idiot Republican who believes ordinary idiot Republican things, like the millions of other ordinary idiot Republicans in this country.

What is it about her that’s so special? What could it possibly be that makes this utterly ordinary idiot Republican somehow a billion times worse than all the rest?

…and she gives her explanation but go to the link and read it, she deserves the hits.

Finally on the 16th she hits it out of the park on RFK Jr’s essay:

He just wanted to talk about the dangers of right-wing hate. Okay, fine. That’s cool. Let’s talk about it. But still: how do you leave out the sentence about Oswald? As a writer, how do you do that? I couldn’t. It feels obligatory. You write this highly-charged essay, you make a big deal about how ugly the right-wing stuff was in Dallas, you evoke the horror of the president’s death; even if you want your takeaway message to be about the dangers of superheated rhetoric, how do you leave out the undeniable historical reality that Oswald was cut from an entirely different bolt of cloth? Even if you tuck it in as a parenthetical throwaway (”of course, ironically…”), you still have to acknowledge it. Don’t you?

I had just about persuaded myself to forget about it—chalk it up to a single editorial decision not to muddy the main point—when I learned today that Eric Boehlert wrote an extremely similar essay in 2009: A President was killed the last time right-wing hatred ran wild like this. It’s exactly the same argument RFK Jr. makes, and with exactly the same stunning omission. No Oswald! Oswald has simply disappeared. He’s gone. And everything that motivated the man is gone. No Cuba, no Fidel, no Soviet Union, no Marxism, no Communism, no nothing. There’s not even a nod to Oswald’s real motive, which was the inchoate longing to be somebody, to be a great man, to be important.

Read this whole essay, yeah it’s hard on the right, but it’s honest and fair and from the left.

I will never agree with the Reclusive Leftist on religion, abortion, George Bush and a million other issues, but boy do I respect her.

Update: Thanks for the lanche Glenn but thanks even more for linking to Violet, honest leftists should be celebrated. BTW Insty readers make sure you read all three of her posts on the subject.

Update 2: A lot of readers think that I’m giving Violet too much credit. Remember a lot of us on the right were once on the left, it took a while for us to get it, its not a switch. If you want to let people find their way to truth the best way is to encourage them along the way.

Sad to say they sound alike

Posted: January 10, 2011 by datechguy in opinion/news
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I took an unexpectedly long nap and ended up awake at midnight, looking around the net I saw this via Lisa Graas:

Is it just me, or is there an incredible lack of reason on the Left?

Incidentally, the way I found out about the shooting was through an avalanche of tweets calling Sarah Palin a ‘murderer’. I was even called a murderer for asking people not to point fingers of blame. There is certainly ‘vitriol’…..but it’s not coming from the direction the Left claims.

For two days I’ve been seeing people hurling the vilest accusations at the Tea party in general and Sarah Palin in particular without any factual basis. And if that isn’t enough everyone’s favorite Democratic Pastor Fred Phelps plans on jumping into the fray..

Phelps praises Loughner’s violent acts in this video, where he announces he will be taking his sick protest to the funerals of the victims of the Arizona shooting spree. He also refers to Loughner as an Afghanistan war veteran, even though initial reports of Loughner being a veteran turned out to be false.

It’s pretty bad, almost as bad as this reaction to the murder of another poll half a world away:

Tens of thousands of demonstrators marched in Pakistan’s largest city on Sunday to oppose any change to national blasphemy laws and to praise a man charged with murdering a provincial governor who had campaigned against the divisive legislation.

The rally of up to 50,000 people in downtown Karachi was one of the largest demonstrations of support for the laws, which make insulting Islam a capital offense. It was organized before the governor of Punjab province, Salman Taseer, was shot dead on Tuesday in Islamabad by a bodyguard who told a court he considered Taseer a blasphemer.

Muslim groups have praised the bodyguard, Mumtaz Qadri, and have used Taseer’s death to warn others not to speak out against the much-derided laws.

Now what does a group of religions fanatics Pious Muslims marching have to do with the left?

Simply this. The Governor of Punjab by challenging his fellow Muslim’s belief was a threat to their mind-set. It’s much easier to eliminate people who challenge your religious beliefs than to defend those beliefs, much less thinking involved.

When I look at the left willing to blame Sarah Palin, Andrew Breitbart, the Tea Party and even Lisa Graas for inciting violence while both using violent rhetoric and ignoring their own violent rhetoric in the past the pieces fit together.

The left secular political beliefs have essentially morphed into a religion. The right feelings and opinions are the sacraments (much easier than having to follow actual commandments like traditional Judeo-Christian beliefs) if you have them you are considered righteous.

Conversely if you don’t share those beliefs you are outside, you are the devil and evil, and since you are evil any level of vitriolic rhetoric or action is permissible. Rather than praying for your enemies as Christianity commands one can hate them openly and feel good about it.

This is why above all Sarah Palin is their Anti-Christ. She symbolizes all that they hate, she is a person of action who lives her beliefs and does so publicly and unabashedly. She is a reminder of a reality that their religion needs to suppress. Screwtape 13 had it pegged:

The characteristic of Pains and Pleasures is that they are unmistakably real, and therefore, as far as they go, give the man who feels them a touchstone of reality. Thus if you had been trying to damn your man by the Romantic method—by making him a kind of Childe Harold or Werther submerged in self-pity for imaginary distresses—you would try to protect him at all costs from any real pain; because, of course, five minutes’ genuine toothache would reveal the romantic sorrows for the nonsense they were and unmask your whole stratagem.
But you were trying to damn your patient by the World, that is by palming off vanity, bustle, irony, and expensive tedium as pleasures. How can you have
failed to see that a real pleasure was the last thing you ought to have let him meet? Didn’t you foresee that it would just kill by contrast all the trumpery which you have been so laboriously teaching him to value?

This is why the right in general and Sarah Palin in particular must be attacked here. Every moment that she is not brings the possibility that realization might strike, that the superficial might be replaced by a foundation in reality and that reality is anathema to all that has come before.

Today Elizabeth Scalia asks the question what is wrong with the world. Chesterton’s spectacular Catholic Answer was “I am” and thus stove to change and improve himself. A great example to all Christians in general and Catholics in particular but self-realization is a tough and painful process and many don’t want to face it. Much easier to carry on confident in one perfection.

Until those on the left can come to Chesterton’s answer and work to correct it we will see more of the same. Remember screwtapes final warning:

The great thing is to prevent his doing anything. As long as he does not convert it into action, it does not matter how much he thinks about this new repentance. Let the little brute wallow in it. Let him, if he has any bent that way, write a book about it; that is often an excellent way of sterilizing the seeds which the Enemy plants in a human soul. Let him do anything but act. No amount of piety in his imagination and affections will harm us if we can keep it out of his will. As one of the humans has said, active habits are strengthened by repetition but passive ones are weakened. The more often he feels without acting, the less he will be able ever to act, and, in the long run, the less he will be able to feel,

Normalizing Communism Deb is only slightly off

Posted: January 4, 2011 by datechguy in opinion/news
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This article at Nice Deb yesterday caught my eye:

Russian TV covers the growing Marxist movement in America – it’s not often that a media outlet calls “progressives” what they really are, as RT America does, here.

I’m not going to embed the video as it’s Deb’s story, but both the story and Deb’s headline is off.

It hasn’t “begun” it has been going on for years.

It went on in the 60’s when college students found that they would not longer get the exemptions that the less fortunate had, joining with Marxists and Jane Fonda aiding enemies and directly leading to the death of millions in southeast Asia

It went on in the 70’s as Colleges veered left preaching moral equivalence between the Soviets and the US

It went on in the 80’s when pols like VP Biden and the late Ted Kennedy backed by the media opposed Reagan tooth and nail as he called the Soviet Union what it was and contained and rolled back communism in our own hemisphere.

We had a brief break in the 90’s as the soviets finally collapsed freeing hundreds of millions (while pols who had supported them and academics who considered them superior suddenly claimed they had been against them or expecting this all the time) but the green movement took over trying to advance the same Red system with a green veneer while ignoring the lack of “Green” in places like China and appeasing North Korea.

And this decade we had the left again blaming the US for the attacks on our soil, railing against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, while ignoring the excesses of regimes like North Korea the violence of Radical Islam, the Judenrein nature of the middle east and the actions of leaders like Chavez.

The reason why it is out in the open is the fear. Times are tough so a nation that has been taught by people who have never had to sign the front of a paycheck or actually understood the sacrifices that allowed them the freedom to goof find themselves confronted by the left once again trying to sell a repackaged bottle of the same “ism” that has slaughtered more people over the last hundred years than anyone or anything else ever. The times have emboldened them and they hope to take advantage of it.

The truth is this: This is the living of the far left and always has been. The left impulses have always been totalitarian, they don’t trust the people but they trust themselves to rule them and hope to be part of that privileged class that like Saddam’s relatives, and party members in the old Soviet Union will still have the privileges that the average person is discouraged from. They aspire to the comfort of the feudal lords of the middle ages while pretending to be the friend of the people that they would make serfs.

This is an old style being sold to a public that has forgotten.

Update: I would have included this Mike Barone article if I saw it before I hit post but here is the little secret that people don’t know:

In addition, as George Mason University economist Tyler Cowen writes in the American Interest, “The inequality of personal well-being is sharply down over the past hundred years and perhaps over the past twenty years as well.” Bill Gates may have a bigger house than you do. But you have about the same access to good food, medical care and even to the Internet as he does.

Or consider something as prosaic as food. The supermarkets of the 1960s and 1970s didn’t come close to matching the amazing selection of produce, meats and exotic foods as you find in supermarkets today — and not just in high-income neighborhoods but in modest-income places all over the country.

Or clothing. Stores like Walmart, Target and Kohl’s sell good quality clothes at astonishingly low prices; you can outfit a kid in school clothes for $100 or so a year.

He also nails the elites who cry wolf:

I suspect that most Americans would be thrilled to get a 13th month of pay. But they’re not seething with envy at those who are better off.

So who does? One example is the cartoonist and author Garry Trudeau, a college classmate of George W. Bush, who has been spewing contempt for the Bushes for 40-some years. The strongest class envy in America, it turns out, may be the resentment of those who were one club above you at Yale.

Bingo!

A side thought about the military and the left

Posted: December 31, 2010 by datechguy in Afghanistan war, culture, media, opinion/news, war
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As I been reading the continuing commentary on the Washington Post piece that has really got the attention of bloggers and readers from the daily pundit

“DADT as the reason for ROTC’s banning was always a sham. Now the mask is finally off. The elite professoriat doesn’t hate ROTC because of DADT, they hate ROTC because they just can’t stand “the warrior ethic”. That’s code for courage, honor, and duty, ethics all anathema to Leftist indoctrinators. They prefer us supine, afraid, and dependent on them.”

an opinion I share to Vodkapundit

“See there, Mr. U.S. Marine Captain — McCarthy doesn’t hate you. Why, he thinks you’re every bit as respectable as a Taliban.

who adds a graphic that says it all to this post at Ace of Spades HQ that compares the course requirement for ROTC at Sienna College and woman and gender studies at Columbia guess which one is more challenging academically?

While all of these are first-rate there is a thought that hit me this morning that hasn’t been touched on. Namely that the McCarthy’s of the world actually bring about the results they claim to deplore.

Consider; our media tends to reflect the views of people like McCarthy and the movies and media we put out there tend to show our troops in a very poor light, particularly over the last 40 years that has been exported as American Cultural and elite opinion to foes all over the world that the Saddam’s, Bin Ladin’s and Chavez’s et/al have bought into. It is precisely believe they have bought into the weakness of American culture and the people opposition to the military and the troops as uneducated rabble that they have been bold enough to make war figuring we can’t defeat them or oppose them.

Hundreds of thousands of idiotic and fanatical followers of these fools have learned the hard way that this is not true (in fact it was the last thing they ever learned), yet their fanatical leaders who are not hiding in caves manage to convince them that America will simply roll over. Why don’t they believe the evidence of the empty chairs where their predecessors have been? Because men like McCarthy promote the idea of a military unwanted and supported, because our media is so focused on the number of our casualties in war that they ignored the losses of our foes that dwarf ours.

These men are the enablers of the very wars they claim to oppose, and even more ironically are only able to be such enablers because our military is precisely NOT like the Taliban or any of these guys.

The secret here is that the McCarthy’s on the left’s position is really less about their hatred of the military, but more about convincing themselves of their own moral superiority. They can’t match the courage or the honor or the sacrifice of these men and women so they denigrate them in a vain attempt to convince themselves that it is their words and good wishes, dare I say it their faith in their own love for their fellow-man that outweighs the works of the military in risking their own lives to save others.

That’s liberalism in a nutshell belief and good intention trump works and results every time.

Update: Oh Brother!

Hitler could have been waited out. He might have been overthrown by his own government. Who knows? To have 50 million people killed: Hitler would have died within 10 years no matter what he did.

Oh and Lincoln was wrong to fight the civil war too. Moe Lane nails it:

Whichever editor approved this Washington Post article should be ashamed of him- or herself. I do not expect shame, but it’s long past time that we started telling these people when they’ve done something foul.

He certainly has the right to free speech but did he have the right to a Washington Post op-ed?

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