Category: Liberalism & the Left

Diversity, good and bad

It is amazing how Leftists have perverted the word “diversity”.  The people who can call a vicious dictatorship “The People’s Democratic Republic of .... ” have done a similar hit-job on “diversity”.  American universities pride themselves on their diversity but are in fact one of the least diverse places on the planet (See here).  In American university-speak, “diverse” translates fairly directly as meaning “black” and nothing more.  Elsewhere, “diversity” has become an excuse for suppressing all traces of majority culture.  Anything not characteristic of majority culture is “diverse” to Leftists and is to be praised no matter what.  And any element of majority culture is conversely not “diverse” and must therefore be condemned.

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Posted by jonjayray on Sunday, December 26, 2004 at 10:04 PM in Liberalism & the Left
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Is leftist psychology the key?

In a recent post John Ray writes that,

“It is of course my contention that Leftism can ONLY be understood as a psychological rather than a rational phenomenon.”

This statement touches on important issues, so I don’t want to let it pass by without comment. I don’t think that John has described things adequately. I believe that both the left and the right wing of politics have adopted the same underlying political principle and that the logical unfolding of this principle explains the course of Western politics.

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Posted by Guest Blogger on Thursday, December 23, 2004 at 08:44 PM in Liberalism & the Left
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Not so redundant

Chris Bonnor wants Australian boys to be more like girls. In 1997 he was a principal of a boys’ school in Sydney when he gave an influential speech on the issue of boys and education.

The gist of the speech was that the world of work had changed. Male skills were no longer required and therefore boys would need to learn to “cross gender boundaries” to succeed in life. According to Bonnor “gender is something that is socially constructed” which meant it was his school’s “core business to reconstruct boys”.

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Posted by Guest Blogger on Thursday, December 23, 2004 at 03:27 AM in Liberalism & the Left
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Why the Left hate America

See HERE for an interesting explanation of why Leftists say America is evil.  Excerpt: “Those who reject morality in their own lives often project their conscience out onto the periphery of their experience. They take righteous stands on political issues and embrace idealistic ideologies, as a compensation for the moral failures and guilt in their personal lives. They reject personal morality but believe in social morality. Holding the right political beliefs enables them to feel self-righteousness, without the trouble of actually being righteous ... Christians know that self-righteousness of every kind is a spiritual delusion that shuts out the need for Christ’s forgiveness”. [(If this article is offline, find it here])

Posted by jonjayray on Wednesday, December 22, 2004 at 10:26 PM in Liberalism & the Left
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26,000 times a bleeding heart

The liberal mind loves to champion an unpopular cause, never more than when it can strike a moral pose.  So it is that just as the Dutch have finally determined to expel failed asylum seekers – 26,000 of them - Geoffrey Macnab in the Guardian “meets the film-makers staging a unique protest.”

In fact, the first person Macnab meets isn’t a film maker at all.  It is Joost Bosland, “a bespectabled, mild-mannered, fifty year old family therapist” from Den Bosch.  Maybe Macnab needs psychotherapy, he doesn’t say.  He certainly exhibits all the traits associated with compulsive, bleeding-heart liberalism.  Bosland, too, it must be said.  He is not remotely sympathetic to his own people, as if they exist purely as a giant human sponge that can absorb all the sorrows of the Third World.

Bosland is also blessed with a highly fertile imagination.  How many psychotherapists conceive an idea for a film series?  Not many, for which perhaps we must be grateful.  Bosland’s conception is a series of short films with the object of personalising the expulsion process.  It is, therefore, called 26,000 Faces.  Each film is to be two minutes long, filled with “children singing nursery rhymes or standing in a rain-swept playground” and such like.  Of course, in the Netherlands it rains all day and all night on every failed asylum seeker wherever he stands, and especially on his twelve children.  The weather system is so unfair to these tragic and deserving, intentionally stateless people.

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Posted by Johan Van Vlaams on Thursday, December 16, 2004 at 07:01 AM in Liberalism & the Left
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“Rednecks” and “Trailer Trash”

In the great outpouring of Leftist hatred towards conservatives (some of it recorded on Leftists as Elitists) that followed the recent Presidential election, one of the most frequent terms of disparagement of conservative voters was “Rednecks”, and, to a lesser extent, “White trash” or “Trailer trash”.  All three terms are extremely derogatory in American life and I am frankly amazed that Leftists use them at all.  These self-proclaimed heroes of tolerance reveal themselves thereby to be in fact most viciously prejudiced and ignorant.

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Posted by jonjayray on Thursday, December 16, 2004 at 03:53 AM in Liberalism & the Left
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An unfunny joke

The piece of advice below appeared under the heading “College Survival Guide” in The Pointer, the student newspaper of the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point on November 4, 2004, p.4.  There is a shot of the page concerned up here at the moment.

“Vengeance.  Killing yourself is sissy and it doesn’t do anything to fix the problem.  Instead, why don’t you go on a killing spree?  I pet you can take out fifteen for sixteen republicans before they gun you down.  Duke, youd be like a heroe”

If you were a freshman student, how would you take that?  I think you would see it as at the very least expressing hatred of Republicans.  And given the many attacks on Republican campaigners in the recent Presidential election, you might even be tempted towards some violence towards Republicans.

But it was all a joke, we are told.  What an hilarious joke!  Substitute in the above sentence “black” for “Republican” and you will see how funny it is!  Quite clearly it is in fact hate-speech and should be treated like any other instance of hate-speech.  It is not being so treated, though.  Even the campus Republicans have been fairly meek and mild about it.  See here.  But given the prejudice against them on campus I guess they have to be.

Posted by jonjayray on Monday, December 13, 2004 at 09:46 PM in Liberalism & the Left
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American patriotism needs conservatism

There is a relatively new Leftist group-blog called “Left2Right” that aims to “talk to” conservatives in a civil and persuasive manner:  A rather amazing idea in the context of the torrents of abuse and contempt that is usually all that the Left can produce by way of dialogue with conservatives.  A recent post by Elizabeth Anderson  aims to deflect the common charge that Leftists are not patriotic.  Given the way America-haters like Michael Moore and Noam Chomsky are lionized and given every honour by America’s Left, that is a big ask from the outset and the way the charming Ms Anderson goes about her task is very revealing.  She is indeed persuasive that she personally loves her country but some of the other things she says about herself and her views suggest that she is in fact fairly conservative:  She says:  “Give me the pursuit of excellence over “self-esteem” any day” and “Central Park ... Fully restored and enhanced to great glory, it is a far cry from its dismal state in the 1970s, when it was a decrepit haven for drug dealers. Now families don’t hesitate to take their children there to play. There is no more vivid sign of the spectacular revival of New York City than this (except perhaps for the clean, grafitti-free subways). The new reign of civility—and yes, I do give former Mayor Giuliani credit for this—” and “Chinatown shows how free trade in goods and free movement of people are inextricable from the free exchange of ideas and willingness to learn from and welcome them, no matter their origin” and “Mayor Giuliani brought spectacular benefits to the city by insisting not just on a crackdown on crime, but on restoring order and civility to the streets, without which people cannot raise families in the city”.  I could go on but it seems to me that the lady is far to the Right of most Leftists and would in fact be unremarked as a moderate Republican.  Given his big spending on the war and such things, GWB could certainly use her eagerness to pay taxes!  So what the good woman seems to have proved by her own example is precisely the opposite of what she aimed at.  She has shown that you have to be substantially conservative in America today to be patriotic!

Posted by jonjayray on Monday, December 13, 2004 at 07:23 AM in Liberalism & the Left
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Scripting the new family

What do liberals think about the family? I have recently read two commentaries on the changing family by liberal writers. Here is the start of one of these items, an editorial from the Melbourne Age newspaper:

“Until the 1960s, the script for family life was predictable, says David de Vaus, professor of sociology at La Trobe University. “The script was boy meets girl, fall in love, get married, set up house, woman stops work to have babies. Then he retires at 65 and one of them dies.” Since then, slowly but steadily, Australians have been tearing up the template.

“As Professor de Vaus documents in his statistical analysis Diversity and Change in Australian Families, the norms once imposed by one’s family, gender, class or ethnic group have largely fallen away. What remains, for better or worse, are individual choices.”

The editorialist is here taking a negative view of traditional family life, on the basis that it is “predictable”, based on a “template” or on imposed norms, and that it lacks individual choice.

Why take this view? The answer is that liberals believe, as a first principle, that to be fully human we must be self-created by our own will and reason. Therefore, a consistent liberal will think that our freedom as humans depends on choosing our own life patterns.

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Posted by Guest Blogger on Monday, December 13, 2004 at 05:30 AM in Liberalism & the Left
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Stereotyping

Around 15 years ago, I went to the library at the University of Queensland and looked up their PsycLIT CD-ROM.  The CD was published by the American Psychological Association and indexes what has been published in all the world’s academic psychology journals.  I entered the search terms “racism” and “ethnocentrism” and looked at the authorship of the stream of articles that came out.  There was one author who had published far more than any other—accounting for about a fifth of the articles concerned.  So, by normal academic conventions, that author would clearly be the world’s leading authority on the psychology of racism.  I am that author.  See here.

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Posted by jonjayray on Sunday, December 12, 2004 at 12:53 AM in Liberalism & the Left
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America’s most offensive four-letter word

There is no doubt that the most offensive four-letter word in America today is “race”.  I gather that my occasional mentioning of it greatly limits the readership of my blog.  It is my contention, however, that it is mainly the Left that keep it that way—by going ballistic every time that the word is mentioned.  Absurd though it is, the convention that the Left have forced onto American society by their torrents of abuse is that anyone who mentions the word “race” is a “racist”.  And “racist” is in fact the most potent term of abuse that there is in most of the world today.

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Posted by jonjayray on Saturday, December 11, 2004 at 07:01 AM in Liberalism & the Left
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“Sensitive” leftists - a minor disagreement with Dennis Prager

I am a great fan of Dennis Prager. Prague has suffered a great loss in losing him and his family. But I have two minor quarrels with him about this article - headed: “Blue America, the land of the easily offended”.

My first quarrel with him is about his use of the term “Blue America” as a synonym for American Left-wingers. The “blue” (Kerry-voting) counties in the last Presidential election were almost entirely the big cities, with their heavy concentration of minorities and welfare clients. And their vote was “bought” with the usual Democrat promises of more handouts etc. Subtract the “bought” vote and the Democrats would almost certainly have been as heavily outnumbered in the “blue” counties as they were in the “red” ones. And given that minorities often have very conservative views on social issues, there is every reason to subtract them. There is therefore no reason to believe that Leftist true-believers are dominant ANYWHERE in America.

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Posted by jonjayray on Thursday, December 9, 2004 at 08:04 AM in Liberalism & the Left
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Leftist logic

An email from a reader of Dissecting Leftism

Regarding “that good old Leftist inconsistency and opportunism” that you mentioned in your post on Darwin [November 29th.], another great example is their inconsistent stance on the “Race doesn’t exist” issue. I learned this the hard way in my personal life, and it wasn’t pretty.

I’m sure you’re aware of the leftist claim that racial categories are nothing but social constructs with no basis in fact. Well, over a year ago I posted an essay at work that argued that race does exist.

The next day I came to work and found that the essay had been literally torn off the wall. The minute my butt hit the seat my boss, who is ultra-leftist, walked over to my cube and said in a quavering voice, “You want to step into my office for a minute?” He then proceeded to tell me that he’d taken down my essay because it was “racist” and violated company policy prohibiting “racial harassment”!

I pointed out that merely arguing that race exists is not racist.

He countered: “Yes, but it’s the first step to arguing racial superiority. First you claim that people are different and put them in separate categories. From there it’s just a short step to saying this category is better or smarter than this other one, and so on…”

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Posted by jonjayray on Friday, December 3, 2004 at 06:18 AM in Liberalism & the Left
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Morality in public life.

To all who look upon the bedtime propinquities of David Blunkett with haughty disdain the life of the late John Cordle stands in wise rebuke.  He it was who, being an indignant and apparently righteous soul and a loud defender of public morals, raised himself up in 1963 to denounce John Profumo, Harold Macmillan’s disgraced Minister of Defence, thus:-

“Men who choose to live in adultery ought not to be appointed to serve our Queen and country… I was appalled to hear that our beloved Queen should be so wrongly advised as to give an Audience to a minister who has proved himself so untrustworthy… it is an affront to the Christian conscience of our nation.”

Unfortunately, Cordle – Conservative MP for Bournemouth East and Christchurch from 1959 to 1977, a disciple of Billy Graham and, for many years, owner of the Church of England Newspaper – was not exactly Snow White of Westminster himself.  He was twice divorced amid tremendous public acrimony at a time (1956 and 1971) when marriage was not yet a revolving-door arrangement and a certain moral standing was expected of our elected representatives.  Alongside his several appointments to Christian evangelical bodies he cultivated a sparkling social life, rising to the station of a Gold Staff Officer at the Coronation, a friend of Princess Margaret and an usher at her wedding.  During the 1960’s his business life became entwined with John Poulson, the international property developer who was to be jailed some ten years later for bribing civil servants and councillors.

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Posted by Guessedworker on Tuesday, November 30, 2004 at 11:19 AM in Liberalism & the Left
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The raw nerve of the liberal democrat

Steve Sailer has an

article

at The American Conservative about how deeply Kerry was troubled by the information, statistically deduced by Charles Murray and Steve himself, that Bush has the higher IQ.

When Kerry insouciantly replied to Brokaw as if he didn’t care what he scored on a 90-minute exam 38 years ago, as if he believed that all that he had accomplished since then was the proper measure of the man, I was impressed.

A few days later, Brokaw went on Don Imus’s radio show and revealed just how much it bugged Kerry that I had said Bush probably had a slightly higher IQ. After the cameras had stopped rolling, Kerry had rationalized to Brokaw, “I must have been drinking the night before I took that military aptitude test.” 

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Posted by Phil Peterson on Saturday, November 13, 2004 at 10:11 AM in Liberalism & the Left
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Confessions of a cultural elitist

I have put up the above-title article by Ted Rall in full because Yahoo articles tend not to stay up for long.

The article is of course an unashamed claim of superiority for Democrats and “Blue State” inhabitants. Insofar as it is an argument rather than mere assertion, however, it is easily demolished.  Before I do that, though, read it for yourself.

Confessions of a cultural elitist
Win or Lose, Kerry Voters Are Smarter Than Bush Voters
by TED RALL

NEW YORK—Democratic hand wringing is surrealy out of hand. No one is criticizing the morally incongruous Kerry for running against a war he voted for while insisting that he would have voted for it again. Party leaders have yet to consider that NAFTA, signed into law under Clinton, may have cost them high-unemployment Ohio. No, Indiana Senator Evan Bayh, darling of the “centrist” Democratic Leadership Council, blames something else: the perception “in the heartland” that Democrats are a “bicoastal cultural elite that is condescending at best and contemptuous at worst to the values that Americans hold in their daily lives.”

Firstly, living in the sticks doesn’t make you more American. Rural, urban or suburban—they’re irrelevant. San Francisco’s predominantly gay Castro district is every bit as red, white and blue as the Texas panhandle. But if militant Christianist Republicans from inland backwaters believe that secular liberal Democrats from the big coastal cities look upon them with disdain, there’s a reason. We do, and all the more so after this election.

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Posted by jonjayray on Thursday, November 11, 2004 at 06:22 PM in Liberalism & the Left
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