It’s time to get serious about being serious.

I have some friends who are true students of the English language.  They understand the etymology of words and sentence structure, and their vocabulary is amazing.  Me, I never met an infinitive that couldn’t (or shouldn’t) be split, and think nothing about ending a sentence with any preposition I can think of.

My so-called language skills focus on a different side of this equation.  I’m less concerned with sentence structure and grammar than I am with content.  Or in the case of Liberal-speak and its close cousin, pseudo-intellectual speak, the lack of content.

It’s always amazing to listen to or read a Liberal as they formulate a thought.  In my experience, it boils down to two basic paradigms:  (1) The initial thought, which is usually a personal feeling disguised as an objective analysis, and (2) The reaction to a Conservative idea, which is often an off-topic vitriolic diatribe disguised as a dispassionate on-point rejoinder, usually accompanied by a self-serving testament to their own moral superiority. 

Let me explain what I mean by illustrating a couple of examples from the pages of past IC essays.

From time to time we’re been treated to essays by occasional peace institute associates or erstwhile social activists who take a supposedly objective look at an issue by telling us how they feel — but not necessarily why they feel that way.  There’s nothing wrong with popping off about how misguided a certain policy or action is.  I do this all the time, including right now.  But you can’t just state an opinion as an objective analysis without going through the analysis itself!  I oppose abortion, and state this position frequently.  However, there’s a bit more to my analysis than “killing unborn babies is bad.” 

I’ve written at length about abortion as the killing of a human life, war and the killing of human life, the execution of certain convicted criminals, killing other human beings in self-defense, and so on.  I’ve argued how each of these acts are properly connected, and how they are not.  You may agree with my logic, disagree with my logic, or as some Liberal commentators do, disagree with my logic without first bothering to read what I’ve actually written.  But you won’t find me making a flat statement of this magnitude without backing it up.  Contrast this with some of the essays we’ve been treated to protesting Israel’s actions in the Middle East, for example, while completely ignoring what is done to Israel by its enemies to warrant or justify such a reaction.  This isn’t analysis.  It’s propaganda.

Regarding the second paradigm I presented — the reaction to a Conservative idea as an off-topic vitriolic diatribe disguised as a dispassionate on-point rejoinder, usually accompanied by a self-serving testament to their own moral superiority — you can scan almost any essay’s comment section and see a good example for yourself.  My personal favorite involves the guy who stated flatly that, “Lincoln had no authority constitutionally or otherwise to wage that war” as a response to my 50,000 word essay on abortion and Islamo-fascism.  I’m still trying to figure out the linkage on that one.  This is followed closely by another person who complained that IC censors had deleted a brilliant response to one of my essays that took him two days to write.  The unfortunate thing was, he wrote this comment less than 24 hours after my essay was posted.  Peppered throughout are comments that those who disagree with them are “morons,” “wing-nuts,” or other disparaging terms.  And of course, when someone becomes morally indignant at the outrageous Conservative thoughts they’ve been forced to respond to in order to protect public decency, they end their commentary with “peace,” “in kindness,” or some other outward manifestation of their moral superiority to further illustrate the philosophical divide that separates us.  

Now don’t get me wrong.  I’m not opposed to street fighting and name calling — in practice, or in principle.  I do both, unabashedly and unashamedly.  My favorite response is “idiot,” which I employ liberally (no pun intended) as the situation warrants.  But I will point out two tiny differences in my approach and the comments of those I’ve read in my posts or observed in other essays.  First, I don’t lead with an insult, but rather employ such terms only after the manifest stupidity has become too overwhelming to deny.  I love a good debate, but have no patience at all for idiots who have no idea what they are talking about, yet continue to make their points even when their original positions have been thoroughly repudiated.  And second, to show that I am an equal-opportunity characterizer of defective intellect, my nastiest replies have been reserved for the idiots on the Right who substituted their own brand of racist bilge for the ideologically-infused reasoning so often employed by the Left.
I’m quite willing to concede points or refine my arguments in the face of objective, relevant criticism, as I’ve done on a few occasions these past several months.  And I’ve come across a couple of Left-leaning commentators who are prepared to do the same, so all hope is not lost for the future of political discourse.  But what I won’t do is what I see all too often on the Left — start a debate by impugning someone’s intelligence (that designation has to be earned, and the specific reasons for it cited).  And when critiquing an author or someone who comments on an essay I respond to what they actually say, instead of ignoring their words just to offer a personal comment.

For example, I reacted to a particularly inane article condemning Israeli actions during the recent Middle East conflict by writing, "Mr. Eland states that ‘Israel suffers from the cult of the offensive.’ Actually, they suffer from the cult of the Islamo fascists who constantly attack their citizens and shoot terror-weapons into civilian population centers." This was followed by a point-by-point rebuttal of the main points made by the author.  The closest I came to a ‘personal attack’ was to write, “Mr. Eland sets up the typical straw man argument to defend his position. He defines ‘victory’ as ‘completely exterminat[ing] Hezbollah.’ Anything less than this is an Israeli defeat. This is pure sophistry. We were still fighting Nazi guerrillas years after the end of WWII, and there are people today who call themselves Nazis. By Mr. Eland’s standard, Germany won that war.”  

Dr. Eland and I disagree on this subject, and pointedly.  But there was no need to personalize the debate by calling him a name, or treating him with personal disrespect.  It’s an author’s ideas that are being challenged, not his character — unless direct evidence exists to link the two.

By contrast, this is the entire response to a 30,000 word, heavily-footnoted essay I wrote on the myth of man-made global warming:  “This article is full of factual and conceptual errors. Here’s one: the author asks 'if there’s a big ball of vibrating, pulsating, fiery gas up in the sky that routinely heats the Earth, shouldn’t we eliminate it first as the cause of this warming before making me trade in my Escalade for a Mini-Cooper?' It’s already been done. [A web link was provided]. It ain’t the Sun, wingnuts.”

A partisan website is cited to oppose a throw-away tag line I used to kick off a multi-level analysis with a bit of humor.  That’s the sum and substance of the rebuttal, except to say that everyone who thinks man didn’t create global warming in every era of the planet’s history (including those epochs when his ancestors were still slithering around some slime mold and/or romping around the Garden of Eden) is a “wingnut.”

What heartens me at this point, and will reinforce the conclusion I’ll make at the end of this essay, is that a number of Liberals are already jumping out of their chairs to point to other silly-ass statements made by Conservative readers to Liberal authors or Liberal commentators.  It’s true, we have clear examples of this on the Right as well.  The farther the Right, the wackier the example, as commentary to the "Racial Purity Test" essay I wrote a while back more than demonstrates.  What I am prepared to defend here, though, is that our “wingnuts” represent an exception to the rule, while the Left-leaning crazies are the rule!

I’ve yet to read a liberal-oriented analysis on this website that is anything other than an angst-driven “feeling.”  Lay out a couple dozen specific points that support your position (complete with documentation), as David Yerushalmi did recently in his essay "On Torture," and what do you get as a Liberal reply?  Absolutely nothing.  The only response was to focus in on the rhetorical device employed by one commentator who framed the debate this way:  “. . . NOTHING [is] off limits when a prisoner has information vital to saving American lives. This is the distinguishing factor and the cause of concern for all people, why are we torturing people? If the answer is to get information to save American Lives, then do it. If we are doing it just to be cruel then no, torture is no way for a civilized country to behave. It is a simply matter of the ends justifying the means. Torture for the pure sake of it is wrong and ought not to be practiced. If the torture results in the saving of American lives, bring it on.” 

This “repulsive thought” was too much for a self-described Liberal who had been peeking in on IC for the last year or so to evaluate this site’s worthiness.  He found that “elevat[ing] torture to a [sic] intellectual passion” was simply too much to bear, and vowed never to soil his mind again by visiting the website.  To which I admit joining the conversation to second his decision, and advising him not to let the door smack him in the butt on the way out.  Having been presented with one of the finest, most balanced essays I’ve read on this topic, our Liberal friend would not reply to a single issue that was raised by the author, and instead took the cheap way out by picking on the word choices of another commentator who illustrated his principle with a graphic example our Liberal peeping Tom found “repulsive.” 

The fact is, this graphic example was a logical extension of a legitimate debate in its own right, and the only so-called ‘offense’ was to put the issue in everyone’s face so it couldn’t be ignored.  How far would we, and should we go to secure information to save American lives?  Those who answer “never torture” under any circumstances to save an American life, substitute “your life,” or “your child’s life” in that place.  

For those of you who still maintain that the answer is “never,” pardon the delay while we all share a laugh.  It’s one thing to say you’re above it all, and quite another to practice what you preach.  I’m sure you’d really let your child die right before your eyes if all it took was a punch in the face of some other person to give you the information you need to stop an attack.  And if the punch didn’t work, you’d use a baseball bat to break his arm, or waterboard him until he broke.  And if that didn’t work, you’d gladly pull the toenails out of a seven-year-old child yourself if that would do the trick. 

Or maybe you’d actually get on the phone to little Jimmy or Susie and say, “I’m sorry honey.  There’s a bomb on your school bus that will go off in one minute and blow you to smithereens.  Daddy could save your life if he pulled the toenail out of a seven-year-old boy, but daddy doesn’t want to be called a bad man by his Liberal friends by making that little boy grow a new toenail, so get ready to die — horribly.  Forty-five seconds and counting . . ..”

We can come to honestly-different conclusions about the what, where, when, why and how of so-called “torture.”  And in doing this, some people may honestly conclude that they would let their own child die for a higher purpose.  But saying so isn’t the same as offering a complete, coherent analysis of the over-all subject of torture from which this position flows.  I learned my lesson early in life when I lectured my friend at a baseball game about the stupidity of trying to catch a line drive into the left field bleachers with your bare hands, only to immediately dive over two rows of empty seats to try and catch a line drive off the bat of Richie Zisk.  Theory and practice are quite often two different things.  When the subject is baseball, who cares if you’re a self-deluded hypocrite?  But when you’re involved in a war against Islamo-fascism, it’s irresponsible to ignore reality to make a purely political point.

I gather that I’m a somewhat unique columnist at IC in that I like to frequently comment on other essays, as well as comment on the comments posted to my own writing.  I do this because I’m using this forum to put forward ideas and engage others in debate.  That’s my motivation, pure and simple, to see if my ideas can hold up in the face of scrutiny, just as I scrutinize the ideas expressed in other essays.  I was initially elated to see that the IC readership not only spanned the spectrum of Conservative thought, but included Liberal readers as well.  What a great way to vet an issue without the incessant stupidity that comes from what passes today as “intelligent thought” on Left-leaning websites.  Having been through this exercise once with my Loony Liberal Chronicles, I wanted to get down some serious debate, and I thought I had the right forum.

The forum is right, but in all honesty, aren’t there one or two Liberals out there who can actually put a coherent thought together that is on-topic?  This includes the occasional guest essayists who put up straw men arguments which they immediately knock down and then call this “analysis.”  There needs to be a greater level of honesty in framing some of these issues so we can grapple with the true crux of a matter, instead of producing a one-sided essay contending that War is Horrible because, essentially, it’s horrible to go to war.

There are thousands of destination points on the Internet that cater to people venting their ideological frustration at this or that, but only a handful that actually seek to find the truth of an issue.  Rather than read this as an effort to suppress opinions, treat it as a plea for more vigorous, focused debate, and as an open invitation to some of those commentators on the Right — and even a few on the Left who don’t seem to wallow in ideological purity when making their points — to submit essays of their own. 

I’ve been tremendously impressed with the thoughtful analysis of those who have actually used this forum as a means to explore the truth and substance of an idea.  We need to hear a lot more from you as essayists in your own right.  There were a number of commentators to the Robert Higgs "War is Horrible" essay who should be submitting work of their own, not to mention others I’ve come across in other postings. 

As I’ve more than demonstrated (positively to some, negatively to others), you don’t need a Ph.D. to express a well-reasoned thought.  Some of the wisest things I’ve been taught came from people who just reflected on how they’ve gone about living their own lives.  All I ask, from a personal basis, is that you tell me why you believe what you believe (other than you believe it because you do). 

Right or wrong, you’ll contribute to the search for answers that is an integral part of what The Intellectual Conservative is all about.  And that’s not a half-bad motive in its own right.