An 18-year old freshman is beat up for her political views and called a racist. Why? She is wearing a McCain-Palin campaign button.
Years ago a youthful thug murdered a young man for his high-priced sneakers. Decent, law-abiding folks wondered, What Is This Country Coming To? In another case, not long ago in Minneapolis, a young thug murdered to rip off his victim's designer sports jersey. Evil happens, its very banality — as political philosopher Hanna Arendt wrote, coining the phrase "banality of evil" — practically makes "normal" once unthinkable events in civilized society.
On election night in Minneapolis, Minnesota, a blue state, my home state, comes a criminal horror story short of murder, but no less disturbing. It happened at a small private liberal arts college, Augsburg College, not far from the main university.
After taunting 18-year old freshman Annie Grossmann for wearing a McCain-Palin pin at an election night get-together, four hysterical women attacked her physically for her political views which, obviously, they did not share. After taking verbal abuse at the election party, Grossmann left after it became clear, at about 10 p.m., her candidates had lost. She was followed into the dark of night by the four women, and attacked in the shadows under a skyway on campus.
The four women, all black, called Grossmann a "racist." She knew none of them. Nor did they know her, at least to her knowledge. It was the McCain-Palin pin that set them off.
"Why do you call me a racist when you don't even know me?" she screamed. No answer.
Grossman then was felled by a blow to her face from the largest of the four who stalked her. Her head stuck a brick wall behind her. The other three women chucked, offering no help to their dazed victim. The banality of evil, as Arendt described Nazi atrocities, had asserted itself on another "cheaper" level.
That this happened on a college campus is hardly surprising. Campuses now ooze with creepy partisan intolerance. They are places mainly where left-wing academia hold forth, along with politically correct staff. Professors rule, often tenured ex-radicals from the Sixties, inculcating their students with their own one-sided, vitriolic, impenetrable rages and biases.
(Not surprising, at another private "liberal arts" college in Minnesota, a professor was recently dismissed for stealing McCain-Palin lawn signs, and taking delight in his crime. No remorse there! Such is the hubris of the clueless Left, perhaps beyond redemption. They probably don't know it, but they do the nation a grave disservice.)
Grossmann had been booed at a freshman "mixer" when she identified herself as a Republican. She is from Delta Junction, Alaska, you see, and naïve to this urban political prejudice. Her mother back home in Alaska is a Republican Party leader, a huge fan of Governor Palin.
Annie considers her governor to be a role model, something ardent leftists and envious feminists must surely deplore, as part of their knee-jerk, articles-of-faith shibboleths, their damn-the-conservatives mind-set. It is viewed somehow, why I am not certain, that stirring insipid ideological hatred is somehow, ah, "cool"? Go figure.
A newspaper says Annie's attackers might not have been Augsburg students. Somehow that makes a difference? Well, to the college, I suppose, it's a matter of proper image — a tribute to virtue. But what were the thugs doing hanging out at a campus party, taunting those who disagreed with their Obamamania, while the other "good" students did nothing? Who stood up for the 5' 2" 120-pound Annie? Who challenged the evil here? Nobody.
Grossmann is on the college's ladies' hockey team. She was excused temporarily from practices after suffering a concussion and blurred vision. Thankfully, her injuries are not thought permanent. Psychic scars will remain, though, along with a lesson in intolerance learned.
It was not the first time Grossman met political hostility in the land of Minnesota Nice. Even her bear-hunting in Alaska proved a sticking point. As reported by the Minneapolis Star Tribune (11/02/08), we find these instructive paragraphs:
Grossmann's parents…said that in the weeks leading up to the presidential election, Annie had trouble on campus because of her political leanings and for being a hunter.
Bruce Grossmann [Annie's dad] said a "PETA person" had to be removed from her dorm room because he was upset by a photo of her with a black bear she had shot. Also, he said, she attended an icebreaker on campus and was booed when she identified herself as a Republican.
"I don't think she was prepared for the close-mindedness," he said. "I told her she needs to take a lower profile [for the sake of] her academic and her sports careers."
Intolerance on college campuses, supposed bastions of free inquiry, is endemic. Campuses have become highly politicized. Free speech itself is imperiled by codes, by political correctness run amok. Professors rule. Conservatives are muzzled, and piled on, as Governor Palin was in the mainstream media. Most campuses are fiercely, irrationally anti-Republican, gone loco against conservatives, whose life and limb now may be in danger for expressing au contraire opinions.
Our nation is less for all this nonsense. Does poet Yeats's famous "centre" not hold? Can civility survive? Today, are the nation's worst "…full of passionate intensity"? Do "the best lack all conviction"? * So it seems.
Another palpable example of partisan evil asserting itself occurred six years ago at the political pep rally masquerading as a memorial service in Minneapolis. At that raucous "service" in 2002, a disabled fellow from St. Paul, confined to a wheelchair, came to what he thought was to be a memorial service for Senator Paul Wellstone and his wife Sheila. He wanted to pay his respects to the senator who had helped him overcome some disability claim issue.
Not reported by liberal news media at the time (except CNN), likely a fact also for Annie Grossmann's story today, was the fact that the guy in a wheelchair was spat upon. Senator Trent Lott (R-MS) was merely booed. But the man in a wheelchair was struck by a big wad on the nape of his neck. His crime? Well, he had a "Norm Coleman for Senate" campaign button on his wheelchair-hung jacket, soon to be ripped off angrily by a partisan Democrat who ran away, laughing at his boorishness.
Certainly in these two cases, and countless others, ideological hatred has left its indelible mark. As for that election night assault at Augsburg College on November 4, 2008, what happened to 18-year old Annie Grossmann was a double whammy; it combined racism and ideological hate. Either way, or both, it's reprehensible to its heart-of-darkness core, banality of evil to be deplored by all right-thinking Americans of whatever party or political inclination. Will they?
* "The Second Coming" by William Butler Yeats (1923)
It’s a good thing Annie was not wearing one of those “I approve of water boarding!” pins.
I feel awful for Annie. It’s just so bizarre that I wonder if we are hearing the whole story. I’m not saying she did anything to provoke the women who attacked her, but seeing as how they weren’t even from the school, it’s crazy that they would be set off by a pin on a student. Obviously they were looking for a victim, and she presented herself. All told, the liberal illuminati supporters are overstepping bounds left and right these days, and I think if the reports can be validated, Obama should address the issue publicly, rebuking the reverse racism.
This will only get worse as time goes on into the NObama presidency. Just think what will happen when we have the BOSS (Barack nObama’s Secret Security) force running around college campuses and other public areas.
“Worshippers in Lansing, MI assaulted by liberal activists”
http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2008/11/worshippers_in_lansing_mi_assa.html
BTW, where is our friend omgucbs?
I do fear that this is only the beginning. I do not believe in conspiracies and I believe in coincidences even less.
My personal experience as an 18-year-old college student during the early 1970s left me indelibly prejudiced toward leftists in general whose success in discrediting their own ideas was directly proportional to the amplitude of their bigoted opinions. While today I can genuinely respect and will listen to leftist ideas expressed with integrity, my anitpathy developed as a result of often-times vociferous reactions received in response to my direct questions regarding issues at that earlier time, and I have ever since struggled to overcome an autonomic propensity to view promulgators of leftist ideas as adherents to a new Inquisition.
I had my first taste of this in high school in 1968, then again in college, and again while in the Navy. In high school I was punched in the face and knocked down for trying to enter a study hall taken over unannounced by black radicals. In college, I was asked to help hoist the flag on the campus quad for Memorial Day by someone who then loudly denounced me before the crowd as a ‘narc’ (he was suspicious of my ‘conformist’ attitudes). And, I was spit on by anti-war radicals while passing through San Francisco’s airport in uniform (other servicemen got rougher treatment). None of this is exactly new, it’s just back. I keep coming back to that new bumper-sticker so popular among liberals, the one that says “Choose Civility”. Well, hon, look in your own mirror for the culprit.
And a black youth was beaten up by two white men with baseball bats on election night to taunts of Obama in Staten Island.
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/ny_crime/2008/11/15/2008-11-15_two_white_teens_arrested_in_alleged_elec.html
Do you honestly believe that thuggery and hate are only the perogative of one side of the political spectrum. That is a very naive and self serving assumption.
This is generalization from anecdote and proves nothing other then there exists some number of intolerant thugs on the left and anecdotes will show the same for the right.
I am not defending the boorishness of many people on the left and it is probably worse in situations where they feel predominant as in certain college campuses. On the other hand, my guess is that if you were in a situation where conservatives predominated, like the military, or small town Mississippi, you would be in far more danger expressing liberal sentiments than conservative ones.
And Bob, during that same troubling period, I was both attacked by the Black Panthers, beaten up and robbed, and also attacked by several Marine Corps off duty who broke my nose, and had a monkey wrench taken to me by a truck driver for having my hair longer than they approved of and I wasn’t even political at the time.
So what does that prove. Yes, choose civility, that should not be a liberal sentiment, but a sentiment for us all.
Yonkel, while I do not see anyone here espousing the sentiment that “thuggery and hate are only the perogative of one side,” your conclusion speaks a truth to us all. May your number increase!
michaelbp:
Re: “While today I can genuinely respect and will listen to leftist ideas expressed with integrity…”
When you consider the human carnage caused by Leftism, I don’t see how there can be any integrity associated with Leftist ideas; there is always an ulterior motive. I categorically reject all their ideas because they are, without exception, put forth without the slightest bit of research because such research would undoubtedly reveal folly. So, Truth is rejected when it conflicts with ideology. Since humans instinctively seek it, Truth has to undergo some form of re-definition. This inevitably leads to taking away peoples’ rights because you have to force people to deny their very nature. The Bolsheviks didn’t revolt to establish gulags; they did it to get social justice. When their ideas failed, it was the fault of the people who didn’t comply, not the ideas themselves.
Liberal/Leftist also have bamboozled conservatives into justifying “why not?”, conservatives forgetting that the burden of proof is on the advocate of change to justify “why”. As far as I’m concerned, liberal/Leftists are guilty unless they prove their innocence. They are “ThOpp-ers” … Think Opposite of what they say to get Truth.
I know what liberals [at least the polite ones] on this site are thinking: “You are closed-minded and not open to new ideas” to which I reply, “Show me a new idea.”
When you look at any one of a whole litany of liberal/Leftist ideas, you will find there is nothing [as in NO THING] new about them. They have been tried before, in some form or other, and as author Paul Johnson says, “at great human cost.”
And that great human cost is never [as in NEVER] paid by the liberal advocates.
Bob Stapler:
Re: “I had my first taste of this in high school …”
What you experienced can be construed as a bill of attainder. As I have posted here before, I am not an attorney but think that the idea that sexual harassment (SH) laws are bills of attainder has some merit because they target an identifiable group, i.e., men. Generally not understood in this country is how far Left-wing government officials and congressmen (and women) have gone in pacifying feminists by treating their complaints against ‘systematic’ discrimination as justification for passing and administering questionable regulations.
This notion of “systematic” discrimination, now applied to racial minorities, taints an identifiable sub-group: white males. How it becomes a bill of attainder is through the brainwashing of minorities into a victim mentality and the government’s roll in perpetuating it for its own political purposes. Lack of enforcement of existing laws, such as assault and battery in your case, is another major contributing factor.
sedonaman
While I generally applaud your comment I would expand on a few things you have said.
1. “The Bolsheviks didn’t revolt to establish gulags; they did it to get social justice” My impression is that they revolted just to be revolting. Something akin to the current vote for change.
2. “And that great human cost is never [as in NEVER] paid by the liberal advocates.” Au contraire. Many liberals (revolutionaries) went to the gulag, especially during the Great Purge of 1937. Moreover, while some may say that the Nazis were right wing and I contend that National Socialist means exactly what it says, the German people who supported the Nazis certainly paid a price. Let’s not leave the leftists thinking they will not have to pay and only we conservatives will be under the control of the statist “regulations”. Freedom and liberty are for everyone.
Ivan Ivanovich:
I am familiar with the concept of a revolution eating its own children, but here I’m talking about the real culprits, and not just of a revolution but of Leftism in general.
Did Marx suffer for his ideas that are responsible for 150 million murders? Did Chamberlain suffer for failing to appease Hitler, when he should have been well-aware of the 2,000 year history of the failure of appeasement?
I agree that Nazism was a Leftist movement, and I’m glad you brought it up. Here is a quote out of Hayek’s Road to Surfdom: “It is a common mistake to regard National Socialism as a mere revolt against reason, an irrational movement without intellectual background. If that were so, the movement would be much less dangerous than it is.”
Orenstein Re-enforces this idea: “Far too little attention has been paid to addressing the fundamental role that ideological indoctrination in classrooms and lecture halls has played in delivering the atrocities of Nazism to the world. The German university was the ideological originator of Nazism, turning romantic racial myths and superstitions about Germany and the Jews into a systematic ‘scientific’ body of knowledge that gave rise to Nazi racial policy and justified the horrors of the Nazi atrocities. Professors and academics with multiple Ph.D.s eagerly collaborated with the Nazi leadership and selected who was to be sterilized and who lived or died for the glory of the Volk, advocated which races were to be exterminated and which nations were to be invaded and conquered for lebensraum.” http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=23293
The current crop of cultural Marxists have already sown the seeds of the next Holocaust, for the academy is where ideas originate and migrate out. When it comes time to knock heads, the professors fade to the background and let the Brownshirts take over.
Sedonaman
“Did Marx suffer” No, but Lenin and Trotsky did:>)
I’m glad you see the Nazis and Soviets together on the left of the scale, totalitarians all. Too bad that the propagandists have led so many to see them as far extremes.
You can go from the center of the body politic and go two steps Left and keep going in that direction and you will end up with admirers of Kim Jong Il.
You can start center and keep heading right a little bit at a time and you will get to Timothy McVeigh, the Klu Klux Klan and the Aryan nations.
The significance of this to me is very little. I judge people by what they believe in, not the extreme ends of the direction that they are from the center, but it seems an obsession with people on the right or left to paint those they disagree with the most extreme and vile ends of their spectrum.
It is as self serving to put Hitler on the Left, as to make Nixon a liberal, and what I expect to be the next revision of history, George W Bush will undoubtedly gain the liberal mantle.
The logos behind this, is since conservatives are the true keepers of the flame then all the evil people have to be on the Left.
The rightist dictators of Chile and Argentina who stole babies and pushed live human beings out of airplanes, were championed by who, the great leftist Jessie Helmes. They all had ties to local nazis.
The people the nazis hated in Germany as much as the jews and gypsies were the socialists and the communists with whom they fought pitched battles in the street. In fact it was the fear of the Left that led Von Hindenburg to appoint Hitler chancellor in 1933, from which point he took over the government.
The first people that went into Hitler’s concentration camps were not Jews but socialists and communists. And if the Fascists were so enamored of the left, then why were they supplying Franco in Spain as he fought the elected socialist government. And why was this same Franco aligned with the right up until his death in 1975.
And in the US, who were the patrons of the Nazis. Henry Ford was an avowed anti-semite and early apologizer for Hitler although he eventually did greatly help the allied war effort. He was no great friend of the left. Charles Lindberg and the America First movement were the paleoconservatives of the time and blasted Roosevelt and the so called Jewish media for drawing us into war with Hitler
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/America_First_Committee
I am the last person to try to tie American conservatives to the far right as the conspiratorialist on the left will, but there is an absurd level of nonsensical insinuation I find amongst the good people of this blog. Obama is no more a communist than I am a hemaphrodite. He will be appointing centrist and liberals and Republicans and I expect him to be less partisan than Bush was. The sky is not falling, just the stock market.
yonkel
Where does it say we must measure politics on a linear scale from Stalin on the left to Hitler on the right? Why can’t we as intellectuals look at the world body politic as a circle with Hitler and Stalin side by side at the 1 and 11 O’clock positions? Then we can put Anarchists at 6, where each person has total freedom. It seems our founders put the USA at 5 or 7 with some federal power, leaving most rule making and enforcement at the local levels. Since 1800 the country has moved away from the 5-7 position upward toward 12 (Orwell’s Oceania). As a conservative I would like to see it moved down again. There is nothing partisan about that, unlike your screed of Hate Bush. Oh yea, and Hate Ivan too!
Ivan, whoever said I don’t like you. I like you.
I occasionally have likened your logic to some unflattering examples like Hitler or a segregationist ,but I don’t think that is you at all, just some convoluted logic on your part.
I respect your viewpoint and don’t think you are a nutjob, and if you make it to NC, I owe you a beer. That is if you don’t mind my preferred brand, Old Milwaukee.
I’ll buy the clock concept.
What I don’t buy is the idea of tying everything left of center with the far extremes. There is a maturity and humility in holding firmly to your own view but not presupposing that everybody else is a fiend or nincompoop. This is the genorosity of a Buckley as opposed to a latter day Limbaugh who has tied the conservatives with such a mean spirit that I think that is why they lost the election.
Where is my screed against Bush? I don’t like his presidency particularly, but I haven’t done any scree’ing.
Now as a variation on the clock thing check out this political compass concept.
http://www.politicalcompass.org/index
It differentiates left and right economic with authoritarian vs libertarian social
I scored -2.38 on the economic and -1.90 on the libertarian scale which is a little left of center economic but toward the libertarian.
I agree with everyone who is bashing the linear left right line that puts Stalin and Hitler at extremes.
I also appear extremely libertarian on a two dimensional scale, believing in hard knocks capitalism, and at the same time being about as socially liberal as it gets.
Ivan Ivanovich called the leftys totalitarians: dont forget all those people on the right side that will tell gays they cant marry or tell a man he cant smoke his pipe of cannabis.
If you don’t like gay marriage, dont get one. If you dont like marijuana, dont smoke it. Stop friskin’ every Muslim man while they walk through the airport. I wish the Republicans would stop trying to stick their hands in the private business of others in these ways, and then go and say say the Democratics are the big government party. There are two sides to the coin, and the only party that really understands what it means to be American is the Libertarian Party of the United States.
Ivan:
I was going to suggest politicalcompass.org but yonkel beat me to it. My scores [for what it's worth]:
Economic +2.63
Social +2.31
I have my doubts about its accuracy because it places 0bama, Hillary, and Biden right around me http://www.politicalcompass.org/uselection2008 , which is a crock.
While we’re at it, here’s another interesting thesis http://www.politicaltypes.com/content/view/24/56 .
Sedonaman-
They do place all the Dems right of center and the authors explain that it is centered on a world perspective, not a US.
For example, Obama supports the death penalty, a position that not even much of the center right of the Europeans support. Also, in Europe national health care is a given more than a controversy. The socialist parties in Europe are all considered relatively mainstream, more or less the equivalent of the Dems here but certainly well to the Left philosophically of the American Democratic Party.
Reminds me of a discussion I was having with Phillip about European politics and the impact of the US on world opinion. His claim was that the election of Sarkozy, Merkel, Berlusconi were vindications of Bush, but the point is that even these center rights by European standards are well to the Left of American politics and more supportive of Obama’s positions than Bush, perhaps not Berlusconi, but definitely the other two.
People of the left and right conceive that there is this vast difference between their viewpoints in America and we are doing this mythical battle between extremes. The reality in a world scale is that Americans are not that far apart and the difference between Obama and Fred Thompson e.g. when looked at in a world perspective is not great.
People tend to apply the slippery slope perspective, that if Obama is 4 steps to the left, that he is going to end up 30 steps, but I don’t see that this ever happens, as our electoral system functionally drives government to the center.
Now, those that derive their identities from a vehement partisanship might find this view uncomfortable, but for others it might bestow some comfort. The world did not end for liberals with George W Bush and the sky will not fall with Obama.
yonkel:
Re: “And if the Fascists were so enamored of the left, then why were they supplying Franco in Spain as he fought the elected socialist government.[?]”
The same reason the Communist Party USA backed a non-intervention policy by the US regarding Germany’s conquests in Europe: Germany and Russia had a pact. Once Hitler broke that pact, CPUSA switched its tune and urged US involvement in the war against Germany. Unless I’m mistaken, Franco fought the Soviet communist-backed socialists. As Ray points out, these conflicts involved grabs for power, not ideological grounds.
“When he [Mussolini] broke with the Socialist party in 1914, it was not over any dissatisfaction with socialist ideology but rather because the Socialists were neutralists in the First World War whereas Mussolini correctly foresaw that the Austro/German forces would not win the war and therefore wanted Italy to join the Allied side and thus get a slice of Austrian territory at the end of the war. Italians had suffered many humiliations at the hands of the Austrians and there must have been very few Italians who did not share Mussolini’s desire to seize historically Italian territory from them. Like many Leftists then and since Mussolini did not have any principles [e.g., ideology] that he allowed to stand in the way of a grab for power.
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/Read.aspx?GUID=4F727F1C-01F2-44AA-93B1-ECCB922B38C3
But the myth persists to this day that communists/socialists are on the Left, and fascists are on the right – solely because Hitler invaded Russia and made an enemy out of Stalin.
yonkel
OK. I was half kidding when I wrote that. I’ll drink a virtual OM with you, as I don’t expect to be in NC in the near future. I took the compass test and scored 3.5/-.62, which proves that we are widely separated. It is an interesting test, but I don’t accept the premise of many questions. The FAQ shows that many conservatives also disagree, as I do, with the questions. The compass remains a linear right/left assessment with polar opposites, only adding the vertical to separate economic from social. I don’t think we can separate the two.
The reference web site suggested by sedonaman makes more sense to me because it is based on the Meyers-Briggs system. Being an ENTJ myself, the charts provided, put me in the conservative side of the spectrum. I’ve found the MBTI to be a very accurate definition of people’s personality. There are tests available online. ENTJ is, BTW, defined as Field Marshal, or in my case Project Manager.
Ivan Ivanovich:
I wonder if a person’s MBTI changes over time. The first time I took it about 15 years ago, I scored INTJ; most recently I scored ISTJ.
I have my doubts, though, about its accuracy. A friend took it and scored ESTJ, and he’s a flaming liberal.
I don’t think it’s so much that we change our type over time, but we do change our opinions and outlook over time. Each of the 4 categories is a continuum and we can move from 48% to 52% depending on many factors. Your change from intuitive to sensing could have happened in a matter of hours or days, never mind years if you are near the midline. I did notice that you are TJ or Thinking/Judging, as I am, and the web site placed us in the conservative/independent category by a 74 to 26 margin. Even the Extrovert/Introvert tendency can change under certain circumstances, say as when looking for a mate, so I would not judge the system to be in doubt because you went to parties as a teen. Anyway it’s an under-reported and an interesting idea.
On another test, I register as an “Authoritarian Libertarian.” So be it. These these tests are subjective and arbitrary.
Although authoritarian liberatarian is fairly close to the mark with myself, methinks.
Ivan Ivanovich:
There is a lady in our Bible study group who use to do some sort of psych counseling, and she claims to have used the MBTI in her work. She seems knowledgeable in it. She said that your answers to the questions in the test are just your preferences, which is why there are no right or wrong answers. So, I guess one’s preferences could change over time.
The first time I took it was in a management team-building class taught by an industrial psychologist. It seemed to me at the time that it could also be used to indicate political preferences so I asked her. She said she had never thought of it that way. Glad someone did.
Economic Right: 7.62
Authoritarian: .21
sedonaman:
In reference to your earlier “When you consider the human carnage caused by Leftism, I don’t see how there can be any integrity associated with Leftist ideas; there is always an ulterior motive.”
I can certainly agree with you that leftist ideas put in to practice have been widely discredited. But I do not associate “integrity” with the mere presence of an idea; I choose, rather, to associate it or not with the person whose conscience sincerely and respectfully submits his or her ideas to the scrutiny of others.
Perhaps that sincererity and civility have often been absent in your personal encounters with ideological opponents (I know if has in mine). But I think we can agree that refusing to admit civil discussions with one’s ideological opponents can only eventually lead from mutual disregard to hatred. There has been more than enough of that to go around,whether promulgated by left or right.
Michaelbp:
Re: “I do not associate ‘integrity’ with the mere presence of an idea; I choose, rather, to associate it or not with the person whose conscience sincerely and respectfully submits his or her ideas to the scrutiny of others.”
You bring up an interesting point.
Dr. Phil Jackson has one test: “Is this person an a$$hole?”
I believe that ideas of the type we’re discussing originate in the academy and migrate out to the society at large. Academic endorsement is critical for the survival of such ideas. As I posted before, Nazism got as far as it did because of its academic origins [see Hayek’s Road to Serfdom]. How many ideas get the “scrutiny” they should before they are let loose from the confines of the campus on to an unsuspecting society? Members of the professorate always hide behind “academic freedom” to avoid this scrutiny, especially by the public who, as a consequence, haven’t the slightest notion of how their taxes are being used to destroy the society they worked so hard to create.
However, “Academic freedom does not mean freedom to misrepresent, to distort or to talk nonsense to students while enjoying security against outside criticism. Faculty members should not feel free to give students any version of the facts that those faculty members are unable or unwilling to defend in a debate with people better qualified than students are to detect errors, and if necessary to expose falsehoods. Students may not only lack the knowledge to challenge a professor’s misrepresentations, even when those misrepresentations arouse suspicion; students may also [not unreasonably] fear the consequences of doing so, such as retaliation in terms of grades. The imbalance of both knowledge and power between students and the professor, especially when the professor’s political outlook is shared by his administrative superiors, makes outside monitoring all the more valuable as a protection for Truth – a safeguard against abuse of academic freedom in the interests of a political agenda. The only real “chilling effect” will be on abuse, not on academic freedom as properly understood – that is, on the freedom to disseminate ideas that they are willing to defend publicly and to support with evidence.” [Emphasis added] – http://www.safs.ca/academicfreedom/hilborn.html
If and when cockamamie ideas are let loose and draw adverse attention, they are defended not on their merits but on what we call “political correctness” – a concept invented to deny or conceal Truth. And that is what I mean by ulterior motive.
I believe your experience with “ideological opponents” is typical and not unique because it’s human nature to resort to ad hominems when your arguments fail; and let’s face it, Leftist arguments cannot pass logical scrutiny.
Yonkel,
I was merely pointing out political hooliganism is nothing new. You should read about the mayhem carried out by both Jeffersons Republicans and Adams Federalists in the run up to the 1800 election. As for the ‘Choose Civility’ bumpersticker, it was sported by a woman driver who nearly collided with me forcing her way onto the freeway, them gave me the finger for having the effrontery of tooting my horn in order to draw her attention to what she was doing. Naturally, she sped off thinking me the nut and herself in the right. Her other bumpersticker say ‘Obama’, but I’m just guessing she’s a liberal.
We can, of course argue all day whether it is liberals or conservatives who are the more uncivil, though I am confident there’s far more evidence of the former than the later (The Terror, 1968 Chicago convention, radical bombers like Bill Ayers, campus speech codes and the shouting down of conservative guest speakers, the many communist massacres, the demonization of conservatives and people faith, Sean Penn, &c).
Bob:
Yes political hooliganism has a fine history. Funny you should mention Adams and Jefferson, because Sabato has a whole piece on that, “Negative Campaigning-What’s New” that he just wrote last week in which he notes,
“In 1800, Thomas Jefferson endured a presidential campaign in which supporters of his opponent, President John Adams, labored mightily to convince the public that the then-vice president was an atheistic coward hell-bent on ripping Bibles from the homes of God-fearing Americans. A Jeffersonian writer, in turn, called Adams a “hideous hermaphroditical character which has neither the force and the firmness of a man nor the gentleness or sensibility of a woman.”
http://www.centerforpolitics.org/crystalball/article.php?id=LJS2008111301
“We can, of course argue all day whether it is liberals or conservatives who are the more uncivil, though I am confident there’s far more evidence of the former than the later”
The question is weather your confidence is trumped by your subjective biases.
“The Terror, 1968 Chicago convention, radical bombers like Bill Ayers, campus speech codes and the shouting down of conservative guest speakers, the many communist massacres, the demonization of conservatives and people faith, Sean Penn, &c).”
Most of your examples were from the sixties. I have stated several times on this site that the arrogance and mean spirit of the left in the 60s when cops were pigs, and soldiers were spat on, helped bring about the “silent majority” for Nixon, and that the current arrogance of the right where people yell traitor and muslim at Obama, and the AM talk jocks call liberals “maggots” and “traitors” routinely, I listen to it and it makes me sick, has helped bring about the current silent majority on the Left. People did not believe in the 60s that all to the right of center were reactionary fascists, and they do not believe today that all center of left are unpatriotic morons.
And as to the Terror (you mean the French Revolution? ) and the communist massacres, that goes pretty far afield and I won’t argue all the historical tyrants and nutjobs on the right, but neither have little to do with American liberals or Conservatives.
Americans voted for Obama’s message of unity that we are not blue and red states but the USA, a sentiment which McCain embodied, but has not penetrated to those that still want the return of Atwater politics or Michael Moore politics.
As you say, it is an argument that could go on all day, but my own political goals involve the establishment of a healthy respect and hopefully political cooperation between citizens of both parties.
When time allows, I hope to start a blog called “A Civil Discourse” (always get to the head of the line starting with an A) in which people from the blue and red persuasions could discuss things. Probably have to moderate it heavily so it doesn’t turn into a food fight.
I blogged a long time on Scott Elliots electionprojection.com and it was good discourse but even though Scott is evangelical conservative, the site was running 4 to 1 liberal and the conservative view got swamped, so I would hope to do one where the sides were even and the views were respectful.
Yonkel: recent examples are the violent and destructive protests at the G-whatever meetings, Eco-terrorism, PETA.
Just a few examples.
LAM:
Radical violent Leftists surely exist and will continue. It is just a low level compared to the sixties and has less credibility and penetration of the mainstream center left.
From ACORN’s own website:
“When the House Banking Committee considered the bill [HR 1858], ACORN was there in force. Denied the right to testify on the proposed legislation, ACORN president Maude Hurd stood up when mark-up began and demanded to be heard. Subcommittee Chair Roukema (R-NJ) called the Capitol Police who took Maude and four other ACORN leaders to D.C. central booking where they were charged with disrupting Congress. Requests from Rep. Joe Kennedy and Sen. Edward Kennedy to release the ACORN activists failed, and it was not until Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA) showed up at the jail and refused to leave that they were released late that night.” http://www.acorn.org/index.php?id=670
Additional info can be found on http://blackrepublican.blogspot.com/2008/10/spreading-virus.html .
This was in 1995 during the 104th Congress, not the ‘60s.
Some questions present themselves here: 1) Since when does the gallery have the “right to testify” in a committee hearing? 2) What conservative group has ever disrupted Congress to get its way? 3) Isn’t this the same tactic Hitler used to gain power, i. e., claiming the government was denying the people their rights?
Sedonaman
Thank you! This ACORN business is just one of the many stories that Obama was able to dodge. Will this along with Ayers, Wright, etc. turn out to be like the burglary at the Watergate? Was Nixon’s association with G. Gordon Liddy deeper than Obama’s associations? We will see. But then again maybe it’s over. I did see Aretha Franklin sing on Dancing this past Tuesday.
Ivan Ivanovich:
Not only did he dodge it, he also used it as a qualification for the job! Talk about chutzpah.
I recommend some additional reading on the Clinton/ACORN, et al, caused crisis at http://www.floppingaces.net/2008/09/22/us-economy-a-perfect-storm-of-housing-and-lending-events/#comment-115460
which references “a very well written article in the winter of 2000″ http://www.city-journal.org/html/10_1_the_trillion_dollar.html
Sedonaman,
“The imbalance of both knowledge and power between students and the professor, especially when the professor’s political outlook is shared by his administrative superiors, makes outside monitoring all the more valuable as a protection for Truth. . .”
As a formerly young and bewildered and now merely bewilderingly flatulent 60s-70s member of the “fascist pig” contingent on campus, I can definitely endorse adopting and maintaining behavioral standards for both students and faculty. Today I especially admire and respect David Horowitz for bringing his academic freedom campaign to college and university campuses.
What is your vision, however,when it comes to a practical mechanism intended to provide the “outside monitoring?” Those immediately and most naturally inclined to send up a flare in reaction to such a safegaurd, it seems to me, would of course be those professors who had hitherto most enjoyed exploiting insularity to market their own political views. On the other hand, there is validity in an argument brought to bear on their behalf: outside intervention initiated with the best of intentions, i.e., to maintain balance and encourage civil discourse can just as easily invite distortion in order to fulfill political/financial agendas which others may wish to impose, in spite of Hayek’s suggestion that “The only real “chilling effect” will be on abuse, not on academic freedom as properly understood.” Is that a camel’s nosehair I see creeping about my tent fringe?
BTW, Dr. Phil’s razor is a subset of Team America’s wider taxonomy (P., D., or A), isn’t it?
michaelbp:
The “chilling effect” comment was not by Hayek but Kenneth H.W. Hilborn of the Society For Academic Freedom and Scholarship [SAFS, http://www.safs.ca ].
A “practical mechanism intended to provide the ‘outside monitoring’” is a tough nut to crack. Solving the K-12 mess is hard enough, even with the general public’s disgust with it. Higher ed. faces an even tougher challenge. Some have said tenure should be abolished. In the current climate of Leftist domination, I’m not so sure. They could just fire what few conservatives remain on campus. However, there are those who probably shouldn’t have academic freedom and who should definitely get flamed if not convicted of violating the law by ignoring CA’s Prop 209 [see here http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=26670 and here http://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/facultydiversity/executive-summary.pdf ].
Public embarrassment seems to have no effect because just when you think things can’t get worse on campus, the politically correct clowns go and shoot themselves in the foot again – doing the same thing; and absent political pressure from state government, little will be done. For the time being, it probably has to come mainly from private organizations like Horowitz, SAFS, ACTA [http://wwwgoacta.org], Accuracy in Academia [http://www.academia.org/about.html], etc. which are largely of interest only to potential students and their parents. [Not endorsing any of these for others, but personally I have been contributing to FIRE (http://wwwthefire.org ) for a few years.]
Private citizens take little interest in campus goings-on unless they have a kid enrolled or about to be enrolled, the assumption is that since educators are in the business, they must know best, and leave it to them to run their institutions. This is because the average citizen couldn’t detect advocacy in a college course catalog if he even bothered to read it. And if he did detect it, he would have to know that the mission of the school is the pursuit of truth, not advocacy. Only then might he even try do something about it. Students themselves can avoid bad instructors and those who use their positions for political purposes by visiting http://www.ratemyprofessors.com . It has good professors along with the turkeys. Although not a complete list, it is something I would have given my right arm to have had when I was in college.
“BTW, Dr. Phil’s razor is a subset of Team America’s wider taxonomy (P., D., or A), isn’t it?”
Did I miss something?
Yonkel,
Excuse me. I’m sorry. I didn’t realize there was a statute of limitations on political extremism, hate-crime and partisan vandalism. So, here is a more recent sampling you can be more at home with:
http://robearbeach.newsvine.com/_news/2008/09/12/1859956-british-jury-clears-eco-vandals-on-grounds-of-defense-of-earth-against-global-warming – liberal British jury acquits Greenpeace of more than £35,000 in damage to a power plant
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2006/01/20/state/n211055S60.DTL – PETA arsons
http://www.nationalreview.com/smithw/smith200507130830.asp – PETA/ELF implicated in extortion, theft, and vandalism
http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200706/s1940849.htm – G8 protest riots
http://www.cbsnews.com/elements/2005/11/08/in_depth_world/timeline1022872.shtml – French Muslim leftist-Islamic riots
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1992_Los_Angeles_riots – the Rodney King post-trial riots
http://countenance.wordpress.com/category/left-wing-extremism/ – French left-anarchists sabotaging high-speed trains, leftists systematically disrupting conservative events, radical-leftist disruption of the DNC convention, more ELF vandalism, Mexican leftist riots, Danish leftist squatter riots, Code-Pink transgender activist-disrupter, and idol of the left – Mumia. (When was the last time you heard of conservatives rioting or disruption a liberal event? Or even advocated rioting as a means the way the left has?).
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=63668 – conservative teen is attacked, then charged for hate-crime (not every reported hate-crime is a hate-crime; and how hate-crime laws aggravate the problem when they excite special-group ‘victims’ to violence knowing they are shielded).
http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/data2/delawarestatecases/superior_9_2006/0506005981.pdf – rape-murder case: white female is raped, murdered and her apartment set on fire; killer (a black man) wrote racist epithets on walls (talk about blaming the victim!) before setting it afire. Police are not calling this one a hate-crime
http://www.onenewsnow.com/Culture/Default.aspx?id=313074 – homosexual activists promoting violence, including killing Christians and burning churches that supported amendments defining marriage as one man and one woman (there’s a qualitative difference between young hooligans beating up a black man on election night and a network of activists plotting and conspiring to make political war – reminiscent of KKK).
http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story/prop-8-supporter-violently-attacked/story.aspx?guid=%7B665DEBA6-A1B2-41A5-BA45-2ACFEAAA2F48%7D&dist=hppr – actual physical attack by a gay-activist against a marriage supporter
http://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2008/mar/08031703.html – dozens of death threats and thousands of hate emails made against a conservative politician
http://www.cnn.com/2007/WORLD/africa/12/31/kenya.elex/index.html – Kenyan election riots fanned by Orange Democratic Movement (in this case, leftist against leftists)
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3827/is_20071022/ai_n21112435 – Ann Coulter nailing “victims of hate-crime” scammers
More faux hate-crimes:
http://www.vdare.com/malkin/more_hoaxes.htm – Malkin reports 3 cases of faked anti-Muslim hate-crime
http://www.startribune.com/local/11594256.html -faked cross-burning
http://www.centredaily.com/news/breaking_news/story/216377.html – murder originally reported as a racial hate-crime, now suspected false clues placed to divert suspicion
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/09/12/AR2007091200044.html?sub=AR – several black residents finding their cars and mailbox spray painted with “KKK” and “Gay Pride”; initially labeled a hate crime; turns out that, of the 4 arrested teenagers, three are black and only the fourth is white and it was a prank
http://www.oregonlive.com/metronorth/oregonian/index.ssf?/base/metro_north_news/1177473358256720.xml&coll=7 – arson case in which Ibrahim Jozin set fire to his brother’s restaurant and sprayed painted anti-Arab hate messages on the walls; police wrongly arrested two white men
http://abclocal.go.com/ktrk/story?section=news/local&id=4946233 – arsonist/insurance scammer burned down his own house after painting it with racist graffiti; disguising it as a hate-crime
http://www.rfj.ch/index.php?cat=infos&news=44731- 2006, in Swiss local elections racist flyers appeared on walls targeting a socialist candidate. This threw suspicion on conservatives with a strong immigration control position, creating sympathy for the socialist who then won the election. During an investigation, detectives found the socialist candidate’s fingerprint on the back of one of the flyers.
http://www.lemonde.fr/web/article/0,1-0@2-3208,36-822745,0.html – France 2006: a socialist candidate is arrested for setting his house on fire, claiming he was the target of racists who sent hate mail and warnings like “Nigger, you gonna die” and “No nigger in Espirat”. Locals threw their support to the socialist signing an anti-racist petition. Meanwhile, Le Monde ran a full page article smearing conservatives as racists and denouncing the National Front running opposite the socialist. The socialist won the election, but now faces charges. Le Monde ran a small retraction in its back pages ( http://www.lemonde.fr/web/article/0,1-0@2-3208,36-822745,0.html ).
http://www1.arguscourier.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060915/NEWS02/60915001 – a 19-year old black man claiming to be the victim of a racially motivated beating, is later arrested when investigators learn (and he later confessed) he concocted the story
http://sweetness-light.com/archive/fake-anti-muslim-posters-planted-at-gwu-in-dc – fake anti-Muslim posters placed on GWU campus were planted by leftist maligning conservatives in order to ‘raise awareness’ – no apology has been issued from the leftist organization despite the posters were denounced by campus officials. So these leftists create a hate-crime for the sole purpose of drawing attention to hate-crimes with the ultimate objective of suppressing hate (aka, free-will). It’s a frame up.
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=78339 – how hate-crime is used to suppress religion
http://www.thewashingtonnote.com/archives/2008/11/postelection_vi/ – Just prior to the election, we have liberal reporters speculating on the probability of riots should Obama lose. No mention is made (and never has been made) of the possibility of riots should a conservative lose. Hm. How are we to interpret this? Of course, the article does not mention who will be doing the rioting so it is just possible he means conservatives will riot out of pure glee. LOL!
Come on Yonkel, conservatives are mostly people who uphold law-and-order; who deplore street violence and vandalism. People tend rightward as we age and prosper, making conservative demographics one of ‘we outgrew the radicalism of youth, poverty, and/or incompetence’. As we grow in competence, we grow in independence; making socialism the less attractive ideology. Only those who are manipulative, incompetent and lazy stick with socialism as they age. Sure, we’ve got a few like those in your article calling themselves conservative, but theirs is a very shallow, ignorant and immature sort of conservatism totally divorced from the conservatism you attack here. In fact, it’s neither conservatism nor liberalism because there is no principle in it; just identity politics and fear. That’s not conservatism.
Lots more where that came from, if you still need more.
Yonkel,
As for Jefferson, you have again got your facts out of order. Jefferson, not Adams, was the master of the smear tactic. Jefferson was a backer of several republican newspapers; which he used to slander Adams and others. Jefferson also engineered Aaron Burr into a corner (because he was too much a rival) and carried on a bitter feud against Supreme Court Chief Justice Marshall over the Adams’ Midnight Appointees (Marbury v. Madison) and because of the rivalry they had regarding branch supremacy. Adams was but a pale imitator who adopted Jefferson’s methods out of desperation. Jefferson denounced all demagoguery only to become a vengeful demagogue (when it suited him); and stooped to whipping up popular wrath against Adams because he felt Adams policies too ‘regal’ and anti-republican (‘republican’ in this case denoting the French-style republicanism that soon devolved into anarchy). Overall, the ‘saintly’ Jefferson had an uncanny habit of turning former friends to foes while also robbing them of any means of challenging him. He appears to have even been something of a disciple of Machiavelli. There is a great deal of Jefferson to admire, but don’t kid yourself it was he who was the ‘victim’ in his disputes with Adams. That’s just the Jefferson propaganda; propaganda so effective it is generally still accepted today. Adams was so surprised and stung by Jefferson’s betrayal, he left Washington unwilling to congradulate Jefferson and would not speak with him almost a decade. Jefferson, on the otherhand, dropped his feigned despite of Adams and begged Adams’ friendship the moment he’s won. Does that sound more, to you, like Adams betrayed Jefferson, or the other way around?
Sedonaman,
Thanks! I just visited the Hilborn link that you indeed had included in your reply.
“P.D.A.taxonomy” refers to this (cover your ears) . . .
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6rDeOojFXk
michaelbp:
Sounds like an X-rated speech right out of the Three Amigos.
Bob Stapler:
The ultimate hate crime of the century:
“A student who called a mounted policeman’s horse “gay” will not be prosecuted, it has been revealed. … But police have stood by their decision to take Sam Brown to court for making ‘homophobic comments’ despite the Crown Prosecution Service dropping the case. … Mr Brown, 21, a student at Oxford University, had said to an officer: ‘Excuse me, do you realise your horse is gay?’”
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/oxfordshire/4606022.stm
Meanwhile, across town, decent law-abiding subjects are being victimized by every sort of violent crime that goes ignored.
Bob:
Interesting on the Adams/Jefferson, I just quoted Sabato’s piece, and know little otherwise, so thank you for the information.
You note
“Excuse me. I’m sorry. I didn’t realize there was a statute of limitations on political extremism, hate-crime and partisan vandalism.”
Who implied there was?
I was just marking the change in time of the predominance of those things. I don’t expect they will disappear, but as somebody who lived through the sixties, race riots, black panthers, Chicago convention, I do know that things have receeded and that the vast majority of those Left of center are not radical or violent.
And you keep bringing up socialism as if it was this popular movement, which perhaps it was in 1912 when Debs received 6% of the vote, or La Follette who got 17% in 1924 or even Norman Thomas in 1932 with 2.2%. But, Nader who doesn’t even advocate socialism only got 0.3% of the vote Trying to extrapolate everything to the Left of Center with the 0.1% of the population who are on the extreme would be no different than me trying to tie in conservatism with the Aryan Nations and Eric Rudolph.
Handing me a dozen anecdotes of left leaning boorishness does not say anything of the frequency or trend in events. Anecdotal evidence is meaningless and says nothing about trends. Do you not think I could supply you with several dozen anecdotes of violence on the right. I don’t waste my time with that, and would suggest that you don’t waste yours. There is a violent left and a violent right, and neither reflects on the 99+% of Americans of all persuaions
Your anecdotes are not things done by main stream liberals, they are things done by the fringe left, and you contrast that with mainstream conservatives, who I agree, are by and large responsible people, but this is no comparison. There is a fringe right too, that are not people that either of us appreciate. Timothy McVeigh was not of the left.
I don’t try to tie responsible conservatives in with the fringe right, but I continually see attempts by yourself and others to tie in all the activities of the fringe left with the broad range of liberals and Democrats.
Yonkel,
True, the things I outlined are not the behavior of most liberals. However, there is a great deal more tolerance of and empathy with such behavior on the left. Timothy McVey was as appalling to conservatives as liberals (you really had to reach even to come up with that one); nor is what he espoused conservatism (it is racism and anarchism). Moreover, the reports of police taking pre-emptive measures to manage radical-leftists at the 2008 DNC convention is no where mirrored by similar behavior anywhere on the right (lefties acted up at both conventions, not conservatives). I challenge you to come up with an example of conservatives deliberately organizing this way to disrupt a political event. Radical-liberals think nothing of busting up peaceful gatherings, shouting conservatives down on campus, passing repressive speech-codes and stealing elections; all of which are repugnant to conservatives. More than anything, these convention disturbances define the very real difference between liberals and conservatives. Where conservatives may sometimes lose our cool individually, liberals actually plot disturbances jointly. I’ll say it again: radicalism is not what we conservatives are about.
I agree with you about the rank-and-file liberal, because I am surrounded by them and closely related to them; and know how little they participate in demonstrations and violence. Yet, that too is misleading. If not members of the rank-and-file liberal community, where do you suppose all these radicals hail from? Certainly, you don’t imagine they spring out of the ground full-grown orphans? No, they learn their liberalism at home and school, and then translate that into radical public behavior. They get swept up in mass causes, thinking they are remaking the world in the liberal image; only to end up obnoxious little Nazis forcing the rest of against our natures.
You are wrong about liberalism not being socialism. Classical-liberalism (aka, Locke, Adams, Hayek, &c) was not socialism, but modern-liberalism as practiced and espoused by Democrats, radicals, and even a good many Republicans ‘is’ socialism. Liberals are universally collectivist as to philosophy and implementation. All liberals advocate wealth-redistribution from those creating wealth to those merely consuming (Obama made that a major talking point of his campaign, and no apologies for it). Liberals uniformly want regulation and shun profit. They regard property and ownership conditional on the needs and preferences of government (eminent domain, New London case). Liberals regard many of their fellow beings incompetent; making us increasingly dependent on government to provide our deficiencies and guaranteeing us against failure (bailouts, state run healthcare, banking insurance, loan guarantees, job protectionism, corporate welfare, educational underwriting, &c); invading and insinuating itself into every aspect of our lives until we can no longer afford to be without. Modern-liberalism is not quite communism, if only because brutal measures are not being used to implement it. But, this is a rather fine point if the end results are indistinguishable from communism.
Yonkel,
You must be kidding thinking Nader is not a socialist. He is the ultimate control freak whose main deal is ‘consumer protectionism’. He created the NGO as a kind of shadow government agency only because he couldn’t get elected. If ever elected, he fully intends to use government to compel his protectionism.
Let’s get this straight. What distinguishes socialist of all stripes from conservatives and libertarians is the belief it is government’s function to regulate and enhance our lives. The communists had it, and modern-liberals, progressives, environmentalists, and assorted wobblies have it. This is the ‘nanny-state’ mentality. The conservative position is: we don’t need the state regulating or enhancing our lives, thank you very much; we can do much better on our own. All we want from government is that it fulfills the legitimate objectives for which we created and granted it limited powers: make the union of states stronger, establish a system of justice, maintain the peace, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare (not micro-manage and suffocate it), and safeguard our liberties against usurpation now and to future generations. That’s it. No nanny-state, no social-justice, no societal re-engineering, no taking control of everything from pet-poo to global-environment.
Yonkel,
You said “Handing me a dozen anecdotes of left leaning boorishness does not say anything of the frequency or trend in events. Anecdotal evidence is meaningless and says nothing about trends. Do you not think I could supply you with several dozen anecdotes of violence on the right. I don’t waste my time with that, and would suggest that you don’t waste yours. There is a violent left and a violent right, and neither reflects on the 99+% of Americans of all persuaions”
Anecdotal evidence is not meaningless, particularly when there is so much of it. It just is not as good as a properly conducted study. What do you think the chances are, however, of anyone in our liberal infested government or socialist academia doing an honest study of the correlation between radical behavior and socialism? Somewhere between nil and non-existent, I’d say (and, if they did, I would question it as a waste of public funds). I did not present you with such a study because it does not exist. That leaves me with anecdotal evidence. What I gathered only took about half a day. In all that, I could not find a single instance of verifiable conservative misbehavior (unless you want to unfairly count assorted McVeighs; and victim-dragging racist & homophobe morons who wouldn’t know conservatism from communalism). You call this wasting my time, but we don’t grow knowledgeable about this stuff sitting on our duffs waiting for it to come to us.
The alternative is to decide what is true and untrue based solely on a biased intuition. Yours seems to be: yeah, we liberals got us some bad actors out there on the fringe, but those conservatives are every bit as bad or worse; and mostly worse. You failed to provide even a scintilla of evidence for this, yet defend it as though gospel. I showed ample evidence of liberal misbehaviors and a grasping socialist philosophy; all of which you shrug off in disbelief.
Part of the problem with liberals is too many of you assume too much about conservatives, never bothering to find out for yourselves who we are and of what our philosophy really consists; preferring the media created stereotype of ‘vast right-wing conspirators’. Whenever a McVeigh crops up, you liberals invariably assume he’s one of those nasty conservatives because “no way is he one of ours’. More often, he’s just some lunatic on a rampage. There are, indeed, some conservatives with political philosophies I find repugnant, but I can’t say I know of any who still act on such philosophies in ways that are actionable the way I can of some liberals. Admittedly, this is more because liberal misbehaviors are condoned in our liberal-dominant society where conservative misbehaviors are not. Where alleged ‘conservatives’ hold such views, they are unprincipled views better regarded as malignance than philosophy. The same can be said of a few liberal-socialists miscreants. Yet, the same cannot be said of all radical liberal-socialists; whose philosophy is virtually identical with that of their peaceful liberal brethren. This is not unlike the distinction as between peaceful Muslims and Muslim-terrorists, both of whom read from the same Koran and both swearing they adhere to the principles of their religion. In making McVeigh a poster-boy for radical-conservatism, you made the faulty assumption he was one of ours (or took it on face value from sloppy, wishful media reporting). I did not assume radical-liberals as being yours without first checking they share the same values and objectives as mainstream liberals, differing only as to aggression; and witnessing countless instances of condoning by ‘nice, quiet’ liberals.
Yonkel,
You said, “You can go from the center of the body politic and go two steps Left and keep going in that direction and you will end up with admirers of Kim Jong Il. ¶ You can start center and keep heading right a little bit at a time and you will get to Timothy McVeigh, the Klu Klux Klan and the Aryan nations.”
That “keep going left and you will arrive on the right”, is another one of those truisms never quite proven. It sounds awfully good, but it doesn’t hold up on close inspection. Neither Timothy McVeigh nor the KKK nor Aryan Nations belong to the same philosophical strain as modern American conservatism; and, you can only arrive at the one by abandoning the other.
What is on the mind of a liberal (not a question)
Although the page http://www.prospect.org/web/page.ww?section=root&name=Liberal+Agenda+Entries#Entries has since been removed, the liberal website American Prospect in January 2005 conducted a contest of its readers on the question, “What does liberalism stand for?”, and the editor posted the ones that were the best. “Equality for all, privilege for none” was one of the most, if not the most, revealing of all.
However, in the 55 entries posted by the editors, some more salient words/concepts emerged in interesting frequencies that tells us more than the actual slogans themselves.
I compiled the following list of the most often used, followed by the number of times they appeared, in descending order:
Government 31
Freedom/Liberty(ies) (Personal) 21
America/American/USA/Nation 18
Opportunity 15
Equal/Equality/Inequality 14
Defend(ing)/Defense/Military 13
Promote/Foster/Expand/Encourage 13
Right(s) (Human/Civil) 13
Fair(ness)/Level/Unfair(ness) 12
Democracy/Democratic 11
Poor(est)/Disenfranchised/
Oppressed/Old(est)/Little Guy 10
Secur(ity) 10
Care/Caring/Compassion(ate) 7
Education 7
Accountability (of Gov’t) 6
Environment 6
Individual/Individuality 6
Good (noun) 5
Moral 5
Dignity 4
Family(ies) 4
Free (Belief/Religion) 3
Capitalism (negatively) 3
Peace 3
Work/Working 3
Investment(/ing) 2
Jobs 2
Law/Rule of Law 2
Privacy/Private 2
School(s) 2
Tyranny 2
Values 2
Accountability (Individual) 1
Business in General (Positive) 1
Children 1
Faith (in Work) 1
Religion/Creed 1
Terror 1
Traditional 1
Virtue 1
Truth 0
Beauty 0
Charity 0
God 0
Bob:
“That “keep going left and you will arrive on the right”, is another one of those truisms never quite proven. It sounds awfully good, but it doesn’t hold up on close inspection.”
Agree completely. I think Ivan brought up that the movement was like a clock, but I see it more as one of those metal bracelet things where the two ends come together but don’t touch. Far right and far left dictatorships resemble each other in their authoritarianism and tyranny, but they typically are mortal enemies.
Batista would never turn into Castro, or Somoza into Ortega or Allende into Pinochet. Mussolini might be a special case, I am less familiar, but the Columbian far left and right have similar methods but again are mortal enemies.
As per Sedonamans interesting post, the Hitler Stalin pact was just two tyrants feasting on the spoils of those weaker, but never an alliance, wheras the Spanish Civil War, was a life and death fight between the left and the right of that country.
“Neither Timothy McVeigh nor the KKK nor Aryan Nations belong to the same philosophical strain as modern American conservatism; and, you can only arrive at the one by abandoning the other.”
Agree, and I never said they did. I just made the comparison that trying to paint the mainstream Democrats and liberals, with the intent and morals of the fringe left is just as incorrect.
As I have stated before the thought on the site is more anti-liberal than conservative, more reactionary than constructive…. rather than applying conservative principles to solving the very difficult problems of today, there seems to be this obsessive need to paint one’s side as the good guy and the other the bad guy, which I think was the nature of this post.
I remember reading an interesting post on the site something energy and environment related, and reading vigorous thoughtful ideas on how to deal with a great problem of our modern era. It pleasantly surprised me because to that point most of what I had read was confined to bashing Al Gore or shaky scientific hypothesis.
If conservatives can’t come up with constructive answers to the major problems of today, and exist primarily in opposition to liberalism, then I believe they will remain in the minority for sometime.