Thoughts on the knee-jerk leftist/”progressive” impulse to shut people up:
It’s an interesting question: do liberals try to silence their opponents because of an inherent authoritarian tendency, or merely because they are losing the argument?
Like John Hinderaker, I think it’s both.
What did it know, and when did it know it?
Thoughts from (Democrats) Doug Schoen and Pat Caddell on the campaign lies about Obama as a post-racial healer.
…versus cargo-cult science:
When the attorney general of Virginia sued to force Michael Mann of “hockey stick” fame to provide the raw data he used, and the complete computer program used to analyze the data, so that “you” could decide, the Faculty Senate of the University of Virginia (where Mann was a professor at the time he defended the hockey stick) declared this request — Feynman’s request — to be an outrage. You peons, the Faculty Senate decreed, must simply accept the conclusions of any “scientific endeavor that has satisfied peer review standards.” Feynman’s — and the attorney general’s and my own and other scientists’ — request for the raw data, so we can “judge whether a sensible conclusion has been arrived at,” would, according to the Faculty Senate, “send a chilling message to scientists … and indeed scholars in any discipline.”
According the Faculty Senate of the University of Virginia, “science,” and indeed “scholarship” in general, is no longer an attempt to establish truth by replicable experiment, or by looking at evidence that can be checked by anyone. “Truth” is now to be established by the decree of powerful authority, by “peer review.” Wasn’t the whole point of the Enlightenment to avoid exactly this?
That old “Enlightenment” thing is for fogies. We’re all postmodernists now.
Stanley Kurtz has a new book
Should be good — he’s a fastidious researcher. Let’s hope wethey won’t get fooled again.
…for Lara Logan.
My lack of respect for Katie Couric continues unabated, however.
*This is the phrase that lefty journalists use when a “right winger” adopts the politically correct position.
…doesn’t seem to fear having his…whatever shoved through a plate-glass window. His thoughts on Mr. Ackerman:
From his hermetically sealed masturbatorium, he can…rhetorically threaten people who have soft hands and who type about politics for a living, but who could still pound the Bad Brains out of him (punk reference!) if they ever came face to face, even if it devolved into a girls-school windmill slap-fight, which it probably would. Though they won’t come face-to-face, of course, because being a tough-guy Washington blogger is a bit like being a phone-sex operator: you can pretend you’re sexy, even when you’re wearing a ratty terry cloth robe, hot curlers, and bunny slippers. Just like as a tough guy blogger, you can pretend on the outside that you want to crease the skull of Frank Foer with a baseball bat or annihilate Ryan Lizza in front of his toddler, while on the inside, you’re a moony-eyed trembling fanboy who writes unicorn-and-silly-bandz sentences such as “Yes we did!” when your swain wins an election. Which is sooo not punk rock. But that’s where the Black Flag t-shirt comes in. It’s a symbol. And what it symbolizes is that Hackerman is a dangerous man, not to be trifled with, since Black Flag was an ur-punk band whose former lead singer, Henry Rollins, was a genuine American badass, the Attackerman of his day. You could tell this, because he swore a lot, and wore tight black t-shirts. Even now, screwing with Rollins is like making a death wish. There’s no telling what that muscled wall of menace might do. He might write a really bitchy spoken-word piece about you, then release it as a podcast.
There’s a lot more where that came from. I wouldn’t want to be these “progressive” dweebs. Of course, I would have never wanted to.
[Via Treacher]
Quake in your boots.
Wow, it’d be hard to find a more Caucasian demographic than the JournoList, other than the MSNBC host lineup and the burglars in the Broadview Security commercials. They’re probably racists.
[Update Sunday morning]
Was Sharrod pushed out by a bunch of West-Wing white guys?
See, I told you — racists all.
[Update a few minutes later]
The Obama administration doesn’t know when to hold or fold the race card.
[Bumped]
Apparently, the latest dribblings from the JournoList reveal that the left and right can find common ground — Keith Olbermann is an @n@l orifice.
It’s pretty pathetic. And as is generally the case with these people, it’s classical projection:
The general manager of her station chimed in with the news that we are all as depraved as she is, so really, get over it:
Sarah was not acting in her position as KCRW Publicity Director when she wrote these comments. She spoke in the heat of the moment without consideration to the impact her words would have. We’ve all said things we didn’t mean and don’t reflect our core values. We believe that was the situation in this case.
We’ve all e-mailed a group of 400 relative stranger with the news that we would laugh like maniacs while watching a man’s eyes bug out as he dies of a heart attack? Seriously? What is in the stuff they are smoking in California, and how could they possibly think of legalizing it?
It reminds me of an old Monty Python sketch (though I guess that’s redundant — it’s not like there are any new ones…):
Well, we psychiatrist have found that over 8% of the population will always be mice, I mean, after all, there’s something of the mouse in all of us. I mean, how many of us can honestly say that at one time or another he hasn’t felt sexually attracted to mice. (linkman looks puzzeld) I know I have. I mean, most normal adolescents go through a stage of squeaking two or three times a day. Some youngsters on the other hand, are attracted to it by its very illegality. It’s like murder – make a thing illegal and it acquires a mystique. (linkman looks increasingly embarrassed) Look at arson – I mean, how many of us can honestly say that at one time or another he hasn’t set fire to some great public building. I know I have. (phone on desk rings; the linkman picks it up but does not answer it) The only way to bring the crime figures down is to reduce the number of offences – get it out in the open – I know I have.
Who among us haven’t fantasied about Rush Limbaugh dying painfully of a heart attack, while we cackled in glee? Why, you’d have to have a heart of stone to imagine Glenn Beck going blind and not take great joy in it.
I have no idea how widespread this fantasy psycho behavior was at the Journolist, or how well it was received. Maybe the Daily Caller could sift their archives and run some denunciations of these sorts of posting. These libs spent years deploring Bush’s macho cowboy act and declared it to be the end of Western Civilization when Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was waterboarded, so I would like to hope that one or two pushed back against the plate glass window smashing and heart attack eye-bugging.
I’d like to hope so, too. But I sure can’t get into the heads of these kind of people. And I don’t think I want to.
[Update a while later]
“Put up or shut up, Ezra.”