Category Archives: Political Commentary

Education, Political Commentary, Social Commentary

Kvetch

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There are plenty of much greater criticisms, and I have them, as any regular reader of this site knows, and no one was more irritated by George Bush’s “nucular” than I was, but I find the new president’s own verbal affectations quite annoying.

“Tahleebahn”? “Pahkeestahn”?

Who talks like this?

As Glenn Reynolds pointed out a long time ago, it’s like the NPR correspondents who work mightily to get their local Spanish inflections exactly correct when reporting on their communist heroes in Central America while not bothering to learn the difference between an auto and semi-auto gun.

Hey, it’s just “Taliban” (like “tally” and to “ban” a book), and “Pakistan” (like “pack” for a trip, and “Stan,” Oliver Hardy’s partner).

And don’t even get me started about “Oreeon.” What does he, think it’s a cookie? That one will be a real problem for the next four years unless he kills the NASA program.

[Monday morning update]

And yes, before anyone asks, while (unlike many, apparently) I had no problem with Sarah Palin’s speech patterns in general, I did find her “Eye-rak” kind of grating.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society, Technology and Society

The Naturalistic Fallacy

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John Tierney has some thoughts on, and from Freeman Dyson, that seem appropriate to last night’s nonsense:

The disagreement about values may be described in an over-simplified way as a disagreement between naturalists and humanists. Naturalists believe that nature knows best. For them the highest value is to respect the natural order of things. Any gross human disruption of the natural environment is evil. Excessive burning of fossil fuels is evil. Changing nature’s desert, either the Sahara desert or the ocean desert, into a managed ecosystem where giraffes or tunafish may flourish, is likewise evil. Nature knows best, and anything we do to improve upon Nature will only bring trouble.

The humanist ethic begins with the belief that humans are an essential part of nature. Through human minds the biosphere has acquired the capacity to steer its own evolution, and now we are in charge. Humans have the right and the duty to reconstruct nature so that humans and biosphere can both survive and prosper. For humanists, the highest value is harmonious coexistence between humans and nature. The greatest evils are poverty, underdevelopment, unemployment, disease and hunger, all the conditions that deprive people of opportunities and limit their freedoms. The humanist ethic accepts an increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere as a small price to pay, if world-wide industrial development can alleviate the miseries of the poorer half of humanity. The humanist ethic accepts our responsibility to guide the evolution of the planet.

Like Tierney, I am firmly in Freeman’s camp.

Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

I’d Love To Change The World

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The old Ten Years After standard should have been the Obama campaign’s theme song, since they told us that’s what would happen if we elected them:

One popular song when I was young was from one of those one-hit-wonder bands who are all but forgotten except for one great tune. The band’s name was Ten Years After and the song was “I’d Love to Change the World.” One memorable line went like this:

Tax the rich, feed the poor
Till there are no rich no more

I can’t tell you how many hundreds of times I sang along to that song before it dawned on me: “Hey, that ain’t right! Shouldn’t it be: tax the rich, feed the poor, till there are no poor no more?”

I have no way of knowing whether or not Ten Years After advocated the abolition of wealth, or if the line was a tongue-in-cheek way of sniping at the simplicity of the argument that removing the wealthy made the poor better off. But what I did know then was that I finally understood the definition of covet. It was to want something so much that if I couldn’t have it, then I wanted to deny it to anyone else.

That’s the politics of envy in a nutshell. Unfortunately, there’s evidence that it’s an evolutionarily evolved feature of human nature, and one of the reasons that the false promises of Marxism remain attractive and enduring, despite the vast amount of empirical evidence that it not only doesn’t work, but is disastrous from a humanitarian perspective whenever it’s seriously attempted. Read the whole thing

Media Criticism, Political Commentary

More Thoughts On Ezra Klein’s Heathers

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From Mark Steyn:

…speaking as someone who gets called a racist by the left all the time, I’d always assumed, as when the mob take the tire iron to you in the back alley, that it’s all business, nothing personal: just what’s necessary to get the job done. It’s rather sad to find this is the way they talk in private, too. For what it’s worth, I don’t regard that Peretz quote as “beyond the pale”, but, if it is, why bother being a writer? I can’t see why anybody would want to enter a profession in which that passage exceeds the very narrow and strictly enforced bounds within which these subjects can be discussed.

…”[REDACTED] clearly must not have a girlfriend”? Oh, my!

Again, whenever the ever reliable “all right-wing men are secretly gay” charge raises its head – see how this thread quickly dissolves into the critical issue of whether it’s Glenn Beck or I who most enjoys wearing frilly panties (answer: it’s me; Glenn prefers a teddy) – I always assume that, too, is strictly business. It’s heartening to know that, in the echo chamber of the JournoList, they turn their lurid obsessions on their own.

I always wonder myself if these casual libels from so-called “liberals” that people who disagree with them are racists (and “haters,” and “homophobes”) are sincere, or if these are merely just one of the disingenuous cudgels to be brought to their ugly ideological street fights. But even when they form a circular slander squad, it’s still hard to know.