Tuesday, April 24, 2007

POLITICAL CORRECTNESS IS MIDDLE CLASS

Or so a noted commentator on British upper class manners says:

But it all goes to show that class isn’t dead. It reminds me of the true story about the aristocrat being treated for depression by the psychoanalyst. The sessions were going nowhere and in exasperation the psychoanalyst said: “Tell me exactly what you’re thinking about right now.” And the aristocrat replied: “I was just thinking what a vulgar little man you are.” And the sessions collapsed because the psychoanalyst felt he’d lost all ascendancy.

Dame Barbara Cartland famously replied, when the television journalist Sandra Harris asked her in the 1960s whether class barriers had broken down: “Well, of course they have, otherwise I wouldn’t be sitting here talking to someone like you.”

Most of the outward signs have gone. When we arrived here 25 years ago I was told it was irredeemably common to have red flowers in a Cotswold garden. Now nobody cares about anything as long as you pay your local bills and don’t hurtle down the village in your shining Chelsea tractor, scraping the paint off parked cars.

But one thing likely to give you away as non-U these days is political correctness because it’s so euphemistic. The aristocrat tends not to be politically correct. In fact he’s generally a randy old sod whose family has spent 700 years fornicating and shooting things. If a girl’s got a pretty face, he won’t care what class she’s from.

But if you start referring to your “partner”, or “lone parents”, or people being “vertically challenged”, you will be instantly marked out as non-U. The papers said Prince William had telephoned Kate during all the furore and been very “supportive” — another dreadfully non-U word. Soon they’ll be rabbiting on about them “achieving closure”, another horror.

There’s a lot of confusion about class. Most of the Labour party thinks Tony Blair is terribly grand, but he isn’t. He’s charming, of course, but very, very middle class, not even upper middle class. And I’ve found out while researching Wicked!, which is set in schools, that among young people the word “posh” often isn’t used to denote class, but to accuse someone of being irritatingly clever. Perhaps people who are “posh” are destined to do well in exams and make it to the top.

Class has given us great comic characters, from Mrs Bennet and Hyacinth Bouquet to Tim Nice-But-Dim and Vicky Pollard, the archetypal working-class girl, mouthy, inarticulate and terribly funny.

It’s much more fun to have a class system than not, as long as everyone can go on gently laughing about it. The thing that’s horrid is when people feel hurt by it. But you should remember that the royal family isn’t nearly as old as half the aristocracy — so a lot of people look down on them, too!

Source



IMMIGRATION CORRECTNESS

We now have treason on display in the Virginia Tech massacre as a peace process parading itself as an immigration policy. This immigration policy is based upon equality or Openness as in the Open Society or what we refer to here at SANE following Professor Robert J. Loewenberg's term, Indiscriminacy. It is a Peace Process that always ends up sacrificing "victims" to prove that men, peoples, and the societies they form, are essentially no different one from the other. It is a Peace Process that, in the name of peace, seeks the World State.

So what do we know of this 23-year old South Korean apparently mesmerized by the Arabic-sounding reference to "Ismail Ax"? What we know is that he was a resident alien, meaning he was NOT an American citizen. He came here as an eight-year old boy with his parents. And, the family remained resident aliens, never actually becoming citizens, choosing for whatever reason to simply renew their "green card" on the first 10-year anniversary of their resident status.

But beyond that we know quite a bit in a relatively short three days since the shooting. We know he was "troubled" to the point of frightening and threatening his fellow students. So much so that some of them refused to attend the same class with him and so much so that one of his professors threatened to quit teaching the class if he was not removed.

He was removed but only then to be tutored by the Chairwoman of the department. He was also troubled enough that at least two female students called the police on separate occasions because he was harassing them. He was also troubled enough that yet another student called police to say that he thought the murderer-to-be was suicidal. The troubled young man was then hospitalized as a danger to himself and possibly to others but released fairly quickly and referred to outpatient care and provided anti-depressant medication.

All of this and he was not even a citizen! He was here as a resident ALIEN! But withal, this troubled young man was able to walk into a gun shop and purchase a nine millimeter semi-automatic revolver and a 22-calibre pistol.

At SANE, we believe the Second Amendment and the responsibility granted to Americans to bear arms is almost sacred. It is who we are as self-reliant people. It begins with our citizen militias at the time of the Revolution and continues through our history of self-defense and citizen-motivated programs to guard the borders, to form citizen posses, and to serve in the Reserves and in the National Guard even as we become citizens in every other way. Americans have always had just the right amount of suspicion that their government could very well fail them when national defense was needed most. We've certainly lived through enough examples of the grossest forms of government incompetence which have cost thousands of American lives to know what Ronald Reagan said to be true: too often government is not the solution; it is the problem.

But what does the Second Amendment have to do with an immigrant who is NOT a citizen and certainly is not part of the American people? The Second Amendment reads: "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed." How can it be that "resident ALIENS" become part of the American PEOPLE and are granted the right to walk around armed?

The answer of course is that in America, as well as in Virginia and most states, resident aliens are treated just like citizens. We have taken the position in this country that the American People and the Society we have formed is no longer about a People. It is now about legal categories. White Christians were at the founding of this nation a distinct people and privileged as such. Men of means among this people were given the opportunity for representative government. This is, for those of you flinching, not a thesis or "viewpoint"; this is historical fact.

After the Civil War, this changed; with the move into the 20th century this change became a wholesale reformation. Today, you cannot speak of Christianity in the public sphere and if you mention "white" and "Christians" in the same sentence you will be set upon as a despicable racist by every "fair-minded" public person. And, this phenomenon extends far beyond race. It is now the case that you cannot speak of the evil of Islam and remain a serious participant in public discourse. In order to speak of the unfathomable murder and mayhem brought to the Western world by Mohammed and his god Allah and the threat it poses to our very existence, we must label it in such ways as to disfigure our very meaning. Thus, Islamists are the bad guys not Muslims; Islamo-fascism is their political ideology not Islam simply and not even Islamic law; and we must, almost per force of law, begin by noting that our critique is not of the noble religion of peace but of radical Islam hijacked by the few extremists among the faithful.

Talk of "illegal" immigrants as opposed to "undocumented" immigrants is likened to the lexicon of Nazis. Even our Republican president informs us that we have an obligation as Americans to care for and accept as one of us those men and women who have broken our laws and intruded into our homes. The argument is that because some bad or weak American actors have given these illegal intruders jobs once they are here, we have somehow relinquished forever our authority and responsibility to protect our nation, its Peoplehood, and its security.

So it is that President Bush and enough of the Republicans can join with the Open Society crowd to defeat sane immigration proposals because they sincerely believe in the "openness" of a liberal democracy and because they see this belief reflected in poll after poll. In other words, most Americans believe in it too!?! While the word "amnesty" doesn't hold much public enthusiasm, words and phrases such as "path to legal citizenship", "mainstreaming", "coming out of the shadows", "family reunification", "comprehensive immigration reform", "guest worker program", and other such disguised amnesty jargon are ways to package the idea that the plight of the illegal intruder non-citizen is somehow our fault for insisting on borders and peoplehood.

It was of course the beloved Ronald Reagan, the David of conservatism against the Goliath of Liberalism, who was the first president in the history of the US to actually grant amnesty to 3 million illegal immigrants with his support of the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act. And before that, it was the Great Society's Lyndon B. Johnson who passed the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which eliminated nation-specific quotas, replacing them with just one overall quota. This meant of course that we had as a country effectively determined that we were not a white Christian nation, but would become a brownish-black nation of third world types who could barely speak our language, knew nothing of our culture and civilization, and indeed desired to be one of "us" predominantly for economic reasons.

But this new view fits our Redirection perfectly; indeed the two are intimately intertwined. As a People we once understood that if we moved away from being a distinct people, meaning overwhelmingly white and Christian with ancestors from the European continent, the America nation would cease to exist because the people would no longer be. Today, with the Redirection in the ascendancy, we are now a country of "citizens" who no longer lay claim to being a distinct nation and people. The question that is surely worth asking is if it is even possible today to expect otherwise?

Indeed, once the 14th Amendment was ratified to "fix" the problem of the "unequal" treatment of the emancipated African slaves in lieu of a plan of mass repatriation, the Supreme Court went to work "incorporating" almost all of the Bill of Rights into the amendment's expansive language thereby bringing state governments, their autonomy and sovereignty, into the jurisdiction of the federal courts and Congress. That of course was not enough for those who wished to destroy the notion of local government and peoplehood at the level of the states. To finish the job the Supreme Court eventually took the Commerce Clause, which was meant to protect the individual states from abuse by other states and to facilitate commerce between the states, and turned it into a club to beat our federalist system to an unrecognizable pulp.

What this came to mean in the late 20th century is that the courts were now free to determine that the American people, including the individual peoples and societies of the formerly sovereign 50 states, were now "legal citizens", "residents", "aliens" and the like all within the purview of its long-arm of egalitarian, nationalized, and indiscriminate legal rules.

(Peoplehood, once experienced as real and certain, was so well understood at the founding that it was enshrined for example in the Second Amendment where you wouldn't imagine granting someone who was not "of the people" the privilege to bear arms. This was given to the people as such precisely because the government should neither be blindly trusted to do what it should do to defend the people against intruder-enemies nor be given license to define and to limit its own reach lest it become the intruder-enemy itself ["A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the People to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed."].)

And so it was that we come to the Supreme Court's now famous footnote dicta in Plyler v. Doe, 457 U.S. 202 (1982). Plyler was really about whether a state like Texas which was inundated with illegal immigrants from Mexico could withhold certain public benefits to the children of these illegal immigrants, such as a free public education. The case did not specifically address whether the affected children were also illegal immigrants born in Mexico or possibly "anchor babies" born in the US to illegal immigrants.

On the main point, the Court decided that there was indeed a constitutional interest to make certain that the states did not "discriminate" against these poor helpess children just because they were "undocumented" by applying the 14th Amendment's Equal Protection Clause (". . . nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.") which applied to "persons".

But the Court would have to explain how the Equal Protection Clause could possible be read to mean that the state of Texas could not preserve its public school system financed by mostly state tax dollars by reserving its privileged use to legal residents. To answer this in a way to destroy the state's sovereignty and the peoplehood of that state, the Court then reached into another of its bags of tricks and pulled out of the Constitution something no one has ever found there: the "Intermediate Scrutiny Test", which is just another of those fictions and constitutional amendments the Court has appended to the written word by fiat without so much as a peep out of the American People now defined out of existence and converted into "legal constructs".

But Pyler's damage to the sovereignty of the states and the residual notion of Peoplehood was not greatest at the point of impact. The real damage was what was implicit in the Court's attitude about "citizenship" and how it read the 14th Amendment. The result was that the destruction it wrought was from the collateral damage contained in footnote 10 of the Court's 5-4 opinion wherein it wrote:

". . . no plausible distinction with respect to Fourteenth Amendment "jurisdiction" can be drawn between resident aliens whose entry into the United States was lawful, and resident aliens whose entry was unlawful."

In other words, it was not enough to destroy the very notion of a People existing as a distinct Society and political order and to replace that with a legal construct consisting of words as symbols and definitions, now the Court wanted to make clear that even the legalistic distinctions between citizens and legal immigrant-residents and illegal immigrant-residents was to be blurred merely by hopping the fence.

And, indeed, as a practical matter, this is how immigration law now works. If a pregnant Mexican woman can cross the border long enough to plop out another of her offspring, take pictures and document it, that baby can then immediately claim to be part of the American People because there is no people anymore but rather legalistic notions of Indiscriminacy. Does one wonder what might happen if our Latino mother has one foot in Mexico and one in the US? Would it depend where exactly the baby plops out? What if little Enrique lands on the line?

And as we all know, when the misfit "racists" and "Resurgent Atavists" raise their "ugly" voices and talk about Peoplehood and immigration controls, the PC machine is ready to shut them down by marginalizing them to the far corners of the blogosphere, typically right next to David Duke but now joined by the Hollywood and Radio City loudmouths like Don Imus. Immediately the PC chorus chimes in about how wonderful the Latino friend is who immigrated here twenty years ago or the Muslim cardiologist who has been here 35 years. But if this is their logic, then why not actively pursue open border immigration as a policy? Join the George Soros "Open World Society". Why not embrace a North American Union like the European Union and tear down our borders? Is there a justification to create a "legal" distinction, nothing more than an artificial "social construct" between Americans and Canadians? And, if we could learn Spanish or teach the Mexicans English or embrace a bi-lingual multi-cultural society, we could destroy our southern border as well. Imagine what all that cheap labor could do for our manufacturing industry. We, the people of the world, all cherish freedom and democracy, do we not? Why should a child born through no fault of his own on one side of the border or the other (which again is not a physical or actual boundary between Peoples and nations but a legal construct to "discriminate" between two equal human beings) be denied "Equal Protection of the Laws"?

So now we have a better understanding of the Virginia Tech massacre. We don't care how many immigrants and resident aliens - legal or illegal - will be inconvenienced by our concerns. Every single life of an American as a member of a distinct and unique People is worth more than all of the "aliens" put together. The Redirection, of course, informs us otherwise by pointing out that per science and democracy there can be no real distinctions between people or peoples. In science as in democracy, we are all radically equal and indistinguishable.

The Virginia Tech murderer, although not an American in any sense of the word was here "legally". Per the Elites, who don't simply suffer from the Redirection but relish and embrace it, there could have been no grounds to discriminate against him. The idea that this "troubled" young man should have been cared for and pampered is second nature and indeed a "human right" embodied in the Constitution even if not in its written word.

The response we know to expect now would be, "What could you possibly be suggesting would have been the proper response of the authorities?" And to that question the answer should be, but is not, obvious. That he and his parents should not have been here in the first instance is clear. That this "troubled" young man was not deported, but should have been, at the first sign of "trouble" is also clear. And, we did not because it would not have been "fair" because he is, after all, as President Bush reminds us about the illegal immigrants in America, a "person" just like "us" except what that means of course is that there is not US only ALL or the World. And therein lies the treason.

Source

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of other countries. The only real difference, however, is how much power they have. In America, their power is limited by democracy. To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges. They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did: None. So look to the colleges to see what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way. It would be a dictatorship.


For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH, EDUCATION WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.

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