Sunday, July 01, 2007

Free speech is unfair to losers

Several of my liberal friends have a funny conversational tic: Whenever the talk wanders into certain topics, they abruptly switch off --- change the subject, or urgently go off to do something else. We're friends, so I never try to push them back to that dangerous little "Eeeek!" moment. But it's just as if they have a little thermometer in their heads, and when things get dangerous, the red line goes way up and all that mercury threatens to squirt out of the top. You can practically see it happening right in front of your eyes.

That's what Sigmund Freud called "signal anxiety" --- or mentally going "Eeeek!" --- there's danger up ahead! Don't let your thoughts run that way! Because, of course, liberals are horribly afraid that they might be wrong --- about abortion, or the war, or whatever secret doubts they harbor in their hearts. It's why they have to shout so loud to drown out other voices.

All that is tremendously ironic. The Left has controlled the media at least since the 1970s, and actually even back to the 1930s. As a result of their monopoly they have lost the ability to compete intellectually --- to persuade by logic and evidence. Instead, they think that just stating their often bizarre and simply false opinions is good enough. But it's not. It is the conservatives who have been forced to think hard, to justify their ideas over and over again. Practice makes perfect, and many (not all!) conservatives have now become very skilled in stating their case to the American public. Liberals are thrown back on using personal insults, because they no longer know how to state their case; and they are afraid to think freely, for fear they might have to change their minds.

When people become afraid of following a thought to its logical conclusion, they can no longer think. Free speech is unfair to intellectual losers. That's why the "Fairness Doctrine" is raising its Medusa head again. Liberals want government-enforced equality because genuine intellectual opposition scares them. Quick, turn on NPR! (Phew, that was a close one!)

The fear of free speech is the fear of skepticism. All stagnant orthodoxies fear doubters, just as Pope Leo xxx feared Galileo, --- who was a feeble old man when he was sentenced to compulsory silence. It's interesting that the censorious Pope was a close friend of Galileo, and he may have privately agreed with him. But as Pope, he protected the Church of Rome by silencing the greatest scientist of the age. The Church has paid the price for its censorship ever since.

Every Leftist establishment in the last hundred years has exercised censorship over speech, from Jozef Stalin to Hugo Chavez and yes, even Harvard University. LINK It's that fear of its own inner self-doubt that makes the Left instinctively reach for the censor's rubber stamp --- the one that says PROHIBITED THOUGHT! in capital letters.

I have a good friend in Sweden who simply goes ballistic with rage at the atmosphere of intellectual oppression over there. Sweden is a socialist paradise only for True Believers. Political doubters are fired, excommunicated and censored. No wonder that socialist countries claim to have a "social consensus." That simply comes from silencing all the doubters, and then denying they even exist. But they are still there, all right, quietly thinking politically incorrect thoughts.

Old Bill Shakespeare knew all about the fear of one's own thoughts. He has mad King Lear ranting on the heath, and raging against his daughters who have cast him out into that dark and stormy night. So when you hear Trent Lott or John Kerry bemoan the rise of Free Speech Radio, just remember that they are listening, all right, and simply saying to themselves: O, that way madness lies; let me shun that; No more of that That's why they need to shut you up.

Source



Left battling with envy

It's back to the '70s as hatred of the rich makes a return, writes Ross Clark

ONE of the little-remarked side effects of the September 11 attacks was the eclipse of the anti-globalisation movement. It is not easy to remember that in the northern summer of 2001, the year protester Carlo Giuliani died during rioting at the Group of Eight summit of rich nations in Genoa, the growing venom of anti-capitalism activists was seen as such a threat to society that, briefly, on the afternoon of September 11, commentators on radio and television discussed the possibility that the attacks had been carried out by enemies of globalisation.

After September 11, however, the movement suffered a precipitous decline. The May Day riots that had shaken London in 2000 and 2001 were not repeated. With the war on terror about to swing into action, taunting police in street battles seemed rather less than a good idea. With security services twitching with the threat of suicide bombers, suddenly there was the possibility that water cannons might be replaced with semi-automatic weapons.

In Rostock in northern Germany earlier this month, however, the anti-globalisers wanted the world to know they were back in business. A rally involving 25,000 protesters erupted into violence, leaving a reported 400 police officers and 520 demonstrators injured. The violence followed protests in Hamburg a week earlier. And that was before a single G8 delegate had touched down in Germany.

It is no accident the revival of anti-globalisation protests coincided with the G8 summit in Germany. It is in the German autonome -- anarchist groups of the 1960s and '70s -- that the anti-globalisation movement has its origins. Still ringing in the ears of German anarchists is the justification by Ulrike Meinhof, the journalist turned terrorist who lent her name to the Baader-Meinhof Gang: "If I set a car on fire, that is a criminal offence. If I set hundreds of cars on fire, that is political action."

The difference is that whereas the autonome were underground organisations, today's anarchists are increasingly open about their methods. You didn't need to be a spy to find out what protest groups were planning for the G8 summit. Anyone with an internet connection would have been able to read the detailed plans of where and how protesters were going to strike, such as outside the Rostock-Lichtenhagen branch of the budget supermarket Lidl, where on June 4 at 10pm, a group called the Dissent Network, along with the Andalusian union of agricultural workers, were planning to protest against Lidl's working conditions and its "ruinous price dictates".

Anyone who imagines what happened in Rostock was caused by a small rabble disrupting a larger peaceful protest and being picked on by over-reacting police should have a look at the Dissent Network's website. For a self-professed anarchist group, it is remarkably well-organised. Long before the G8 summit, it had set up two camps, one in Rostock and one outside, for a total of 11,000 protesters, complete with soup kitchens and medical tents. Prospective activists were told the object was to close all entry points to the G8 summit and were given advice as to the most effective way of doing so: you might consider, for example, linking arms with the aid of metal pipes set into concrete blocks that you prepared earlier, then lying in the street. "There is little you can do against armoured police vehicles," it goes on to advise, "but they do, for example, hate paint on their windscreens."

At Heiligendamm, too, eager members of the Black Bloc were expected -- another German born and bred anarchist outfit that was active in Genoa five years ago and that has its roots in the era of Baader-Meinhof and the Red Army Faction. Unlike the Dissent Network, the Black Bloc doesn't have a website proclaiming what trouble it intends to cause at G8. Neither does it have a press spokesman. But to give us a flavour of its ideology, one of its top brass, calling herself "Mary Black", posted the following on the internet: "It is not just that police abuse power, we believe that the existence of the police is an abuse of power ... many of us believe in revolution and within that context, attacking the cops doesn't seem out of place."

In other words, as far as the Black Bloc is concerned, cops are there to be beaten up. It isn't just the cops, either. Mary Black goes on to offer her thoughts on capitalist enterprise: "I believe that using the word violent to describe breaking the window of a Nike store takes meaning away from the word ... It is true that some underpaid Nike employee will have to clean up the mess, which is unfortunate, but a local glass installer will get a little extra income."

The vacuity of Black's self-justification defies belief. How does she know Nike is going to employ a local glass installer rather than give the work to a multinational outfit? And if Nike is going to employ the small man, what on earth is Black moaning about? Presumably, if there is any consistency in her philosophy, she ought to be praising a company that smiles on the small man.

The rise of violent protest on the Left is not wholly a European phenomenon. In 1998, Ward Churchill, professor of ethnic studies at the University of Colorado, published an influential book, Pacifism as Pathology, in which he castigated the Left for being too weak and implored protesters to turn violent. It was at the meeting of the World Trade Organisation in Seattle the following year that the tradition whereby anti-globalisation protesters target international political meetings was born: 50,000 rioted, elevating Starbucks to an object of hate on the Left.

Since then, Churchill has moved up a gear. Shortly after September 11, he published an essay entitled Some People Push Back: On the Justice of Roosting Chickens, in which he suggested that the "Little Eichmanns" who worked at the World Trade Centre were not "innocent civilians" but a legitimate target: "True enough they were civilians of a sort. But innocent? Gimme a break. They formed a technocratic corps at the very heart of America's global empire, the 'mighty engine of profits' to which the military dimension of US policy has always been enslaved." Although little noticed at the time, Churchill expanded his essay into a book, which reached 100 on Amazon's bestseller list.

It would be easy to dismiss members of the resurrected anti-globalisation movement as a bunch of nutters. But that would be to underestimate the influence of anti-globalisation on left-wing thought generally, and not just on the fringes. It has become so commonplace to blame the oil industry for any meteorological-induced hardship in developing countries that no one seems to protest any more, even though such cheap gibes are polluting serious debate over climate change. Likewise, no one seems to mind any longer that Western clothes manufacturers, in advertisements by once-respectable aid charities, are blamed for creating poverty in developing countries when the reality is that they attract workers to their factories by paying higher wages than any other local employer.

A dozen years after Tony Blair ditched Clause IV (British Labour's nationalisation platform) and declared an end to the politics of envy, it has become fashionable again to bash big business and the wealthy. A recent debate in Britain on BBC TV's Newsnight between the candidates for the Labour deputy leadership exposed a general leftwards shift in the party's outlook. But what was most remarkable about it was that the most rabidly left-wing remarks came not from Jon Cruddas, a mild-mannered old Labour candidate who wants Britons to return to living in council houses, but from Harriet Harman, the former social security secretary and middle-class paragon. Demanding a return of the royal commission on distribution of income and wealth, she complained: "You can't have proper equality of opportunity with a huge gap between rich and poor ... Do we want a society where some struggle and others spend pound stg. 10,000 on a handbag?"

Like many of Harman's utterances, her appeal to the Left doesn't bear analysis. What about the people who sew together the pound stg. 10,000 handbags; surely the more the wealthy spend on handbags, the more they earn? It is certainly a contrast from the remark made by Harman's soon-to-be ex-boss, Blair, when challenged on equality, also in a Newsnight interview, in 2001: "It's not a burning ambition for me to make sure that David Beckham earns less money." But it is a sign of the direction in which Labour is going: away from championing opportunity for the many and not the few, and towards straightforward envy of those who have wealth.

It is a long way, of course, from playing to the left-wing gallery in a debate over the deputy leadership of the Labour Party to throwing bricks through windows at the G8 summit. But before respected government and former government ministers start showing contempt towards a particular group of people -- in this case the wealthy -- they may just care to consider who they are influencing. A little more than a month ago Segolene Royal, the socialist candidate in the French presidential election, made one of the most disreputable remarks uttered in recent times by a leading Western politician when she implored the French to vote for her or, in the event of a Sarkozy victory, face the prospect of seeing their country explode into anger and rioting. Fortunately, in the event her implied threat not only backfired, her prediction failed to materialise.

One imagines that she was not really egging on her countrymen to indulge in the orgy of car burning that struck urban France in 2005 following the electrocution of two immigrants in a Parisian suburb. She may even be horrified at re-hearing her remarks. But there is little doubt elements of the Left are getting nastier. Having regrouped after the distraction posed by al-Qa'ida, the rich haters are back on the march.

Source



Insensitivity training: Facing the crybaby culture

Every couple of days it seems somebody falls apart due to "insensitivity." The problem has been buzzing around in our headlines for years. We all remember back in January 1999 when a group of Professionally Aggrieved Grievance Professionals came unglued after David Howard, a white aide to Anthony Williams, the black mayor of Washington, D.C., used the word "niggardly" in reference to a budget. It mattered not one iota that the word has absolutely no etymological relationship with "nigger." (It's of Scandinavian origin and means "miserly" or "stingy.") Letters were written; protests were mounted. Howard himself bowed and scraped in abject remorse like a Stalinist show-trial witness confessing to crimes against the regime. Ten days later, Howard was sacked in a rite of sacrificial appeasement to outraged sensitivity gods. Only his own membership in an Approved Victim Group saved him: It turned out that, as a homosexual, Howard was himself backed up by an entire community of Professionally Aggrieved Grievance Professionals with their own deeply rooted sensitivities that likewise demanded appeasement. The mayor therefore offered Howard a chance to return to his position. Howard refused but accepted another position with the mayor instead.

Such tales are not isolated in our culture. One can go on and on, if for no other reason than the sheer amusement of the thing. A couple of years ago, for instance, Southwest Airlines was hit with a lawsuit for racial harassment. Their crime? They do not assign seats. You simply pick a seat, and the plane takes off. So, in the final prep for take-off, one of the flight attendants came on the intercom and said, "Eenie meenie minie mo, pick a seat, we gotta go." Two African-American passengers naturally could not endure this horrific assault on their exquisite sensitivities. Lawsuit city.

Speaking of cities, Los Angeles issued a request to all manufacturers of computers to cease referring to "master" and "slave" units on their equipment after a hurt soul filed a complaint. Numerous computer manufacturers slavishly complied.

Fortunately, the hypersensitivity industry has also pinpointed the deep wells of pain opened by the Cleveland Indians and the Atlanta Braves. Particularly offensive is the heart-breaking use of the "tomahawk chop" by Braves fans. In other sensitivity news, Notre Dame recently had to fend off charges from Irish Americans doubled over in anguish by the torment they feel at the label "Fighting Irish" and the Notre Dame mascot (a leprechaun with his dukes up). The Notre Dame Observer (March 23, 2006) had to answer these charges by reaffirming offended Irish people in their okayness and assuring them that the plucky little leprechaun is "a celebration of the resiliency and strength of the Irish people," symbolizing how "the Irish have suffered through numerous hardships in their history-occupation by a foreign power, religious discrimination, famine and overt racism here in the United States have all been faced by the Irish people, and yet they persevered to become one of the most influential peoples in history." (Let me say that, as a member of America's suffering Irish-American community, I thank Notre Dame for drying my tears of outrage. On behalf of the groaning legions of agonized Irish in America, I forgive you, Notre Dame.)

Not everyone is similarly inclined to mercy, however. Sometimes the tinder-dry sense of outrage caused by our culture's gross insensitivity to practically everything threatens to erupt in a conflagration of hurt feelings. For instance, a couple of years ago a proposed picnic to honor baseball Hall-of-Famer Jackie Robinson led some 40 students at the University of Albany, State University of New York, to protest that the word "picnic" originally referred to the lynching of blacks. It turned out the protestors were what the dominant Europhallocentric Hegemony calls "wrong," since "picnic" actually comes from a 17th-century French word for "social gathering in which each person brings a different food." But the sensitivity professionals at SUNY did not let stultifying categories of "right," "wrong," "ignorant," or "informed" get in the way of their festival of emotional incontinence. The strained feelings of offended black students were in such a pitch that the university instead put out a memo asking all student leaders to refrain from any use of the word "picnic." Explained the Campus Affirmative Action office, "Whether the claims are true or not, the point is the word offended." Therefore, in publicity for the event, the word "picnic" was changed to "outing."

However, the use of the word "outing" offended-wait for it-the gay community, so the event formerly known as a picnic was ultimately publicized with no noun to describe it.

Meanwhile, in the sphere of gender and sex, terrible battles are being fought by another gathering of the extremely sensitive. From the feminist musicologist who recently announced that Beethoven's Ninth Symphony was an expression of rape, to the courageous Euro-feminists who suffer "because a man standing up to urinate is deemed to be triumphing in his masculinity, and by extension, degrading women," great strides are being made. A feminist group at Stockholm University recently sought to ban all urinals from campus, following their removal from a Swedish elementary school. Likewise, the word "history" was banned a while back at Stockport College in Manchester, England, because it contains the sharply wounding syllable "his." And few can but admire the Oscar-winning performance of Dr. Nancy Hopkins of MIT who told the Boston Globe that she had to leave the room or else she would have "either blacked out or thrown up" after then-president of Harvard, Larry Summers, suggested that there might be differences between men and women in aptitude to the hard sciences. Summers paid for this mild observation with his professional life, of course.

Every once in a while, there are collisions between various aggrieved peoples, which make the suffering they must endure all the more terrible. For instance, a few years ago Native Americans in Washington State (members of one of the highest-ranking Approved Victim Groups) decided they wanted to revive the ancient sacred mystical ancestral tradition of going out in a power boat with echo locators and lots of high-tech gear to kill a whale.

This presented the sensitive people in western Washington with an apparently insoluble conundrum: If the local media complained about the murder of our cetacean brethren suckling at the breast of Gaia, they would be imposing their Dead White European Male Cultural Hegemony on the bleeding wounds of suffering Native Americans! The depths of pain that could well up in the Native American community made strong editorial writers and TV pundits blanch with terror. But if the Manufacturers of Culture in Seattle media didn't complain, they would be letting Free Willy die at the hands of evil predatory Homo sapiens who have been raping Gaia for eons. The high-pitched cry of pain from the Green Community would be audible to our mammalian animal companions for miles. We would once again have failed to act while our Mother Earth was taken one step closer to extinction by the defiling disease that is humanity!

At last, after much deliberation in closed-door sessions, the hierarchy of values was clarified by the arbiters of correct sensitivity: Native Americans trump Euro-Americans, but whales trump all humans. Accordingly, media reports were filled with cries of anguish from the Green Community on behalf of outraged whales, but there was a moratorium on reports about Native Americans outraged over chardonnay-sipping Euro-American TV pundits telling Native Americans how to run their lives. Instead, Euro-American critics of Native American environmental destruction would only be reviled for their cultural imperialism and insensitivity when they were white sports fishermen complaining that Indian gill netters were indiscriminately denuding the rivers of all fish. For as everyone knows, people who hunt and fish for sport are a form of life lower than Neanderthals, murdering Mother Earth for the sheer pleasure of killing. No one cares what they think. Problem solved.

Of course, religion is also a rich field for the terminally sensitive. On a Beliefnet blog, for instance, a reader recently complained about the horrors of insensitivity that he must endure as a non-Christian in a religious American culture:

More here

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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 INTERNATIONAL, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL 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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