Entries Tagged 'liberal' ↓

Originally posted at 2.0: The Blogmocracy

It takes a particular type of self-righteous and aggressive ignoramus to think that the real evils of this world will all go away if enough people can be shamed or bullied into denying that those evils exist.

Case in point:

Russell Simmons Unveils ‘Coexist’ Banner Near Ground Zero

Simmons’ apartment on Liberty St. overlooks Ground Zero. Each letter of the banner features different religious and spiritual symbols. Like Bloomberg, Simmons is a big supporter of the planned center: “I was trying to figure out ways I could reach people and promote a message of tolerance…The fact that it is a public discussion, that there’s so many against it is what I think is disappointing to me, that so many people don’t know that we founded our country on the First Amendment,” he told the AP.

Read the rest.

I am not the only one to complain

Recently, I have noticed that I am not the only one who despises this asinine symbolic slogan:

YouTube: Allen West Hates the Co-Exist Bumper Sticker
h/t: Kitman TV

More of Allen West’s speech here.

By Charlie Sykes
Story Created: May 15, 2009
(Story Updated: May 15, 2009)

As John McAdams sums up the story so far:

It all started with a parody from Tom McMahon, who was aggravated by the extremely smug and intellectually slovenly bumper sticker in which a variety of religious symbols spell out “COEXIST.”

McMahon produced a parody bumper sticker with Nazi and Communist symbols substituted.

His point, of course, was that some religious views are simply impossible to coexist with, and must (like Nazism and Communism) be fought.

Read the rest.

Update: Here’s another parody, courtesy of Mike C. on Blogmocracy:

‘Coexist’ in Firearm Manufacturer Logos

The underlying spiritual problem

When ‘tolerance’ proves to be nothing more than moral indifference and cowardice cloaked in self-righteousness, it is not a virtue but a vice.

Gates of Vienna: The Sin That Believes in Nothing

We Christians strongly believe in tolerance, and this is what British novelist Dorothy Sayers pointed out about “Tolerance”:

In this world it is called Tolerance, but in hell it is called indifference, the sin that believes in nothing, cares for nothing, seeks to know nothing, interferes with nothing, enjoys nothing, hates nothing, finds purpose in nothing, lives for nothing, and remains alive because there is nothing for which it will die.

If any viewpoint is equally as valid as any other, then no viewpoint has any meaning, and it matters not what any of us thinks, says, or does. This philosophy is truly satanic, and it is called nihilism.

Originally published at 2.0: The Blogmocracy

Underemployment: Obama’s dirty little secret

Even the best-qualified, highest-skilled, and hardest-working Americans are up against it these days. Yes, even those Americans who still have jobs! We all know that the official unemployment statistics are vastly understated, in that they focus only on claims for unemployment compensation. The stats do not properly account for older workers who have taken early retirement after losing a job; young workers who cannot enter the labor force; “discouraged workers” who are still looking for work, but whose unemployment benefits are exhausted; disabled persons who could work to a limited extent, but who aren’t being hired; and American citizens who have had to travel overseas, often at great sacrifice and financial loss, to find work.

But perhaps the biggest of the dirty little secrets hidden by the official unemployment statistics is underemployment. I know about this from personal experience. Despite all of my qualifications, I have not been able to find full-time employment in over two years. The reason? With all of the hidden ramifications of Obamacare looming over everyone’s heads, along with the other past and future attacks on private enterprise, nobody wants to hire full-time people at all if they can help it. Certainly nobody wants to hire someone over 55 for a full-time job where the employer will be forced to provide overpriced health insurance or be fined for not providing it. Some people may call it age discrimination, but it’s the government that is causing it, not the prejudices of private employers.

There’s no need to take my word for any of this. Look at any job board or want-ad listing and notice the proliferation of part-time, temporary, and contract assignments, and the relative absence of full-time jobs with benefits. For example, a retail store that would normally hire two or three full-time employees will instead hire five part-time employees for 15 to 30 hours per week, at minimum wage, perhaps with commissions, but no benefits. A recent Gallup Poll also reveals large-scale underemployment in the form of part-time workers who want, but cannot get, full-time employment.

The liberal elite wants it that way

Of course, the liberal establishment pretends not to know why unemployment remains so high. Case in point: NYT: Mystery for White House: Where did the jobs go? [H/T: Rodan]

That conundrum, which reclaims center stage in Washington this week, is this: Why is unemployment so high?

The whodunit has flummoxed economists in both parties for a year. In 2009, as the new Obama administration grappled with the financial crisis, joblessness rose nearly two points beyond customary recession forecasts.

Part of the uncertainty concerns why. More consequential now, as the administration and Congress determine what to do, is whether the unemployment spike reflects a short-term or permanent shift in demand for workers.

But seriously…

I have studied economics and I know this for certain: All they have to do is repeal Obozocare, resume drilling, seal the borders, and end the H-1b program, and unemployment will drop three points within a month. I guarantee it!

But none of that will happen until we somehow muster the political will to force our government to do that. Or until enough States secede and decide to govern themselves in the interest of their own citizens.

One way or another, we need to free ourselves from the predatory liberal elites who flout the will of the people and who serve only their own interests and those of our foreign enemies.

The Obama administration, together with the liberal establishment in academia, the mainstream media, the NGOs, the foundations, the Ivy League, and the UN, all have reason to want unemployment to remain high. Why? Because, though it may make the Obama administration look incompetent in the short run, as it did with FDR, it will create more dependency on the government and increase centralized government power in the long run.

Dependency, the Liberals’ Natural Resource explains how this nefarious system works:

A Heritage Foundation report shows that thanks to multiple government programs, the proportion of Americans in some way dependent on government largess has suddenly jumped by 31.2% since 2001 after decades of much slower increases. Even in inflation-adjusted dollars, America now spends thirteen times more on public welfare than it did in 1965. Dependency has snowballed in health care, public welfare, and housing, and the upward trend seems likely to continue as Obama’s statist polices take hold and baby boomers retire. Indeed, the president plans to spend some $10.3 trillion in welfare over the next decades. In a nutshell, Uncle Sam is replacing the family, the church, private charities, and all other non-government sources of assistance, and this means regular jobs for the new caregivers. And it feels good to work for Uncle Sam: Benefits included, the average federal workers in 2008 earned double what those in the private sector took home. So it is hardly unexpected that since about January 2008, some 7.9 million private sectors jobs have disappeared, while 590,000 public sector jobs were created — and this trend seems to be multiplying. It’s a thoroughly modern ménage à trois of dependent citizens, well-paid government employees ministering to them, and harried taxpayers footing the bill.

…

Here’s what makes this “new wealth” so attractive: In today’s uncertain economy, it far outshines the old wealth of building things and selling them at a profit. For one, jobs ministering to the dependent are labor-intensive and immune to mechanization. Government jobs are also wonderfully secure. It is inconceivable, for example, that a counselor working with Vietnamese gangs in Los Angeles will be replaced by an industrial robot or that under-employed social workers will also be asked to direct rush hour traffic to trim labor costs. This is not the cost-cutting-obsessed airlines where passengers make their own reservations, print boarding passes, stow their own luggage, and bring their own food. Nor can these interventions be outsourced to foreign competition. Helping the less fortunate has a permanent “Made in USA” label attached — Toyota has no interest in tackling the pathologies of those living in Detroit.

The supply of these jobs-generating assets is also inexhaustible. America will never, never run out of this newly discovered “wealth.” We may deplete our oil and ravage our forests, but what are the odds of drug addicts, the mentally ill, young unwed mothers, and others needing intervention vanishing? Those mired in pathology are a truly renewable natural resource. Social problems do recede, but rest assured, replacements are easily found (e.g., sex addiction). In a pinch, just open the borders and receive a bountiful fresh supply. And compare the ease of setting up an in-school clinic to mentor anorexic, non-English-speaking adolescent girls with low self-esteem versus building a factory. The former is instantly shovel-ready.

Read it all.

In other words, if the government stops the private sector from offering relatively secure, remunerative, full-time employment to American citizens, that will eventually leave the government as the only source of good jobs on American soil. This is how the federal government creates a new class of Soviet-style apparatchiki. Of course, those jobs ONLY go to those who actively support the regime and do their part to enhance the careers of those already in power, while keeping everyone else down.

Now what?

Our goal is to re-empower ourselves and our families, and decentralize and take back control over everything that has been usurped from us. That means we need to go on the attack to discredit the liberal establishment and all its pomps and all its works, anywhere and everywhere it appears.

We must overcome not only economic underemployment, but the underemployment of the human spirit.

To that end, please turn your attention to this excellent article: Read the rest of this excellent article at America’s Ruling Class — And the Perils of Revolution. [H/T: doriangrey]

… Consider: The ruling class denies its opponents’ legitimacy. Seldom does a Democratic official or member of the ruling class speak on public affairs without reiterating the litany of his class’s claim to authority, contrasting it with opponents who are either uninformed, stupid, racist, shills for business, violent, fundamentalist, or all of the above. They do this in the hope that opponents, hearing no other characterizations of themselves and no authoritative voice discrediting the ruling class, will be dispirited. For the country class seriously to contend for self-governance, the political party that represents it will have to discredit not just such patent frauds as ethanol mandates, the pretense that taxes can control “climate change,” and the outrage of banning God from public life. More important, such a serious party would have to attack the ruling class’s fundamental claims to its superior intellect and morality in ways that dispirit the target and hearten one’s own. The Democrats having set the rules of modern politics, opponents who want electoral success are obliged to follow them.

…

Reducing the taxes that most Americans resent requires eliminating the network of subsidies to millions of other Americans that these taxes finance, and eliminating the jobs of government employees who administer them. Eliminating that network is practical, if at all, if done simultaneously, both because subsidies are morally wrong and economically counterproductive, and because the country cannot afford the practice in general. The electorate is likely to cut off millions of government clients, high and low, only if its choice is between no economic privilege for anyone and ratifying government’s role as the arbiter of all our fortunes. The same goes for government grants to and contracts with so-called nonprofit institutions or non-governmental organizations. The case against all arrangements by which the government favors some groups of citizens is easier to make than that against any such arrangement. Without too much fuss, a few obviously burdensome bureaucracies, like the Department of Education, can be eliminated, while money can be cut off to partisan enterprises such as the National Endowments and public broadcasting. That sort of thing is as necessary to the American body politic as a weight reduction program is essential to restoring the health of any human body degraded by obesity and lack of exercise. Yet shedding fat is the easy part. Restoring atrophied muscles is harder. Reenabling the body to do elementary tasks takes yet more concentration.

The grandparents of today’s Americans (132 million in 1940) had opportunities to serve on 117,000 school boards. To exercise responsibilities comparable to their grandparents’, today’s 310 million Americans would have radically to decentralize the mere 15,000 districts into which public school children are now concentrated. They would have to take responsibility for curriculum and administration away from credentialed experts, and they would have to explain why they know better. This would involve a level of political articulation of the body politic far beyond voting in elections every two years.

If self-governance means anything, it means that those who exercise government power must depend on elections. The shorter the electoral leash, the likelier an official to have his chain yanked by voters, the more truly republican the government is. Yet to subject the modern administrative state’s agencies to electoral control would require ordinary citizens to take an interest in any number of technical matters. Law can require environmental regulators or insurance commissioners, or judges or auditors to be elected. But only citizens’ discernment and vigilance could make these officials good. Only citizens’ understanding of and commitment to law can possibly reverse the patent disregard for the Constitution and statutes that has permeated American life. Unfortunately, it is easier for anyone who dislikes a court’s or an official’s unlawful act to counter it with another unlawful one than to draw all parties back to the foundation of truth.

Read it all.

Originally published at 2.0: The Blogmocracy.

And ye shall hear of wars and rumours of wars: see that ye be not troubled: for all these things must come to pass, but the end is not yet. – Matthew 24:6 (King James Version)

In his new article, The Immorality of the Moral High Ground, Sultan Knish explains why Israel and the West keeps losing, and the jihadis keep winning. It’s because we have been manipulated into trying to claim the moral high ground in a struggle that leaves no room for morality. The eventual result is capitulation to evil.

We can’t win the War on Terror so long as we hold to liberal definitions of the Moral High Ground. We can’t even begin to really fight it. What’s worse, is that not only does this warped understanding of morality result in more American deaths, it results in more deaths of both fighters and civilians on the enemy side. Because where the soldier understand that the most moral way to win a war is, quickly. The bleeding heart liberal thinks that the most moral way to win a war is, never. To a liberal if we must fight a war, we should do it with our hands tied behind our backs, and after a decade of senseless bloodshed, we’ll finally come to realize that war is a bad thing.

As the Biblical quotation reminds us, war has always been, and always will be, part of the earthly human condition. Violent conflict is a part of the fallen nature of mankind, which is the very thing that the “progressives” attempt to deny by insisting that they can perfect mankind by perfecting the structure of society. This is why the efforts of so many people to prevent war, or to legislate rules for fighting war, serve only to worsen it when it inevitably happens.

Putting liberals in charge of determining what soldiers can do in a war is like putting die hard big government advocates in charge of privatizing the government. Not only will they see that the whole thing fails, they’ll make sure that it fails as painfully and horribly as possible in order to serve as a lesson to any future government that might flirt with any similar notion. They did it with the War on Terror, intimidating military interrogators with threats of legal action and exposure, while helping the terrorists realize that all they need to do is claim torture in order to be set free. They did it brilliantly in Iraq, subverting the reconstruction in the aftermath of a successful war, from within, until the entire thing collapsed into squabbling factions. They did it on Iran, feeding false claims that there was no nuclear program long enough for Bush to leave office.

But of course, the liberals never apply the same moral standards to our enemies.

Why? Because they want our enemies to win, that’s why.

Why does Israel have a terrorist problem, and not Jordan, which has the same Arab population that Israel does? It’s not simply because Israel is mostly Jewish and Jordan is mostly Muslim, though that is a contributing factor. A primary focus of Islamists is to take over countries with majority Muslim populations in order to build the Caliphate. The reason is because in 1970 when the terrorists began hijacking planes and declared that a part of Jordan belonged to them, King Hussein sent in the army. He didn’t kill a mere 52 Palestinian Arab terrorists, as Israel did in Jenin. Or a mere 107 in Deir Yassin. Not even the 800 or so killed in fighting between Arabs in Sabra and Shatilla. No, according to Arafat, King Hussein’s troops killed an estimated 25,000 Palestinian Arabs.

This wasn’t some sort of unique event by Middle Eastern standards. When the Islamists tried to stage an uprising in Hama, Syrian troops killed somewhere between 20,000 to 40,000 people. When Arafat sided with Saddam during the Gulf War, Kuwait expelled 400,000 Palestinian Arabs. Why did they do it? Because by 1990, Kuwait had some 564,000 native Arabs, and some 450,000 Palestinian Arabs. So the Kuwaitis began bombing Palestinian Arab neighborhoods, top officials boasted about “cleansing” Palestinian Arabs from Kuwait, and tanks and troops were sent into Palestinian Arab neighborhoods, setting up checkpoints, killing, imprisoning and torturing thousands. There were plenty of atrocities that got brief mentions in the media, before the Palestinian Arabs were gone from Kuwait, and everyone moved on.

Just to grasp the sheer scale of the double standard here, in the same year that the Bush Administration was pressuring Israel to negotiate with the PLO in the name of human rights, President H.W. Bush gave a blank check to the Kuwaiti royal family to do anything they wanted to the Palestinian Arabs in their country. He told the Kuwaiti ambassador, “The war wasn’t fought about democracy in Kuwait” and justified everything the royals were doing, saying, “I think we’re expecting a little much if we’re asking the people in Kuwait to take kindly to those that had spied on their countrymen that were left there, that had brutalized families there, and things of that nature.” The Kuwaiti government newspaper Sawt Al Kuwait, featured Bush’s comments under the headline, “We Would Be Asking a Lot, If We Asked Them to Show Mercy.”

And that just about says it all. The same Western governments which think it’s asking a lot to expect Muslims to show mercy, make those demands of Israel all the time. They make those demands of their own forces, while never expecting Muslims to show mercy.

Sultan Knish explains what we must do instead:

…In the same way, stamping out the first terrorist attacks will save you from engaging in a prolonged struggle. That means doing it with decisive finality. This is a simple truth that every Middle Eastern country, but Israel understands. And a simple fact that every Muslim country understands, but the United States does not. Throw a dart at any major Muslim nation, and you find repression, mass graves and even genocide. Indonesia, Sudan, Iran, Iraq, Somalia, Turkey– it never ends. There’s a very simple reason for that. In Islam, force is the only real morality.

Mohammed is not the Prophet of Islam because he offended the Meccans and got killed for it. He’s the prophet of a worldwide religion, because he killed everyone in his path. And then his followers killed everyone in their path. And then their followers went on doing the same d— thing for over a thousand years, right into the present day– where Muslims are still killing and making war on everyone who isn’t a Muslim, and refuses to become one. Islam has only one real revelation, death. But it has to be death with a purpose. The purpose is the triumph of Islam. If victory is possible, then the Islamists have plenty of volunteers to die, because they believe in the Islamic paradise and its 72 virgins. If on the other hand, the Islamists get stomped into the dirt, their religious credibility runs at an all time low. When victory is impossible, Islam withers and goes into the long sleep of cultural hibernation to awaken in a more permissive time.

There’s only one way to defeat terrorists. To fight them without any more restraint than they impose on themselves. Under such conditions, superior force and technology makes the victory of the civilized side inevitable, and creates an incentive for the uncivilized side to become civilized, or pay the price. The Moral High Ground, the whole idea that restraint toward those who would kill you is the essence of morality, is one of the most perniciously self-destructive ideas ever coined. It is suicide with a slogan. The Moral High Ground is not moral and it is not the high ground, it is the way by which civilians go to their death over the cliff of their own warped ideals.

There is only one Moral High Ground that that can defeat, the moral high ground of standing up for civilization, against those who would drown it in the ichor of their own hate, the stench of their own greed, the lust of their own power and the blood of their endless murders. It is not moral to let your family be murdered, rather than harm the murderers. He who slays those who kill his loves ones, stands on the true moral high ground. The only true Moral High Ground that there is.

Read the rest.

Sadly, it is not only the dhimmis in the Obama administration (and in the administration of every US president since Reagan left office) who are to blame for our current predicament. It’s the fact that the US has let itself be fooled by the leftist elite, not only in Washington DC, but also the Ivy League, the think tanks, the NGOs, the Hollywood left, and the rest of the mainstream media. As Sultan Knish also mentions, Israel has its own left that exerts a pernicious influence, to the detriment of Israel’s security and survival. And as Gates of Vienna tells us every day, the same is true in the EU.

Perhaps most of all to blame is the UN and all of its pomps and all of its works. As I personally tried to warn everyone over a decade ago, Israel would be next in line to suffer the condemnation that was visited upon the Serbs for daring to defend themselves against the jihadi onslaught. And so it was.

There is no joy in pointing out that I was right, after it is too late to mitigate the damage. At least for me, to say “I told you so” is not so much a temptation, as Thomas Fleming once warned, to the sin of pride, but to that of despair.

If you ever wondered what side of the fence you sit on,
this is a great test!

If a conservative doesn’t like guns, he doesn’t buy one.
If a liberal doesn’t like guns, he wants all guns outlawed.

If a conservative is a vegetarian, he doesn’t eat meat.
If a liberal is a vegetarian, he wants all meat products banned for everyone.

If a conservative is homosexual, he quietly leads his life.
If a liberal is homosexual, he demands legislated respect.

If a conservative is down-and-out, he thinks about how to better his situation.
A liberal wonders who is going to take care of him.

If a conservative doesn’t like a talk show host, he switches channels.
Liberals demand that those they don’t like be shut down.

If a conservative is a non-believer, he doesn’t go to church.
A liberal non-believer wants any mention of God and religion silenced. (Unless it’s a foreign religion, of course!)

If a conservative decides he needs health care, he goes about shopping for it, or may choose a job that provides it.
A liberal demands that the rest of us pay for his.

If a conservative reads this, he’ll forward it so his friends can have a good laugh.
A liberal will delete it because he’s “offended”.

Well, I forwarded it to you.

The above photo of protesters at the University of Washington is from Twitpic via Instapundit.

What these manifestly ignorant clowns FAIL to comprehend is that we each have a duty…not a right, but a DUTY…to educate OURSELVES to the best of our ability.

Long ago, I observed that each human being is issued one (1) human head…one cranium per customer.

Given that we don’t all share the same head and brain, it behooves each of us to USE the faculties with which we have been endowed, and NOT put the burden on teachers, parents, the government, or anybody else to do all the work of instilling knowledge and wisdom into us.

In a nutshell, the assertion, “But nobody ever TOLD me that!” is not a valid excuse for failure to cope with life.

Having been given powers of observation and cognition, it’s our job to go out and collect data about the world around us, to distill it into knowledge, and, insofar as is possible, to make a contribution to the wisdom available to humankind.

If we don’t, we have ourselves to blame.

The Infamous 1389 Stirs The Pot Again

Subject: Banned from BoingBoing with NO notice or explanation?

Dear Mark Frauenfelder,

For all your supposed interest in getting rid of onerous censorship, there seems to be some of it taking place on BoingBoing itself.

I created an account for the purpose of posting a comment on the BoingBoing article having to do with what was purportedly a kid’s lingerie line being sold by Noah Cyrus (but was actually no such thing). I roundly criticized BoingBoing for having run what I deemed to be a hysterically-worded and error-riddled article in the first place. I used NO vulgar language, NO bigoted comments, NO threats, NO libelous accusations, nothing that should have gotten me banned from your site.

My comment was posted for maybe half an hour or so. Then the comment vanished. I saw a notice that my logon had expired, so I tried to log on again to see what had happened. I simply got a message saying “Permission denied.” Then I went to check my email. There was NO notification that my comment had been taken down or that I had been banned from BoingBoing. But apparently that is what happened.

It seems awfully hypocritical that someone at BoingBoing is banning people, WITHOUT notice or explanation, simply for criticizing BoingBoing itself.

It looks as though I need to go back to blogging about censorship issues, as tired of that topic as I am by now, simply because sites such as BoingBoing are failing to do their job. Obviously, just because a site CLAIMS to be in favor of free expression of ideas, does not mean that it actually IS. And in my experience, no site that employs, or is run by, persons of a left-wing bent, ever truly goes to bat for free expression for anybody who DISAGREES with material on the site itself. In other words…it’s always free speech for me, but not for thee!

For obvious reasons, I see no reason to identify myself to you any further. If you don’t trust me to comment on your site, why should I trust you with my personal information?

1389AD

“Hey, it’s their site, and they can do what they want!”

That’s true.

It’s also completely irrelevant.

“Why?”

Here’s why:

If BoingBoing and Mark Frauenfelder want to posture as defenders of free expression on the Internet and everywhere else, that’s their privilege.

If BoingBoing and Mark Frauenfelder want to ban me for making a comment that criticizes them for having run a deeply flawed article on their own website, that’s also their privilege.

But if they choose to do both at once, they’re going to look like a bunch of fools, and it’s MY privilege to point that out!

Oh, and by the way, whether you agree with me or not, you can contact Mark Frauenfelder at mark@boingboing.net and let him know what you think!

Mainstream media corruption is nothing new!

Leftists, leading America’s foreign policy astray for over 45 years and counting…

Visit this article, and read it all:
Who Owns the Vietnam War?

…Lately, however, thanks to a growing body of evidence and careful work by scholars aided by first-hand accounts from former North Vietnamese and Vietcong participants, a much more comprehensive picture has begun to emerge, one that challenges the conventional wisdom from start to finish.

Among the new generation of historians of the Vietnam war, important debates and differences still remain – for example, over the efficacy of American tactics of counterinsurgency and pacification. But they overwhelmingly agree on one point: the old account is a myth, and no longer stands up to scrutiny. It is worthwhile reviewing some of the main findings of the new scholarship before returning to the question of their relevance, if any, to our present struggle in Iraq and to the President’s warning on August 23.

(H/T to Cecil and The Belmont Club)

Also, please visit the other links at The Belmont Club:

• Sunday Reading

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Posted by mobile phone:
Details about protest in NYC on Foehammer’s Anvil

Also see: September 11, 2001: Eternal Memory

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