Anti-Americanism

Fourteen Days of Vileness

by

At about this time every year, Texans and others mark the anniversary of the siege of the Alamo (Feb 23–March 6, 1836), sometimes referred to as the thirteen days of glory.

At about the same time, for the last several years, college campuses in the U.S. and elsewhere in the western world play host to something called Israeli Apartheid Week…a very long week, apparently running from March 7 to March 20: indeed, we could (and I will) refer to it as the fourteen days of vileness.

Information and analysis concerning the 14 days of vileness can be obtained from Phyllis Chesler, CAMERA, Judith Levy, and many other sources,

Hostility toward Israel has become a defining characteristic of the “progressive” Left, and the recent NPR case shows just how acceptable anti-Israel attitudes–even extremely strident ones–have become to the mainline liberal establishment. Especially when they don’t think anyone is listening.

Read more

The Puritan Minister, The Pox, and How Much We Assume is Wrong

by

The Puritans begin each semester. Their beliefs and modes of thought foreshadow much that comes after. Their emphasis upon the word understood, translated, interpreted – leads to reasoned argument; they do personal interpretation and respect biblical authority, they do introspection and encourage humility. These naturally lead to experimentation, scientific skepticism. How a Puritan Cotton Mather and a figure now seen as personifying the scientific method and American Enlightenment Benjamin Franklin reacted to the 1721 small pox epidemic in Boston is the subject of the short, quite readable The Pox and the Covenant by Tony Williams. The controversy over inoculation split the town, undercut the old traditions, and show us the universals that moved them and now move us. Reason, pride, passion, feeling for our fellows entered into a controvrsy which also challenges our assumptions, our sense of who Cotton Mather was and who Benjamin Franklin was.

The battle set authorities scientific and religious against one another. William Douglass, the most credentialed Boston doctor, countered Boylston, one of the most innovative of the American-trained practitioners. More important to our understanding of the period, perhaps, and to my lit class, it also set Cotton Mather (with his father Increase), the leading Puritan ministers, scholars and authorities of their day, against the Franklin brothers. The brilliant Benjamin was a mere apprentice but already the witty author of the Dogood letters. His brother, James, found that encouraging and exacerbating the controversy increased the popularity of the New England Courant, their new paper: what the Iran hostage crisis was for ABC’s nightly report, this battle was for the Frankllins.

Read more

When virtue becomes a vice…

by

As for me, I prefer to live (as best i can) by the Beatitudes, and under the US Constitution and Bill of Rights.

Obviously, Leftists’ “Hate Mongering” Caused the Frankfurt Shooting

by

A shooter has opened fire on a bus carrying US military personnel at the Frankfurt airport. It looks like he killed the civilian bus driver and one American soldier. The killer reportedly “shouted Islamic slogans” as he fired.

In the past, I would have thought only the shooter himself, and perhaps some radical clerics from the Islamic world, bore any moral responsibility for the crime. However, our intellectual betters on the Left have graciously condescended to explain to us all that even seemingly innocuous political speech can drive individuals to lash out violently, and that therefore we all must hold those who engage in violence-promoting political speech strictly responsible for the violence itself.

For example, prior to the shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords on January 8th of this year, I would have naively assumed that merely using the common motif of a crosshair in a political graphic could not possibly influence anyone enough to actually cause them to commit murderous violence.

Boy, was I wrong. The Left were nobly quick to educate us.

No less a luminary than that Nobel Prize-winning engine of reason Paul Krugman leaped into action within a couple of hours of the shooting itself. Krugman tore himself away from his glorious work to eruditely link the deceptively innocent graphic, and other non-leftists’ criticisms of the Left,  to the motivations of the shooter. Who can forget his sage sermon admonishing us inferiors to accept moral responsibility and mind our tongues?

You know that Republicans will yell about the evils of partisanship whenever anyone tries to make a connection between the rhetoric of Beck, Limbaugh, etc. and the violence I fear we’re going to see in the months and years ahead. But violent acts are what happen when you create a climate of hate. And it’s long past time for the GOP’s leaders to take a stand against the hate-mongers.

Krugman and the other leftists really opened my eyes. Who knew that political speech was so dangerous? I certainly didn’t but then I was educated in the sciences and not the liberal-arts, so my mind is obviously too puny to understand these things.

So, when I read about a European Muslim shooting at American soldiers, I immediately applied the lessons taught to me by the wise and benevolent Krugman.

Read more

Egypt: tear gas and hotels

by

[ cross-posted from Brainstormers on the Web ]

Here are two data-points to drop into the mind-pool as we think about current events in Egypt, the Middle East in general, and the way the world turns.

DoubleQuotes is my name for the format I’m using here, which I came up with a few years back on Brainstorms. The idea is simply to generate fresh insights by juxtaposing two thoughts be they images, quotes, or even equations (I don’t have the technical chops for music or film clips yet) — in condensed, haiku-like form.

Think of them as pebbles dropped in a pond, watch the ripples…

[ note to ChicagoBoyz readers: I’ll say more about Brainstorms and Brainstormers on the Web in a week or two, once the “on the Web” blog gets under way ]