Leftism

Well, at Least We Know ABC is Immune to Intellectual Embarassment

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Creeping Chavezismo in the MSM in regard to President Obama. From Drudge:

On the night of June 24, the media and government become one, when ABC turns its programming over to President Obama and White House officials to push government run health care — a move that has ignited an ethical firestorm! Highlights on the agenda:

ABCNEWS anchor Charlie Gibson will deliver WORLD NEWS from the Blue Room of the White House.

The network plans a primetime special — ‘Prescription for America’ — originating from the East Room, exclude opposing voices on the debate.

Imagine if ABC news delivered a report on religion from the Vatican and excluded non-Catholics. What message would that send? This is an amazing level of sycophancy toward a president by a major media outlet, even a Democratic president.Let us hear no more whining about bias on FOX or talk radio, this stunt by ABC amounts to unpaid advertisng and a de facto government TV program. Why is this happening? Simple Obama-worship at ABC? Unlikely.

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They Don’t Call It “Fisk-ing” For Nothing

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Robert Fisk (yes, that Robert Fisk) is apparently in Iran. As is routine for Fisk with his delusional world view, he finds himself shocked at the violence directed against demonstrators.  

Robert Fisk, a writer and journalist who was observing the rally, told Al Jazeera he had heard shoots fired  and seen demonstrators break out into a run, but that things  had continued to be  largely peaceful.
 
“It’s extraordinary to me that anyone would start shooting at such a huge crowd of people,” he said.

Gee, Fisky, do you think it might have something to do with the people doing the shooting being are… what’s the technical term for it… oh, right, Evil?

It says a lot about Fisk’s world view that he finds it  extraordinary  that a brutal, authoritarian regime would open fire on protestors. It explains a lot as well.

Civic Amputations

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Via Instapundit comes this story on plans to bulldoze large sections of 50 failing cities in Great Lakes states. That alone is enough to make one weep.  A mere 40 years ago, these cities were still the economic titans of all the earth and now they are  imploded  wastelands.  

Even more shocking and frightening is the strange, delusional state that seems to have settled over the political thinking of the majority of the people in the region. They seem to have no conception that their own political choices destroyed their communities. Worse, they’re rationalizing their own self-inflicted failure as a good thing.  

Here’s Dan Kildare, Obama’s point man for the plan:

“The obsession with growth is sadly a very American thing. Across the US, there’s an assumption that all development is good, that if communities are growing they are successful. If they’re shrinking, they’re failing.”

What the HELL is wrong with these people?

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Do Women and Minorities Owe Allegiance to Leftists?

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An interesting thought in this comment  on a post at Don Surber’s blog.  

As liberals see it, they are 100% responsible for every advance or progress made by either women or blacks. Therefore these two groups “owe” liberals, and if a woman or black person dares to be a conservative, they are savaged as somehow ungrateful and treasonous. As they see it, every woman in this article owes their career to Gloria Steinem, and therefore they have a moral obligation to agree with her on any point Steinem wishes.

I think the commenter might be on to something.

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Disgusted Conservatives

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Ever since the days of Karl Marx, leftists have tried to stigmatize the political beliefs of non-leftists as stemming from some irrational pathology.

Marxists developed the idea of “false consciousness”  to explain why everyone in the world didn’t immediately recognize the obvious correctness of Marxist ideas. Later, leftists of all stripes resorted to explanations based on Freudian pseudo-science to “explain” that conservatives rejected the obviously correct leftist ideas because of sexual repression or other Freudian mechanisms we now know to be without any scientific basis.  

Today, we see an increasing number of “studies” that seek to link non-leftist beliefs to mindless biological factors. The latest comes from political scientists at Cornel University.  

The press release from Cornel says:

Are you someone who squirms when confronted with slime, shudders at stickiness or gets grossed out by gore? Do crawly insects make you cringe or dead bodies make you blanch?
 
If so, chances are you’re more conservative — politically, and especially in your attitudes toward gays and lesbians — than your less-squeamish counterparts, according to two Cornell University studies.
 
Liberals and conservatives disagree about whether disgust has a valid place in making moral judgments, Pizarro noted. Conservatives have argued that there is inherent wisdom in repugnance; that feeling disgusted about something — gay sex between consenting adults, for example — is cause enough to judge it wrong or immoral, even lacking a concrete reason. Liberals tend to disagree, and are more likely to base judgments on whether an action or a thing causes actual harm.

This study [PDF]  clearly fits the historical pattern of stigmatizing conservatives as making political decisions based on thoughtless gut reactions while intelligent, educated leftists make decisions with emotionless logic.  

I can say a lot of things about this study and the obvious unconscious biases it reveals, but for the sake of brevity in this post I will confine myself to examining only the study’s basic methodology, the press release’s assertions, the obvious contradictory evidence.  

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