[This post only provides reference materials for a subsequent post. Comments are disabled.]
Leftism
Non-Leftist Reality Versus Leftist Fantasy
Reason Hit & Run has a good post defending Milton Friedman against leftists’ charges that his ideas contributed to the current financial crisis. I made the following comment:
Leftist always claim that the economic crisis du jour indicates the failure of the free market. Embedded in the assertion is the unstated premise that if leftist ran everything, we would never have economic crises. This in turn reveals the leftist’s wildly exaggerated sense of their own understanding of the economy and everything else.
The left’s critique of Friedman in this context is especially silly because I’m pretty sure setting up giant government sponsored enterprises to buy up half the residential mortgages in the country and thereby distorting the markets assessment of risk, isn’t a plan that Friedman would have come up with.
The left doesn’t actually have an developed system of thought regarding the economy. They can’t actually explain why the real world political process will systematically make better decisions than the free-market. Instead, they simply point to any reversals in the real economy, regardless of cause, and then assert that in their imaginations, leftist politicians could have done better.
It’s hard to argue against people’s imagination. You end up with a discussion much like two D&D geeks arguing over whether a dwarf with a +10 axe could take an Elf with a vorpal sword.
Leftists are fantasy driven. They create elaborate fantasies and then force everyone else to argue for reality against the fantasies. The real-world system always comes out the worse in the comparison for the same reason that the people we have sex with in our fantasies are usually better looking than the people we have sex with in real life.
Since When?
RealClearPolitics via Instapundit:
Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., for example, when asked on “Face the Nation” to respond to Rush Limbaugh’s and Newt Gingrich’s comments about Sotomayor, said, “That’s an absolutely terrible thing to throw around. Based on that statement — that one word ‘better than’ (sic) — to call someone a racist is just terrible and I would hope that Republicans would not do this.
I had to stop laughing before I could post this. Since when do leftists consider it terrible to accuse some of being racist, sexist, homophobic, etc. based on the flimsiest evidence?
Leftists casually accuse people who disagree with them of having the vilest motivations imaginable.
Watch The Goode Family
ABC has a new animated comedy by “King of the Hill” creator Mike Judge that takes a satirical look at faddish leftism. Even if you don’t usually watch these kinds of shows you should watch this one. It’s a riot. This trailer doesn’t begin to do it justice.
My son and I watched the first episode and we had to pause the DVR every couple of minutes so we could stop laughing so hard we couldn’t hear the dialog. The show starts with a shot of a bumper sticker on the back of a Prius that reads, “We support our troops… and their opponents” and just gets more and more humorous from there out.
Judge does a good job of gently poking fun at his subjects without dehumanizing them. Yes, the characters and their views are exaggerated but only compared to real life. They’re not exaggerated compared to most characters on TV. They’re certainly not more exaggerated than the bizarre depictions of social conservatives that one routinely sees on TV, especially on animated shows.
You should watch “The Goode Family” and let ABC know you appreciate some balance in TV’s depiction of various parts of the social spectrum. You can watch the first episode online at ABC’s website.
How Faddish Leftism Kills: Part 2,658,893
While people in Zimbabwe starve, Robert Mugabe’s [sic] “consumer rights group” raids stores that sell genetically modified food. In Zimbabwe, GM plants provide basic staple foods that the country must import. Their loss seriously depletes the food supply.
This is a case in which the intellectual fads of western leftists in rich countries mutate into something lethal in the less sophisticated political systems of the 3rd world. In this case, the hysteria over genetically modified foods promoted by revenue-seeking, activist-corporations (e.g., Greenpeace) in the developed world provides the moral justification for a thug like Mugabe to kill people.