Political Philosophy

“The overall impression one gets is that the Senator doesn’t really care about the positions he takes, as long as he gets to be President.”

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A comment on the latest presidential debate by Jonathan Lipow, Oberlin College, in a press release from Economists for McCain:

As for healthcare, Sen. Obama ceaselessly attacks Sen. McCain for advocating the elimination of tax breaks for employer-provided health insurance. It is difficult to square this position with that of Obama’s chief economic advisor, Jason Furman, who recently published a paper that argues that this tax break is a scam that benefits the rich while actually making it more difficult for lower income people to obtain insurance. Once again, it is difficult to understand why Obama is ignoring the views of his own advisors. The overall impression one gets is that the Senator doesn’t really care about the positions he takes, as long as he gets to be President.

Read the whole thing.

(If you google “economists for mccain” the top result is a link to a page on the Obama campaign’s web site. The real link to Economists for McCain is found only several links down the Google search results page. I don’t know if this happens because the Obama people are more search-engine savvy or because Google is biased in favor of Obama, but with Google politically-sensitive search results seem always to be either neutral or to break in favor of the Left. I’ll be interested to see if Google does some kind of celebratory logo change on the day after an Obama victory. No doubt Google would receive little anti-trust or other regulatory scrutiny under an Obama administration.)

Moral Shower

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Sometimes I wish a thing such as a “moral shower” existed, some combination of water and magical soap that could remove the sense of moral taint and utter revulsion. Today is one of those times. I’ve got moral slime all over me and I can’t get it off.  

It started when I bought a used bicycle on Craigslist.

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Talk About Cognitive Dissonance

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Count up the innocent dead. Measure human misery, pain, and despair. Pile the corpses high.

The accounting makes it very clear that Communism is the greatest tragedy, the most murderous blight, in all of human history.

And yet, for some reason, the Left doesn’t seem to care. Liberal ideology is always worthy no matter the body count. It seems that the only real crime is in opposing their pet political philosophies.

Joseph McCarthy is a demon in their eyes, an odious and insidious monster. The fact that history has proven that some of his charges were valid is carefully ignored, as are the mountains of stinking corpses left behind by their favorite dictators and totalitarian regimes.

To be completely candid with you, dear reader, I have a hard time understanding why. How obvious does it have to be, anyway?

A recent article at The American Thinker sheds some light on this puzzle. It seems that the majority of educators, people who should be smart enough to know better, simply refuse to mention these undeniable historical facts to their students.

“This stuff isn’t rocket science. It is easy to teach, if the professor desires. The problem is that it isn’t being taught. Consequently, Americans today do not know why communism is such a devastating ideology, at both the level of plain economic theory and in actual historical practice. It is a remarkably hateful system, based on literal hatred and targeted annihilation of entire classes and groups of people.”

The author of the article, Paul Kengor, also explains why this refusal to pass on important details concerning the recent past has done much to create the situation we find facing us today.

“What does it all mean for November 2008? It means that millions of modern Americans, when they hear that Barack Obama has deep roots with communist radicals like Bill Ayers and Frank Marshall Davis, don’t care; they don’t get it. Moreover, the leftist establishment — from academia to media to Hollywood — will not help them get it. To the contrary, the left responds to these accusations by not only downplaying or dismissing them but by ridiculing or even vilifying them, given the left’s reflexive anti-anti-communism. The left will create bad guys out of the anti-communists who are legitimately blowing the whistle on the real bad guys.”

I never had a problem telling good from bad. It is a pity the Left does.

Quote of the Day

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Conjuring images of the medieval church or the Kremlin persecuting dissidents is delicious, but it comes from times and places where very few people even had access to the information that the academy was exposed to. Those controlling authorities could actually hope to keep certain opinions from spreading by applying pressure at a very few places. That world has been disappearing for years. Anyone can get ahold of the ideas of Foucault, or Trotsky, or Derrida at the touch of a button now. Where unavailability is still a problem, ironically, are precisely those areas where those ideas are in ascendance.
 
This is why online learning and other consumer-driven postsecondary education is pushing them out. Prestigious universities are losing prestige, not because Americans are anti-intellectual, but because they are anti-intelligentsia, anti-academy. Even George Bush reads Camus nowadays. The figure of The Professor in comic books and Gilligan’s Island, a person who knows much about all important subjects, does not even work as comedy or stereotype anymore. People chuckled about the comedic exaggeration of Russell Johnson’s character then – now they would fail to find it funny at all, except as some sort of retro thing. People have access to the information themselves and know that humanities professors are often not all that smart. Smarter than average people, perhaps, and trained in particular specialties, but not dealing with subjects far beyond the ken of mortals. That is in fact why these disciplines have developed their own coded vocabularies, to identify outsiders rapidly. They can no longer rely on their superior knowledge to do that for them. It’s too easy for a talented amateur to join the conversation after a little work.
 
There is no need to censor the academy. They are making themselves increasingly irrelevant. The entrenched, government-funded educators at younger levels is more worrisome.

–Assistant Village Idiot

Foster’s Clip – and Others Floating Out There

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Another comment to yet another interesting post by Foster.   (The advantage I have over some of our commentors is that I can put up a post when I realize I’m getting too long-winded and too off-topic.)

Palin’s high energy may not  rescue the McCain candidacy but at least it’s enlivening.   Obama appears to have energized some passions in  Manhatten as well as across the country,  if  dulling other  civil & communal qualities.    Transferring religious fervor  to the political leads to  some strange results.   Of course, that is why political fervor is both compelling – and disturbing.    Belmont Club discusses one.

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