ONE AMERICAN LEFTIST FINALLY GETS IT (MORE OR LESS)

Martin Peretz, a moderate American Leftist, has some remarkably perceptive comments on the state of his "liberal" brethren. Just a few excerpts:

"It is liberalism that is now bookless and dying..... Ask yourself: Who is a truly influential liberal mind in our culture? Whose ideas challenge and whose ideals inspire? Whose books and articles are read and passed around? There's no one, really....

even in the morally self-satisfied Scandinavian and Low Countries, the assuring left-wing bromides are no longer believed.....

Sharpton is an inciter of racial conflict. To him can be debited the fraudulent and dehumanizing scandal around Tawana Brawley (conflating scatology and sex), the Crown Heights violence between Jews and blacks, a fire in Harlem, the protests around a Korean grocery store in Brooklyn, and on and on. Yet the liberal press treats Sharpton as a genuine leader, even a moral one, the trickster as party statesman......

virtually nothing has been done to make sure that children of color--and other children, too, since the crisis in our educational system cuts across race and class--are receiving a different and better type of schooling, in science and in literacy, than those now coming into our colleges. This is not about Head Start. This is about a wholesale revamping of teaching and learning. The conservatives have their ideas, and many of them are good, such as charter schools and even vouchers. But give me a single liberal idea with some currency, even a structural notion, for transforming the elucidation of knowledge and thinking to the young. You can't.....

This will not curb the liberal complaint. That complaint is not a matter of circumstance. It is a permanent affliction of the liberal mind. It is not a symptom; it is a condition. And it is a condition related to the desperate hopes liberals have vested in the United Nations. That is their lodestone. But the lodestone does not perform. It is not a magnet for the good. It performs the magic of the wicked. It is corrupt, it is pompous, it is shackled to tyrants and cynics. It does not recognize a genocide when the genocide is seen and understood by all. Liberalism now needs to be liberated from many of its own illusions and delusions. Let's hope we still have the strength....."

Belmont Club has a fuller commentary on the Peretz article and makes this excellent point:

"Paradoxically, dogmatism is rooted in relativism more than in the belief that real truth is discoverable. For as long as the truth is believed to be "out there"; it will be sought. When its existence is doubted none will venture into the dark. Under those conditions, we get exactly what Peretz describes: an illogical attachment to old formulations of the 1960s, which can be uttered only because they are hallowed."

In other words, the Leftist intellectual sickness is so great that it is the very believers in there being no such thing as right and wrong who are most fanatical in enforcing particular ideas of right and wrong -- under the banner of "political correctness". Fierce censorship is practiced in the name of "tolerance". It is the relativists who are most dogmatic. It is the supposed opponents of the "status quo" who are themselves stuck in a rut. Orwell would understand.

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ELSEWHERE

A victory for free speech: Under the threat of legal action, the University of Nevada has blinked in its year-long confrontation with Prof. Hoppe. It was a close-run thing, though. Prof. Hoppe is not letting them off the hook, though, and is seeking compensation for their campaign against him: "UNLV President Carol Harter tried to end the standoff between professor Hans-Hermann Hoppe and administrators Friday by removing a critical letter from his personnel file. "Professor Hoppe does not assert that materials he presents are the opinions of UNLV, nor has he ever purported to speak for UNLV. Whether anyone in the university agrees or disagrees with Professor Hoppe's theories or his opinions is not ultimately relevant," Harter wrote in a statement sent to students and media. "Teaching is of its nature and origin provocative." But Hoppe and his attorneys weren't satisfied with the proposed resolution. They said they also want an apology and a year-long sabbatical for the professor".

The racist "Far Right" give me a lot of laughs. They have been doing so for a long time, in fact. One thing that they absolutely HATE is the term "Judeo-Christian". Why? because they see Jews as the racial enemy and Christianity as "us". So you can't have the two together, you see. I therefore posted on one of the sites they frequent this extract from an excellent conservative article by Dennis Prager -- who is a Jew. I did it in the full knowledge that seeing anything by a Jew there -- no matter how sensible -- would evoke an outpouring of rage. I was not disappointed -- as you will see if you read the comments. Being a totally incorrigible tease, therefore, I also added in the following as a comment on the comments: "The objections above to the notion "Judeo-Christian" amuse me. Has anyone noticed who the guys were who wrote BOTH parts of our holy book? And I guess that Christ guy was an Anglo-Saxon? Christianity IS Jewish! It's the evangelical sect of Judaism". I can imagine the spluttering at that comment!

Good news for Boeing: "Top European discount airline Ryanair ordered new planes worth more than $4 billion from Boeing Co. on Thursday as part of an ambitious plan to double its passenger numbers by 2012. Dublin-based Ryanair, which aims to become Europe's largest airline in seven years, said it had ordered 70 Boeing 737-800 aircraft and had taken options to buy a further 70".

Tristram Hunt is a pathetic British academic who hates America's large homes. He fears that Britain might go down the same path. Large homes are only for the rich apparently. Excerpt: "What hits one first about exurbia is its ugliness. Laid out by competing developers, disparate 'cookie-cutter' housing developments (often christened with faux Wild West prefixes such as Vale, Ranch or Stable) wander into the distance, devoid of any master-plan. Self-contained behind electronic gates, each house seamlessly resembles the others in a conveyor belt of McMansions".

Carnival of the Vanities is up again with much good reading.

My latest posting on MarxWords shows that Marx despised poor people. My latest posting on "A scripture blog" looks at Revelations 20 and the lake of fire.

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE and LEFTISTS AS ELITISTS. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here

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That power only, not principles, is what matters to Leftists is perfectly shown by the 2004 Kerry campaign. They put up a man whose policies seemed to be 99% the same as George Bush's even though the Left have previously disagreed violently with those policies. "Whatever it takes" is their rule.

Leftists are phonies. For most of them all that they want is to sound good. They don't care about doing good. That's why they do so much harm. They don't really care what the results of their policies are as long as they are seen as having good intentions.

The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist"

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