“I will frankly admit I find it increasingly difficult to share the same planet as leftists. That’s because I believe they are all insane. They say such things as “We all belong to the state” or “It takes a village to raise a child” with a straight face. One might say that a North Korean belongs to the state, but an American?

To tell the truth, the only way I have found to cope with liberals is by ridiculing them every chance I get.”

Burt Prelutsky then goes on the describe many phenomena he sees and his Coping Mechanisms. He touches the Gonell late term abortion examples, the CBC looking for an ‘any but white’ host for an afternoon TV show for kids, the recent study about hospital treatment costs, the Benghazi situation, and the high esteem in which certain politicians are held despite being deep in political scandal muck. There is much to puzzle over.

“politicians and judges constantly misapply the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment in an effort to rid the public square of religious references. Did our forefathers really intend to make an invocation of God before supper roll call at Virginia Military Institute unconstitutional? Is an Air Force commander announcing a base chapel program the same thing as the government establishing a religion? Who better to interpret the Constitution than those who wrote it and passed it into law?”

“The only way to purport a purely secular government today is to reinterpret the words of the founding documents in a way the Founders did not originally intend. The legal and correct way to change the Constitution is to amend, not reinterpret it. The fear of the Danbury Baptist Association in 1802 is being realized in 2013: If the government has power to grant religious freedom, the government has power to take it away. Today, “separation of church and state,” is being used as a weapon to intimidate military leaders to tread lightly concerning religion or get sued or prosecuted by the Uniform Code of Military Justice. Our military members fight to guarantee our freedoms. Now it is time we stand up and fight to guarantee theirs.”

“it’s been personally disheartening to stand by and watch this beloved American icon as it is pressured and attacked by those who have little or no stake in the organization or interest in its mission. Their actions raise the question: Who really cares about what is best for the Scouts?”

Two cases: Hiss-Chambers and the Rosenbergs. Both deemed innocent by the Left; both found guilty; prosecutions labeled persecutions of the innocent by those in denial. Scott Johnsom talks about commies and their friends and two books about these cases.

“Much of the opposition to Weinstein…derived not from the facts uncovered by his work, but from the need to demonize his findings lest the public realize that there really was an internal Soviet apparatus seeking to discover our nation’s top secrets. And primary in that effort was the Nation, which editorialized that Weinstein had “misquoted and misrepresented” sources and written “false history.” Weinstein, added the Nation, had “aligned himself with those Cold War intellectuals who presumably sleep better at night secure in the knowledge that there was an internal Communist espionage menace.””

Denial in these cases means trashing anything that threatens the desired view. Sound familiar?

The Russians have retailiated. They have banned 18 Americans from their country because the U.S. banned Russian officials involved in the 2009 death of a lawyer in Moscow who was representing a whistleblower about government fraud. John Yoo, a frequent target of the left in the U.S. was one of those banned and he addressed the false equivalence the Russians (and the Left) have sought to create.

“There is no moral equivalence between the United States and Russia in their treatment of prisoners and detainees. The most obvious difference is in what constitutes “torture” in the Magnitsky case and the American war on terrorism. In the former, even according to Russian officials, Magnitsky was kept in squalid prison conditions, physically beaten by guards and denied medical treatment for serious gall bladder and pancreatic problems. All contributed, it appears, to his death. There is also speculation that he might have been murdered. Yet his treatment should not be considered anomalous. Conditions in Russian prisons are notoriously abominable and the treatment of prisoners routinely brutal.

Antiwar critics likewise claim that the U.S. has similarly mistreated and tortured al Qaeda leaders. This is a willful misreading of the record.”

Scott Johnson tells the story as John Yoo fulfills a dream. He always “dreamed of being declared persona non grata by Moscow.” What the story illustrates, though, is the very common false equivalence used to condemn the U.S. Words such as ‘torture’ lose much of their impact as illustrated in this example. Compare and contrast the treatment that Magnitsky received to the prisoners in Guantanamo Bay. Compare and contrast the reasons that these people were imprisoned in the first place. Excusing extreme behavior and going fanatic over mild behavior distorts definitions, belies integrity, and defines deviancy down to where it is simply a matter of one’s fantasies and not of any substance.

The instruction used to be to hate the sin but love the sinner. No more it seems. Emmett Tyrell describes why he thinks the left really, really hates us. Us, of course, is anyone not in sync with the left. “They were always irritable. In fact, I wonder which came first: the irritable disposition or the crazy ideological desiderata. At any rate, here we are in 2013, and boy, do they hate us.”

It is very difficult to have an intellectually honest debate with someone whose emotions distort reality and distract from reason.

A good example of the moral equivalency nonsense that shows up as an assumption or given truth is provided by Via Meadia: Japan walks back official whitewashing of war record.

“finding a way to come to terms with the evils done by the Imperial Japanese Army is a very real dilemma for some in Japan today—much as it still is for many Turks regarding the Armenian Genocide, or even for some Germans and the Holocaust (and, we hasten to add, some Americans and the legacy of slavery).”

What is telling here is that it puts slavery in the early U.S. history as something unique, tragic, and outrageous on a par with mass murder and worse. That ignores history. It also ignores the fact that slavery is endemic even today in some places but it is what is considered ‘educated’ these days. There are many lapses of intellectual integrity in this sort of allegation. One is that of singling out the U.S. as villain, another is taking historical events out of their context, another is conflating evils as equivalent as a means to avoid making proper judgements, and another is selection of evildoers that tends to whitewash the true evil.

It’s got to be experts who opine in a way we like – like the climate change alarmist climatologists. Social violence is another issue where the plea is for some experts, but only those who can help rationalize irrational opinions.

“How can we “gun people” honestly be expected to come to the table with anti-gunners when anti-gunners are willfully stupid about guns, and openly hate, despise and ridicule those of us who own them? There must first be respect and trust — even just a little — before there can be even the beginnings of legitimate discussion of the issue.”

The president is making assertions to young folks that ‘the government is your friend’ and all this talk about tyrany is bogus. That presumes an ignorance about the discussions and insights of those who founded the country.

“An anti-gunner reads a book though, or sees a documentary on TV — or perhaps worst of all, gets a degree — and suddenly they have the almighty authority and expertise to tell us how we ought to live our lives, replying to our objections to their onslaught by throwing pictures of dead kids in our faces and commanding us to shut up, because we’re just a bunch of stupid radicals and liberals alone know what’s best for America.”

Barry Snell at the Iowa State Daily discusses Walking the dragon — How Feinstein fiddled while America burned. Compare and contrast how the sides of the gun control argument differ and see why there are so many who think there may be a rather violent rebellion somewhere down the road. Father knows best is one thing but government knows best is entirely another, especially when intellectual integrity goes out the door in trying to support viewpoints.

Ann Coulter does the background work to lay it on the table.

“You can tell the conservatives liberals fear most because they start being automatically referred to as “discredited.” Ask Sen. Ted Cruz. But no one is called “discredited” by liberals more often than the inestimable economist John Lott, author of the groundbreaking book More Guns, Less Crime: Understanding Crime and Gun Control Laws.”

If you want names and numbers, check out why AC calls Lott America’s most feared economist. The tactics described are common and nearly indicative of which side of the political spectrum one chooses. One one side, careful research that stands up to scrutiny and on the other, name calling and manufactured results.

It’s a common management problem in service performance evaluation. Joanne notes on educator who is saying good-bye to the school assembly line due to feeling like “Lucy Ricardo working on the candy assembly line, but without the benefit of eating all that chocolate.”

The widget effect is the result of seeing people doing service activities as things that can be tweaked and twiddled for optimum efficiency. This is the attempt to move the time-efficiency studies developed for assembly lines in the early 20th century to activities that are not by nature assembly lines. That is part of the idea that when you have a hammer, everything is a nail. In this case, you have a measurement paradigm and everything must be made to fit it. The result is often not pretty.

It appears that the Sacramento Bee editor defends Rick Perry “BOOM!” cartoon and, in doing so, illustrates the tactic of doubling down on a dishonest assertion and rationalizing that dishonesty by diversion. The rationalization is to assert that the objection to the cartoon is ” being disrespectful for the victims of this tragedy” and a personal assault on the governor’s “disregard for worker safety.” Those assertions personalize the issue, create a straw man, and completely ignores the actual message of the actual cartoon.

The FAA’s attempt to punish the public with the Sequestor, an idea the administration put up for budget compromise, is one example. The fertilizer plant explosion in Texas is providing another. See Democrats try to cash in on Texas Fatalities.

The attempt here is to brand economic success as a failure in order to defeat the idea that pro-business government, like in Texas, is bad while anti-business government, like in California, is good. This is related to the ‘schools need more money’ mantra that has been going on for years. The ignorance, intentional or otherwise, involved in pushing such ideas is (or should be) astounding as a phenomena itself.

“I am a general surgeon with more than three decades in private clinical practice. And I am fed up. Since the late 1970s, I have witnessed remarkable technological revolutions in medicine, from CT scans to robot-assisted surgery. But I have also watched as medicine slowly evolved into the domain of technicians, bookkeepers, and clerks.”

Dr. Singer describes How Government Killed the Medical Profession.

There is a lot that has roots in the big organization management evaluation struggle. How do you get an objective assessment of value for something that does not have sharp boundaries?

There are a number of columns in the Washington Times this morning related to values and virtues, tolerance and bigotry, government and common sense.

STEMBERGER: Scouting is for honor, not sex and politics

“Until recently, the BSA was unwavering in its conviction that these values and principles were “timeless.”

But now those values are under attack. The Boy Scouts are the victims of an aggressive, well-funded and relentless campaign to inject sex and politics into Scouting.”

…

“The real issue is this: Homosexual-rights activists are not satisfied with membership in good standing and being allowed to fully participate like everyone else. They want to be able to openly promote homosexuality.”

HANSON: A nation of promiscuous prudes, America grooves on schizophrenic sexual morality

“Graphic language, nudity and sex are now commonplace in movies and on cable television. At the same time, there is now almost no tolerance for casual and slang banter in the media or the workplace. … Many colleges offer courses on lurid themes from masturbation to prostitution, even as campus sexual-harassment suits over hurtful language are at an all-time high. … The judge determined that it was unfair for those under 16 to be denied access to such emergency contraceptives. However, if vast numbers of girls younger than 16 need after-sex options to prevent unwanted pregnancies, will there be a flood of statutory rape charges lodged against older teenagers who had such consensual relations with younger girls?

… Modern society also resorts to empty, symbolic, moral action when it cannot deal with real problems.

… Not since the late 19th-century juxtaposition of the Wild West with the Victorian East has popular morality been so unbridled and yet so uptight.”

GEORGE: How hostile to religion must the state be? Graduation in a church should pass Supreme Court muster

“the 7th U.S. District Court of Appeals struck down the use of the auditorium as unconstitutional and held that the “religiosity of the space” would cause students to believe that the district was endorsing Christianity. Several judges dissented, arguing that the ruling showed hostility toward churches and would prompt unnecessary lawsuits against school districts across the country.”

DRIESSEN: Double standards for regulators – Feds give themselves a pass for flimsy facts

“blinding reality often has no effect on government programs, and cloaking policies in rhetoric like environmental protection, social justice, renewable energy or sustainable development can grant them enduring approval.

… The examples are legion. If the ruling elites didn’t have double standards, they wouldn’t have any standards at all. Legislators and regulators would never tolerate such behavior in the private sector. Citizens should no longer tolerate it in our government.”

good food for thought.

If you saw headlines about a war hero busted for “rudely displaying” a weapon, you should know that it was a Dad with his son on a ten mile hike needed for a merit badge. See the story at RedState.

Cops need to obey the law, too. They also need to keep in mind that they serve citizens and not vice-versa.

“I have something in common with climate change myself. When I read about myth masquerading as fact, I find that my own temperature starts rising.”

Michael Kirsch thinks medicine and climate change might have some common elements.

“I don’t think that creationism is science and it should not be disguised as such. Global warming, or climate change, however, is more nuanced. While it is inarguable that temperatures have been rising, it is not certain and to what extent human activities are responsible for this. Clearly, this issue has been contaminated by politically correct warriors and those who have an agenda against fossil fuel use. Science, like all scholarship, should be a pursuit of the truth, without a destination in sight. Believing or wanting to believe that man is turning the world’s heat up may sound plausible, but it may not be true.

 

Just because something sounds true and logical, doesn’t make it so. In addition, repeating an opinion like a mantra isn’t sufficient to confer legitimacy on a view. Zealots and partisans gainsay these inconvenient truths.

In the medical universe, much is presented as true, which may be either false or unproved. Consider how many established medical procedures and practices have no underlying science to buttress them. Consider the following examples and decide if you agree that each is a good idea that makes sense.  Do they sound right or are they truly sound?”

Too often, people go off on things that sound right but are not truly sound. They then proceed to rationalize what they think sounds right and that is where the problem comes in. The often miss things like the comparison Kirsch provides between creationism and climate change. That is noting the ‘weak analogy‘ logical fallacy. The use of such fallacies is not restricted to a particular topic but rather to a behavior where trying to figure out what is truly sound is not the goal.

OK: Why should government money go for science, anyway? Sandwalk picked up the chain with Why Do We Do Science?

“Phill Plait of Bad Astronomy hits the nail on the head as far as I’m concerned [Wall Street Journal Editorial Board Member Gets Schooled on Science Funding]. His defense of science should be the primary talking point whenever anyone questions the value of learning about the natural world.”

The idea is a good one, the straw man doesn’t help it. The idea:

“We research the Universe around us because we are curious, inquisitive, intelligent animals. We don’t know what snail mating habits might teach us. That’s why we study it. Maybe it’ll lead into insight on how animals behave, or a new chemical secreted during the process, or to insight on the environment where snails live. Maybe none of that.”

The staw man? It’s those evil conservatives.

“It’s an uphill climb, to be sure; the forces of antiscience are strong and loud. One of them is the Wall Street Journal, which frequently publishes ridiculous OpEds baselessly denying global warming.”

Of course, they couldn’t stick to just “If you don’t engage in the kind of research that Conservatives want, then you won’t get funded” but have to identify a few sample villains with generic topics of dear interest to ideologs – climate change and creationism in these samples. The meme here is also significant because it expresses the anti-capitalism ethos in another straw man. That is that the rationalization for science research is strictly a matter of return on investment. These are characteristics to watch for as they indicate that it is not suppporting ones’ point of view that is paramount but rather demeaning the opposition. That indicates the intellectual integrity is not a priority, either.

John Hinderaker asks Why Aren’t More People Repelled by the Left? The latest episode is about the dancing on the grave of a former Prime Minister.

“Margaret Thatcher’s death has been the latest occasion for the Left to show its true stripes. All across the U.K., there have been demonstrations–vulgar at best, and violent at worst. In Bristol, lefties celebrating a Thatcher “death street party” started fires, destroyed property and battled police”
…
“Here in the U.S., the last similar display from the Left was the Occupy Wall Street movement, but liberal violence and general hatefulness have a long and consistent history.”
…
“I don’t get it. Why aren’t more voters repelled by the constant parade of vulgarity, hate and violence that characterizes modern liberalism?”

it does seem strange but then, there are many who deny the evidence – they are the ‘both sides do it’ camp and will go to dellusional lengths to try to pretend it is so.

Useful tools is the proper appelation. Catholic bishop calls for tighter gun-control to build pro-life culture is an example. The President’s ministers provide more examples.

In this case, you’d think a person who has risen in the Catholic church would be more aware of the folly of trying to foist man’s vices and sins on his tools. Pope John Paul II is cited in a manner that the Bishop should carefully consider. The Catholic church used to have a reputation for sound thinking with careful definition of terms and a solid background and logic. This news story is about a Bishop who denies his church, both in teaching and in terms on intellectual integrity.

Three articles at Frontpage Mag point out how the first ammendment is being assaulted. ACLU Sues 70-Year-Old Christian Flower Shop Owner for Refusing to Participate in Gay Wedding follows on a previous incident where a photographer was required to do business with clients his religion refused to recognize.

“Homosexual activists are not looking to live and let live. They are out to force their way on everyone else at any cost. Even shamelessly going after a 70-year-old woman who was only following her faith.”

The Boy Scouts are another target. This example is California, again. California Democrats Target Boy Scouts for Trying to Prevent Sexual Abuse

“Can anyone really claim with a straight face that keeping men who have same-sex fetish issues out of a position where they can supervise boys won’t stop a single case of sexual abuse?”

This time the idea is to deny nonprofit exemptions if an organization doesn’t toe the government’s religious edicts.

Then there’s a book review: Persecuted on All Sides: Christians in the Modern World (Amazon affiliate link)

“The authors chronicle in detailed fashion all manner of religious repression against Christians, such as laws inhibiting conversion to Christianity, state destruction of unapproved churches, torture of Christian dissidents, and often socially sanctioned vigilante violence.”

The reason that the U.S. Constitution has a prohibition about laws establishing religion has much to do with the sort of effort that can be seen in the attempts to establish such laws. Despite the dimissal of ‘bible thumpers’, the matters of morality and ethics do hinge on established moral codes and the Bible is the pre-eminent source. It is one thing to tolerate deviations from that code but it is entirely another to foist participation in such deviations on those who do hold the Christian ethos dear.

The issues today are just like kids pushing the line to see how far they can get. For the most part, things like murder and theft are considered a bit too far (except in certain social endeavors). Things like animal sacrifice are a bit too wierd. That is why issues like changing the definition of marriage are at the forefront. That can be assaulted on in terms of all sorts of events from small impact laws to subtle changes in established concepts.

The sad part is that this is a ‘been there done that’ why can’t people learn from history episode.