Liberalism - It makes a desert and calls it peace...

...and never, ever says "sorry."

Thus, as a result of Kate's and her pals’ agitation back in the seventies psychiatric and mental health institutions were forever changed.  This culminated in the depositing on the streets of NYC thousands of confused, terrified and seriously disturbed persons left to fend for themselves in the mean streets of The City.  Most people were shocked but the hapless denizens of New York simply shrugged their shoulders and left these poor souls thus deposited to the whims and cruelty of teens, gangs and other bullies.  We've all read the accounts of sick and helpless people being kicked about, murdered, robbed and even set on fire.  Yet, due to my sister's genius for chaos creation, no one, not even the Police Department can lift a finger of mercy to help these persons because it's a "violation of their civil rights" to do so.

As they say, "As New York City goes, so goes the country." And so it was as most of America followed suit and dissembled their mental health institutions and systems.

When I hear the multiple reports of this catastrophe in Santa Barbara my heart swells with sorrow over the people whose lives have been irrevocably altered by the actions of this very sick young man and when I witness (and how I do identify with) the agony of his family who tried so very hard to obtain help for him; the vivid story of Elliot's mother going to the police passionately begging for help.

DO NOT start the usual vilifying of the NRA and the constant claptrap about guns.  Half of the people Elliot Rodger killed last weekend were felled by the knife.  What?  You want to confiscate all knives?  Or make people get permits to own a knife?  Most of the people injured were hurt by his car.  Shall we outlaw cars?  Let's start thinking straight:  Do you seriously want to blame the instrument for the actions of the user?  We may as well blame the keyboard for the poison pen letter or the telephone for the obscene phone call or death threat!!! Make no mistake about it.  It's not guns, not male chauvinism, not white male privilege or male rage.  It was the deconstruction of the mental health system in our country achieved in the seventies and eighties by a mad little gang of meddlers led in their mischief by Kate Millett//

How much of the sadness launched by Kate Millett was enabled by her confreres who wanted to show that they were just as committed and good as crazy Kate?

Did they notice that Kate was a lunatic?  Did that make them re-think wha they had done?

Gorillas in the Mist.

Via Instapundit

//LIFE IN THE BUBBLE: Yale Prof. Surprised To Find That Tea Partiers Are Scientifically Literate, Since He Doesn’t Know Any. “All my impressions come from watching cable tv — & I don’t watch Fox News very often — and reading the ‘paper’ (New York Times daily, plus a variety of politics-focused Internet sites like Huffington Post and POLITICO). I’m a little embarrassed, but mainly, I’m just glad that I no longer hold this particular mistaken view.”

And here’s academia’s insularity, and the GOP’s media problem, both in a nutshell. . . .

Can't wait for the next Republican president to follow this precedent.

Oh, the outrage we will hear!!!!

Jay Carney won't call on Foxnew's Ed Henry:

Talk about your government shutdown. Conservatives would have enjoyed watching liberal TV reporters sputter if President Bush had completely skipped the first row of reporters and picked only friendly reporters, even writers for conservative blog sites. But the media elites would have thrown a major tantrum about censorship -- including Jay Carney in his tenure at Time magazine.

Put the shoe on the other foot, and the liberal media is pretty quiet. President Obama failed to call on TV reporters at his Wednesday press conference, even though he came to The Huffington Post for a shoe-shine question. Then Tommy Christopher at Mediaite pointed out White House press briefer Jay Carney aggressively ignored Ed Henry of Fox News twice at Friday’s briefing, so he walked out:

At Friday afternoon’s long-delayed briefing, Carney had gone through every TV reporter when Ed Henry began to ask his question. He got out “Jay…” before Carney called on The Chicago Tribune‘s [Obama fangirl] Christi Parsons, and as she asked her question, Henry could be seen shaking his head.

Henry tried again on the next question, and when Carney ignored him again, Henry smiled, got up, and walked out. While Fox News hasn’t always gotten a question at presidential press conferences, this was the first time in memory that a Fox News reporter wasn’t called on at a daily briefing.

Henry has sparred noticeably with Carney in recent weeks. This probably wouldn’t have happened to Henry if he’d stayed at CNN!

Obama’s shutdown of TV network reporters may be related to the recent tough questions for Carney from ABC’s Jonathan Karl. (Of course, then ABC won’t show any of that.) Brit Hume told Greta van Susteren that Obama can’t seem to handle tradition: “There’s a long tradition among network correspondents that cover the White House of asking presidents of both parties challenging questions. They may sympathize with the president, but they ask challenging questions. No network correspondents were called on today.”

sadly, I don’t think network reporters always ask challenging questions – not of Obama, and certainly not of Bill Clinton. They have more bravery with the press secretary, but once the Democratic leader’s on stage, it often goes soft.

Academic malpractice

The Wall Street Journal reports on how a college president made the mistake of provoking a conservative philanthropist:

The Klingenstein report nicely captures the illiberal or fallacious aspects of this campus doctrine, but the paper's true contribution is in recording some of its absurd manifestations at Bowdoin. For example, the college has "no curricular requirements that center on the American founding or the history of the nation." Even history majors aren't required to take a single course in American history. In the History Department, no course is devoted to American political, military, diplomatic or intellectual history—the only ones available are organized around some aspect of race, class, gender or sexuality.

One of the few requirements is that Bowdoin students take a yearlong freshman seminar. Some of the 37 seminars offered this year: "Affirmative Action and U.S. Society," "Fictions of Freedom," "Racism," "Queer Gardens" (which "examines the work of gay and lesbian gardeners and traces how marginal identities find expression in specific garden spaces"), "Sexual Life of Colonialism" and "Modern Western Prostitutes."

Regarding Bowdoin professors, the report estimates that "four or five out of approximately 182 full-time faculty members might be described as politically conservative." In the 2012 election cycle, 100% of faculty donations went to President Obama. Not that any of this matters if you have ever asked around the faculty lounge.

"A political imbalance [among faculty] was no more significant than having an imbalance between Red Sox and Yankee fans," sniffed Henry C.W. Laurence, a Bowdoin professor of government, in 2004. He added that the suggestion that liberal professors cannot fairly reflect conservative views in classroom discussions is "intellectually bankrupt, professionally insulting and, fortunately, wildly inaccurate."

Perhaps so. But he'd have a stronger case if, for example, his colleague Marc Hetherington hadn't written the same year in Bowdoin's newspaper that liberal professors outnumber conservatives because conservatives don't "place the same emphasis on the accumulation of knowledge that liberals do."

Are we at the point where liberals believe that "whole swathes" of America are illegitimate because of race and birth?

Liberalism...what a strange, weird trip it's been when an ideology based on rejecting the idea that people are defined by their status at birth finally evolves into a racist system based on birth.

Glen Reynolds writes:

THE WASHINGTON POST FANS THE FLAMES OF RACISM AND SECESSION with this execrable editorial on the Susan Rice confirmation battle:

Could it be, as members of the Congressional Black Caucus are charging, that the signatories of the letter are targeting Ms. Rice because she is an African American woman? The signatories deny that, and we can’t know their hearts. What we do know is that more than 80 of the signatories are white males, and nearly half are from states of the former Confederacy.

Could it be that the Editorial Board of the Washington Post is a pack of pathetic political hacks who’ll engage in racial hate speech in order to advance the White House’s agenda? Apparently, whole swathes of the electorate are illegitimate just because of their birth. If you really believe that, you’re doing more to promote division than anyone who signs a dumb White House petition for secession. Disgraceful.

The Government is the only thing we all "belong to"??????????

Why is it wrong exactly to call the the Democrats "socialists" when they idolize the State?

Here is an excerpt of an inspirational video played to the DNC with the tagline that the government is the only thing we all "belong" to, because, don't you know, we all "belong" to different states, cities and churches.



This is like Obama's "you didn't build that" gaffe, the context sucks. The context being that the government is something outside of us that rains down its riches on us like the Sun King raining down pennies from Heaven.

We don't belong to the government; the government belongs to us.

We don't need to belong to the government; we are all Americans and we all own the history, natural rights, and opportunities that are America.

The Democrats have things ass-backwards.

Religious liberty for everyone except the stupid, superstitious and wrong.

Juicy Ecumenism points out the the apparent irony of the liberal United Methodist Church supporting an illiberal restriction of liberty:

Many prominent evangelicals who approve of contraceptives still understand the assault on religious liberty by COMPELLING Roman Catholic institutions to fund them under Obamacare. Some evangelical schools have joined in litigation against the contraceptive/abortifacient mandate, understanding it poses a threat to all.

Sadly, the chief of the United Methodist General Board of Church and Society enthusiastically endorses this attack on the First Amendment.

“Why is it that the liberty of those who are denied basic health-care services is not at issue?” asked Jim Winkler in his recent weekly email. “Contraception benefits society. It reduces the spread of sexually transmitted diseases, reduces the need for abortions, and assists families to plan the number and spacing of their children.”

Winkler argues for contraception, but he doesn’t really admit the debate is not about contraception but about the federal government FORCING religious institutions to violate their own beliefs. What other religious freedoms is Winkler willing to forego in favor of advancing the coercive federal Welfare & Entitlement State?

In typical fashion for many liberal Protestant elites, he claims that modernity makes traditional Roman Catholics and other believers morally irrelevant. “There were those who argued that racial segregation was biblically mandated, that keeping women out of church leadership was sanctioned by God, and that destruction of the environment is approved by God,” he recalls. “All of these notions were and are wrong.”

To me, what is interesting is the historical continuity of liberal intolerance between the Kulturkampf and today.  In the 1870's it was German liberals who promoted the German state's oppression of Catholics precisely on the ground that Catholics were superstitious, stood in the way of modernity, and ignorant. In my review of Michael B. Gross' s "The War against Catholicism," I observed:

As Gross documents in the writings of liberal politicians and liberal newspapers, liberals viewed the liquidation of Catholicism as a duty imposed on liberals in order to advance the health of German society by removing what liberals believed to be a retarding, regressive force for superstition and ignorance. Because liberals viewed Catholics as being superstitious and ignorant, and Catholicism as being an institution that fostered superstition and ignorance, liberals justified the persecution of Catholics on the grounds that Catholics were not entitled to the benefits of tolerance. Dr. Gross quotes the liberal leader Eduard Windthorst (who was the nephew of the Catholic faction leader, Ludwig Windthorst) that "Freedom protects everything except unfreedom, and tolerance endures everything except intolerance." (id. at p. 259.)
 

The interesting thing, from a historical perspective, is how the liberal argument hasn't changed: it's as if "the intolerance of intolerance" meme is bred into liberalism's genetic source material.

Our editorial position on Obama's recent comment on small business.

Obama fundamentally doesn't understand American constitutional law.

The government exists for the people. The government is the servant of the people. Whatever the government built it built for the people. The people paid for whatever the government built with taxes and, occasionally, blood. The people own whatever the government built.

The people do not exist for the government. The people are not the servants of the government.

We do not owe the government a damn thing.

I paid my share for whatever the government has with my taxes, or my father did, or my grandfather did. I am a co-owner of every damn thing Obama mentioned - the internet, roads, police stations, etc.

Obama: If you've got a business, youdidn't build that, someone else made that happen.

How to put this charitably?

Try this. Liberals believe that we are all serfs of the state. Whatever we have, whatever our earnings, it all belongs to the state, which gave it to us in the first place. Whatever we happen to possess right now is just what the state has allowed us to keep for now.

Here is Obama to explain it to you:



And this is the rest of his speech:

There are a lot of wealthy, successful Americans who agree with me — because they want to give something back. They know they didn’t — look, if you’ve been successful, you didn’t get there on your own. You didn’t get there on your own. I’m always struck by people who think, well, it must be because I was just so smart. There are a lot of smart people out there. It must be because I worked harder than everybody else. Let me tell you something — there are a whole bunch of hardworking people out there. (Applause.)

If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business — you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen. The Internet didn’t get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet.

I am so tired of getting "Sunday punched" by things like this.

I've been a George R.R. Martin fan since I was a teenager.  I like the interbraided complexity of his Game of Thrones.  I purchased the first season of Game of Thrones on DVD and I am on episode 9 of 10.

You would think that I would be safe from the gratuitous insults of American liberals in a fantasy world based on the High Middle Ages, but, no, the fargin' liberals have to engage in their monkey-like flinging of feces by fashioning a fake head of George W. Bush and sticking it on a pole with the executed traitors of King's Landing.

[On the far left.]
Can you imagine some show doing that with Obama or Reid or Teddy Kennedy?  No, because it would be properly castigated.

More important, I don't think it would occur to conservatives.  I don't think that conservatives are as political as liberals.  I don't think that conservatives look out at the world and see everything as an opportunity for self-indulgent displays of their political spleen.

In other words, conservatives have a life that is not all about politics.

Glen Reynolds writes:

A JOURNALIST READER WHO I’M SURE WOULD PREFER ANONYMITY WRITES: “I know this game gets tired, but imagine, just imagine the months of fury, the global advertising boycotts, the anguished Senate investigations if a network did this with our current president.”


HBO apologizes and offers a really stupid explanation.

HBO: We were deeply dismayed to see this and find it unacceptable, disrespectful and in very bad taste. We made this clear to the executive producers of the series who apologized immediately for this inadvertent careless mistake. We are sorry this happened and will have it removed from any future DVD production.

David Benioff and D.B. Weiss: We use a lot of prosthetic body parts on the show: heads, arms, etc. We can’t afford to have these all made from scratch, especially in scenes where we need a lot of them, so we rent them in bulk. After the scene was already shot, someone pointed out that one of the heads looked like George W. Bush.

In the DVD commentary, we mentioned this, though we should not have. We meant no disrespect to the former President and apologize if anything we said or did suggested otherwise.

Right. None of the prop guys, director or anyone else thought it would be "hoot" to put Bush's head on a spike.

If it had been a liberal icon, you can bet it wouldn't have happened.

Your typical death-worshipping American of the 21st Century.

Ted Turner thinks that there should be a one-child policy for one-hundred years.

The video is a little nutty, with the videotaping guy yelling "you're a nazi." That kind of thing is un-called for.

I'm reading Domenico Losurdo's critique of liberalism - the traditional liberalism of John Locke and the Enlightenment - "Liberalism: A Counter History", where Losurdo observes after reviewing the eager enthusiasm of Enlightenment figures like Locke and Mandeville, Franklin and Malthus for eliminating the parisitic poor and breeding the industrious poor, who will, of course, do the work that the upper classes don't want to do:

"A general conclusion is indicated. The eugenics temptation runs deep in the liberal tradition. Not by chance, the discipline that took that name had its baptism in Great Britain and experienced extraordinary success in the United States." (p. 115.)

Insofar as Turner wants to play the game of eugenics, i.e., too many of you, just enough of us, and see the surplus population to fit his view what is just right, he may have a dim sense that his belief is somehow "politically incorrect - after all, the wrong sort of people, the people who would be eliminated in his dream are kept at arm's length by his flacks, except when rude people yell "you're a Nazi at him" - he seems to fall well-within the mainstream of the liberal tradition.

Keith Olbermann has fans in al-Qaida.

A memo from Osama's compound shows that al-Qaida ranks the American media as its friends and foe the same way as non-liberals:

A letter dated October 2010 outlines a plan to get al-Qaida's message across in American media for the 10th anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, and "how to exploit the media in general."

It should be sent for example to ABC, CBS, NBC, and CNN and maybe PBS and VOA. As for Fox News, let her die in her anger.

It then launches into a full opinion on the state of the American media, saying that he used to think MSNBC was fair and neutral — BEFORE they fired Keith Olbermann.

I used to think that MSNBC channel may be good and neutral a bit, but is has lately fired two of the most famous journalists – Keith Olberman and Octavia Nasser the Lebanese.

CNN, Gadahn's letter reads, is No. 2 on the hit list. He said that it is in the tank for the U.S. government more than anyone else, "except for Fox News, of course." He shared much of the same opinion about CBS, but he did like "60 Minutes" and its "long broadcasting time." And ABC, he wrote, is "all right." He wrote that ABC is "interested in al-Qaida issues, particularly the journalist Brian Ross."

In conclusion, the letter said that there is no one single outlet to rely on for al-Qaida to get its message across. One, though, was definitely off the list.

"From the professional point of view, they are all on one level — except (Fox News) channel which falls into the abyss as you know, and lacks neutrality too."

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/osama-bin-laden-hates-fox-news-and-thinks-msnbc-is-not-neutral-because-they-fired-keith-olbermann-2012-5?op=1#ixzz1trHj1HqE

It's Fizbin Sunday!

...Liberals show how to stay classy and civil!



Telling jokes about the married spouses of politicians is wrong!

Making fun of Homosexuality is wrong!

Unless it's telling jokes that imply that the husband of a Republican woman is gay and then it's all good!

The amazing liberal group mind managed to score "he's a closeted gay" jokes about Marcus Bachman, the husband of Michelle Bachman, twice on two separate shows, to wit, Bill Maher re-told a disgusting gay joke about Bachman and Saturday Night Live worked a similar joke into its obligatory smearing of the Republican nominee.

Stay classy, Leftists!

The Epistemic Closure of the Echo Chamber of the Left...

...in Academia.

Timothy Dalrymple writes about the Haidt study on how Conservatives understand Liberals but Liberals don't understand Conservatives:

Further, Haidt (a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia, and a former liberal who became a centrist in the process of conducting this research) finds that liberals and conservatives alike form their political beliefs according to three values: caring for the weak, fairness, and liberty. Yet conservatives also hold to three other values: loyalty, respect for authority, and sanctity. This accounts in part for the liberal failure to understand conservative viewpoints. As Chivers puts it, “Conservatives can understand the morality of liberals, but much of conservative morality is alien to their opponents.”

This corresponds exactly with my own observations of the educated liberals among whom I lived and worked in academia for many years. Precisely the social institution that is supposed to encourage Americans to understand both sides of the argument, and precisely those individuals who repeatedly teach that we should enter sympathetically into the worldviews of those who differ from us, have by and large failed to encourage a charitable understanding of conservative beliefs and motives and have conferred a flat, exaggerated sense of what conservatives think.

And:

By any measure–self-identification, voting patterns, campaign donations–American academia is overwhelmingly liberal. From 1999 to the present, 75% of campaign donation money from professors has gone to Democrats and 10% has gone to Republicans. In some fields, such as law and the humanities, the voting and giving often skews between 90% and 100% toward Democrats or other liberal parties like the Green Party.

The liberalization of the American educational establishment has been a colossal failure. Liberals overtook the universities because (reasonably) they saw them as the way to shape a more progressive society in the long term. They insisted that they could set aside their own partisan beliefs and teach in ways that are fair to both sides. It is abundantly clear, however, that a progressive political mindset prevails in the American university system, especially at the elite levels. It’s more difficult for conservative professors to be hired or receive tenure, it’s more difficult for conservative students to speak up without fear of the consequences, and liberal students emerge from the universities with a terrifically superficial understanding of the conservative mindset — and American society is the poorer for it.

When you look at the three values that conservatives (according to Haidt) honor but liberals do not — loyalty, respect for authority, and sanctity — these are precisely the values that are flouted in the precincts of American academe. The result is a more impoverished moral imagination amongst students, a stubborn inability to understand the beliefs and the motives of conservatives, and thus the imputation of nefarious motives to those irrational conservatives who do not see things in the ways the illuminati do. If you don’t believe that this has contributed to the partisanship we’ve observed in recent years — particularly the exceedingly nasty way in which liberals in general have responded to the Tea Party movement, to social conservatives and generally to anyone who refers too much to moral sanctity and loyalty to American traditions and institutions, then I think you’re wearing exactly the kind of blinders Haidt talks about.

The nice thing about having a Democrat in the White House is that there is never any bad news...

...such as the fact that the President ordered a Tomahawk missile attack on civilians and is personally involved in jailing a journalist who reported on the attack.

Glen Greenwald seems to be the only leftist interested in what the Noble Peace Prize winner is doing:

Jeremy Scahill, The Nation‘s national security correspondent, is easily one of America’s best and most intrepid journalists. He spends his time in dangerous places in order to uncover what the U.S. Government is doing around the world. He often produces vital scoops that, during the Obama presidency, are — for reasons often recounted here — largely ignored by the American establishment media and both political parties. In July of last year, he returned from Mogadishu and documented the Obama administration’s maintenance and proxy operation of secret CIA-run prisons in Somalia of the type that caused so much controversy during the Bush administration and which Obama supporters like to claim the President ended, and last month he returned from tribal regions in Yemen and detailed how U.S. civilian-killing drone strikes (along with its support for Yemeni despots) are the single most important cause fueling Al Qaeda’s growth in that country. But his newest article – describing President Obama’s personal, direct role in ensuring the ongoing imprisonment of a Yemeni journalist – may be his most important one yet; even for those inured to the abuses of the Obama administration, it’s nothing short of infuriating.

And:

Despite that important journalism — or, more accurately, because of it — Shaye is now in prison, thanks largely to President Obama himself. For the past two years, Shaye has been arrested, beaten, and held in solitary confinement by the security forces of Saleh, America’s obedient tyrant. In January, 2011, he was convicted in a Yemeni court of terrorism-related charges — alleging that he was not a reporter covering Al Qaeda but a mouthpiece for it — in a proceeding widely condemned by human rights groups around the world. “There are strong indications that the charges against [Shaye] are trumped up and that he has been jailed solely for daring to speak out about US collaboration in a cluster munitions attack which took place in Yemen,” Philip Luther, Amnesty International’s Deputy Director for the Middle East and North Africa, told Scahill. The Yemen expert, Johnsen, added: “There is no publicly available evidence to suggest that Abdulelah was anything other than a journalist attempting to do his job.”

Shaye’s real crime is that he reported facts that the U.S. government and its Yemeni client regime wanted suppressed. But while the imprisonment of this journalist was ignored in the U.S, it became a significant controversy in Yemen. Numerous Yemeni tribal leaders, sheiks and activist groups agitated for his release, and in response, President Saleh, as the Yemeni press reported, had a pardon drawn up for him and was ready to sign it. That came to a halt when President Obama intervened. According to the White House’s own summary of Obama’s February 3, 2011, call with Saleh, “President Obama expressed concern over the release of Abd-Ilah al-Shai.” The administration has repeatedly refused to present any evidence that Shaye is anything other than a reporter, and this is what State Department spokesperson Beth Gosselin told Scahill in response to his story...

Via Mark Shea.

So, how is that meta-narrative about "the War on Women" going?

Not so good, I'd imagine, when every day it continues is another day to rake liberal hypocrisy through the coals.

For example, remember this picture?

Remember the outrage that happened when Obama's speechwriter was discovered to be simulating a bar rape with a cardboard photo of Hillary Clinton?

Of course, you don't because it didn't happen.

Glen Reynolds reminds us:

WAR AGAINST WOMEN: Woman Raped At Occupy New Haven. #Occupyfail.


UPDATE: I suppose that this should come as no surprise considering the signals that have come from the very top of the Democratic establishment:

At the exact moment Jon Favreau is receiving high praise in pre-inaugural media puff pieces, the 27-year-old chief speechwriter for President-elect Barack Obama (not Jon Favreau, the Hollywood actor/ director) finds himself in a minor mess over a photo from a recent private party showing him groping the breast of a cardboard cutout of Hillary Rodham Clinton as an unnamed pal wearing an “Obama staff” T-shirt kisses and feeds her beer.

If you haven’t seen it, imagine the early stages of the barroom rape scene of “The Accused” with Jodie Foster. Or think prosecutor Mike Nifong’s graphic (though false) descriptions of the Duke lacrosse party. Justin Timberlake and Janet Jackson danced to a similar tune at the 2004 Super Bowl.

Fraternities have been closed for less.

But the feminists didn’t get mad. Favreau was on their team, so he had privileges.

The science is settled - Liberal Intolerance, Part 2.

It gets better. According to Andrew Malcolm

The new research found that instead of engaging in civil discourse or debate, fully 16% of liberals admitted to blocking, unfriending or overtly hiding someone on a social networking site because that person expressed views they disagreed with. That's double the percentage of conservatives and more than twice the percentage of political moderates who behaved like that.

And:

Of those who dropped or shunned someone over political disagreements, Pew asked a follow-up question:

-- 21% of them blocked, unfriended or hid a coworker,

-- 31% blocked, unfriended or hid a (formerly) close personal friend,

-- and 18% blocked, unfriended or hid an actual family member.

Bottomline, this study is obviously racist.

Also notice how the fear of shunning and ostracism rules the liberal end of the spectrum:

More Liberal Double-standards.

Via Instapundit:

THE POLITICS OF HATE: Dems Incite Death Threats Against Limbaugh. And Limbaugh’s already had to call the bomb squad to his house. That’s their approach. Marginalize, then brutalize.

When will President Obama speak out against this hatred and extremism? Probably never. But since it’s been established that this sort of thing happens via close coordination between the White House and Media Matters, etc., there’s no denying responsibility now. I call upon the President to denounce his supporters’ hateful violent rhetoric, to promise not to engage in or encourage it again, and to apologize to Limbaugh for stirring up this cesspit of hatred among his followers. A President is supposed to lead, not incite violence

Maybe we should start posting Obamicons with “HATE” instead of “HOPE” until he does. . . .

Funny how death threats and bomb scares aren't a sign of incivility when it happens to a conservative.

Judge throws out assault case against Muslim who attacked atheist wearing a zombie Muhammad costume...

...because if you are part of a religion that issues fatwahs, you are legally entitled to issue a "heckler's veto."

Discussions about this case have been flitting around the internet for the last week, but I didn't know the fact, which are reported here:

A legal expert, a former Navy chaplain, and a pro-family leader agree that a Pennsylvania judge should be removed from the bench for throwing out an assault case lodged against a Muslim who attacked an atheist dressed as a zombie Muhammad at a Halloween parade last year.

Judge Mark Martin is an Iraq war veteran and a convert to Islam, according to George Washington University law professor Jonathon Turley. The incident, recorded on video, occurred on October 11, 2011 at the Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania Halloween parade. Ernie Perce, an atheist, was attacked by Talaag Elbayomy, a Muslim, because of the former's costume.

Judge Martin threw out video evidence of the assault, dismissed the testimony of an eyewitness officer, and then lectured the atheist victim about the sensitivities of the Muslim culture. He stated in court that Elbayomy was obligated to attack the victim because of his culture and religion.

"They are so immersed in it," he said. "And what you've done is you've completely trashed their essence, their being. They find it very, very, very offensive. I'm a Muslim. I find it offensive."

Apparently, Martin actually said "If I were a Muslim...."

And:

Professor Turley also notes that another atheist, dressed as a zombie Pope, was marching beside the zombie Muhammad, but no outraged Catholics attacked him.

"If a Christian had been doing the harassing, I don't believe the judge would have dismissed those charges," Gramley contends. "I think in this case, Judge Martin is showing preference to the Muslim."

Here is the NRO story, with a transcript of Martin's comments.

The Volokh Conspiracy provides this follow-up:

From a CNN interview (starting at 2:15):

Interviewer: When I spoke to him over the phone, Judge Martin acknowledged it’s his job to protect the rights of people like the atheist, no matter how offensive they might be.

Interviewer to Judge Martin: … There are some who believe you were failing to protect that right.

Judge Martin: No, I don’t think so. Here’s the thing: It’s a right, it’s not a privilege, it’s a right. With rights come responsibilities. The more that people abuse our rights, the more likely that we’re going to lose them.

But I don’t quite see how this is “the thing,” at least in the sense of an explanation of the judge’s actions at the trial. I don’t think that we’re in danger of losing our free speech rights because some people say things that are offensive to Muslims. I do think that free speech rights are in danger when judges berate alleged crime victims for their anti-Islam speech, and thus convey the message that the legal system may be biased against those who engage in such speech and may fail to protect those people because of such speech.

This judge is nuts. It's his job to protect free speech rights, even for socially-autistic atheist jerks who undoubtedly deserve a good ass-kicking.

The idea that the police are supposed to protect even obnoxious and offensive attacks on religious minorities - at least when they are Catholic - was exemplified in Cantwell v. Conn., 310 U.S. 296 (U.S. 1940, where the United States Supreme Court reversed the defendants' convictions for unauthorized soliciting and inciting a breach of the peace.

The facts of Cantwell show an amazing insousiance on the part of the defendants and their trust in the American legal system. As described in the case:

The facts adduced to sustain the convictions on the third count follow. On the day of their arrest the appellants were engaged in going singly from house to house on Cassius Street in New Haven. They were individually equipped with a bag containing books and pamphlets on religious subjects, a portable phonograph and a set of records, each of which, when played, introduced, and was a description of, one of the books. Each appellant asked the person who responded to his call for permission to play one of the records. If permission was granted he asked the person to buy the book described and, upon refusal, he solicited such contribution towards the publication of the pamphlets as the listener was willing to make. If a contribution was received a pamphlet was delivered upon condition that it would be read.

Cassius Street is in a thickly populated neighborhood, where about ninety per cent of the residents are Roman Catholics. A phonograph record, describing a book entitled "Enemies," included an attack on the Catholic religion.

Cantwell v. Conn., 310 U.S. 296, 301 (U.S. 1940)

And:

The facts which were held to support the conviction of Jesse Cantwell on the fifth count were that he stopped [*303] two men in the street, asked, and received, permission to play a phonograph record, and played the record "Enemies," which attacked the religion and church of the two men, who were Catholics. Both were incensed by the contents of the record and were tempted to strike Cantwell unless he went away. On being told to be on his way he left their presence. There was no evidence that he was personally offensive or entered into any argument with those he interviewed.

Cantwell v. Conn., 310 U.S. 296, 302-303 (U.S. 1940)

Picture the facts: a bunch of Jehova Witnesses invade a working-class Catholic neighborhood to play a record accusing the Catholic Church of being the anti-christ.

It's amazing that these JWs managed to get out with their life, much less a good thrashing.

It also reflects well upon working-class Catholics in a less-enlightened time that they didn't administer said thrashing.

Naturally, the police felt that there was the potential for a sound thrashing of a couple of scrawny JWs by a neighborhood filled with outraged working-class Catholics, so they arrested the JWs on breach of the peace.

The court was having any of that "breach of the peace" talk on that day:

The offense known as breach of the peace embraces a great variety of conduct destroying or menacing public order and tranquility. It includes not only violent acts but acts and words likely to produce violence in others. No one would have the hardihood to suggest that the principle of freedom of speech sanctions incitement to riot or that religious liberty connotes the privilege to exhort others to physical attack upon those belonging to another sect. When clear and present danger of riot, disorder, interference with traffic upon the public streets, or other immediate threat to public safety, peace, or order, appears, the power of the State to prevent or punish is obvious. Equally obvious is it that a State may not unduly suppress free communication of views, religious or other, under the guise of conserving desirable conditions. Here we have a situation analogous to a conviction under a statute sweeping in a great variety of conduct under a general and indefinite characterization, and leaving to the executive and judicial branches too wide a discretion in its application.

Having these considerations in mind, we note that Jesse Cantwell, on April 26, 1938, was upon a public street, where he had a right to be, and where he had a right peacefully to impart his views to others. There is no showing that his deportment was noisy, truculent, overbearing or offensive. He requested of two pedestrians permission to play to them a phonograph record. The permission was granted. It is not claimed that he [*309] intended to insult or affront the hearers by playing the record. It is plain that he wished only to interest them in his propaganda. The sound of the phonograph is not shown to have disturbed residents of the street, to have drawn a crowd, or to have impeded traffic. Thus far he had invaded no right or interest of the public or of the men accosted.

The record played by Cantwell embodies a general attack on all organized religious systems as instruments of Satan and injurious to man; it then singles out the Roman Catholic Church for strictures couched in terms which naturally would offend not only persons of that persuasion, [**906] but all others who respect the honestly held religious faith of their fellows. The hearers were in fact highly offended. One of them said he felt like hitting Cantwell and the [***1221] other that he was tempted to throw Cantwell off the street. The one who testified he felt like hitting Cantwell said, in answer to the question "Did you do anything else or have any other reaction?" "No, sir, because he said he would take the victrola and he went." The other witness testified that he told Cantwell he had better get off the street before something happened to him and that was the end of the matter as Cantwell picked up his books and walked up the street.

Cantwell v. Conn., 310 U.S. 296, 308-309 (U.S. 1940)

And:

In the realm of religious faith, and in that of political belief, sharp differences arise. In both fields the tenets of one man may seem the rankest error to his neighbor. To persuade others to his own point of view, the pleader, as we know, at times, resorts to exaggeration, to vilification of men who have been, or are, prominent in church or state, and even to false statement. But the people of this nation have ordained in the light of history, that, in spite of the probability of excesses and abuses, these liberties are, in the long view, essential to enlightened opinion and right conduct on the part of the citizens of a democracy.

The essential characteristic of these liberties is, that under their shield many types of life, character, opinion and belief can develop unmolested and unobstructed. Nowhere is this shield more necessary than in our own country for a people composed of many races and of many creeds. There are limits to the exercise of these liberties. The danger in these times from the coercive activities of those who in the delusion of racial or religious conceit would incite violence and breaches of the peace in order to deprive others of their equal right to the exercise of their liberties, is emphasized by events familiar to all. These and other transgressions of those limits the States appropriately may punish.

Cantwell v. Conn., 310 U.S. 296, 310 (U.S. 1940)

So, to recap, back in the day, Catholics were supposed to withstand rank provocations like true gentlemen and did; today, Muslims aren't and don't.

It certainly appears that 70 years of "progress" in diversity, victimization and multi-culturalism have not yielded much progress in making better citizens.

The Incoherence of Totalitarian Liberalism.

This is a follow-up on Father Baron's video on how liberalism has split into two sects - one sect affirming the traditional liberal virtues, the other demanding complete adherence to its substantive predilections. I've scrubbed the names off of this Facebook discussion.

What I'm interested here is not in liberal-bashing. I'm more interested in the intellectual coherence of the two sides, and the strength of the claim that I was mischaracterizing Dude 1's arguments.

If anyone thinks that I was mischaracterizing Dude 1's arguments - mischaracterize, not frame them in a sharper, less self-congratulatory way - please tell me, and explain in what way I mischaracterized those positions.

Also, does it appear that Dude 1 - who calls himself a "libertarian" - is taking a position that Father Baron described as "totalitarian liberalism."

Thanks.

______

Dude 1 Posts:

‎"This idea that people should be left alone, be able to do whatever they want to do," Santorum complained to NPR in 2006, "that we shouldn't get involved in the bedroom, we shouldn't get involved in cultural issues ... that is not how traditional conservatives view the world."
Santorum is severely wrong | Washington Examiner
washingtonexaminer.com
Republican presidential candidate, former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum, is lit by utility lights as he speaks at an evening outdoor rally at the Washington State History Museum, Monday, Feb. 13, 2012, in Tacoma, Wash. (AP Photo/Ted S. Warren)
Yesterday at 7:31am ·

* 1 share1 share
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Peter Sean Bradley Liberalism has a much better approach - it makes you pay for what other people do in the bedroom.

As a libertarian, I think the best approach is to let other people do what they want in the bedroom so long as they don't jurt anyone else, and that includes not paying for them to do it.
Yesterday at 8:13am ·

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Dude 2: No one has ever paid me for what I do in a bedroom. I'm a liberal. What are you talking about? Maybe I'm just doing it wrong, but no one has ever complained.
Yesterday at 8:29am ·

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Peter Sean Bradley Brian, then I take it you will stand with me in opposing President Obama's mandate requiring Catholic employers to violate their conscience by requiring them to pay for abortion, sterilization and contraception?

Is my point somewhat clearer now?
Yesterday at 8:45am ·

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Peter Sean Bradley You know, my "avatar" should have provided a clue as to what I meant.

I take it that Obama's order has scratched the surface of the liberal mindset as a problem to be concerned about? I notice, for example, that our host, who often posts about governmental oppression, hasn't posted anything on this clear violation of the First Amendment.
Yesterday at 8:48am ·

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Peter Sean Bradley There is also a practical problem with the liberal - make someone else pay - mindset. What other people pay for, they have an ownership interest in. If the government can penalize smoking through insurance co-pays, why can't it penalize risky sexual behavior?

That's a serious question.
Yesterday at 8:50am ·

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Peter Sean Bradley
Also, what is it with leftists and misquotes? Here is the full quotation:

Senator RICK SANTORUM ("It Takes a Family"): They have this idea that people should be left alone, be able to do whatever they want to do. Government should keep ou...r taxes down and keep our regulation low and that we shouldn't get involved in the bedroom, we shouldn't get involved in cultural issues, you know, people should do whatever they want. Well, that is not how traditional conservatives view the world, and I think most conservatives understand that individuals can't go it alone, that there is no such society that I'm aware of where we've had radical individualism and that it succeeds as a culture.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4784905

The problem is that Santorum is right and everyone knows it.

We don't live in a world of radical individualism.

If we did, Obamacare wouldn't exist, much less the issue about having certain religious minorities - not favored by the liberal elites - violate their conscience by subsidizing other people's sexual activities.

Liberals don't mind people being involved in the bedroom; they just want it on their terms.See More
Rick Santorum, 'It Takes a Family' : NPR
www.npr.org
Sen. Rick Santorum (R-PA) is one of the Republican Party's strongest and most c...onservative voices. He talks about his new book, It Takes a Family, where he discusses the politics of intelligent design, and what he'd like to hear from Supreme Court nominee John Roberts.See More
Yesterday at 9:08am · ·

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Peter Sean Bradley Perhaps we should live in a world of radical individualism.

Discuss.
Yesterday at 9:09am ·

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Dude 2

Dude, first off, on my phone, your avatar is way to small to read. The only truly visible part is an Iron Cross. You could be a Hell's Angel for all I can tell.

That said, I still don't see how anyone is getting paid for what they are doi...ng in the bedroom either under the original proposal, or the compromise.

I don't have the time, or the patience, right now to read, on my phone, everything you just posted, but I gather your in the "every sperm is sacred" and oral contraceptives can't be used for other legitimate medical reasons, camp. That's just silly. The compromise settles all reasonable objections and is supported by the cast majority of Catholics.

It is only the crazy right wing nuts who continue to oppose based on politics instead of morality, if they are intellectually honest with themselves. See More
Yesterday at 11:25am ·

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Dude 1:

The world won't really be a better place until the superstitious nature of man is no longer prevalent. So I guess we just have to settle for what we've got and fight when we can. ;) As for my posts regarding "oppression," I don't believe I'...ve ever posted about religion. If I did, I would be of the opinion that anyone who wants religion to be somehow babied by the government should find, or buy (the Catholic church has the money for this, right?), their own country and move there to set up their religious oligarchy. I am of the opinion that religion is largely evil and those who embrace it should be given as little ability to rule over others as possible.See More
Yesterday at 11:29am ·

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Peter Sean Bradley So, Dude 1, liberty for everyone, unless it involves religion or conscience?

As I've said, we're growing a strange crop of libertarians these days.

As for me, I will defend your freedom of conscience even if I disagree with it.
Yesterday at 11:34am ·

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Dude 1: I don't recall saying superstitious illogical people can't have their liberty. I think I said they shouldn't be allowed to rule over other people.
Yesterday at 11:35am ·

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Peter Sean Bradley: Dude 2, I knew that you'd go for the bait and unmask the fascism inherent in modern liberalism.

In other words, freedom for everyone, until someone disagrees with liberalism, and then ...They.Must.Submit.

Liberalism has taken quite a tumble in the last forty years, which is probably evidence that power corrupts.
Yesterday at 11:37am ·

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Peter Sean Bradley: Dude 1, and by "rule over," you mean not subsidize things that their conscience says is wrong.

You have a very convenient approach to libertarianism.
Yesterday at 11:38am ·

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Peter Sean Bradley You two are proving Santorum's point, by the way.
Yesterday at 11:38am ·

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Peter Sean Bradley Congratulations.
Yesterday at 11:38am ·

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Dude 1: They can refuse to participate in a democratic society if they want. As I said, let them go buy their own country.
Yesterday at 11:38am ·

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Dude 1: As long as all you want to do is harangue people on someone else's wall, I've other things to do. I made my point.
Yesterday at 11:40am ·

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Peter Sean Bradley So, Dude 1, I now take it that you are siding with me in opposing Same-Sex Marriage in California, which was struck down by a majority of Californians in a democratic process?

Or is there a different rule for that?
Yesterday at 11:40am ·

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Peter Sean Bradley
Dude 1 wrote "They can refuse to participate in a democratic society if they want. As I said, let them go buy their own country."

Perfect!

This is exactly what Santorum was saying!
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So, what was your problem with the entire Santorum quote?

Your problem isn't that you favor freedom; your problem is that you favor freedom for certain people.

Ha, I scoff at you when you call yourself a libertarian.See More
Yesterday at 11:42am ·

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Dude 1: Yes, different rule. People getting married have no impact on how you live YOUR life. That's the problem with superstition. It warps your brain so you see no difference between what you want and what other people should do. Refusing people health benefits because your stuperstition ordains that they should not live that way does impact how they live their lives.
Yesterday at 11:43am ·

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Peter Sean Bradley: Dude 1 wrote "As long as all you want to do is harangue people on someone else's wall...."

Nah, I just want to hold your feet to the fire as a principled libertarian.
Yesterday at 11:44am ·

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Dude 1: My problem with Santorum is that neither he, nor his brand of Christianity, ever owned this country.
Yesterday at 11:44am ·

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Dude 1: Frankly, I think Catholicism and Libertarianism are incompatible, which probably explains why you're so twisted. ;)
Yesterday at 11:45am ·

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Peter Sean Bradley
Santorum's a Catholic, He would be the first to agree that "his brand of Christianity" never owned the country.

To the contrary, there is a history of governmental oppresion of Catholicism that is more significant than any anti-semitism ...that has ever occurred in this country. One of the first of "privacy" cases was Pierce v. Society of Sister in which the Supreme Court in the 1920s knocked down Oregon's attempt to shut down the Catholic school system in favor of making everyone go to public schools.

So there is a long history of Catholicism anti-statism working to expand liberty in this country.

It's really sad how liberals have forgotten that freedom of conscience and freedom of religion are the sine qua non of freedom.See More
Yesterday at 11:48am ·

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Dude 1: Yes, the treatment of Jews in America has never been terrible. Most of the time, they've been allowed to live, so long as they are quiet about it. But thanks for verifying that Santorum's brand of Christianity never owned America and supporting my view that if they want a country where they can establish their own control over how others live, they can go somewhere else and buy one.
Yesterday at 11:52am ·

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Peter Sean Bradley
Insofar as Catholicism has caused its adherents to have a loyalty to something that is not the State, Catholicism is derogatory to the State's natural tendency to demand greater and greater obedience, authority and control. It is not surpr...ising that Catholicism was seen as a threat by the Nazis and the Communists and that it was workers rallying around their Catholicism that helped to end the Soviet Union.

If you were interested in reading one of the founders of modern libertarianism, you could check out G.K. Chesterton's idea of "subsidiarity."See More
Yesterday at 11:53am ·

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Dude 1: Yeah, right now the greatest threat I see is people like Santorum, and the right wing, who say it's okay to control the day-to-day personal behaviors of the rest of us. If you want to talk about dismantling government, go for it. And don't worry, I'm voting Republican in this election -- because I think it's the best way to ensure a civil war.
Yesterday at 11:55am ·

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Peter Sean Bradley
Dude 1, I know that you are making a conventional leftist point about "his brand of Christianity" not "owning" America, but, seriously, it sounds lame.

Obviously, Catholicism never "owned" America. No one has ever made that claim.... You are refuting a strawman. Catholics didn't come to this country in great numbers until the mid-19th Century. When this country was founded there were still a number of states that had laws against Catholics voting.

Yawn.

What you want me to answer is whether Protestantism "owned" this country at some point.

That is something I have never answered.

It may be simply an example of the lack of historical curiosity bred into the left by their contempt for religion, but you know that Protestantism and Catholicism are not the same thing?See More
Yesterday at 11:57am ·

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Peter Sean Bradley
Dude 1, a libertarian would say that people control your day to day behaviors when they make you work to pay taxes.

Further, requiring me to pay for abortion, controls my day to day behavior. Every minute I spend working, I'm subsidizing murder.

Further, the left with its endless stream of nice fascist regulations - about where people can smoke, how they must be politically correct, how they must hire transexuals, how much they can pay for minimum wage, etc., etc. - control day to day behaviors.

You aren't in favor of freedom. You are in favor of freedom for people who agree with you. As for people like me, your attitude is that I can leave this country.

Santorum has never said that, but how is that different from what you think Santorum is saying?See More
Yesterday at 12:00pm ·

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Dude 1: I don't believe any branch of christianity ever owned America. That's what's made us great. The reason we're in decline now is all these idiot stuperstitious people trying to own it.
Yesterday at 12:00pm ·

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Peter Sean Bradley
I guess the question is what do you mean by "own"?

Have you ever read Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address?

Can you imagine a more richly religious text? Can you imagine that speech being given by anyone today?
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Are we better now - when expressions of religion are held in contempt - than we were when Lincoln was free to give the Second Inaugural Address?

Seriously, these are things that any student of history should be thinking about.See More
Yesterday at 12:02pm ·

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Peter Sean Bradley Like a lot on the left, you have a knee-jerk attitude about religion. Have you ever considered it in its reality, rather than as the caricature that left paints?
Yesterday at 12:04pm ·

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Dude 1: So you point to a dictator to explain why it's okay for stuperstitious to take control of my life?
Yesterday at 12:04pm ·

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Dude 1:
See, Peter, this b.s. you spout about what my views are, without actually knowing me, is one reason I find it not useful to bother talking to you much. Descriptions of my views as "knee-jerk attitude[s]" and suggesting that I have never con...sidered religion in its reality, but rely upon caricature is evidence you have no idea who I am. And our views are so far different from one another that we will never be able to reconcile them. So even if you were more about that, than about attempting to convince yourself and others that your views are superior because you say so, we'd never get there. We differ on the foundational issues, so the higher-level ones, like whether stuperstitious people should be allowed to rule over others are just out of the realm of possible agreement, except by accident; i.e., even when we agree, it's just a happy coinkydink.See More
Yesterday at 12:25pm ·

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Peter Sean Bradley Huh? Lincoln was no dictator.
23 hours ago ·

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Peter Sean Bradley And how is someone who is "superstitious" taking over your life if we don't make them pay for contraception?

Are they "taking over your life" because they resist your efforts to make them do something?

I'm curious, what does libertarianism mean to you?
23 hours ago ·

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Dude 1: Yes, I would definitely take my comments about superstitious people taking control over my life as having to do with paying for contraception. You know quite well that's not what I was talking about. That's the way to stay slippery when arguing. And if you don't think Lincoln was a dictator, then you haven't read enough about Lincoln.
23 hours ago ·

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Peter Sean Bradley My basic point here is that there is a very interesting discussion about the limits of state intervention into the life of free men that ought to break out if we could just get past the left's need to accuse everyone else of being fascist while ignoring its own fascism.
23 hours ago ·

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Dude 1: I don't particularly care what the left does. They aren't part of this conversation, either.
23 hours ago ·

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Peter Sean Bradley
Dude 1, unlike you, I treat my opponents as being rational and having something worth hearing.

But this is what you've said in this discussion.

1. Santorum is bad because he wants to get involved in the bedroom.
...
2. Making people who think that abortion and contraception is morally questionable pay for abortion and contraception is ok because they live in a democratic society (and as the buried minor premise, presumably, they must abide by the results of democracy.)

3. Besides people who oppose abortion and contraception are superstitious and ignorant.

4. The principle of living in a Democratic society doesn't count when it comes to the people of California voting against gay marriage because the people who voted against gay marriage are superstitious and have their minds twisted ( and the buried minor premise seems to be if they didn't, they would think like Dude 1 and/or liberals.)

5. Abraham Lincoln was a dictator because he insisted on making the Southern states live with the consequences of living in a democratic society, i.e., living with the consequences of an election.

6. Religious people are superstitious and can't think straight.

7. Religious people are taking over other people's lives when they ask to be let alone and not forced to fund programs that involve what other people do in the bedroom.

I think that you can assert some of these positions and make an interesting argument. I don't think you can assert them all and make any claim to intellectual coherence.

You are not in favor of a principle so much as you are against a group of people you really don't know.

But the funny thing is, is that you and Santorum are saying the same thing, except that Santorum is not inconsistent. He says that there is no radical individualism, and so we have to have discussions about these issues - that they are legitimate areas of inquiry. You feel the same way, except you think that your prejudices are off limits and my prejudices - because they are mere superstitions - don't count.See More
22 hours ago ·

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Dude 1: Look as long as you want to keep mischaracterizing and misquoting what I'm saying, such that you're actually arguing with someone who doesn't exist (whoever might make the arguments you're attributing to me), why do you want to waste our time? Is this just entertainment for you?
22 hours ago ·

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Peter Sean Bradley
I don't think that I have mischaracterized your statements. They are almost verbatim of what you have said. For example, didn't you say "People getting married have no impact on how you live YOUR life. That's the problem with superstition.... It warps your brain ..." How was my summary of your response inaccurate?.

If you think I have been inaccurate, tell me where I've done that.

What I'm really interested in is how you justify your "Lincoln was a dictator" claim.

Care to share?See More
20 hours ago ·

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Peter Sean Bradley As to why I'm doing this, I think you are a smart guy. I think you've got a lot of insights to share.

Sue me.
20 hours ago ·

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Dude 1: Then quit mischaracterizing my arguments.
20 hours ago ·

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Peter Sean Bradley I don't agree that I am. Tell me how I am, if I am.

Also, care to share your insights about why Lincoln is a dictator and why consideration of the Second Inaugural Address is therefore inappropriate vis a vis a comparison of theological influences in the past and now?
3 minutes ago ·

____

Reading through this exchange I am struck by how the name-calling goes one way. Dude 1 is offended by my description of his ideas as "knee-jerk" but launches multiple arguments that consist of nothing more than calling religious people "superstitious."

I'm also struck by the absence of real evidence. I pointed to Pierce v. Society of Sisters, the actual complete statement made by Santorum, Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address, etc., all of which was ignored, and no counter-evidence was offered.

From this exchange, would you conclude that liberals are running on intellectual vapors?