The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Christianity In The News

Posted on | August 4, 2010 | 20 Comments

by Smitty

There has been an uptick in the amount of stories about Christianity of late, but it’s probably James Clark’s utterly weird “Why Marijuana Decriminalization Should Be a Christian Issue” that is the proximal source of ire driving this post, which argues that James Clark is making a questionable moral argument in an ethical context.

Outline:
Definitions
Christianity
Units of Analysis
A Mis-application
Concluding. . . Read more

Category: Religion

Sissypuss: Gov’t Cheese Not Selling In MO

Posted on | August 3, 2010 | 32 Comments

by Smitty

Down at the bottom of the page (h/t Gateway Pundit) it looks like nearly three to one in favor of Prop C:

The Missouri Health Care Freedom, Proposition C is on the August 3, 2010 statewide ballot in Missouri as an legislatively-referred state statute. The proposed measure aims to block the federal government from requiring people to buy health insurance and bans punishment for those without health insurance.


Sissypuss: I blame the Velveeta Underground for this outrage.

Category: Sissypuss the Blog Kitty

World’s Most Dubious Storybook Romance Turns Out to Be Fiction

Posted on | August 3, 2010 | 34 Comments

C’mon, did you really buy into the Bristol Palin-Levi Johnston reunion? Ricky Hollywood is far too deeply in love with himself to permit anyone else to intrude.

In fact, as a pathological narcissist, Levi is incapable of recognizing other people as fully human. They are merely objects which have no purpose for existence other than as means of his own gratification.

Category: Celebrities, Sarah Palin

Death by Political Correctness?

Posted on | August 3, 2010 | 20 Comments

“Everyone must come to grips with and make sense of their own failures. Excuse-making, blame-shifting, scapegoating — ‘It wasn’t my fault!’ — prevents us from learning the lessons of our failures. . . . Persistently attempting to externalize blame for our own failures is a recipe for moral disaster.”
— Robert Stacy McCain, “Lindsay Lohan Begins Serving Two Weeks in Jail,” July 21

If even an overprivileged Hollwyood star like Lindsay Lohan must be permitted to indulge the self-pitying sense of her own victimhood, who would dare question the officially-recognized victimhood of a black man?

Police in Connecticut have confirmed nine people were killed and two others injured in a shooting rampage at a beer distributorship. . . .
A company official identified the shooter as Omar Thornton, a driver who had been asked to quit his job. He refused and instead opened fire.
A union official says Thornton had been caught on videotape stealing beer. . . .
His girlfriend’s mother says Thornton, who was black, complained of racial bias, but the union says it knows of no complaints of racism. . . .
Teamsters Local 1035 official Christopher Roos says Thornton was “a disgruntled employee who shot a bunch of people.”

For all we know at this point, the company and union officials routinely turned a blind eye to white guys stealing beer. It is entirely possible that Thornton was, in some sense and at some level, a victim of racism. On the other hand, I would be willing to bet that there were many other black employees of this company who — whatever disadvantages or insults they may have suffered on account of their race — refused to surrender to the self-pitying victim mentality that appears to have motivated Thornton’s murderous rampage.

All of us live in a narcissistic culture that encourages us to externalize blame as a defensive rationalization for the protection of the sacred self. Yet some rationalizations are more equal than others, and certain categories of victimhood are enshrined in law and culture in such a way that skepticism is forbidden. This is where political correctness becomes such a deadly poison, like an invisible gas slowly permeating the atmosphere.

How many other disgruntled losers, each with his own self-pitying sense of grievance, have committed similar acts? And how many times have we seen their bloody acts attributed to some politically useful motive, or explained away as caused by the widespread availability of guns?

“[T]herapeutic morality encourages a permanent suspension of the moral sense. There is a close connection, in turn, between the erosion of moral responsibility and the waning capacity for self-help . . . between the elimination of culpability and the elimination of competence.”
– Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations (1979)

A society that provides prefabricated excuses and ready-made scapegoats for failure is, perhaps unwittingly, depriving individuals of the sense of personal responsibility that is the only solid basis for achievement. If we are not responsible for our own failures — if even on-the-job theft can be attributed to the evil machinations of The Man — then how may we credit others for their success? The externalization of blame turns people into moral cripples, incapable of coping rationally with their own shortcomings and ready to lash out at others whenever their own incompetence or malfeasance is exposed.

As for Omar Thornton, let his epitaph be the same words that came to mind when people offered politically convenient rationalizations for Pentagon shooter Patrick Bedell: “Whatever happened to crazy?”

Category: Crime, Culture, Racism

Ta-Nehisi Coates and the Sloppiest Argument for Gay Marriage, Evah!

Posted on | August 3, 2010 | 31 Comments

“Nationalism is, for good or ill, at my core. Thus I see the fight for marriage rights not as a fight for a squishy, gauzy ‘tolerance,’ but as a fight  for gay self-determination. . . . Thus gay marriage is, to me, not about relieving homophobes of their burdensome ignorance but about the right of gays to defend themselves against that ignorance.”
— Ta-Nehisi Coates, “Race And Gay Marriage In Perspective,” the Atlantic Monthly

If you’ve followed the rhetoric of the gay-rights movement a while, you’ve long since become jaded to bad analogies — homophobia-as-Holocaust, etc. — and inured to pretzel-logic efforts that present same-sex marriage as the ultimate cause for which Goodman, Schwerner and Chaney died. To read the above-quoted essay, however, is to plumb new depths of wordy incoherence that even Andrew Sullivan has never yet reached.

Gay-rights nationalism? The lazy self-serving presumption that political opponents can only be motivated by ignorance and pathological “phobia”? Is there no one on the Left who has the courage to tell Coates that he never should have pressed the “publish” button on this embarrassingly gushy nonsense?

UPDATE: A gay guy accidentally scores a near-miss on the truth: “The presence of a vagina apparently counts for everything.”

If that vagina were a snake, it would have bitten him. The derogation of nature — the blithe assumption that we can and should substitute our will for that which is self-evidently transcendent — is one of those ideas that has consequences.

Category: Gays

JDAM

Posted on | August 3, 2010 | 4 Comments

by Smitty

Julian “Duh” Assange “Munch”
Justification Descends. Almighty Ministers.
Just Don’t Ask Me.

(tip o’ the JDAM to Vodka Pundit)

Category: VodkaPundit

Social Science Isn’t Scientific

Posted on | August 3, 2010 | 18 Comments

“Unlike physics or biology, the social sciences have not demonstrated the capacity to produce a substantial body of useful, nonobvious, and reliable predictive rules about what they study — that is, human social behavior, including the impact of proposed government programs.”
— Jim Manzi, “What Social Science Does — and Doesn’t — Know,” City Journal

Category: Science

Victoria Jackson In A Retro Moment

Posted on | August 3, 2010 | 1 Comment

by Smitty (h/t NiceDeb)

Somehow, explaining the current situation to colonials results in guffaws.

It’s dated last November. Missed it somehow.

NOTE from RSM: “A Fat Man Flying!”

Category: humor
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