ABF Friday: Blame America First edition!
While everyone else in the liberal blogosphere is focused on the world-historical shenanigans of ABC-Disney-Rove’s fictionalized docudrama, The Path to 9/11: Clinton Did It (original title: A Million Little Pieces of the Democrats’ Plan to Undermine America), I figure that somebody around here ought to be paying attention to the Old Media, namely, books.
So it is in the spirit of bookselling hucksterism that I bring you the new fall line for Outer Wingnuttia, courtesy of Dinesh D’Souza:
In THE ENEMY AT HOME, bestselling author Dinesh D’Souza makes the startling claim that the 9/11 attacks and other terrorist acts around the world can be directly traced to the ideas and attitudes perpetrated by America’s cultural left.
D’Souza shows that liberals—people like Hillary Clinton, Ted Kennedy, Barney Frank, Bill Moyers, and Michael Moore—are responsible for fostering a culture that angers and repulses not just Muslim countries but also traditional and religious societies around the world. Their outspoken opposition to American foreign policy—including the way the Bush administration is conducting the war on terror—contributes to the growing hostility, encouraging people both at home and abroad to blame America for the problems of the world. He argues that it is not our exercise of freedom that enrages our enemies, but our abuse of that freedom—from the sexual liberty of women to the support of gay marriage, birth control, and no-fault divorce, to the aggressive exportation of our vulgar, licentious popular culture.
The cultural wars at home and the global war on terror are usually viewed as separate problems. In this groundbreaking book, D’Souza shows that they are one and the same. It is only by curtailing the left’s attacks on religion, family, and traditional values that we can persuade moderate Muslims and others around the world to cooperate with us and begin to shun the extremists in their own countries.
No, dear friends, this is not one of my parody posts.
According to D’Souza, 9/11 was brought to you by people legitimately outraged by the sexual liberty of women, gay marriage, birth control, and no-fault divorce. Not to mention Bill Moyers. For who can forget Osama bin Laden’s searing videotape of fall 2001, in which he speaks of “eighty years” of Arab “humiliation and disgrace,” calls for the restoration of the Caliphate, and condemns the United States for “no-fault divorce” and its impact on the traditional family? “Your Barney Frank has always repelled me,” added bin Laden in the October 2004 tape that is widely credited with boosting George Bush’s re-election campaign. “I was most pleased when your Dick Armey called him ‘Barney Fag,’ and I urge your homosexuals to stop abusing the freedom to choose their life partners. Also, your Michael Moore is considerably overweight.”
D’Souza, you’ll recall, began his post-Dartmouth Review career as a public intellectual in 1984 with a hagiography of Jerry Falwell, entitled Falwell: Before the Millenium. That’s the book in which D’Souza writes, “listening to Falwell speak, one gets a sense that something is right about America, after all.” The Enemy at Home, far from advancing a “startling claim,” is just more of the same old same old: Falwell’s once-notorious post-9/11 remarks in book form.
I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People For the American Way, all of them who have tried to secularize America. I point the finger in their face and say “you helped this happen.”
“All right, Michael,” you say, “you’ve gone after D’Souza before, haven’t you?”
Why, yes, I have. Ten years ago I published a review of The End of Racism, the book in which D’Souza dilates on the “civilizational differences” between blacks and whites, poses the searching question, “what do blacks as a group owe America for the abolition of slavery?” and argues that “the American slave was treated like property, which is to say, pretty well.” I ended that review by saying, “As I contemplate The End of Racism, I await the requisite soul-searching on the Right.” My old pal Mark Bauerlein dismissively replied to this sentence, in his oft-cited review of one of my books, by calling it “piously contemplative.” Bauerlein said nothing about the actual D’Souza volume that gave rise to my pious moment, however, and in the intervening years I haven’t seen any other conservatives taking their distance from D’Souza. So I suppose you could say that I’m still waiting for that soul-searching, even though the decade hand on my watch has moved and I’m beginning to think that the conservative repudiation of D’Souza might never show up at all, and you know, it’s getting kind of cold out here.
“Yes, yes, Michael, we know. You and D’Souza go way back, blah blah blah. But he’s a marginal figure at best, just one of the Coulteresque figures in those crazy ‘culture wars’ that only a handful of talking heads and campus blowhards care about. The American mainstream doesn’t go for this kind of thing—really, most Americans are in the vital center, and people like you should stop worrying about the radical fringe and help us restore civility to public discourse along with Katie Couric and Rush Limbaugh. After all, who publishes Dinesh D’Souza anymore? Regnery, right? Or maybe Thomas Nelson, the home of Michael Savage and other obscure Christian authors?”
Well, actually, no, you increasingly annoying imaginary interlocutor. Falwell: Before the Millenium was published by Regnery, that much is true, as was D’Souza’s 2002 tome, What’s So Great About America? (Answer: not teh gays and loose women!) But The Enemy at Home was published by Random House.
And that probably explains why D’Souza had to drop his working title, Al-Qaeda Was Right.
Believe it or not, my path and Dinesh’s crossed once at a debate about affirmative action in 1991 at my school (at the start of the backlash against political correctness). I asked him whether AA was an appropriate remedy where a state had a radically regressive and unfair school finance system based on property taxes, like the state he was having the debate in (Texas).
Had I known he would write that racism had ended, I would have shelved the question and asked the nearest black student for a reward for my ancestors having freed them.
Had I known that he’d write some sub-Pat Robertson bullshit about the hand of God being lifted when the first lesbian couple adopted a child, I would just shouted “READ THE QU’RAN, DAMMIT! SAVE YOURSELVES!” at the assembled audience.
Posted by norbizness on 09/08 at 09:39 AMSee, I knew it was all The Left’s fault. Thanks for the confirmation, norbizness!
Posted by on 09/08 at 09:51 AMI am sad to admit that not only did D’Souza once visit the college I taught at (his visit was arranged by a conservative student who invested an enormous amount of personal energy in this sad enterprise) but the What’s So Great About America? book was also one of the central texts used by two of the poli-sci profs at said college.
D’Souza’s performance was full of sound and fury and no doubt bamboozled some of the weaker minds in the room, but it seemed evident to lots of folks I spoke with after the event that it was paper thin.
I had hoped that the move to Regnery was evidence that his asshattery was evident to all but a small fringe of supporters, but Random House’s decision will force me to rethink that.
Eric
Posted by on 09/08 at 10:09 AMWhile ridiculing D’Souza might be fun, what’s arbitrary about it? Should we be mocking his musical taste? His cooking?
Posted by JRoth on 09/08 at 10:12 AMWell I’ll be. So the radical Muslims and the radical Christians really see eye to eye on all this stuff? Who’d have thunk it. No hard feelings about the Crusades, I guess. And if we all get haircuts, dress primly, and join a church that will teach us proper sexual habits, they’ll look the other way on the Israel thing? A little more conformity in the U.S. and peace reigns on earth? Hell, my best years of debauchery are behind me anyway; I can probably swing it. I have just one question: Can I still care about the “little guy,” or do I have to go all in for status and rigid hierarchy? That could be the deal breaker.
Posted by on 09/08 at 10:14 AMHey, you Paterno-ist left wing, American hating professor type, there was some serious vetting of this wonderful script before you and your left-wing friends in the media started attacking this patriotic movie.
In the first version of the script, Bill and Hillary Clinton secretly take over the US in August 2001 (don’t ask how; the Clintons can do anything because they are more powerful than the space and time continuum), while George Bush is forced to go back to Crawford, Texas--with the cover story being that he needed a “vacation” after nine months on the job. In fairness to the president, it had been a tough nine months of office and he hadn’t taken too many days off at that point. Oh, and Cheney was just packed off to Walter Reed Hospital for “tests.” Lots of tests, like the kind the aliens do when they beam you up.
Anyway, when the events of 9/11 occurred, the White House was unprepared because Bill was having sex with two female interns and one male intern (don’t ask, don’t tell!) and Hillary was too busy preparing for her weekly committee of lesbian witches to determine the best way to eat Christian children.
For some reason, there was a terrific row with the “suits” who wanted all this taken out of the script. The writers insisted this was vital to the “narrative” while the obviously left wing “suits” were yammering about something they called “facts.” What the suits didn’t get was that the script had already been vetted by various historians and journalists. For example, Victor David Hanson, Judy Miller and Kit Seelye each read the script in its original form and said, “Don’t change a thing. It’s perfect!” And yes, they said that in unison from different phones at different times--surely a divine coincidence that proves not only the existence of God, but that this script was supported by Jesus Himself!
So, see, you Prius and homo loving, ivory tower traitors? There was already some serious editing of this wonderful film that has already been compromised beyond what was necessary. Now, shut up and go home, you infidels.
Posted by Mitchell Freedman on 09/08 at 10:19 AMWhile ridiculing D’Souza might be fun, what’s arbitrary about it? Should we be mocking his musical taste? His cooking?
Actually, I fail to see the fun part. And your headline promises fun!
Posted by Roxanne on 09/08 at 10:21 AMMichael,
You misquoted Falwell. Here’s the correct text:
I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, Bill Moyers, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People For the American Way, Bill Moyers’ Now series, all of them who have tried to secularize America. Damn you to hell, Bill Moyers. I point the finger in their face and say “‘you helped this happen.’”
Posted by Crazy Little Thing on 09/08 at 10:24 AMThe fun for me is pointing at D’Souza and shouting, “Residual, residual! Your work is nothing but a residual cultural practice.”
Or so I hope.
Posted by J— on 09/08 at 10:38 AMYou also mis-quoted the title of D’Souza’s 2002 book. It’s not “What So Great About America?"-- that acknowledges a question about the matter. No, it’s “What So Great About America.” Not a question, just pre-emptive assertion before the thought is allowed to corrupt our sheepish minds.
I’m sure the soul-searching right-winger Godot will be coming to meet you shortly.
Posted by on 09/08 at 10:39 AMI read this morning in a new doorstop by Niall Ferguson that somewhere Paul Johnson blamed the violence of the 20th century on “moral relativism, the decline of personal responsibility, and the repudiation of Judaeo-Christian values.” Somebody should check the D’Souza book for extended unsourced quotations.
Posted by Miracle Max on 09/08 at 11:03 AMI have a question. Are libertarians traitors too? Or is it just liberals?
Posted by bi on 09/08 at 11:16 AMHe argues that it is not our exercise of freedom that enrages our enemies, but our abuse of that freedom...
Are these culture-war screeds like Magic Eye posters or something? I want to hold them at arm’s length and let my optic muscles and human reason just float around for a while, hoping to make sense out of the visual static. Maybe there’s a picture of a sailboat there, or even a bunny.
Posted by on 09/08 at 11:19 AMYou’ll notice that our host never explicitly promised arbitrariness nor fun in his post. I think in this case ABF stands for “Amoral Batsh*t Freeper”.
Michael D, it’s a schooner.
Posted by on 09/08 at 11:35 AMNot that I don’t appreciate the heads up on the right wingnuttery (I really do), but it is definitely not fun.
Coincidentally, I read your The End of Racism review just last night. I’m feeling rather depressed.
I think I’ll go to the beach instead of campus this morning…
Posted by on 09/08 at 11:36 AMAs many have noted, while there are functional differences between the hard right in this country and the bin Ladins of the world, in psychology and ideology, they have many remarkable similarities. I suspect it’s the psychology that breeds the ideology, a la the kind of thing John Dean talks about in his latest Conservatives Without Conscience, but regardless of the root source, it’s the same dance, just different costumes. I don’t know much about al Qaeda’s views on economics, but even if they lean socialist, as I suspect, we all know that socialist economics can be easily bent to fit an authoritarian ideology and mindset.
Posted by Theron on 09/08 at 11:38 AMOsama bin Laden writes, in prose that even The Notorious Riley will have to admit has loads o’ sprezzatura,
I was most pleased when your Dick Armey called him ‘Barney Fag,’
to which I have to reply that I for one wish to welcome our new Dick Army overlords. Long may their towering missiles, and their enormous throw weight, reign.
Posted by John Protevi on 09/08 at 11:44 AMWell Islam did kick a some Gnostic ass in the early days as well - so “enemy of my enemy” and all of that.
Posted by on 09/08 at 11:45 AMDespite your disclaimer, I had to follow the link to Random House before I could actually believe this was not a parody. Unless, of course, you’ve cleverly linked to a parody of Random House, because I’m still having trouble believing it. On the subject of Michael Moore’s responsibility for 9/11, which of his pre-2001 movies do you think angered muslims the most, Roger and Me or Canadian Bacon? Probably the latter, as in bacon being pork, and muslims don’t eat pork. I seem to recall riots all over the middle east when “CB” came out, whereas everyone knows muslims are totally down with eating rabbits and making fun of ceo’s.
Posted by on 09/08 at 11:56 AMThis is a terrific post. You said exactly what I was thinking but phrased it much more elegantly and graciously than I ever could. Thank you so much for writing it!
Posted by on 09/08 at 12:07 PMJust when you’ve completely forgotten about wingnuts past, they crawl out of their jobs at some position-paper mill and write some batshit book that conservative organizations can use as a promotional “gift” making contributions.
Posted by on 09/08 at 12:25 PMEven sadder is the fact that D’Sousa cribs his argument from another asshat: Ramesh Ponnuru. Ponnuru’s *Party of Death*, and his recent essays for The National Review, have sent a clear message to the Islamic fundamentalist world: your true enemy is the American Left and the French, not us god-fearing fundamentalist Christians.
What’s hilarious is that, in equating the Left with the terrorists, D’Sousa and Ponnuru also sympathize with the terrorists. The Right really needs to get this straight: either my love of the New Deal and Jessica Simpson makes me the ally of the terrorists or it makes me their true enemy. You can’t have it both ways.
But I suppose you can have it both ways. That’s what an ideology does, right? To oversimplify Jameson on Levi-Straus, ideological narrative allows wingnuts to hold two contradictory thoughts in their minds at one time, and to fashion them into a mace to smack the Left around with.
I think it’s time to build a great Ark, and on it place pairs of asseaters, both Left and Right. Let’s pair off the Blame liberals firsters with the 9/11-conspiracy-theorists, put them on the boat, and sail it off the flat earth both groups seem to believe in.
Posted by on 09/08 at 12:30 PMNow that he isn’t the only token South Asian on the Right, may be he felt compete to compete/crib.
Posted by on 09/08 at 01:05 PMTheir reality has lapped our satire. You wrote “No, dear friends, this is not one of my parody posts.” Unfortunately, it has become almost impossible to parody the right, as their own reality is beyond satire. I wrote a long diary, with pictures and cartoons, about this here- http://thedailypulse.blogspot.com/2006/07/their-reality-has-lapped-our-satire.html
it might be worth a read.
Posted by dhonig on 09/08 at 01:07 PMThat article in Harper’s about the right-wing’s use of “Dolchstosslegende” (stab-in-the-back legend) is obviously going to be the RNC and Wingnuttia’s Fall 2006 campaign strategy.
Oh my.
Posted by Alex Von Waldenberg on 09/08 at 01:07 PMDidn’t Shrub say, “they hate us for our freedoms”? To paraphrase Rumsfeld, freedom does get messy at times.
Posted by on 09/08 at 01:24 PM"the aggressive exportation of our vulgar, licentious popular culture”
I don’t know if I can disagree with this assessment of our popular culture, but DeeDee must surely be aware that the decision to aggressively export “vulgar licentiousness” is driven by corporations helmed by conservative CEOs. It’s the Rupert Murdochs—not the Michael Moores and Bill Moyers of this world—pushing this crap.
But hey, as long as they continue throwing a few bucks at the Heritage Foundation or the Cato Institute, thus ensuring that fabulous intellects like DeeDee’s have safe, comfortable sinecures at these think tanks to rest up between jeremiads, all is forgiven, right?
Posted by on 09/08 at 01:51 PMIs the working title, “Al Qaeda was Right” snark, or is that true? I can’t tell anymore.
Posted by on 09/08 at 01:52 PMD’Souza is now added to the list of people I’d punch in the nose if I ever met them. Anybody who calls me and most of my friends and family, and millions of others I don’t know, responsible for those 3000 deaths, while he thinks he’s some kind of hero and isn’t to be blamed, deserves a lot worse. Such intellectual dishonesty shouldn’t be countennaced.
Posted by on 09/08 at 01:53 PMI thought the terrorists were pure evil, and that trying to understand them was wimpy, liberal thing to do.
Posted by on 09/08 at 02:00 PMRP: not ONLY that, but D’Souza wants to appease the terrorists by purging american society of those elements that the terrorists object to.
D’Souza is apparantly a wimpy appeaser dressed up in a GOP clown suit.
Posted by on 09/08 at 02:20 PMJeesh, what a bunch of Debbie Downers commenting on this blog. There’s a Grouchy Medivalist (not heard from in this thread yet), a Grouchomarxist, and now a Grumpy Physicist. All we need is a Disgruntled Postal Worker to complete the set. Lighten up! Sure, the wingnuts are sending us to hell on a toboggan, but toboggans are fun! Can’t you appreciate the pure comedy genius of D’Souza blaming the Left for terrorism while lining up the Right’s beliefs with the terrorists’ beliefs? And the bit about how blacks should be grateful to whites for ending slavery, why, I laughed so hard my head almost exploded.
Buffalo Gal, aka the Cheerful Cynic
Posted by on 09/08 at 02:50 PMso, if I understand Mr. D’Souza correctly, we should appease Osama Bin Laden and his Islamic fundamentalist bretheren by adopting Taliban-like controls on public morality.
Perhaps Mr. D’Souza’s next tome could advocate for the establishment of a Bureau for the Promotion of Homeland Virtue and Prevention of Vice. Women could be required to wear a burqa in public and on television in order to prevent any possibility of the titillation of males. Transgressors would be beaten with a cane. Homosexuals could be publicly executed - perhaps by decapitation, or better yet, stoning.
D’Souza not only slays any possibility of satire, he chops it into little pieces and stomps the remnants into pulp.
Posted by on 09/08 at 02:57 PMyou’re right buffalo gal; we should enjoy the batshit crazy antics of people like d’souza.
Thanks for taking d’souza to task again Michael; I read his stuff early in grad school in a critical race theory course, and I’ve hated his faulty logic ever since.
captcha: complete, like this guy is a complete asshat
Posted by on 09/08 at 03:05 PMI don’t know if I can disagree with this assessment of our popular culture, but DeeDee must surely be aware that the decision to aggressively export “vulgar licentiousness” is driven by corporations helmed by conservative CEOs. It’s the Rupert Murdochs—not the Michael Moores and Bill Moyers of this world—pushing this crap.
oddly it is the very exportation of ‘decadent western pop culture’ which played no small role in the fall of the USSR. Russians - and Iranians too - want their MTV, their blue jeans, their Hollywood flicks. Yes, they even want to smoke pot like Americans do.
If D’Souza’s idiotic thesis was correct, Iranians would love living under their fundamentalist regime. They decidedly do not.
Posted by on 09/08 at 03:08 PMIn sense, D’Souza is right: Bin Laden and his cronies do hate our liberal, enlightenment values of openness, tolerance, rationality and equality. So I guess D’Souza is saying that his values are closer to Bin Laden’s than Bill Clinton’s, which is perfectly cromulent.
Posted by on 09/08 at 03:09 PM>>While ridiculing D’Souza might be fun, what’s arbitrary about it? Should we be mocking his musical taste? His cooking?<<
Actually, I fail to see the fun part. And your headline promises fun!
And just to pile on here, if it’s ABF Friday then shouldn’t it be “America Blame First” instead of “Blame America First”?
Posted by Tom Hilton on 09/08 at 03:24 PMIt’s a well established and widely excepted premise that populations in the third world envy America’s (and the West’s) economic and technological wealth but are most repulsed by our moral decadence.
This phenomena is not relegated (in the least) to Islamic countries, but applies equally to second and third world nations as compared to third world nations (often referred to as traditional societies)
The licentiousness, fornication, pornography and over all moral relativism expounded in our culture and its exports (Bay watch, Hollywood , ect) intensifies the effect.
A strong echo of this thinking is expounded in the Lefts argument that we aught not torture, and accord due process rights to prisoners ect. This is premised on the belief that we need to show our adversaries that we are moral exemplars. Why would this not ALSO be the case with gay marriage, ill religion, and the like?
They don’t just call us the great Satan because of our policy with Israel.
Posted by on 09/08 at 03:30 PMLiberals piss off the god freaks? Good! That’s the best news I’ve heard in years! Too bad their beliefs are so fragile that they don’t stand up to criticism.
Posted by on 09/08 at 03:32 PM"9/11 was brought to you by people legitimately outraged by the sexual liberty of women, gay marriage, birth control, and no-fault divorce.”
Mulah D’Souza speaks for us all. Those damn whores. We should slash them all across the phase for tempting us with their delicious sinful curves!
Posted by on 09/08 at 03:41 PMFitz you are full of shit. The Iranian people should love their fundamentalist overlords, who ban all vice and decadent western culture. Instead they loathe them. They want satellite dishes so they can watch western films. They want to date who they want, dress the way they want, screw who they want, watch porn and listen to rock and roll.
That’s what freedom and the pursuit of happines smells like, bub. If you don’t like freedom, go move to Iran. Sounds like you’d enjoy it there a lot better.
Posted by on 09/08 at 03:42 PMD’Souza’s obviously got ready-access to some of the most potent LSD available since the 60s and Owsley’s glory days.
D’Souza is just an acid-head who can’t get through the day without the aid of a 4-way tab.
Make that TWO 4-way tabs.
I’m sure he’s been lovin’ it.
But for the rest of us…“It’s a bumma’, please!”
Posted by on 09/08 at 03:45 PMBeing from Michigan, I have often talked with Recent Immigrants, immigrants, and sons and daughters of immigrants from the Middle East. One of the things they notice about America – that they did not expect – (and unlike Europe) is the number of Churches and marked religiosity of our people. This helps mollify there most separatist impulses, and gives them a sense of commonality with the larger culture.
In reading about the problems Europe has in integrating Muslim Immigrants this is often brought to the fore. Contemporary Secular Ideologies are incapable of building any common ground between traditional societies and itself.
Somewhere between the all confining Burka and the thong bikini is a sensible middle ground.
Posted by on 09/08 at 03:53 PMCoolness! Michael, you’ve really hit the jackpot this time, or at least the trifecta: The Notorious Riley, Kirby Olson, and now Fitz himself! Last seen over at Feministing arguing against condoms in Africa, Fitz shows up here to denounce “our moral decadence.”
He’s apparently quite the expert on such matters, as this trenchant commentary can attest:
39. They say Oprah is doing very well in Islamic countries --- we might conquer them in the end with our banality and celebrities. Arabs can often be found in Las Vegas and they seem quite attracted to the more decadent American women --- the Arabs on my campus had to have been finding their dates in cheap bars.
I think he’s the best one yet. Can we keep him?
Posted by John Protevi on 09/08 at 04:02 PMI think piling on D’Souza’s cooking would be fun. I’ve heard that he regularly cooks his pasta way past al dente and that his nickname in the halls of the Heritage Foundation is “Mushy Noodle” D’Souza.
Posted by on 09/08 at 04:12 PMIt’s obvious D’Souza has no idea what a fact is when he calls Hillary Clinton a liberal.
Posted by SocraticGadfly on 09/08 at 04:13 PMJohn P, only if you promise to clean up after him.
Posted by on 09/08 at 04:16 PMWhat you seem to be missing. (or intentionally engaging in hyper bowl so as to obfuscate around) is any common humanity.
Obviously no one on the right thinks that (say banning pornography more than we already do) will cause Osama to quit his war. We are however talking about why large swaths of the Middle East (and, as I stated- all traditional societies) don’t relate to and fear America.
Of coarse the third world has a love hate relationship with western culture. If you had not noticed the west has a love hate relationship with American culture. We don’t air hard core pornography on prime time television- this doesn’t make us the equivalent of the Saudi –Arabian morality police. Most European nations have more restrictive abortion laws then America (with countries like Poland banning them).
One can look at the cultural moral heritage of the west and draw rough parallels with values shared in the rest of the world. As most things it’s a question of degree and application. NOT absolutes that pit all moral precepts against the utopia of unrestrained human freedom.
Posted by on 09/08 at 04:18 PMthat we can persuade moderate Muslims and others around the world to cooperate with us
Here’s D’Souza practicing his Moderate Muslim Outreach™ techniques several years back at the “The Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace with Honor.”
... So what you have is an envious, humiliated civilization lashing out against a more successful civilization that is making inroads into Islam because of the tremendous appeal of its ideas. In that sense, yes we did provoke Osama, but Osama is in a sense, lashing out at the superiority and justified superiority of American civilization.
and now:
He argues that it is not our exercise of freedom that enrages our enemies, but our abuse of that freedom…
So which is it Dinesh? either:
1) the justified superiority of American civilization is based on our “abuse” of freedoms
or
2) an unwillingness to compromise your intellectual integrity for a chance to score domestic political points is the hobgoblin of small minds.and you know, it’s getting kind of cold out here.
Coo coo it’s cold outside. ... Don’t forget
your mittens.Posted by on 09/08 at 04:29 PM"Hyper bowl”?
Fitz, I love you, man. Please tell me that’s how you pronounce it, too.
Posted by on 09/08 at 04:30 PMActually, the nickname “Mushy Noodle” D’Souza has a double meaning - he overcooks his bow-tie pasta (what other kind would conservatives eat?) while listening to Kenny G and other purveyors of noodly pseudo-jazz. So we can ridicule both his cooking and his musical taste in one fell swoop.
Posted by on 09/08 at 04:31 PMIn Dearborn Michigan on Ford road their lies the largest (and most influential) Mosque in America. It is preceded by a Armenian Catholic Church, A Lutheran Church, A Catholic Church, and a Greek Orthodox Church. (All well attended thriving congregations)
They all lie one directly after another along this major thoroughfare. It was no mistake of coarse that the Muslim community chose this spot on which to buy land and build. (its really quite dramatic representation of American religious pluralism)I have these “culture war” conversations with Muslims all the time. The smartest and most adept of these (a colleague of mine) who is not a particularly observant Muslim agrees that a return to Americas tradtion of natural law morality seems to be the only philosophical approach that can breach Eastern Western divides as well as create a decent moral environment for family formation and human thriving.
Posted by on 09/08 at 04:36 PMWow, it looks like Fitz is serious! I totally thought those first comments were parody…
You win, dhonig…
Posted by on 09/08 at 04:42 PMWhat you seem to be missing. (or intentionally engaging in hyper bowl so as to obfuscate around) is any common humanity.
THIS 1S A GR8 COMMENT!!! U SED EX4CTLY WUT I WUZ THINKING BUT U S3D IT MUCH M0RE NICE THAN I CUD!! TH@NKZ F0R RITING 1T!!!!!!!!!
+---------+
| B1FF |
| R00LZ!! |
o +---------+Posted by B1FF on 09/08 at 04:56 PMWow, it looks like Fitz is serious! I totally thought those first comments were parody…
Yep. He’s doing Michigan State University Law School proud, he is.
He’s posting these same comments, verbatim, over at Kevin Drum’s site right now.
By the way, Fitz, who’s your pick for the Hyper Bowl this year? I’m going with Florida and Penn State.
Posted by on 09/08 at 04:58 PMFitz on 09/08 at 03:36 PM:
...It was no mistake of coarse that the Muslim community chose this spot on which to buy land and build.
How sweet! More Fitz BS accompanied by an ignorance of local history. Like other ethnicities in Dearborn, they came here in the 20’s for jobs at Ford’s auto factories and as a result of displacement from their countries of origin...Not because they were impressed by the religiousity of the people, as you falsely state.
Oh yeah; I’m from Michigan, have worked in Dearborn, and can read a freakin’ history book.
The smartest and most adept of these..
Smart, as in he agrees with you ‘Smart’? Are you sure that he’s not just nodding his head to get you to shut up and let him get back to work?
“natural law morality”...Eeesh.
Posted by on 09/08 at 04:59 PMAll I can say is...THREE CHEERS FOR THE AMERICAN TALIBAN!! That’s where we’re headed with this nonsense.
In my simple and shallow (but damn well thinking) mind, it seems that all the religous right PLUS nationalistic pooh-pooh being spewed has our more common than not american non-thinkers so duped, that we may not be able to crawl back normalcy. But what worries me more than people like D’Souza is a movie like “The Path to 9/11”.
Remember, the people that Americans should really be afraid of are the americans that vote without thought or common sense. They won’t be reading D’Souza, or any other author. But they sure will sit in front of the tube watching abc, disney and fox with a beer, chips and/or tub of good ole american ice cream, then drag their sorry ass to the poles and vote for the “god-fearing, ultra-patriotic” repugs...again...and again...and again…
Posted by on 09/08 at 05:18 PMI’ve been speaking at Bucknell and on the road all day (as if you all didn’t know), but it’s good to see everyone’s having so much arbitrary fun!
Is the working title, “Al Qaeda was Right” snark, or is that true? I can’t tell anymore.
I was kidding, Seebach, but who knows anymore? After the Atlantic published Barbara Dafoe Whitehead’s “Dan Quayle Was Right” in 1993, I figured it was just a matter of time before a “liberal” outlet published a story on immigration titled “Pat Buchanan Was Right.” But with The Enemy at Home we seem to have skipped that one altogether and gone for the Hyper Bowl.
Somewhere between the all confining Burka and the thong bikini is a sensible middle ground.
OK, here’s the tipoff—I think Fitz is really a sockpuppet for Joe Lieberman.
All hail the thong burka!
Actually, the nickname “Mushy Noodle” D’Souza has a double meaning - he overcooks his bow-tie pasta (what other kind would conservatives eat?) while listening to Kenny G and other purveyors of noodly pseudo-jazz. So we can ridicule both his cooking and his musical taste in one fell swoop.
Whereas Azelie wins the Synaesthesia Bowl for this wonderfully sprezzatural remark. If we add the obvious, namely, that “Mushy Noodle” is also a remark on the quality of D’Souza’s thought, I’d say we could hit the trifecta.
Posted by Michael on 09/08 at 05:32 PM’But they sure will sit in front of the tube watching abc, disney and fox with a beer, chips and/or tub of good ole american ice cream, then drag their sorry ass to the poles and vote for the “god-fearing, ultra-patriotic” repugs...again...and again...and again…’
if you’re going to adopt an air of intellectual superiority, you might want to spell “polls” correctly.
Posted by on 09/08 at 05:33 PMYour piece reminds me of the bloodfest over Churcill’s “little Eichmanns” comment. By the way, must you coldcock Christianity every third article? Was it the Jesuits at Regis High? JD Crossan new book on Paul, Liberation Theology, spirituality as transpersonal value rather than transcendence? If you on the Left could find this kind of rapprochment… Probably too risky for you.
Posted by on 09/08 at 05:36 PMMichael, I still think your most lucid, witty, and trenchant takedown of D’Souza predates the End of Racism review, which pretty much draws its power from quoting DD and his apologists. That whole account of his early career that appears in Public Access still holds up remarkably well.
I met a teacher at Medaille College in Buffalo a few years ago who told me his favorite political writers were D’Souza and Chomsky. Evidently he thought that the biggest injustices in the world were U.S. imperialism abroad and multiculturalism on college campuses. Hard to deal with that.
Posted by on 09/08 at 05:40 PMI’m so sick of these “blame America first” types like Falwell and D’Souza!
Posted by on 09/08 at 05:42 PMRemember lefties, your condoms are lightin’ rods for terrorists, so best be careful.
Fitz:
Most European nations have more restrictive abortion laws then America (with countries like Poland banning them).Unless things have changed radically in the last 4 years, you have your facts totally backwards. You haven’t exactly captured the benevolence of this reader.
--
Jeesh, what a bunch of Debbie Downers commenting on this blog. There’s a Grouchy Medivalist (not heard from in this thread yet), a Grouchomarxist, and now a Grumpy Physicist.Funny enough, I was in a band once called The Downers. Pure kismet.
--Theron sez:
I suspect it’s the psychology that breeds the ideology, a la the kind of thing John Dean talks about in his latest Conservatives Without Conscience, but regardless of the root source, it’s the same dance, just different costumes.
Here you go:
The enthusiasm of fans for their favourite rock star and the religious trance of a devout Catholic in the presence of the Pope are libidinally the same phenomenon; they differ only in the different symbolic network which supports them. Sergei Eisenstein’s provocatively entitled essay ‘The Centrifuge or the Grail’ aims precisely at emphasizing this ‘unhistorical’ neutrality of ecstasy…: in principle, the ecstasy of the knight in the presence of the Grail, and the ecstasy of a lover in the presence of the beloved, are of the same nature as the ecstasy of the kolkhoz farmer in the presence of a new centrifuge for skimming milk. Zizek, Plague of Fantasies, 50 (although I’m sure he says it about 7 times elsewhere; since I’ve quoted this before, consider my quotation an hommage to SZ’s favorite method of bulking out a composition)
Of course there’s far less difference between Islamic and Xian totalitarianism than there is between a lover and a centrifuge.
Posted by on 09/08 at 05:46 PMActually, as a lefty, I’m committed to the inappropriate use of apostrophes in weird last names because some godless people took prayer out of our schools and replaced it with bad punctuation. Put the Baha’i prayers back in our schools!
Posted by Kevin Hayden on 09/08 at 05:48 PMsweetnessandlight - I seem to have screwed up the sarcasm tags. This guy actually scares the bejesus out of me.
Posted by on 09/08 at 05:57 PMI meant “committed to END inappropriate use” etc, etc.
I must be weakening spiritually.
Oh, God, there’s even hair on my palms now…
Mama said this would happen if I kept watching Oprah. I should have listened.
Posted by Kevin Hayden on 09/08 at 06:02 PMThe problem with the academic left is that finally all they have to serve is plates of Sade.
Vegetarians love that stuff.
It’s so French!
But here we’re getting a little warmed-over Williams.
Most Americans would prefer Sade, to that old sod Williams.
At least the French know how to cook.
There’s a little helping of humor on the side, too, here, but it’s not the main meal.
Just observations.
Even heaping portions of Williams with Sade will never get you another president.
Something more substantial is needed.
Lutheran Surrealism!
Posted by Kirby Olson on 09/08 at 06:20 PMDon’t worry, Buffalo Gal, as long as you stay away from Arabs in Las Vegas or in cheap bars, I think you’ll be okay. Fitz talks big about protecting the sanctity of the less decadent American women, but it’s single sex marriage that he really cares about. But don’t take my word for it, take his:
Im a pig opponent of SSM
What has happened in Mass is a lot more Machevellian than you may imagine.
I know this issue inside out.
Its a cultural coup – they forced it through the Judiciary, now they will sit on it and try an ingrain it into the culture and law as deeply as possible.
Until it becomes a fate accompli.He’s not just indulging in hyper bowl when it comes to that fate accompli you know.
Posted by John Protevi on 09/08 at 06:23 PMKirby, there’s nothing sadder than an old flame getting all rouged up to visit the site of his former triumphs, only to see everyone smitten with a newer, sexier, more sprezzatural model. You had your turn in the sun, but this is Fitz territory now. Look, it’s not you, it’s me. It was fun while it lasted, but once he showed up, it was a fate accompli.
Posted by John Protevi on 09/08 at 06:34 PMFaut-il bruler Sade?
It doesn’t matter one way or the other.
Tastes the same.
(Fitz has only encouraged me, and I am only hoping to egg him on. Corny as we are, we are substantial!)
Go Fitz! I will happily retire into the shades now!
Posted by Kirby Olson on 09/08 at 06:37 PMSo you are Achilles, and Fitz is Neoptolemus? How are those fields of asphodel I hear so much about?
Posted by John Protevi on 09/08 at 06:42 PMSorry for the typo anon, but I did tell you that I had a “simple and shallow mind”. And I do not claim, or even imply intellectual superiority.
Hell, I’m not even an inttellectual, let alone having a perception of being superior to anyone.Can you come up with a plausible (dude, did I spell that right?) explanation for the folks we have in office? Can you explain how a thinking individual can listen to the bush-boy, or any member of his bush league and then say “I agree, that really makes sense.”?
You may find typos and grammatical errors in my comments, but the real error is the lack of collective thought, our failure to demand a mandate for transparency and accountability from elected officials, and expressing our displeasure at the POLLS. It’s sad to think that we have the ability, through our democratic process, to bring about change in this society, but often cannot motivate even 50% of eligible voters to get to the POLLS.
By the way, please don’t think that I believe in the democrats that are curently in office. A real change is needed. But the question is, can there be real change?
Posted by on 09/08 at 07:04 PMHey, we’re just ordinary Christians, like 80% of the country. At least I don’t think either one of us is a pagan.
The pagans are what D’Souza was complaining about.
You have to admit that the left had its moment. They used it at my school to teach French theory, Williams, and a wonderful seminar on the ethics vs. the aesthetics of fist-fucking. Were these the ultimate concerns of the 60s generation?
The wave crested, naturally. The public doesn’t even begin to know what has happened in academia on its dime over the last two decades. If they knew, the campuses would be closed down by order of the Sanitation department.
The left could have used its time in academia to support better causes. There is a belated effort to start green studies.
But what was really in full play was Lacanian Desir—full-out, with academic superstars like Zizek supporting the child molesters (he gave a talk in Seattle in support of the high school teacher who committed statutory rape against a 12-year old boy).
Is this really what we need? Perhaps the cry of the wolves began with Howl, but at this point a great deal of people would like to have their culture back.
Next time, if there is a next time, the left will have to think about something corny like responsibility toward others, rather than randiness toward children.
You have to benefit others and get the head out of the ass.
Ask not…
That was a good sentence. Since then we’ve hardly heard anything remotely responsible from the left and their pulpit.
D’Souza writes awkwardly and I can’t read it. He’s not a poet like Deleuze. But he has a kind of old-fashioned substance and good sense that poor Gilles had thrown out the window with the window.
Alas.
Because we could have used a brilliant perspective or two.
But it can’t come from either Masoch or Sade on the nickel of the folks from Dime Box. I’m sorry, this call is over. Please deposit another generation.
Posted by Kirby Olson on 09/08 at 07:10 PMHey Michael, hombre:
How do we tell your parody posts from the real posts?
So let’s see..."Their outspoken opposition to American foreign policy—including the way the Bush administration is conducting the war on terror—contributes to the growing hostility....”
It’s not the fact that we invaded Iraq, it’s the opposition to the invasion that has really pissed off the insurgents/terrorists.
Makes perfect sense.
Posted by on 09/08 at 07:44 PMThe feministas who tore their bras off in the sixties are to blame for 9/11.
Solution: men, put your women in burqas. This will go a long way towards stopping the Muslim hatred and the terror attacks. It’s for the good of the country.
Need a burqa? Look no further:
http://www.alhediya.com/burqa1.html
Posted by on 09/08 at 08:18 PMBy the way, must you coldcock Christianity every third article?
I’m sorry, JCF, was this directed to me? Because I’m not seeing the coldcocking of Christianity in this post, let alone in every third. Thanks--
Posted by Michael on 09/08 at 08:36 PMAll we need is a Disgruntled Postal Worker to complete the set.
The set is now complete. I’m unarmed. For now. But I’m in Texas. I can fix that, PDQ. Saw a Glock .357 with night sight advertised on the marquee of a pawn shop near only a few blocks from work once. Still laugh about that one. Evil people, tempting me that way!
Posted by on 09/08 at 08:39 PMHey Michael, hombre:
How do we tell your parody posts from the real posts?
Oh, I really don’t have any idea anymore. As Jorge Luis Borges almost put it, years and years of parody posts have not failed to influence reality.
Posted by Michael on 09/08 at 08:41 PMsnarky ABF comment: Is the abbreviation in #60, as referenced in #76 correct?? I was thinking it was a typo, meant as a spiffy cool way to intice the altogether obvious nature of the parodic comment--J-F-C!
JP Stormcrow not withstanding when he quoted:
that we can persuade moderate Muslims and others around the world to cooperate with us
but my serious question, {"really" (captcha word) would i joke about this?} is just what weapon system would we use as the persuader??? Do we rely on the shock and awe of strategic MIRV’d nukes, say a couple of sub launched Tridents, whilst using our nuclear torpedoes to sink Islamic fleets?? Or do we focus on tactical cruise missles and more DU tipped artillery to make our persuasive argument? I know we already have a decider, but if DeeDee is really going to get others to stand by his man, he needs to find a real persuader.
Posted by on 09/08 at 09:08 PMMichael,
Wow, your right I did misread you here. My apologies.
Posted by on 09/08 at 09:54 PMBaudrillard by ten in the HyperBowl.
Posted by on 09/08 at 10:10 PMI was in a band once called The Downers
Like this matters to anyone but me: “...once in a band...” My shame as an academic parvenu wins me the Pnin-hat (Hat-Pnin?) this month: that’s what I get for checking on whether Fritz had come back.
Poster over at Pandagon said that if excessively enjoyed civil liberties cause terrorism, then it’s clear, and I paraphrase, why Al Qaeda’s (or was that Dimmu Borgir?) left Scandinavia a smoking wasteland of lutefisk and furniture with nice clean lines. And mermaids. Mourning for Oslo is my sop to you, Kirby.
PS Enjoyed the PoMo chapter very much MB. Had only the vaguest sense of Rorty, and now I’ve reason to read him.
Posted by on 09/08 at 10:47 PMRemember when the rightwing was all about the “Beer! Whiskey! Sexy!” and Afghan beauty contests? Good times....
Posted by on 09/08 at 11:18 PMDinesh D’Souza - sounds arab or dutch
and then there’s that indian catholic Romish Ponnuru
Michele Malkin’s from china or some such
and horowitz gotta be a jew
By God! What’s a ‘merican right winger to do?
Our nation’s downfallen and can’t ever stand
when we got to outsource to staff up the KlanPosted by on 09/08 at 11:23 PMI stopped reading the comments after Fitz wrote that David Hasselhoff is the reason for terrorism.
Nothing more to learn after that.Posted by on 09/09 at 12:21 AMI guess I need those tags myself, Buffalo Gal; I was *trying* to respond in kind.
Posted by on 09/09 at 12:29 AMEnjoyed the PoMo chapter very much MB. Had only the vaguest sense of Rorty, and now I’ve reason to read him.
Oh, thanks so much, Karl. And from a Medievalist who is Grouchy, no less! That chapter is (for me) the heart of the book, so I do appreciate it.
Posted by Michael on 09/09 at 12:34 AMPersonally, I blame the blogofascists. Their liberal use of their keyboards inflames the passions of many souls in the Middle East and as Fitz and Dinesh both aver, other traditional societies not infected with blogofascism, which is basically a precondition for no fault divorce, gay marriage, support of the minimum wage, universal health care, enviromentalism and conservation, labor unions, abortion and over-the-counter abortifacients, secularism, liberal socialism, the culture of death, the humanities, and so on. Appeasement by any other name, and I don’t mean Neville Chamberlain! I prefer to retreat into the House of Being (that’s Sein and not Dasein, mind you) and lock the door very tightly. Van Gogh’s shoes really deserve my attention. The blogofascists are tapping away, so hurry along.
Posted by Sprezzatura on 09/09 at 01:42 AMSayyid Qutb, one of the intellectual authors of modern Islamism, came to America and was shocked, shocked, among other things, by going to a church social and seeing men dancing with women to whom they were not married, in public. This episode was one of the things that pushed him toward the belief we are living in an age of jahiliyya--pre-Muhammad primitivism.
It’s certainly true that young Muslim men find our culture both attractive and repulsive at the same time, and that’s a factor in drawing some toward jihad. Although I like the tango and the merengue, there are in fact serious problems with many of the trends in our culture.
Even if there came about, however, a nationwide revival and we all became lifetime heterosexual monogamists and daily communicants, I doubt that would deter the jihadis. It might even enrage them, a competing faith being more offensive than a complaisant secularism.
Posted by Grumpy Old Man on 09/09 at 06:27 AMHillary Clinton is a liberal?
Posted by on 09/09 at 07:37 AMThis meme has been around for a long time: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0898705797?v=glance">"Ecumenical Jihad,” from the mid 1990s, by one of the biggies in the conservative Catholic academic movement, Peter Kreeft.
Posted by bellatrys on 09/09 at 08:43 AMLet’s try that HTML again - “Ecumenical Jihad”.
Posted by bellatrys on 09/09 at 08:45 AMIn short, morality’s aim is to produce acquiescent subjects who, despite distress and humiliation, are adjusted to the authoritarian order. Thus, the family is the authoritarian state in miniature, to which the child must learn to adapt himself as a preparation for the general social adjustment required of him later. Man’s authoritarian structure-this must be clearly established-is basically produced by the embedding of sexual inhibitions and fear in the living substance of sexual impulses.
The exceptionally out of fashion Wilhelm Reich who studied something that could not happen here.
Posted by on 09/09 at 09:07 AMChildhood in the family is in many ways a preparation for life in adult society. What a concept!
Add “authoritarian” to this commonplace, dress it up in some Teuto-Marxist rhetoric, and away we go.
Posted by Grumpy Old Man on 09/09 at 10:48 AMThe answer to all this terrorism is obvious. It’s hard to stop righteous anger, but maybe we could make all this hate flow elsewhere.
I am speaking, of course, of Russia. Of course, al-Qaeda already hates Russia, but let’s make them ONLY hate Russia.
Here’s how we package it on al-Hurra ("The Free One")
1. Russian women are notorious for having something like six abortions a month.
2. TaTu
3. Viagra sold on the street! In America, you have to get a prescription.
4. Russia is big. You gotta hate something big.
5. Muslims in the Russian Federation drink and whore it up like all the other Russians. Nothing stokes up the hate better than religious backsliders. In comparison with Russian Muslims, American Muslims seem like the essence of Islamic orthodoxy.
6. Russian sex slaves corrupt their Muslim Turkish owners. When was the last time you saw an American sex slave?
7. Russia has plenty of those sexual libertines and godless people that Al-Qaeda hates, but very few people like Dinesh D’Souza, whose presence in the US is the only reason why al-Qaeda hasn’t wiped us off the map completely (he’s sort of a modern-day Lot).
8. Russia’s power is on the rise, America’s is not.
9. Half of Israel’s population now consists of Russian emigres. And they all play the Saxophone! American Jews might control the media, but the Russian Jews are out there on the front lines, driving poor Muslims crazy with their irresistable lascivious perestroika-era Jazz.
10. Russian loose women are prettier than American loose women. Pretty=morally dangerous.Posted by on 09/09 at 11:16 AMShorter Grumpy: I’ve never heard of Reich, but he’s German, so it can’t possibly be true.
Posted by John Protevi on 09/09 at 11:33 AMAlthough I like the tango and the merengue, there are in fact serious problems with many of the trends in our culture.
I absolutely agree. The level of tolerance for Republicans is not something anyone serious about morality can accept. It may be that “one thing you can’t hide, is when you’re twisted inside”, but at least they could have the decency not to flaunt it.
John Protevi: Einstein was german too, and I have not noticed any bending of space around my gravity, so there’s another data point for Grumpy.
Posted by on 09/09 at 12:37 PMGrumpiness is contagious, dammit!
You ought to check out Reich. A fascinating intellectual biography. Be sure to google “orgone box.”
Posted by Grumpy Old Man on 09/09 at 01:08 PM”The bourgeois family becomes the most important ideological workshop of capitalism through the sexual repression it carries out.”
WILHELM REICHSince we’re all being pedantic, I must agree – Grumpy is spot on target. This is pure Frankfurt School subversion, popularized by Herbert Marcuse and running roughshod through our culture and culmination in political movements like same-sex “marriage”.
Not only “cant it happen here” it has been happening for the last 40 years.
We either share a greater humanity with a billion five Muslims- or we continue to slide down the path of cultural suicide so as to pave the way for the revolution that is already dead.
Posted by on 09/09 at 01:46 PMGrumpy: what is this Google of which you speak?
Fitz: is the revolution that is already dead anything like a fate accompli?
Posted by John Protevi on 09/09 at 02:00 PMNot to be too weirdly paranoid or anything, but I’m having doubts about Fitz’s “hyper bowl.” If he had only heard the word spoken, but didn’t know how to spell it, he would write something like “hyper bully” (which would actually be a good eggcorn). If he had read it and thought it was pronounced “hyper bowl,” he would still spell it the way he had seen it written, hyperbole. So what’s the deal, Fitz? Am I just a lunatic with far too much time on my hands, or do you have some ulterior motive in writing poorly about your opinions on modern society (captcha) here?
Posted by on 09/09 at 02:07 PMAh Grumpy, if only it was so easy to disregard Reich. A quick trip to google. A snide reference to his sad demise. Why should anyone care about the irrational roots of the appeal of fascism in Jim Dobson’s America?
Posted by on 09/09 at 02:08 PMFitz: See my remark on republicans at #97.
Posted by on 09/09 at 02:10 PMDoes this mean the family is a fascist wellspring and needs to be radically recast or not?
Posted by on 09/09 at 02:24 PMOh Fitz, there’s no funny spellings or weird phrases to snark about in 104. You’re no fun anymore.
Posted by John Protevi on 09/09 at 02:31 PMFitz #104: Unless you can say that in a faux working class Brit falsetto and toss in a remark about parrots, I think it is beyond the pale.
Posted by on 09/09 at 02:35 PMNot only “cant it happen here” it has been happening for the last 40 years.
He’s right, ever since Ara Paraseghian wimpily ran out the clock and settled for a 10-10 tie with Michigan State in 1966, Notre Dame football has been maligned, sometimes with barely concealed religious overtones.
Ooops… wrong thread.
Posted by on 09/09 at 02:43 PMI get it now; I can go rest (captcha). Fitz is lobbying for the role of persuader.
Orgone boxes are fun actually; interesting in the partiality of sensory deprivations sense. Spending a couple of hours inside a completely dark, metal box, that begins to vibrate/pulse with one’s breathing (if it is made correctly), is not a bad way to enjoy an evening. It was a reich on thang to do in the mid 60’s at UCLA.
Posted by on 09/09 at 05:17 PMrunning roughshod through our culture and culmination in political movements like same-sex “marriage”
Fritz, you know the problems of roughshod riding predate Marcuse by centuries. Frankly, I think the problems begin with the church’s interference in the marriage racket. Why, once the church started promoting ‘consent’ in the 12th c., it was a slippery slope to banning marital rape, allowing interracial marriage (despite the opposition of some 80% of Americans), and “same-sex” marriage. And there goes our culture, so long as by ‘culture’ you mean ‘not the Jews’! The only thing they did right imho was condemning clerical marriage. I think demanding celibacy of our clergy would ensure that only the most dedicated occupied the pulpits of this grand nation, don’t you?
Also, banning stirrups would prevent roughshod riding. Think about it.
And, yeah, we really should resent Marcuse. I’m sure that you, like me, got your jodhpurs in a twist when he argued that accepting death as natural is key to allowing ourselves to be sacrificed to the dark gods of totalitarianism and war.
Now, Fritz, don’t miss your cue. The next bit’s meant to conjure up a bit of Horowitzian hackery. Hop on it hypocrite lecteur!
Posted by on 09/09 at 06:06 PMHi Karl, great comment, as usual, but please don’t call him “Fritz”! That’s sure to attract the ire of Grumpy, who’s ever-sensitive to the Teutonic (or as he calls it, the “Teuto"). His name is “Fitz.” If we don’t keep their names straight, Michael’s prize troll doll collection, which is growing day by day and will soon rival that of the Evil Emperor Zurg, will be hopelessly muddled. Only by assuring proper labelling by his commentators can Michael ever hope to attract an even higher caliber troll, such as Gary Ruppert, or even, dare we say it, Floyd Alvis Cooper himself!
Posted by John Protevi on 09/09 at 06:18 PMYou know how, when you’re driving through the suburbs of Berlin, and you see a Swiss chalet-style house with every conceivable style of garden gnome in the yard and you think to yourself, “Hey, what the hell is a Swiss Chalet doing north of Bavaria after 1950? And how do their people mow the lawn, anyway?”
What made me think of that, I wonder?
Oh, it must be that I could never distinguish between gnomes and trolls as a kid. That could have been tragic, as trolls are known to eat children. Hey! Maybe that’s why the new collection of trolls here are so determined that everyone have more children than they can reasonably care for. They’re hungry. It has nothing to do with needing human women to be legislated into acting as if we were less than we are in order for them to feel like the men they haven’t a gnome’s chance in Schleswig-Holstein of becoming. Whew, what a relief.
Shall I blame Marcuse as well?
Posted by heocwaeth on 09/09 at 06:29 PMWhen I was a wee undergraduate, we used to make fun of the silly nonsense spouted by supposed lefty intelleckchals in the liberal arts. And for good reason - some of their crap was just so fourth rate, intellectually. You know - Andrea Dworkin, or for that matter, Camille Paglia, who went downhill after her mildly interesting senior thesis that she spent two decades on.
But no one beats the right wing “public intellectuals” for wankery. They are to public discourse what intelligent designers are to science, and their methodology is identical. Start with a ridiculous bias and bring all your itty bitty brain cell activity to bear on it for long periods of time. Bingo - enough nonsense to drive Republican public policy for decades.
So, how does one actually put D’Souza’s ideas into action? Why by enacting a rigidly theocratic totalitarian state, of course. If we become the state our terrorist enemies want us to be, then they’ll leave us alone.
Of course, the Bush administration has tried appeasement before - closing the Bin Sultan air base as Osama asked, for example. But I forget - don’t listen to what Osama says. Listen to what Dinesh says, because he’s just so freaking brilliant.
Posted by on 09/09 at 06:39 PMThe whole idea of the 60s was to shatter the family so that the state would not have any resistance, and the Maoists could then tell us exactly what the future would be like, including the weather. Total control.
And who was to run it? The old upper class—Foucault and the whole mess of them were members of the extreme wealth of Paris—and yet they wanted even more power. They wanted Pol Pot type power, so that every decree would be total, and resisters destroyed.
In America the upper class leftists tried to make a go of it, too.
But then Horowitz broke ranks and turned his howitzer on his own ranks, and now it’s over.
As over as the Finnish Winter War, man, in which the Lutherans were outnumbered 50-1 by the godless communists, and still slaughtered them. One million Russian dead in three months. It wasn’t even any fun for the Finns because it was so awful to have the slaughter the waves and waves of godless communists.
Because the problem with communists is they must all think alike, or else what’s the state and its decrees even for?
And now, outnumbered 50-1 in the universities, the people who can think for themselves have slaughtered the communists again. With what? Two books? 101 profs by Horowitz and 1 book by D’Souza, and ten minutes now and then from O’Reilly.
And now with Fitz on the case, the left is in for a total rout.
Posted by Kirby Olson on 09/09 at 06:44 PMI predict that by 2006, someone will call Camille Paglia a lefty intellectual. And I’m sticking by my original prediction that personal jetpacks will render the automobile obsolete by 2007, too.
Posted by Criswell on 09/09 at 07:22 PMWell, well well.
I have nothing but the greatest respect and admiration for Ed Brayton, and agree with him nearly 90% of the time, and i only violently disagree over only 1%. He, at one time, held DeeDee in some regard, but this latest seems to have removed that veil. And as he is want to do, he strikes at the core of the issue :
I love this notion that if someone is free to do something he doesn’t approve of, like take birth control or watch movies he thinks are naughty, then suddenly they’re “abusing” that freedom. Freedom, to him and most social conservatives (whether of the Christian or Muslim variety), really just means that you’re free to do what they approve of you doing. The moment you do things they don’t approve of you’re engaging in “licentiousness” and “abuse of freedom” rather than exercising your freedom. A bit like telling a slave that they’re now free, as long as they don’t leave the plantation. The moment they leave the planation, then they’re “abusing” that freedom and we will take it away from them again.
The whole idea of the 60s was to shatter the family so that the state would not have any resistance
Well i guess i can safely assume Kirby never delved into the real 60’s koolaid; looks like he could use a huge cup full.Posted by on 09/09 at 07:24 PMFor some reason these trolls remind me of bad songs.
----
Whiter shade of beyond the paleWe skipped right to D’Souza
turned the Coulter to the door
I was feeling kinda seasick
couldn’t read Niall Ferguson any more
The neo-cons were humming harder
as Horowitz blabbed away
When we called out for another drink
the waiter brought a trayAnd so it was that later
as Judy Miller told her tale
that her face, at first just ghastly,
turned a whiter shade of paleShe said, ‘There is no reason
and the truth is what we’re told.’
But I published yet another Regenry book
and collected piles of gold
from the Scaifes and the Olins
who said the liberals were toast
and although my eyes were open
they might have just as well’ve been closedPosted by on 09/09 at 07:52 PMProtevi (2nd conjugation, 1s perfect of what?): gotcha: fitz fitz fitz.
Heocwaeth, my fellow medievalist: Perhaps this would help?
And now back to work.
Posted by on 09/09 at 08:03 PM"Ah Grumpy, if only it was so easy to disregard Reich. A quick trip to google. A snide reference to his sad demise. Why should anyone care about the irrational roots of the appeal of fascism in Jim Dobson’s America?”
I didn’t say “disregard Reich.” I said he had “a fascinating intellectual biography.” That’s an invitation to look into his writings.
And--just where exactly is there a fascist movement in America? If fascism is anything but a political swear word, you can’t find one of significance.
Have you ever read Dobson, or listened to his program? He’s quite soft-spoken and thoughtful, actually. Let me make it clear--I’m not a Dobsonian. But it’s a slander to imply that the man is an avatar of Mussolini.
Posted by Grumpy Old Man on 09/09 at 08:13 PMGood to hear that the Dobster is soft-spoken! I’m a fan of his books on beating children with belts and wooden spoons, myself. I didn’t know you could start hitting them as early as 15 months until I spent a couple of weeks at Focus on the Family’s re-education camp.
So “Mussolini” is definitely slander.
Posted by Michael on 09/09 at 08:26 PMD’Souza has apparently never been outside the USA, given we’re just about the most prudish country in the western world by any objective standard.
Posted by on 09/09 at 08:27 PMand the Maoists could then tell us exactly what the future would be like
Well, I guess that lets Criswell of the hook from being a Maoist.But in honor of the game of the day, my favorite “Maoism in the university” story is as follows: (although I heard it from an OSU athlete of the era, it is most likely aprocryphal - so call it an Apocryphal But Fun story.)
Before the first practice of the season Woody Hayes sent all of his coaching staff a copy of Mao’s Little Red Book and told them to study it. At the first staff meeting of the season he passed out a quiz on it, collected it, graded it, announced everyone’s score and then said “This concludes the meeting, the subject was discipline.”
I think this was shortly after he said “F… the Pope, how big is his offensive line.”
Posted by on 09/09 at 08:37 PMSoft spoken, eh. Well, that makes it definitely not fascism. Fascists must sweat and rant in high pitched squeaky voices.
Thanks for helping me out and let’s all get behind Ted Bundy’s campaign to be Gaulieter.
Posted by on 09/09 at 08:56 PMI can’t believe no one has commented on this so far:
I haven’t seen any other conservatives taking their distance from D’Souza. So I suppose you could say that I’m still waiting for that soul-searching, even though the decade hand on my watch has moved and I’m beginning to think that the conservative repudiation of D’Souza might never show up at all . . . .
Actually, Glenn Loury did—he once resigned from a think tank over the fact that Charles Murray and Dinesh D’Souza were being admitted as fellows or something. So that’s one conservative. Just don’t ask me to name another one.
So that’s one conservative.
Posted by on 09/09 at 10:51 PMI worked at a university hotel where D’souza came to speak and it was strange. His wife and daughter came along with him but really seemed subordinated: staying in the hotel all day, quiet while d’souza took care of public transactions. In the context of how he considers America so fallen, this behavior certainly reflects what gender roles d’souza might consider ideal. It’s not hard to imagine him harboring a profound respect for “Islamofascist” patriarchy.
P.S. I kind of feel dirty for gossiping.
Posted by on 09/10 at 06:06 AMQuite right, anonymous. I mentioned in my review of The End of Racism that it was “remarkable that D’Souza’s book has provoked only one resignation from the AEI—that of prominent black conservative Glenn Loury.” And I was deliberately trying to hold other conservatives to Loury’s standard. But I closed the review by saying that while I await the requisite soul-searching etc., I’m not holding my breath. Good thing, too, or I’d have been holding my breath for ten years now. Not even David Blaine could pull that off.
Posted by Michael on 09/10 at 07:07 AMKirby in #113:
The whole idea of the 60s was to shatter the family so that the state would not have any resistance, and the Maoists could then tell us exactly what the future would be like, including the weather. Total control.
And who was to run it? The old upper class—Foucault and the whole mess of them were members of the extreme wealth of Paris—and yet they wanted even more power. They wanted Pol Pot type power, so that every decree would be total, and resisters destroyed.
So Foucault was a member of the extreme wealth of Paris who wanted total state control and the destruction of resisters.
Tell me Kirby, do you teach this stuff to your students? Because even a moderately on-the-ball DA might see here grounds for TWI (Teaching While Incompetent).
In your defense (think of it as a pity fuck for an old troll who can’t get much action any more), you’re probably confusing Foucault with that other Maoist member of the extreme wealth of Paris, the transplanted Greek sailor and mathematician, Odysseus Nullset.
Posted by John Protevi on 09/10 at 10:18 AMI never mention Foucault in any classes. I read the History of Sexuality Part One and was astonished that he had played down the child molester Jouy on or about p. 36. He said what did it matter if some guy in some other century made some little girl masturbate him (he never quite explained what the game he referred to was—I think it was called boiled milk, or something—but in the context it seemed to be either a blow job or a hand job). So basically Foucault sounded as if he was for child rape, as well as for child prostitution, and couldn’t see any problem with either.
That’s about the time I stopped taking him seriously.
Then I read part of the biography and it said he went around in Stockholm picking up teenagers in his red sports car.
I can’t stand to read Foucault, as there’s no decency whatsoever.
I do not teach at a school with a graduate student body. Our students are often studying things like culinary arts, golf course technology, construction. I don’t think they need to know about Foucault in order to live productive lives.
In fact, I don’t think anybody needs to know anything about postmodernism to lead productive lives.
I also don’t think it’s necessary to burn Sade. It tastes the same.
And I do think he was mentally incompetent, and belonged in the asylum, along with those who think he was a great writer.
Posted by Kirby Olson on 09/10 at 01:04 PMMore on Sayyid Qutb in this Martin Amis piece, including his reaction to social dancing in Greeley, Colorado.
Posted by Grumpy Old Man on 09/10 at 01:07 PMI never mention Foucault in any classes. I read the History of Sexuality Part One and was astonished that he had played down the child molester Jouy on or about p. 36. He said what did it matter if some guy in some other century made some little girl masturbate him (he never quite explained what the game he referred to was—I think it was called boiled milk, or something—but in the context it seemed to be either a blow job or a hand job). So basically Foucault sounded as if he was for child rape, as well as for child prostitution, and couldn’t see any problem with either.
This qualifies as a Wolfgang Pauli moment: “this analysis is so bad it’s not even wrong.”
In fact, I don’t think anybody needs to know anything about postmodernism to lead productive lives.
Well, you’ve got that necessary condition covered. If only it were sufficient to leading a productive life, you’d have the game figured out.
Posted by John Protevi on 09/10 at 01:55 PMI had the passage checked by various Foucauldians, and they said, yes, that what I said it means is what I thought it meant. It was hard to believe even for myself. Then I looked it up in the MLA and there are several essays against the passage by feminists in the 80s.
I didn’t think you would be able to understand it.
But since you think you do, explain it.
Then I will embarrass you by quoting the feminists.
And then you will have one of those moments: which fashion should I follow?
Really, you are embarrassing yourself, John.
Posted by Kirby Olson on 09/10 at 02:26 PMKirby, you’re a sorry old troll. And your concern for my embarrassment is touching.
But I have to give you props for your strategy. If I spend time showing you the childish presuppositions behind your analysis, as well as cite people like Ladelle McWhorter who criticize the early reactions, then you get what you want, more attention, but I lose face by seriously dealing with a sorry old troll. What would it gain me to actually write something on Foucault just for you? That’s what I have a website for. Tell you what. Why don’t you visit the site, pull up my outline on HS1, and write back after you’ve had a look. In the meantime, you probably should keep to your policy of not mentioning Foucault in your classes. Though I do have to thank you for the “Foucault as a member of the extreme wealth of Paris bent on total state control” line. That’s got to be good for a free drink or two somewhere down the line. You know, in those boasting competitions, where profs drag out student bloopers like “In midevil times most of the people were alliterate.”
Posted by John Protevi on 09/10 at 03:15 PMNo, I don’t feel like visting your site much. I’ve had enough of you already here.
But here’s the passage for anyone who’s not so totally invested in the stinking hunk of dead meat named Foucault that they can read it for themselves.
The passage appears in pages 31-32 of the History of Sexuality. I tossed the book when I left graduate school, but just looked it up at Amazon.com. Page 31 where the description of the game of “curdled milk” appears, is not available for viewing for some reason. But on page 32, the following sentence appears,
“...this village half-wit would give a few pennies to the little girls for favors the older ones refused him...”
The village half-wit was called Jouy, and the translator gives us this hint, as to Foucault’s one joke in this book (not a very good one) --
*Jouy sounds like the past participle of jouir, the French verb meaning… to have an orgasm, to come.
So he got his rocks off by giving pennies to little girls.
And Foucault says the only problem with this is that the medical-police establishment was concerned enough to write it up. Foucualt apparently thought this was crazy for them to bother, which means that he thinks that pedophilia was ok. In fact, the Foucauldian that I asked about the passage verified my reading of it, and then said that he himself wasn’t sure if pedophilia was ok or not!
I can’t imagine anything clearer than this. However, I understand that people want to protect their intellectual “goods.” Having sunk a half a life-time into a rotten chunk of intellectual history, and now that it is your metier, you will defend it violently, just as the Freudians will defend their turf, or the Bible belters, theirs.
And naturally the cicadas will now sing.
But anybody who doesn’t have a vested professional interest in maintaining Foucault of all people as an intellectual saint and who actually looks at the passage will have to see that F. is basically saying that the principle of child molesting is beneath his interest, and that Jouy should have been able to get his two cents worth, same as any other tourist to Thailand today.
But this is PART of the reason that D’Souza rightly objects to much of what is being taught in academia today. Pedophilia is wrong, but Foucault didn’t know it, and his interpreters look the other way, and backpeddle, or else they’d be out of a schtick.
Posted by Kirby Olson on 09/10 at 03:37 PM"Vested professional interest”? But Kirby, old man, I’m a member of the extreme wealth of Baton Rouge. I don’t have to work for a living, but I keep this professor gig as part of my plan to seize total state control.
Posted by John Protevi on 09/10 at 03:52 PMTo get a quick sense of the class milieu that the Parisian intellectuals of modernism and postmodernism inhabited you have to read just a little bit of biography or even novels, not just theory. Who were these people?
Simone de Beauvoir tells you quite a lot in the Mandarins.
Kristeva tells you more in the Samurai.
These are extreme upper class Parisian elite.
It may be that they cared about the poor, but they would never have actually descended into a soup kitchen in the manner of Mother Theresa. How gauche!
They would of course commit what we would call statutory rape. SdB’s rape of her 16 year old philosophy student Jacqueline Lambda is accounted for in the youth’s book, A Disgraceful Affair. SdB admitted that she and Sartre had taken advantage of the youngster, before throwing the Jewish child out of their apartment into occupied Paris.
To survive the French intellectual milieu you have to think of the merciless cliques in upper class New York or London schools for the rich. It is a similar thing in Paris only worse.
And for them to play at caring for the working class—like Marie Antoinette played at being a maid—is just so much pretense.
They think of you and I the way that John Protevi apparently cares about his undergraduates.
But please dream on that the world can be saved by reading such people. Or theorizing via Oxford Marxists over tea and crumpets.
Posted by Kirby Olson on 09/10 at 06:34 PMI never realized that poor Bill Moyers was a backer of Madonna and her ilk.
Posted by on 09/10 at 06:47 PMKirby, I’m sorry, but my shame quotient has been reached. This is getting to be like bear-baiting. If I snark at you any more, you’ll roar and snarl, gnash your teeth, and wave your claws about menacingly. While the rubes might like it, I’ll just feel even more ashamed at myself for provoking you for cheap laughs.
Posted by John Protevi on 09/10 at 07:45 PMThanks John, you have helped me gain so much clarity in all this. It is quite apparent now that Lutheran Surrealists don’t need to know very much at all to live productive (in the consumerist middle class sense) lives.
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Posted by Michael on 09/11 at 08:44 AMDrat! I’m too late.
There’s one thing I’m confused about, though—if the traditional cultures all the world over despise American licentiousness, why is immigration to America so popular? All I can figure is that they want to come here, watch Fox News, study for citizenship, become citizens, and vote for Republicans, who will enact the proper Puritan rules. Granted, it’s a long-term project, but why else would so many people want to move to America?
Posted by Orange on 09/11 at 11:45 AMNone of this is terribly difficult. It’s not much of a point to concede, unless one is intellectually vested in the philosophical justification for the very decadence Dinish , I, and others point to.
Traditional societies resent and fear America and the West in large measure because of our moral decadence. This applies across multiple cultures and defines an important line between traditional societies and first world western democracies. Even if not grounded in fact (it is) this is still the widespread perception.
My middle eastern (Muslim) associates tell me their parents (the first generation immigrants) came here for the economic opportunity – and reject contemporary western culture as decedent.
Simple? No?
Posted by on 09/11 at 12:50 PMI’m still wondering why al-Qaeda didn’t go after Brazil. Because those thongs on the beaches of Rio are really, really too much. And don’t even get me started about that Nudity Festival they call “carnival.”
Posted by Michael on 09/11 at 12:58 PMYou miss the point again.
Its not that they Al, Qaeda attack’s America simply because of our decadence.More precisely it would be that - Terrorist find sympathies and recruits against the west in large part due to our (perceived?) decadence.
If followers of this blog are forced to make light of such a point, one can only assume it is an effort to obviate around an idea to strong to face directly.
Posted by on 09/11 at 01:06 PMHey, Fitz, I like my licentiousness, fornication, and pornography, and the only way Osama bin Laden is going to get me to give it up is to pry it from my cold, dead, and probably sticky, fingers.
Posted by on 09/11 at 01:38 PMI nominate Fitz for a Star Trek Writing Award. He has boldy gone where no man has gone before in using the phrase “obviate around,” though it is true some bots have followed him.
He stands alone, however, in using the phrase “masters of obviation,” as in the immortal sentence, ”I do not use the term ‘masters of obviation’ lightly.”
Indeed, I should hope that phrase is used only with the utmost gravitas. Its use in snark could severely compromise our already weakened national moral standards.
Posted by John Protevi on 09/11 at 03:12 PMIs a “decedent” like an antecedent, only one more mortally obviated into some grounded state (like under)???
Oh, and my friends and associates (drug-addled, porn sharing, techno-tribal warrioring, naked fire-dancing, freaks) tell me that violent islamic extremists hate theocratic christian imperialists more than they hate penthousers and playboys. Is this possible??
well come on, the captcha word is “question”
Posted by on 09/11 at 04:38 PMNaked fire-dancing freaks? Quit obfuscating around, spyder!
and reject contemporary western culture as decedent.
Fitz’s obtunded-around point, obviously, is that Western culture is dead. It all has to do with obstetricizing around the obloquy, of course.
Posted by Orange on 09/11 at 04:54 PMI can’t stand to read Foucault, as there’s no decency whatsoever.
....
In fact, I don’t think anybody needs to know anything about postmodernism to lead productive lives.I’m inclined to agree with the sentiment on postomodernism. OTOH, Foucault at least has a gift for turning a phrase, although this should never be confused with substance.
Posted by on 09/12 at 06:29 AMMr. Berube:
Thanks for pointing out that wingnuts like D’Souza, Coulter, Limbaugh etc. are actually integrating themselves quite well with the larger, (’Dominant’?) culture. And that we ignore them at our peril.
I don’t know why people have such trouble understanding that just because they make no sense and are crazy evil, that doesn’t mean that the populace won’t listen to them and even follow them.
Posted by on 09/19 at 11:26 AMHas anyone posting here actually read Dinesh’s book—“Enemy at Home?” Doesn’t seem like it. And that includes Michael, the esteemed professor who refers only to the publisher’s intro letter. That’s not a very good way to critique a book is it—glibly “debunking” the publisher’s letter--without even reading the book??
As a university professor myself, I try to read books thoroughly before I discuss them, much less trash them...and their authors.
I actually read the damn thing in its entirety for a book review and found many of the arguments compelling, even if I disagree with some of the conclusions to one degree or another.
Despite Michael’s mocking comments, Osama bin Laden and many other radical Muslims have commented extensively on the West’s, especially America’s, perceived depravity (rampant pornography, anti-male feminism, gay marriage, promoscuity, divorce, drug addiction, alcoholism, secularism, mocking and degrading of religion, vulgarity and coarseness, etc.)-- but the mainstream US corporate media (surprise!!) generally ignores those comments and selectively focus on their other comments.
Which is why Michael and others may never have heard them.
The radicals--and many moderate Muslims-- see our secular debauched culture as a form of anti-religion. These are things most conservative “red state” Americans deplore as well. Yet these “depravities” are all icons that the cultural Left prides itself on.
And while many countries are corrupt, we are the world’s only superpower--the leader of the West--and the only country that really is exporting its “culture” globally. So they do see that as a a threat.
They see that American inspired, media- fueled, cultural depravity and social decay encroaching on them through the media/Hollywood and other forms of what the Left usually calls “cultural imperialism.” They see it coming at them like a tidal wave that undermines their traditional families and religious norms. Which is why the Radical’s calls to hardening Islam and going on the offnesive does have a certain ring to the ears of moderates.
So I think Dinesh’s right there. Where he may miss the boat, is ignoring the fact that Bin Laden, et al, also have another agenda which is expansion and conquest, that while it dovetails with this anti-decadent West argument, is not only about it. So, Dinesh’s arguments uncover a big part of the Radicalization of Islam problem...and denying that is dumb… but it is not the sole piece of that puzzle.
In any case, dismissing authors, books or ideas out of hand, and then engaging in petty personal attacks, while ignoring the arguments made, is certainly not very open-minded, nor very liberal, nor very intelligent, nor particularly fitting for an academic.
Much could be learned, even from thinkers and authors we may not totally agree with...if we only act like true liberals and listen, read and think, before we refute.
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