James Taranto on Sarah Palin’s abortion effect on liberals
Bookworm on Jan 19 2011 at 3:34 pm | Filed under: Abortion, Sarah Palin
Mr. Bookworm loathes Sarah Palin: “She’s not one of us.” I don’t know what he means. She’s a married mom with children. She went to college. She and her husband work. They pay taxes. She doesn’t drink (or not to excess), smoke, or do drugs (so far as we know). She’s well-groomed. She has a sense of humor. She’s interested in the world around her. She’s religious but we actually have some friends and neighbors who are religious too.
Of course, she’s really religious. She actually takes it seriously. I think that’s what irks him so much.
And that’s kind of what irks others about her. Or, as James Taranto makes more specific, its her moral objection to abortion, which is undoubtedly a byproduct of her religion, that drives the women bonkers. To the pro-choice crowd, abortion is the last gasp of freedom.
I know this for a fact, because it’s the way I thought. Abstinence is great as birth control, but it denies a woman access to one of life’s fundamental pleasures. Birth control itself is great, except for all the problems with it: the hormonal nightmare of the pill, the mess of the diaphragm, the risk and embarrassment of the condom.
When all else fails, when you’ve given in to your instincts, but the birth control didn’t work, you’ve still got abortion. Abortion keeps you from a life of less money, less sleep, less freedom, less control over your time, less self-indulgence, less time for movies, reading, dinners out, dates, etc. And all that’s after the baby’s born. Abortion also keeps you from nine months of vomiting, non-stop peeing, back pain, hemorrhoids, massive weight gain, heart burn, sleepless nights, all of which suffering is followed by a few minutes to several days worth of incredible pain. Oh, yeah!
I totally get it. I really, really get it.
The only problem is that the other end of this equation, the one causing the nine months of discomfort, followed by the 18 years of sleepless nights, no money, etc., is a human being. It’s a baby, a toddler, a child, an adolescent and a young adult. It is a person, whose smell is instantly recognizable to you, who turns to you in times of happiness and times of need, who constantly grows and changes, often making you very proud. It is a potential mother, father, sister, brother, doctor, soldier, maintenance person, bus driver, lawyer, good Samaritan, criminal. It is potential. It is life.
These facts, the imbalance of parenting, means that those who are invested in freedom from pregnancy because it makes their own lives better (and it does) are very angry at Palin. She reminds them that, not only is another life involved, but also that one can be happy and productive, both despite and because of that other life — even if that other life is disabled. She makes liberals, especially women, feel inferior. And there’s no one better to savage than the woman who makes you feel lazy, whiny, self-centered, and ugly.
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“These facts, the imbalance of parenting, means that those who are invested in freedom from pregnancy because it makes their own lives better (and it does) are very angry at Palin. She reminds them that, not only is another life involved, but also that one can be happy and productive, both despite and because of that other life — even if that other life is disabled.”
Nail on the head, Book. Palin doesn’t think it’s either the Big O or misery since she knows life is a bit more complex than fallacious extremes.
The Taranto link took me to a page that said “Forbidden.”
I think I got the link fixed.
I agree with you, Book, on what liberal women hate about Palin. That said, I benefited from abortion as a girl and I refuse to be a hypocrite in my old age. Women have been aborting unwanted children for eons, it’s just that they did it under the table. I’m of a mind that thinks abortion should be safe, sane, and legal for any woman who decides she needs or wants one.
In olden times, women with unwanted pregnancies went to “wise women” in their communities who would give them an herb to take which would cause the pregnancy to terminate with none the wiser. Pregnant women in the 21st century are much more likely to survive their pregnancies and live to see their children grow up than those women who were using herbs, too.
In the 20th century, prior to Roe v. Wade, young women still had abortions but either they went on an extended tour of mexico or the continent, or the abortions were performed in none too sterile environments, often with a coat hanger in the hands of someone who either wasn’t a medical professional or had just enough medical training to be dangerous, and the young woman would not only lose the baby, she could also lose her life. I don’t like that idea.
I confess that I have become more ambivalent about abortion as I have gotten older, but abortions will happen whether it is against the law or not, so why not leave it alone, since it has been legal for most of my life, and frankly, we got bigger fish to fry.
I think that Liberals and too many people on the elitist conservative right absolutely loathe Sarah Palin from their core because her very existence and accomplishments are a refudiation of their core – that is, everything in which they have believed, for which they have sacrificed and for which they stand. You go, girl!
Greetings: especially “Duchess of Austin” @ #4
My father mentioned, once, twice, maybe more, that there was a difference between a reason and an excuse. An excuse, he thought, was a bad reason. Recently, I came across an article that I thought addressed the “coat-hanger” excuse rather nicely. I forget the author and whereabouts, but the crux of his argument was that there doesn’t seem to be much interest in finding out from medical records how many women died due to non-medical non-”legal” abortions of the invasive type prior to the enforcement of “Roe vs Wade”.
It seems relatively accepted that there are a million plus abortions per year in the good old USofA. The author offered a figure of 5000 botched abortion deaths per year prior. That seems to me quite a disproportionate trade-off. My understanding of human nature includes that a lock is to keep an honest man honest, not to preclude a thief’s success. The lack of “legal” abortions may have operated in a similar way, kind of a “ggod girls don’t”.
As to Bookworm’s overall argument, I would add only that in my Catholic school days, the good Sisters (of Mercy) were fond of saying that, when it comes to temptation, the Devil almost always has ease and pleasure on his side.
Duchess, you make a lot of assertions that I suppose you want us to take on faith. But I like my faith fortified by facts. Perhaps you could supply the following?:
These herb-dispensing “wise women” you refer to: In what specific cultures using which specific herbs? Any flurry of URLs you could link us to, Zach-like?
These abortions performed in non-too-sterile environments, sometimes with a coathanger as the instrument oif deliverance: How many performed? How many led to death? How many were done by coat hanger? Surely if you assert and know these things, you can support.
Please name the bigger fish we have to fry. What is bigger than the willful destruction of human life and cynical defenses of that destruction?
Of course you benefited from abortion as a girl. Unfortunately, your child didn’t. As to being hypocritical about changing your mind over abortion, those knucklewalkers, the Christians, have this funny notion they call repentence. You might consider it sometime.
Duchess of Austin, I don’t disagree with you. Abortion is as old as human pregnancy. But there’s something horribly disgusting and off-putting about a debate that negates life. Having had children, I simply can’t ignore that life factor any more. That’s my problem with the Left and abortion — the profound dishonesty about what’s at issue.
There may be a place, a time, a need, a personal necessity, etc. for abortion. Heck, I came of age in the 1970s and 1980s and doubt I’ll ever be anything more than a warm, to luke-warm, pro-Lifer. But to elevate abortion to a sacrament simply creeps me out. And to savage a perfectly decent woman because she personally rejects it offends me. What’s sad is that more people aren’t creeped out and offended.
Charles:
I posted mine seconds after your posted yours, so missed yours. You’re right too. Abortion has always been around, and it’s always meant almost certain death for the babies involved, and possible death for the women involved.
But I’d still like to keep the focus on the true disgusting-ness of the debate, because that’s where I think the battle can be won, the battle to take down this awful sacrament from its political pedestal.
Well, we don’t really need to stop with abortion, after all. A baby (oops…meant to say “fetus”) is pretty much unable to fend for itself outside the mother’s body for the first 2 years or so. That will surely make life way easier for many women.
Why not allow infanticide up to the age of two? Infanticide has been practiced for eons as well and will continue to be practiced. It was even a part of many religions (Phoenicians and the worship of Baal, the Aztecs etc.) and every religion is the equal among all, isn’t it?
Isn’t it?
Peter Singer, the Princeton Ethics chair, would disagree with you Danny. Even he concedes two years is too long. He would give parents just a month to return a defective baby to the hospital for infanticide.
What’s weird is that, even if one tries to exaggerate, it still falls too near the truth.
No disagreement, Book. I was just trying to see if Duchess might offer us more than what she did.
About 18 months ago I was sitting at the dinner table with an old friend, and my wife and son. The discussion somehow got onto Obama’s support of infanticide (of which my NYT-reading friend had no idea) and, inevitably, abortion.
My wife is a “personally opposed but support choice” type, which to her, given her leftist worldview, is coherent. But as the discussion got onto the issue of choice and I asked her what “choice” meant, all she could say was ”to keep the child or abort it.”
When I then asked her to describe an abortion, she could not bring herself to say more than, “the pregnancy is ended.”
“No,” I said, “please describe the procedure itself. The instruments used and their effect on the fetus.”
She would not go there. Somewhere deep down she realized the horror of dismantling a human being. I think we should always press abortion supporters to tell the rest of us just what this simple medical procedure entails.
“and, inevitably, abortion.”
Sorry for the sentence fragment. It should read “…and inevitably abortion came up.”
>>almost certain death for the babies involved>>
Not really meaning to quibble, but “ALMOST” certain death?????
Ummmm…..so….how many are adopted?
>>but abortions will happen whether it is against the law or not, so why not leave it alone>>
So will theft, so will murder, so will adultery, so will abandonment of children and old folks, so will every other form of evil human beings do to profit themselves in some way.
Why bother with laws at all? People are going to do what they do anyway…why not just leave it alone?
I confess that I have become more ambivalent about abortion as I have gotten older, but abortions will happen whether it is against the law or not, so why not leave it alone, Duchess of Austin
This is true about everything that is against the law. Robberies still happen, drugs still happen, kidnappings, rape, murder, prostitution….heck, even speeding, drunk driving, running stop signs. Are there any of these laws that you are also ambivalent about…because people do it anyway and will continue to do it, even though these things are illegal.
Well shoot Suek, I started my post and walked away for a bit. Guess I should have checked first to see if someone beat me to my point.
Charles,
I recently saw a commercial on tv where the narrator, when shown on screen, had a hole in her throat, a result, i assume from smoking. Pretty effective. A few years ago people went ballistic when it was suggested to show the after effects of a 3rd trimester abortion. I would venture that the people who would want to show this anti-smoking commercial were the same ones who went ballistic re the proposed anti-abortion commercial. In the end however the person who must deal with “choice” is that individual, within their soul. When the govt mandates that public tax dollars contribute to that abortion then it makes all of us complicit regardless of how you think and feel about abortion, and that is heinuous.
Cheesestick…
Great minds….!!
I meant almost certain, Suek, but there are periodic lawsuits about abortions that didn’t take, so that the baby was born. Then, the mom sued the doctor for malpractice.
While the abortion issue is significant, I don’t think it’s the primary factor behind the “she’s not one of us” phenomenon–especially among men. I think it is largely about education. People who have spent many years getting advanced degrees are threatened by the large-scale success of someone who doesn’t have on and doesn’t genuflect to those who do. This is particularly true when the individual’s degree is in something soft and squishy and/or when the individual’s career has not been as successful as he had expected.
>>I recently saw a commercial on tv where the narrator, when shown on screen, had a hole in her throat, a result, i assume from smoking.>>
stanley…
One can harden oneself against almost anything – that’s kind of the whole problem. If you don’t have an internal moral “horror” of evil, then eventually we become conditioned to the physically horrible. How else can people survive some of the mass slaughters that occur, and people have to just keep on keeping on? Hence many of the terrible atrocities of the world. Humans adapt. Only in the mind and soul can one retain a certain innocence, and only with some effort – great or small, depending.
I saw that same woman some number of years ago, doing more or less the same ad, with a cigarette in the hole, puffing away at the cigarette. The point of the ad was that even after a surgery of that extreme nature, it was a habit she couldn’t kick.
>>Then, the mom sued the doctor for malpractice.>>
And what happens to the “mistake”?
Duchess, please excuse me if I sound cruel, but I think you’re missing the point. You said “I benefited from an abortion.” I’m sure you believe you did, but your baby didn’t. The entire abortion debate is shot through with dishonesty: people in favor of abortion never ever mention the child. It’s all about me, me, me.
The pro-abortion side always refers to the child by clinical terms – embryo, fetus – and never as a baby in an apparent effort to avoid saying what they must know: they are taking a human life. From the moment of conception, the child respires, she (we all start as female) takes in nutrition, and she excretes waste: she is alive. From the moment of conception, the child has human DNA. The child is a human and the child is alive. If the pro-abortion side would admit it was extinguishing a human life, we might be able to have an honest conversation about abortion, but refusal to recognize the facts makes the situation hopelessly politicized and pretty much hopeless.
Suek:
The docs are sued for the cost of raising (feeding, educating, sheltering, clothing, etc.) the “mistake.”
But who gets “possession”?
Stanley, I remember that ad. There was no way around the message.
Among the objections I’ve read to the public display of graphic images of the aftermaths of abortions is that they are gruesome and inappropriate, and could traumatize children. I assume those who object thusly say it with a straight face and not a whit of irony.
David, I think you make a good point. Many leftists are obsessed with status, which in our day and age often means having a credential bestowed by a higher power. I know a woman who has a PhD in history who thinks Castro is a great man because Cuba has a 98 percent literacy rate. You cannot get any stupider than that, but the PhD ceritificate protects her from ridicule.
Yes, Sarah Palin is opposed to abortion. Has she ever, ever said that she would take steps to make it illegal? Not to my knowledge, but I could very well be wrong.
The “slippery slope” polemic is used by all. From the right it has often been of the nature that “this will lead to socialized grobnik”. From the left it is “they want to come into my bedroom” or “they’ll make us go to church”. Google “slippery slope” and you get over a million hits. Google “slippery slope fallacy” and it’s over 50,000.
I am loathe to engage slippery slope discussions. Pigs and mud and all that. Best to ignore them and hope that a majority dismiss them as the banality that they are,
>>the need to see themselves as “good”;>>
Someone included this as a list of leftist needs. I think it’s a valid one.
>>Has she ever, ever said that she would take steps to make it illegal? Not to my knowledge, but I could very well be wrong.>>
The problem is that those who want to consider homosexuality or abortion “good” do so because they need to see themselves as good. The right has an objective moral standard by which they can measure themselves – the left does not. They decide what they want, and want to justify whatever as being good, but having no standards, they can only do so by condemning as “bad” anyone or anything that says that they are “not good”.
I’m not expressing this very well…
Regarding Palin and abortion. She knowingly had Trig after the test came back positive for Down’s. Now I say to NOW, Singer and thelike, that’s Prolife! She answered the challenge by sucking it up rather than out. Palin is a finger in the eye of the guilty an they can’t stand it.
She has a sense of humor.
She has a ‘normal’ marriage, and some goofy kids who haven’t been perfect, but whose has? They aren’t criminal, either.
Not to get away from the abortion argument, which I agree with Book about, but I find that most of the real Left is just miserable about….everything. My sister, and another family member, both of whom are psychiatrists, call them, simply “the Angry People”, deal with them all the time in therapy. Not that everyone on the other side of the divide is perfect and rational, but I think it appears that Palin is just in a good mood most of the time.
Bush was like that. Never mean-spirited. Reagan. They DESPISED Reagan, because he APPEARED HAPPY. I know this is very superficial, but I think it’s a truism. Liberals are people who are congenitally or from a bad childhood unhappy. They are happy only when they are unhappy! They will not be happy with Palin until she’s miserable or broken. They never let go of Reagan (hence his own miserable son, Ron, coming up with the stuff about Reagan having Alzheimer’s while still in office. Ron is just a sad and angry person. Go figure) because they couldn’t get Reagan down or to act hateful. They were only happy when he did get diagnosed with Alzheimer’s and then died…oh hell, they STILL hate him.
They are simply twisted sad and angry people. I tend to see them as children who have not fully matured in a psychological fashion. Somehow, they’ve never gone to adulthood, where facts matter and the world doesn’t necessarily revolve only around their egos, and thus the tantrums when they don’t get EVERYTHING they want. A baby would compete with the infantile personality, so is to be avoided.
I believe it simply comes down to the fact that she is a major political threat to their dominance of the status quo.
There are other female politicians who are anti-abortion in their personal views. There are others who are devoutly Christian. There are others who are rock-ribbed conservative. But none of them generate the vitriol and insane hatred that Palin generates.
She was selected by John McCain and she struck a CHORD across large swaths of the population. THAT is what elevated their dislike of her into open, ranting hatred. She single-handedly vaulted the Republican ticket into the lead, and were it not for the investment/liquidity/housing crisis, McCain-Palin might very well have won. (in a squeaker, to be sure)
Palin is a lightning rod for them solely because she resonates. They have gone after her relentlessly, unstoppably, ever since that moment. To a large part they’ve succeeded in demonizing her to large numbers of people.
For die-hard, committed liberals, there are any number of issues they can seize upon as the focus for the hatred. They’ll choose the one that matters the most to them, whichever one it is. But it is the EXISTENCE of the hatred that is the key, not the particular issue they choose to hate her for. I truly believe the choice of the specific issue comes second, after the hatred. Because the hatred is due to her effective resonance with the American People.
The easiest case to see is that of far-left feminism. Palin represents a version of feminism totally at odds with that one. And it resonates with many women. For far-left feminists, this is an extraordinary threat to a constituency they believe they OWN. They simply cannot allow her to siphon off the support of, say, 25% of women who take a look at Palin-feminism and really like what they see. And so the two years of insane hatred has raged on. Certainly the abortion issue and her choice to actually birth her defective child (defective in THEIR minds, NOT mine) is a key point in their hatred for her. Some out of unexpressed or even unacknowledged guilt, some on the principle itself.
Finally – the only other conservative icon, aside from the untouchable Rush-bo, that liberals see as a threat is the Tea Party. And you see the same kind of ranting insanity and determination to destroy it there, that you see against Sarah Palin. That’s why the THREAT that she poses is what I see as the cause.
As to your husband, Book… it would be interesting to go through each of the issues and identify which one(s) resonate most strongly with him in his personal Palinn-hatred. I suspect in his case he’s just been effectively programmed to hate her by the media barrage.
Danny #10 ” (oops…meant to say “fetus”) “ as I understand it fetus is Latin for Little One. Perhaps we should use the long hand version…
Just recently I ran across some wag’s great line, “Sarah Palin: living in liberals’ heads since 2008.”
Mosonny…”most of the real Left is just miserable about….everything.” This is certainly true of many of the leftists who are driving the train. I think there are also many riders on the train who are pretty psychologically normal but who never had an overwhelming interest in politics and have had little exposure to any information & ideas other than those promulgated by the dinosaur media. Imagine what it must be like to have your view of events filtered through CNN, ABC/CBS/NBC, Time, Newsweek, and the typical daily paper.
All very good comments about why some folks “hate” Palin. I especially agree with those who have said that those on the left “tend to be happy only when unhappy.” That sums up so many of those who are self-called liberals that I have met over the years – there is always something for them to gripe about and there never seems to be anything good.
I would like to add to all the above comments that Palin also drives some folks crazy because, as has been said by many others, Palin refuses to be a victim. In one of her books I read that she felt that God didn’t “punish” her with an imperfect child;, God gave her and Todd a child who would need their extra-loving attention because God knew that they would be the best parents for that child. Now, whether one is religious or not, that’s a positive and very healthy outlook to have in life. Kudos to Sarah and Todd.
On a personal note, many years ago in the company where I was working at the time we had a new hire that everyone hated and had rude comments to make about her behind her back. I decided that the main reason for this venom spit at her was precisely because she was always upbeat and positive; nothing ever seem to get her down, she always tried to do her best, always tried to keep a smile on, even when things weren’t going well she always seemed to “keep on trucking.” As one manager said to me, I can’t stand a “bubbly person first thing in the morning.” So, it really comes down to what so many have said here – her success is what drives them crazy!
That’s why I love that old joke about the parents of twin boys, one of which is an incurable optimist. On their 8th birthday, the parents put a pony in one twin’s room and three feet of horse manure in the optimistic twin’s room.
When the optimist sees the horse puckey, he immediately rushes downstairs and out the back door to the tool shed, then returns in moments with a shovel. He begins frantically digging through the mess in his room.
“Son,” his parents ask, “what are you doing? Isn’t it obvious that your birthday gift is a pile of horse s**t?”
“No worries, Mom and Dad,” he replies. “I just know there’s gotta be a pony in here somewhere!”
Thank God for people like that.
Agreement with all the reason postulated here. I think it’s all part of a larger reason: Sarah Palin is the Feminist ideal – professional, successful, married, self-sufficient, smart, beautiful, equally adept with diapers and firearms, wealthy, happy, etc, etc, etc. She has it all. Palin’s only problem, her one sin – she’s not liberal. How can someone like her deny the self-evident truth of modern liberalism in favor of backward, uncouth, parochial modern conservatism?
Bookworm’s thesis makes a lot of sense to me — Palin makes people feel bad because, applying principles they affect to despise, she is making an amazing success out of her life and clearly having a lot of fun in the process. The question why they hate her so much has been puzzling me enough that lately I’ve been trying an experiment when I encounter people willing to say that they “hate” her. (Sadly, I live my life surrounded by such people — though in the past week or so they’ve been a little abashed and a little quieter about such things.) Anyway, whenI hear that word “hate,” I’ve been responding by asking, in a mild, curious way, “Why?”
First they look surprised — they’re not used to hearing anyone question such a fundamental religious precept But then they try to answer. Many start with personal insults like, “Because she’s stupid,” or “It’s that voice of hers!” When I echo back (using my best active listening skills!) “You hate her because she’s stupid?” or “You hate her for her voice?” most will try to move on to something a little more rational. (If they answer, “Yes! She’s stupid! She said she can see Russia from her house!” you might be dealing with someone too far gone for further discussion, though it wouldn’t hurt to point out that that was Tina Fey.) Anyway, most will come up with some objection to her politics, such as “She’s anti-abortion” or “She wants to drill, baby, drill,” or “She’s a creationist” or some other political disagreement. I haven’t been arguing with these statements, even when they’re wrong about her views (“She banned library books” or “She made rape victims pay for their rape kits.”) I have just been listening carefully and then saying, “So, you disagree with her politically?” and when they confirm that, asking, “And that’s why you hate her? Because you disagree with her?”
Nobody, so far, has been willing to admit that. Most of them have stared at me for a moment, floundered a little, maybe blushed, and said something like, “Well, of course I don’t REALLY hate her. She just makes me so mad.” Or they change the subject or, in one case, stomp off in a snit.
Anyway, it seems to be making them notice exactly what is going on inside them. It might make some of them think twice about letting so much hatred inhabit them for such a reason. And I continue to hope that some day, somebody who’s willing to stand by all that hatred will give me an illuminating answer as to why.
I find the argument “she is a creationist” interesting because it addresses something that I find puzzling: how do people (esp. on the Left) define “creationist” or “intelligent design”?
To me, “creationist” refers to someone that believes the world is only 4,000-something years old. Now, I don’t happen to believe that but I wasn’t around when the world was created and I happen to think that such a belief is pretty harmless. By “intelligent design”, do they refer to the idea that the world was created by a “creator” (versus what…total randomness?)? If so, I venture that most people in the U.S. believe in intelligent design by virtue of the fact that most people in the U.S. are religious.
Can someone help me out with definitions, here? I have this feeling that I am missing something more profound in these discussions.
Re the “she’s not one of us meme,” C S Lewis wrote a very insightful essay on what he calls The Inner Ring. I’d link it, but your comment system seems to be having issues today. Easy to find via Google, though.
“One of us” thinking can be a good thing when the definition of “us” is about adherence to a strong moral code…ie, a Marine might say “He’s not one of us” about someone who had shown cowardice. But when “one of us” thinking is based on compliance with an intellectual world-view, it will destroy any entity–a business, a military force, or a whole society–in which it takes root.
So many good comments here, capturing all the “objections” liberals have (or project on) Sarah Palin. I tend to agree that the main animus is not just abortion-based, but it started when she was tapped by John McCain and made a favorable speech and big splash right out of the box–she generated excitement and renewed interest in the Republican ticket, and thus became the No. 1 target for the Democrats (including those in the press) to aim for in the 2008 election. And because she remains prominent, strong, and liked by so many, she is still the same danger to the left which must be stopped at all costs, including using libel, smears, and lies.
My liberal friend told me Sarah Palin is too pretty to be taken seriously as a politician–that being a former beauty queen, she couldn’t really have any substance. I assume my friend heard that from Olberman or Colbert or somebody on NPR, since that’s where she gets her unquestioned talking points. I was so embarrassed for my friend’s anti-woman statement that I was speechless. I didn’t even challenge her on it, although I’m sure she saw my look of incredulity, which she let pass. That’s about the last conversation on politics we’ve had. If people can’t even judge folks on the content of their characters, (or, if they’re politicians, on their political views) there’s not a lot I have to say to them, as we’re talking on vastly different intellectual levels. That’s when conversation ceases being a dialogue and has to just remain civil, I suppose. But I like Mrs. Whatsit’s suggestions for challenging people to think deeper–it’s just hard to do that with close friends when you realize suddenly how disappointing their thinking process really is.
I agree Sarah Palin’s upbeat persona and success at life (including being the mother of five and making successes out of hardships) irks liberals, makes them envious and feel secretly out-of-control and guilty. She shows them up; she’s a living, smiling contradiction to all they believe and stand for. As for me, she IS my kind of people, and I find her strength, fortitude, political canniness, and perseverance inspiring. I also admire her morals. She may or may not be the best candidate for President (compared to who? I will decide among the field by their merits for the office), but I sure like Sarah Palin as a fellow American woman. As a post-feminist feminist, I can’t understand other women who don’t see that.
Wasilla if you can make it there, you can make it any… Wait, what, no that’s not right.
An that is why they hate her. She’s living proof that you can live in a nice place, harass you kids out of genuine affection, enjoy visiting your parents and still be a happy person. Whereas, many of the liberals have the “perfect” life in which they are perfectly miserable.
Her TLC show was a serious slap in the face. Constantly with her kids, and always visiting dad and a big wide open place to live. I’m sure a lot of ladies had to go off to buy a new pair of shoes or a bag to salve their jealousy over her having relationships.
Sadly, some of them don’t even SEE the hate.
One asked me recently why people give so much power and attention to that “Media Wh*re” Palin (discussion started by ringing up all the “right wing hate” that “caused” the Giffords shooting…) instead of just ignoring her.
I told her “It’s because they hate her. Not just hate her, but reflexively hate her to such an extent they can’t contain their hatred and will even make gagging noises and motions at the mere mention of her name, while calling her stupid, dumb, and mocking her.”
The sad part? In this conversation started about “right wing hate” by a person who refers to the right as hateful, bigoted, etc.?
The person I described in the “makes gagging noises” was her when the Alaska show was brought up a while back.
…and she wasn’t self-aware enough to stop and think about it for just a second.
Zabrina…”My liberal friend told me Sarah Palin is too pretty to be taken seriously as a politician–that being a former beauty queen, she couldn’t really have any substance”
It would be interesting to put together a list of really beautiful women who have achieved remarkable non-beauty related things. One of the first ones who comes to minds is Krystyna Skarbek, a runner-up for Miss Poland of 1930, and later one of Britain’s most effective underground agents during WWII.
Let’s see if the links are working now…yes.
David Foster mentioned something about my earlier comment about Palin being attacked because she ha a happiness mentality. I stereotyped all liberals as being hateful and unhappy. David pointed out that many are not that way, and I have to agree. I have many friends who are self-avowed liberals, who are no more childish or unhappy than I am. He also pointed out the MSM is still a major source of news and analysis for many, maybe most people, and so many are just misguided, more than hateful.
Having agreed with that, I would also add that much of the angry Left, the ones who are driving the train, as he put it, are simply envious of her, and that seems to be a commonality of what the comments above are saying, in one fashion or another. Envy is one of the worst of human emotions but is a big motivation, I believe, of the Left. Even if they superficially have success and money…there are underlying psychological problems where they ARE miserable and angry or fearful. That’s why those drivers are always on the attack, and it IS personal with them…and much of what they push is just purely projection. Victor Davis Hanson also has an article about Palin-hatred up at http://pajamasmedia.com/victordavishanson/the-war-against-palin-goes-on-and-on-and/ and he documents how the attacks on her, the specific things they ascribe to her have been said by someone on the Left, as clear a case of projection as could be. It too is worth reading as another take on this phenomenon.
But I think that Zabrina’s comment about her friend that said Palin is “too pretty”…ohmigosh, does that not say volumes! We can’t trust pretty and happy and optimistic and America-as-a-shining-city-on-a-hill type silliness…and yes, the women who hate her because she seems happy and not hateful against the “oppressors” (men, for instance!). AND JKB’s statement about the TLC show…that too is correct. Palin’s family, while not perfect, and going through some of the same problems as the rest of America…they ALL seem happy TOGETHER. As a FAMILY. She takes vacations with her family! It’s a radically horrible notion, if you are a committed Far Leftist, because the Left is anti-family, and I think they at heart believe family is often at the roots of their problems.
Having this happy family, acting as if she is so carefree, having some decent looks…oh the horror of it all! The Envy is overwhelming for those who have been taught to be unhappy.
This probably deserves an entire post, but I think one of the key attributes of the modern “progressive” is the absolute inability to feel a sense of **gratitude**. And this particular hole in a person’s soul will tend to make them much angrier than a person who does have such a sense.
Liberal women hate Palin because every choice she’s made has been the opposite of what they’ve been advising women to do, and each choice of hers has been a success:
*Married young – Still happily married to a supportive (and handsome) guy.
*Stated a family while she was young/successful in her chosen career – 5 happy, normal kids
*Stayed out of major cities (NYC, LA, DC, Boston, etc.) – comfortable in a beautiful, rural place & not missing all of the culture of city life.
*Didn’t single-mindedly pursue a high-powered career – flourished in a variety of jobs, including some typically male jobs
*Got into politics, and progressed and succeeded, without the help of family connections and/or a powerful spouse
*Took on the establishment politicians instead of following the party line and embracing all of the typical “women’s issues” like abortion, education, gun control
*Is pro-life and has stuck to her values when she had Trig and supported her teenage daughters pregnancy.
By doing all of this, and being happy, she is living proof that the feminist track is bad for women.
Charles: I’m not a Zachlike liberal and I’m not an extremely religious person either. I believe in God, not church, the social pact that is our Judeo-Christian morality and I’m not about the destruction of human life for the fun of it. Nor am I going to site statistics for your pleasure because I am a woman, I’ve had an abortion and I have had a child. I know for a fact that women have been ridding themselves of unwanted pregnancies, one way or another, since the dawn of time. Making abortion illegal does nothing to stop it, regardless of the statistics or the way you may feel about how a woman comports her *own* body.
If I was Queen of the World, I would have every baby sterilized, across the board, with a reversible procedure that would be done in the future if they met certain standards to breed, but of course that’s about as fascist as it gets. *grin*
I realize that abortion is repugnant to some of you, and that is perfectly ok. Don’t have any abortions. That’s pretty much the same thing conservatives tell libs when they start whining about being offended…don’t look. Don’t participate. But please, don’t try to force your beliefs on me. Sure you can beat me over the head with calls for statistics, but that doesn’t mean that abortion doesn’t happen, whether you like it or not, and whether it’s illegal or not. I even agree with Bookworm that holding it up as a talisman is creepy. I don’t advocate abortion as a means of birth control (although I realize and concede that this is how it is used by a fraction of the population), and I’m sorry if it doesn’t please you that I chose not to have a child at 17 years old.
As for the bigger fish we have to fry, our fiscal situation as a country may soon make the whole abortion argument moot if we don’t get a handle on it, not to mention illegal immigration, health care, dealing with entitlement reform and a laundry list of more important problems, so I believe the GOP needs to get off the morality bandwagon in order to get things done. I’m all about a more moral society but one needs to deal with reality. Abortions are reality. The left has the opportunity to use abortion as a political cudgel because they are terrified of conservatives forcing their ideas on the general populace and the GOP allows them to get away with it by making abortion an issue. Abortion is legal. It has been for 35 years. Get over it.
I, for one, would be a whole lot happier if the GOP would start emphasizing that education without real world experience is worthless when it comes to running the giant business that is the federal government, and get off the abortion bandwagon. You cannot legislate morality.
“Nor am I going to site statistics for your pleasure because I am a woman, I’ve had an abortion and I have had a child.”
I wasn’t looking for pleasure, I was looking for intelligent support of several statements that, frankly, are a bunch of hooey. It’s obvious to me that you cannot support your assertions about “wise women” and “back alley abortions” and death by coathanger. No biggie—people often repeat unsupportable memes because it makes them feel better.
While we’re on the topic of pleasure, my concern over your doing away with your child at age 17 really has nothing to do with pleasing me. I was not the aggrieved party; your dismantled child was.
>>You cannot legislate morality.>>
True in one sense, not in another. In the sense of a spiritual morality, you’re right. However the moral values of a society _do_ determine what many of its law will be, and in that sense, we _do_ legislate morality.
If you assume that a fetus/baby is a human, then abortion is murder, plain and simple. Murder is against the law – so we _do_ legislate morality. The objection raised is that some do not consider abortion to be human, so therefore, it isn’t murder. Our laws are inconsistent – for example, remember the case in Ca where the husband apparently killed his wife? They asked for the death sentence because he was guilty of two murders – his wife and their unborn child. But – his wife could have gone to a clinic somewhere (I’m not sure about the laws in any particular state) and had that same baby aborted, and it _wouldn’t_ have been murder. That’s irrational. There was case where a woman was shot, killing her 7 month fetus, but not the woman herself. The shooter was convicted of murder. Irrational. Either that fetus is a person and the attacker is indeed guilty of murder, or it is _not_ a person, the attacker is not a murderer (though still guilty of attack on the mother) and it’s just the mother’s bad luck that her baby died. It’s no more murder than if the attacker shot her car and “killed” it.
It’s illegal to harm or remove from the nest the egg of the golden eagle – because it’s protected. Obviously, the law considers that egg to be an eagle – in the making, but still an eagle. Why is a still unformed human any less so?
Heh. What she’s saying is that she’s a woman and therefore is not responsible for the morality or legality of her choice.
Still a victim.
Duchess, do you propose that murder be optional, depending on whether or not the killer thinks it is OK? What about theft, or rape, or any other crime? That’s what logically follows from your proposition of “I realize that abortion is repugnant to some of you, and that is perfectly ok. Don’t have any abortions.” If abortion is the taking of a human life, and it really can’t be anything else, then it needs to be illegal. I don’t see any way of doing that right now, other than by moral suasion, but it needs to happen eventually.
And Charles, I am very, very pro-life, and those gruesome ads make me sick. I also have to skip over reading descriptions of partial-birth abortions – they are literally sickening to me. What I see occasionally in Seattle (!) are ads of absolutely adorable babies smiling and the statement on the board is something like, “I had a heartbeat when I was 12 days old” and it’s worded in such a way as to make it clear that this was 12 days after conception. In the spirit of catching more flies with honey than with vinegar, I would think that these ads would be more persuasive than the ones with all the grue.
If you think that conservatives tend to be happier than liberals, it is supported by empirical evidence:
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2010/11/23/why_conservatives_are_happier_than_liberals_108033.html
Religious people are happier as well (at least in this country), and the more religious, the happier they are (an more generous, too, and that goes for conservatives as well).
Certainly my own experience confirms this, although I have certainly met some happy, liberal atheists.
I think it offends liberals to see a conservative, religious person that is just too darn happy. Aren’t religious people supposed to be stick-in-the-mud type who frown on having fun? How can someone be happy when there are children that go to bed hungry each night?
I suspect that if Palin were a sober and serious grouch, nobody would pay any attention to her – conservative wouldn’t love her and liberals wouldn’t hate her.
I think that in reading all these comments I have figured out the people who hate Palin specifically and Mosonny’s “unhappy people” in general.
It starts here: “…for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” Romans 3:23 if you want to read it in context.
Conservatives, even those who are not Christians, don’t seem to have a problem with this. We all recognize man’s fallen nature and don’t expect men to be angels. We like to quote Madison: “But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary.”
But liberals truly, deeply, madly believe in the perfectibility of mankind. They will actually say that they believe people are innately good, thinking that makes them optimistic and enables them to see themselves as good (suek). In point of fact, it invariably sets them up for failure and disappointment and you end up with very unhappy people.
When you think that people who are given something for nothing will always behave responsibly and make sure that their children are fed and clothed and schooled and Mom will do what she can to get off welfare, and instead, since she’s being taken care of, she figures someone else will take care of her kids and she can blow all her money on drugs and booze, the liberal is disappointed and thinks it’s just because they, the liberals, didn’t try hard enough. The conservative is saying, “What in hell did you think was going to happen?”
This is why I always think it’s so very funny when lefties think of themselves as “reality-based.” We’re the ones who see human nature for what it is. They end up being disappointed cranks.
Danny, basically the Left’s argument is that God didn’t create humans. Aliens did. So they’re against INtelligent Design.
That’s it in a nutshell.
Pregnant women in the 21st century are much more likely to survive their pregnancies and live to see their children grow up than those women who were using herbs, too.
There’s something called 100% contraception in the 21st century. You couldn’t find that back in the day either.
Mrs Whatsit
They can’t give you an illuminating answer partially because they were told to hate and so they did. It’s not like someone with an actual personal reason like “you picked up my child and dashed her brains out on the rocks” or something like that. They are just following orders. You know, like proper sheep. They go, do, and feel whatever it is they are told to go, do, or feel. Free individuals? They’re not free. Free people may agree or disagree but they are the masters of their own fate. They make and decide their own choices. They are not cult addicted fanatics that obeys whatever the cult leader commands.
Listening to the foe is a good thing to do. Sun Tzu said that if you know yourself and you enemy, you will not fear the outcome of a hundred battles. Good intel comes from good scouting.
Get over it.
You don’t get it. Most pro-life groups aren’t interested in making abortion illegal. They have chiefly 2 concerns in aggregate.
1. Planned Parenthood’s deliberate increases in abortion and partial birth abortion and Post-Birth abortion (after a child is born, killing him/her). The PP deliberate increase is about not increase in number of abortins, but increase in the number of aborted “real” babies. Not just in the womb, but outside the womb. And not just in the womb because of a choice, but because PP didn’t give the females in question a choice. They indoctrinated them to believe so and the women suffered psychologicaly as a result, if they survived the abortion with their health intact. So ” sane” it is not guaranteed. Because PP is lying. This in a nutshell is one central pillar of the pro-life platform against abortion.
2. Federal funding for abortion as part of the Obama healthcare or other subsidiary laws to that effect.
Given a choice between making abortion illegal and making Planned Parenthood illegal, you would find a lot of pro-lifers going with the last choice, not the first choice.
Federal funding is connected with Planned Parenthood, because PP is making money off it. Along with abortion doctors. Federal funding needs to be cut, and it was cut, but there are loopholes. And there are loopholes precisely because PP exists to take advantage of them. They have a lot of influence, bought with that cash.
If you think this is about abortion, you’re wrong. This is about who decides the political and legal structure of America. Is it going to be the allies of PP, that wants partial birth and post-birth to be cultural and legally accepted, while making the tax payers pay for it so that abortion doctors can get rich quick? Or is it going to be those who oppose PP and render abortion safe, rare, and often times unnecessary when a female’s options are given to her?
In a nutshell, the pro-lifers are actually pro-choice while the pro-choice factions are actually more accurately labeled anti-life.
On the matter of my views concerning Sarah Palin, a repost of mine at Grim’s hall.
Whether I admire Sarah Palin or whether something else is going on.
I’d vote for something else is going on. To distill it down to something shorter in stature, I admire certain actions Palin has taken against the Left. Much as I would admire any act of heroism or courage against the onslaught of evil, depravity, or cowardice. It’s just a moral issue with me. You can strip the politics out of it and it’d still be what it is. I feel something substantially weaker for Lieberman’s actions on going INdependent when the Democrat party wanted to expel him from politics. Do I agree with Lieberman on any of his politics? Not really. Yet you could say I respect his actions. I wouldn’t call it admiration, but it is not Great Enough to be called an admirable action. A courageous action, perhaps. A decisive one even. But it contributed mostly to his own benefit, thus I would not label it admiration. I admire those that do good, not simply those that do what it takes to survive.
In that sense, I have a certain respect for Palin or any other person who says what they mean, and actually does what they say they were going to do. If Palin starts bowing and apologizing for her open actions, my respect would, by the power of natural law, decrease. Her weakest situation, to me, was after her two interviews. I had gotten to the idea that she know the truth about the Left, the same as I knew the truth. Yet her actions concerning the media did not demonstrate that awareness. It demonstrated a curious ignorance on the truth of mass media corruption. She acted naive. But that wasn’t the important. People make mistakes and they are often defeated. But they can only stay defeated if 1. they are dead or 2. they give up. So was Palin going to give up?
The answer to that question, answered the rest of mine.
The reason why I don’t attach such things to her person is because it’s not a cult of personality that is going on here. Much of Palin’s supporters are supporting her much like Christ Christie’s (former) supporters supported him.
The Tea Party doesn’t deny Sarah palin is a “leader”, because they approve of her actions. They agree that her actions are benefiting the Tea Party and their constituent members. But the moment the Tea Party aggregate members or local tribal leaders decide she is not benefiting them, they will withdraw their approval.
These are the proper actions of free men and women. Only slaves, to duty or honor or the law, obey the corrupt as if they are the One and Only God, regardless of how much evil is being done in their name.
On the matter of what Sarah Palin is, in actuality:
Palin is different because she is a woman yet has taken a role often taken by men. Thus there are social cue malfunctions going on, even if you ignore the malevolent intent behind some of her critics.
Women don’t go out of their way to criticize or lambast certain people. If they lack a personal reason (jealousy or hierarchy conflicts), they have no reason to take an argument to higher and higher levels of escalation.
Palin is in a situation men often find themselves in. You can either sit down and shutup, while allowing other people to control your followers and punish them, or you can stand up and do something about it.
Grim has written often about women in leadership roles, such as in battle or war, but that’s ancient history. Palin, however, is happening now. It is not so ancient.
While there are other women that have experienced something similar (the female Afghan general as one example), this is the one closest to us in culture and language.
Women are given positions of authority, but carefully kept away from the “real rough” and tumble, such as the Secretary of Defense (or War). Relegated to “talking” departments like the Department of State:DoS. They are kept away as much by self-inclination as any social glass ceiling and gender preference. Women don’t want to take charge of a department of war and order people to their deaths. They aren’t motivated in such a manner as often as men are motivated by such.
Yet Palin is motivated in a manner not often associated with women. She will speak up. She will call certain people bastards for what they have done. She will escalate certain things. She is not taking the road of subtlety. She is not hiding herself properly as a woman should, the power behind the throne or as a backup support for the Man in Charge.
I would say even the Leftist feminists find it surprising and a shock. They didn’t expect it either. They thought Palin was the “sweet face” put on by Old Man McCain and attacked her for being a tool or for being dumb. Now they attack her for ordering/causing people’s deaths (people as in Democrats). Like a Warlord should and can. A warlord? Palin? Like Dick Cheney? Do they respect her or fear her?
That’s a sea change from their previous propaganda goals.
On Palin the warrior and why she’s always in the media fighting them or the Left:
People who cannot generate a will to fight, don’t tend to last long on the battlefield. Mental fatigue will take them down, if physical fatigue does not.
People are diverse so they do it a couple of different ways. You have the calm general that projects an aura of san froid, becoming calmer the more people lose their heads in the chaos of violence. You have the motivated warrior, such as Allen West, bound by duty and honor such that it multiplies his strength, spiritual, mental, and physical. You have the dedicated extreme kind of guy, Charles Ziegenfuss, who is profuse in extreme rhetoric, yet is just as extreme in the pursuit of excellence and dedication. Then you have the happy warriors that crack the best jokes under the most intense pressure. Palin is of the last sort. While Bush was of the calm line.
Tonestaple, I agree with your honey vs. vinegar comparison. My point in bringing up gruesome abortion photos was to note the irony that some people who defend abortion down to the very last fetus protest visual evidence of their beloved procedure’s gruesomeness.
Charles Martel, doesn’t that remind you of vehement anti-war activists that will spit in your face and throw explosives at you because you are a baby killing, warmonger (they said)?
My, my, how “pacific” these self proclaimed pacifists are.
How about if everyone lightens-up on the Duchess of Austin.
I consider myself very pro-life but I don’t think this is helping.
The Duchess probably regrets ever mentioning that very private part of her life in the interest of discourse. I give her an awful lot of credit for that. It isn’t as if she was bragging about it.
While I agree with many of the pro-life arguments made, I don’t believe in public stonings. We all have to cut our own deals between our consciences and God…personally. I certainly recognize that I have some things to answer for.
Just a thought.
Tonestaple,
I agree.
Fundamentally a conservative’s worldview is that man is by his very nature, a sinner. You have to do the best you can with what you have. Government is instituted to try an keep our sinful (animal) nature within reasonable bounds. This view, which entirely conforms to the Christian worldview, is easy to grasp for anyone just based on experience.
Liberals believe that people can be perfected. If only everyone behaved like fill-in-the-blank, the world would be a better place. Of course. If only. But everyone never has, doesn’t now, and never will. The trouble is, too many people aren’t perfect (liberals, by definition, already are perfect, or close to it) and for some ridiculous reason don’t want to be perfect. Therefore, it is the purpose of government to force those people to be perfect. This is, of course, why liberal governments always over time tend to the totalitarian.
“Being a liberal means never having to say you’re sorry”.
“Being a liberal is all about feeling good about yourself (and bad about those blankety-blank others)”.
I can empathize with Tones and Martel’s hatred of abortion and such sentiments akin to it.
I also agree with Danny on 59.
I hate the Left. It’s unquestionable. However, hate is only a tool when you control it.
I choose to do so by differentiating individuals in front of me and the amorphous alliance I call the Left. Until I have a personal reason why I should do otherwise, I leave it at that.
If I’m going to hate somebody enough that I want to hurt them personally, I’m going to find a real reason for it. And not a displaced reason from an unconnected source such as ideological allegiance.
With very strong and negative emotions like anger, things can leak over very easily. Before you even notice it happening. The single thing that should help people focus their mind on the matter, if your belief that abortion is truly wrong is true, concerns targeting. To use up your energy fighting an unrelated individual or faction, instead of saving it to break the real evil doers, is a waste of time.
If you hate abortion because you think it is evil or murder, then find a way to channel your belief against those responsible. Those responsible, I said. For it all. Not just one. Not just two thousand. All of it. Find the source and cut it off. Isn’t that a more productive way of fashioning your internal drive.
True hatred contains something essential. Focus and targeting.
Or maybe you could say I’ve had too much H2H training. Although you could never have enough of that.
TommyC, perfection, looked at another way, means eternal stasis and unchanging conditions. If you are perfect, you don’t need to change or adapt, right. So wouldn’t a very flawed and mean LibProg find that kind of idea nice? That they are already perfect and thus don’t have to change (atone) for their crimes against humanity.
But conservatives see evil all around them and they refuse to believe that this is perfection. They want to change it. They are willing to change themselves. No matter how much it hurts. No matter how many people say it isn’t possible. They want things to get better.
But for things to get better, they must inherently be imperfect.
Yamarsakar,
“Sixth, conservatives are chastened by their principle of imperfectability. Human nature suffers irremediably from certain grave faults, the conservatives know. Man being imperfect, no perfect social order ever can be created. Because of human restlessness, mankind would grow rebellious under any utopian domination, and would break out once more in violent discontent—or else expire of boredom. To seek for utopia is to end in disaster, the conservative says: we are not made for perfect things. All that we reasonably can expect is a tolerably ordered, just, and free society, in which some evils, maladjustments, and suffering will continue to lurk.”
Russell Kirk, Ten Principles.
The Left has been said to favor the perfection of human nature. What does this mean? I suppose it means they aim to create a hive mind, where humans no longer have free will. If you cannot choose to do evil, doesn’t that mean human nature has now become “perfected”? Of course, you wouldn’t be human at that point, but the Left deems that a necessary price to pay for the end goal of Utopia.
On the other hand, perfecting human nature seems a bit too primitive of a goal. If you want perfection, why not seek omniscience or omnipotence? Why not seek to become God, then. That’s a high goal worthy of human aspirations. Perfecting human nature is like refining slime. Even if you could do, what’s the point. You’d just get some better slime.
With technology, human nature can be made static, aka perfect, in a few centuries if not decades. But to become all wise or all power or some other unobtainable standard of sublime beauty, such as creating a galaxy that looks nice, would take millions upon millions of human years.
Why not reach for that “perfect” state of being rather than settle for perfecting human nature?
And the answer is…. the Left isn’t much interested in eternally beautiful goals. They’re interested in a quick buck, so to speak.
Ymarsakar,
I agree. And I think liberals in general don’t think they need to change and adapt – they are just fine as they are. It is the other guys that are the problem – they need to change, and by Jove, if it takes the government to make them change then so be it.
Perfection (everybody totally good) would be pointless and boring. Certainly, we should always strive to make things better – both ourselves and our society. But a realistic view of imperfect man will yield much better results. I’ll resist the temptation to launch into all sorts of examples.
Regarding perfection: I doubt we’ll ever see a conservative writing a novel or a tract about a utopian society. Every utopia I’ve read – ‘Lost Horizon’, ‘Erehwon’ (though that was a satire), ‘Looking Backward’, etc. – described a society that I would detest living in. Conformity, free love, people belong to society rather than to families, etc.
Those would be akin to dystopias. A specific genre in which the future is both more advanced and more horrible than the normal imagination has grasped.
There’s Utopias, dystopians, post-apocalyptica. I like David Weber’s take on the future though. Grand, but still understandable from a human perspective.
Babylon 5 had two super powerful species, Ancients: the Shadows and the Vorlons. Interesting philosophical debate there. Yet as powerful and ancient as they were, they still had what you might “human failings” due to their mortality.
Ymarsakar, I’ve never read ‘Babylon 5′. Do you recommend it?
These last few comments about the liberal belief in the perfectibility of human nature are fascinating. For years I’ve been wondering about the self-loathing that seems to be at the core of much liberal thought (especially clear in environmentalism but also revealed in multiculturalism, refusal to believe in American exceptionalism, those comfortless, masochistic vegan diets, adulation of victims, and such.) I think I see a connection! If you believe that human nature is perfectible — but can’t help noticing that nonetheless, you’re not perfect, and neither is anybody around you — wouldn’t you feel constantly disappointed in yourself, your relationships, your choices, your life – dissatisfied and guilty at your failure to achieve your full potential — and perhaps, eventually begin to despise yourself?
Maybe that’s why conservatives tend to be happier, in part — if you don’t expect perfection of yourself, it’s got to be easier to like your life and yourself. Personally, I believe that people ARE innately good. I had a shouting fight with my ninth grade English teacher when he sneered at Anne Frank for writing that she thought so. However, I also believe that we’re innately bad — every one of us — and that each of us lives out a struggle as to which half of our souls will dominate our choices. I’m not religious, so I don’t cast this in terms of God on one side and Satan on the other, but leaving them aside, it’s not very different from what the Bible has to say. There’s no question that it helps make my life happier to realize that an unholy impulse here or there, on my part or that of somebody I love, doesn’t have to mean complete failure (depending what we do about it) but just reflects our normal, imperfect, struggling humanity.
Back to the original quote -“She’s not one of us.” Sounds like the royal ‘we’ to me.
Wonder how he views Golda Meir?
I’ve been rereading Brave New World, Aldous Huxley’s prescient 1931 novel about a benign dystopia where people are manipulated genetically to accept predestined roles and where endless, consequence-free sex and mindless entertainments are used to distract them.
In a foreward he wrote to a reissue of the novel years later, he discussed the use of sex in establishing the soft totalitarianism he envisioned. I bring it up because many of the people who hate Palin are themselves people who adore the orgasm and total sexual freedom, and see the liberation of the genitals as one of the greatest-ever blows for human freedom. Sarah Palin’s adherence to a more ancient (and honorable) sexual code drives them up the wall.
Huxley:
“As political and economic freedom diminishes, sexual freedom tends compensatingly to increase. And the dictator (unless he needs cannon fodder and families with which to colonize empty or conquered territories) will do well to encourage that freedom. In conjunction with the freedom to daydream under the influence of dope and movies and the radio, it will help to reconcile his subjects to the servitude which is their fate.”
Danny, I agree that we should be kind to the Dutchess. It took great courage for her to share her experience and beliefs on this site and even more courage for her to answer us in a follow up comment. But it is still perfectly fair and legitimate to address the substance of her comments. She says:
“I realize that abortion is repugnant to some of you, and that is perfectly ok. Don’t have any abortions. That’s pretty much the same thing conservatives tell libs when they start whining about being offended…don’t look. Don’t participate. But please, don’t try to force your beliefs on me.”
It is easy to say that this argument can be defeated simply by substituting murder, rape, incest, armed robbery or whatever for abortion. But I’d like to make a different substitution, because the Dutchess also says:
“Abortion is legal. It has been for 35 years. Get over it.”
What if someone in a Southern state in 1855 had said those same two quotes with slavery substituted for abortion? Would this have been a persuasive argument to anyone who opposed slavery on moral grounds? I do not believe so. Why, then, should it be a persuasive argument to one who opposes abortion on moral grounds? If a person sincerely believes that abortion is the murder of a human being, isn’t the murder of a human being even worse that the enslavement of one? I’m sorry, but “Don’t try to force your beliefs on me.”and “It has been legal for 35 years. Get over it.” are no more persuasive (to me, anyway) than the same comments made about slavery by a Southern slave owner.
You’ve never heard of Babylon 5? Amazing.
Well, it’s one of the few tv series produced for broadcasting that’s actually not based upon LibProg philosophy or PC thinking.
The original creator, Michael J S(with an Eastern Europe name I can’t spell), wanted to get his vision across without broadcasting putting a PC lid on it or “adjusting” his written material. If you liked Firefly (Western in space created by Buffy the Vampire Slayer writer/producer), it’s of a similar theme.
I would recommend it to anyone that wants to see an uplifting vision of the future, but one still complete with a bunch of normal human problems you see everywhere today. It’s space opera, but some episodes are sort of like short stories about things like telepaths, alien diseases, murder mysteries, and so forth. What makes the story interesting is that there’s an overarching plot which overs the entire 5 or 6 seasons of B5. The level of detail and story telling is comparable to a novel, but better given the addition of graphics and voice acting. At the end, it really felt epic in that the season finales had some googoo SCIFi mind blowing concepts. Like “what happens to the human race when the sun is about the die” and things like that.
If you’re looking for a taste, rent the movie Babylon 5: In The Beginning. Easily available from rentals or netflix. The tv series is pretty long and requires a lot of time investment, but if you found the movie fascinating, then the time invested in the series should pan out for you. In The Beginning is set during the latter B5 storyline, but goes back to tell the story of the human-Minbari war.
Mrs Whatsit
It comes down to, really, what people mean by “Good”. Good is a specific term used in ethics, which is part of philosophy. Religion, Christianity specifically, relates to this by applying Original Sin as part of the dogma explanation. This connects to Jesus Christ and his sacrifice on the cross to absolve people of original sin. And Original Sin came about because Adam and Even ate the apple from the Tree of Knowledge on Good and Evil. Meaning, they became able to make decisions and choose between the Good and the Evil. Thus they fell from a more innocent state, to the state humans now were in. That’s the theological explanation of Good and Evil, as a beginning. But it’s not the only philosophical model of what is good. Aristotle’s Virtue Theory is another. The virtues are mostly the same as that taught in Christianity by the Saints. Mostly. Then there’s Kantian Imperative Ethics as well as utilitarian ethics (greatest good for the greatest number). What a person chooses to live by is a choice they make partially as a result of their upbringing and partially as a result of their acquired life experiences.
Now when people don’t use that background when they use the term “Good”, they are mostly referring to society and rules. People are considered “good people” based upon a cultural interpretation of mutual cooperation and obedience to the mutual law. I think your perspective would be more accurately labeled neutrality. Meaning, the statement that human nature is neither inherently good nor inherently evil, but a pendulum swinging often wise both ways. A neutral position, using tool ethics. A tool is not an ethical agent, good or evil only results from the user of the tool.
DQ – I agree with all that you have said.
I am still working mightily on getting to that point with Zach, though. So much to do, so little time. Sigh!
You got to sum things up so that not even a genius doublethinker can double think it back up to doubleplusgood, Danny!
Ymarsakar, I don’t watch much TV, obviously. I’m better read than watched, so to speak. I’d heard of Babylon 5, but assumed it was based on a book. Well, it sounds interesting. I’ll give it a shot. Maybe, as you say, start with the In the Beginning.
Martel, you mean the one about Soma? That was pretty funny in the end. I think I saw the movie version only.
Farnham’s Freehold is, I think, a libertarian take on self-sufficient individuals. Freehold by Michael Williamson is an extreme vision of the future where a colony from Earth has developed towards the extreme end of personal responsibility and social/financial liberty. I found the social experimentation interesting.
David Weber wrote Mutineer’s Moon, a novel which I found expanded my horizons of “Big”. It’s akin to the feeling a small village raised and born individual feels when he gets out and finds that there are mega huge cities beyond them mountains. The world just got a lot bigger in the mind’s eye.
The problem with the Left and their “entertainment” derived copy cat methods is that they can’t think big. They’re stuck in their little bigoted, PC thinking, boxes. It isn’t even a Happy Box. It’s one of those Toxic Waste boxes instead.
The Left corrupts all in time. But their level of intellect just isn’t enough to challenge me. I found that out pretty fast. The Left is not powerful because they are smart. They are powerful because they are ruthless and never give up. There’s a difference. They’re sort of like the village idiot that never gives up trying to walk on water. Sure, everybody knows it can’t happen, but when they see this guy trying it every day, they start thinking “hey, maybe it’s possible”. Then when they get the crack cocaine, weed, and sexual rewards going on, they start fantasizing about walking on water like the village idiot. Then the entire village becomes an idiot. Except they aren’t as nice as the village idiot. And they’re going to drag you into the water whether you want to or not. Whether you can swim or not.
Everybody knows why humans have imagination and drew paintings on cave walls, right?
It’s because if humans didn’t have an imagination, we would still be trying to “react” to winter, where there is little food. Instead, we “imagined” how winter would be, when it was still warm and food was plentiful, and thus began to hunt and store food. Then grow food using agriculture. All because of human imagination. Human imagination, far from being an artistic illusion, is a pretty useful survival tool. That was its original intent and design, to help humans survive by imagining future threats or dangers. However, because humans no longer live in an environment similar to how humans evolved, our imagination has begun to run rampant. Que Marx, Hitler, Mao, Stalin. Their imaginations brought forth terror unending and make it real. That’s basically all the Left is good for. Bringing forth not visions of beauty for humanity to strive for, but never ending nightmares.
That’s just not something all that useful, you know, for humanity’s survival and progress.
Danny, #40: you asked about how people on the left define creationism and Intelligent Design….
Well, Darwinists in general seem determined to obfuscate the issue to the point that there is no difference between them. Thus “Intelligent Design Creationism”, or “Intelligent Design is just Creationism in a cheap suit.” Etc.
The reason is (this is my own analysis, based on decades of studying and teaching in this area) that when we’re talking about the origin of life, the origin of the DNA code, and the origin of the information stored in the DNA of today’s living forms, both the Creationists and the Darwinists take a “religious” rather than a “scientific” position. I say this because my belief that God spoke life on this earth into existence can never be confirmed by empirical experiment; AND because Richard Dawkins’ belief that life originated from the unguided interactions of atoms/molecules on the early earth is equally closed to experimental confirmation. Should you want to doubt the latter, imagine if scientists DO “create life in a test tube”…..we will have support for a pre-existing intelligence choosing a set of chemicals and the conditions under which they will interact to produce new life. This is hardly the Darwinian view.
Between these two religious “extremes”, we find “Mere Science”….a group of scientists (some Christians, some Jews, some Hindus, some Muslims, some atheists, etc.) who have agreed that, for the purposes of doing science together (and particularly “historical science”, which is where most of the disputes arise), they will set aside their personal views on those things that can never be confirmed or refuted empirically, and accept the most logical interpretation of the current evidence. So materialists don’t insist on spontaneous generation, but agree that life APPEARS to have been designed by pre-existing intelligence, and Christians who interpret the Bible in the traditional way do not insist on a 6,000 year chronology, and learn to use the Geologic Column and its dates of millions of years. I suspect that materialists still believe that eventually we’ll find evidence that will support their view that life came from non-life, and I KNOW that Creationists of the more traditional sort expect that eventually we’ll learn something about the radiometric dating methods that will harmonize their interpretation with Genesis.
I can’t see that the scientific enterprise would be hurt if scientists generally would all operate under this umbrella. But those at either end of the spectrum I describe have strong religious motivations to get everyone to accept their view and reject the other, and so the entire thing has become a political issue. Given the amount of money and cultural power that’s riding on the outcome, “winning” now seems to be the major goal. Education would certainly be improved (critical thinking, anyone?) if fair-minded teachers would talk about these issues and explain to young people (at higher levels – down in grade school, it’s parents who should teach their kids about origins) the history and current status of all of this, without the dogmatic pronouncements that now mar our textbooks. Do I expect to live long enough to see it? I can hope….but “expect” is far too strong a word to describe what I think is going to happen, given that we’re stuck with humans who are acting and interacting.
Earl, that was a superbly well-presented essay. Thank you.
Actually ya’ll…as long as illegals can come across the border and get amnesty…sure, if they can get a free felony then I’m all for everybody getting a free felony. Murder is a felony, right?
Ummmm…well, Duchess…
Who’s in favor of giving illegals amnesty??? Is there something someone said that gave you the impression that a majority here might think that’s a good idea?
Going back to Earl’s comment…why is it that Evolution seems to be entirely “gospel” to the Left, but they are unable to allow failing species to disappear, or failing humans to die? Doesn’t it seem logical that if you believe in a system that depends on “survival of the fittest”, that you’d be cheering for the “fittest” and jostling to be among them? Instead, our Leftist brethren seem full of love of humanity and willing to do everything to preserve every one of them who manages to exit the womb (that being a perilous journey), but then screech loudly when the effect of having so many of us results in extinction of species that serve no particular purpose at all.
Rather like – as I saw somewhere yesterday – the emphasizing the need for every person to be the same as every other while at the same time glorifying diversity…
How do you achieve perfection when that perfection demands opposite ideals?
1. Self made.
2. Blue collar – husband union
3. Attractive -but in touch with middle america i.e. soccer mom not barbie
4. Living example of what is wrong with the pro choice feminist meme
5. Proof that conservative choices still lead to professional success and personal happiness
6. Proof that state college education as useful as private eastern school i.e. my polo without an alligator is same as your polo with alligator only i saved 40 bucks.
7. Happy Warrior — they fear the rise of new conservativism. Palin deconstructs the leftist world view by example, not rhetoric. Just being herself is all it takes.
They live in a world where acceptance of group defined status points matters most. (Its totally the inner ring thing that CS lewis essay is dead bang on.) She shows that all their efforts are basically trying to fill seives with water – useless timewasting when their efforts should have been on real things. Most of the “haters” are too old to re-tool. The cognitive dissonance that they live in a false world is painful. If you tell someone they a doomed to a life of futility and unfullfillment they will be upset – but it will pass because they will deny it to themselves. However, when you show them a continuing example of how they doomed themselves to a futile existence, they will hate you with an endless fire. I love Palin, but I do not think she can be elected. Too many conservative women have gotten drawn into the fruitless life of chasing status instead of real value, and they don’t like seeing her either since it points up choices they made which they now have reason to regret.
PS Her dad is awesome. Todd is awesome. I can see where it all comes from.
Duchess, since you prefer emotion over logic, I’ll cater to such a preference.
What makes you think Planned Parenthood or those involved in spreading abortion, gives a damn about your choices?
>>PS Her dad is awesome. Todd is awesome. I can see where it all comes from.>>
You point out another problem the Lefties have – the emasculation of their men. A strong woman like Sarah needs a strong man, if they’re to be partners. Feminists can’t tolerate strong men. Their idea of a helpmate is one who caters to them. She not only is what they cannot be, but she also succeeds in pointing out the weakness of their men. Insufferable!
Ymar: I know the Planned Parenthood peeps don’t care about me or my opinions. I confess that it’s an emotional issue for me, and having grown up during the “bra burning” years (I was born in 60), I’ve seen the evidence of what “Women’s Lib” and welfare did to women and I don’t like it much. Personally, I see the Women’s Movement as a net loss for women on a number of levels. We still don’t get paid as much as men for equal work, and we have lost the social weapons that at least worked toward guilting men to either support their children or not make them at all. These days we send deadbeat fathers to the slammer when they get caught. The only ones who are actively looked for are the ones that owe hundreds of thousands and their exes have a wealthy daddy who can move heaven and earth to find the little scumbag.
While its true that prior to the woman’s movement, men walked away from their families and started new ones, they were at least shunned socially for doing so. Same with young women who had out of wedlock babies (meaning the ones who didn’t have enough money to go have an abortion in Mexico or take an “extended” tour of Europe and come back with a ((surprise)) child they somehow adopted there). These days young women have that “magical thinking” going on because they are not forced by circumstances (you know, actually having to financially support their progeny) and they do not look at young men as anything close to an actual provider for their families. They look at these young men as potential “baby daddies.” That term makes me want to throw up.
As I have gotten older and age has made me more conservative (I’ve been a republican since before I was old enough to vote, thanks to my first love who was President of the College Republican group when I was in high school), I have come to the conclusion that traditional roles are that way for a reason. To me, liberals go against human nature and they want to try to “engineer” out all that stuff that Mother Nature equipped us with for a reason. Like…man’s tendency to be violent and greedy. *smile* Funny that some of the most violent and dangerous places in America are places where there aren’t supposed to *be* any weapons at all in the hands of the _inmates_.
This is going to sound fascist as hell, but maybe Margaret Sanger had a point. The dimwits and dullards are out breeding us and the average American IQ is going down at an alarming rate. (sorry Charles, no statistics for you just the anecdotal evidence of my own lyin eyes) I deal with teens all the time who have no clue how to make a business phone call or write even the simplest of business emails and these young people are the ones who are going to be calling the shots when I’m too old and feeble to defend myself. It frightens me. So, if Laquesha with a 70 IQ wants to have abortions, I’m all for it. Same for Linda and Juanita too, if they are so inclined. We need to thin out the herd and clean out the gene pool.
Frankly I’d rather see these young women put an end to a pregnancy in utero, where the chances are high that the child will grow up to be the young criminal who will beat an old woman to death. Just sayin…
Okay, fair enough on your first point.
Thanks for updating your answer with an elaboration. It helps paint your views in a better, or perhaps more understanding, light.
I agree with you on the matter of Women’s Lib. The differences, however, can be summed up this way. Women’s Lib requires abortion to be accelerated in order to generate more social change. Stalling them on abortion, regardless of what people are saying, will also strip away some of the power of the Left in corrupting society and dominating women’s social standards.
There are many issues in contention but all of them are connected to Leftist funding sources. Regardless of which one you choose to specialize in, all of them can indeed be used to make the Left less effective.
I love the logic. Lakisha is a dimwit, so let’s kill her baby.
What we might try—although I think it’s way too late—is to raise children outside the toxic confines of inner-city black culture, Mexican-American indifference to education, and the white trashification of majority American culture. It’s not a question of IQ, it’s a question of rearing children with a high set of standards and expectations.
You can slaughter as many innocents as you want (50 million and counting so far since 1973), but killing potential dimwits is itself dimwitted because you’re not addressing the real problem. Even a moron, if reared properly, can contribute to the world.
The most renewable resource is humans.
And there are plenty of ways to put humans to use. America, if we had 500 million more people, would have a GDP of 30 trillion. That would allow expansion over so many poor and 3rd world economies that the wave of progress would expand at an ever greater pace.
>>Even a moron, if reared properly, can contribute to the world.>>
True.
http://gatewaypundit.rightnetwork.com/2011/01/breaking-fox-news-hires-olbermann/
suek: ROFLMAO
I suspect most here are more than passing familiar, but just in case you missed this article over the week-end, it’s pretty appalling to think about. It fits in this thread, but as you’ll see, there are a couple of other threads where it would fit just about as well…
http://www.americanthinker.com/2011/01/chinas_dead_babies.html
Charles….it seems to me that your answers are just about as good as mine
My solutions at least address reality. Yours seem to be daydreams.
Try to raise children outside the “toxic confines of inner-city black culture, Mexican-American indifference to education, and the white trashification of majority American culture.” You’re kidding me, right? In order to accomplish something like that we’d have to roll society back to the 1950s. Do you *really* think that’s gonna happen? Uhm….not bloody likely. Until young men can be penalized in exactly the same way as the young women (which, they can’t), i.e., they have to miss just as much of their youthful lives as the young women bearing the babies and subsequently having to raise them, abortion *needs* to be a safe, sane alternative to pregnancy. Or…you could force young women of menstruating age to be plugged with a copper 7 or the Norplant. Let’s see how well that goes over. Rick Perry nearly got himself impeached mandating a life saving *vaccine* for young women in Texas. How do you think mandating birth control will go over?
So, in order to keep Laquisha and her buds from overpopulating the US with their moronic progeny, I say let ‘em have as many abortions as they need. In fact, I’d be willing to give young women under the age of say…25, who already have 2 children, a one-time, lump sum payment to give up their ability to procreate, forever, or even with a reversible procedure that would allow them to have more kids when they are old enough and mature enough to actually raise and afford them. In my mind, it would be a whole lot cheaper in the long run to give them 25k USD to terminate their ability to have more babies, and it would save millions, nay…billions (!) of dollars in welfare benefits NOT paid to women because they never had the extra children.
Win/win for both of us, right? Abortions would be reduced, if not completely eliminated. Young women would not be penalized by being stuck raising children because their teenaged “baby daddy” decided he wanted to take that football scholarship after all, and thus mired in poverty because they don’t have the time to go to school and improve their lives. The children they do have will have better quality lives because mom didn’t have 5 more bros and sistas for them….seems to me that’s the best, most realistic way to deal with these young women. They sign off on it as adults, they get a lump sum to invest in themselves (be it school, a downpayment on their own home, or maybe a car), and they have the opportunity to actually get the sort of education that would get them OUT of the inner city ghetto.
Whaddaya think?
Thanks for responding, Duchess. I’ll get to an analysis of why there are better solutions than yours, in a bit.
Duchess, I think you do a powerful lot of projection. For whatever reason, at age 17 you got pregnant and decided to have an abortion. It seems to me that since then you’ve been trying to rationalize your decision to end your child’s life by insisting that abortion, especially when applied to your social inferiors, is a wonderful solution to the apparently never-before-encountered problem that intercourse can make you pregnant.
Speaking of returning to the 50s, I don’t recall a high abortion rate back then (you never did—and never will—provide any proof that there was), and I don’t recall gold-plated welfare then either. Nor do I recall the toxic black culture that later produced all those Lakishas you so look down upon. So, by your lights we can never try things that might let us rebuild that kind of society, we can only continue oozing further into the latrine.
I’m interested, too, in who gets to pay for your post-abortion rationalizing, namely buying off girls who couldn’t possibly exercise the teensiest bit of self-control, because we know that teens—especially Lakisha-type teens—have such a hard time keeping their legs closed. It seems to me you’re suggesting that the government pay for these bribes. Well, I sure as hell don’t like government intruding in the bedroom (hey, there’s an argument I’ve never heard before!), so I’m afraid your idea is something you and others like you will have to pay for yourselves.
I sense a very utilitarian attitude in you when it comes to your fellow beings, especially the unborn ones. They either fit within your expectations and requirements or they’re outta here!
(PS: Your bit about baby daddies running off to accept football scholarships and leaving their poor Lakishas behind was a hoot. For every kid who gets such a scholarship, there are a thousand who don’t and never will. Why use such an example if it carries no weight?)
Duchess,
See Sanger, Margaret and Hitler, Adolph. Read about eugenics.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics
Roy
You’re kidding me, right? In order to accomplish something like that we’d have to roll society back to the 1950s.
Americans are living lives that are not crime ridden and economic traps. Are they now living in the 1950s? Last I checked, they were in the 21st century, not ancestors 60 years gone.
Do you *really* think that’s gonna happen?
It’s not about whether it’s gonna happen. It’s already happened. The question is whether people will allow it to happen or will they stop it.
Until young men can be penalized in exactly the same way as the young women (which, they can’t), i.e., they have to miss just as much of their youthful lives as the young women bearing the babies and subsequently having to raise them, abortion *needs* to be a safe, sane alternative to pregnancy.
And the reason why they are not penalized is because of the Left and their social welfare engineering. Until you destroy the Left, feminist factions included, guess what? It’s pointless cleaning up their dirt. Cause they’ll just dump more trash in your house.
You say you can’t change the way so that they can be penalized. That demonstrates the true power gap between you and the Left here. Leaving the Left alone, is not going to make your situation any stronger.
So, in order to keep Laquisha and her buds from overpopulating the US with their moronic progeny
Those at the bottom are not the ones with political power. They are not deciding US policy. Democrats are. Can you abort the Kennedy clan? If not, then going after the poor, is going to do what again.
Win/win for both of us, right?
You are under the mistaken impression that it is us vs them. You forgot about the Left. They are the ones dictating matters, not the blacks at the bottom of the ladder.