Defining terms so that they align with values
Bookworm on Mar 22 2011 at 9:27 am | Filed under: Leftist morality
Anecdote 1: My son is now, and always has been, fascinated by weapons. He’s especially intrigued by sniper rifles, and their spectacular range, especially when in the hands of a talented shooter. I therefore emailed my son a link to an article about two British snipers in Afghanistan who killed 75 Taliban fighters in just 40 days. Mr. Bookworm was in the room when my son read the article, and he started reading it too.
Mr. Bookworm was horrified. “I can’t believe you sent our son this stuff. These are cold-blooded murderers. They boast about killing people.”
My son froze. Had mommy just sent him the written equivalent of a snuff film?
I responded, “Are you calling my father a murderer? [As Mr. Bookworm and my son both know, my father spent five years fighting Nazis, sometimes in hand-to-hand bayonet combat.] This is war, not murder. In war, you kill the enemy before he kills you.”
My son relaxed. Mr. Bookworm harrumphed, but subsided.
Anecdote 2: Last night, we got around to watching HBO’s television show about the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, which occurred 100 years ago this month. The show was interesting insofar as it had interviews with descendants of those who survived the fire (including one of the factor owners). The pictures of the young women who died were moving. The show was also boring insofar as it was one of the most heavy-handed pro-union polemics I’ve ever seen. It was as if the SEIU wrote the script. Subtlety would have been more attractive and, probably, more effective.
When the show ended, Mr. Bookworm said to me, “You and your right wing wackos want to get rid of all those protections. You want to go back to the time when nothing stopped the rich people from exploiting the workers.”
“I don’t know where you get that idea,” I said. “I think it’s a good thing for the government to impose minimal, reasonable standards for workplace safety.”
“Hah! ‘Minimal.’ That’s like no standards at all,” he responded.
“No,” I replied. “That’s not what I mean. I just mean that bureaucracies tend to be self-propelling, and they enact ever more standards. I’m totally on board with life-saving safety standards. But you know that OSHA gets involved in everything from chairs to types of pens used. If they could, they’d dictate what color paint to have on the wall, because more people find pink soothing, while some people say that green makes them bilious.”
“Harrumph.”
I thought of this little exchange when I read Evelyn Gordon’s post about the way in which the international community has cheapened to meaninglessness such terms as “genocide” and “ethnic cleansing.”
It’s hard to argue with the Israeli diplomat who called Richard Falk, the UN’s special rapporteur on Palestinian rights who accused Israel of “ethnic cleansing,” an “embarrassment to the United Nations” yesterday. But the problem isn’t that Falk lies, or even that he does so with the UN’s imprimatur. The real problem is the larger trend he represents: The self-proclaimed “human rights community” increasingly treats minor issues as indistinguishable from major crimes.
[snip]
By defining “ethnic cleansing” so broadly as to even include tenant evictions, Falk is essentially equating such evictions to events like the Srebrenica massacre, in which Bosnian Serbs massacred more than 8,000 Bosnian Muslims, and demanding that the world be equally outraged by both. But humans have a limited capacity for outrage, and the international community has a limited capacity to intervene. Thus demanding international intervention in cases like this actually reduces the likelihood of intervention in genuine cases of ethnic cleansing like Srebrenica — i.e., in precisely those cases where the victims most need help.
My interactions with a liberal show precisely the same thing: To a liberal, two soldiers fighting a war against a committed enemy determined to kill them (and, as 9/11 shows, us) are “murderers.” In the same extremist vein, the government should control workplaces, because all safety issues are equally serious.
In both situations, Mr. Bookworm’s “harrumph” was a tacit admission that I’d talked him down from such silly and egregious definitions. Most liberals, however, function in a vacuum or an echo chamber. They never have anyone applying logic to their increasingly Orwellian vocabularies. This wouldn’t be a problem if the Lefties never left their houses. As long as they control the media and most educational institutions, though, it’s a big problem. We need to talk them down harder and faster if we don’t want our world reduced to flammable, meaningless mush.
Related posts:
- Defining our terms when we speak about Egypt
- A leftist guide to mis-defining terms when it comes to Kagan
- Relative values — or no values at all
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I wish I could remember where I read it. In all the discussion on taking action on Libya, either in a post or a comment, someone related a Vietnam vet friends experience when one of their liberal friends lamented that someone needed to do something about the genocide in Cambodia after we left Vietnam. The vet said, I was and you sent me a letter with two words “Baby killer.”
As for bureaucracies: There is a firefighting device that can be driven through the hood of a car and deliver water or extinguishing agent without the need and risk of opening the hood. This device would be of value on a ships since it is definitely not fun opening a breath of fresh air on a fire in a compartment or stateroom to get the fog nozzle in. However, should a vessel under USCG jurisdiction have one of these devices on board, they would be cited for having non-approved equipment. It’ll take years to get approval.
“Most liberals, however, function in a vacuum or an echo chamber. They never have anyone applying logic to their increasingly Orwellian vocabularies. This wouldn’t be a problem if the Lefties never left their houses. As long as they control the media and most educational institutions, though, it’s a big problem. We need to talk them down harder and faster if we don’t want our world reduced to flammable, meaningless mush.”
I’ve been working on it. My brother-in-law is an unreconstructed “progressive” who spouts nonsense that he wouldn’t get away with in a courtroom (he’s a lawyer). Without revealing his identity, I’ve converted two of our recent exchanges into blog posts:
http://politicsandprosperity.wordpress.com/2011/03/19/taxing-the-rich/
http://politicsandprosperity.wordpress.com/2011/03/22/more-about-taxing-the-rich/
Greetings:
I’ve long thought that desensitization was a process that required a female hand. Few men have either the long term outlook or the patience to reach the desired goal.
In that regard, I humbly submit the following in support of your Mr. Bookworm effort.
Back in my infantry days, I used to tell my new soldiers this parable.
Two young riflemen were having the age-old philosophical discussion about where to shoot those who would oppose them. One was a “head-shooter”; the other preferred the “center-mass” (torso). The head-shooter asserted that if you hit him, he’s done. The center-mass guy liked the larger target area. As they were going back and forth, their Platoon Sergeant came by. “Hey, Sarge,” called out the head-shooter, “where do you like to shoot the bad guys?”
“In the back,” he replied.
As many as you can, as often as you can, anywhere and any way you can.
Greetings:
Then again and on the other hand, my favorite Platoon Sergeant told me that it was impolite to keep count after your first dozen.
Good for you, Book. I think it is probably a good thing that your kids get to hear both sides of an argument in your household. It forces them to always consider two opposing points of view: a rational, conservative point of view (you) versus a teleological, feeling-centered Liberal point of view (Mr. Bookworm).
This will leave them much better armed to confront and destroy the Liberal worldview and to snipe with pin-point precision at the irrational arguments proffered from the Left.
I’m off – my son graduates Army bootcamp this week.
We had a much more ancient doctrine: the doctrine of “almost miss,” i.e. damage, don’t kill.
If you kill, you get one opposition force warm body off the field. Wound him, you get three out of the fight: him, and the two necessary to get him back to the aid station. (Plus, there’s a chance they’ll have to uncover trying to get him moved – those are freebies.) So: lower body mass, upper legs.
Danny: Please pass on my congratulations and my thanks to your son. I hope he finds his service exciting, enriching and that he, like my father, comes through it successful and unscathed. (I think my father had his own angel: Five years in North Africa and Southern Europe, including El Alamein and Crete, and not a single scratch. That must be some kind of record. Then, another war after that and, again, not a scratch. There was also the time his motorcycle skidded under a moving bus — and, yes, you guessed it, not a scratch from the bus, although he did get some gravel burns that time.)
Book, I didn’t know that your father fought in North Africa. My dad, now 95, was a paratrooper with the 82nd Airborne in North Africa, Sicily and Italy. He received three flesh wounds during those campaigns, but what took him out in the end was a bite from an Italian mosquito. Once his malaria was under control, they mustered him out by mid-1944 and he was able to come back to the States and begin a quiet life with his wife and, eventually, three sons.
Daddy was in the RAF, although for reasons unclear to my Mom, he actually ended up answering to ANZAC (the Australia New Zealand Air Corp). He was in virtually every major battle in that field. He was also briefly in charge of a group of Italian POWs. He loved that time. The Italians were so grateful to be out of Mussolini’s and Hitler’s war. They grew flowers and vegetables in little plots, and cooked wonderful food. It was the un-Gitmo.
Given the way modern wars have panned out, if Americans wound an enemy soldier, it won’t be the enemy’s medical facilities taking care of their wounded. It’ll be ours.
Congratulations post ceremony, Danny.
Book:
He was also briefly in charge of a group of Italian POWs. He loved that time. The Italians were so grateful to be out of Mussolini’s and Hitler’s war. They grew flowers and vegetables in little plots, and cooked wonderful food. It was the un-Gitmo.
I worked in South America with a German national who had spent nearly his whole life in South America- his father was an expat mining engineer. One of his uncles was interned as an enemy alien in the US during WWII. I forget the precise phrase he used to describe his uncle’s time in internment camp. Suffice it to say that his uncle thought he was treated pretty well.
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