White Liberals and Politically Correct Racism
Edmund Standing
The white liberal is an unhealthy type of creature that you will undoubtedly have encountered, if not in real life, certainly via the media. By ‘liberal’, I do not mean simply someone who has a generally liberal outlook, in the sense of a ‘live and let live’ philosophy, nor do I mean liberals in the sense of the classical liberals of the conservative tradition. By ‘white liberal’, I mean a white Western individual who is likely to come from a middle class background and have a university education, considers him or herself to be both ‘left-wing’ and socially ‘liberal’, and almost certainly reads The Guardian or The Independent. White liberals espouse an artificial and pretentious form of ‘egalitarianism’, a patronising and hypocritical approach to ethnic minorities and non-Western cultures, and – in a re-hash of the notion of the ‘white man’s burden’ – devote themselves to a delusional Messianism in which they seek to ‘save the world’ through protesting against war (in real terms, protesting against non-white people having a chance at freedom and democracy), Israel (the one truly liberal society in the Middle East), globalisation (thereby opposing the one great vehicle by which poorer nations can develop), and so on, while making themselves feel and look ‘good’ by flaunting their pious support for campaigns to end poverty in the Third World (which will do no such thing, as Dambisa Moyo, Stephen Pollard, Marian L. Tupy, and others rightly point out ), and boasting about how ‘progressive’ they are by showing ‘solidarity’ with genocidal Islamists in Gaza.
White liberals, despite viewing themselves as intelligent and open-minded, are actually some of the most illiberal and narrow-minded people in society today. Their reactions to the idea that anyone might think differently to them range from gut-wrenching despair to pure hatred of the kind seen in the most fanatical of ‘true believers’. White liberals are, by and large, incapable of serious adult debate (preferring innuendo and accusations of bigotry), or of dealing with the fact that not everyone will agree with them (despite their supposed love of pluralism and a multiplicity of different ‘voices’), and tend to see any view which deviates from their cultic leftist script as a form of irredeemable moral evil. White liberals do not base their world-view on rational analysis and sensible argument, but instead on an almost religious faith that they possess the ‘truth’, and just as we see in so many fundamentalist religious cults and sects, the devotees of the white liberal faith burn with hatred for the ‘sin’ that surrounds them, and indeed, all too often for the ‘sinners’ themselves. White liberals, who are the intellectual equivalent of stroppy, rebellious teenagers, have sought to subvert and undermine Western civilisation, and some offer support for authoritarian and even terrorist movements as part of their attack on ‘racism’ and ‘colonialism’.
White liberals approach issues of race and racism from an essentially irrational, moralistic standpoint. White liberals do not simply judge racism to be based on bad thinking and criticise it for its illogical collectivism. Instead, white liberals make the issue of racism, as with other issues, all about them. White liberals have colonised the discourse of racism and anti-racism because it offers them an opportunity to boast of the superiority of their virtue and to demonstrate their purity and holiness through ostentatious and vacuous public displays of self-flagellation. Just as early Christianity imbued adherents with a deep sense of guilt and sinfulness, so the white liberal finds in reflecting on the history of white racism the opportunity to both revel in the guilt of the sinner and to make atonement through ‘anti-racist’ initiatives, thereby offering them the opportunity to further present themselves as a holy elite tasked with saving the world. And just as at various points in the history of Christianity an overarching sense of guilt derived from an intense awareness of, and obsession with, the supposedly inherent sinfulness of human beings and of the ‘world’ led ‘holy’ men and women to conclude that the path to holiness is found in the hatred of self, world, and the human condition, white liberals indulge in a form of self-hatred which is designed to project the image of penitence and sanctity, while actually being transparently pretentious, self-aggrandising, and destructive.
Exclusive: The Airhead Liberal Political Disorder
Robert Weissberg
On Wednesday, February 10th, the American Psychiatric Association proposed its latest Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), the Association’s official, encyclopedia-like catalogue of psychiatric disorders. The DSM’s certification has enormous consequences for dispensing therapy, insurance payments, future research and peoples’ self-definition. This latest DSM is, however, only a proposal designed to solicit public feedback and after preliminary trials, the final version will be published in 2013. Inclusion or exclusion can be tricky business, often reflecting both shifting politics and social conditions. DSM’s mental illness catalogue once included homosexuality; today, “Internet Addiction” and “lack of sexual interest” are candidates for admission.
Despite these labors, opportunities for adjustments remain and this may be a once-in-a-generation opportunity for right thinking people to confront a specific, widespread mental disorder that has long driven us crazy: what I call Airhead Liberalism Political Disorder or ALPD for short. This is not a coherent ideology like Socialism or Marxism. Rather, it is a style of political engagement whose purpose is psychological satisfaction independent of actual of costs or benefits. In a nutshell: if advocating a policy makes me feel good about myself, it’s a good policy. The disorder resembles self-medicating drug addiction where addicts will do anything, no matter how injurious, to achieve transitory “highs.” What especially drives right-thinking people to buy Maalox at Costco or take Valium is that Airhead Liberals sufferers are impervious to reason or evidence, no matter how persuasive.
Consider one ALDP outcropping: manic grab-bag environmentalism. The typical ALPD afflicted activist is determined with religious-like devotion to save polar bears, rescue tropic dwellers from heat prostration, reverse glacial melting, restore the rain forests, protect world’s cities from floods, eliminate skin cancer, reduce the incidence of Hurricanes, require non-polluting electric cars and otherwise stop impending doom. It is not that these desires are necessarily evil. What defines the disorder is that true-believers cannot be budged, let alone consider possible non-environmental paths to achieving these goals. Nor can he or she be enticed to consider the full consequences of any of these demands or achievability. They worship the god of Nike – just do it. Saving the planet just feels good, so who wants to hear that the polar bear population is actually increasing, not all glaciers are melting or that cold kills more people than heat so global warming will save lives? Worse, imagine these feel-good activists learning that millions for rescuing polar bears could be better spent giving away sun block to millions of humans? Not much feel-good moral high ground there.
If the Airhead Liberal disorder were just some neurotic inclination akin to compulsively buying fake designer pocketbooks there would be no problem, at least generally. Alas, that millions of Americans seriously suffer from Airhead Liberal Political Disorder makes it a serious public problem. These self-indulgent do-gooders are a standing voting bloc for any pandering-inclined politician to expand government. Its nefarious budget-breaking, debt-building impact can be seen in the nosy clamor to lift up the poor into the middle class, provide free medical care to the uninsured, eliminate racial and gender gaps in education, force banks to lend to deadbeats, require businesses to hire according to color and sex and virtually every other item on today’s get-Washington-to-do-it space cadet agenda. Again: it is not that these goals are prima facie unworthy. It is the intellectual shallowness of these demands, their divorce from hard reality, their staggering cost apart from specified benefits that is so dangerous.
Let’s help all those psychiatrists working on the next DSM by offering some precise, clinical traits associated with the disorder. First, since those with Airheads pursue politics solely to achieve a moral high, they cannot rationally explain a policy’s benefits other than “it seems like a good idea.” Everything is flippant and superficial – No hard-to-digest facts please, we’re Airhead liberals – as if ALPD were a disability that excused all intellectual obligations. Their favored slogans perfectly expose the mentality. Foreign Policy: War is Not the Answer. Racial or ethnic strife: Hate is not a Family Value. Medical care: People Not Profits. Predictably, the bumper sticker is the perfect policy manifesto. Notice how Airheads decorate their cars with them, poking along so other drivers can carefully read these “deep” messages and then allow others to overtake them so as to see the smug “virtuous” driver.
The corollary of this lazy shallowness is a complete disdain for finance. Numbers are boring, and important numbers are the most boring! How can one possibly secure the moral high by slogging through cost accounting, conflicting budget estimates and all the other financial drudgery? Indeed, for truly impassioned Airhead liberals the phrase “we cannot afford it” does not instigate a statistical rejoinder; it is perceived as a ruse to be met with “yes we can since it is so very important that we must do it!” For believers compelled to “do good” regardless of resources, economics is truly the dismal science since hours spent scrutinizing numbers is a downer.
Second, Airhead Liberal activists suffer from severe attention deficit disorder. Crusades come and go like one night stands. While a professional lobbyist spends years learning the ropes on boring tax law, the Airhead liberal may take only a month to “master” gay marriage, hate speech laws, discrimination against the handicapped, sheltering the homeless, banning trans fats, protecting baby seals, providing amnesty for illegal immigrants, horrific conditions for farm animals, absence of female role models in school textbooks, distributing free condoms to combat AIDS, supplying government run daycare, renewable green energy, banning excessive pesticide use, and the peril of highly sugared breakfast cereals. The frustrating upshot of this promiscuity is that rejoinders quickly become obsolete. By the time a clear-thinking person has assembled the damning evidence on, say, mainstreaming the handicapped, the ALPD sufferer has moved on to banning nuclear weapons. Their happiness is thus Darwinian – like some viruses, they can’t be defeated since they mutate so quickly.
Third, those with the Airhead Disorder are addicted to Utopianism independent of what the pursuit might cost. Think universal disarmament, ending world hunger, decent housing for everyone and all students testing above average. More recent is promoting world peace by teaching youngsters to cherish diversity. In fact, the more unobtainable and idealistic the goal, the more alluring it becomes. After all, attempting to achieve some small, practical improvement can hardly produce the necessary feel-good buzz. To Airhead Liberals the criticism "that's unrealistic" or "it will never work" is a compliment since it confirms the commitment’s high moral purpose. Anybody can embrace mundane programs assisting few people, but only the purest of souls will insist upon sweeping solution for the hopelessly insolvable. Why favor modest scholarships for top students? Too practical and worthwhile, so not much glory there. Demand instead that Harvard and Yale award full scholarships plus expensive support services to the dull-witted unlikely to survive their freshman year. That harebrained nostrum demonstrates the highest of the high dedication to improving the world, and that this demand is oblivious to costs only multiplies the ego gratification. It is practicality the antithesis of political virtue for the ALPD sufferer.
Our analysis is, obviously, only the first step and much research remains to be done, especially uncovering the root causes of ALPD to facilitate early intervention. And let’s be blunt, while “low levels of sexual interest” is certainly a pressing psychiatric problem to many, Airhead Liberalism Policy Disorder is an urgent national problem. Who needs a government running helter-skelter chasing one Utopian version after the next, many of which inflict more harm than good, while driving the country into bankruptcy? So, my right-thinking friends, before buying yet more Maalox or renewing your Valium prescription, let alone forming a support group for distraught family members, take a moment or two and send a note to the American Psychiatric Association demanding that ALPD be included in the next DSM. Here’s the address:
American Psychiatric Association
1000 Wilson Boulevard
Suite 1825
Arlington, VA 22209 Email: apa@psych.org
Conservatives vs. Liberals
If a conservative doesn’t like guns, they don’t buy one.
If a liberal doesn't like guns, then no one should have one.
If a conservative is a vegetarian, they don’t eat meat.
If a liberal is, they want to ban all meat products for everyone.
If a conservative sees a foreign threat, he thinks about how to defeat his enemy.
A liberal wonders how to surrender gracefully and still look good.
If a conservative is homosexual, they quietly enjoy their life.
If a liberal is homosexual, they loudly demand legislated respect.
If a black man or Hispanic is conservative, they see themselves as independently successful. Their liberal counterparts see themselves as victims in need of government protection.
If a conservative is down-and-out, he thinks about how to better his situation.
A liberal wonders who is going to take care of him.
If a conservative doesn’t like a talk show host, he switches channels.
Liberals demand that those they don’t like be shut down.
If a conservative is a non-believer, he doesn’t go to church.
A liberal wants any mention of God or religion silenced.
If a conservative decides he needs health care, he goes about shopping for it, or may choose a job that provides it.
A liberal demands that his neighbors pay for his.
Wednesday, December 03, 2003
I’m a fighting liberal
By Steve Gilliard
You know, I’ve studied history, I’ve read about America and you know something, if it weren’t for liberals, we’d be living in a dark, evil country, far worse than anything Bush could conjure up. A world where children were told to piss on the side of the road because they weren’t fit to pee in a white outhouse, where women had to get back alley abortions and where rape was a joke, unless the alleged criminal was black, whereupon he was hung from a tree and castrated.
What has conservatism given America? A stable social order? A peaceful homelife? Respect for law and order? No. Hell, no. It hasn’t given us anything we didn’t have and it wants to take away our freedoms.
The Founding Fathers, as flawed as they were, slaveowners and pornographers, smugglers and terrorists, understood one thing, a man’s path to God needed no help from the state. Is the religion of these conservatives so fragile that they need the state to prop it up, to tell us how to pray and think? Is that what they stand for? Is that their America?
Conservatism plays on fear and thrives on lies and dishonesty. I grew up with honest, decent conservatives and those people have been replaced by the party of greed. It is one thing to want less government interference and smaller, fiscally responsible government. It is another thing entirely to be a corporate whore, selling out to the highest bidder because the CEO fattens your campaign chest. They are building an America which cannot be sustained. One based on the benefit of the few at the cost of the many. The indifferent boss who hires too few people and works them to death or until they break down sick. Cheap labor capitalism has replaced common sense. “Globalism” which is really guise for exploitation, replaced fair trade, which is nothing like fair for the trapped semi-slaves of the maquliadoras. In the Texas border towns, hundreds of these women have been used as sex slaves and then apparently killed,the FBI powerless to do anything as the criminals sit in Mexico untouched by law.
For the better part of a decade, the conservatives made liberal a dirty word. Well, it isn’t. It represents the best and most noble nature of what America stands for: equitable government services, old age pensions, health care, education, fair trials and humane imprisonment. It is the heart and soul of what made American different and better than other countries. Not only an escape from oppression, but the opportunity to thrive in land free of tradition and the repression that can bring. We offered a democracy which didn’t enshrine the rich and made them feel they had an obligation to their workers.
Bush and the people around him disdain that. They think, by accident of birth and circumstance, they were meant to rule the world and those who did not agree would suffer.
Liberal does not and has not meant weak until the conservatives said it did. Was Martin Luther King weak? Bobby Kennedy? Gene McCarthy? It was the liberals who remade this country and ended legal segregation and legal sexism. Not the conservatives, who wanted to hold on to the old ways.
It’s time to regain the sprit of FDR and Truman and the people around them. People who believed in the public good over private gain. It is time to stop apologizing for being a liberal and be proud to fight for your beliefs. No more shying away or being defined by other people. Liberals believe in a strong defense and punishment for crime. But not preemption and pointless jail sentences. We believe no American should be turned away from a hospital because they are too poor or lack a proper legal defense. We believe that people should make enough from one job to live on, to spend time on raising their family. We believe that individuals and not the state should dictate who gets married and why. The best way to defend marriage is to expand, not restrict it.
It was the liberals who opposed the Nazis while the conservatives were plotting to get their brown shirts or fund Hitler. It was the liberals who warned about Spain and fought there, who joined the RAF to fight the Germans, who brought democracy to Germany and Japan. Let us not forget it was the conservatives who opposed defending America until the Germans sank our ships. They would have done nothing as Britain came under Nazi control. It was they who supported Joe McCarthy and his baseless, drink fueled claims.
Without liberals, there would be no modern America, just a Nazi sattlelite state. Liberals weak on defense? Liberals created America’s defense. The conservatives only need vets at election time.
It is time to stop looking for an accomodation with the right. They want none for us. They want to win, at any price. So, you have a choice: be a fighting liberal or sit quietly. I know what I am, what are you?
With three weeks left before summer break, a record 36 Chicago Public Schools students have been killed this school year, marking the third straight year that youth homicides have climbed into double digits. Chicago has surpassed New York City and Los Angeles for having the highest youth homicide rate in the nation.Where is Jesse Jackson? Where is Al Sharpton? Maxine Waters? Why is the Daily Kos and Huffington Post both silent on this? Why is the left silent? Black children are being killed!
"I think people in Chicago have almost gotten numb to the statistics," said Dexter Voisin, a researcher at the University of Chicago who studies the impact of violence on adolescents.
The latest victim in Chicago's long year of student killings is 15-year-old Alex Arellano. On May 1, he was chased, beaten with baseball bats, run over by a car, shot and burned. His body was found days after he disappeared from his family's home on the city's South Side.
Police continue to investigate the killing; gang activity has been suggested. His grieving family members have denied any gang connections and continue to look for answers.
"The homicide rate is just the tip of the iceberg," Mr. Voisin said. "Those with nonfatal injuries are almost 100 times that of our homicide rates. You think for about every one kid who is murdered, 100 kids witness the murder or are victims of nonfatal injuries, of robberies, muggings and gang-related incidents. A lot of times, this exposure goes undocumented or unreported."
Black youths, he said, are two times more likely than white youths to fail or drop out of school, and at the same time they are also eight to 10 times more likely to be victims of homicide than whites.
"I don't even know where to begin," said Diane Latiker, who runs a program for at-risk youths out of her home in the city's Roseland neighborhood. "There aren't any words for what I feel for what is going on for our youth."
Ms. Latiker uses three rooms of her six-room apartment to run a nonprofit program called Kids Off the Block. She offers tutoring, mentoring and travel opportunities designed to show Chicago youths who want successful futures that the violent culture they see daily is not the norm.
The local drug dealer in a big car with flashy rims, wearing cool sneakers, appears to many to be the model of success, Ms. Latiker said.
"The A and B students, they have family and community support," she said. "What about the kid who is struggling, hanging out there on the street corner and joining that gang because he feels hopeless? That's what I'm hearing from our youth. They feel they have nothing to live for."
Read the full story here.
