Jonah Goldberg has posted a tart essay on the Left’s conceit that it is they, not conservatives, who stand on the side of personal liberty.
We read:
Alleged proof for this amusing myth (or pernicious lie; take your pick) comes in the form of liberal support for gay marriage and abortion rights, and opposition to a few things that smack of what some people call “traditional values.’
The evidence disproving this adorable story of live-and-let-live liberalism comes in the form of pretty much everything else liberals say, do, and believe.
Social liberalism is the foremost, predominant, and in many instances sole impulse for zealous regulation in this country, particularly in big cities. I love it when liberals complain about a ridiculous bit of PC nanny-statism coming out of New York, L.A., Chicago, D.C., Seattle, etc. ”” “What will they do next?’
Uh, sorry to tell you, but you are “they.’ Outside of a Law and Order script ”” or an equally implausible MSNBC diatribe about who ruined Detroit ”” conservatives have as much influence on big-city liberalism as the Knights of Malta do.
Seriously, who else do people think are behind efforts to ban big sodas or sue hairdressers for charging women more than men? Who harasses little kids for making toy guns out of sticks, Pop Tarts, or their own fingers? Who wants to regulate the air you breathe, the food you eat, and the beverages you drink? Who wants to control your thermostat? Take your guns? Your cigarettes? Heck, your candy cigarettes? Who’s in favor of speech codes on campuses and “hate crime’ laws everywhere? Who’s in favor of free speech when it comes to taxpayer-subsidized “art’ and pornography (so long as you use a condom, if liberals get their way) but then bang their spoons on their high chairs for strict regulations when it comes to political speech? Who loves meddling, finger-wagging billionaires like Michael Bloomberg when they use state power and taxpayer money to herd, bully, and nudge people but thinks billionaires like the Koch brothers who want to shrink government are the root of all tyranny?
Right. And when it comes to taking control, let’s not forget toilets, light bulbs, and a whole lot more. Pretty much everything, in fact, except sex, drugs and the border.
Read the whole thing here.
19 Comments
Liberal Theory: Everything not forbidden is required.
Liberal Practice: Whites off Earth now!
The brows of Jonah Goldberg would furrow at only one of these.
I remember when I used to read (and subscribe, for God’s sake) to that rag of craven “conservatism” National Review. I recall once Goldberg mentioning that it would never do to allow whites their own nations as that would inevitably seed the ground for…Are you ready, hey are you ready for this? Are you hanging on the edge of your seat? Out of his mouthway the word rips, to the sound of the bleat. Aww yeah. Another jew cries nazi!
So to the Goldbergs my people must perish, because if not who knows how it might affect the jews.
Hey Porter,
Who the f*ck are your people? Do you claim sole ownership of white skin? Are you some kind of Aryan?
BTW, it’s Jews, with a capital “J”, asshole.
Say what you will about Goldberg, Porter, but what he says in this essay is on target, his comments on other topics notwithstanding. (And yes, you wanted a capital ‘J’ there.)
In my opinion the modern disease of radical multiculturalism, the fetishization of Diversity, and the suicidal taboo against any sort of discrimination are all a spasm of reaction to the horrors perpetrated by the Nazis.
I believe that any people is perfectly justified in trying to preserve a homeland of its own, if that’s what it wants. (After all, even the U.N. has declared its full-throated support for the proposition that peoples have a right to “maintain and strengthen their own institutions, cultures and traditions, and to pursue their development in keeping with their own needs and aspirations”.) Nobody minds much that the Tibetans, the Japanese, etc. feel this way. The Jews are admirably forthright about it. It is a natural human impulse, with deep evolutionary roots (as pointed out here, not so long ago). Moreover, any ethny that does not take some interest in this has set itself on a short path to extinction.
It ought to be just as acceptable for white European peoples to share in these natural sentiments; at the very least it shouldn’t be a career-destroying offense for any of them even to entertain the notion in public. There is not a mainstream publication, however, no matter how “conservative” it imagines itself to be, that would dare go near this position. That is how strong this reaction still is, seventy years on.
If there is any group for whom I can cut a little slack on this, though, it is the Jews themselves. To the extent that they support demographically and culturally catastrophic resettlement policies in Western homelands, I will of course oppose them. But after the horrors of the 1940s I can understand why they might still feel skittish about Eurocentric ethnonationalism.
Otherwise, I think Jonah Goldberg generally gets an awful lot right.
Ha! Wait until Bill de Blasio has been in office for a few years. Both you and Jonah Goldberg will be begging for a fourth term for Michael Bloomberg.
On this, Peter, I fear you are absolutely right. I plan to be spending a lot more time elsewhere if Joe Lhota doesn’t carry the day.
I don’t know much about de Blasio, except that his wife is a Negress and his kid has a really great Afro. From what little I know, he seems to have rode a wave of resentment against stop-and-frisk and the perceived favoritism shown towards rich Manhattanites over less rich people in the boroughs.
Bloomberg did some great things. The city is in good fiscal condition, and survived the 2008 financial collapse surprisingly well. Crime is down. I hear there is a really awesome bike rental program where you can pick up in one place and drop off in another. It would be great to spend a day in New York just riding around Central Park. OK, there’s the Mets. Not much he can do about them. My guess is that these things will be remembered long after people forgot about trans fats and Big Gulps.
I agree. In many ways, Bloomberg has been a good mayor. He’s a good executive.
A narcissistic, patronizing, meddlesome, self-righteous megalomaniac who sees the free men and women of New York as his retarded children, and who is dead wrong about half a dozen issues of paramount importance, but a good executive.
One of the most effective programs of his administration — stop-and-frisk — will be right out the window if di Blasio wins.
The rage, the righteousness, the apoplexy…the comedy. You may as well spare the kleenex “big” Henry. Your cheeks are to glisten anew.
First an observation: though I capitalized neither jew nor white henry succumbs to calling me one of his family names at only one…with malcolm offering his own approving tut tut. So which one of your two lower case indignities shall you both alight upon?
And henry are you a jew? If so, who the fuck are your people? Do you claim some ownership of jewishness? Are you some kind zionist? Do these amateur shaming questions lead you to conclude that jews are properly stateless? No? Well here come the tears again.
Malcolm…
the fetishization of Diversity, and the suicidal taboo against any sort of discrimination are all a spasm of reaction to the horrors perpetrated by the Nazis.
And what of the spasm of reaction to the horrors of the Bolsheviks? The Red Terror? The Holodomor?
What of the spasm of reaction to these lurid enterprises and the millions of souls they consumed? It seems quite muted frankly.
In contrast, we can expect a new holocaust film/documentary/book/museum coming out in regular intervals until the sun vaporizes the oceans.
I wonder what or who keeps the West in these suicidal spasms. Any ideas?
I believe that any people is perfectly justified in trying to preserve a homeland of its own…The Jews are admirably forthright about it
Was that sly understatement? Well yes, they certainly are admirably forthright about they having a homeland of their own. So how admirably forthright are they about extending that courtesy to us? And why don’t you feel compelled to demand they do?
There is not a mainstream publication, however, no matter how “conservative” it imagines itself to be, that would dare go near this position
And why not? Is there some wealthy, cohesive, group holding a near media monopoly that would attack the publication viciously?
To the extent that they support demographically and culturally catastrophic resettlement policies in Western homelands, I will of course oppose them
What form will your opposition take? From only your comment above, it seems so subtle as to possibly elude its intended audience.
But after the horrors of the 1940s I can understand why they might still feel skittish about Eurocentric ethnonationalism
And how skittish should we feel about being eradicated? And whose existential skittishness (ours or theirs) should take priority precedence in our minds?
Otherwise, I think Jonah Goldberg generally gets an awful lot right.
That’s a laudably charitable assessment toward a man so sanguine about your people’s demise.
@12:18 am:
Whites and blacks are not capitalized because they are colors, not a “people”. You are the one who lamented that your “people” need a nation of their own. So who are the people you call your own? White people? That includes a majority of Jews.
Yes, I am a Jew. But I made no claims of ownership; you did. My nationality is American. My skin color is white. My ethnicity is Ashkenazi. My religion Judaism.
What about you, Porter? Are you some kind of Aryan? Are you white? Black? Some other color?
I am not sure who my “people” are, but I am positive they wouldn’t include someone like you. We would have gotten your kind out of the gene pool a long time ago.
Hillbillies for instance is only capitalized should the group be listed first in a sentence otherwise me stating I’m a hillbilly who is not so ‘shooken up ‘n all tetchous’ over proclaiming The Big Henry my friend (T,B & H being capitalized ’cause that’s a name[d] blog commentor – same as P with, oddly enough “orter”).
The ‘orter’ Porter you might know – especially if you know hillbilly – having to do with “ought.”
As in, if your thinking dropping comments “enlightlit’nin’ as you might think’ suggests you orter consider taking up another hobby.
But after the horrors of the 1940s I can understand why they might still feel skittish about Eurocentric ethnonationalism.
The campaign against Eurocentrism began in the 1930s-at a time when NS persecution was relatively mild,especially compared to what was going on in the Soviet Union. A Kevin MacDonald review of a book by a mainstream liberal academic that shows this:
The ‘Jewish Threat’:
Anti-Semitic Politics of the U.S. Army
(…)
The tide against the world view of the officers turned with the election of Roosevelt. ” Jews served prominently in his administration,” (p. 244) including Felix Frankfurter who had long been under scrutiny by MID as a “dangerous Jewish radical” (p. 244). Jews had also won the intellectual debate: “Nazi racial ideology was under attack in the press as pseudo”‘science and fanatical bigotry.”
(…)
It is remarkable that the word ‘Nordic’ disappeared by the 1930s although the restrictionists still had racialist views of Jews and themselves (p. 245). By 1938 eugenics was “shunned in public discourse of the day.” (p. 250) Whereas such ideas were commonplace in the mainstream media in the 1920s, General George van Horn Moseley’s 1938 talk on eugenics and its implications for immigration policy caused a furor when it was reported in the newspapers. Moseley was charged with anti”‘Semitism although he denied referring to Jews in his talk. The incident blew over, but “henceforth, the military determined to protect itself against charges of anti”‘Semitism that might sully its reputation or cause it political problems …. The army projected itself as an institution that would tolerate neither racism nor anti-Semitism” (p. 252″‘253).
(…)
The new climate can also be seen in the fact that Lothrop Stoddard stopped referring to Jews completely in his lectures to the Army War College in the late 1930s, but continued to advocate eugenics and was sympathetic to Nazism in the late 1930s because it took the race notion seriously. By 1940, the tables had turned. Anti-Jewish attitudes came to be seen as subversive by the government, and the FBI alerted military intelligence that Lothrop Stoddard should be investigated as a security risk in the event of war (p. 280).
From Bendersky’s perspective, these changes are due largely to the triumph of science: “Not only was Stoddard’s racial science erroneous, it was –– despite his assertions to the contrary –– out of step with the major trends in science and scholarship” (p. 262). What Bendersky does not note is that the “scienitific” refutation of the ideas of Stoddard and the other Darwinian theorists was entirely due to a political campaign waged in academic social science departments by Franz Boas and his students and sympathizers. The political nature of this shift in intellectual stance and its linkage to Jewish academic ethnic activists has long been apparent to scholars. (Degler, 1991; Frank, 1997; MacDonald 1998/2001; Stocking 1968, 1989.)
(…)
Porter,
First of all, a tut-tut is all I can muster regarding capitalization. You and Henry can thrash that out between yourselves.
As for the horrors of Commmunism: where, indeed, is the outrage? I live in a New York neighborhood populated in large part by young, affluent liberals, and it is not unusual to see their larvae sporting, as if billboards for their parents’ moral, political, and historical ignorance, Che Guevara T-shirts.
Sadly, statist collectivism is alive and well, not just among the Jews, but among the intelligentsia generally — within which group, thanks to their relatively high IQ as a population, Jews are disproportionately represented. (Look, for example at Sweden, and other Scandinavian nations: their political, academic and media elites are hardly dominated by Jews — yet they are as badly afflicted by the multiculturalist mind-virus as any Western nation, and are succumbing to self-inflicted demographic destruction faster than almost anyone.) It would, of course, be inconvenient for a favored ideology to be tainted in its essence by the Communist hemoclysms of the twentieth century; it is much easier, instead, simply to indulge a little cognitive dissonance — after all, as I mentioned just the other day, this is already, with this crowd, a well-practiced skill — and pretend that it’s all about getting the implementation right.
Nazism, on the other hand, is dead and gone. It never had the transnational fungibility that Marxism did and does. Classes are everywhere; Germans are not.
But enough from me; your criticism was directed against Jonah Goldberg, as an exemplar of this pernicious double standard. Here, then, is Jonah Goldberg himself condemning exactly the relative lack of moral outrage that you (very rightly) point out.
Well, what do I have at my disposal? For now, I suppose speaking and writing will have to do. (There is also the illusion of power conferred by the ballot-box, but I’m well aware, at this point, that I might as well send my vote up the chimney.) History makes clear that things may decline sharply, of course, for which event it is prudent to be prepared with something other then the pen.
As I wrote above, any ethny that does not take some interest in this has set itself on a short path to extinction.
I know that you know that my “thrash out” with Porter was only superficially about capitalization. You are too smart and insightful not to understand that his bible is The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
henry says:We would have gotten your kind out of the gene pool a long time ago.
I understand this henry. It is precisely the point I hope Malcolm will grasp.
Though honestly it’s almost refreshing to see such unintentional candor. A living counter example to the malicious stereotype of intelligent jews. But if I may offer counsel, you’re supposed to only make such statements sotto voce. The eternal victim ploy doesn’t find purchase otherwise.
As to your last comment, this would have sufficed.
My candor is intentional. If I may offer counsel, there is a great need for human shields in Gaza. Your kind are perfectly suited for the task.
Jews don’t consider it malicious; it’s just accurate.
If I may offer counsel, you should purchase your one-way ticket for Gaza without delay.
JK,
Your vow of friendship is noted; graciously accepted; and gladly reciprocated.
Hillbillies rule!
TBH
Hillbillies rule![img]http://asset.zcache.com/assets/graphics/s.gif[/img]