Time for another roundup of this and that:
Posts Tagged ‘abortion’
LinkSwarm For February 15, 2012
Wednesday, February 15th, 2012LinkSwarm for December 26, 2011
Monday, December 26th, 2011Still getting back up to speed after Christmas, so here are a few links that I’ve been squirreling away like nuts for winter:
Additional hat tips to Insta and Ace.
Dewhurst, Cruz Trade Social Conservative Endorsements
Monday, November 14th, 2011Big senate race news on the endorsement front:
First, Texas Right to Life PAC endorses David Dewhurst. That’s a very good pickup for him, as he has not exactly been overwhelmed with conservative endorsements. I’m sure the Ted Cruz campaign is not happy that Dewhurst snagged this one. (Also not happy: ex-senate candidate Elizabeth Ames Jones, now running for the state senate from District 25…where they endorsed rival Donna Campbell for the same seat the same week Jones (who has repeatedly stressed her pro-life credentials) got into the race…)
Then, in short order, the Cruz campaigned fired back with an endorsement from Focus on the Family founder Dr. James Dobson.
Of the two, I have to rank the Dewhurst endorsement as the better pickup, mainly because his conservative endorsements for this race have been thin on the ground.
Can Dewhurst snag more conservative endorsements? Maybe. He’s been endorsed by groups like the NRA and Texans for Lawsuit Reform in the past…but that was when he was running against Democrats as Lt. Governor. Such groups may decide that Cruz is the better alternative, or pass on endorsing anyone before the primary.
Obama to Troops: Drop Dead
Friday, April 8th, 2011When I first read on Ace of Spades that Obama intended to let our soldiers go without paychecks during the shutdown, I was somewhat incredulous. After all, even Obama should be able to see how lousy the “optics” are with withholding paychecks from troops involved in no less than three wars kinetic military actions overseas. Surely not even Obama could be that stupid?
Evidently I was wrong. Obama would rather let our troops go without pay than stop taxpayer funding of abortions.
To dramatize the issue, I’ve actually created a small film about the topic. I’ve taken the details of who all will still be getting checks in a shutdown from this piece up on Reason (which was, in turn, taken from The New York Times, saving you the 15 seconds it would have taken you to defeat the paywall…) Keep in mind that I’m putting it up in advance of the actual shutdown, so the details may vary…
I did this quick and dirty, and I didn’t see any actually U.S. soldiers as part of any character sets…
An Explanation for the Left’s Irrational Hatred of Sarah Palin
Sunday, September 12th, 2010“Oooo, I don’t like that woman,” said a non-conservative of my acquaintance when Sarah Palin’s name came up. And indeed, the reason for the American left’s pathological hatred of Palin, a reaction based on a visceral emotional reaction rather than intellectual disagreement, is one of the great mysteries of our time. Kevin Burke suggested that one reason was repressed shame over themselves not living up to Palin decision not to abort Trig.
This essay over on Chicago Boyz suggests that the real reason is status anxiety:
Status-anxiety occurs when a person believes that their position in a real or imagined social hierarchy is threatened. Leftists react emotionally to Palin because of the threat she poses to their own individual sense of status. All their other arguments are just put forth to rationalize that emotional reaction.
In short, it is not the ideas she puts forth, its that someone like her is significant at all.
Status-anxiety occurs most strongly when a group has no meritorious claims to its social position. The classic example would be the pre-WWII European aristocrats who inherited their wealth and position, and who therefore had no right to status in an industrial society other than from cultural inertia. Closer to home, the most vicious white racists were poor and working-class whites who knew full well that only racism kept them from being on society’s bottom status tier. As long as all non-whites were judged inferior to any white person, a poor white person still had some status. They bitterly resisted losing what little status they still had.
Leftism at its heart holds that a small percentage of humans have a vastly superior understanding of everything compared to ordinary people. The point of leftism is to empower these superior individuals to impose their superior understanding upon society by the force of the state. Leftists must be viewed by themselves and others as superior human beings if they are to have a claim to power and status.
Also:
Since they have few meritorious indicators of a personal and group claim to status remaining, leftists are forced to fall back on the same standards employed by the European upper classes. They try to restrict status not by merit but by conformity to their own life pattern. They demand that people go to the right elitist schools. They demand that people live in certain communities. They demand that people have the right recreational interests. They demand that people enjoy uniform kinds of art and music. They demand that people have the proper modes of speech, accent and allusion. They demand that people have the right religious beliefs. And so on.
On this basis Palin is a nightmare: She went to a state college. She lives in the “backwoods”. She likes hunting, fishing and sports. She likes country music and representational art. She doesn’t have the right accent. She doesn’t dress appropriately. She’s a Pentecostal instead of atheist, Unitarian, Episcopalian, etc.
Palin’s success stabs them in the heart of their anxiety. If Palin can be a successful political leader, what does that say about the leftists’ claims of intellectual and moral superiority? If people don’t just instantly assume that leftists are smarter and better than everyone else, why would people trust a leftist government to make so many decisions about the people’s live, e.g., medical care?
That is why leftists see Palin as a genuine and significant threat of unusual magnitude. In the emotional thinking of leftists, she is a personal threat to everything each individual leftist has attained in life. They feel a sincere, visceral sense of danger about her because she attacks the very core of their egos. They feel the same hatred towards Palin that the European upper classes felt towards the upstart middle-class. They feel the same hatred that poor whites felt towards non-whites. They feel that way for the same reasons. If she succeeds, worse, if she is right, then they become nobodies.
As long as she is viewed as a significant political figure, the left’s obsession with Palin will never wane because it does not spring from rational roots. She threatens something too deep and too profound in a political subculture built around the belief that a small percentage of human beings have a vastly superior understanding of the world compared to all the rest.