Reality Is Reactionary

We haven't had some Steyn for a while, so here he is getting to the heart of the matter:

Let's take it as read that Rick Santorum is weird. After all, he believes in the sanctity of life, the primacy of the family, the traditional socio-religious understanding of a transcendent purpose to human existence. Once upon a time, back in the mists of, ooh, the mid–20th century, all these things were, if not entirely universal, sufficiently mainstream as to be barely worthy of discussion. Now they're not. Isn't the fact that conventional morality is now "weird" itself deeply weird? The instant weirdification of ideas taken for granted for millennia is surely mega-weird — unless you think that our generation is possessed of wisdom unique to human history. In which case, why are we broke?

Or, indeed, why is the education system collapsing, the crime rate skyrocketing or the myriad other things going south at a rate of knots?

In many ways liberal social policy is like a real life version of one of the UEAs dodgy climate models, where whatever you plug into it, the Earth turns into ball of fire. We're not supposed to notice that the Earth remains stubbornly inhabitable, just like we're not supposed to notice that increasingly large parts of our cities aren't. If there was as much evidence of carbon emissions damaging the global environment as there is of liberalism damaging the social environment, conservatives would be riding to work on Raleighs. Meanwhile, liberals climb atop the rubble and insist that they're the Smartest People In The Room, and anyone who disagrees is some kind of creepy wierdo.

PC And The Shrunken Mandate

NNW isn't too impressed by the left's response - or lack thereof - to Weinergate.

Indeed, it's not just Weiner that's been left exposed. It's hard not to notice that the left's conception of freedom looks a little... shrunken? Flaccid? Inadequate?

Libs think anyone who has issues with the Honourable Member's Honourable Member appearing in in-boxes across America is, like, a total square but if he had used a felt tip to write 'Islam Sucks' on his junk beforehand, they'd have demanded the death sentence.

Of course, we've been here before. Hell, after years spent defending Clinton, Weiner flashing his majority to all and sundry probably seems refreshingly normal to them.

Liberals are proverbial for turning into Bernard Manning once one of their guys falls foul of PC, but the corollary is often missed. Professional conservatives endlessly jibber-jabber about the need to ditch the embarrassing bumpkins in the base, get with the PC program and reach out to all those groovy youngsters who were just waiting to vote conservative, but were put off by the lack of tackle twittering. But how does that work exactly?

In so far as leftists in both the US and Britain ditch their PC principles faster than a speeding e-mail once one of their guys is in the frame, why even pretend it's anything other than a stick to beat conservatives with? Criticising Cherie Blair's sleazy dealing is The Sexism, but John Prescott can use his private office like a harem, and that's 'just John' as Tony helpfully explained. Why even bother to play in a rigged game?

Straight From The Horse's....

Steyn catches a liberal OD'ing on scopalamine:

So ethnic cleansing of Jews is a “liberal” position? Albeit an “anti-establishment” one? What’s interesting is that, after spending so many years huffily insisting they’re not anti-Semitic but merely “anti-Zionist”, the British left is now happy to put an explicit call for “the Jews” to be returned to the land of Auschwitz under the category of “criticism of Israel”

As ever, I say: if it's the right that's so extreme, how come it's always liberals who fantasise about murder and ethnic cleansing?

Steyn!

Haven't had a good Steyn quote for a while, but here he is reminding us that sometimes a cigar is just a cigar:

Before the body was found, The Independent's Robert Fisk offered a familiar argument to Pearl's kidnappers: Killing him would be "a major blunder... the best way of ensuring that the suffering" – of Kashmiris, Afghans, Palestinians – "goes unrecorded." Other journalists peddled a similar line: if you release Danny, he'll be able to tell your story, get your message out, "bridge the misconceptions." But the story did get out; the severed head is the message; the only misconception is that that's a misconception.

Well, quite. A lot of liberal babbling at the moment reminds me of Len Deighton's line about Chamberlain deciding to deal with Hitler as though he was a civilised man, since he had no idea how to deal with him if he was not.

Steynism!

Brilliant response to a letter writer whining about cruelty to all those martyrs in the public sector:

I can't usually connect all the widely scattered dots in your Macleans columns, so I would normally be unable to comment, but I think I understand the gist of your rant about the public sector. To which I have this to say:

Many who work in the public sector do so out of choice, and, in fact, many leave for the private sector or spend their careers shuttling between the two. Public sector jobs, at a mid-to-high level, often mean receiving lower wages. These jobs nowadays are dynamic, challenging, and done under the most severe public scrutiny. I encourage you to try working in the public sector for a while before raking over the coals the hard working people doing the sometimes thankless tasks that keep our country going.

Brendan Watkins
Victoria, British Columbia

MARK SAYS: Going where?

Steynism

....I give up on the whole d'/de/du jour thing.Instead, on with the show, and this perfect summing up:

News from the Netherlands: To protest the Islamophobia of Geert Wilders, a male teacher from Eindhoven has taken to wearing a Muslim headscarf in public.

Look, I like a neat visual shorthand as much as the next fellow, but this is almost too perfect a symbol of what's happening on the Continent: European men are auditioning for the part of Muslim women.

Steyn D'Jour

Yes, indeed: it's Diversity Day at the House and who better to sum it all up than the Great Steyn:

"Diversity" is not a virtue; it's morally neutral: A group of five white upper-middle-class liberal NPR-listening women is non-diverse; a group of four white upper-middle-class liberal NPR-listening women plus Sudan's leading clitorectomy practitioner is more diverse but not necessarily the better for it.

Steyn D'Jour

The Great Steyn returns to an important point:

"Diversity" is one of those words designed to absolve you of the need to think. Likewise, a belief in "multiculturalism" doesn't require you to know anything at all about other cultures, just to feel generally warm and fluffy about them. Heading out from my hotel room the other day, I caught a glimpse of that 7-Eleven video showing Major Hasan wearing "Muslim" garb to buy a coffee on the morning of his murderous rampage. And it wasn't until I was in the taxi cab that something odd struck me: He is an American of Arab descent. But he was wearing Pakistani dress – that's to say, a "Punjabi suit," as they call it in Britain, or the "shalwar kameez," to give it its South Asian name. For all the hundreds of talking heads droning on about "diversity" across the TV networks, it was only Tarek Fatah, writing in The Ottawa Citizen, who pointed out that no Arab males wear this get-up – with one exception: Those Arab men who got the jihad fever and went to Afghanistan to sign on with the Taliban and al-Qaida. In other words, Maj. Hasan's outfit symbolized the embrace of an explicit political identity entirely unconnected with his ethnic heritage.

Actually, I'd go further: multiculturalism actively requires ignorance of other cultures. In so far as liberals blindly assume that Islamofascists are basically Guardian readers with a penchant for florid rhetoric, it's the left that is truly ethnocentric.

Liberals are incapable of seeing the rest of the world as anything other than the West's culture wars writ large. Consider Senator Patty Murray's claim that Bin Laden helped to build day care centres in Afghanistan, presumably to help out all those working mothers juggling work and career under the Taliban. To the point: Senator Murray's claim is so self-evidently ludicrous that it speaks to a profound ignorance about the nature of Islam.

All of which is by way of saying that, as ever, the supposedly enlightened liberal position only stands up providing you don't know anything the subject concerned. Hence why liberals are obsessed with the idea of suppressing 'hate speech' and the like: liberal ideas don't stand up well when people are allowed to discuss them.

Steyn D'Jour

Did you hear the one about the guide dog and the gay hotelier?

This being Steyn, even when it sounds like a joke, there's a serious point:

[T]yranny is always whimsical. Which is exactly how the social engineers of the “human rights” nomenklatura like it. Because it legitimizes the state as the only valid mediator of social relations. And so in the cause of invented rights of near parodic absurdity, a profoundly wicked “human rights” apparatus is happy to destroy utterly the lives and livelihoods of blameless individuals.

Steyn D'Jour

No wonder they get on so well with libs - they're seventh century post-modernists:

One sympathizes with Benjamin Netanyahu. But he’s missing the point. Ahmadinejad & co aren’t Holocaust deniers because of the dearth of historical documentation. They do so because they can, and because it suits their own interests to do so, and because in the regimes they represent the state lies to its people as a matter of course and to such a degree that there is no longer an objective reality only a self-constructed one.

Steyn D'Jour

On why conservatives should treat with contempt liberal charges of 'extremism':

The aim of a large swath of the Left is not to win the debate but to get it canceled before it starts. You can do that in any number of ways – busting up campus appearances by conservatives, "hate speech" prohibitions, activist judges' more imaginative court decisions, or merely, as the Times does, by declaring your side of every issue to be the "moderate" and "nonideological" position – even when, in many cases, the "extreme" position is supported by a majority of voters.

Steyn D'Jour

Steyn with more reasons why Cameronism sucks:

A “social liberal/fiscal conservative” is not necessarily a girly-man, more of a pre-op transsexual.It would be nice to be able to have it both ways, like that so-called “pregnant man” out on the West Coast — and, incidentally, didn’t Ahnuld play a pregnant man in some movie a decade or so back? Why, so he did: Junior. I remember the poster, the leading man with a swollen belly — like a girly-man governor about to give birth to a big bloated budget. The problem with being “socially liberal, fiscally conservative” is that most of the social liberalism comes with quite a price tag — just have a ten-minute riffle through the non-stimulus bill....

Steyn D'Jour

Talking specifically of those who defend their human right not to allow anyone to disagree with them, but with wider implications for conservatism in general:

As I've said re the so-called "global consensus" of the UN, if you mix half-a-pint of vanilla ice cream with half-a-pint of dog feces the result will taste more like the latter than the former. Likewise, if you split the difference between me and Commissar Barbara Hall, or Ezra and Jennifer Lynch, QC, you're still quite a long ways down the road to tyranny. "Moderation" - of the CTV/Gazette school - is a euphemism for drift, for letting the culture be tugged gently, imperceptibly, remorselessly into darkness

Quote Of The Day

Steyn explains why the culture war matters:

If the non-political sphere is permanently left-of-center — the movies, the pop songs, the plays, the sitcoms, the newspapers plus the churches, schools and much else — it's simply unreasonable to expect people to walk into a polling booth every other November and vote conservative. The culture is where the issues get framed and the boundaries set.

All of which is by way of saying that if you can't turn on the TV without catching a drama featuring babies being born headless because of pollution caused by evil businessmen, then it's going to be hard to make a case against the ecoloon cause d'jour.

Steyn D'Jour

Steyn on the culture war:

If the default mode of a society’s institutions is liberal, electing GOP legislators eventually accomplishes little more than letting a Republican driver take a turn steering the liberal bus. If Hollywood’s liberal, if the newspapers are liberal, if the pop stars are liberal, if the grade schools are liberal, if the very language is liberal to the point where all the nice words have been co-opted as a painless liberal sedative, a Republican legislature isn’t going to be a shining city on a hill so much as one of those atolls in the Maldives being incrementally swallowed by Al Gore’s rising sea levels.

Steyn D'Jour

A great obit for a genuine movie star, plus this:

One notes that, for all the apocalyptic nightmares over ever deadlier technology, the great slaughters of our age – Bosnia, Rwanda, Congo, Darfur – have all been low-tech affairs. Yet no one ever proposes “machete control”.

Steyn D'Jour

On post 9-11 lawsuits:

According to the Times, many of the bereaved are angry and determined that their loved one's death should have meaning. Yet the meaning they're after surely strikes our enemies not just as extremely odd but as one more reason why they'll win. You launch an act of war, and the victims respond with a lawsuit against their own countrymen.

Steyn D'Jour

On the Minority Report-style justifications for 'hate speech' laws:

I've been hearing the same line for five months in these nutso "human rights" complaints up in Canada: Steyn writes a book to promote his "ideas"; Adolf Hitler wrote a book to promote his "ideas". And we know how that turned out...

It's interesting that the same people who object to the doctrine of pre-emption with regard to, say, the Iranian nuclear program are quite happy to apply it to radio hosts and columnists.

Steyn D'Jour

Another day, another great point from Steyn:

The embittered white men are just about the only demographic weighing these candidates on their merits. The significant proportion of women and blacks in the Democratic base for whom identity politics trumps all is what's stopping either candidate from gaining the momentum that would have emerged in a contest between two squaresville dead European males. It's the identity-uber-alles blocs that prevent the black guy from finishing off the feminist or vice-versa.

Indeed. The most visible feature of the modern leftist is a sense of grievance. Their arguments might not make any sense, but they're sure all the problems in the world are down to The (White) Man.

There's no discernible ideological spine there, just a shared set of hatreds. The trouble for the Democrat brass is that after spending decades cultivating their supporters sense of victimhood and encouraging them to wallow in insane conspiracy theories, they can't hardly put the genie back in the bottle now.

Steyn D'Jour

The great man notes that there's no precautionary principle for social engineering:

But, at the same time as the Royal Institute and The Guardian and all other bien pensants are in a mass panic at the thought of the krill having to adjust his way of life, they're positively insouciant about massive changes to our own habitat. You like fox-hunting? You're not entirely cool with gay marriage? You prefer English common law to this new Euro-pudding legal code? Tough, shrugs The Guardian.