Category Archives: Pseudo-intellectualism

Libertarian ‘Idiocracy’ Rising

Intelligence, libertarianism, Political Philosophy, Pop-Culture, Pseudo-intellectualism, The West, The Zeitgeist

Over the pixelated pages of Barely A Blog and IlanaMercer.com, I’ve devoted time and effort to elucidating where libertarianism has gone wrong. The sexy, rah-rah, fist-in-the air aura of anarchism has attracted the worst to the movement. My own readers are constantly seduced and pulled back, on BAB, from the brink of errant thinking—as when they fall into pacifism or social determinism.

Then there are the dumbing-down forces that have taken their toll on the Zeitgeist in general. In America, and elsewhere, we are in the throes of an era that elevates and celebrates the worst of humanity, man and woman; intellect and ethics. To get an exaggerated sense of what the consequences of such a persistent upheaval in the natural order, I recommend my all-time favorite social commentary, “Idiocracy.” Comedic reductio ad absurdum is better than the kind of social science-cum-social engineering produced these days by the likes of Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam.

After that prelude, please take a look at what goes for gritty libertarian thought on the website of The Examiner: “Is cannibalism really wrong or just taboo?”

An intellectual pygmy and shock jock gets a forum. An even stupider editor believes musing about cannibalism is edgy and exciting. Your main deduction here as far as libertarianism goes must not involve libertarian legal theory. For the act of cannibalism should go unpunished only in extremis—where the individual would not survive unless he indulges.

Otherwise, a society that is reduced to the skeletal essence of the non-aggression axiom is not a civil society, but an “Idiocracy.” (Bless Mike Judge for that stroke of genius.)

Update II: Lady La Raza (Sotomayor: Spanish For Racial Set-Asides)

Affirmative Action, America, Barack Obama, General, Justice, Law, Multiculturalism, Pseudo-intellectualism

Update I (May 29): Go Tancredo! “ALL FOR THE RACE; NOTHING FOR THE REST” is how Colorado Republican Rep. Tom Tancredo encapsulated La Raza’s mission. On CNN, Tancredo went on to call La Raza, to which the newly nominated Lady Justice belongs, a Latino KKK. As I write, the heroic Tancredo is hammering David Shuster, an MSNBC hombre—who tried to pin him up against the wall—refusing to back down, backing-up his words impeccably with a tale of La Raza’s honoring of a gentleman whose cri de coeur was “eliminate the Gringo.”

And you know what? When meek WASPs refuse to turn the other cheek, bullies back down. Likewise, Shuster was shushed.

Update II (May 29): Margaret Warner of the PBS’s News Hour talked to legal scholars Emma Coleman Jordan of Georgetown University Law School and Paul Cassell of the S.J. Quinney College of Law at the University of Utah about Sotomayor’s judicial record. Coleman, an African-American woman, called Sotomayor brilliant. What else? Cassell, who actually could be a candidate for this liberally applied designation, said he had read very many of her decisions and that she “breaks to the Left,” sides with the plaintiff in so-called sexual harassment cases, and has a pedestrian mind that is no match for Antonin Scalia’s. That’s the good news.

As readers have noted in this space, one doesn’t wish for a formidable liberal legal theorist, but, rather, for a plodder; someone who can barely digest the facts of a case, much less find the intellectual wherewithal to apply critical race theory to the facts. You don’t want a woman capable of expansive theoretical formulations. However, it is quite clear that this is a double-edged sword; it portends a gravitation toward group think. I am Latina hear me roar, and all that stuff. Sotomayor is Spanish for racial set-asides. It is quite clear from Staurt Taylor’s stellar coverage (National Journal Online) that Sotomayor thinks racial groups ought to be represented in a society’s institutions commensurate with their percentage in that society. An absence of such representation, in this post hoc illogic, indicates discrimination. A subtle mind indeed.

(May 28): In a previous post I said that Obama, who is married to an intellectual pygmy — a mediocrity who graduated from an Ivy League university — seems wedded to the idea of entrenching her ilk everywhere. Pat Buchanan’s on the same page, although Mr. Buchanan is more positive than I am about the Republican’s capacity to counter Obama:

“The process by which Sotomayor was selected testifies to what we can expect in Obama’s America. Not a single male was in the final four. And she was picked over the three other women because she was a person of color, a ‘two-fer.’ Affirmative action start to finish.

Reading 30 of her opinions, GW law professor Jonathan Turley found them ‘notable’ for ‘lack of depth.’

Liberal law professor and Supreme Court expert Jeff Rosen of The New Republic reports, after talking to prosecutors and law clerks, that Sotomayor covers up her intellectual inadequacy by bullying from the bench.

The lady is a lightweight.

What should Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee do?

Abjure the vicious tactics Democrats used on Robert Bork, Clarence Thomas and Sam Alito. Lay out the lady’s record. And let America get a close look at the kind of justice Barack Obama believes in.”

The Left’s Gallery of Cretins

Elections 2008, Intelligence, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Pseudo-intellectualism, The Zeitgeist

This is not an excerpt from my upcoming WND column; it’s a supplement to a line-up of Palin competitors: those who score way higher on the cretinism quotient than the governor.

In my journalism-school days one looked up to the brilliant and brave late Oriana Fallaci. Now, it’s mediocrities like Barbara Walters and colorectal crusader Katie Couric who’re considered cutting-edge clever. Among Walters’ prime picks for “Most Fascinating People List” were Paris Hilton, Victoria and David Beckham, and Justin Timberlake.

You’ll hear nothing but curtain calls for “Bawbawa.”

I grant lefties that if cleverness is the name of the game, then Elizabeth Hasselbeck is fair game. Other than being blond and bubbly, Hasselbeck’s conservative “credentials” amount to agitating against Don Imus and for breast cancer prevention and research, the Amber Alert Initiative, the war, and Our Leader.

On the other hand, the following is an excerpt from “The Left’s Gallery of Cretins”:

“Speaking of the Left’s intelligentsia, unlike [Mike] Taibbi and [Bill] Maher, who made a “case” against Palin’s candidacy by cussing, Joy Behar at least tried to “argue.” The result? The most originally asinine anti-Palin argument to date:

You know, the one thing that I don’t think anybody’s said yet is that she’s very mean to animals, this woman. Why does she have it in for these poor polar bear and the caribou and she aerial kills wolves? That’s a very mean thing to do. … I don’t think that’s very nice, do you? I think that that’s an important point we should all be looking at.

So now it’s Palin’s PETA papers that aren’t in order. Put it this way: If Rep. Ron Paul clubbed seals to death on ice floes; I’d still consider him a smashing potential president. (If he fired a trooper who abused his power, all the better.)”

“The Left’s Gallery of Cretins” is up on WND.

Updated: Deifying the Dalai Lama

Celebrity, Hollywood, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Pop-Culture, Pseudo-intellectualism, Reason

“… While the Dalai Lama seems a sweet enough fellow down to his conventional, simplistic, unoriginal quips, he is, nevertheless, a caricature, the creation of pseudo-spiritual, faux-intellectual liberal elites…”

More poignantly: “The story of Tibet is a story with more twists than a serpent’s tail. Unfortunately, most Americans are as unequipped as Lauren Caitlin Upton of the 2007 Miss Teen USA fame to locate Tibet on a map, much less preach about its politics…”

Read the rest in “Deifying the Dalai Lama,” my new WorldNetDaily.com column. (Readers of Barely a Blog will be familiar with the theme.)

Update (April 24): There’s an interesting new letter in our Comments Section from a skeptical (read: thinking) health-care professional who’s recently encountered the Lama.