Sunday, March 05, 2006

LEFTISTS ARE ALWAYS CORRECT -- EVEN WHEN THEY GO INTO REVERSE

Hildabeest and Schumer are Profiling Muslims

It really is true that lies have short legs. One way or another, liberals always end up contradicting themselves, tacitly acknowledging that their pronouncements are more political artifice than statesmanlike artistry, more incitive than insightful. What brings this to mind is the controversial plan allowing the Dubai-based company DP World to assume managerial responsibilities at six major US seaports.....

Hear ye, hear ye! Hillary Clinton and Chuck Schumer are profiling Muslims. This conclusion is inescapable. After all, on what basis do they object to this plan? "Er . . . it's, it's, it's that it is a foreign company," stammer the apologists. Nay, the liberals were silent when the British company from which DP World is taking the reins oversaw the ports, and it strains credulity to claim the New York senators would have been so taken aback had the baton been handed off to a Swiss entity. Face it, they have been caught with their political-correctness down.

But this is a rare occasion when their antennae are up (Schumer anyway, as I suspect Lady Macbeth is driven by expediency). The fact of the matter is some liberals are finally demonstrating a grasp of the proper application and value of profiling. After all, implicit in their judgement is the following: virtually all the terrorists who bedevil us are Muslim, therefore, we have to assume that a Muslim company would be more likely to harbor terrorists or their sympathizers than a non-Muslim company. Note that "more likely" doesn't mean it's definite. It doesn't have to be, as most things in life are assessed based on probability. In some sports and games this is called playing the percentages.

And this is precisely the science that underpins good profiling (a.k.a. racial-profiling, which is a misnomer). The principle in question is: if a group is over-represented in a certain category of crime, it will receive scrutiny commensurate with that representation when matters concerning that crime category are involved. In other words, we will assess the probability that a given entity has criminal intent or poses a danger and act accordingly. This is the principle that justifies suspicion of DP World. It is a just principle. And Clinton and Schumer are embracing it.

How, though, do they reconcile this position with the consistent liberal opposition to the placing of greater scrutiny on Muslims at airports? Furthermore, how can they now have any credibility when criticizing others for applying this principle to other minority groups? Is this the fruits of an epiphany? Is it a spiritual and political rebirth? Am I to count you, Senators Clinton and Schumer, as my allies in the fight to finally use profiling in a way more symmetrical with good criminology than bad ideology? Ah, I wax rhetorical.

But it's a curious and delicious departure from leftist orthodoxy. Such liberals had always been monolithic and steadfast in their opposition to the profiling of any politically privileged "underprivileged" group, while uttering nary a word about the profiling of politically underprivileged "privileged" groups. It was: the profiling of whites, yes; the profiling of blacks, no. The profiling of men, yes; the profiling of Muslim men, no. But these liberals have allowed common-sense to intrude into their ideology. These demagogic chess masters have finally made the wrong move. They have exposed their king, and he has no clothes.

Needless to say, this foray into reason will prove to be nothing more than a flight of reality. Clinton and Schumer will continue to object to the equitable and proper use of profiling and cast its proponents as bigots. That's how they maintain their ill-gotten power. How will they justify it? They won't.

Liberals aren't thinkers, they're "feelers." Thus, they are not governed by absolutes but by expediency and what feels right at the moment. Profiling Muslims within the context of the port situation feels right, whereas doing so at airports doesn't. It's that simple. For this reason, a given liberal "principle," for lack of a better word (it's not quite accurate to call an ever-changing emotional preference a "principle"), is only pulled from the magician's hat when it can be placed in the service of a liberal agenda. It's the closest thing to a religious experience the Clintons and Schumers of the world will have. Their "principles" undergo a continual cycle of death and resurrection, the latter phase being animated by the desire to breathe life into deadly fallacies in need of buttressing.

What we can do is remember the day when Hillary Clinton and Chuck Schumer walked where liberals fear to tread. When arguing in favor of good, equitable, across-the-board profiling, we must cite that time when two of the most powerful liberals in the country said, unknowingly and in so many words, "Yeah, you traditionalists were right about that profiling stuff all along." Now, if only the senators' enlightenment were not so fleeting, for it's a beautiful thing. I think it's what alcoholics call . . . a moment of clarity.

Source



OFFICIAL SEXUAL ASSAULTS

By Peggy Noonan

America has become creepy for women who think of themselves as ladies. It has in fact become assaultive. I start with a dictionary definition, from American Heritage, not that anyone needs it because everyone knows what a lady is. It's a kind of natural knowledge. According to American Heritage, a lady is a well-mannered and considerate woman with high standards of proper behavior. You know one, the dictionary suggests, by how she's treated: "a woman, especially when spoken of or to in a polite way." Under usage, American Heritage says, "lady is normally used as a parallel to gentleman to emphasize norms expected in polite society or situations."

I would add that a lady need not be stuffy, scolding, stiff. A lady brings regard for others into the room with her; that regard is part of the dignity she carries and seeks to spread. A lady is a woman who projects the stature of life. These definitions are incomplete but serviceable--I invite better ones--but keep them in mind as I try to draw a fuller picture of what it was like to be taken aside at an airport last week for what is currently known as further screening and was generally understood 50 years ago to be second-degree sexual assault.

I was directed, shoeless, into the little pen with the black plastic swinging door. A stranger approached, a tall woman with burnt-orange hair. She looked in her 40s. She was muscular, her biceps straining against a tight Transportation Security Administration T-shirt. She carried her wand like a billy club. She began her instructions: Face your baggage. Feet in the footmarks. Arms out. Fully out. Legs apart. Apart. I'm patting you down.

It was like a 1950s women's prison movie. I got to be the girl from the streets who made a big mistake; she was the guard doing intake. "Name's Veronica, but they call me Ron. Want a smoke?" Beeps and bops, her pointer and middle fingers patting for explosives under the back of my brassiere; the wand on and over my body, more beeps, more pats. The she walked wordlessly away. I looked around, slowly put down my arms, rearranged my body. For a moment I thought I might plaintively call out, "No kiss goodbye? No, 'I'll call'?" But they might not have been amused. And actually I wasn't either.

I experienced the search not only as an invasion of privacy, which it was, but as a denial or lowering of that delicate thing, dignity. The dignity of a woman, of a lady, of a person with a right not to be manhandled or to be, or to feel, molested.

Is this quaint, this claiming of such a right? Is it impossibly old-fashioned? I think it's just basic. There aren't many middle-aged women who fly who haven't experienced something very much like what I've described. I've noticed recently that people who fly have taken to looking away when they pass someone being patted down. They do this now at LaGuardia, in line for the shuttle to Washington, where they used to stare. Now they turn away in embarrassment. They're right to be embarrassed. It is to their credit that they are.

An aside with a point: I almost always talk to the screeners and usually wind up joking with them. They often tell me wonderful things. The most moving was the security woman at LaGuardia who answered my question, "What have you learned about people since taking this job that you didn't know before?" She did an impromptu soliloquy on how Everyone Travels With the Same Things. She meant socks, toothbrush, deodorant, but as she spoke, as she elaborated, we both came to understood that she was saying something larger about. . .what's inside us, and what it is to be human, and on a journey. One screener, this past Monday, again at LaGuardia, told me that no, she had never ever found a terrorist or a terror related item in her searches. Two have told me women take the searches worse than men, and become angrier.

But then they would, for they are not only discomforted and delayed, as the men. There is also the edge of violation. Are the women who do the searches wicked, cruel? No, they're trying to make a living and go with the flow of modernity. They're doing what they've been taught. They've been led to approach things in a certain way, first by our society and then by their bosses. They're doing what they've been trained to do by modern government security experts who don't have to bother themselves with thoughts like, Is this sort of a bad thing to do to a person who is a lady? By, that is, slobs with clipboards who have also been raised in the current culture.

I spoke this week at a Catholic college. I have been speaking a lot, for me anyway, which means I have been without that primary protector of American optimism and good cheer, which is staying home. Americans take refuge in their homes. It's how they protect themselves from their culture. It helps us maintain our optimism.

At the Catholic college, a great one, we were to speak of faith and politics. This, to me, is a very big and complicated subject, and a worthy one. But quickly--I mean within 15 seconds--the talk was only of matters related to sexuality. Soon a person on the panel was yelling, "Raise your hands if you think masturbation is a sin!," and the moderator was asking if African men should use condoms, yes or no. At one point I put my head in my hands. I thought, Have we gone crazy? There are thousands of people in the audience, from children to aged nuns, and this is how we talk, this is the imagery we use, this is our only subject matter? But of course it is. It is our society's subject matter.

I was the only woman on the panel, which is no doubt part of why I experienced it as so odd, but in truth the symposium wasn't odd, not in terms of being out of line with the culture. It was odd only because it was utterly in line with it. Was the symposium the worst thing that happened to me this year? Oh no. It wasn't even the worst thing that has happened to me this week. But I did experience it as to some degree violative of my dignity as a person. An adult. A woman. A lady. And I have been experiencing a lot of things in this way for a while now. Have you?

I experience it when I see blaring television ads for birth-control devices, feminine-hygiene products, erectile-dysfunction medicines. I experience it when I'm almost strip-searched at airports. I experience it when I listen to popular music, if that's what we call it. I experience it when political figures are asked the most intimate questions about their families and pressed for personal views on sexual questions that someone somewhere decided have to be Topic A on the national agenda in America right now.

Let me tell you what I say, in my mind, after things like this--the symposium, the commercials, and so forth. I think, We are embarrassing the angels. Imagine for a moment that angels exist, that they are pure spirits of virtue and light, that they care about us and for us and are among us, unseen, in the airport security line, in the room where we watch TV, at the symposium of great minds. "Raise your hands if you think masturbation should be illegal!" "I'm Bob Dole for Viagra." "Put your feet in the foot marks, lady." We are embarrassing the angels.

Do I think this way, in these terms, because I am exceptionally virtuous? Oh no. I'm below average in virtue, and even I know it's all gotten low and rough and disturbed. Lent began yesterday, and I mean to give up a great deal, as you would too if you were me. One of the things I mean to give up is the habit of thinking it and not saying it. A lady has some rights, and this happens to be one I can assert.

"You are embarrassing the angels." This is what I intend to say for the next 40 days whenever I see someone who is hurting the culture, hurting human dignity, denying the stature of a human being. I mean to say it with belief, with an eye to instruction, but also pointedly, uncompromisingly. As a lady would. All invited to join in.

Source



Irving and Livingstone: what liberal backlash?

The imprisonment of David Irving and suspension of Ken Livingstone are the logical extension of an illiberal political climate that some of the backlashers helped to create

These are, as we know, illiberal times, when you can hardly smoke a cigarette, celebrate a goal or hate religion/homosexuality/the Welsh/whatever without the risk of having your collar felt. Yet suddenly it seems as if everybody wants to sign up to a 'liberal backlash'.

Austria's jailing of David Irving for Holocaust denial has met with widespread opposition in Britain from many whom in normal circumstances would cross the road to avoid the fake historian. And the decision of the Standards Board for England to suspend London Mayor Ken Livingstone for a month, for bringing his office into disrepute by comparing a Jewish journalist to a concentration camp guard, has been widely criticised among Livingstone's opponents as well as supporters. (The suspension has now itself been 'suspended' by a high court judge.)

What is behind this sudden outbreak of backlashes? Although they come from opposite ends of the political spectrum, both Irving's imprisonment and Livingstone's suspension should certainly be opposed. spiked made that clear from the moment these issues arose, when Irving was arrested and Livingstone reported to the authorities. We do not support either Irving the far-right crank or Livingstone the left-wing opportunist, but we do have a strong and consistent commitment both to freedom of speech and democratic accountability....

Over the past week or so, however, many who previously took little or no interest in these issues suddenly began howling with outrage at the treatment of Irving and Livingstone. Confronted with these extreme examples of the ugly illiberal and anti-democratic tendencies in politics today, they recoil in horror. Yet these cases are in fact only a logical extension of the broader political climate we live under now - a climate which many of the alleged back-lashers have helped to create and institutionalise.

For example, laws and rules and codes against hate speech have mushroomed in British and European society over recent years. Governments and campaigners of different stripes have engaged in crusades to outlaw offensive and provocative words, whether spoken by far-right politicians or radical Muslim clerics. There has also been a strong lobby within New Labour to make Holocaust denial a crime in the UK, as it is elsewhere in Europe.

Yet when the Austrians put this not-in-front-of-the-children approach to debate into practise, by locking up Irving for something he said years ago, there is a general throwing up of hands and wailing of 'we didn't mean that!'. Many of Austria's critics seem to be in denial about their own anti-hate speech arguments. Would they object as loudly if the leader of the British National Party were to be found guilty of the incitement to race hate charges on which he currently faces retrial?

Mayor Livingstone, of course, has spent years demanding bans and restrictions on words which he finds offensive. Yet now he has been hoist with his own petard, punished for what he said rather than anything he did. In another sense, Livingstone's suspension can be seen as a result of the wider tendency to put personal characteristics rather than political principles at the centre of public life, and to subject democratically elected representatives to the supervision and guidance of unaccountable bodies and officials. Yet these political trends have been supported by many of those now objecting to the treatment of Livingstone.

New Labour and the liberal press made issues of 'sleaze' and personal character central to their assault on the last Conservative government, hounding Tory politicians over their tax returns rather than their taxation policies. Tony Blair subsequently based his appeal on his personal image as a 'pretty straight guy', and New Labour set up anti-sleaze bodies such as the Standards Board to police the behaviour of elected representatives.

Even Livingstone ran for London mayor on a personal ticket as an honest man of the people. His suspension can be seen as a pay-off from this 'trust me, me, me' school of politics where character matters above conviction. Thus the Standards Board ruled that the mayor's behaviour outside a party had brought not only himself but his office into disrepute - or in other words, as Livingstone's allies used to say, that the personal is political. Livingstone may complain now that it is an outrageous assault on democracy for some unelected bureaucrats to ban a mayor - as indeed it is. But his case would be stronger if he and every other Labour politician had not seemed so in thrall to unaccountable quangos, semi-state committees and unrepresentative lobby groups for years.

It is hard to launch effective opposition to bans and proscriptions when you have supported the political process that led up to them, and helped to create the illiberal climate in which they can be imposed. Worse, some of the loudest arguments used against the judgements against Irving and Livingstone reflect similar anti-democratic instincts as those they purport to criticise.

Take the widespread objection that Irving, and to a lesser extent Livingstone, will be turned into 'martyrs' by being persecuted. The assumption appears to be that there is a pan-European mob of racists waiting to rally around Irving the Holocaust-denier if he is persecuted. At another level, it is also implied that stupid Londoners will be conned into sympathising with the dreadful Livingstone if he appears to be picked on.

What many of these allegedly liberal protests reveal is a profound mistrust of the public. Just as the Austrian authorities locked up Irving for fear that his idiotic speeches might prompt a Nazi revival, so these critics want him released for fear that his imprisonment might have the same effect. And just as the sleaze police assume that they, rather than the dumb electorate, are best-placed to judge the London mayor, so some objecting to Livingstone's suspension appear worried that it will help him pull the wool over gullible voters' eyes.

In fact we should be against these illiberal measures for precisely the opposite reasons: because we do trust the people to decide for themselves what they think of an Irving or a Livingstone. Here at spiked, of course, we believe that the two should be treated very differently. Irving's crankish racism should be exposed, ignored, allowed to fade away. Livingstone's popular miserabilist politics should be rigorously argued with. Both will require a commitment to free speech and democratic debate that seems sadly lacking in public life today.

A backlash is a momentary, partial thing that changes nothing unless it leads to a questioning of the underlying political realities. Instead the recent reaction to these decisions has done little to challenge the illiberal, anti-democratic drift of our time. Even the mayor's appeal had to be left in the hands of a high court judge. It is high time we were left to judge important issues for ourselves.

Source

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