DANIEL GREENFIELD: THE WEEK THAT WAS PART ONE
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TOW BE OR NOT TOE BE
What this silly little exchange brought home to me once again is how liberals are invested in the appearance of intelligence, something that I wrote about in Manufactured Intelligence.
“Intelligence to a modern liberal isn’t depth, it’s appearance. It isn’t even an intellectual quality, but a spiritual quality. Compassionate people who care about others are always “smarter”, no matter how stupid they might be, because they care about the world around them.
And that is the supreme duty of the modern liberal intellectual, not to be smart, but to make others feel smart.
The thought never rises within this bubble of manufactured intelligence that all of them might really be idiots who have convinced themselves that they are geniuses because they read the right books (or pretend to read them), watch the right movies and shows (or pretend to) and have the right values (or pretend to).”
The problem isn’t that our progressive friend with a PhD and a teaching position somewhere thinks that it’s Tow the Line. We all go through life discovering on occasion that we got something very simple wrong. It’s that he believes in his own intelligence because he has the right values. He’s gay and liberal, therefore he’s smart. I’m conservative, therefore I must be stupid.
Any other outcome is impossible. And so he doesn’t know what he doesn’t know which makes actual progress impossible. In a worldview where intelligence is just liberal values misspelled, Obama’s 57 states is correct while Romney’s binders of women is a huge gaffe.
It’s not a debate over facts. It’s a cultural difference. We’re losing the ability to discuss anything because the dominant cultural paradigm is in the hands of people who care about values, not facts, and who are convinced that if they have the right values, the facts will follow.
It didn’t work in the USSR. It’s not working in Venezuela. And it isn’t working in America.
GETTING TO THE POINT
The Freedom Center has assembled some 20 of my best articles from last year into an ebook titled “Getting the Point.”
It’s available here though a donation to the Freedom Center.
9 Out of 10 Saudi Men Say Eyeshadow on Women Causes Sexual Assaults
STAGES OF WAR
September 11 was a calling card that served its purpose for Al Qaeda moving it along to its next stage from a series of isolated terror groups to a global army with the manpower to launch full scale guerrilla wars seizing cities and entire regions. The core Al Qaeda doesn’t need another September 11. It will leave that to its affiliates, some of which are already playing with WMDs.
The Al Qaeda that we think we know, the terrorist group with cells lurking and plotting attacks, was only an intermittent stage in its growth strategy. The same is true of most terrorist groups. There was a time when the Communists were just another bunch of quarreling groups. Then they became an army and a country and a whole global union of countries. That is where Al Qaeda wanted to go all along.
Al Qaeda wants to destroy America, but it doesn’t need it to do it in the linear fashion that many imagined after September 11, by scaling up to more and more devastating attacks.
How Al Qaeda Is Winning the War on Terror
Saudi Islamic Police Ban Women from Giving Birth Without Male Guardian
FROM TIME IMMEMORIAL
The “Palestinian” case that Judis retroactively constructs is a modern invention and he admits as much. Liberals of the day, like Bartley Crum of the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry on Palestine, heard from Dr. Hitti of the Institute for Arab-American Affairs that there was no such entity as Palestine.
Ahmad Shukeiri, before he became the first Chairman of the PLO, told the UN Security Council that, “Palestine is nothing but Southern Syria.” Abu Nidal, the ultimate Palestinian terrorist, proclaimed, “Palestine belongs to Syria.” Azmi Bishara, the Arab Israeli MK who fled the country after collaborating with Hezbollah, said in a television interview, “I think the Palestinian nation is a colonial invention.”
Judis dismisses Jewish nationalism as a 19th century invention, when it’s Palestinian nationalism that is a late 20th century invention.
The Colonialism of the Anti-Israel Left
Everyone in the Middle East Hates John Kerry
JUST ADD ENVIRONMENTALISTS
This was just what Lady Young was looking for. She had already been giving lectures and evidence to a House of Lords committee on the EU’s earlier Water Framework directive, proclaiming that one of her agency’s top priorities should be to create more ‘habitats’ for wildlife by allowing wetlands to revert to nature. As she explained in an interview in 2008, creating new nature reserves can be very expensive. By far the cheapest way was simply to allow nature to take its course, by halting the drainage of wetlands such as the Somerset Levels. The recipe she proudly gave in her lectures, repeated to that Lords committee, was: for ‘instant wildlife, just add water’.
How a Fanatical Environmentalist Deliberately Caused UK Flooding
Obama Blames California Drought He Caused on Global Warming
UNCOMMON CORE
The civil war encompasses debates over testing and charter schools. On one side are technocratic progressives backed by Silicon Valley; a small army of successful men and women turned amateur experimenters trying to tinker with schools in their free time through wealthy foundations determined to centralize and nationalize the educational system. On the other side is the traditional inertia of teachers unions still fighting for a school system that gives teachers everything and asks for nothing in return.
On one side is Bill Gates. On the other side is a fifth grade teacher with seniority looking forward to retirement.
But when it comes to Common Core, the unions aren’t wrong. Every educational reform is a band aid meant to fix the last reform. Now Common Core already needs fixing.
Common Core is the Left’s Latest Educational Civil War
Imam Rapes Sister, Forces her to Abort Baby, Blames Job Stress
OUT OF DAHLANISTAN
All that would make Dahlan a bit of a Shakespearean villain, killing everyone in sight to seize power, playing the United States against Russia and Israel.
Bill Clinton liked Dahlan. He was, until Abbas, the only Palestinian Arab figure to get a private meeting with President Clinton, except for Arafat. The Clinton Administration had quietly signaled that Dahlan was the future. But by then, the moment had slipped away and Bush had replaced Clinton.
It would take a certain kind of crazy ruthlessness to obtain polonium from a Russian source, poison Arafat, kill his nephew and hope to leverage that into power. And Dahlan had it. He was uniquely vicious and ruthless, eager to take dangerous risks… even when compared to his fellow terrorist gang leaders.
Dahlan was willing to take on Arafat and Hamas. His men killed his rivals and ruled over Dahlanistan. If there was anyone who had the nerve to finish off Arafat and hope to profit from the chaos, it was the Palestinian Authority’s version of Titus Andronicus’s Aaron.
Did Mohammed Dahlan Poison Arafat?
2% of Italy is Muslim, 35% of Italian Prisoners are Muslim– There are 181 Imams in Italian prisons.
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