Holding Paper - Liberal Racism.

Liberals can get away with calling Clarence Thomas a "nigga" and a "slave" because, you know, they care about racism and civility.

Have you ever noticed how porn merchants and pick-up artists are the biggest supporters of "a woman's right to choose"?

I'm sure they are persuaded by the rock-solid intellectual arguments as opposed to their own self-interested desire to avoid responsibility for their sexual activities or something.

Hustler magazine publishes a demeaning photoshopped picture of libertarian/conservative pundit S.E. Cupp. Hustler explains its editorial position as follows:

S.E. Cupp is a lovely young lady who read too much Ayn Rand in high school and ended up joining the dark side. Cupp, an author and media commentator who often shows up on Fox News programs, is undeniably cute. But her hotness is diminished when she espouses dumb ideas like defunding Planned Parenthood. Perhaps the method pictured here is Ms. Cupp’s suggestion for avoiding an unwanted pregnancy.

Stay classy, Larry Flynt. Stay classy.

Of course, no one cares what Larry Flynt or Hustler does. They are both circling the bottom of the sleeziest toilet in the universe. Nonetheless, it is noteworthy for "Holding Paper" purposes to notice the how the Venn diagram of political ideology connects "misogynists" with "people who really, really believe in a woman's right to avoid carrying her pregnancy to term if she wants to be a slut."

Just saying.

In the future, when some tooth-ache liberal says something over the top about President Romney, and then loses some gig with the government, and liberals start talking about free speech and how "dissent is the highest form of patriotism"...

...I'm going to pull out the time that the military cancelled a Ted Nugent concert after he said something over the top about President Obama.

I don't care what the rules are; I just want them applied equally to all sides.

The Epistemic Closure of the Echo Chamber of the Left...

...in Academia.

Timothy Dalrymple writes about the Haidt study on how Conservatives understand Liberals but Liberals don't understand Conservatives:

Further, Haidt (a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia, and a former liberal who became a centrist in the process of conducting this research) finds that liberals and conservatives alike form their political beliefs according to three values: caring for the weak, fairness, and liberty. Yet conservatives also hold to three other values: loyalty, respect for authority, and sanctity. This accounts in part for the liberal failure to understand conservative viewpoints. As Chivers puts it, “Conservatives can understand the morality of liberals, but much of conservative morality is alien to their opponents.”

This corresponds exactly with my own observations of the educated liberals among whom I lived and worked in academia for many years. Precisely the social institution that is supposed to encourage Americans to understand both sides of the argument, and precisely those individuals who repeatedly teach that we should enter sympathetically into the worldviews of those who differ from us, have by and large failed to encourage a charitable understanding of conservative beliefs and motives and have conferred a flat, exaggerated sense of what conservatives think.

And:

By any measure–self-identification, voting patterns, campaign donations–American academia is overwhelmingly liberal. From 1999 to the present, 75% of campaign donation money from professors has gone to Democrats and 10% has gone to Republicans. In some fields, such as law and the humanities, the voting and giving often skews between 90% and 100% toward Democrats or other liberal parties like the Green Party.

The liberalization of the American educational establishment has been a colossal failure. Liberals overtook the universities because (reasonably) they saw them as the way to shape a more progressive society in the long term. They insisted that they could set aside their own partisan beliefs and teach in ways that are fair to both sides. It is abundantly clear, however, that a progressive political mindset prevails in the American university system, especially at the elite levels. It’s more difficult for conservative professors to be hired or receive tenure, it’s more difficult for conservative students to speak up without fear of the consequences, and liberal students emerge from the universities with a terrifically superficial understanding of the conservative mindset — and American society is the poorer for it.

When you look at the three values that conservatives (according to Haidt) honor but liberals do not — loyalty, respect for authority, and sanctity — these are precisely the values that are flouted in the precincts of American academe. The result is a more impoverished moral imagination amongst students, a stubborn inability to understand the beliefs and the motives of conservatives, and thus the imputation of nefarious motives to those irrational conservatives who do not see things in the ways the illuminati do. If you don’t believe that this has contributed to the partisanship we’ve observed in recent years — particularly the exceedingly nasty way in which liberals in general have responded to the Tea Party movement, to social conservatives and generally to anyone who refers too much to moral sanctity and loyalty to American traditions and institutions, then I think you’re wearing exactly the kind of blinders Haidt talks about.

Dispatch from within the Echo Chamber...

...Chris Matthews was surprised - surprised! - to learn that the Obamacare mandate might be unconstitutional.




John Podhoretz follows up on the theme that living inside an echo chamber - in a condition of "epistemic closure" - makes liberals unable to understand anything other than their own ideas:

The panicked reception in the mainstream media of the three-day Supreme Court health-care marathon is a delightful reminder of the nearly impenetrable parochialism of American liberals.

They’re so convinced of their own correctness — and so determined to believe conservatives are either a) corrupt, b) stupid or c) deluded — that they find themselves repeatedly astonished to discover conservatives are in fact capable of a) advancing and defending their own powerful arguments, b) effectively countering weak liberal arguments and c) exposing the soft underbelly of liberal self-satisfaction as they do so.


That’s what happened this week. There appears to be no question in the mind of anyone who read the transcripts or listened to the oral arguments that the conservative lawyers and justices made mincemeat out of the Obama administration’s advocates and the liberal members of the court.

This came as a startling shock to the liberals who write about the court.

Jeffrey Toobin of the New Yorker and CNN confidently asserted on Charlie Rose at the beginning of the week that the court would rule 7-2, maybe even 8-1 in favor of ObamaCare. The previous week, he called the anti-ObamaCare arguments “really weak.”

His view was echoed by an equally confident op-ed assertion by the veteran court reporter Linda Greenhouse, who in The New York Times declared the case against ObamaCare “analytically so weak that it dissolves on close inspection.”

It was quite a change, then, to see Toobin emerge almost hysterical from the Supreme Court chamber after two hours of argument on Tuesday and declare the proceedings “a train wreck for the Obama administration.”

Yesterday, after another two hours of argument, he suggested it might even be a “plane wreck.”

That was the general consensus across the board. It held that the two lawyers arguing against ObamaCare — Paul Clement and Michael Carvin — were dazzlingly effective, while the administration’s solicitor general, Donald Verrilli, put in a mediocre performance.

True enough. But here’s the thing: There was nothing new in what Clement and Carvin said.

Why do liberals Leftists make such bad arguments?

According to Tom Chivers at the Telegraph:

Here's a distressing fact, for a liberal. Liberals, on one small but extremely important metric, are wrong far more often than conservatives.

Jonathan Haidt, the moral psychologist, shows as much in his book "The Righteous Mind: why good people are divided by politics and religion", which I've mentioned before and which my colleague Ed West and I have been reading from our differing political perspectives. The measure is a simple one: how well do they understand their political opponents?

They asked two thousand Americans to describe their political leanings (liberal, moderate, conservative) and fill out a questionnaire about morality, one-third of the time as themselves, one-third of the time as a "typical liberal", and one-third of the time as a "typical conservative". The clear answer was: self-described conservatives and moderates were much better at predicting what other people would believe. Liberals, especially the "very liberal", were by far the worst at guessing what people would say, and especially bad at guessing what conservatives would say about issues of care or fairness. For example, most thought that conservatives would disagree with statements like "One of the worst things a person could do is hurt a defenceless animal" or "Justice is the most important requirement for a society".

Where does this come from? Why do a significant number of liberals think that conservatives are animal-torturing thugs who don't care about anyone but themselves? (Admittedly a number of conservatives think that liberals are crypto-Stalinists bent on world domination, or something, but according to Haidt that's not the majority position.) For Haidt, it's because our morality is not based on reason, as we fondly imagine, but on intuition – an instant, unreasoned response more akin to our taste in food than to our rational thoughts. He argues convincingly that our reasoned arguments are post-hoc justifications for gut reactions; our ability to construct such arguments does not exist to get us to the truth, "truth" rather than usefulness being of limited survival value, but instead to justify to others why we act the way we do, like an on-board press secretary. We're social creatures, and have evolved extraordinarily good systems for making ourselves look good to other members of society.

The trouble is that liberals, in general, base their morality almost exclusively on three "flavours" – care for others, liberty from oppression, and fairness – whereas conservatives use those three plus another three: loyalty to one's group, sanctity and sacredness, and respect for authority. So conservatives can understand the morality of liberals, but much of conservative morality is alien to their opponents.

Another, simpler explanation is that liberals are able to live in an insular, parochial world where they are never exposed to anything but the caricature of conservatives; conservatives, on the other hand, who watch the news or television or go to movies or go to school or college, can't help but be exposed to liberals.