Mona Charen makes some interesting points in her column at National Review Online.
Global-warming priests, while sermonizing about the need to spend trillions on new energy sources, almost never have a kind word for nuclear power — casting doubt on their motives. If the goal were really to reduce our carbon output (and not to recast our way of life), clean, efficient, affordable nuclear power would be the obvious choice.
There’s much more.
This guy has the answers.
Science has important things to contribute to ethical reflection, but by itself it cannot resolve ethical questions. Science cannot tell us whether there are such things as dignity and rights, or whether all human beings or, for that matter, any human beings have them. Science cannot tell us whether slavery or segregation or rape or torture is right or wrong. It cannot tell us whether mentally retarded individuals or victims of senile dementia have the same fundamental dignity and right to life as the rest of us possess. It cannot tell us whether it is unjust to kill infants or mentally disabled people to harvest their vital organs to use in transplantation surgery. It cannot tell us whether it is wrong to kill blacks to save whites, or Jews to save gentiles, or human beings in early developmental stages to save those at later stages. Science can confirm that blacks, no less than whites, Jews, no less than gentiles, and embryos, fetuses, and infants, no less than adolescents and adults, are living individuals of the human species—human beings. The questions that then must be faced are ethical, not scientific: Do all human beings, or only some, possess inherent dignity?
If you’re on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; in that case, the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive.
LOPEZ: What’s wrong with the phrase “the anti-war movement”?
LEAF: All of the most important leaders of the “anti-war” movement — Tom Hayden, Bill Ayers, Mark Rudd, Abbie Hoffman, Katherine Boudin, et al. — were very much in favor of violence and war. It’s just that they wanted our Communist enemies to win. Their love for violence was possibly best indicated when Bernadine Dohrn announced at a national SDS convention that the group should adopt a new salute — of forked fingers — to honor the Manson murderers who ate and then stuck their forks into the belly of the dead but pregnant Sharon Tate.
From an interview with Jonathan Leaf about his book The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Sixties.
I’d like to see a citation of that Bernadine Dohrn comment but I am inclined to believe it.
The latest from Jonah Goldberg from what is becoming his unofficial fan site...
What was it Al Pacino said in Godfather III? "Just when I thought I was out – they pull me back in."
That’s sort of how I feel these days about the current fight over liberals and fascism. In case you haven’t noticed, fascism talk is everywhere. Nancy Pelosi with her Sixth Sense-ish "I see swastikas," Rush Limbaugh fighting back, Glenn Beck pounding the table, town-hallers hauling around pictures of Obama with a Hitler mustache: These are good times to be moving a book called Liberal Fascism. And that leaves out the White House’s asking Americans to rat out neighbors who peddle "fishy" e-mail. It overlooks the fact that Obama’s science adviser, John Holdren, and one of Obama’s health-care gurus, Ezekiel Emanuel, have written things that would fit nicely into my chapter on eugenics. And – oh yeah – it also leaves out that Obama has essentially nationalized much of the banking and auto industries while vowing to do his darnedest to make us more like European social democracies. The news out of this administration bolsters one argument after another in my book.
But the thing is, I’ve been arguing about fascism and liberalism nonstop for nearly two years now. And it is exhausting. Moreover, the glorious thing about the Obama Moment is that I can just say "look around" to those who thought I was imagining things when I first wrote the book and gave little thought to an obscure Illinois state legislator.
But there’s a problem. Many folks claim to see in Obama the makings of an actual Hitler and in Obamaism a repeat of the National Socialism of the 1930s. Worse, some think my book supports their fears. And maybe it does, though I hope not.
The simple truth is that I do not think it is in the cards for America to go down a Nazi path. I never said otherwise in Liberal Fascism either.
It’s important to keep in mind that, as bad as various other avowedly fascist regimes were, only the Nazis did what they did. Mussolini was a bad man and a dictator, but he was no Hitler. The Italians did bad things, but they don’t amount to a fraction of German crimes. Supposedly fascist Franco wasn’t nearly as bad as Mussolini, and Franco’s complicity in the Holocaust was nil. In other words, fascism brings out things in specific cultures at specific moments. Not only is Obama obviously not interested in being a Hitler, he couldn’t pull Hitlerism out of the American people if he wanted to.
Indeed, while I don’t think it is remotely right or fair to call Obama a crypto-Nazi (if by that you mean to say he’s a would-be Hitler), the real problem with all of this loose Nazi talk is that it slanders the American people. Daniel Jonah Goldhagen may have overstated his case in Hitler’s Willing Executioners, but he was certainly right that the German people were Hitler’s willing enablers. The overwhelming majority of the American people – in their history, culture, bones, hearts, souls, DNA, and carbon molecules – are not like that. That goes for American liberals and leftists too. The extent and depth of liberalism’s obtuseness on the subject of fascism (and much else) stews my bowels, but American liberals are still Americans, and Americans will not goose-step behind a Hitler, period.
As I make clear in Liberal Fascism, the obvious and pressing threat is not from a Hiterlite-Orwellian dictatorship but from a Huxleyan namby-pamby mommy state. That sort of system could seduce American into becoming chestless subjects of the State in exchange for bottomless self-gratification and liberation from the necessity of adult decision-making. Yes, there’s a danger that such as society could then be susceptible to some darker vision that lionizes the lost manhood of a half-forgotten past. But, by that point, this would be America in name only, if even that ("U.N. District 12" has a nice ring to it).
I think it’s just an evil-sounding name for basic, normal police work. I
think any cop who doesn’t do it isn’t doing his job properly. If you’re in a
neighborhood or a town or a country where crime is more likely to be committed
by a guy with brown skin, then a guy with brown skin is more suspicious-looking
than other people by definition.
