Do Human Beings Have "Dogmatism Quotas?"

Excellent question!

Lately I have found that many I expect to be quite open, because of their associations with "Liberal tolerance" are actually quite dogmatic in other areas. And vice versa.

This surprises me, quite frankly. Because... up until 2008 I believed that rigidity in one area of life was likely to foretell rigidity in others.

What do you think? Do we tend to need a certain amount of dogmatism in our lives? So that... when we are open minded in one arena, we actually shut down in another??

SYD

PS. Art Credit.

Two Reasonable Approaches to Terrorism: Conservative and Progressive Strategies

First of all I think at this point we must accept that electing Barack Obama has not done what many people thought (hoped) it would do. It has not placated Radical Islam. In fact, we seem to be moving in the opposite direction. Jihadism seems to be making a comeback. On U.S. airplanes over Detroit, for example.

There are only two reasonable approaches to this development as far as I am concerned. The Conservative argument is well laid out by Charles Krauthammer and discussed at No Quarter.

The rational "Progressive" (ie Feminist) strategy is being explored by Phyllis Chesler.

As a Feminist, and a Family Scientist ... I gotta tell ya.... I believe Phyllis has the answer. The liberation of Yemeni women and their babies will likely go a long way toward ending the Jihadi hotbed that country is cultivating. But... I also admit that this is a LONG RANGE strategy, wrought with painful lessons about the nature of the "enemy."

First we must deal with today's attackers. Which brings us back to Krauthammer and Bronwyn's piece at No Quarter.

No rational person... no matter how "Progressive" or "Liberal" can reasonably argue that we are helping ourselves, or the "Lonely and Murderous Sons of Allah," by pretending that "isolated suspects" should be treated as if they were American citizens with a right to legal counsel. Any argument that champions the return of terrorist sons, to Yemen (or Afghanistan or wherever,) for more training in Islamofacism is failing the children in ALL countries.

That kind of thinking is not "Progressivism" my friends. And it's not "Liberalism." It is nothing more than Tom Foolery. And by "Tom Foolery" I mean to say that "Tom" is pulling the wool over our (Progressive Feminist) eyes such that "Tom" may maintain power over Neda... the world over.

Think about it!

SYD

H/T to Legal Insurrection for the 2009, Obot "Tweet of the Year."

(Disclaimer: I do not think Mr. Rambo is actually an Obot. Apparently he just does one hell of a parody of them on Twitter.)

Just for Today, Camille Paglia Speaks for Me

Ms. Paglia has not always been my "homegirl." I completely disagreed with her, during the Democratic primaries. The matter of electing a bumbling neophyte to the highest office of the land was never negotiable to me.

But right here.... Ms. Paglia calls it like it is.

Quoting:

"Yes, something very ugly has surfaced in contemporary American liberalism, as evidenced by the irrational and sometimes infantile abuse directed toward anyone who strays from a strict party line. Liberalism, like second-wave feminism, seems to have become a new religion for those who profess contempt for religion. It has been reduced to an elitist set of rhetorical formulas, which posit the working class as passive, mindless victims in desperate need of salvation by the state. Individual rights and free expression, which used to be liberal values, are being gradually subsumed to worship of government power.

The problems on the American left were already manifest by the late 1960s, as college-educated liberals began to lose contact with the working class for whom they claimed to speak. (A superb 1990 documentary, "Berkeley in the Sixties," chronicles the arguments and misjudgments about tactics that alienated the national electorate and led to the election of Richard Nixon.) For the past 25 years, liberalism has gradually sunk into a soft, soggy, white upper-middle-class style that I often find preposterous and repellent. The nut cases on the right are on the uneducated fringe, but on the left they sport Ivy League degrees. I'm not kidding -- there are some real fruitcakes out there, and some of them are writing for major magazines. It's a comfortable, urban, messianic liberalism befogged by psychiatric pharmaceuticals. Conservatives these days are more geared to facts than emotions, and as individuals they seem to have a more ethical, perhaps sports-based sense of fair play.

Probably the main reason for my unorthodox view of politics (as in my instant approval of Sarah Palin) is that I had much more childhood contact with working-class life than appears to be the norm among current American columnists. One of my grandfathers was a barber, and the other was a leather worker at the Endicott-Johnson shoe factory in upstate New York. Thanks to the G.I. Bill, my father was able to attend college, the only one in his large family to do so. I was born while he was still in college and mopping floors in the cafeteria. Years later, he became a high-school teacher and then a professor at a Jesuit college, but we never left our immigrant family roots in industrial Endicott. To this day, I have more rapport with campus infrastructure staffers (maintenance, security) than I do with other professors or, for that matter, writers. Don't get me started on the hermetic bourgeois arrogance of American literati!"

As a social "Liberal" rooted in working class ethics ... I, too, find the arrogance of the American "literati" insufferable. And, to be quite honest, I blame them for Liberalism's Jumping of the Shark.

Paglia, herself, can share some of that that blame.