Burke and Hobbes and...

"Conservative" Philosophers in the News:

• Debbie Schlussel (link via TBogg; please do not click the first one if you suffer from heart disease, tender digestion, are pregnant or nursing or nursing a hangover, or have a mouthful of liquid and a monitor or keyboard nearby) gets tricked into reading a NY Times science feature because the phrase "Ear Wax" appears in the headline, and concludes that Europeans couldn't have stolen the Americas from Native Americans--whom she refers to as "Native" Americans--because they came from Asia.

I know, I know. The idea is so incredibly stupid it's practically impossible to convey it in words. Just for the hell of it I tried without success putting it in grunts, wacking it out on the seat of my chair with a yardstick, and finally ramming it directly into my skull via a brick wall. Nothing worked. This single post may wind up requiring us to scrap the totality of Post-War linguistic theory.

There's much humor, if you can stand it, to be gleaned from her repeated defense that saying:

So whom did THEY steal the land from? Somebody else, obviously.

doesn't mean she's claiming there was somebody else. But for me the real howler sorta got lost in the shuffle:

But the paper glosses over the most important finding. The study found that Europeans and Africans tend to have wet ear wax, sweat more, and have more under arm body odor than Asians, who have dry ear wax and don't sweat much. But the study also found that "Native" Americans have dry ear wax and body odor similar to Asians, proving they migrated here from Asia.

The paper glosses over the important point that this is further proof of what has been an accepted explanation for at least a century, except in parts of Utah! Meanwhile, Debs has sorta glossed over her own collision with Aristotelian logic (he rides on blithely, she suffers a massive head wound, which fortunately in her case is a trifling matter): the Asian/Native American ear wax connection doesn't prove anything whatever about settlement of the New World; the two could be unrelated, a point which is actually made in the article, though not overtly because, well, it was of necessity written for the literate.

And these are the people who want to tell us how to teach science.

• Dennis Prager explains that the Palestinian elections "reveal more about the left than about Palestine", because, you know, he always knew the Palestinians were bloodthirsty Muslims who won't rest until Israel is destroyed, but this business about the Left equivocating around the point caught him by surprise.

This is the spot where I'd normally lead into a quote roughly outlining Dennis' thesis, but there doesn't seem to be one. He seems actually to believe that the elections do reveal more about the Palestinians than about the Left. Hell, let's just cut to the cognitive dissonance:

So the Palestinian vote reveals the falsity of the worldwide Left's view of the Palestinians as committed to peace. It likewise reveals the falsity of the Left's belief that Palestinian terror is supported by a small minority of the Palestinian population.

That is one reason why the Bush doctrine -- we need to spread democracy everywhere possible, including, or even especially, in the Arab world -- is so valid. You cannot deal with any problem in life -- from the most personal to the most macro -- by engaging in wishful thinking and denying reality.

I gotta tell ya, when I got through that second paragraph I immediately went back and reread Schlussel just to bask in her superior reasoning skills for a moment.

It seems that Den's on the cutting edge of a new wingnut talking point regarding Hammas, namely that the elections prove the Bush doctrine is working; now, whenever there are democratic elections in the Middle East we'll know from the results whether we need to kill them all or not. But my real reason for bringing up the soon-to-be-available Mr. Prager was his handy-dandy guide to the beliefs of one Norbizness:

On just about every issue, the Left lives in a childlike fantasy realm. Their views are expressions of what they wish for, not what actually is.

Here is a small sample:

-- Support for terror represents a tiny sliver of the Muslim world.

-- All cultures are essentially morally equivalent.

-- The United Nations is a wonderful institution and the best hope of mankind.

-- Men and women are basically the same.

-- It makes no difference whether children are raised by a loving man and woman or by two loving parents of the same sex.

-- Violent criminals in our society are pushed into crime by socioeconomic circumstances, not because of their own flawed characters and values.

-- War is not the answer.

The list of leftist positions based on a rejection of reality is as long as a list of leftist positions.

War is the answer, Mr. Left. How many more missions do we have to accomplish before you just fucking admit it?