I admit I was going to ignore this story altogether...but what the heck, perhaps what started off as a blog spat is now becoming a major source of MSM and Blogosphere discussion. It does not however mean that I am entertaining any debate as to whether Mel Gibson is an anti-Semite, that is where I draw the line. Of course he is, end of discussion...LOL.
Now onto the infamous Jane Hamsher the founder of the Firedoglake blog, and a friend of Ned Lamont's, whose campaign she is following, and who has become the center of a controversy due to a photoshopped photograph of Joe Lieberman depicted as a blackened face minstrel, including suit and tie, posted by Hamsher on Arianna Huffington's blog.
Hamsher has apologized, and withdrawn the image without an official mention of the incident on the Huffington Post, upon the request made by the campaign office of Ned Lamont. Now whilst Hamsher admits that she does not work for Lamont, taking heed of his advice is something she has clearly done and with admirable speed. Lamont in turn is distancing himself, professing that he knows nothing about blogs, despite his recent video interview with Hamsher, where he specifically goes into great detail about how the blogs are a great help in campaigns, and how he likes hers in particular (watch the video).
Lamont's campaign manager Tom Swan condemned [the image] calling it very offensive and said he requested that it be removed. He also said that while blogger Jane Hamsher is a supporter, she is not on the campaign pay-roll.
Now my friend Tom Maguire has this gem from the comment section over at Arianna's place, from the artist who calls himself, I kid you not 'Dark Black'
As the composer of the work in question, allow me to make some broader points clearer. This will be my last word on the subject, but all are free to debate further, of course.
Lieberman has attempted to activate a voting demographic that his strategists believe will aid him in his quest.
To this end, he has imported a figure, Bill Clinton, who has standing with the American black community, and has repeatedly asserted his personal credentials as one who has worked on behalf of that community.
Yet Lieberman has engaged in race baiting (with the Lamont flyer) as a cynical attempt to game this demographic, and he has engaged in other activities which cast doubtful shadows upon this allegiance.
Thus, in my opinion, Lieberman is pretending to be something that he is not for personal gain, exactly like the vile caucasian minstrel show performers of Vaudeville.
And so my artist's impression stands.If we as a people run from controversial imagery, we will never stop running. Better to unearth and deal with the unpleasant than to live in fear.
I do not ever wonder why Michelle Malkin calls the left, and especially the left academia, "unhinged", especially when they make comments like this, in this instance referring to the Hamsher incident
Why do liberal people who are really smart sometimes do things that defy common sense, throwing red meat to the wild-eyed right-wing hyenas?
I thought liberals like to portray themselves as pillars of "tolerance and racial equality", umh what happened? As for me? Who am I to talk...I mean really. However, since when has being in a position to talk on any given subject, or restraining oneself from being the proverbial pot calling the kettle black, to coin a phrase, been a prerequisite for blog spatting? Certainly not with Hamsher, who is used to f-ing and blinding language, and photographs of the black minstrel show, title and all. (h/t my friend Good Lt over @ Jawa)
[grinning] No hurry, my friend, and I'm sure it will be worth waiting for.
Posted by: Kenny Pierce | Monday, August 14, 2006 at 11:56 PM
Kenny Pierce,
I have been away since my last comment. I was in the process of responding to your comments, but something came up and pulled me away, so to speak. I know the thread may have gone cold, but then again it never really was hot. So it is just as well. I will get to it within the week, however. I promise you, I have an angle on the debate that you will like.
Posted by: slowtrain | Monday, August 14, 2006 at 08:51 PM
Slowtrain,
Since I can put up a decent counterargument against my own position, starting from your arguments and developing them along the lines of Mill's argument against the "goodness" of God, you've now got me convinced that I need to do a much more rigorous treatment of "fairness." I still think my point is valid but it needs to be made much more precisely and much less clumsily.
Here are the major ways in which I hear the term "fairness" used; I would appreciate it if you would point out alternative uses. And I don't mean from a dictionary; I mean snatches of dialog that would represent the way people really use the term "fairness" in everyday discourse.
1. (Familiar to every parent) "That's not fair!" in the sense of, "Why him and not me?" or its inverse, "Why me and not him?"
2. "That's not fair," in the sense in which it is used to say that it is not "fair" for there to be an immense gap between the pay of CEO's and blue-collar workers.
3. "Now, kids, you need to play fair." That is, an appeal to an obligation to follow the rules that everybody has agreed to -- you can't cheat, and you can't go back on your word.
4. "It wasn't a fair fight." "He has unfair advantages." Somewhat more challenging to classify but I think tends to be a variation either of #2 or else of #3.
5. "It's not fair to expect him to _______." Either means, "It's unreasonable in the sense that you're going to be disappointed," or else, "You should not blame him / hold him culpable."
6. "You're not being fair," when there is a dispute between two parties and you are making a decision based on personal loyalty rather than on the facts. There is a classic marital conflict that arises when a wife has gotten into an argument with somebody and appeals to the husband for support, as husbands (generally speaking) consider their primary obligation to be fairness while wives (general speaking) consider the primary obligation to be loyalty. "Whose side are you on?!? I can't believe you're taking her side!" "But, dear, she's right..."
7. "Our coverage is fair and balanced" / "The MSM's coverage is grossly unfair to Israel." Here "fair" essentially means "honest" -- you don't make stuff up, you don't leave stuff out of your coverage because it makes your side look bad, and you don't overemphasize the facts that support your side while burying the inconvenient facts in an afterthought paragraph on page 33.
Is that a reasonably complete list, Slowtrain?
Posted by: Kenny Pierce | Tuesday, August 08, 2006 at 12:45 PM
Gang,
I like that. Very well put.
Posted by: Kenny Pierce | Tuesday, August 08, 2006 at 12:08 PM
Kenny,
Excellent posts.
I once heard someone say that tolerance was the virtue of a man/woman with no convictions.
Seems about right.
Posted by: Gang of One | Tuesday, August 08, 2006 at 10:45 AM
Oh, and by the way:
denotation: the dictionary meaning
connotation: the emotions evoked by a term because of that term's experiential associations for the audience -- the difference, that is, that an American feels between, say, "state" and "Reich." The difference between calling somebody "detail-oriented" and calling him "anal" is precisely a difference in connotation. People interested in clear thought, work with denotation. People interested in the manipulation of emotion (preeminently politicians and other demagogues) work primarily with connotation. The ordinary not very intellectually rigorous person does much more feeling than he does thinking, and therefore it is extremely important to select words that have an appropriate connotation -- indeed, if you want to be persuasive, it is usually much more important to get select a term with the correct connotations than to select a word with the correct denotation.
Posted by: Kenny Pierce | Sunday, August 06, 2006 at 01:54 PM
Now, as to the way “unfairness” is actually used in political discourse and in theology: it is used whenever God or somebody else treats one person differently from another. More specifically, it is used when somebody you like wants something but doesn’t have it, while somebody you don’t like has it. And that pisses you off.
In particular, Americans in general are convinced that life "ought" to be fair in the specific sense that life's pleasures and wealth and remuneration on the one side, and its burdens and sorrows and curses on the other, should be allocated out in ratio with the degree to which the recipients are morally admirable. Life should go well for the nice people and it should suck for the jerks; anything else "isn't fair."
Thus it is “unfair” for the ordinary hard-working guy to slave away at minimum wage while CEO’s rake in millions. It is “unfair” for poor people to pay the same percentage of their income in taxes that the rich pay. It is “unfair” – well, here, for example, is a complaint against God from a guy I corresponded with long ago, and here is my response.
His complaint:
Now this is what most people mean when they talk about “fairness.” And here is my response, in part (his complaint was much longer than what I have quoted and my response was 50 single-spaced pages; so I certainly won’t post the whole thing):
One of the most important things my father have taught me was simply this (which, oddly enough, I later heard that Bill Gates had said in a high school graduation speech; so I presume my dad didn’t make it up):
“Life isn’t fair. Get over it.”
I am perfectly well aware that the dictionary defines fairness as roughly synonymous with justice. But my whole point about the denotation/connotation thing is that a dictionary is a very bad place to go to find out what a word that has come to be used a lot in political discourse, really means, because dictionaries give only denotation; but in political discourse words are used more for purposes of evocation through connotation than for elucidation through denotation. (Which is hopelessly pedantic but I think is fun to say.) And “fairness” is a word that has come to mean whatever the person using it wants to mean – just like “racism.” I’m sure that if you go to a dictionary and look up the word “racist,” you won’t find the definition, “Somebody who is presently engaged in winning an argument with a liberal,” but that is in fact the way the word has come to be used – the dictionary definition has ceased to be relevant because the word’s denotation is no longer the reason it’s used; it’s the emotional payload – the connotations – that drive its use. “Fairness” is just such a word.
It seems to me that what you want to say is that God is holy/just and that His holiness/justice and His love are the same thing (though this holiness/justice/love presents itself to our limited perceptions in different aspects at different times), and therefore that His love never overrides His holiness/justice. That is entirely true. But to say that “fairness” – in a world where the one thing most non-Christians are convinced is true about the Christian God if he really exists, is that God isn’t “fair,” and where by their meaning of “fair” this is absolutely true -- seems to me to be most rhetorically unwise. If you tell an American agnostic that God is “fair” but that a person who, through no fault of his own, happens to be born to a Hindu family, is much less likely to find salvation than a person who, through no merit of his own, is born to a Christian family, then I guarantee that you have just completely lost your agnostic American friend's respect through what to him seems an unanswerably obvious self-contradiction. God's behavior in this respect simply is not fair -- at least not in the sense in which the ordinary American is wont to say that something “isn’t fair.”
As I say, I think our disagreement is about semantics rather than substance – or, rather, that it is about tactics of communication and how best to forestall misunderstanding when speaking to the ordinary American about God.
But that doesn’t mean I don’t still think I’m right. ;-)
Posted by: Kenny Pierce | Sunday, August 06, 2006 at 01:50 PM
Slowtrain,
Here's the first thing I promised. I'll respond on fairness later.
On toleration:
Human nature has a couple of characteristics that come near to being constant.
1. We don’t, generally speaking, attain virtue because it’s too hard.
2. We like to think that we are virtuous.
Because of the second characteristic, even when Satan has us trapped in vice, there’s always the danger (from his perspective) that we will long for redemption and that grace will find us. Imitation virtues are the substitutes that Satan provides in the place of true virtues in order to keep us from longing after the real thing. They are the vaccine with which Satan inoculates us against the desire for genuinely admirable character by reassuring us that we already possess it.
An obvious example is the false virtue that encourages us (if I may paraphrase Sheldon Vanauken) to hate the oppressors of our neighbor, and then congratulate ourselves on how much compassion we have for our neighbor. Taking up offenses – that is, reveling in an anger that implicitly claims that our neighbor’s oppressor owes it to us not to oppress our neighbor – is a vice, not a virtue; but it is very easily confused with the virtues of compassion and of chivalry. Rachel Corrie – consumed with hatred of Amerikkka, her face distorted in rage as she burned her Amerikkkan flag, and then dying pointlessly and asininely in an utterly useless gesture of protest – was no doubt confident that she was motivated by “compassion” and was “defending the oppressed.” That any half-decent Marine does more for the oppressed than a thousand Rachel Corries or Cindy Sheehans, is something that the Corries and Sheehans can’t face up to; much less that it is really hatred, not compassion, that is their defining characteristic.
But when I think of false virtues, the one I think of first, at least in connection with America, is tolerance.
Now the true virtue that tolerance attempts to replace, is love – but when you use the word love you have to be careful because what God means by love is not generally what we mean by it. To love somebody is to desire his good; and unconditional love desires good for the other person no matter how badly that person behaves.
Of course, if a person is behaving badly, then love doesn’t necessarily mean that you stand back and let him keep doing so, especially if he is hurting other innocent people. There are some kinds of behavior that ought not be tolerated; and there are some kinds of behavior that we are emotionally incapable of tolerating. Ideally those two classes would perfectly coincide; in practice they do not. By that I mean that most of us tolerate in others some kinds of behavior we ought not tolerate, and find intolerable other kinds of behavior that we ought to put up with. What the virtue of love tells us is two things.
First, it tells us that we ought to put up with the tolerable kinds of bad behavior rather than demanding that the rest of the world, or even just one or two other people, adjust their lives and convenience to a tyranny of our peeves and peccadillos. Where our innocent desires happen to be in conflict, we should be just as willing for the other person to get his way as we are willing to get our own; for we should desire his good as we desire our own. Love makes his good, our good, because we desire for him to receive good things.
But second – and much more formidably – love tells us that even when we have to step in to put a halt to behavior that ought not be tolerated, we still have to desire the good of the person. The extreme example of this template comes from the traditional words with which we sentence people to execution: “...and from thence to the place of execution...,” because his behavior was that intolerable, but also, “...and may God have mercy on your soul,” because we do still love him and do still genuinely hope that he will yet find grace and eternal life. But any parent who has ever disciplined the child she loves, knows this dynamic intimately from personal experience that is just as real, if rather less dramatic, an outworking of this principle.
Tolerance, in other words, is not a virtue in the sense that love is. It is always good to desire the good of another person – though we may err by misunderstanding what his true good is. But assuming that that which we desire for him is truly good, to desire it and to take that action that is most likely to accomplish his good, is always virtuous. But while tolerance is often a good thing, it also often is a bad thing. And this is particularly true when “tolerance” comes to be defined, as it is among the more foolish subcultures of the Left, as “not saying that somebody is behaving badly.”
In other words, tolerance properly speaking is allowing somebody to behave in a manner that you find morally wrong or personally annoying. You don’t like it; you don’t necessarily even pretend to like it; you may urge him to think better of his folly; but you don’t try to force him to stop. And even with that definition of tolerance, there are many types of behavior that no genuinely moral person would tolerate – for example, a man who would stand by and do nothing while a much smaller and weaker man than he raped an old lady, would not be demonstrating virtue by his tolerance of the rapist. How many more exceptions to the general rule that tolerance is good, then, will we encounter when the scope of “toleration” is expanded to include even the expression of doubt as to the factual accuracy of another person’s opinions, or as to the wisdom of his decisions!
So when tolerance is promoted to a virtue, three things happen.
1. It practically always replaces love in the “tolerant” person’s moral system. In my own experience, if you show me a person who talks about “toleration” as though it were one of the highest of all moral virtues, I can almost always show you a person who will tell you plainly that it’s impossible to hate a sin and still love the sinner – and whose behavior proves it to be true in his own case. But anyone who doesn’t understand that the more you genuinely love a sinner, the more fiercely you will hate his sin, doesn’t really understand the first thing about love.
2. It can’t be worked out coherently as a fundamental virtue because there are too many things that morally ought not to be tolerated. It can be brought into an ethical system as a derivative and contingent virtue – that is, as a course of action that under certain circumstance can be the proper expression of one or more fundamental virtues – but it can’t be a fundamental virtue itself.
3. It can’t be lived out systematically because for every individual person there are certain behaviors that he is emotionally incapable of tolerating in others.
What is so devastating about the third in particular, is that the person who has promoted tolerance to the level of a fundamental moral requirement and then finds himself face-to-face with intolerable behavior, has a fundamental emotional conflict that simply doesn’t exist for the person who is pursuing the virtue of love.
Here’s what I mean. Let us say that you have been taught, correctly, that it is your duty to love everybody with whom you have dealings – but there is that one guy that just drives you crazy, and no matter how hard you try, you just can’t help feeling most of the time that you’d like to wring his neck. Now, it is absolutely open to you to confess that emotion to God in your prayers and to choose to say to God, “He drives me crazy but bless him anyway...ideally with a brand new and much less annoying personality, if that suits Your plan for him; but at any rate, Thy will be done, and give me the grace to do for him whatever Your plan for his life requires me to do.” You can pray for the man, and thus choose to act for his good, even if all you can feel for him is annoyance or even hatred.
But what if you have been taught that tolerance – in the particular sense of not imposing your own religious opinions on others – is a moral requirement; only you’re dealing with a homophobic theocrat who wants to discriminate against homosexuals by refusing to go along with their ordination into the priesthood, or to rent apartments to gay couples? It is extremely difficult to find any way to justify bringing the law to bear on the evangelical landlord that does not, in the end, mean that you are forcing him to conform to your own religious opinion, namely, the opinion that God does not object to homosexuality. You are, quite clearly, being intolerant; which given your conviction that you need to be tolerant so that you can feel good about yourself morally, is a guilt-inducer. And while a particularly agile mind might be able to work out some set of principles under which the obligation of toleration was suspended in the case of the “intolerant,” that would still tend to leave open the question of why you should get to decide which kinds of intolerance are okay and which aren’t, plus – much more importantly – that would be a helluva lot of intellectual work.
So instead, it seems to me that the Tolerance Movement (if that calls to mind the Temperance Movement, it should, because they have much more in common than the Tolerance Brigade would like to admit) is driven much more often than not to exaggerating the moral turpitude of the people that they can’t tolerate, so that they won’t feel guity for being intolerant themselves. Since love leaves you free to say that some acts are intolerable but you can still love the person even while stepping in to make him stop what he’s doing, that particular emotional self-contradiction simply doesn’t come into play for those who pursue love. Thus the more committed you are to “tolerance” in the abstract, the more you ahve to demonize the people whom you can’t tolerate, in order to justify to yourself your own obvious intolerance of those people.
Even more devastatingly, I think, is this: in the very act of convincing yourself that they are so bad that you don’t have to tolerate them, you convince yourself that they are so bad that you have no moral obligation left to them at all. For after all, your fundamental obligation to them is the obligation of tolerance; but they have forfeited it. Love says that even if you have to kill them, you still have to desire their good; you still have to pray that they find grace and that you will rejoice to find them in Heaven with you for eternity. Nothing they can do can release you from the obligation of loving them. But if your core obligation is the obligation of tolerance...well, there’s plenty that people can do that relieves you of the obligation of tolerating their behavior; and if toleration is your fundamental obligation, then when they forfeit that then all bets are off...and since you are almost certainly exaggerating their degree of depravity in order to reassure yourself that it really is okay in this particular case to be intolerant, the level of viciousness is even more exaggerated.
At any rate, whatever you think of the emotional conflict I’m here hypothesizing, I think it’s a simple and obvious empirical fact that the people who make the most noise about “tolerance” have long been the people who are most active in trying to ban from the college campus speakers with whom they disagree. I think this is precisely because they have stopped valuing love and have instead made an idol out of “tolerance.”
But that’s just my opinion; I could be wrong.
Posted by: Kenny Pierce | Sunday, August 06, 2006 at 01:19 PM
Oh boy! Talk about stepping out on a limb and provoking a debate.
Kenny Pierce wrote:
I don't think that fairness -- by any definition that conforms to the way the term is actually used in day-to-day English and in political discussion -- is an attribute of God at all and can't imagine what would make anybody think so. Neither the empirical evidence nor the testimony of Scripture supports the thesis. It certainly is not synonymous with justice. Indeed I have never heard anybody define the term in a way that is coherent enough to hold up in even a remotely rigorous analysis of whatever ethical system is trying to incorporate it.
Kenny, the Webster Dictionary defines fairness as “marked by impartiality and honesty”, “free from self-interest, prejudice, or favoritism”. And it listed the following words as synonymous: fair, just, equitable, impartial, unbiased, dispassionate, objective. And it defines them as follows:
Fair - implies an elimination of one’s own feelings, prejudices, and desires so as to achieve a proper balance of conflicting interests
Just - implies an exact following of a standard of what is right and proper
Equitable - implies a less rigorous standard than “Just” and usually suggests equal treatment of all concerned
Impartial - stresses an absence of favor or prejudice.
Unbiased - implies even more strongly an absence of all prejudice
Dispassionate - suggests freedom from the influence of strong feeling and often implies cool or even cold judgment
Objective - stresses a tendency to view events or persons as apart from oneself and one's own interest or feelings
As far as I know, this is how the term is used in day-to-day English and in political discussion, except you are referring to a different planet, which I would not be aware of. These are not only what are implied when we speak of justice, they are how justice is described of defined in day-to-day English and in political discussion. And if they are not God’s attributes, you tell me why and tell me what is. As for the Scriptures, there is overwhelming evidence clearly stating that fairness or justness is an attribute of God. To mention a few; Deuteronomy 32:4 says “He is the Rock, his work is perfect: for all his ways are judgment: a God of truth and without iniquity, just and right is he.” Nehemiah 9:33 says “Howbeit thou art just in all that is brought upon us; for thou hast done right, but we have done wickedly”. Isaiah 45:21 says “Tell ye, and bring them near; yea, let them take counsel together: who hath declared this from ancient time? who hath told it from that time? have not I the LORD? and there is no God else beside me; a just God and a Saviour; there is none beside me.”
I don’t believe my usage of the term “fairness” is unique or idiosyncratic as you say. But I admit that the limitation of language (English particularly) has created the pesky lexical constraints that are frequently attendant in contextual communication. Nevertheless, in contemporary parlance the “connotation” of the word fairness is synonymous to justness or justice. But even more than connotation, is its denotation as the synonyms listed above show. In terms of strict grammatical origin, validity or structure, you may be right, but only in the same sense that, as though all men are male, yet all male are not men, but that takes us down the road of qualitative analysis, which is unnecessary for our purpose herein.
I am sure you understood the spirit of the term in the context it was used in my comments. The debate, if there is one, should not be on the grammatical inflection of the word in question but on the common understanding of it, which I am sure is clearly evident in my comments as a whole.
It has, in fact, almost no denotation whatsoever, being something very close to a purely connotational emotional placemarker -- sort of the opposite of a negative pure-connotation term like "racist."
Quite frankly Kenny, I don’t understand the latter part of the above sentence. It appears that you are playing with words here. Nevertheless, connotations, axioms, even analogies may be placeholders, but they are logical placeholders and never emotional placeholders. In fact, the Webster Dictionary defines connotation as “an essential property or group of properties of a thing named by a term in logic” and I believe the logic in my comment is clear enough. Moreover, in communication, especially everyday communication, we are not limited to only words that have direct specific meaning, in order to establish a valid point, we equally employ words with implicit meaning or clearly “understood associated ideas”. I have read your comments on ATB and I know that you have frequently employed words that connote rather than denote. So lets not make that the subject, the real subject is more interesting and I am still waiting...
Posted by: slowtrain | Sunday, August 06, 2006 at 01:14 AM
Slowtrain,
My apologies, I will genuinely do my best to get to it after we're done with family night tonight. I didn't expect to be as busy as I have been (but I've been busy hanging out with the kids so it's a good busy).
I don't think that fairness -- by any definition that conforms to the way the term is actually used in day-to-day English and in political discussion -- is an attribute of God at all and can't imagine what would make anybody think so. Neither the empirical evidence nor the testimony of Scripture supports the thesis. It certainly is not synonymous with justice. Indeed I have never heard anybody define the term in a way that is coherent enough to hold up in even a remotely rigorous analysis of whatever ethical system is trying to incorporate it. It has, in fact, almost no denotation whatsoever, being something very close to a purely connotational emotional placemarker -- sort of the opposite of a negative pure-connotation term like "racist."
Now there's you a challenge. ;-)
Having said all that, I do recognize that it's possible that you are defining "fairness" in a highly idiosyncratic fashion. So, here's what I suggest: give me a good, rigorous definition of "fairness" as you perceive the term. Perhaps it will turn out that we agree in substance thought not remotely in semantics.
And I really will try to get to that fake-virtues comment.
Posted by: Kenny Pierce | Saturday, August 05, 2006 at 05:24 PM
Kenny Pierce,
Where is the food for thought you promised the 'ATB community' when you wrote:
“but at some point tonight I will try to explain a concept I've developed over the years about:
1. Imitation virtues in general.
2. The specific case of tolerance as a bad substitute for charity.
3. The logical/emotional forces that cause a person who idolizes tolerance rather than charity, to be driven to intolerance by the very logic of his nominal endorsement of tolerance as a virtue.”
The concept sounds interesting and I am keen on reading what you have to so. But I waited and waited and waited…still no show. What’s up Kenny? Don’t tell me the bar stays open that long. :)
Now that the food for thought you promised isn’t forthcoming, I must provoke the thought by stepping out on a limb to say that charity is potentially or intrinsically as deficient as tolerance, if or when charity is not preceded by fairness. Indeed, fairness is the essence of humanity. It precedes charity, even love and compassion.
Truth, justice or fairness, love and compassion are all attributes of God and essential elements of humanity. These are all wrapped in those cardinal rules of loving God above all else and loving one’s neighbor as one loves oneself, hence doing to others as we would want done to us. It was God’s attribute of justice that required that the penalty for sin must be paid, but it was God’s attribute of love and mercy for humans that necessitated the death of Christ (to redeem us) on the cross at Calvary. Without God’s attribute of justice and if God had only acted out of love, God would have undermined his primary attribute of justice. Charity, even love is preceded by fairness. One cannot exercise true love, compassion or charity without first possessing the foundational virtue (morality) of fairness. I believe that all these attributes of God constitute the essence of humanity - God’s image in humans — Genesis 1:27.
The Webster Dictionary defines virtue as “conformity to a standard of right” or morality. Our morality (the Judeo-Christian) morality derives from the attributes of God: justice, love and mercy among others. Ultimately, the power to live true to our belief derives from these attributes. “The logical/emotional forces that cause a person who idolizes tolerance rather than charity, to be driven to intolerance by the very logic of his nominal endorsement of tolerance as a virtue” exist because those forces do not have fidelity with the power that derives from the original virtue (truth) contained in justice, love and mercy. “The limitation of virtues in general”, lies in the notion of virtue or morality that is independent of God, because the virtue of “tolerance” as advanced by political correctness attempts to mirror God’s attributes without knowing or acknowledging God.
Remember, tolerance is sympathy or indulgence for beliefs or practices differing from or conflicting with one’s own or the act of allowing something or the allowable deviation from a standard. By nature, it is bound by thresholds, which are sometimes breached and when that happens, the inevitable breaks out.
Posted by: slowtrain | Saturday, August 05, 2006 at 12:54 PM
If you only come her to bitch at ATB / Alexandra, we all would appreciate it very much if just... didn't come here at all.
Posted by: Michael van der Galien | Saturday, August 05, 2006 at 10:15 AM
RJBJ,
Why do you bother coming to ATB? I never understand it really. Perhaps you are naturally bitchy, and you just can't help yourself, or perhaps it's a slow day for everyone else too so whatever...
Posted by: Alexandra | Saturday, August 05, 2006 at 05:25 AM
I wasn't going to write about this, and it means nothing really, but it's a slow day for everyone else too so whatever...
Posted by: RJBJ | Saturday, August 05, 2006 at 04:27 AM
Alexandra, I stand corrected.
Posted by: slowtrain | Friday, August 04, 2006 at 02:34 AM
Slowtrain,
Just a minor correction, but an important one nevertheless, you say: "Alexandra wrote" and then you quote the artist "Dark Black" who says "If we as a people run from controversial imagery, we will never stop running. Better to unearth and deal with the unpleasant than to live in fear", being the end of a quote which begins with me saying "Now my friend Tom Maguire has this gem from the comment section over at Arianna's place, from the artist who calls himself, I kid you not 'Dark Black'".
It does unfortunately give the wrong impression, especially as the preceding sentence in the quote by the artist is: "Thus, in my opinion, Lieberman is pretending to be something that he is not for personal gain, exactly like the vile caucasian minstrel show performers of Vaudeville. And so my artist's impression stands."
No need to respond, I just wanted to clarify it.
Posted by: Alexandra | Friday, August 04, 2006 at 01:53 AM
Alexandra wrote:
If we as a people run from controversial imagery, we will never stop running. Better to unearth and deal with the unpleasant than to live in fear.
A certain African adage says that “when the wind blows, the chicken’s posterior is revealed”. What that means is that, uncertain (and sometimes desperate) times often expose the unpleasant sight that lies beneath a façade or colorful plumage. Such is the case with the progressiveness, inclusiveness and hollow idealism of political correctness and multiculturalism that have come to symbolize the so-called elite or liberal intellectuals. The sentiment Jane Hamsher expressed in her depiction of Joe Lieberman has something in common with adultery, they are both products of inclination and opportunity. The problem is that such opportunity is like a knife that can cut both ways.
These people who call themselves liberals are nothing but wolves in sheep clothing, all their hypocritical mantra of progressiveness and inclusiveness is nothing but the art of Machiavellianism, which they have practiced on the African American community for a better part of a half century. How can people who deny the essential elements of that great providential document that heralded freedom in America and continues to inspire the desire for freedom around the world - the United States Declaration of Independence, which recognizes the providential ideal of equality for all men, claim to be progressive and inclusive. It is logically impossible to hold the view that people are not created, let alone created equal and yet claim to be champions for equality, inclusiveness and all the those
one-word descriptions of liberals we have all heard before.
The truth is that behind closed doors and deep down in their subconsciousness they still perceive African Americans in the images established by the blackface minstrelsy and the darky iconography invented and popularized by the liberal media of the day, as Jane Hamsher has shown in this rare glimpse into her soul. She and the horde she represents are nothing but dubious actors on the political and social stage; they are virtuosos in their deceptive art of progressiveness and inclusiveness theatre, which is nothing but the art of pulling wools over people’s eyes, particularly African Americans whom they have engaged in wholesale exploitation, through clever manipulation of sentimental hangovers.
There is a book titled The Power of Definition: How Perception Becomes Reality, which will be release this fall; it promises to bring out all the “controversial images” from our collective “closet”; to inspire us “to unearth and deal with the unpleasant than to live in fear” and hypocrisy. If we, in the land of the free and the home of the brave, cannot be true to ourselves, we would have lived less, cheated ourselves and lived undeserving of the freedom that endows people with the privilege to be true to themselves, to discover themselves even through the painful road of self-examination and open debate on the things that make us uncomfortable or ashamed.
As I have said before, in the totality of the American experience, there is an element of “the good, the bad, and the ugly”, which by the way is not unique to America. But America has never been timid in confronting any issue that undermines her true ideals, at home or abroad, and reinventing herself and reshaping the world when those issues so warrant. This in itself has been an inspiration to the rest of the world. America cannot now become timid in dealing with issues that cannot be avoided; issues that one way or another, however much we try to avoid them, continue to trip us, divide us and keep America from reinventing herself.
Posted by: slowtrain | Thursday, August 03, 2006 at 08:19 PM
I have an important social engagement (which means "it's an open bar") but at some point tonight I will try to explain a concept I've developed over the years about:
1. Imitation virtues in general.
2. The specific case of tolerance as a bad substitute for charity.
3. The logical/emotional forces that cause a person who idolizes tolerance rather than charity, to be driven to intolerance by the very logic of his nominal endorsement of tolerance as a virtue.
Posted by: Kenny Pierce | Thursday, August 03, 2006 at 06:14 PM
Read a satirical critique of the battle being waged amongst Democrats in the Lieberman v. Lamont Senate race coined "The Hatfield's & McCoy's"...here:
www.thoughttheater.com
Posted by: Daniel DiRito | Thursday, August 03, 2006 at 01:33 PM
Sorry about that... Not the correct link.
The comments were actually on the DSCC parent site From the Roots . Every now and then you should look out of the window of this beautiful salon that Alexandra has provided to remind yourself of the venom and bile that passes for discourse "on the street".
I did see one comment from "isolde" that about sums it up.
"Once was a time when disagreement didn't split apart family and friends.
Once was a time when political disagreement did not make one "evil".
As a conservative in a liberal state (MA), I've learned the art of respectful debate. There's rarely agreement, but with my liberal friends (remember, I live in MA), we can enthusiastically disagree but then, raise a glass and go on with our friendship."
I am glad we can do that here at the site Alexandra so graciously provides.
Thank you again Baroness!
We are eternally grateful for you providing a place, and attracting an excellent caliber of persons with whom we can respectfully disagree with.
Posted by: Patrick | Thursday, August 03, 2006 at 10:55 AM
I have to agree with Michael. I admit it. Last night I had to look at the Fudge Report and the "intellectual" comments there. I was expecting a parody site with some humor. Boy was I wrong. Absolutely Amazing! Lots of comments about how the democrats are the party of the intellectuals. Could not see that from any of their comments (they were baited quite unmercifully). All I can say is, Wow!
Definately a realm populated with extremist who yell liar, liar, pants on fire...literally. It would be humorous if it were not so sad. My mother and wife both grew up democrat. Some moderates tried to post polite questions/comments and were just viciously attacked. If you do not toe their party line, you must be a liar and are obviously just trolling. No need to even attempt to say anything in that forum.
Posted by: Patrick | Thursday, August 03, 2006 at 10:33 AM
LOL I was wondering about all of this myself Alexandra.
However, it took me some time, but I have figured it out. Some people, like yourself, wonder where the tolerance of the left went...
The answer is quite simple: extremists are not tolerant. American left is becoming more and more extreme.
Posted by: Michael van der Galien | Thursday, August 03, 2006 at 10:15 AM