Buchanan is a victim of "Pathological Altruism," which is the subject of a new book by that same title by Barbara Oakley, and it is characteristic of the morality of the left, which is focused overwhelmingly on care, and the prevention of harm. This fixation results in the sacrilization of certain groups that are perceived to have been victimized. Question that sacrilization AT ALL, and you get the Buchanan treatment.
“I have come to believe,” [Oakley] explains, “that, for my fellow liberals, empathy, altruism and caring for others have become a kind of secular religion that is actually harmful, because it can be used as a cover for nefarious, corrupt and self-serving action. People can be blinded by their caring into doing things that hurt those they hope to help.” Like communism, altruism is often only seemingly beneficent. … [For Example,] Oakley suggests that we hear rather too much about the self-serving nature of corporations, given that “many other organisations behave in precisely the same way.
“Feminism can be thought of as like a corporation. It’s interested in its constituents. Well-meaning feminists are often trained only to see a certain way, only to support their constituents. That is partly what underlies the spurious research on battered-woman syndrome. Anyone who questions whether battered women are only simple victims is put in the pillory and crucified.
“There are young, inexperienced women who fall in love with a man and are put in a battering situation, but there is nothing wrong with them more than simple bad luck. That’s absolutely possible and my heart goes out to them. But there’s also a sizeable group – perhaps 40 to 50 per cent of battered women – who are themselves as much involved in the battering as the man. That simply isn’t discussed; it’s considered to be ‘blaming the victim’. But in fact it’s being more perceptive about the difference between real victims and those who portray themselves as victims.
There are six (seven really, another will be announced in the next year or two) ingredients, if you will, of morality, that are a part of the human psyche as a result of natural selection. Three of them are focused on the individual, three on binding people together into cooperative communities. The conservative psyche employs all six in equal balance. The liberal psyche uses the individualizing ones almost exclusively. Liberal thought does not acknowledge the other three as part of morality.
Since half of the moral spectrum is essentially invisible to liberals they are dumbfounded in their attempts to understand conservatives, and are left with practically no other option but to attribute conservative views to some sort of mental or moral dysfunction, like racism, homophobia, religious zealotry, “climate of hate,” "paranoid style," etc., etc., etc. http://ccpolitical.activeboard.com/t47702783/thread-on-cc-about-rolling-stone-article/
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It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so.” – Mark Twain
I am reading and typing this on a Fire. Mom didn't eat much for lunch. Her bed was wet and now changed. Wife has a headache. I now have a headache.
Can you summarize last two posts in a few sentences?
-- Edited by longprime on Tuesday 21st of February 2012 02:52:14 PM
I remember thinking Buchanan was some kind of crazed racist back in the early nineties when he labeled what was happening in America a "culture war." He coined the phrase.
Actually, I see now he was prescient. Though under Obama the Great Uniter, we're now not just in a culture war, but a war.
The modus operandi of these thought police at Color of Change and ADL is to brand as racists and anti-Semites any writer who dares to venture outside the narrow corral in which they seek to confine debate. All the while prattling about their love of dissent and devotion to the First Amendment, they seek systematically to silence and censor dissent.
Without a hearing, they smear and stigmatize as racist, homophobic, or anti-Semitic any who contradict what George Orwell once called their “smelly little orthodoxies.” They then demand that the heretic recant, grovel, apologize, and pledge to go forth and sin no more.
Defy them, and they will go after the network where you work, the newspapers that carry your column, the conventions that invite you to speak. If all else fails, they go after the advertisers.
I know these blacklisters. They operate behind closed doors, with phone calls, mailed threats, and off-the-record meetings. They work in the dark because, as Al Smith said, nothing un-American can live in the sunlight.
-- Edited by hope on Friday 17th of February 2012 06:13:50 PM
-- Edited by hope on Friday 17th of February 2012 06:25:03 PM
