Strawman, Strawman, Strawman- Poof! I'm Right!*

You know what's easier than logical argumentation involving research and facts? Illogical, emotional, inflammatory nonsense!

I recently listened again to an excellent speech that comedian and author Evan Sayet gave at a gathering of the Heritage Foundation. The speech, entitled "Hating What's Right: How the Modern Liberal Winds Up on the Wrong Side of Every Issue"reminded me of some salient points when looking at the ideology behind modern liberalism. (If you've never watched the speech, take a look at the end of the post.)

Referring to Allan Bloom's seminal work The Closing of the American Mind, Sayet reminds us of Bloom's observation that modern liberalism relies on the ideal of indiscriminateness in direct opposition to the liberal Satan of discrimination. As Bloom puts it, "indiscriminateness is a moral imperative"in the ideology of modern liberalism (pg. 30).

Modern liberalism finds discrimination, any form of discrimination, to be antithetical to modern liberal thought. We must not discriminate against race, we are morally compelled (by political correctness) not to discriminate against culture, lifestyle, moral behavior or indeed any action deemed ideologically pure.

Gee, did I not get the memo on ideological purity? The above is a load of nonsense flavored with sophistry. The English language is, at best, imprecise. "To discriminate" can mean a few things, some of them acceptable- she has discriminating taste- some of them unacceptable- they discriminate against minorities. Then there are things that could certainly be defined, loosely, as discrimination: refusing to hire a 3 time embezzler as your accountant, for example. No one would, in common parlance, refer to that as discrimination, but technically, the word is defined that way. All of which lends itself beautifully to sophistry, an artful play of language to obfuscate meaning and logic.

What Euripides is doing above is engaging in a such sophistry, blurring the line between acceptable and unacceptable, redefining the common parlance and generally obscuring meaning. I'll save you all an entire semester's worth of studying logical argumentation: If you have to redefine words to make your point, you don't have one. (See how good I am to you?)

So, what sorts of bigotry, oh, I'm sorry, let's just call it "roses", does Euripides wish to engage in? The usual.

Airport Security
Even though we know, we know, that a certain brand of young, male, Muslims are responsible for 9/11 and other airplane hijackings and terrorist activities, we must not discriminate, in fact we must be stupidly indiscriminate at airports, taking away rights from everyone during security checks in order to appear not to discriminate against any one.

Why do we do this? Besides the leftist moral imperative of indiscriminateness, we give up our rights so we might not hurt others' feelings or "profile" unsuspecting Muslims. In fact, we must become stupid in our indiscrimination.

Yeah. Because nobody but a Muslim man . . . um, what does a Muslim man look like, exactly? Muslim refers to a religion, not a race. It's not like they're all purple or something. Heck, I could become a Muslim right now. (I probably would if I got to be purple!) Oh, a "certain brand" of Muslim man. Ayrabs, you see. Which is kind of funny, because there are Afghani Muslims and they aren't . . . oh, never mind. We just need to stop searching white people at the airport. It's so obnoxious for blondie. (Seriously, take a look at his profile pic. If he gets any whiter, he'll glow.)

Never mind that racial profiling doesn't work. Why should reality get in the way of Euripides' roses?

Arizona Immigration
Speaking of racial profiling, the loud-mouthed leftists who jumped on the ideological bandwagon, lost no time at all in condemning Arizona's new immigration law because it failed the liberal test of indiscriminateness. Once again, liberals demand that we make ourselves stupid in order to avoid the Mortal Sin of discrimination.

Let's have no doubts, racial discrimination has indeed produced social and legal injustices. However, in their zeal for an indiscriminate society, leftist liberals would have us stupidly ignore illegal immigration or illegal activity in order to uphold an ideological belief instead of exercising common sense. We must be indiscriminate to the point of stupidity.

Nobody said that liberals want to ignore illegal immigration, Euripides. See, this is what we call a false dichotomy. Either we accept a flawed, bigoted law or we just throw open our borders and wait for everything to burn down. There are other options. Lots of them. But reasoned discussion doesn't allow you to call whole groups of people stupid!

Same Sex Marriage
The ultimate in indiscrimination is the leftists invented the ideal of same sex marriage or gay marriage. If discrimination is the Mortal Sin of modern society, then the ultimate discriminate conclusion is that there are any differences at all between men and women. The indiscriminate liberal logically concludes that if we must not discriminate, then we cannot discriminate between the sexes and hence, traditional marriage is a meaningless institution, destined only to become an indiscriminate union.

We must stupidly ignore the differences and complimentary nature of the sexes in order to support a redefinition of marriage to conform to the ideology based on indiscriminateness.

Considering that you completely redefined "marriage" to arrive at this point (marriage as it is today hasn't been around that long), I fail to see the issue here. Oh, and prove "complimentary nature of the sexes" without referencing NOM. Or the Book of Mormon. It's easy to win if you assume x is true and then move on to y and z, but we really should establish x first. Plus, TEH GHEY IZ BAD! isn't really logic.

Sex Education
According to modern liberal ideology, we cannot teach children not to have sex. That's discrimination. We must, instead, stupidly support an indiscriminate system that rewards children for their own indiscriminate sexual activity, despite any consequences of disease, pregnancy, or abortion. In fact, the system actually promotes the lack of self-control by removing, decriminalizing, and in the case of abortion, actively supporting the lack of consequences.

Dude, when could you ever teach children not to have sex? Srsly. My mother graduated high school in 1961. Girls were getting pregnant out of wedlock back then, too. It's nothing new. What I object to is people who have no knowledge of how their bodies work, how to prevent pregnancy, how to prevent the spread of disease going out and having sex anyway, cuz that's what they do. Abstinence only education led to a rise in teen pregnancy, asshat. You can't stop people from having sex, you can just make it more dangerous.

Modern liberals cannot understand other ideologies or moral systems, for the simple fact that the modern liberal ideology holds indiscriminateness as the Holy Grail of some fantastical utopian society. To comply with the moral imperative of indiscrimination, we must make ourselves stupid in order to comply with the moral imperative of liberal indiscriminateness.

None of the above is true, but strawmen are fun to set ablaze, I admit.

*h/t to [redacted]

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