Recommended
July 19, 2012
A few interesting readings I’ve run across recently:
1.
Via Rush Limbaugh, John Kass responds to President Obama’s recent comments with a tribute to his hard-working father, and the rest of his family, who ran a small business.
(President Obama said last Friday, “If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that.” That’s not taken out of context; on the contrary, in context, it sounds even worse. Don’t take my word for it; read as much of the context as you’d like.)
2.
Project Veritas, run by James O’Keefe, appears to have caught union bosses on video agreeing to help get government money (that’s your money) to pay people to dig holes and fill them back in:
James O’Keefe is the same one who has apparently produced video of Planned Parenthood workers helping and counseling a man they thought was trafficking in underage prostitutes, video of ACORN workers counseling Hannah Giles on how to conceal prostitution and child trafficking, and other undercover videos.
We know that crossing the unions can get you shot, to say nothing of kidnapping and property damage. Even if you disagree with Mr. O’Keefe politically, I think you should consider sending him a donation just to help level the playing field, in the interest of keeping speech free.
3.
Speaking of which, via The Other McCain, a female blogger tells (from personal experience) the costs that liberals sometimes impose on the exercise of speech:
Since then I’ve amassed nearly one hundred pages of disgusting, hateful and threatening messages. They’ve said that I (and all of you conservative readers) have no place in this world. They’ve told me to slit my own throat. They’ve called me every foul name you can think of. They’ve insulted my husband, accused me of molesting my children and threatened to report me to my local school board. They impersonated my husband and contacted a local divorce attorney. They tried to have pornographic sex toys catalogues sent to my home. They have sent emails on my behalf to my elected representatives advocating for policies I disagree with completely. They’ve signed me up for more email spam than anyone could possibly do in his or her spare time. (As of this moment I have 1630 emails in my spam folder.) They’ve called my home using Caller ID spoofing software or websites. They’ve let me know they know where I live. There isn’t time to list everything, but you get the gist of it.
That’s very bad. The risk of that kind of misbehavior from liberals is part of why I’ve always written under a pseudonym—but then, so did she.
4.
Here’s a story with a happy ending: Via Wintery Knight, blogger Josh Weed and his wife say that he is and has always been sexually attracted to men and not sexually attracted to women; yet he has chosen marriage, to her, and they couldn’t be happier. (They have been married for ten years already and have three children.) I certainly don’t agree with him on everything (from believing in Mormonism to his use of terminology), but I think there’s a lot of wisdom in there. In any case, I know that people on all sides of certain issues will find it very interesting to learn about his experience.
Enjoyment and Contemplation 
July 19, 2012 at 6:59 PM
[…] at iOwnTheWorld, Zilla, The Other McCain, Conservative Commune, Loopy Loo, Jackie Wellfonder, Enjoyment and Contemplation, The Impolite Canadian, Nice Deb, Blazing Cat Fur and Lady Liberty. I also want to thank those of […]
July 19, 2012 at 8:44 PM
I think I’ve raised this point before, but are you so delusional as to think that only “liberals” do bad things?
July 19, 2012 at 10:57 PM
No doubt others do indeed do bad things, but if you can find me a single instance of this level of thuggery from the right, directed at someone at this level on the left, I will be very interested to hear about it.
Note that there is also a potential evidentiary problem: Given that liberals sometimes lie about their identity and their position, as also described in the blog entry linked above (I have certainly experienced it even among commenters on my own blog), I wouldn’t be surprised if any such incident you can find (or create) is in fact made up.
July 20, 2012 at 9:28 AM
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-abortion_violence
July 20, 2012 at 9:20 AM
There’s a war on. As with any war, people fight for different reasons. Some for money or power, some for an ideology. I think it might matter a great deal that the liberal ideology is a sort of utopian dedication to a particular end result. The conservative ideology, insofar as it begins with some understanding that utopias aren’t possible, is an ideology of process, of means. The guerrilla wing of the conservative army is videotaping inappropriate behavior and dressing like George Washington at city council meetings. The liberal guerrillas are ruining the lives of normal people. Maybe it matters less to them how they get what they want.
I agree, I’d like to see the evidence that conservatives are conducting these kinds of attacks against ordinary people.
July 20, 2012 at 1:31 PM
Does murder qualify?
July 20, 2012 at 1:37 PM
Asked and answered, counselor:
July 20, 2012 at 1:44 PM
Apparently you didn’t read the link. Among the dead, two receptionists, a clinic escort, and an off-duty police officer, i.e., people who had nothing to do with the actual carrying out of abortions.
Now that I’ve responded to your foolish question with concrete evidence, will you acknowledge that you were wrong?
July 21, 2012 at 3:13 PM
Apparently you still didn’t read what I wrote. On the one hand, you have a handful of people (who certainly did not have “nothing to do with” the carrying out of abortions) who were murdered. On the other hand, you have literally tens of millions of unborn children murdered, 100% of whom were innocent. Again, if it doesn’t go without saying, I agree that all murder is wrong, including murdering murderers, and certainly including murdering accessories to murder, but the left is on this scale a million times worse than the right.
If we’re asking how prevalent certain bad behaviors are on the left and on the right, it may also be relevant that more or less all conservatives agree that bombing abortion clinics is wrong, and they often say so publicly. I don’t recall once hearing a conservative advocate that the legal penalties for these killers be relaxed even a little bit (and as your Wikipedia article reports, their sentences have ranged from life in prison to the death penalty). By contrast, more or less all liberals seem to agree that abortion should remain legal.
You’re right, I spoke in general terms. Your quibbles do not change my basic argument. If you want to split hairs, I was granting you “a dozen” abortionists murdered; according to your Wikipedia article, the number is in fact only four abortion doctors, plus four people who worked for abortion doctors. Again, not to diminish how wrong each of those eight murders was, they are nothing compared to the violence from the other side—tens of millions of (actually innocent) victims murdered.
Even if there were any conservatives mistreating liberal bloggers, I’m not sure there’s any way the left could make up that lost ground—they’re millions of murders behind at this point—but if you want to take back your goofy bravado and take back any mention of abortion, I’ll grant for purposes of argument that that’s a different category and doesn’t have to affect the comparison I originally suggested. In that case, you would still have to find examples of, e.g., conservatives doing their best to make a woman’s life a living hell just because she was a liberal blogger.
July 21, 2012 at 3:23 PM
I think Unassuming suggests an interesting additional point about the two sides’ very different “guerrilla wings”. As I said about the “Google bomb” campaign against Rick Santorum,
July 21, 2012 at 11:32 PM
What information do you have that I don’t about every abortion doctor in the United States that allows you to know that “liberals” are responsible for every abortion carried out? If you do have such information, how on Earth did you acquire it?
July 22, 2012 at 9:48 PM
[…] didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.” (Previously linked on this blog, John Kass and Mark Steyn […]
October 24, 2012 at 2:43 PM
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