Unspeakable truth, mandatory lies

One of the weirdnesses of 21st-century life is that certain facts are politically incorrect. Notice I said facts, not opinions. Joel Stein of the L.A. Times points to one such verboten truth:

I have never been so upset by a poll in my life. Only 22% of Americans now believe “the movie and television industries are pretty much run by Jews,” down from nearly 50% in 1964. The Anti-Defamation League, which released the poll results last month, sees in these numbers a victory against stereotyping. Actually, it just shows how dumb America has gotten. Jews totally run Hollywood.

Stein backs up that statement with extensive evidence of Jewish dominance within the entertainment industry and, unlike the ADL, sees no reason to be embarassed by it. Yet, to the ADL, it is considered a sign of enlightened tolerance that 78% of people falsely believe that Hollywood is not dominated by Jews. So, according to the ADL, the alternative to delusion is bigotry. Steve Sailer observes:

In general, isn’t it weird how it has become fashionable to be naive and less worldly . . .? It used to be that people felt proud of knowing the score, of understanding the way of the world, of being clued in to how things work.
Today, though, it’s cool to be ignorant.

Ignorance as enlightment follows a definite pattern, as with the case of how Tom Clancy’s Palestinian terrorists in The Sum of All Fears morphed into neo-Nazis in the movie version. One can no longer generalize about group tendencies without inviting the charge of fostering “hate.” Kathy Shaidle notes the “moral exhibitionism” of those who react to her “matter of fact, everybody-knows statement about . . . Black culture” by condemning her as a racist. Kathy correctly locates the origin of such condemnation in modern academia. Our education system nowadays seems to emphasize a vision of egalitarian homogeneity, so that people are fungible units without any distinctive ethno-cultural traits to differentiate them.

Furthermore, academia seems to be teaching young people to argue by exceptions, to naysay any general observation by responding, “Yeah, but what if . . .?” The “what if” is always some hypothetical case intended to disprove the general observation. You see this all the time in the abortion debate.

The overwhelming majority of abortions are merely retroactive contraception to terminate an adult woman’s inconvenient pregnancy. Yet pro-choicers are always conjuring up the specter of the 14-year-old incest victim, or the woman whose pregnancy presents potentially fatal medical complications. One might allow for every such exceptional case and still prohibit 97 percent of abortions — reducing the annual number of U.S. abortions from more than a million to less than 50,000 — but in the mind of pro-choicers the existence of a relatively few exceptional cases justifies unlimited abortion.

Which brings us back around to the ADL’s survey. A certain percentage of people who would agree with the statement about show business being “pretty much run by Jews” are anti-Semites, and these exceptional cases are, to the ADL way of thinking, sufficient to justify the presumption that all who agree with that statement are tainted by anti-Semitism. (And the dangers posed by anti-Semitism are so great that, if you don’t donate generously to the ADL, tomorrow the brownshirts will be goose-stepping down Main Street.)

BTW, Barack Obama hasn’t named a single Jew to his Cabinet. Does that make Obama a Jew-hater? Why are the forces of enlightened tolerance denouncing Kathy Shaidle, when they ought to be watching out for President-Elect Eichmann?

UPDATE: Linked at Dustbury — thanks.

UPDATE II: Sharon at GPWOW:

Often, in my debates with pro-choicers, I am accused of being anti-contraception, anti-woman (indeed, frequently assumed to not be a woman), heartless, stupid and against any possible exceptions for abortion. This isn’t the case; I think contraception is a good thing if you don’t want children, and even though I personally wouldn’t have an abortion for rape or incest (perhaps not even the life-threatening pregnancy), I could allow those exceptions if it meant barring the 97% of abortions done for other reasons.
But this never seems to be enough for the hardliners. Because if you point out where you might agree with them–on contraception, for instance–they will simply keep moving the goalposts. What about the morning after pill? What about babies born to abused women? What about all those babies already born but living in orphanages?

Indeed. It’s like any other argument with a liberal. In The Vision of the Anointed, Thomas Sowell has a chapter called “The Irrelevance of Evidence” that captures this tendency quite concisely. At some point, you realize that you aren’t really arguing about abortion, or education, or immigration, or whatever the issue is supposed to be. Rather, you are arguing against the liberal’s sense of his innate superiority to ordinary people like you. This is a point he will never cede under any circumstance, and therefore argument is useless.

Her Sugar Daddy

Her rich boyfriend pays her rent, lavishes her with gifts, and takes her on luxury vacations. So why isn’t everyone congratulating Melissa Beech on her good fortune?

In a society that long ago discarded the ideal of premarital chastity, youthful fornication has lost its shock power. If Miss Beech were merely sleeping with a college classmate, her behavior would be no different than that of millions of other young women in 21st-century America, and nowadays only the strictest of religious conservatives would condemn it. None of those passing judgment on her, however, speaks the language of sin. Her stone-throwing Pharisees are strictly secular.
Much of the opprobrium heaped on Miss Beech took her to task for failing to live up to the careerist ideals of feminism.

That’s from a column I wrote for Taki’s Magazine. Please read the whole thing.

UPDATE: David Kirkpatrick shares my suspicion that “Melissa Beech” might be doing chick-lit fiction here.

Sarah, Santa and a C-130

The governor and the Alaska National Guard deliver Christmas gifts to a remote village.

Blame Clinton!

The New York Times never met a tax cut it liked — not even one signed into law by Bill Clinton.

Obama’s population bomber

Yuval Levin points out that Barack Obama’s science advisor John Holdren included in a 2007 speech a respectful reference to Paul Ehrlich’s utterly discredited 1968 book The Population Bomb. He might as well have referenced phrenology or necromancy.

The Population Bomb — named one of the worst books of the 20th century by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute — began with one of the most infamously mistaken prophecies ever published:

The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970’s the world will undergo famines — hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now.

Wrong. The mass famines never happened. World population, which was about 3.5 billion when Erhlich wrote that, is now about 6 billion, and humanity has never been more well-fed than it is today. Far from a population “explosion,” what the world now faces — especially in industrialized nations — is a population implosion. In Europe, birth rates in recent decades have been disastrously below what demographers call the replacement rate (2.1 average lifetime births per woman) needed to maintain a stable population size.

Yet many people (Ted Turner notoriously among them), continue to pretend that Ehrlich’s misguided warning that “mankind will breed itself into oblivion” was accurate, and to push programs based on Ehrlich’s 1968 ultimatum:

We can no longer afford merely to treat the symptoms of the cancer of population growth; the cancer itself must be cut out. Population control is the only answer.

To speak of population growth — i.e., people having babies — as a “cancer” reflects an almost genocidal misanthropy. That Obama would choose as his science adviser Holdren, a believer in such malevolent hokum, is a disgrace.

UPDATE: Via Memeorandum and Ross Douthat, I learn that I’m arriving a little late to this dance. John Tierney is all over the Holdren appointment, revealing that Obama’s advisor was one of the “experts” consulted by Ehrlich in his ill-advised bet with the late Julian Simon. Reason magazine’s Ron Bailey has even more on the consistently wrong Dr. Holdren.

One global-warming fanatic recognizes Holdren as a kindred spirit: “Obama is dead serious about the strongest possible action on global warming.”

I hate to pick a fight with the Obama administration over science. After all, I’m hoping to get federal funding for my own research.

UPDATE II: Obama makes it official. And in his radio address, he declares:

“Today, more than ever before, science holds the key to our survival as a planet and our security and prosperity as a nation. . . . It’s time we once again put science at the top of our agenda and worked to restore America’s place as the world leader in science and technology.”

This eye-rolling is giving me a headache.

Here’s video of Obama’s speech:

Homophobia is the new Jim Crow?

That’s what this Time magazine columnist seems to be saying, comparing Rick Warren to the late Georgia Sen. Richard B. Russell.

Since when did Time magazine become part of the left-wing blogosphere? I mean, I remember being a kid and reading Time magazine, and it was a very respectable sort of publication. Now it reads like Firedoglake or something.

Duggars get baby No. 18!

And, proud papa Jim Duggar tells a reporter, they’d love to go for No. 19! Man, these guys make me feel like a piker for stopping at six . . .

Sarah: Don’t do it

Don’t let anyone — not even Allahpundit — talk you into running for the Senate. I don’t care what the polls say. Being governor is better than being a senator. This past campaign, with three senators (Obama, Hillary and Crazy Cousin John) in the running, was an exception that proves the rule.

The people urging you to run for the Senate are doing so because they don’t want you to run for president in 2012. Since I do want you to run for president in 2012, I say skip the Senate race.

Read my lips: No more Bushes.

California, R.I.P.

California now has the third-highest unemployment rate in the nation. Once the land of opportunity, the former Golden State has been strangled by liberalism.