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I've been neglecting George Will for quite a time now, but will give a quick run through his most recent Last Word column in Newsweek: "2008: Rod, Eliot, Yuck."
Will, second para.: If you pay taxes, you'll "probably" have bought a used car company, in effect.
This seems to be putting down the bailout-ish action the government has/will take re the Big Three auto companies. The use of "probably" means what he wrote is at least somewhat unlikely, making it a straw-man argument. Also, if you make what most people do, what you pay in taxes couldn't get you a dealership anyway.
Will: "Cuba being politically primitive..." Primitive as shown by its universal health care system, by a population that has a longer life expectancy than the US's, by having higher literacy rates than in the US, by its surveillance of whoever it wants to watch and/or listen to, by its use of torture (as performed in its US-held Guantanamo Bay), by its government that appoints whoever it wants for political reasons.
That last gets to Will's ill-considered point: Castro ceded power to his brother. Cuba is Communist. The person who will take over H. Clinton's Senate seat will be appointed for political reasons as well. Sarcastically, Will says the latter will happen "because this is a democracy."
The US is a Republic. The Pledge of Allegiance goes something like this "...and to the republic for which it [the flag] stands: One nation, under God..." Fitting that "under God" was added to the Pledge in 1954 because America is not a nation of godless Commies and, seen above, behaves nothing like them.
Then a litany of news items, the likes of which Conservatives love, and which make them angry. Nine out of ten of these items involve small towns, extremely few people, and whatever "wrong" (according to Conservatives) committed, having been either completely fabricated, embellished, or an embellished fabrication. Plus, the "wrongs" committed, nine of ten times, have been rectified by the time a Conservative writes about it. (When this last bit is mentioned to one he/she insists these news items are emblematic of what is happening everywhere.)
What's worst about Will wasting space with non-news in this particular column is that he cares about them, and writes about them at a time when our nation is fighting multiple wars and in its next Great Depression.
Example: In Hayward, California, "a teacher asked her kindergartners to sign cards pledging 'not to use anti-LGBT [lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered] language or slurs'"
Asked. The kids weren't even forced.
Will gives no context regarding this incident. Readers are obviously supposed to be enraged, no matter the circumstances, that children had been asked to be nice to people who are LGBT.
I bet the teacher (should she actually exist and have done what she did) would even want her kids not to use slurs against an animatronic, homophobic colostomy bag, like Will, that looks human enough on television (though stops seeming so once he speaks).
Near the end of the column, Will mentions a court ruling and, in that context, writes that the slave trade interfered with God's plan.
Which likely means Will is yet another Christian who hasn't read the Bible. Slavery is endorsed by God. God personally, in his own voice, gives his people at least one hundred laws pertaining to slavery. God micromanaged the institution of slavery.
Earlier in this column, Will mentions that Californians (with a push from a biblical flood of cash from Mormons who don't live there) "voted to define marriage as between a man and a woman."
George: Get the Bible on tape. Have an intern read it to you. Get a vague sense for your religion.
Religion is between one man and as many wives as he can afford. California's law is an abomination.
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Showing posts with label george will. Show all posts
Showing posts with label george will. Show all posts
Thursday, December 25, 2008
Wednesday, December 3, 2008
George Will: un-smart. (Edition 2)
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This post discusses Will's column "Free Ride for the Campus Left."
Will, like all good conservatives, hates higher education -- colleges, universities and the like.
And, like the majority of education-loathing conservatives, Will spent a lot of time becoming educated at the places he hates. He also spent a lot of time teaching at such places -- including Harvard, which Will cannot deride enough.
To wit: "Will graduated from University Laboratory High School of Urbana, Illinois, and attended Trinity College, in Hartford, Connecticut (B.A.). He subsequently read PPE at Magdalen College, University of Oxford (B.A., M.A.), and received M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in politics from Princeton University. His 1968 Ph.D. dissertation was entitled Beyond the Reach of Majorities: Closed Questions in the Open Society.
"Will then taught political philosophy at the James Madison College of Michigan State University, and at the University of Toronto. He taught at Harvard University in 1995 and again in 1998."
Will is a damned hypocrite. Like the vast majority of education-hating conservatives.
Also, Will may have daddy-issues, since his father was a professor of philosophy at the university of Illinois. Father Will specialized in epistemology, which "primarily addresses the following questions: 'What is knowledge?', 'How is knowledge acquired?', 'What do people know?', 'How do we know what we know?'" (Wikipedia)
Will's body of work strongly suggests his answers to these questions are: Knowledge is what is espoused in conservative talking points, is acquired through reading them, and that we know what we know through having read these talking points.
On to a few choice cuts of this column:
"Fish's advocacy of a banal proscription -- of explicit political preaching in classrooms -- may have made him anathema to academia's infantile left."
It is infantile to use unsupported ad hominem attacks.
Quoting Fish, Will writes: "'the fact of a predominantly liberal faculty says nothing necessarily about what the faculty teaches.' Note Fish's obfuscating 'necessarily.'"
Note that Fish is correct. How many university faculty are members of certain religions, agnostics, or atheists? Do they teach their religion (or lack thereof), even in religion classes? Et cetera.
Will writes: "Genuflecting before today's academic altar, [Fish] asserts what no one denies: Race and gender are 'worthy of serious study.'"
Which is odd, because just before writing that sentence, Will wrote of "the proliferation of race and gender courses, programs and even departments..."
He went on to assert that "the political nature of such curricula [race and gender studies] is why they often are set apart from established, and more academically rigorous, departments of sociology, history, etc."
Note the use of the loaded term "proliferation." What modern reader can imagine this term without also imagining nuclear non-proliferation efforts? Google "proliferation" and six of the first ten results have to do with keeping dangerous weapons from becoming more widespread.
And Will flat-out states that race and gender studies lack academic rigor.
The sum of these parts equal Will stating: Race and gender studies departments and courses grow and spread like nuclear weapons and are unimportant when compared to other topics.
Having stated the above -- his true feelings -- he feebly semi-disowns them by writing the opposite: that race and gender studies are important. So important that no one would deny the fact that they are.
Even if they just have, I suppose.
Will ends with: "People who tell you they are brave usually are not."
And people who tell you bullshit for a living usually are un-smart.
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This post discusses Will's column "Free Ride for the Campus Left."
Will, like all good conservatives, hates higher education -- colleges, universities and the like.
And, like the majority of education-loathing conservatives, Will spent a lot of time becoming educated at the places he hates. He also spent a lot of time teaching at such places -- including Harvard, which Will cannot deride enough.
To wit: "Will graduated from University Laboratory High School of Urbana, Illinois, and attended Trinity College, in Hartford, Connecticut (B.A.). He subsequently read PPE at Magdalen College, University of Oxford (B.A., M.A.), and received M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in politics from Princeton University. His 1968 Ph.D. dissertation was entitled Beyond the Reach of Majorities: Closed Questions in the Open Society.
"Will then taught political philosophy at the James Madison College of Michigan State University, and at the University of Toronto. He taught at Harvard University in 1995 and again in 1998."
Will is a damned hypocrite. Like the vast majority of education-hating conservatives.
Also, Will may have daddy-issues, since his father was a professor of philosophy at the university of Illinois. Father Will specialized in epistemology, which "primarily addresses the following questions: 'What is knowledge?', 'How is knowledge acquired?', 'What do people know?', 'How do we know what we know?'" (Wikipedia)
Will's body of work strongly suggests his answers to these questions are: Knowledge is what is espoused in conservative talking points, is acquired through reading them, and that we know what we know through having read these talking points.
On to a few choice cuts of this column:
"Fish's advocacy of a banal proscription -- of explicit political preaching in classrooms -- may have made him anathema to academia's infantile left."
It is infantile to use unsupported ad hominem attacks.
Quoting Fish, Will writes: "'the fact of a predominantly liberal faculty says nothing necessarily about what the faculty teaches.' Note Fish's obfuscating 'necessarily.'"
Note that Fish is correct. How many university faculty are members of certain religions, agnostics, or atheists? Do they teach their religion (or lack thereof), even in religion classes? Et cetera.
Will writes: "Genuflecting before today's academic altar, [Fish] asserts what no one denies: Race and gender are 'worthy of serious study.'"
Which is odd, because just before writing that sentence, Will wrote of "the proliferation of race and gender courses, programs and even departments..."
He went on to assert that "the political nature of such curricula [race and gender studies] is why they often are set apart from established, and more academically rigorous, departments of sociology, history, etc."
Note the use of the loaded term "proliferation." What modern reader can imagine this term without also imagining nuclear non-proliferation efforts? Google "proliferation" and six of the first ten results have to do with keeping dangerous weapons from becoming more widespread.
And Will flat-out states that race and gender studies lack academic rigor.
The sum of these parts equal Will stating: Race and gender studies departments and courses grow and spread like nuclear weapons and are unimportant when compared to other topics.
Having stated the above -- his true feelings -- he feebly semi-disowns them by writing the opposite: that race and gender studies are important. So important that no one would deny the fact that they are.
Even if they just have, I suppose.
Will ends with: "People who tell you they are brave usually are not."
And people who tell you bullshit for a living usually are un-smart.
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Tuesday, November 25, 2008
George Will: un-smart. (Edition 1)
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(This is the first post in a series that will deal with the writings and general thoughts George Will is un-smart enough to make public.)
Re: Newsweek's "Last Word," December 1, 2008 edition:
Will states that "the doctrine of 'nondelegation'"... is "a necessary concomitant of the Constitution's separation of powers, [and] usually concerns improper delegation of legislative powers to the executive branch."
Yet Will did not, and does not, believe nondelegation to be important concerning the "improper delegation of legislative powers to the executive branch." He has never had a problem with what has come to be called W.'s Imperial Presidency.
Will only is concerned with the unconstitutionality of the recent bailouts, and supports his view with an idea he lauds in this instance, and shuns in most others.
Onward: TARP "has made Treasury Department bureaucrats into legislators; or perhaps it has made Secretary Hank Paulson the fourth branch of government."
No. Congress still is the only branch of government that can create and pass legislation, even if it is the kind of legislation Paulson and the Treasury explicitly desired.
And the bailout measure was full of enticements that bought representatives' pro-votes.
These weren't in Paulson's plan. They got there because the bailout had to go through Congress' colon.
So I'm still only counting three branches of government.
Will spouts nonsense for a bit, then this: "Socialism is not merely susceptible to corruption; it is corruption—the allocation of wealth and opportunity by political favoritism. Under democratic socialism, such favoritism is then rewarded by financial support, by those favored, of the dispensers of favors."
Will's point must be that W. ran a socialist regime. W. made his friends and supporters rich and filled his government with them, from Heckuva Job Brownie to Halliburton to giving any and every government job to Republicans (being a Repub. was a prerequisite for service, with Dems being weeded out by design in application processes).
The column's second-to-last paragraph is this:
"It serves the left's agenda of expanding the scope of politics by multiplying the forms of dependency on government. Hence liberalism's enthusiasm for enriching the menu of entitlements; hence liberalism's promotion of equality by making more groups and entities equally dependent on government."
All of this is opinion (fine in an opinion piece) unsubstantiated by any facts. It's simply the warped way Will views "liberalism."
Liberalism is (m-w.com):
1: the quality or state of being liberal2 aoften capitalized : a movement in modern Protestantism emphasizing intellectual liberty and the spiritual and ethical content of Christianity b: a theory in economics emphasizing individual freedom from restraint and usually based on free competition, the self-regulating market, and the gold standard c: a political philosophy based on belief in progress, the essential goodness of the human race, and the autonomy of the individual and standing for the protection of political and civil liberties d: capitalized: the principles and policies of a Liberal party.
And Will believes liberalism to be self-evidently evil.
Which allows one to argue rather easily that Will, rather, is evil. And also shows that he doesn't have a proper conception of what he writes about (since he believes the US is a Christian nation and loves nothing more than to profess his adoration for individual freedom, free competition, and especially the self-regulating market).
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(This is the first post in a series that will deal with the writings and general thoughts George Will is un-smart enough to make public.)
Re: Newsweek's "Last Word," December 1, 2008 edition:
Will states that "the doctrine of 'nondelegation'"... is "a necessary concomitant of the Constitution's separation of powers, [and] usually concerns improper delegation of legislative powers to the executive branch."
Yet Will did not, and does not, believe nondelegation to be important concerning the "improper delegation of legislative powers to the executive branch." He has never had a problem with what has come to be called W.'s Imperial Presidency.
Will only is concerned with the unconstitutionality of the recent bailouts, and supports his view with an idea he lauds in this instance, and shuns in most others.
Onward: TARP "has made Treasury Department bureaucrats into legislators; or perhaps it has made Secretary Hank Paulson the fourth branch of government."
No. Congress still is the only branch of government that can create and pass legislation, even if it is the kind of legislation Paulson and the Treasury explicitly desired.
And the bailout measure was full of enticements that bought representatives' pro-votes.
These weren't in Paulson's plan. They got there because the bailout had to go through Congress' colon.
So I'm still only counting three branches of government.
Will spouts nonsense for a bit, then this: "Socialism is not merely susceptible to corruption; it is corruption—the allocation of wealth and opportunity by political favoritism. Under democratic socialism, such favoritism is then rewarded by financial support, by those favored, of the dispensers of favors."
Will's point must be that W. ran a socialist regime. W. made his friends and supporters rich and filled his government with them, from Heckuva Job Brownie to Halliburton to giving any and every government job to Republicans (being a Repub. was a prerequisite for service, with Dems being weeded out by design in application processes).
The column's second-to-last paragraph is this:
"It serves the left's agenda of expanding the scope of politics by multiplying the forms of dependency on government. Hence liberalism's enthusiasm for enriching the menu of entitlements; hence liberalism's promotion of equality by making more groups and entities equally dependent on government."
All of this is opinion (fine in an opinion piece) unsubstantiated by any facts. It's simply the warped way Will views "liberalism."
Liberalism is (m-w.com):
1: the quality or state of being liberal2 aoften capitalized : a movement in modern Protestantism emphasizing intellectual liberty and the spiritual and ethical content of Christianity b: a theory in economics emphasizing individual freedom from restraint and usually based on free competition, the self-regulating market, and the gold standard c: a political philosophy based on belief in progress, the essential goodness of the human race, and the autonomy of the individual and standing for the protection of political and civil liberties d: capitalized: the principles and policies of a Liberal party.
And Will believes liberalism to be self-evidently evil.
Which allows one to argue rather easily that Will, rather, is evil. And also shows that he doesn't have a proper conception of what he writes about (since he believes the US is a Christian nation and loves nothing more than to profess his adoration for individual freedom, free competition, and especially the self-regulating market).
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