UPDATE: The battle of the Yes on 8 sign continues unabated at our local elementary school. The last one I put up (the third replacement I put up, to replace one someone ELSE had first installed, in a public area with many political signs) was defaced by having the YES torn out, and the word NO put on with a marker. I left it there, as was; it seemed a good way to illustrate to passersby that those demanding tolerance were the most intolerant of all. This morning, when I took my daughter to school, someone had replaced that sign with a fresh, new YES on 8 sign. I smiled, knowing there was a fellow traveler out there somewhere. But when I picked up my daughter today, that new sign had been completely stolen. NO other signs in that area are touched, ONLY the YES on 8 sign. The lesson is clear, isn’t it?
PREVIOUS POST: Earlier, I reported on all the Yes on Prop 8 signs that are being stolen and defaced. (More at the link.)
When I came back, the sign I put on the corner of my property was gone, again. I will never, never let any person from the Left tell me about how the Left is about tolerance of diverse viewpoints. I have observed many instances of the Left shouting down the (very) rare speaker from the Right on college campuses, while the reverse virtually never occurs. This is my first experience with it happening on my own property, and in my own relatively rural community, however. Bottom line: the Left is about shutting up the opposition, not merely about winning the argument. The Left is not in favor of diversity, the Left uses diversity-speak as a tool, plain and simple. Pay attention. You will hear this material again.
Since that post, I’ve put up several signs, and had them stolen or vandalized (sometimes they just rip out the YES, and scribble NO on it), both off my own property and on public property where other political signs are left alone. Uniquely, I have not heard of or noticed any missing or defaced signs for candidates, just Yes on Prop 8 signs.
Here’s my latest attempt on my own lot:
This is the corner of my 5 acre property. I added the additional sign “My Land, My Sign, Hands Off!!” just in case some Lefty miscreant thinks that it’s public property and so he can do what he wants to my sign…. Not that I expect it to do any good. But you do what you can.
So, I’m taking bets: this sign went up today at noon. How long will it last?
And I have quite a bit more information now, enough to know that “NO on 8” signs in my community are being left alone, and no candidate signs are being touched… it seems to be ONLY Yes on 8 signs. So none of this “moral equivalence” nonsense, please. Everybody isn’t doing it. It’s the Left, period, around here, and apparently statewide, from all reports.
October 30th, 2008 9:19 pm
the left also claims to be more “tolerant” in general. And of course the media doesn’t cover this either, because the media is so left and liberal now that it is completely unobjective in the sense that news is now no longer news but an indoctrination of the masses since people refuse to do research on their own.
November 3rd, 2008 5:00 pm
Here’s an example of both kinds of signs getting stolen.
http://www.ocregister.com/articles/signs-sign-ban-2197356-vandalism-people
November 3rd, 2008 5:12 pm
Distinction: when anyone steals signs or commits vandalism, on either side, the huge majority on the Right would consider it a sin, not defensible on any grounds. On the other hand, the Left has a great many people who don’t really believe in “right and wrong” as such (except for not being diverse and driving an SUV, of course). Opponents of Prop 8 are far more likely to be people who “wink and nod” at theft/vandalism of YES on 8 signs.
The Left will deny this, of course, for public consumption.
But see my post earlier on “Violently non-violent”. It’s SO typical, and this guy is a theology professor, for, uh, “gosh” sake.
November 4th, 2008 10:46 am
Be careful! Save our Churches and vote NO on proposition 8! It’s OK to vote NO on 8
November 4th, 2008 3:30 pm
“On the other hand, the Left has a great many people who don’t really believe in “right and wrong†as such (except for not being diverse and driving an SUV, of course).”
So you are merely suggesting that other people have different definitions of right and wrong than you do…or at least that they place more emphasis on certain rights and certain wrongs than you do.
Blaming the stealing of signs on some amorphous “Left” is a little bit of a gross generalization, don’t you think? People who feel threatened do strange things, sometimes (I’ve been told in unequivical terms that if I believe in the Bible, then I WILL vote yes on 8. Really? It’s that simple?). People on both sides of the issue feel threatened. It will be interesting to see how it plays out today…
November 4th, 2008 4:45 pm
Prop 8 is such a no brainer that even non-Christians get it. A person who has actually read the Bible and still doesn’t get it is reading through very strange colored lenses. There seem to be a number of ‘Christians’ wearing those lenses these days.
November 4th, 2008 5:25 pm
Mr. Hamm: you’re simply laughable. Or maybe just hysterical.
Hello: it’s pretty simple. The Left is populated by a large majority of people who really don’t believe in “absolutes”. Post-modernism reigns. Very, very, little is absolutely a sin in any circumstance, in the world of the Left, except maybe self-defense, failure to recycle, failure to support affirmative action quotas, and failure to believe in the neo-Darwinian synthesis as the only possible explanation for the how bacteria led to Einstein.
You say you don’t know this? Read more. What I said is true of the secular Left AND the religious Left, as stated by their own leaders, from mainline protestant clergy to emerging church authors to more recent neo-atheist scientists and journalists.
I truly wish this was not true. But it is, and that’s why it really isn’t profitable to have much of a conversation with committed Lefties. On the other hand, there are a great many people who mean well, but just haven’t completely thought through the issues, and are perhaps unaware of the origins of ideas, with whom it is profitable to dialog. Sadly, there’s sometimes no easy way to tell which is which until you TRY to have the conversation, and see what kind of responses you get.
November 5th, 2008 11:56 pm
Amen and FM (as my friend, and APU alum Martha, used to say)
November 6th, 2008 10:27 am
Here’s maybe another perspective for you, harmomicminer.
The Right is populated by a large majority of people who are convinced that their view of the world is the only correct view of the world. Modernism reigns. Very, very, little is up for debate in any circumstance, in the world of the Right, except small nuances to their beliefs.
I truly wish this was not true. But it is, and that’s why it usually isn’t profitable to have much of a conversation with committed Righties. On the other hand, there are a great many people who mean well, but just haven’t completely thought through the issues, and are perhaps unaware of the origins of ideas, with whom it is profitable to dialog. Sadly, there’s sometimes no easy way to tell which is which until you TRY to have the conversation, and see what kind of responses you get.
November 6th, 2008 11:07 am
You miss the point, Hello. Lefties don’t believe there IS such a thing as “a correct view of the world”. In fact, they don’t really think there are objective criteria by which various views of the world can be judged. Hence diversity, multi-culturalism, moral equivalence between Christian fundamentalists and Islamic terrorists, etc. Not only that; they don’t really believe there is such a thing as a “correct view” of anything. Because nothing really exists independently of interpretation, context, power relationships, who wins and loses if the idea is true, etc. To Lefties, there really is no such thing as “human nature”, which is thought to be endlessly plastic, or “natural law”, which is just a set of agreed upon assumptions with no bearing in reality, and always up for revision.
And that’s why you’re little attempt at mirroring my comment fails.
The Left doesn’t just think “other views might be correct”, it doesn’t think there IS such a thing as one view clearly being better than another, by any objective standard, or moral principle, or reference to natural law or human nature.
Your attribution to “modernism” of solid belief in the correctness of a belief or concept is laughable. Ever heard of, oh, the Apostle Paul? Plato? Augustine? Acquinas?
November 6th, 2008 11:26 am
Of course, our interpretation of Paul, Aquinas, and the rest all depend on the lense we use to read these people, doesn’t it?
You seem worried about post-modernism and some kind of post-modern/Leftist agenda. You should read “Who’s Afraid of Post-Modernism?” by James K.A. Smith. I think it came out in 2005 or thereabouts. It’s a fairly short book, but it does a good job showing how we might be throwing out the baby with the bathwater if we wholesale reject post-modernism.
I would like to point out that your automatic association with “Lefties” (whatever those are. I suspect you are using the word in the same way that you might use, “people that I don’t like and think are stupid’) with a radically nihilist perspective of the world. The version of post-modernism that you are describing is extremely radical. You are right, post-modernists tend to be uncomfortable with the idea of objectivity, but that is because they have deconstructed the idea and have found that what we often call ‘objective’ still is not truly objective. In a sense, post-modernists take objectivity more seriously than people who are not. Post-modernists are the first to admit that they are not objective, that they have biases, and so does everyone else. The thing that people who are not post-modernists don’t understand is that for these people, the fact that they are not objective (and never will be) is actually quite freeing. They admit that there truly is “no view from nowhere”, and that everything is conditioned by the lense we view it with. Is that ok? Some say it is not, but I would submit to you that we can still know lots of good things even after admitting that we are not and will never be objective on anything.
“The Left doesn’t just think “other views might be correctâ€, it doesn’t think there IS such a thing as one view clearly being better than another, by any objective standard, or moral principle, or reference to natural law or human nature.”
You’re inference here, I take it, is that this is a bad thing. But I’m telling you that it doesn’t have to be! The suspicion against meta-narratives means that each narrative can be compared to others, and each is free to accept or reject these narratives. So, the evangelistic message changes from, “Don’t you see this is correct? If not, something is wrong with your common sense” to “Here is this version of reality. Does it make sense to you? Why or why not? What other things make more sense to you, and why?” There is more of a conversational approach, and one need not get caught up in arguments over “objectively” held dogma. Wow, I thought I’d had my final discussion on post-modernism about 4 years ago. I guess I was wrong. 🙂
November 6th, 2008 11:52 am
Hello Hello,
I’ll let readers parse. I think post-modernism isn’t sufficient to explain its own existence.
BTW… I LIVE in the academic community, and I hear all this kind of prattle all the time.
I’ve recommended this book before:
A Conflict of Visions by Thomas Sowell
Check it out. It’s much deeper than any “can’t we all be friends” kind of post-modernist apologetic, including the one you recommend, which I’ve read, and found woefully incomplete for its failure to account for human nature, a real thing, and the moral law, also a real thing.
This line is really funny:
By definition, this is no such thing as a “final discussion” on post-modernism, and according to post-modernism, the jury will be out on post-modernism FOREVER, because nothing is final, ever, in post-modernism, since someone else may have another “narrative”.
I note that you seem singularly uninterested in really following through to the logical necessities of MY narrative.
I have never seen post-modernism be used in any other way than as an apologetic for the Left. Can you state a counter example? How about 10? I have about a million examples on my side….
November 6th, 2008 4:02 pm
It originally started because people thought that the way of thinking about the world that they were presented with was lacking, not because they wanted to bother conservatives. I still really have no idea who you think the “Left” is, because I’m seeing you use the term in ways I am not familiar with. Like I said, it seems to me that you use the term to simply refer to people that you don’t like.
By my comment about the ‘final discussion’, i was simply remembering back to a few years ago when virtually every discussion I had seemed to be about post-modernism, and how it was going to ruin the world and would cause everyone to kill each other, or worse, become gay. I’ve been glad to not talk too much about it recently, but here I go again.
Post-modernism is a study in the problem of language and perception. I think this discussion (or whatever this is) is a good example of that.
November 6th, 2008 4:35 pm
Hello, are you really pretending not to know what “the Left” is? I use it in the absolutely standard way. If you don’t know, read this and this and this and this.
If you still don’t have it figured after that, we can talk. The wiki source is neutral. The next two books are by people from the Right. They are, however, both very well researched and quite scholarly. And I suspect you will recognize all the players. The last book is neutral.
If you come out of it without an adequate understanding of the differences between the French Revolution and the American one, or the distinction between people who think human nature is endlessly plastic and society totally moldable, and people who think there are certain intractable characteristics of human nature and natural law, then I’m not sure what to say.