Wednesday, March 15, 2017

Rush Limbaugh on Intersectionality

Winter storm Stella was not so stellar. Here in the Big Apple everyone was hunkered down awaiting the winter storm to end all winter storms. I had recalled previous predictions of massive storms that had not happened, so I was skeptical. There’s nothing wrong with being prepared. There’s something wrong with going crazy preparing.

From his perch in Palm Beach Rush Limbaugh offered a few salient comments about it all. A culture that wants us all to become victims—all of us, that is, except for straight white males—is making us weak and dependent. As soon as we are persuaded that we are powerless to effect any outcome in our lives we become more needy and more anxious about whether or not government will bail us out.

Rush stated it thusly:

My point is, whether it’s the snowflakes who are afraid of whatever they hear they disagree with, or people afraid of a weather forecast, literally afraid of a weather forecast, or afraid that government won’t do something to protect them, we’ve created a culture of crisis and fear. And many people believe that they’re not gonna be able to navigate life without government helping them because everybody seems so willing to accept victim status.

Truth be told, there was a paucity of snowflakes in New York yesterday. Perhaps this will make some people skeptical about the dire predictions of civilizational apocalypse coming to us from the environmentalist left. Perhaps it will cause some people to doubt the ability of climate scientists to predict the future. Probably, it will not. It’s called being impervious to facts.

Anyway, Rush points out the obvious:

One hundred million people have been killed by radical, socialist regimes and governments in the history of the world. Climate change hasn’t killed anybody yet, although, have you seen this horrible story in Ethiopia? I’m not making this up. The poverty in Ethiopia is so bad that people don’t dumpster dive; they dive for remnants of food in giant landfills. And there an avalanche of landfill garbage sludge, and people died in it as they were looking for just morsels of food in Ethiopia, in Africa.

And Ethiopia’s economy is said by the Drive-Bys to be burgeoning and growing as Ethiopia seeks to become a regional power. You couldn’t even say that global warming killed those people. Global warming hasn’t killed anybody. It hasn’t killed any polar bears. It hasn’t killed any penguins or any of that. But man, oh, man, are we afraid. College students are afraid of anything that they don’t agree with.

Rush also takes out after the intersectionality crown, the one I wrote about a couple of days ago. He echoes the point, made by William Deresiewicz, Andrew Sullivan and yours truly… namely that political correctness is a religion. And he adds, that once a belief system becomes a religion, it does not deal with facts. It does not lend itself to proof, but only to faith.

In his words:

Because when something becomes a religion, it requires no evidence, it requires no proof, it requires nothing but faith. And therefore you cannot disprove it to the faithful, no matter what you do. And this is a strain of liberalism that is radical, and it’s infected many campuses all across the country.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

No doubt the college snowflakes think themselves "Spiritual, but not religious."

James said...

In this last paragraph "Because when something becomes a religion, it requires no evidence, it requires no proof, it requires nothing but faith. And therefore you cannot disprove it to the faithful, no matter what you do. And this is a strain of liberalism that is radical, and it’s infected many campuses all across the country." Rush is exactly right.
I'll go again about the Catholic Church and this subject some more. Back around 1100 to 1500 it was really bad in that you had power invested in the State/Church all wrapped up in one (along with the masses who very much less educated and informed than they are today), with one supporting the other overtly and covertly. Challenge one and you challenged both, which put you in danger in this world AND the next one which included eternity (which was considered a long time). Challenge the earthly power and they responded if necessary my "right comes from god" and the Church would back them up because they knew the unknowable because of "faith" of course the right kind of faith, their faith. A pretty neat trick and the powers that be today are nudging us along to that place.
The problem with being the last word on "faith" and the "unknowable" is that you are easily tripped up on emerging contradictions. An example, the Church stated that no one could go to heaven and see god unless he acknowledged JC as his saviour. Well a lot of people said wait a minute what about Moses, Bhudda, and a lot of others who lead sinless lives who don't say that or never even knew of JC, does that mean they go to hell? Because you're saying there are only two end points, heaven or hell and you've set the criteria for getting into heaven. Well finally the Church addressed this with the creation of "Limbo" where the sinless but non christians had to wait until the second coming before getting their ticket punched. Unfortunately this led to unforeseen things (peculiar Caribbean dancing, Rastafarianism, etc) and was just generally a theologically and logically clunky solution, at the second Vatican council I think they decided to let everyone in. I know this from being an ex altar boy and it's early morning a good time to be philosophical.

Ares Olympus said...

Stuart: Perhaps this will make some people skeptical about the dire predictions of civilizational apocalypse coming to us from the environmentalist left. Perhaps it will cause some people to doubt the ability of climate scientists to predict the future. Probably, it will not. It’s called being impervious to facts.

The same argument can be made about a lot of things that have a probabilistic nature, and unknowns we can't discover without waiting for things we may not be able to handle.

And that is the whole problem with predicting the future in anything. If there unlimited potential threats with various degrees of uncertainty.

The suspect part of the denial stance (the other place where people can be impervious to facts, which is easy when the future doesn't yet exist) is that if the COST changing our behavior was low, we're willing to do our part, but if the costs are high and the uncertainty of exact outcomes are high, its much easier to put your head in the sand and double-down on whatever worked in the past.

Myself, I prefer the "inherited wealth" model for fossil fuels. Whether or not burning 100 million years of carbon from stored fossil fuels in 100 years will cause catastrophic climate change in another 100 years, the reality is we can only burn it once, and we have no technology to remove the carbon if its a problem, or not without taking more energy than the fossil fuels had in the first place.

Like if you have a bank account with an inheritance you got from your ancestors, and you're draining it at a depletion rate of 10% per year, and your consumption is rising 20% per year, you can plug those numbers into a spreadsheet and figure out when your one-time inheritance will be spent, and you can decide if you care if your children need any of it, or if you're going to leave them nothing when you die.

Of course we can try to spend some of our energy searching for new one-time resources to exploit, but that success does nothing to change the fact we're still spending down something we can't get back, and we're still spending more each year. And since the easiest one-time resources are taken first, we're forcing the future to always do something harder than we're willing to do.

So a person can say "We can't predict the future but experience shows us miracle will happen because they always have." so let's just keep doubling out bets on new miracles.

And you don't need to be "impervious to facts" to have such confidence. You just need to be desperate and lazy and complain that anyone who doesn't believe miracles solve all problems is just being a doubting Thomas or a know-it-all who is trying to spoil your good mood.

Anonymous said...

Rush Limbaugh is for inter-gluttonality. He will eat anything.