root causes

A Bobby Jindal Critic Asks, “Would I Be Uncivil If I Were To Suggest That Somebody Punch This Man Right In His Dick?” Why Yes, I Believe You Would…

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments
By all means, this should be our model for political discourse...

By all means, this should be our model for political discourse…

Gov. Bobby Jindal, desperately trying to stay relevant in the Republican race to be the party nominee in 2016, weighed in on the Oregon community college shooting with an extensive blog post that shows, if nothing else, that the Fifties live. It’s pretty awful, designating as “root causes” of the violence such Oldies but Stupidees as “glorifying violence” in popular culture (Actually, this one is closer  to 1650), movies, TV shows, music (Run, Tipper! This is your chance!) the decline of religion ( “…we flaunt the laws of God and common decency”—I think you mean “flout” there, Bobby), the decline of the family…you know the list. The problem with Jindal’s rant—other than its exaggerations, poor writing and hysterical tone— is that taking any single event and attributing it to generic causes is demagoguery, and as intellectually dishonest as  blaming the NRA every time someone is murdered with a gun.

The Huffington Post, mocking Jindal’s eminently mockable screed, asked “What about gun violence?” as if Jindal left out the one obvious “root cause.” Is it really necessary to point out that gun violence is responsible for gun violence? But that’s anti-gun code for guns, you see. Guns are responsible for the shootings. Take the evil guns away, and nobody dies! That this facile and deceitful dead end reasoning is so accepted among progressives and liberals that it is considered an obvious truth is depressing, but I digress.

Jindal is also depressing, since the only remedy for violent movies, TV shows and video games is censorship of one kind or another, and you know what the Right will do if it gets that started: TV couples will again be sleeping in twin beds like Rob and Laura Petrie by edict. His lack of logic is depressing too—how does someone like this get elected a governor?—when he attributes alleged conditions like “the family is a mess” to a rampage by someone who might have been raised like Opie Taylor but whose mind just snapped, as they have a tendency to do. Again, a single incident has specific causes. Jindal’s main argument is exactly as exploitative and dishonest as using the Oregon shooting to lobby for gun regulations that wouldn’t have stopped the shooting. Continue reading →

Ethics Quiz: What Rationalization Is This?

/ Jack Marshall / 25 Comments
A gang of Washington, D.C. rocks, plotting an attack on city buses.

A gang of Washington, D.C. rocks, plotting an attack on city buses.

If living near the District of Columbia doesn’t transform you into a right-wing nut, it’s probably because you quickly learned not to read the columns in the Washington Post Metro Section. There refugees from the darkest, looniest corners of the Sixties have held sway for about fifty years, making illogical, emotional, angry and reliably leftist arguments, often in semi-literate form. The Post obviously believes, with good reason, that these would embarrass the paper if they were allowed to invade the Op-Ed Page, so they are buried in the middle of the paper.

The Post has a passel  of these writers, who only occasionally venture into the land of the fair and reasonable. About 30% of the time, their creative output is devoted to race-baiting. I decided decades ago that my sanity and political equilibrium depended on my ignoring these daily sanity-bombs, way back in the days when a community-revered wacko named Dorothy Gilliam regularly defied logic in her 700 word rants. I now only learn about the most absurd of these columns only when a Post letter-writer flags one of them as particularly mind-blowing.

Coutland Milloy has been the main offender on the Post’s Metro page since Gilliam retired to the Big Angry Leftist Padded Room in the Sky, and he was in top form last week, when he addressed the recent problem of city buses being pelted with stones in some of the poorer areas in D.C. Read his piece if you dare: his basic premise was that it is significant that at a public hearing about the problem, nobody “spoke up for the kids” or discussed “why” the rocks were being thrown. You don’t really have to read the essay to guess its larger thesis: the areas are poor, city resources are misaligned, gentrification is breaking up neighborhoods, kids are frustrated, so it’s not the kids fault that they are attacking Metro buses. In the printed version of the Post, his column was titled “Don’t Pin the Rock Problem On The Kids.” Continue reading →