Big Sky Cairn

MtPolitics found this. It’s disturbing - especially since these are the enlightened scholars that the Left would love to put in charge of our public and social policy. One of their main points seems to be that only people afflicted with some sort of disease called Whiteness can be racist - which makes me wonder. Exactly how much whiteness does one have to possess before they cross that threshold. Say someone’s 1/16 white - are they safe? What about 1/8? What’s the threshold here? And if we’re really interested in stamping out racism, wouldn’t it make sense to register anyone over that threshold? We can put them in sensitivity camps starting with Fort Missoula (it’s worked before!) - although my guess is for the sake of eliminating racism we’ll just have to kill them.

Anyway, Craig also found this interesting combo:

*38. Racism — A system of privilege based on race**.
**34. Race — An ever evolving [sic] social, legal and political construct that has no basis in biological fact.***

***You can’t make this [sic] up.

So racism is thus defined as

“A system of privilege based on an ever evolving [sic] social, legal and political construct that has no basis in biological fact.”

Our scholarly friends at the very same tax-funded institution that gave us Ward Churchill have effectively defined as racism:

• a progressive tax system
• welfare
• anti-smoking laws
• medicare
• unemployment benefits
• discounted tickets to Disneyland for residents of California
• any VIP access to any event or activity
• pro-bono legal advice
• government classified information
• …

This list is a bit like the energizer bunny - it could keep going and going and going…

With racism this prevalent, maybe it’s a good thing that Global Warming is going to do all the work of wiping it out via Mass Human Extinction!

Yesterday on Montana Headlines, we took note of Montana Democrats distancing themselves from Sen. Obama over his recent comments at a San Francisco fundraiser. 

While there has been a lot of ink spilled over Obama’s “guns and religion” comments, today’s piece by George Will is particularly worth reading.  We’ve been enjoying Will more of late — he is drifting back toward his more old-fashioned conservative roots.  Like the recently passed dean of conservative writers and thinkers, William F. Buckley, Jr., Will has been increasingly critical of the Iraq War and the abandonment of the principles of limited government and fiscal discipline by many Republicans in recent years.

In this column, Will reminds us that Obama’s statement is just part of a continuum of American liberal thought that has a long history:

When a supporter told Adlai Stevenson, the losing Democratic presidential nominee in 1952 and 1956, that thinking people supported him, Stevenson said, “Yes, but I need to win a majority.”

He quotes Michael Barone as writing:

“Stevenson was the first leading Democratic politician to become a critic rather than a celebrator of middle-class American culture - the prototype of the liberal Democrat who would judge ordinary Americans by an abstract standard and find them wanting.”

Will continues by saying that Obama’s comment is in line with an approach pioneered by Columbia University historian Richard Hofstadter: 

The tactic is to dismiss rather than refute those with whom you disagree.

Obama’s dismissal is: Americans, especially working-class conservatives, are unable, because of their false consciousness, to deconstruct their social context and embrace the liberal program. Today that program is to elect Obama, thereby making his wife at long last proud of America.

Hofstadter dismissed conservatives as victims of character flaws and psychological disorders - a “paranoid style” of politics rooted in “status anxiety,” etc. Conservatism rose on a tide of votes cast by people irritated by the liberalism of condescension.

One recalls Lionel Trilling’s famous comment in the post-war era that American conservatives had no ideas, only “irritable mental gestures.” 

Anyone who has read Albert Jay Nock, Donald Davidson, or John Don Passos knows that Trilling was exaggerating about the right having a lack of intellectual credibility (but to be fair, all one has to do is read Jeffrey Hart’s New Criterion retrospective on WFB’s mentor at Yale, Wilmoore Kendall, to know that the “irritable” part wasn’t exactly groundless.)   

Such attitudes toward the right are convenient — the progressive/liberal wins debates by default because the opposition simply has psychological “issues” and is not worthy of debating.  And so the endless task of reminding the public that there are options — preferable options — to the solution offered by Sen. Obama.  That solution is a sort of progressive ”end of history” notion in which we will be swept up by the rapturous winds of change and converted to the true faith.  And because it is so inspiring and wrapped in colorful “post-partisan” rhetoric — we aren’t supposed to notice that it’s just the same old leftist pablum, preached with the same aloof hauteur that we have come to know so well.

The proposal to close the ‘M’ Hiking trail between August and October has touched a bit of a raw nerve with me. In the summer, I probably hike to the M twice a week, and all the way to the wind sock at least once or twice a month. The official reason - concerns about fires - didn’t make much sense to me since there have been other dry years and that mountain has always seemed susceptible to burning (look no further than the North face to see that this isn’t a new threat).

The fire concern also made more sense from a county perspective than a city or university approach. The article clearly explains that the proposal was being floated by both the City of Missoula and the University of Montana. That didn’t make too much sense until I remembered something that I read with regard to the 2000 seat expansion of Washington-Grizzly Stadium. I can’t find it online, and I’ve since thrown away my dead-tree copy, but in essence a University Official was explaining that the expense of the renovations was going to be recouped by a combination of increased ticket sales and higher royalties for television coverage. What caught my attention was that he also said that fans watching the games for free from Mount Sentinel reduced the television ratings, which actually cost the University hundreds of thousands of dollars every season.

Click. Suddenly “August through October” has a whole new significance. Is the University supporting the closure of the ‘M’ to help finance a larger stadium? Maybe.

My biggest concern though is that there is a more insidiously diabolical goal behind this seasonal closure plan. Michael Moore over at Western Montana 360 set my brain working with his post about the concerns that “local plant protectors” (environmentalists, not union bosses) had with the environmental impact of the famous “M” (and to a lesser degree, the “L” too). For the extreme environmental fringe in Missoula, the wide trail cutting its way up to the concrete monstrosity of the “M” has always been contentious. I know that Loyola Sacred Heart High School - which maintains the “L” - has run afoul of environmentalists with it’s annual whitewashing of the stones that make up that letter.

So my question is this. Does anyone actually think that “fire concerns” are the real motivation behind this plan? Or are we seeing a money grab by the University of Montana athletic department? Or is this the first step in reclaiming Mount Sentinel permanently in the name of Mother Gaia?

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The politics of the financial crisis are going to be messy, but one thing is for sure, Democrats will push for more market regulation under the cloak of helping the free market. This is what I like to call it the FREE, or Federally Regulated Economic Exchange, market philosophy.

The FREE market is a union of free market rhetoric, leftist moralism, and collectivist economics all exercised through a political body. The FREE market relies on the idea that economic freedom equates to personal freedom; however, it adds the thought economic freedom is not possible without the intervention of government. In the FREE market, multi-national corporations are assumed to be bad players in the global marketplace. Thus, the tax and regulatory code must be altered to limit the ability of the free market evolve on its own, independent of the wishes of the political body.

Additionally, in the FREE market, the individual is never to be blamed for poor choices if they make less than $84,000/year. However, if an individual makes more than $200,000 they are assumed to be predators who made their money through the work of others and not because of any effort that individual put forth.

Take the mortgage crisis for example; in the free market, the high rate of foreclosures is due to a convergence of factors including individuals seeking loans for more than their ability to pay and the incorrect belief that home prices will always be on the rise. Under the FREE market, the individual is absolved from all responsibility and the problem arises from a supposed lack of regulations on banks and mortgage lenders.

Hillary Clinton sums up the FREE market school of economic thought pretty well;

I just believe that there’s got to be a healthy tension among all of our institutions in society, and that the market is the driving force behind our prosperity, our freedom in so many respects to make our lives our own but that it cannot be permitted just to run roughshod over people’s lives as well.