Gentle Readers, Dennis Prager has, as promised, posted Part Two of his, well, interesting take on the differences between the Left and Right in America. I won't go into the detail on this one, as the whole essay is simply a list of those differences, and I don't want to include his entire essay as part of mine. That would be (a) cheating, and (2) tedious. So if you have a taste for it, read the essay on the Townhall site.
I will just point out that of the fifteen policy/principle topics he lists, his description of the Left coincides (more or less) with my own thinking on the first, second (kinda), fourth, sixth, tenth, and twelfth. I agree with his portrayal of Right-thinking principles on the eighth. I don't actually understand the third or the seventh. The fifth had me reaching for my "it's more complicated that that" stamp, which I would also use on the fourteenth. The ninth is just a lie about the Left, and so is the fifteenth. The eleventh is so ambiguous I don't see how anybody could know how they stand on it. And the fourteenth may well be an accurate caricature of the Left, but I don't quite understand it as a question of principle.
I sure hope I haven't miscounted.
Redintegro Iraq,
-Vardibidian.
Another doozy from Mr. Prager. I think I’ll undertake a brief survey of his rhetorical mischief. False alternatives seems to be his favorite device, though it’s certainly a device suitable to his chosen format.
Item 1. False alternatives. Left prefers U.S. to follow the lead of international organizations; Right prefers that U.S. lead. While it is possible for U.S., by preference to follow the lead of others, it is not possible for U.S., by preference to lead others. We can choose to go it alone, and whether others will follow our lead is up to them.
2. Reductio ad absurdum. On importance of minorities’ “feelings”: Prager uses office Christmas party as representative case, when it is in fact a trivial example that fails to illustrate the issue, to undermine credibility of Left sensitivity.
5. Unbalanced lists: In explanations for Bush’s war on Iraq, the Left is allowed only one reason, the Right gets two.
6. False alternatives. In matters of taxation, Left is represented as taxing money that people “earn,” while Right simple wants to let people keep their money. In matters of taxation, where people get their money from (such as inheritance) is an important factor in determining how it should be taxed — Prager oversimplifies the Left in a way that makes their position look as questionable as possible, while glossing over the complicating issue on the Right’s side of the ledger.
13. False alternatives. Left — prefer cheating to smoking, Right — prefer smoking to cheating. Totally false alternatives. One never makes a choice between cheating or smoking, and condoning one has nothing to do with condoning the other.
14. False analogy. Left — Israelis and Palestinians both responsible for Middle East violence, just as U.S. and Soviet Union were both responsible for the Cold War. False analogy, designed to suggest that positions on the Cold War and positions on Israel-Palestine conflict are necessarily the same. Comparison is unnecessary to distinguish the Left and Right positions on the current conflict, and serves only to resurrect now irrelevant anti-Communist fervor and apply it to a truly relevant policy distinction.
If one adds this list of rhetorical mischief to the outright lies that V. has noted, there are few statements that pass muster as truthful representations of the real differences that separate the Right and the Left. Prager plays it straight just enough to provide some semblance of even-handed description for this list, but there’s scarcely a single statement in the list that is not calculated to make the Right’s positions appear favorably, the Left’s unfavorably. It’s certainly Mr. Prager’s right to advance his beliefs in writing, but to set up the pretense of offering a balanced description as a way of giving credibility to a heavily biased presentation is hardly the act of an honest man.
But it’s nice to see that Mr. Prager has written a book saying that people should be happy.
This is a bit beside the point, but I thought y’all might enjoy this blog:
Body and Soul