“America, meet the Uighurs. Seventeen of the 241 terrorist detainees currently being held at Guantanamo Bay are Chinese Muslims known as Uighurs. These Uighurs have been allied with and trained by al Qaeda-affiliated terrorist groups. The goal of the Uighurs is to establish a separate sharia state.”

Is anyone else vaguely nostalgic for the days when the far right could have at least been counted on to object to Communist governments abusing their own people? Or do I misremember and they never really cared?

They never really cared about the people, just the fact that the dirty commies were preventing good, wholesome capitalists from being able to make a quick buck selling them shit they don’t want (but will gladly manufacture for us at slave wages).

Apart from everyone in the world, sure.

I really think that this is the heart of Goldberg’s random musing—or rant, if you will—concerning the current crisis at the U.N. a frickin’ TV show.

The moral quandary of “Do we cut a deal with a Nazi?” is so ancient and tired.

I really think that this is the heart of Goldberg’s random musing—or rant, if you will—concerning the current crisis at the U.N. a frickin’ TV show. It is a cliche, by now. Why go there? Isn’t that his point?

Or are we to believe that what he “really means” is that he’s sad that the television audience hasn’t “woken up” to where sci-fi shows can portray liberal college professors as the ultimate evil?

This is what happens when you take every opportunity to mock, and turn every mocking into your own little rhapsody.

Obviously that claim is normative, but I’m not arguing for more redistribution. Merely asserting that a little redistribution isn’t evil in the same way that a little racism is. Obviously at some point nearing the abolition of private property a redistributive system becomes highly pernicious. But it isn’t a linear relationship the way racism is.

Or put more strongly, I’d say that we have a consensus among industrialized countries that some optimal amount of redistribution exists, and it isn’t zero. Again, this would only be denied by really extreme conservatives (i.e., even a flat tax rate is redistributionist, because it takes more from the rich than the poor; only a fixed per-person tax rate is truly non-redistibutive). Whereas most decent people agree that the optimal amount of racism is none at all. Probably Goldberg would agree (i.e., not favor financing the government via a head tax) if he thought it out, but he hasn’t, and wants to insist that redistributing wealth in any amount is just as bad as racial discrimination.

Is it really possible that you don’t see that sentence as ideologically loaded? Do you think that it describes a factual situation objectively? If so, could you perhaps explain the grounds for thinking so?

I mostly agree with you, but I know that when I do I’m choosing to. How does it work for you?

(reads the effing pantload post) quite as I thought: it’s a trivial context, but Goldberg is wondering why Hitler is considered uniquely evil, that some other mass-murdering tyrant couldn’t have filled the bill. There are of course perfectly sound non-political answers to his complaint, both specific to the drama in question, and generally regarding the role Nazism plays in the public imagination vis-a-vis other regimes that were host to genocides.

But Goldberg’s is irritated that Nazism has this particular evil eminence all to itself (the rest of the following makes a lot of interpretive jumps, but surely I can’t be mistaken that he is irritated). He probably thinks this is due to the commie leanings of the media, and that correctly, racial ideologies in all their manifestations should be considered no more evil than redistibutionist ideologies in all their manifestations. If so, he’s wrong on two counts: (1) the unique status of Nazism has nothing to do with the liberal leanings of journalists and dramatists, but with the particular dramatic arc of the rise and fall of the Third Reich, and the compressed nature of its war with the Allies, and (2) racism is bad in any form, proportional to its virulence, but redistibutionism isn’t intrinsically evil in an analogous way at all.

Goldberg seems to want to say that, because Hitler = Stalin, then the milder variants are also equivalent: George Wallace = Henry Wallace. But racism is evil in all its forms, but curtailment of private property is only evil, if even then, in its absolute and outright abolition (I could see where even a total abolition of property might not be evil if it were enacted democratically (though I would never vote for such a proposal)). Obviously conservatives would disagree, perhaps as much that private sector racism is evil, as that democratic soc1a!izm (hope that gets by the sentry) isn’t.