The New York Times has an interesting article on treating “gun violence” as a disease. It describes the work of Gary Slutkin who “came to the view that gun violence in poor neighborhoods did indeed resemble the epidemics he had treated in Africa”.
In 2000, he founded CeaseFire (now known as Cure Violence), a Chicago-based organization that treated violence in one such local cluster — in West Garfield, one of the toughest neighborhoods in the city — as a public health problem rather than a criminal justice issue. Shootings dropped dramatically. …
The center’s director, Amy Ellenbogen, had decided several years earlier to begin focusing on gun violence in the African-American community. … The first step in combating an epidemic is to find the disease carriers. … A second group of staff members are called “violence interrupters.”
Slutkin’s treatment apparently rests on the idea that shootings are an African-American cultural problem and by finding “disease carriers” and treating them, crime could be reduced. Slutkin’s heart must be pure, or else his whole program would be condemned by the NYT as an exercise in racial profiling and forced re-education.
Rebranding works wonders. Shakespeare was mistaken to say, “what’s in a name?” A name is everything. Andrew Sullivan has recently imagined president Obama as Ronald Reagan. It’s not hard to see why. Reagan was a winner and Obama is … well Reagan. Everyone knows that Abraham Lincoln would be a liberal democrat today. Might as well say it.
Bull Conner and Orval Faubus were Republicans
Try changing “R” to “D” and the approach of “curing” the African-American population of gun violence by mind control is instantly legitimized. It isn’t fascism when the Left does it. Margaret Sanger the founder of Planned Parenthood wanted to eugenicize mental defectives and genetic inferiors in order to achieve racial betterment.
As part of her efforts to promote birth control, Sanger found common cause with proponents of eugenics, believing that they both sought to “assist the race toward the elimination of the unfit.” Sanger was a proponent of negative eugenics, which aims to improve human hereditary traits through social intervention by reducing reproduction by those considered unfit. Sanger’s eugenic policies included an exclusionary immigration policy, free access to birth control methods and full family planning autonomy for the able-minded, and compulsory segregation or sterilization for the profoundly retarded. In her book The Pivot of Civilization, she advocated coercion to prevent the “undeniably feeble-minded” from procreating.
Although Sanger supported negative eugenics, she asserted that eugenics alone was not sufficient, and that birth control was essential to achieve her goals.
In contrast with eugenicist William Robinson, who advocated euthanasia for the unfit,[note 9] Sanger wrote, “we [do not] believe that the community could or should send to the lethal chamber the defective progeny resulting from irresponsible and unintelligent breeding.” Similarly, Sanger denounced the aggressive and lethal Nazi eugenics program.
In addition, Sanger believed the responsibility for birth control should remain in the hands of able-minded individual parents rather than the state, and that self-determining motherhood was the only unshakable foundation for racial betterment.
Sanger also supported restrictive immigration policies. In “A Plan for Peace”, a 1932 essay, she proposed a congressional department to address population problems. She also recommended that immigration exclude those “whose condition is known to be detrimental to the stamina of the race,” and that sterilization and segregation be applied to those with incurable, hereditary disabilities.
Uh-huh
But at least her heart was pure. The content of a political proposal doesn’t depend on its content; it relies on who proposes it. Conservative bad, progressive good. It’s simple: me Tarzan, you Jane.
The difference between “Climate Change” and raping Gaia is that it’s only an affront to Mother Nature when its for the Keystone Pipeline. The Left can change climate to any degree and still be in the good. Matthew Watson of the Guardian writes “why we’d be mad to rule out climate engineering”. He adds, “if climate change continues then all options to lessen its impact, including geoengineering, must be considered as a last resort”.
We know that supertyphoon Haiyan wasn’t caused by UN initiatives on climate change because they never do anything bad. Balmy breezes caressing the tropical nights are the work of the Left. When death and destruction ensue it is certain to be the conservatives fault.
Just recently members of the Communist New People’s Army attacked a burial party on the island of Leyte. It must be good. They were only trying to make sure the dead were really dead and not US imperialist zombies in disguise. That’s why Jose Maria Sison, the man who commands the New People’s Army, is a protected person in Europe. Just like Sanger, his heart is pure.
Recently the WSJ informs us that Obama has decided to oppose Obamacare. The “White House to Allow Insurers to Continue Canceled Health Plans”. But weren’t conservatives criticized for the very same view on the grounds that Obamacare is the “law of the land” and they were Confederate Rebels to oppose it, not to mention slaveholders? But it’s only the “law of the land” when Obama agrees with it. When he changes his mind he can set it aside by Executive Order.
Obama now admits that Obamacare is unworkable, in the felicitous phrase of Peter Suderman. The real issue is why he was deceived. The president told a press conference that he was angrier than anyone at being uninformed.
OK. On the website, I was not informed directly that the website would not be working as — the way it was supposed to. Had I been informed, I wouldn’t be going out saying, boy, this is going to be great. You know, I’m accused of a lot of things, but I don’t think I’m stupid enough to go around saying, this is going to be like shopping on Amazon or Travelocity, a week before the website opens, if I thought that it wasn’t going to work.
That convoluted admission will not change the fact that Obama is the smartest president in history. Megan Daum of the LA Times explains why a stammer is never just a stammer:
Apparently, a lot of people consider President Obama to be bumblingly inarticulate. “The guy can’t talk his way out of a paper bag!” a reader wrote to me recently. “Sarah Palin is a brilliant speaker. It’s the president whose sentences are undiagrammable,” said another in response to a column I wrote about Palin. It’s not just my readers, nor is it exclusively conservatives, who hold this view. A Google search of “does Obama have a speech impediment” turns up several pages of discussion among the president’s supporters and critics alike.Admittedly, the president is given to a lot of pauses, “uhs” and sputtering starts to his sentences. As polished as he often is before large crowds (where the adjective “soaring” is often applied to his speeches), his impromptu speaking frequently calls to mind a doctoral candidate delivering a wobbly dissertation defense.
But consider this: It’s not that Obama can’t speak clearly. It’s that he employs the intellectual stammer. Not to be confused with a stutter, which the president decidedly does not have, the intellectual stammer signals a brain that is moving so fast that the mouth can’t keep up. The stammer is commonly found among university professors, characters in Woody Allen movies and public thinkers of the sort that might appear on C-SPAN but not CNN. If you’re a member or a fan of that subset, chances are the president’s stammer doesn’t bother you.
It takes a real genius to think of that. Me, I would have just thought he had a stammer or talking through his hat. But since conservatives are by and large inclined to leave you alone, nobody cares about what I think; why should you when I’ll leave you alone? I won’t send the New People’s Army to shoot up your funeral. This indifference is characterized as “uncaringness”. However the Left is relentlessly interventionary. Not only about the political, but the personal. They have an opinion on everything and know exactly what you need.
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