The Left and Hysteria

[riceowl]

I thought it was a pretty good editorial:
 
September 27, 2005
The Left and Hysteria
By Dennis Prager

If you want to understand the Left, the best place to start is with an understanding of hysteria. Leading leftists either use hysteria as a political tactic or are actually hysterics.

Take almost any subject the Left discusses and you will find hysteria.

The Patriot Act: According to leftist spokesmen and groups, the Patriot Act is a grave threat to liberty and democracy. It is frequently likened to the tactics of a fascist state. This is pure hysteria. The Los Angeles Times recently published statistics concerning the use of the Act. Through 2004, of the 7,136 complaints to the Justice Department's inspector general, one was related to the Patriot Act. The number of "sneak and peek" warrants, allowing searches without telling a subject, totaled 155. The number of roving wiretaps was 49, and the number of personal records seizures under Section 215 of the Act was 35.

The war in Iraq: It is not enough for leftist opponents of the war to argue that the war is a mistake, was initiated due to faulty intelligence, or is being poorly prosecuted. Rather they charge that President Bush lied, that the war was waged for Halliburton, and that America is engaged in a criminal and imperialist enterprise. Each charge is a form of hysteria.

Risks to health: Not everyone who believes the hysterical claims of danger made about secondhand smoke, baby formula, dodgeball or Bextra is on the Left. But the Left leads the country in hysteria over dangers to health. That is why leftist organizations are generally incapable of merely saying that something is unhealthy. The danger must be described as the killer of hundreds of thousands and often be ascribed to some murderous corporate conspiracy.

Environment: More people may be attacked by aardvarks in any given year than visit the remote and frozen region of Alaska known as the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR). It is the home, however, of vast oil reserves and many caribou. Good people can differ on whether or not to drill for oil there. But the rhetoric of the Left is hysterical. Listening to leftist organizations one would think that drilling would bring no benefit to America and would render the caribou virtually extinct. None of this is true. It is all drama.

Likewise there is largely hysteria over global warming and the charge that man -- especially Homo Americanus -- is the cause of it. The great number of scientists who claim that we are in a normal warming period or in no major weather change at all are ignored. Only the most hysterical scenarios are offered by the Left. Witness the reasons given for Hurricane Katrina. Yet even The New York Times reported that scientists are virtually unanimous in denying that the hurricane has anything to do with global warming.

Animal rights: People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) is the living embodiment of hysteria. Take their program "Holocaust on your plate," which equates barbecuing chickens with the cremating of the Jews in the Holocaust. It is one thing to be concerned about chickens' welfare, but only hysterics compare eating them with the slaughter of a people.

Racism: There is no worse charge than racism. Acting hatefully toward people because of their skin color is among the most vile acts a person can engage in. Yet the Left throws that charge around as if it were the essence of the American people (which, come to think of it, is what many on the Left believe). Most of the time, however, the charge of racism -- such as when it is directed at opponents of race-based affirmative action -- is just another example of hysteria.

Christianity: Most on the Left really believe that this country is on the verge of a theocracy because George W. Bush is an evangelical Christian, because the words "under God" are still in the Pledge of Allegiance, and because most Americans don't think marriage ought to be redefined.

Other examples abound. America neglects its poor, beats up its gays, oppresses its women, fouls its environment, ignores its children's educations, denies blacks their votes, and invades other countries for corporate profits: These are common accusations of the Left.

No event is free of leftist hysteria. On the third day after Katrina, civil rights activist Randall Robinson reported that blacks in New Orleans were resorting to cannibalism. Indeed, most of the news media coverage bordered on the hysterical. Not to mention the hysterical predictions of 10,000-plus dead in New Orleans.

None of this is to deny that the Right also gets hysterical. Some right-wing reactions to immigration and Terry Schiavo provide such examples.

But the irony in all of this is that the Left sees itself as the side that thinks intellectually and non-emotionally. And that is hysterical.
 

[The Dowager Mod]

Kinda like the hysteria whipped up by the right over gay marriage or Welfare queens or non existant WMD's.

[Gabu]

Wow, I don't know where to start, so I'll just post links to pages about logical fallacies that this guy committed:

Ad hominem: This is the biggest one.  Even if all leftists are hysterical, this does not say anything regarding whether or not their claims are true; this article is attempting to disprove an argument entirely based on the form in which it is given, which is completely logically unsound.

Hasty generalization: Last I checked, there were around 18% of the population who were self-described liberals, which constitutes a little over fifty million people.  The editorial makes it sound as if PETA (an organization with which just about nobody agrees with - since when do most liberals support what PETA says?) and Randall Robinson make up 100% of the liberal population.

Spotlight: This is similar to the one above.  The news is very, very seldom representative of any sizeable group at all, and when considering those who appear on the news, think about what gets you on the news when you're a political activist: you have to be the loudest, most obnoxious and imposing person out there or else coverage of you will not be interesting.  If a liberal had well-thought out views that he casually presented at a debate, he's going to get no publicity whatsoever.  Of course left-wing activists in the news are reactionary.  So are right-wing activists in the news.  This is not so much a function of one's political slant as it is a function of what the news likes to cover.

Straw man and poisoning the well (two for the price of one!): I know we hate hearing the former from BRTD, but the fact of the matter is that it is honest-to-God applicable in this circumstance.  It's not so much that this editorial is distorting the claim presented as it's that it's taking the claims of the most radical of the radical on the left and then acting as if every single person on the left agrees with these claims in lockstep.  Refuting these claims is therefore taken to act as if the claims of anyone from the left have been refuted, even if there's a leftist who holds a different opinion.  I throw in the second fallacy as a 2-for-1 deal because, in addition to attempting to refute the arguments of everyone from the left through refuting the most radical of the arguments, the editorial is also attempting to thereby delegitimize any argument coming from the left by making people think that being on the left implies that you agree with these claims.

I could go on, but I think it should be clear that this argument's composition is like Swiss cheese.  I'll just finish with a simple statement.  To reiterate what was said before, there are around fifty million people who are self-described liberals.  Does it really seem plausible that fifty million people would all be brainless automatons, all believing exactly the same thing, all acting in exactly the same way, all hating exactly the same people?  Why does it suddenly seem completely okay to bundle fifty million people in one incredibly tight package, as long as we call them "liberals"?

[Fmr. Gov. NickG]

Where was the "editorial" published?  Because I can't imagine any decent newspaper running something something with so little basis in reality.  Who does he actually think makes up "the Left"?  He doesn't mention a single actual person (except Randall Robinson, who I have never heard of), because no serious person believes most of the things he is talking about.