As IF Times

link Death of 3.5 Million Makes Dismal Economics: Commentary William by Pesek – Bloomberg.

This is a slippery slope.  While I’m sure the author’s intentions are in the right place, it’s debatable whether or not it’s any of our business as to how other nations run their society.  For what it’s worth, I personally think smoking in all forms is a disgusting and filthy habit even without the attendant health risks.  The issue is, why should we care if it is a filthy habit practised in another country.  Many have accused the U.S. of nationbuilding and meddling when it comes to their actions in other parts of the world.

We slide down a long slippery slope when we deign to dictate to other people how to best run their lives because the obvious issue is; what entitles us to provide judgement?  In the West, we are smothered with creeping nannyism wherein the state in varying forms directs our behavior via propaganda or by taxation.  While I certainly don’t want to fall into the tired liberal technique of moral relativism, there are a lot more serious things in the world to worry about than deaths from smoking in China.  The author is of course, probably correct when he offers mortality figures in the millions.  However, let’s also remember that there are over a billion people in China and on a percentage basis of population, the mortality rate may only be nominally higher than the West’s rates.  Someone will have to prove me wrong on this one.  

Imagine if the Chinese commentators made light of the social diseases that afflict western society, such as rampant promiscuity and drug use among its youth.  The glamorization of  anti-social behaviours and lifestyles.  Entertainment which glorifies dumbness and perpetuates liberal stereotypes.  As we all know, practically all ‘lifestyle’ advertisements employ some kind of sexed up imagery in order to hook their customers.  In addition, they often play on the insecurities and perceived inadequacies of people in order to rope them into their particular product.    It can be easily argued that such afflictions may impose as much long term damage to society as smoking.  Smokers in a society eventually die and presumably, the next generation that comes after will be more savvy of the health issues.  Dumbness on the other hand can be bred from one generation to the next and so on like a perpetual virus.

The Chinese have come through a long tortuous and painful path to arrive where they are today and along with the good comes a lot of bad.  It is no exaggeration to say that in many cases, most Chinese were dirt farmers barely a generation ago.  So they smoke.  It’s not good for them.  Neither is drinking.  Or gambling.  If you were brought up in an environment where survival is more a pressing concern than to worry about what Oprah may think of your personal lifestyle, having the odd cigarette is no big deal.  They’re smart, they’ll catch on soon enough.

link Analysis: Sarah Palins use of blood libel sparks new controversy.

This time, the culprit is The Washington Post, another liberal source of cheap fish wrap masquerading as a newspaper driving the “words do hurt” wagon while the NY Times and Paul Krugmann go for a smoke break.   The left’s favorite target, Sarah Palin is once again taken to task for her “hateful words and violent imagery”.

How did we allow society to fall under the tyranny of a small group of politically correct weasels?  Hardly anything we say these days is not subject to the banal  filter of sensitivity and correctness which somehow has come to be accepted as ‘civilized’ discourse.  What are we, 5 years old?  Over the past few generations, it appears that people can no longer treat people as adults, instead having to interact in sanitized gibberish bordering on infantspeak.   We risk losing all color and depth to the English language if everything that’s said has to pass through the fine mesh of what’s acceptable. 

Recently, there was a proposal by the U.S. State Department to replace the categories of Mother and Father on passport applications, to be replaced with the designations of  Parent 1 and Parent 2.  !!!  Surely this couldn’t have been in response to some massive outcry from the public.  Have the labels of Father and Mother become too confusing for people?  At weddings, when the minister asks, ” who gives this woman to be wed to this man?”, would someone rather pipe up and say, ” I, Parent 1 do”?  No doubt the initiative was spawned inside the smaller than normal sized head of some bureaucrat who wanted to extend the PC line to include test tube babies, gay parents and those who think it better reflects a secular society.  Even so, why do other 98% of the general population have to ride along in their wack-wagon?  Mercifully, in short order, this policy was reversed and the proper Mother and Father labels were re-instated.   However, this is an apt illustration of the harm that only one moron can cause if they’re allowed to get away with it.  Imagine if the cause was taken up by the media….or Oprah.   Shiver.

In strict communist regimes, they are fond of de-humanizing their population as a means of maintaining order.  Far easier to execute some unsavory action upon a populace if they’re a a collection of abstract numbers rather than real people with real names.  As most know, the common moniker for people in those regimes are brother/sister, or comrade, implying equality, but really enforcing servility.  In the case of western societies, which should know better, governments are also actively in the word sanitation business.   Despite the liberal protestations of the imagery, the term War On Terror was an explicit and clear depiction of what the stakes were in the ongoing battle with terrorist campaigns against the U.S.   The revision by the present administration  to the catchy “Man Caused Disaster” is laughably meaningless and could apply to anything including the invention of turkey fryers.   There was recently a push to scrub the colloquial term for a black person from the book, Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain.  This is changing history folks.  They are trying to change the way things were characterized during a period in America’s history.

We’ve reached the point in society that small molehills are built into great mountains based on someones interpretation of what’s offensive and perhaps hurtful.  Perhaps many of these people were test tube babies and lived inside some bubble world until they were old enough to be sent to the brainwash academies, I mean universities.  As most people of my generation know, when we grew up as kids, you were exposed to all kinds of idiots.  You called them names, they called you names.  Few of us went on to develop deep seated emotional scars to be manifest later on in life via anti social and violent behavior.  Ok, well some did become lawyers, but for the most part, name calling was just name calling.   It was the sticks and stones part that was hurtful.

Today, you have to have a jargon handbook available  just to figure out what they’re trying to say in the news.  A crook is now a morally or ethically challenged person,  a bunch of hooligans burning cars and breaking store windows during a riot are student demonstrators.   A famous professor found to be cheating at school was academically dishonest.  A drug addict is chemically challenged.  Urban=black.  On the other hand, the label  for hunter is now changed to animal assassin.   One of the more amusing ones I’ve heard is the expression for panhandler; unaffiliated applicant for private sector funding.  

How about we just call a spade a spade? How about we just call idiots, idiots instead of liberal journalists?