Your genius is in recognizing mine
I love David Warren and everything, but he's talking absolute shit here.
Identity politics, of its essence, is beneath the dignity of conservatives. So when they (conservatives) take the line that some forms of identity politics are more acceptable than others, they are not, as they might think, fighting fire with fire; they are, rather, allowing the Left to set the agenda. (Indeed, they're kinda suggesting that they're more left than the Left.)
My point, with regards to the above excerpt, being: it's a ridiculous notion that there is a trend amongst those Canadians who approve-of-abortion-but-wouldn't-dream-of-having-one- themselves, that they are so inclined because of a desire to reduce, by extermination, the members of "inferior races" because they might eventually immigrate to Canada. This is to indulge in precisely the sort of pofaced, pseudo-intellectualism that has come so much to characterize the lumpen Left (i.e. just about anyone in North America with a bachelor's degree who considers himself a political liberal).
The problem here is not that people are putting the wrong sort of thought (i.e. the racist kind) into the issue of abortion. Rather, it is that they are putting precisely no thought into it--and that they believe that this is intellectually defensible.
To wit: the "genius of Ignatieff's appeal" is not that it lends itself so well to the racism/xenophobia apparently lurking in the hearts of so many Canadian women; it is, rather, that it's got us all prattling obtusely-on about "the genius of Ignatieff's appeal." As though the appeal itself were nothing as compared to its timing.
The "genius of Ignatieff's appeal," is, then, that it was so cynically calculated that people--including David Warren apparently-- would appreciate it (the appeal) more for its tactical merits than for its substance. And they did, the birdbrains.
Note the genius of Ignatieff's appeal: not for more contraception and abortion here, where we have surely had enough, but rather in "the poorest countries" -- which we think have long been producing "too many babies." And, too many babies who could be clamouring to come here one day. Harper's policy might increase the load; Ignatieff's might reduce it.It has become an irritating habit of the right, in the face of those tedious and definitively hysterical comparisons of them to Nazis, that they now counter--and apparently in all earnest--"We're not the Nazis; you're the Nazis!"
Even within North America, abortion appeals to some because it does, in fact, disproportionately reduce the offspring of certain racial minorities. The eugenic argument for it was actually the first to be made, back in the days when it was still acceptable to speak about the fertility of the "lower orders" and the "inferior races."
Identity politics, of its essence, is beneath the dignity of conservatives. So when they (conservatives) take the line that some forms of identity politics are more acceptable than others, they are not, as they might think, fighting fire with fire; they are, rather, allowing the Left to set the agenda. (Indeed, they're kinda suggesting that they're more left than the Left.)
My point, with regards to the above excerpt, being: it's a ridiculous notion that there is a trend amongst those Canadians who approve-of-abortion-but-wouldn't-dream-of-having-one- themselves, that they are so inclined because of a desire to reduce, by extermination, the members of "inferior races" because they might eventually immigrate to Canada. This is to indulge in precisely the sort of pofaced, pseudo-intellectualism that has come so much to characterize the lumpen Left (i.e. just about anyone in North America with a bachelor's degree who considers himself a political liberal).
The problem here is not that people are putting the wrong sort of thought (i.e. the racist kind) into the issue of abortion. Rather, it is that they are putting precisely no thought into it--and that they believe that this is intellectually defensible.
To wit: the "genius of Ignatieff's appeal" is not that it lends itself so well to the racism/xenophobia apparently lurking in the hearts of so many Canadian women; it is, rather, that it's got us all prattling obtusely-on about "the genius of Ignatieff's appeal." As though the appeal itself were nothing as compared to its timing.
The "genius of Ignatieff's appeal," is, then, that it was so cynically calculated that people--including David Warren apparently-- would appreciate it (the appeal) more for its tactical merits than for its substance. And they did, the birdbrains.
posted by Edward Michael George at 1:50 PM
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