Posted on January 30, 2021

 

 

Discomfort Food For Thought

Uncomfortable conversations we don't have

by

Daniel Clark

 

 

For almost a year now, leftists have been telling us that we need to have "uncomfortable conversations," but of course they never mean those conversations should be uncomfortable for themselves. Their role is to impugn us, our country, and everything we believe in, while we're expected to apologize for our existence, and beg them to provide us with some means of placating them.

Yet, they're not entirely without a point. In fact, they're unwittingly illustrating what's wrong with politically correct speech codes, collegiate "safe spaces," and all the other tools their side has been using to prevent people from saying things that might cause discomfort for others. If it's true that admitting to having a problem is the first step toward solving it, then discomfort can be a necessary stage along the way to a resolution. With that in mind, here are some topics for uncomfortable conversations that would be constructive to have, but are not being had, because the very people who tell us of the need for such things would never tolerate it.

* Abortion is not an antidote for rape.

* Our terrorist enemies do not agree that the "forever war" has been "ended."

* It's difficult to conceive anything more racist than the idea that there's so little commonality among people of different skin colors that we're unfit to question what each other says about his own experience.

* Working from home may have its advantages, but as much as employers already intrude upon their employees' lives, do we really want to invite them into our houses?

* When the only thing we know about a person is that he has entered our country illegally, he does not deserve the presumption of pure motives and high moral character that most politicians are eager to bestow upon him.

* Why do we make distinctions between what's natural and what's manmade, when we don't create a separate category for things that are made by other creatures? Are beaver dams unnatural? How about honey? Manmade things are no different, in that they are all made of things that come from the earth. Plastic was not beamed down from outer space.

* Nobody who is speaking truthfully ever employs the phrase "my truth."

* Leninists referred to their bogeymen as the "bourgeoisie." Stalinists called them the "kulaks." In America today, they are known as the "privileged."

* Our nation was founded on the presumption that we have a Creator. If we don't, and everything in the universe has come about by accident, then it inevitably follows that human life has no purpose or intrinsic value. This way of thinking is rapidly becoming more common, and there are bound to be consequences.

* Nowhere in our Constitution does it say that any of our rights may be suspended in case of an emergency.

* Artificial intelligence poses a threat because it could be controlled by people with ill intent, not because the robots might become ambitious and conquer us. The intellectuals who push this latter scenario do so because their atheist beliefs are threatened by their inability to account for free will. Their solution: we have no free will, but instead passively react to highly complex combinations of variables, such that the same process might someday be replicated in an electronic device. Mind you, if these people were only machines themselves, they would not deserve any credit for their own accomplishments, and there is no way they believe that.

* Had General Patton gotten his way and taken America to war against the Soviet Union at the end of World War II, the United States, being the world's only atomic power, would have won. We don't know how terrible the cost might have been, but we do know that there would have been no Korean War, no Vietnam War, no Cuban Missile Crisis, and no Red China.

* How does the National Football League square its policies on violence against women with its endorsements of George Floyd and Jacob Blake?

* The entire point of the word "climate" is to distinguish the environmental characteristics of one geographic location from another. To refer to a singular climate that encompasses the whole world robs the word of all meaning. The reason certain people use that terminology is not scientific; it's political. If there is only one climate, then there should be one body to govern it. Different geographic locations, especially those that are known as nations, are meant to be redefined into insignificance.

* We're not supposed to say "Oriental" these days. Instead, we're told to say "Asian," even though Asia is many times larger than the Orient, and "Asians" encompasses many different peoples, including Indians, Arabs, and many Russians. The word "midget" is likewise forbidden, in favor of "little person," in spite of the fact that a vast majority of little people are not midgets. Instead of "homosexual," we're now supposed to say "LGBT person," a designation that includes whole categories of people who are not homosexuals. This pattern proves that enforcers of political correctness are not just well-meaning, hypersensitive liberals. Anybody who wages this kind of campaign against specificity is up to no good.

* No matter where you're from, if you reside in the United States, the English language belongs to you, and nobody who discourages you from acquiring it is your friend.

* Race-consciousness by its nature portrays each racial group in a negative light. When politicians pander to blacks, they usually do so by freely associating them with all the worst elements of society. Free the drug dealers and spare the murderers? Whom of any color is that meant to benefit?

* No innocent reason exists for opposing voter ID laws.

* Modern environmentalism is an obsessive compulsive disorder on a massive scale. People convince themselves that they know what the temperature of the earth must be, how much CO2 must be in the atmosphere, which species belong where on the earth, and all sorts of other things about which they have no genuine idea, and then assume that any deviation will result in global catastrophe. The fact that our educational system and children's TV shows encourage this behavior is unconscionable.

* Surveillance technology cannot be un-invented. If we're really concerned about it, we should be trying harder to keep it out of the hands of people who think everything about us is their business..

* People who frame abortion as a women's rights issue are totally callous toward the countless pregnant women who are assaulted or murdered while protecting their unborn children from the men who want them dead.

Uncomfy yet?

 

 

Return to Shinbone

 The Shinbone: The Frontier of the Free Press 

 Mailbag . Issue Index . Politimals . College Football Czar