By Kelly O'Connell ——Bio and Archives--October 16, 2012
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Why, then, did Biden decide to snicker, chuckle, grin, smirk and shake his head at the one GOP nominee for national office in the last 50 years that even partisan Democrats acknowledge as a serious, substantive, and formidable guy? The oddest aspect of his patronizing performance involved the complete disconnect between his derisive laughter and anything that Paul Ryan actually said. The debate became queasy, unpleasant, uncomfortable to watch, not because Biden overpowered his opponent on substance (he emphatically did not), but because the normal, reassuring, ritualized sense of congeniality and decorum seemed altogether lacking.Medved well captures the anti-authority spirit of crazy Joe's stunt. This posture illuminates the Heart of Darkness at the center of all socialist movements. Leftists do not accept humans as special because people are neither made in the image of God, nor have they souls. Therefore, being rude to a mere animal because of bad behavior is perfectly acceptable.
The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution was a 10-year political campaign, a social experiment aimed at rekindling revolutionary fervour and purifying the party. Mao Zedong and his wife, Jiang Qing, directed popular anger against other members of the party leadership. While others were removed from office, Mao was named supreme commander of the nation and army. Ideological cleansing began with attacks by young Red Guards on so-called "intellectuals" to remove "bourgeois" influences. Millions were forced into manual labour, and tens of thousands were executed. The result was massive civil unrest, and the army was sent in to control student disorder.Blood-curdling stories are recounted, often with public shaming rituals involved:
Children stood by as Red Guards beat up their mothers for being "rightists." Neighbors informed on neighbors. Violinists had their instruments and even fingers smashed by Red Guards. The accused sometimes had their jaws dislocated so they couldn't speak in their defense and were forced to bow in front of mobs that spit and screamed at them. Children of unpopular party members were gagged and executed; "rich peasants" and "bad elements" were publicly denounced and beheaded; children denounced their parents, and political targets were paraded in stadiums packed with screaming crowds; students at a Beijing girls' school beat their vice-principal to death with nail-studded planks in 1968.Accounts of the attacks against everyday Chinese leaders are absolutely astounding:
During the Cultural Revolution several hundred "counter-revolutionaries" were publicly killed, cooked and eaten in Guangxi province. Red Guards and party workers in one remote area of Guangxi ate the flesh of some 100 victims they had tortured to death, "as a way to demonstrate their "class feelings.'" One Guard said, "What I killed was the enemy. Didn't Chairman Mao teach us, 'If we don't kill them, they'll kill us?'" Another man led a Red Guard attack on a student who defeated him in a political debate. "His faction trapped the guy and cut off his tongue with scissors."Who did Mao single out in his attacks? One site reports:
Mao singled out nine categories of enemies: landlords, rich peasants, counter-revolutionaries, bad elements, rightists, traitors, foreign agents, capitalist roaders and--the Stinking Ninth--intellectuals. In the fight against "class enemies" and "bourgeois reactionaries," teachers, people with a college degree or relatives overseas, workers, and members of minority groups such as Tibetans, were all targeted. Mao announced that the Cultural Revolution would "thoroughly expose the reactionary bourgeois stand of those...who oppose the party and socialism." Children of landowners were thrown into trash cans. Families who lived in large houses were squeezed into single rooms as their possessions were smashed by Red Guards and poor families moved into the other rooms.
Politeness is a habit that what's left of the women's movement needs to grow out of. Most women grow up learning, directly or indirectly, how to be polite, how to defer, how to be good employees, mothers and wives, how to shop sensibly and get a great bikini body. Politeness, however, has bought even the luckiest of us little more than terminal exhaustion, a great shoe collection, and the right to be raped by the state if we need an abortion. If we want real equality, we're going to have to fight for it.On another level, the classic leftist refusal to acknowledge opponents as being intelligent, serious or morally fit enough to warrant engagement in dialogue is doxology from the progressive worldview. After all, if people opposing liberalism were smart enough, genuinely good, or educated--they would not be in opposition to Marxism's self-evident "Truth."
Essentially destructive criticism of all the main elements of Western culture, including Christianity, capitalism, authority, the family, patriarchy, hierarchy, morality, tradition, sexual restraint, loyalty, patriotism, nationalism, heredity, ethnocentrism, convention, and conservatism. Under Critical Theory, anything emanating from the west is to be libeled and attacked over and over again...
Lord...we ask you to help us work for that day when black will not be asked to get in back, when brown can stick around, when yellow will be mellow, when the red man can get ahead, man; and when white will embrace what is right.
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Kelly O’Connell is an author and attorney. He was born on the West Coast, raised in Las Vegas, and matriculated from the University of Oregon. After laboring for the Reformed Church in Galway, Ireland, he returned to America and attended law school in Virginia, where he earned a JD and a Master’s degree in Government. He spent a stint working as a researcher and writer of academic articles at a Miami law school, focusing on ancient law and society. He has also been employed as a university Speech & Debate professor. He then returned West and worked as an assistant district attorney. Kelly is now is a private practitioner with a small law practice in New Mexico.