So some right-wing rag comes up with an article called "Ten Most Harmful Books of the 19th and 20th Centuries". Sounds scary eh? Let's take a closer at their picks:
Equalizing the distribution of wealth is more dangerous than exterminating millions of people.
Let's start with 'The most dangerous' book: "The Communist Manifesto". This isn't as important on its own as it is as a comparison with others, like the second most dangerous book. Look closely my friends, book number 2 falls over thirty below number 1. What is this number two? "Mein Kampf" by the one and only Adolf Hitler. So what message are we supposed to take away from this?
Advocating for a system that more fairly distributes wealth and seeks to alleviate the inequalities of the world is much more dangerous than the blueprint for exterminating people based on genetic predisposition.
Are the judges of the 'competition', and I use the word very lightly, advocating genocide and extermination by omission? You judge for yourself.
Sex is bad
Yes, apparently these idiots still drag old musty concepts like that to daylight instead of letting them rot in some musty crypt like the rest of their braincells. They say "The Kinsey Report" [was]
designed to give a scientific gloss to the normalization of promiscuity and deviancy". Ahem. In their own words they add: "Kinsey's initial report, released in 1948 . . . stunned the nation by saying that American men were so sexually wild that 95% of them could be accused of some kind of sexual offense under 1940s laws
Mind you even if that characterization were true these people aren't decrying the banality of 1940's sexual laws they are decrying the report for elucidating common sexual practices. Never once do they say these reports are false, just that they dabble in immorality.
The bottom line is that these assholes spend even a paragraph on demonizing... OK, I have to stop myself, they attempt to demonize the Kinsey Report, but their methods are so ham-handed and idiotic, their argumentation so poor, and their logic so weak so as to only highlight what a yellow rag this magazine is. I suspect that the only reason this magazine is able to publish since 1944 is the continued influx of money from ideologically motivated assholes and not actual news makers.
Thinking is bad
OK, the right wing isn't exactly the moral outlook of the thinking human being. Nowhere have idiocy, myopia, xenophobia, misogynism, homophobia and plain rudeness combined as in the right wing. These people would stick a rusty spoon in the left eye if they could get away with it, not because the eye harmed them, but because they are so indoctrinated and politically asinine that they can't distinguish 'left' the direction from 'left' as a political outlook, and try to stab their eye out for being a 'leftist'. Human Events seems to take this to an extreme.
They criticize John Dewey:
...he disparaged schooling that focused on traditional character development and endowing children with hard knowledge, and encouraged the teaching of thinking "skills" instead
I don't even have to try here. This is too fucking easy. In the right wing world schools are for teaching "knowledge" i.e. what your elders tell you is right, and build 'character' i.e. what your elders tell you to do. Thinking about these deeper concepts is really not encouraged. So when some liberal pointy-head, I really doubt Dewey is much of a leftist, comes to teach our younger generations "thinking skills" apparently he is too much of a threat.
This is the 'take home' lesson: the right wing only sees education as a means to achieve an end, which is to make people useful enough to be slaves in a more technical world instead of seeing as education as being an end in itself that we should pursue and encourage.
Making money: good! Making sure that society is healthy: bad.
John Maynard Keynes' "General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money" is the last book on the top ten list. Why? it is one point higher than the first 'honorable mention'. Something strikes me as inherently shitty about their selection criteria, but what do I know? I am just a socialist anarchist. I digress and all that, let's get back to the subject at hand. Their commentary is worth quoting extensively:
When the business cycle threatens a contraction of industry, and thus of jobs, [Keynes] argued, the government should run up deficits, borrowing and spending money to spur economic activity.
Immediately they attach the following to the end:
FDR adopted the idea as U.S. policy, and the U.S. government now has a $2.6-trillion annual budget and an $8-trillion dollar debt
Mind you, they aren't saying that FDR, hence democrats are the cause of the deficit, but to their audience and to many people reading that screed that is what it will read like. How, pray, does FDR have such an influence on the economy sixty years after his death? Who the fuck knows and who the fuck cares? Apparently Human Events doesn't. Nevermind that the last two Republican Presidents of the USA have systematically ruined the federal budget, stripped services that already had money, increased spending on non-infrastructure building programs, and made the tax-burden on US citizens so disproportionate so as to punish the poor, the middle class and leave the richest and most padded go tax-free.
Tax the poor, whore it up with the rich. Let services wither on the vine and restructure government so that it only acts as a giant service provider to be accessed via fees. If you do not have the money then you do not need the fees and instead should make yourself a better economic drone to increase your wealth potential and be able to participate better in the government. What is next? In order to vote you need to pay USD 29.99?
Yes ladies and gentlemen, this is what modern newspapers come up with. However, instead of letting these assholes get away with this shitsmearing of our consciousness let us pay them back.
Here are their names and where they can be reached. Ladies and gentlemen, I present:
Americas Fifteen Most Dangerous People
- Arnold Beichman
- Research Fellow
- Hoover Institution
- Prof. Brad Birzer
- Hillsdale College
- Harry Crocker
- Vice President & Executive Editor
- Regnery Publishing, Inc.
- Prof. Marshall DeRosa
- Florida Atlantic University
- Dr. Don Devine
- Second Vice Chairman
- American Conservative Union
- Prof. Robert George
- Princeton University
- Prof. Paul Gottfried
- Elizabethtown College
- Prof. William Anthony Hay
- Mississippi State University
- Herb London
- President
- Hudson Institute
- Prof. Mark Malvasi
- Randolph-Macon College
- Douglas Minson
- Associate Rector
- The Witherspoon Fellowships
- Prof. Mark Molesky
- Seton Hall University
- Prof. Stephen Presser
- Northwestern University
- Phyllis Schlafly
- President
- Eagle Forum
- Fred Smith
- President
- Competitive Enterprise Institute
These people should be ashamed and you should be ashamed for allowing these assholes to get any sort of space to air their decrepit views. What the fuck educational institutions are doing allowing shitheads and mental deficients to educate future generations is beyond my understanding.
