19 Replies to “If the Left doesn’t like you, you’re not a real human being [Darleen Click]”

1. bergerbilder says:

   March 5, 2012 at 7:17 am

   Hanna, here’s a Berenstain “Stain” you can proudly wear on your carpet. —*—.

2. Pablo says:

   March 5, 2012 at 8:10 am

   You don’t think at all, twat. You emote.

3. Lost My Cookies says:

   March 5, 2012 at 8:32 am

   In most of those books Father Bear is an absolute idiot.

   Funny, sure, but if you have kids you know that you end up reading the same books over and over and over. So after a week or two of “The Honey Hunt” or “The Bike Lesson” I started getting kind of touchy.

4. JD says:

   March 5, 2012 at 8:39 am

   Father Bears tend to be idiots, LMC.

   Are you and yours safe?

5. Silver Whistle says:

   March 5, 2012 at 8:50 am

   Sorry to go O/T, but seeing as this is Britain, what do you think the chances of this guy winning are?

   And who would you sue for your failures?

6. palaeomerus says:

   March 5, 2012 at 9:08 am

   Hanna probably thought she would appear enlightened by acting like a dumb, inconsiderate, intolerant, cruel, little jerk with an idiotic chip on her shoulder. But I’m sure she’d try to pass off her obvious personal deficiencies as evidence of her “right thinking”.

7. Ernst Schreiber says:

   March 5, 2012 at 11:06 am

   I thought that was a rare bit of honesty from a committed leftist.

   Jan Berenstein’s not a person, she’s an abstraction —to be utilized as a leftie like Rosin see’s fit.

   You’d better not try to do it yourself though; not if you know what’s good for you.

   I’m lookin’ at you, Limbaugh!

8. sdferr says:

   March 5, 2012 at 1:00 pm

   It is kinda funny that Rosin thinks the act of a human being is like a coat she can put on and take off, at will. Aristotle — that doddy oldster — would have told her she could become more highly human by being human from the start, and practicing virtuous acts all along the way in order to become virtuous habitually. Otherwise, what has she got?

9. Ernst Schreiber says:

   March 5, 2012 at 2:58 pm

   A social imagination instead of a moral one sdferr. That’s what she has.

10. sdferr says:

    March 5, 2012 at 3:07 pm

    It’s strange (and I take your word for it Ernst, since I’m not sure what the social imagination encompasses) that Rosin’s initial stance is akin to the stance of Adam Smith’s fellow who, hearing of floods in China or some catastrophe or other far away, doesn’t give it a second thought with regard to actual human beings being on the receiving end of the overpowering waters (if I recall Smith’s analogy correctly).

    Or that, to pull it back a bit, the “social” wouldn’t be thought to be composed of the individual human being as its most fundamental element, or primary phenomenon. But that’s just how impoverished my own understanding must be, I guess.

11. bh says:

    March 5, 2012 at 3:10 pm

    I’m a bit busy at the moment but there was an edifying thread where Ernst laid out the social vs moral imagination distinction that I quite liked.

    There were excerpts and everything.

12. Ernst Schreiber says:

    March 5, 2012 at 3:38 pm

    [Lionel Trilling’s The Liberal Imagination is a criticism of modern liberalism’s dependence on what might be called the social imaginiation—the imagination that seeks not merely to understand society but even to save it [from itself, I might add E.S.]. “Some paradox of our nature leads us,” Trilling wrote, “when once we have made our fellow men the objects of our enlightened interest, to go on to make them objects of our pity, then of our wisdom, ultimately of our coercion. It is to prevent this corruption, the most ironic and tragic that man knows, that we stand in need of the moral realism which is the product of the free play of the moral imagination.”

    (Michael Knox Beran, Pathology of the Elites, ix)

    Rosin then, is a moral idealist, one who, because Berenstein didn’t live up to her ideals, thought nothing of her passing other than “good riddance” of Berenstein’s passing because she was of no other use to her in pursuit of that ideal.

13. sdferr says:

    March 5, 2012 at 3:39 pm

    That would be good: Ernst, could you paste in a link? Bing returns “sociological imagination” [C. Wright Mills] to a “social imagination” query. Go there?

14. sdferr says:

    March 5, 2012 at 3:42 pm

    Ach, sorry, I hadn’t refreshed before posting.

15. sdferr says:

    March 5, 2012 at 3:49 pm

    So, I dug up this, yes?

16. geoffb says:

    March 5, 2012 at 3:53 pm

    Here bh.

17. sdferr says:

    March 5, 2012 at 4:05 pm

    Just through the first few paragraphs, but it looks as though the social imagination is closely akin to the Hegelian teleological worldview. “. . . a creature of his age . . . ” — “the son of his times”. “This was a period . . .”, etc.

    But then, up jumps Rousseau: “The result was a ‘systematic separation of the individual from his actual self.’ “

18. sdferr says:

    March 5, 2012 at 7:25 pm

    Harvey Mansfield, in the WSJ, eulogizing his recently deceased colleague James Q. Wilson:

    [. . . ] The will to win in sports can also be found in politics. It is not the same as the desire for gain, the economic motive that was adopted by the Yale behavioralists as the essence of politics and, again, lamentably lapped up by the profession.

    The will to win might make you forgo the desire for gain. It can be dangerous and, because it cannot be removed from human nature, it needs to be controlled. Here is where character comes in.

    What Wilson, after his mentor Edward Banfield, called “the progressive impulse” tried to ignore the phenomenon of human partisanship and the need for character to direct it. The progressives, with their social science, thought they could go directly to the rational, economic solution and did not take account of the ways people resist science and reason when they believe it works against them.

    These ways are many and unpredictable, particularly since social science in its pompous naiveté cannot see why people resist social science. That is why progressives think they know more than they do and overestimate the ease of change.

19. Ernst Schreiber says:

    March 5, 2012 at 7:48 pm

    Compare Knox Beran:

    When you affix a social or social-scientific label to a person (“bourgeois,” “anal-retentive,” “extrovert”) or classify him according to his social provenance (“working class,” “Ivy League,” “inner city,” “WASP,” “Jew”), you have, very often, the illusion that you have plucked out the heart of his mystery and know the essential thing about him. It is a dangerous conceit. As soo as you have reduced a person to a type, you have begun to forget that he is a human being. [….]

    The difficulty of our time is that those who have cultivated the social imagination most passionately have not limited themselves to the elucidation of social facts. They have judged moral facts in the light of social theories; they have applied the devices of the social imagination in domains that were once the province of what Trilling (following Edmund Burke) called the moral imagination. In using the latest social technic… members of our modern power classes have weakened practices and customs that have over the centuries been nourished by the moral imagination, and that are very likely essential to its continued vitality.

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