Reblogged: Why the Leftist Non Sequiturs?

[Gus Van Horn blog]

Michael Hurd takes a look at the leftist campaign rhetoric behind Hillary Clinton's presumptive 2016 candidacy for President and finds both dishonesty and insults. Regarding the latter, he says, after noting that someone like Margaret Thatcher would never enjoy such support:

Why does Hillary Clinton insult herself, and other women of all political points-of-view, by making one's gender the centerpiece of fitness for office? Transgendered people aside, you don't choose your sex organs. Why is being a woman any more an accomplishment than being a man? It seems to me that it's what you do with your masculinity or femininity--more importantly, your humanity and your intellect--that really counts.

The question is rhetorical, and its answer is as simple as asking what this tack is supposed to accomplish. Leftists want to be able to tar Mrs. Clinton's opponents as sexists, as if opposing her could only be due to misogyny. This is just a typical example of the intellectually bankrupt default "debating" tactics of the left. (A commenter here once called an example "a typical [leftist] non sequitur".)

Another example can be observed in the push for draconian government controls of the energy sector in the name of staving off global warming. Even if human activity were causing the climate to become warmer, such a conclusion would not justify their legislative agenda. (Too many of their opponents fail to grasp that it violates the proper purpose of government, as protector of individual rights.) But they act like it does, and that anyone who opposes it for whatever reason is scientifically illiterate, anti-science, or in "denial". They don't really give a damn about "the science": They just want to be able to smear opponents.

Package-dealing support of Hillary Clinton with the view that women have rights equal to men -- or a central planning scheme with a pro-reason, pro-science outlook -- fails to provide actual reasons for supporting either, and actually epitomizes the opposite point of view. Or, as Ayn Rand once put it, package-dealing employs "the shabby old gimmick of equating opposites by substituting nonessentials for their essential characteristics."

-- CAV

Link to Original