Things You Believe

• Anthropogenic Global Warming is pretty well confirmed by the scientific evidence. Our release of CO2 has caused the climate to warm. There is no evidence to the contrary.
• Cap and Trade is a great idea. It will create jobs, lowering the unemployment rate, and help cool the planet.
• The belief that economic stimulus - spending by the federal government in order to stimulate the economy and create jobs - works is based on sound economic evidence.
• Sarah Palin is stupid, ignorant, and a silly, while Barack Obama is smart, knowledgeable and accomplished.
• The only reasons there is any resistance to the federal government's plan to take over the health insurance industry are selfishness, ignorance and stupidity. The values at stake in the debate are fairness, decency and justice on the one side and greed on the other.
• We should make private health insurance companies illegal and let the government be the only health insurance provider.
• We have double-digit unemployment and will do so for the foreseeable future because of what Republicans did in the past.
• Our guys in the military are stupid and have no other viable options in life and therefore are being taken advantage of by our government.
• Good solid conservatives worth listening to for the sake of your open-minded fairness are chiefly David Brooks and David Gergen.
• MSNBC is fair while FOX News is extremely biased.
• The opposition to Barack Obama is attributable to racism and ignorance.
  

Kettle

No, really.

Bigwig?

It's making a sound. Can't poke it because it's made of cyberpixels. Just have to wait. The world's most bestest blogger stirs. Prolly it'll just roll over and go back to sleep, which is just fine. Thy will be done!

Peter Bocking RIP

Fare thee well, PeterUK.

RIP, Mr. Bocking.

Conservatism is in the Middle of a Web

There is a web of values which we have inherited from our ancestors, a large set which form the moral substance of the ways of life which we love and which make for good and decent lives. They hang together in mutual support in the way that a the strands of a spider web do.

Unfortunately, some of the strands may be pursued monomaniacally. Fetishizing one value over the rest, away one goes off on a tangent away from the central network. One leaves the other strands behind, gives them short shrift, allowing one's preferred thread to trump all the others. Libertarianism is an example of this monomania. Go to a local libertarian meeting. Half the room will turn out to be anarchists. Liberty is a trump, so government is not allowable.

Some of the strands do not fit in with the rest of the web. Moral and political debate is supposed to ferret out these elements and discard them, just as one discovers and erases whichever of the entries in a crossword puzzle is incoherent with the rest.

Some people make fetishes out of an improper strand instead of properly discarding it. An example is the effort to redistribute wealth. There is no justice in the redistribution of wealth. It also does no good. It is a bad value. Yet many base their political points of view on it, fetishizing it, making it trump all the other values in the web. They, too, end up far away from the central cluster of values, out on a tangent. But, unlike the libertarian, they sacrifice all else to a bad value, not a good one.

Conservatism is the intent to preserve the cluster, to prevent any drift of one's morals or of the body politic in any direction away from the center. The cluster is worth preserving. None of the strands in the cluster, whether proper or improper, is more valuable than the entire set.

So-called moderates? They are people who drift from the center in whichever direction, only not very far.

This is a decent picture of conservatism and its alternatives. As I've argued in previous posts, the left-right spectrum is a very poor model.

Conservatism is Indexical

Reader Stephen Krueger writes in:

I've read some of John Ray's writings on the meaning of "right" and "left". What I took away from it is he was defining them as conservative and progressive, respectively. Conservatism meaning a general temper for experience or what came before, and progressivism meaning a temper for changing the standing order. The terms are not to be taken as determining what level of government is acceptable. So your statement: "It means that libertarians are to the right of conservatives, and anarchists still further to the right," doesn't fit.

Well, yes, but there is more to be said.

By "indexical" I mean referring to a certain thing. Political and moral conservatism is a conservative stance about a certain thing; it is not just a conservative stance about anything. And it that certain thing is a certain set of ways of life; it is not just any ways of life. There is a reason that there are no leftist conservatives, and it's not a superficial reason.

Of course conservatives are known for loving and preserving traditional ways of life inherited from history. This being so, one might set of a right-left spectrum in which those who want a new society are on the left and those who do not - conservatives - are on the right. This dichotomy might render the terms "left" and "right" more sensibly than the dichotomy between totalitarianism and liberty. In this way one could not be too conservative and anarchists would not be nonsensically placed to the right of conservatives.

However, this allows for the possibility of communist conservatives, anarchist conservatives, and so forth. In any society in which totalitarianism or anarchy held sway, the conservative, we would have to say, would favor maintaining the totalitarianism or anarchy. You might be satisfied with that sense of "conservative," in which the term applies to anyone who wants to keep his society the way it has been for some time. But this is not the best sense of the term.

The term "conservative" is indexical. It refers to the desire to preserve the ways of life suitable to our nature; "our" is an indexical term, a pointer. Take an analogy: "great lover." We don't mean someone who demonstrates deft and fervently amorous behaviors behaviors about just anything - bicycles, twigs, people, water, string, chunks of ice in Saturn's rings, etc. We mean he does demonstrates these behaviors toward human beings, and even certain human beings, at that, ones worthy of his affections. Similarly a man who reflexively aims to preserve his countries old totalitarian, welfare-statist, or anarchist system is not a conservative any more than a member of the Charles Manson clan would have been had one of them devoutly tried to preserve its traditions.

Therefore, what drives conservatism is human nature. Conservatism aims at obtaining and maintaining moral and political values which are appropriate to the kind of beings we are, which promote our flourishing and enable us to live decent and good lives. Fondness for tradition isn't conservatism without this tether to human nature. Conservatism is a disposition to keep to traditions but within the constraint that the traditions track the facts about human nature. You needn't be fully aware of this tethering and tracking to be a conservative; you need only have a sense that something like this is what you are trying to do in preserving your values.

To be conservative, then, you have to get it right. Conservatism is indexical. If you haven't pointed your conservative dispositions at the right set of ways of life, you are not a conservative. You may be a crank or a reactionary, but you aren't a conservative. You might think you are a conservative, but you would be mistaken, just as a child who doesn't know anything about soccer at all may play with a ball and think he's playing soccer but be utterly mistaken.

There are two points downstream of this. First, the right-left spectrum is still not very helpful here. There is a sweet spot called conservatism in which we get a variety of values right and intend to preserve them. Then, again, there is a variety of directions in which one may diverge from these values: libertinism, anarchism, libertarianism, welfare-statism, and totalitarianism. I suppose if you would like to call the sweet spot in the middle "the right" and all the deviations away from it collectively "the left," then you may. But I don't know why anarchists and totalitarians are leftists. No, the left-right spectrum is not useful.

Secondly, conservatism is indexical but has a less-than perfectly strict threshold for accuracy. If you took yourself to be a conservative but in aiming to preserve all the right values you didn't get everything right, but got almost everything right, then you would still be a conservative. The more you get wrong, however, the more we are inclined to remove you from the category "conservative" and place you in the category of "ideologue" or "reactionary crank." (Do not confuse "conservative" with "reactionary." Leftists can be reactionaries and there are many such leftists about today. A reactionary who will not take any criticism of his tendentious and unproven views seriously but will instead excoriate his critics.) Still, like many other concepts, "conservatism" is one the fulfillment of which doesn't require absolute perfection. This is why conservatism is a big tent. Conservatives have much to deliberate about, to disagree on, and to debate. It isn't easy to get all the right values right.

The Cause of the Financial Crisis Was Government Interference

I notice that some people continue to blame "greedy" businessmen and underregulation of the market for the crisis. The idea is that it was they and not the CRA that caused the crisis. One fact adduced in favor of this theory is that most of the bad loans did not go to poor people. That's as deep as the theory goes. It's very shallow, but it gets you to where you want to go: to support for your leftist welfare state and your hatred of free markets.

So, let's rehearse this again. (Prior posts here and here.)

CRA. Must make bad loans. Artificially low interest rates? Why not.

Need to pool risk. FNMA FMAC MBS. Plus CDS/CDO.

Hey. I can dump all sorts of crappy loans into these MBS's! FNMA and FMAC are happy to cover for me. I'll make bad loans to middle class and even richer folk.

I'm making a killing. Flipping houses. Making crappy loans.

All of a sudden: POP! Oh, well.

Now let's go back in time and do this without government interference: without CRA/low interest rates/MBS/FNAC/FNMA.

Ready? Here we go:

Did you miss it? No, you didn't miss anything. Nothing happened. No bubble. No pop.

Let's even stipulate that the government allowed financial institutions to diversify in banking and investment and to get overleveraged. So, what? Nothing happened. It would have been a great world.

But alas, we live in this world, in which government interference is considered normal and in which the bad effects of stupid and immoral businessmen are amplified beyond belief, rather than squelched by market forces. Oh, well, at least it gives the leftists a chance to claim the crisis as a reason for even more government interference.

There will always be stupid and immoral businessmen. It's almost as unavoidable as stupid and immoral politicians. The free market and prudent laws are normally able to crush these people. But government over-interference in the market is not unavoidable. It is purely optional.

Government over-interference in the market kills and ruins lives by the million, yet you continue to support it because you hate the rich, you find in your pseudo-support for the poor (you give nothing to charity) a satisfactory facsimile of moral depth, and because you believe that this time, after all the failures of the last 100 years, a welfare state will finally work. You still believe that Keynesian stimulus will work someday because you hate the alternative: the free market. You still hate the fact that tax cuts for investors stops recessions. In fact, you are so far gone that all you need to dismiss these concerns is to wave your hand at the notion that moneyed forces have raised them. You are so far gone that you are all but satisfied by "that's just health insurance company propaganda" as a retort to every argument against socialized health care. Etc. You really are in quite a state of befuddlement. And you're proud of it.

You should re-examine your beliefs. Start by considering whether they are based upon hatred, rather than fact. Part of the problem is that much of your university education taught you that critical analysis means inventing moneyed interest behind every argument against your leftist ideology. This has crippled your intellect by allowing the muscle that dissects actual arguments to atrophy. You also have lost hold of the notions of the rights to life, liberty, property, free association and contract, and so forth. You have a lot to reflect upon.

Palin in Hong Kong

Here are some excerpts. Point after point, spot on.

Fuller excerpt here.

More Palin, please.

Karl Denninger

Here he sums up his last year or so of blogging. It ain't pretty.

If you haven't been following Denninger, dip into his archives. It ain't pretty.

Simplicius on Right and Left

Go. Go and read.

The Meaninglessness of "Right" and "Left"

Let's finish up this story.

If you want to use the terms "right" and "left," you have a decision to make. The early 20th C. fascists were on the "right" in common English. It has been demonstrated that they were also on the left, but that doesn't disprove the former point. Under these circumstances, "left" and "right" are incoherent or at least too confused to be useful.

If you want to use the terms, you will have to remove the confusion embedded in them, namely that the fascists were on the right and on the left. You'll need to prove that all users of English should (a.) reserve the term "right" for conservatives and other opponents of totalitarianism and (b.) stop calling Hitler and Mussolini "on the right" or "right wing." Good luck with that. It isn't going to happen. Take a look at John Jay Ray's writings on this. You'll have to search the Web under his name and "fascism," "leftism," "Hitler," and so forth; they're well worth reading in full. He has undertaken the Herculean task of semantically pushing the totalitarians out of the right.

Suppose you could accomplish this feat. Now you have conservatism on the right and totalitarianism (socialism, fascism, what have you) on the left. What good does that do you? It means that libertarians are to the right of conservatives, and anarchists still further to the right. Is that what you want? It will do you no good. If you want anarchists to be considered as to the right of conservatives, then you want to introduce a new semantics and not to clean up an old one. Also, you'll have rendered conservatism as only moderately right. To the right of it will be decidedly unconservative territory. This would render "extremely conservative" and even "very conservative" meaningless. You'll have to explain those features of the English language away.

"Right" and "left" are confused and intellectually useless. Their usage is best reserved as brickbats to be hurled at various totalitarians. This is how various totalitarians themselves have used them. The leftists decried the right wing fascists, and vice versa. At best the terms mean "totalitarian whom I dislike intensely." As a conservative, you can accept the label "right wing" only if you accept that it indelibly connotes "totalitarian whom I dislike intensely." Have fun washing that away. Lenin even denounced leftist communism as infantile. You better get to work if you want to clean up all the confusion. You'll fail, and if you succeed, you'll still have only useless gibberish left over.

Better to eschew these terms, preferring these: totalitarian, statist, fascist, socialist, communist, conservative, and libertarian. "Liberal" was also taken over by the socialists and is now in dire straits. It might be rescued as a close relative of libertarianism and conservatism, but the prospects are not good. Once you allow your language to be perverted for decades, you can't simply clean house. Semantics are not easily reversible because the meanings of words cannot be easily changed.

By the way, when you give up the useless left-right spectrum, you may still speak of degrees of conservatism. Conservatism is a devotion to a large set of important values, including liberty, order, justice, charity, and self-reliance, amongst many others. To be extremely conservative is to be absolutely and implacably so devoted. To be extremely unconservative is therefore to be amoral. There is in addition a sense in which one may be "too conservative." In this case, one is absolutely adherent to the traditional moral judgments one holds, even when one of them has been proven groundless or inconsistent with the others. The defenders of slavery in the 19th Century were too conservative in this sense. This is not a very salutary locution, however, as the ability to renounce moral judgments which run against the larger set of one's values is precisely a way of being devoted to that set and not a disloyalty to it. Slavery ran against the value of liberty and against certain non-moral facts, such as that blacks are people. To defend slavery in these circumstances is hardly conservative and only "too conservative" in an idiosyncratic sense. The real conservatives denounced slavery. Consider an analogy. Consider a scientist who won't give up his belief in one of the current theories in the face of conclusive evidence against it. Is he being "too scientific"? Of course not. "Too conservative," then, is hardly useful.

If you hear someone call conservatives "right wing" you might speak up and say "Do you mean like the fascists Hitler and Mussolini? Then how are conservatives, supporting limited government and individual liberty as they do, right wing? Please explain yourself." The reply will be hopelessly confused. This is a semantic task that requires less than Herculean effort and is achievable.

It's a Joke

Can we please stop pretending that the Obama Adminstration (such as it is) is not a joke?

Okay? Okay.

What kind of administration hires an avowed communist and 911 Truther as czar? The joke kind.

What kind of an administration quadruples the deficit from under $400B to a trillion or two every year? The joke kind.

It's not an administration. It's a joke. The joke is on you, your kids and your grandkids.

Are you surprised at all this? Really? When you hire a 47-year-old leftist ideologue who has never accomplished anything in his life and you make him the President of the United States, are you really surprised that the result is a joke? Really?

Dostoyevsky, Alinsky

Simplicius has an interesting post.

Conservative writers have recently made much of Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals (1971), hoping to show that moves being made currently are not innocent of revolutionary intent. They are not wrong in this, but their case is actually stronger than they seem to realize. Alinsky’s tactics were not original, they had actually been developed over the past hundred and fifty years. His tactics had already been applied by Hitler in the 1930s, before him by Mussolini, and before him by Lenin and Trotsky. But that they were already clearly understood a good fifty years earlier is evidenced by these speeches and others like them in The Possessed.

Read the whole thing.

You Are Strangely Nonchalant

You voted for these leaders. Yet you are strangely nonchalant about their spending habits and the damage they are doing to the economy. Why?

Perhaps you weren't really upset about the GOP spending too much but merely used the issue as a brickbat to express your mindless rage. For now you are strangely quiet. Meanwhile, others get it:


We are probably moving into a multi-year depression like the one bloated government spent us into in the 1930's. I think you like the idea. It's a sort of catharsis to you, isn't it? Having lived in affluence for your whole life, you see poverty romantically, don't you? All the while, you suspect that you will do fairly well during the depression, working in the public sector which causes it. You know in the back of your mind that the suffering won't draw too near to you. Your hatred for those who don't share your fascistic vision but who just want a small government and who value mainly liberty, self-reliance and charity instead, has driven you to this. Who managed to put this vision into your mind long ago? What fueled it over the years? Do you have strong arguments for maintaining it? You don't, do you? You have only mindless verbiage, such as "For me but not for thee" and "Let the devil take the hindmost" which you convince yourself are the core of the American values you hate. You do not understand what you hate, yet you do not know this.

You are strangely quiet.

It galls you that conservatives give far more to charity than leftists do, doesn't it?

Although liberal families' incomes average 6 percent higher than those of conservative families, conservative-headed households give, on average, 30 percent more to charity than the average liberal-headed household

So, what really is the substance of your vision? It's certainly not concern for the poor any more than Lenin and Stalin's was. What, then, is it? What are your solid arguments for it? You need to think about that very carefully. That vision is destroying the American economy right now. What are you really up to? Who has put you up to it? What caliber of people were they?

UPDATE: You might consider other points of view:

Sixty-two percent (62%) of Americans say it’s always better to cut taxes than increase government spending because taxpayers, not bureaucrats, are the best judges of how to spend their own money.

A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that just 20% of adults disagree, and 18% are not sure.

Do you live in a way such that you only converse with people who agree with your progressive vision? Perhaps you live in an intellectually stagnant hole. But you can't tell. Does the notion of fiscal conservatism in politics make you angry and reach for epithets such as "racist," "callous," "oppression of the poor," and the other two I mentioned before? Do you feel that you want to label fiscal conservatives and supporters of small government and the free market "fascists"? If so, let that paradox sink in for a moment. It entails that the Founding Fathers were fascists. Of course, supporters of the free market favor interference with the market place that stops monopoly, fraud, and the like. So, take that off the table. Your belief that the free market and limited government are fascistic is based on the fact that in such a system, there will be losers who end up poor, isn't it? This is why you indulge in the mindless pap of "For me and not for thee." And yet, you give little to charity and you do not volunteer at soup kitchens. So, what is really the substance of your concern? Perhaps you find it a quick and easy way to install a facsimile of moral depth and seriousness into your soul. Perhaps you envy successful, happy people and want to bring them down. Liberty, self-reliance and charity, on the other hand, are not a facsimile and are not easy. They are also inconsistent with envy. As Franklin said, "Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom. As nations become corrupt and vicious, they have more need of masters." You are ready for masters, now, aren't you? You call for them: experts in Washington to control most of the economy, to destroy private health insurance, and to control businesses. And yet you label opponents of this goal "fascists."

Leftists usually label their opponents "fascists" or "right wing," whether their opponents are competing leftists (as in the case of the international socialists' labeling the national socialists) or not (as in the case of your labeling the thought of the Founding Fathers fascistic.) Yet, are you sure that you aren't a fascist? Do you want a drastic increase in government power, along with a control of business by government? Do you think that government should implement many more regulations of American life? Did you have impulses to partake in a cult of personality surrounding Barack Obama? Do you feel a slight sensation of euphoria when contemplating a state in which all people are one in will and mind?

You've Been Had

VDH sums it up.

You voted for a charlatan who had never accomplished anything in his life and who has difficulty speaking in paragraphs when the teleprompter isn't around. Yes, you are really that shallow and ignorant. He tripled the deficit. The depression will be your fault. And the double-digit unemployment which will last for years. And the rationing of health-care. Perhaps we can dismantle and clean up your mess in the '20s. Probably not.

At least we can get a chuckle out of his doing rendition and torturing white-collar criminals. Yes, at least there's that. Of course, you're screaming for his impeached for that, right? I, sorry, I forgot. He's a leftist. So, it doesn't bother you.

You've been had. Wait until the next generation finds out what you did.

UPDATE: Enjoy your totalitarianism. Pity about the loss of liberty and prosperity though. Oh, well, at least you've satisfied your fetish for leftist ideology. How do you like it?

Just Keep Scrolling

Dennis is on a roll these days.

Have a read.

You're Getting Played

You are getting played for a fool. But then, you elected him, so why wouldn't he assume you were a fool?

Take a look at Palin on tort reform. Specific problem, specific solution.

Also, how about making it illegal for states to stop health insurance companies from selling across state lines? How about giving tax write-offs for catastrophic insurance but not for full insurance? Etc. There are specific problems with the system and they have specific solutions. Anytime a government official tells you he needs to replace the entire system, you're being played for a fool. Follow the money and the power. The official ends up with the power and the money if you agree to his plan, doesn't he?

Posers

Dennis is right a lot.

Indeed. If you're an economic egalitarian you have a duty to impoverish yourself by giving all of your excess money to charity. Either there is an injustice in your having more than someone else or there isn't.

Not a single leftist complies with this duty. They're all malcontents and posers.

Okay, the tedious objection: "We object to the system as it is. It's not fair that only we and no other wealthy people should give our money to the poor. So, we are justified in keeping our new Volvos and IRAs until the system is changed."

Reply: Uh, huh. Some people are in a burning house. You are in a crowd of onlookers standing outside. None in the crowd will help, despite your pleas. You could save some of the people in the house, but it's not fair that you be the only one. So, you decline to offer help and you go on sipping your $4 latte.

Hogwash. Sorry, but if you are on the left and you are rich, then you are a hypocrite.

Blogs

Stop by M. K. Freeberg's. Free stuff to think about. No nonsense.

May I suggest Dennis? I call him DtheP, as Samuel called him in the old days. Dennis will cut through the day's news for you. Using implements such as a chainsaw, flamethrower, bulldozer, a nuke.

New kid on the block, a philosopher: Simplicius Simplicissimus.

Heh. These guys' blogs are feeling the awesome power of the philolanche right about now.

Whoops a Daisy

Presidents of Canadian Medical Association:

We all agree that the system is imploding, we all agree that things are more precarious than perhaps Canadians realize," [incoming CMA president] Doig told The Canadian Press.

"We know that there must be change," she said. "We're all running flat out, we're all just trying to stay ahead of the immediate day-to-day demands."

Oh, my.

His thoughts on the issue are already clear. [Current CMA president] Ouellet has been saying since his return that "a health-care revolution has passed us by," that it's possible to make wait lists disappear while maintaining universal coverage and "that competition should be welcomed, not feared."

In other words, Ouellet believes there could be a role for private health-care delivery within the public system.

Oh dear, oh dear. Haven't they heard that limiting government power is fascistic?

Meanwhile, here in the U.S., you want to socialize the health insurance industry in the U.S. because you hate rich people. And you think leadership is having a bunch of lobbyists write a 1000-page bill and signing it by Tuesday. Meanwhile, in your universe, anyone who speaks out against this travesty is a racist.

UPDATE: Treacher notices some chutzpah.