Deconstructing "Progressive " thought

[Marchog]

Au contraire.  Put simply, Moral Relativism holds that morals ("Good" and "Evil") are all, well, relative.  And subjective to what people believe.  It is without substance and illogical. It is simply opinion held as fact.  For example, today I identify as a woman, therefore I *am* a woman. Tomorrow, I identify as a Klingon, therefore I *am* a Klingon.

The polar opposite of Moral Relativism is Moral Objectivism.  It hold that there is a "Good" and "Evil".  Religious people hold that these come from God.  Others hold that these just *are*, just as 1+1=2.  It just is.  And we can know or recognise "good" and "evil" through the use of logic, reason, observation, etc.


If someone is a Moral Relativist, then silly things like objective science are simply barriers, because, well, truth is relative, right?  It sounds absurd, because it is.  But in a society in which Moral Relativism runs rampant, truths are no longer universal.  Think of this next time you hear someone criticize or justify something based on the year, and not based on reason. ("It's 2015.  That crap shouldn't be allowed!"....I'm not sure what 8:15 pm has to do with right or wrong, but hey, who am I to judge, right?)
/hippy

Sanest thing I've read on the internet this week. Mind you, that's not saying much, in light of the kulturkampf going on down South.

For the pedagogically minded, I would suggest reading up on the history of western philosophy, and the trajectory it followed since the Early Modern period. Much of today's relativistic weirdness stems from entrenched philosophical assumptions (and as far as I'm concerned, mistakes) inherited from thinkers anywhere from Descartes to Kant. Especially relevant is the inferred perception "filter" between the mind and the external world (via hyper-dualism and the "mind-body problem", a non-issue in ancient and medieval views), which opened up the possibility that the external world could be perceived differently by different minds (thus relativism).

I come at it from game theory and evolutionary ecology.  If it's in my best interest I'll do it.

I'm going to sound harsh, but is this really the attitude the military should be encouraging? Half of my BMQ was spent deliberately bludgeoning "me me me" thinking out of our heads.

 

[a_majoor]

Getting back to the article a bit, the idea that "we" can afford to turn a blind eye because "they" are doing things over there does not bear scrutiny.

First of all, *we* are already engaged, even if only in a small way. The CF-18 pilots flying missions over Iraq and Syria are proof enough that at least some of the people in charge of these resources do believe that it is worth taking a risk and spending blood and treasure to defend human dignity against barbarism. Even if I don't agree with the form this takes, I do believe that *we* need to take active measures. If I could figure out what the best ones would be....

More appropriately, the behaviour of the "Progressives" is disgraceful because they are turning a blind eye to assaults on human life and dignity here as well. While they celebrate victory over microagression on campus, I never heard one word from the "feminists" "Studies departments" or many of the other cheerleaders of moral relativism against the domestic violence which resulted in the murder of young Afghan-Canadian women and their mother not too far away from where I am in Kingston. Total silence about the real "rape culture" in Rotherham, England or other abominations right here at home. "Yes but" for the Charlie Hedbo massacre in France. IF events this large can happen without comment right under our noses; what lesser crimes are totally unremarked?

So in the end, this is very much an issue of focus and proportionality, and the various groups which presume to speak for the Progressive cause have totally failed to keep what is truly important in focus, preferring to expend disproportionate amounts of effort on trivia instead.

 

[a_majoor]

This article has two very succinct messages.

1. Why waste time trying to debate/change the minds of Progressives/Social Justice Warriors/Climate change alarmists/etc. Set them on ignore.

2. They are acting in bad faith since their agenda is and always has been: Power

http://journal.ijreview.com/2015/07/245635-gun-rights-advocates-have-a-devastating-new-argument-against-gun-control-here-it-is/

Gun Rights Advocates Have A Devastating New Argument Against Gun Control. Here It Is.
Written by Kurt Schlichter

American gun owners are beginning to respond with a fresh, powerful argument when facing anti-gun liberals. Here it is, in its entirety. Ready?

“Screw you.” That’s it. Except the first word isn’t “Screw.”

It’s not exactly a traditional argument, but it’s certainly appropriate here. The fact is that there is no point in arguing with liberal gun-control advocates because their argument is never in good faith. They slander gun owners as murderers. They lie about their ultimate aim, which is to ban and confiscate all privately owned weapons. And they adopt a pose of reasonability, yet their position is not susceptible to change because of evidence, facts or law. None of those matter – they already have their conclusion. This has to do with power – their power.

You can’t argue with someone who is lying about his position or whose position is not based upon reason. You can talk all day about how crime has diminished where concealed carry is allowed, while it flourishes in Democrat blue cities where gun control is tightest. You can point to statistics showing that law-abiding citizens who carry legally are exponentially less likely to commit gun crimes than other people. You can cite examples of armed citizens protecting themselves and their communities with guns. You can offer government statistics showing how the typical American is at many times greater risk of death from an automobile crash, a fall, or poisoning than from murder by gun.

But none of that matters, because this debate is not about facts. It’s about power. The liberal anti-gun narrative is not aimed at creating the best public policy but at disarming citizens the liberal elite looks down upon – and for whom weapons represent their last-ditch ability to respond to liberal overreach.

Put simply, liberal elitists don’t like the fact that, at the end of the day, an armed citizenry can tell them, “No.”

So they argue in bad faith, shamelessly lying, libeling their opponents, and hiding their real endgame. Sure, sometimes the mask slips and a liberal politician like Mike Bloomberg or Diane Feinstein reveals their true agenda, but mostly they stay on-message.

For example, Barack Obama, who always tries to reassure us bitter clingers that he doesn’t want to take our guns, speaks longingly about the Australian plan – which was confiscation of most viable defensive weapons from the civilian population.

Obama is lying – about gay marriage, about your doctor – and he is likewise lying about guns. The minute he could disarm every American civilian he would, something particularly alarming in light of his pal Bill Ayers’ infamous observation that ‘fundamentally transforming’ America would require killing at least 25 million citizens.

No wonder free Americans are done pretending the gun argument is a rational debate and are responding with an extended middle finger – and the challenge to come and take their arms. The fact remains that any outright attempt to take the arms from tens of millions of American gun owners would almost certainly result in a second Civil War. And we all know how the first Civil War went for the Democrats.

So, through a campaign of shaming, dissembling, and outright slander, liberals are trying to talk Americans into giving up their weapons voluntarily. There’s always another “common sense” restriction to enact, spurred on by a tragedy that the last “common sense” restriction didn’t prevent and that the proposed new “common sense” restriction would not have prevented. They want to do it in baby steps, and with our cooperation, since they cannot do it by force.

There are a few people arguing in good faith, but it’s too late. Liberal writer Kurt Eichenwald recently wrote a “compromise” proposal to settle the gun issue that was notable because he actually analyzed gun freedom arguments and agreed with some of them. He cited the silliness of the “assault weapons” and “cop killer” bullet lies. While he still rejects 30 round capacity magazines, he began with opposition to silencers and then, after hearing facts and evidence from knowledgeable gun owners, changed his position. That’s good faith, the threshold requirement for a real debate, but Eichenwald mistakenly assumes this is a debate based upon reason between good faith opponents. It’s not. It’s based upon the desire of liberals for total supremacy.

So until the gun control argument becomes a real argument instead of a transparent power grab, there’s only one appropriate response to liberal gun banners. And it’s similar to “Screw you.”

 

[a_majoor]

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn is being channeled by candidate Carly Fiorina. the response of the media is eerily similar as well...

http://pjmedia.com/instapundit/215423/

FIORINA POPS THE LIBERAL BUBBLE: “It has been impossible to miss the shift in tone among liberals when criticizing Carly Fiorina. The timbre of their opposition to the surging Republican candidate has evolved from dismissive and aggravated disappointment to disproportionately seething rage.  Among liberals, Fiorina has inspired passionate resentment, and it isn’t hard to see why. She has rather deftly infiltrated the left’s comforting and previously impenetrable habitat of fictions, and they vehemently resent the contamination of the fragile artificial environment they have constructed for themselves,” Noah Rothman writes at Commentary:


For two weeks, Fiorina has been made to answer for what the political press has universally dubbed not merely the conflation of B-roll footage with actual events – an honest and deserved critique of her characterization of the Planned Parenthood videos – but a willful misrepresentation of the specifics. There is a reason for this: the image of the moving, likely viable fetus out of the womb – an infant born alive during a failed abortion attempt – is so grossly disturbing that it has the potential to move the cultural needle. Those images present an existential threat to those who would advocate for unrestricted access to elective abortion. The videos themselves cannot be discredited in the absence of an investigation, but the Republican candidate who has become their chief evangelist can be. In that way, the liberal activist and journalistic classes can perhaps vicariously delegitimize the bombshell Planned Parenthood videos.

“This is about the character of our nation,” Fiorina warned from the debate stage. To her credit, she has refused to back down even amid a withering assault on her credibility from the left. The intellectual self-deception that they have summoned in order to contend that Fiorina made her claims from whole cloth is borne more out of fear than frustration. Their bubble has been popped.

While the now-interlocked stories of Fiorina’s presidential bid and her impact on Planned Parenthood are still very much playing out in real-time, at the moment, it reminds of the way Tom Wolfe described the fury to which the left responded to the arrival of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn to America in his 1976 article “The Intelligent Co-Ed’s Guide to America:”


The publication of The Gulag Archipelago in 1973, however, was a wholly unexpected blow. No one was ready for the obscene horror and grotesque scale of what Solzhenitsyn called “Our Sewage Disposal System”—in which tens of millions were shipped in boxcars to con­centration camps all over the country, in which tens of millions died, in which entire races and national groups were liquidated, insofar as they had existed in the Soviet Union. Moreover, said Solzhenitsyn, the system had not begun with Stalin but with Lenin, who had im­mediately exterminated non-Bolshevik opponents of the old regime and especially the student factions. It was impossible any longer to distinguish the Communist liquidation apparatus from the Nazi.

Yet Solzhenitsyn went still further. He said that not only Stalinism, not only Leninism, not only Communism — but socialism itself led to the concentration camps; and not only socialism, but Marxism; and not only Marxism but any ideology that sought to reorganize morality on an a priori basis. Sadder still, it was impossible to say that Soviet socialism was not “real socialism.” On the contrary — it was socialism done by experts!

Intellectuals in Europe and America were willing to forgive Solzhe­nitsyn a great deal. After all, he had been born and raised in the Soviet Union as a Marxist, he had fought in combat for his country, he was a great novelist, he had been in the camps for eight years, he had suf­fered. But for his insistence that the isms themselves led to the death camps — for this he was not likely to be forgiven soon. And in fact the campaign of antisepsis began soon after he was expelled from the Soviet Union in 1974. (“He suffered too much — he’s crazy.” “He’s a Christian zealot with a Christ complex.” “He’s an agrarian reaction­ary.” “He’s an egotist and a publicity junkie.”)

Solzhenitsyn’s tour of the United States in 1975 was like an enormous funeral procession that no one wanted to see. The White House wanted no part of him. The New York Times sought to bury his two major’ speeches, and only the moral pressure of a lone Times writer, Hilton, Kramer, brought them any appreciable coverage at all. The major tele­vision networks declined to run the Solzhenitsyn interview that created such a stir in England earlier this year (it ran on some of the educa­tional channels).

And the literary world in general ignored him completely. In the huge unseen coffin that Solzhenitsyn towed behind him were not only the souls of the zeks who died in the Archipelago. No, the heartless bastard had also chucked in one of the last great visions: the intellec­tual as the Stainless Steel Socialist glistening against the bone heap of capitalism in its final, brutal, fascist phase. There was a bone heap, all right, and it was grisly beyond belief, but socialism, had created it.

Fiorina has exposed yet another socialist bone heap – naturally the left wishes nothing more than to consign her to it as well.

 

[a_majoor]

Finally, credit for the ideas of the Fascists is being given where it is due. This is more interesting since we are in election season and the various ideas that are being put forth by the Liberals and NDP share much of the same pedigree. (Sadly, the CPC hasn't made a very great effort to put these ideas in their proper place: the dustbin of history):

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/425012/economic-policymaking-obama-1930s

Checkmate: The Economic Chess Masters Play a Losing Game
by KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON October 2, 2015 3:30 PM @KEVINNR

The Institute of Supply Management issued a study warning that American manufacturing growth had come to a standstill in September, and the Labor Department’s latest employment figures, the worst jobs report of the year, tell the same story from another perspective: unemployment rate stagnant, wages stagnant, hours worked down, number of new jobs far below forecast, previous reports revised downward, labor-participation rate at 38-year low, with nearly 95 million eligible American workers sidelined. That the Obama administration is foundering from an economic-policy point of view is not news. Barack Obama & Co. represent the very freshest and most imaginative thinking of the 1930s — stimulus, public works, monkeying with the minimum wage, political favoritism for union constituencies, the ancient superstition that simply putting money in somebody’s pocket makes the nation richer through the miraculous power of the economic multiplier, etc. “Get ready for the new normal,” writes Scott Sumner. “3.0 percent NGDP growth — it’s coming soon.”

Tyler Cowen and others argue that we have entered into a new kind of economy. “There is more and more evidence that we’ve shifted into a new regime where wage growth for most income classes simply doesn’t happen to any significant degree,” Professor Cowen argues. “This may not last forever, but it remains the status quo, and too many people find it too hard to wrap their heads around that. That to me is the single biggest takeaway.”

There is a temptation, especially on the left, to argue that the current prolonged weakness is a result of the financial crisis of 2008–09, but it probably is more accurate to say that the crisis and subsequent recession revealed the weakness of the current regime rather than that they caused it. 

President Obama and his advisers take an essentially managerial view of the economy. Their hearts may secretly thrill to memories of exciting old campus Marxists in days gone by, but they are not in the main government-ownership-of-the-means-of-production guys. They see themselves as chess masters. If you remember those scenes in the original Clash of the Titans with the gods of Olympus moving little figurines around on a gameboard — that is how they see government (and, not coincidentally, themselves). Their role, as they see it, isn’t to own the farms and factories, but to set the terms of employment, to give this constituency a nudge, to take that one down a peg, to push sugar imports in one direction and so-called green energy in another. The Right’s habit of comparing President Obama’s thinking to that of the Italian fascists and their corporazioni isn’t (only) for the purposes of denigration. The president and his men see the government as a partner, an entrepreneur, an economic actor with incomparable resources and power.

If you read Ezra Pound’s admiring estimates of 1930s European corporate-state economics, it will sound quite contemporary: The state has the power to act — why not make the most of it? ’Create jobs,’ but create jobs creating what? No politician ever wants to think about that too deeply, because it means thinking about why demand for their pet projects is insufficient without their artificially inducing it through subsidy or mandate. What about the knowledge to use that awesome power effectively? There’s an old joke about an engineer, a priest, and an economist trapped at the bottom of a deep pit: The engineer looks for a way to get a handhold on the wall, the priest prays for deliverance, and the economist says, “No problem. First, assume a ladder.” Assume you know what the balance of trade in sugar should be, assume you know what McDonald’s fry guys should earn per hour, assume you know what the mix of energy sources used in electricity generation should be . . . Those assumptions are running up against a persistent and unpleasant reality just now.

Our metaphors fail us. Our political leaders still talk about the economy as though it were one of Henry Ford’s factories: It creates so many jobs, produces so many pieces, consumes so much steel and rubber, and if government lent it some money at subsidized rates, maybe it could add another line, which would “create jobs,” etc. Create jobs creating what? No politician ever wants to think about that too deeply, because it means thinking about why demand for their pet projects is insufficient without their artificially inducing it through subsidy or mandate. At his worst, President Obama really does seem to believe that paying a man to dig a hole in the morning and fill it up in the afternoon makes the country richer because it contributes to consumer spending. This is superstition. Pull the consumption lever, watch production ramp up. But the 21st-century economy isn’t a series of levers; it’s a series of relationships. The nature of our technologically enabled present global connectedness means that for the first time in human history all economic activity happens in immediate relation to everything else. You cannot isolate the variables, which is a real problem if you believe in political management of the economy and see the policy question as nothing more than a really tough math problem.

The persistent failure of our current approach to economic policymaking suggests a very different role for government from the one that exists in the mind of the purported chess masters in Washington. President Obama, whose background is in the crank-turning mechanicalism of the law, is not intellectually up to the challenge. It isn’t clear that there is anybody on the scene who is.

— Kevin D. Williamson is roving correspondent for National Review.

Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/425012/economic-policymaking-obama-1930s

 

[a_majoor]

And a useful "how to" guide to eliminate "Progressive" and SJW influence on your workplace:

http://www.fourmilab.ch/fourmilog/archives/2015-10/001582.html

Reading List: SJWs Always Lie

Day, Vox [Theodore Beale]. SJWs Always Lie. Kouvola, Finland: Castalia House, 2015. ASIN B014GMBUR4.

Vox Day is the nom de plume and now nom de guerre of Theodore Beale, a musician with three Billboard Top 40 credits, video game designer, author of science fiction and fantasy and three-time Hugo Award nominee, and non-fiction author and editor.
If you're not involved in the subcultures of computer gaming or science fiction and fantasy, you may not be acquainted with terms such as SJW (Social Justice Warrior), GamerGate, or Sad Puppies. You may conclude that such matters are arcana relating to subcultures of not-particularly-socially-adept people which have little bearing on the larger culture. In this, you would be wrong. For almost fifty years, collectivists and authoritarians have been infiltrating cultural institutions, and now occupy the high ground in institutions such as education, the administrative state, media, and large corporations. This is the “long march through the institutions” foreseen by Antonio Gramsci, and it has, so far, been an extraordinary success, not only advancing its own agenda with a slow, inexorable ratchet, but intimidating opponents into silence for fear of having their careers or reputations destroyed. Nobody is immune: two Nobel Prize winners, James Watson and Tim Hunt, have been declared anathema because of remarks deemed offensive by SJWs. Nominally conservative publications such as National Review, headquartered in hives of collectivist corruption such as New York and Washington, were intimidated into a reflexive cringe at the slightest sign of outrage by SJWs, jettisoning superb writers such as Ann Coulter and John Derbyshire in an attempt to appease the unappeasable.

Then, just as the SJWs were feeling triumphant, GamerGate came along, and the first serious push-back began. Few expected the gamer community to become a hotbed of resistance, since gamers are all over the map in their political views (if they have any at all), and are a diverse bunch, although a majority are younger males. But they have a strong sense of right and wrong, and are accustomed to immediate and decisive negative feedback when they choose unwisely in the games they play. What they came to perceive was that the journalists writing about games were applauding objectively terrible games, such as Depression Quest, due to bias and collusion among the gaming media.

Much the same had been going on in the world of science fiction. SJWs had infiltrated the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America to such an extent that they directed their Nebula Awards to others of their ilk, and awarded them based upon “diversity” rather than merit. The same rot had corrupted fandom and its Hugo Awards.

Vox Day was near the centre of the cyclone in the revolt against all of this. The campaign to advance a slate of science fiction worthy of the Hugos rather than the pap selected by the SJWs resulted in the 2015 Hugos being blown up, demonstrating that SJWs would rather destroy a venerable institution than cede territory.

This book is a superbly written history of GamerGate and the revolt against SJWs in science fiction and fantasy writers' associations and fandom, but also provides deep insight into the seriously dysfunctional world of the SJW and advice about how to deal with them and what to do if you find yourself a target. The tactics of the SJWs are laid bare, and practical advice is given as to how to identify SJWs before they enter your organisation and how to get rid of them if they're already hired. (And get rid of them you must; they're like communists in the 1930s–1950s: once in place they will hire others and promote their kind within the organisation. You have to do your homework, and the Internet is your friend—the most innocuous co-worker or prospective employee may have a long digital trail you can find quickly with a search engine.)

There is no compromising with these people. That has been the key mistake of those who have found themselves targeted by SJWs. Any apology will be immediately trumpeted as an admission of culpability, and nothing less than the complete destruction of the career and life of the target will suffice. They are not well-meaning adversaries; they are enemies, and you must, if they attack you, seek to destroy them just as they seek to destroy you. Read Alinsky; they have. I'm not suggesting you call in SWAT raids on their residences, dig up and release damaging personal information on them, or make anonymous bomb threats when they gather. But be aware that they have used these tactics repeatedly against their opponents.

You must also learn that SJWs have no concern for objective facts. You can neither persuade nor dissuade them from advancing their arguments by citing facts that falsify their claims. They will repeat their objectively false talking points until they tire you out or drown out your voice. You are engaging in dialectic while they are employing rhetoric. To defeat them, you must counter their rhetoric with your own rhetoric, even when the facts are on your side.

Vox Day was in the middle of these early battles of the counter-revolution, both in GamerGate and the science fiction insurrection, and he provides a wealth of practical advice for those either attacked by SJWs or actively fighting back. This is a battle, and somebody is going to win and somebody else will lose. As he notes, “There can be no reconciliation between the observant and the delusional.” But those who perceive reality as it is, not as interpreted through a “narrative” in which they have been indoctrinated, have an advantage in this struggle. It may seem odd to find gamers and science fiction fans in the vanguard of the assault against this insanity but, as the author notes, “Gamers conquer Dragons and fight Gods for a hobby.”

 

[a_majoor]

Funny how most screeds about "saving capitalism" are exactly pointed in the wrong direction. Here is a pretty effective takedown of the latest effort in that direction:

http://www.hoover.org/research/economic-fantasies-robert-reich

The Economic Fantasies Of Robert Reich
by Richard A. Epstein
Monday, October 12, 2015

The United States has seen better days. The political and economic fabric of the country is unraveling, yet there is little agreement about how best to move the country forward. My own position has long been that the culprits of slow growth and social discontent are the increased levels of taxation and regulation that suck the productive lifeblood out of society. That position today is in the minority. A vocal group of progressive thinkers are plumping for the opposite course—and prominent among them is Robert Reich, former Secretary of Labor for Bill Clinton. In his new book Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few, he argues for a set of policies that would cripple the American economy. A better title for his book would be Dooming Capitalism, For Everybody.

Reich makes no bones about his central contention, which is to support “an activist government that raises taxes on the wealthy, invests the proceeds in excellent schools and other means people need to get ahead and redistributes to the needy.” In his view, only with these reforms and by “other means,” most of which are left unspecified, can we return to the glory days of his father, when union members could afford to give a good life to their children, which cannot be done today. Reich offers no explanation for why the decline has taken place, but contents himself with denouncing the “myth of the free market” and the idea that the government should not “intrude” into the business of its citizens.

More concretely, Reich starts by insisting that it is a fantasy to assume that there can be a free market without government to create property rights, control monopoly, and enforce contracts. But he fails to note that this exact list of tasks is what classical liberals like myself assign to government as well. In fact, his list is too short. First, he ignores the role of government in controlling crime and pollution. Second, he does not discuss the limits that should be imposed on the subsidy of some businesses by others. Third, he leaves to one side the difficult questions about the organization and financing of public infrastructure and the management of public resources. A good government is ironically a lot larger than Reich seems to understand.

The real differences between progressives like Reich and classical liberals like myself come then not in the proposition that markets depend in multiple ways on public support. Rather, the disagreement is over the means chosen to generate social improvements. It is here that Reich repeatedly misfires. In dealing with property rights, it’s nice that Reich comes out against slavery—but it is troublesome how he dismisses the right of all persons to determine what job offers to accept for work in the open market. The issue comes to center stage on the question of the minimum wage, where Reich takes the sunny view that the huge increase of the minimum wage to $15 per hour from its current level of $7.25 will largely be a transfer of wealth from rich CEOs and their shareholders to workers, who can use the money in question to get off of public assistance.

Dream on! Reich is in serious denial when he assumes that hard pressed firms in competitive markets won’t make serious changes in how they do business when labor costs move sharply higher. If the minimum wage shoots up, it will start to make more economic sense for these firms to replace low-skilled labor with machines and technologies that can do the same work. The employees that do remain will be, by and large, more skilled, shutting out the poor further. For example, Reich never considers the exceedingly high levels of unemployment among minority teenagers, whom regulation has shut out of the labor market.

The unintended consequences of regulations count. The early returns on the minimum wage increases in Seattle are a loss of 1,000 restaurant jobs in the city compared to an increase of 2,300 restaurant jobs in the rest of the state. And this is only for the first round of minimum wage increases. It is unlikely that Reich knows more about the restaurant business than the businesses themselves who will likely turn to customer self-order kiosks and other adjustments to offset rising labor costs. It is just foolish to project that the relatively small declines in employment levels from small increases in minimum wages will carry over when they increase the wedge between the market and the minimum wage.

Reich takes an even odder view in his discussion about the control of monopoly power. There is no classical liberal who looks with indifference on the creation or toleration of cartels or monopolies, especially when propped up by state power. But the same cannot be said of Reich. In his discussion of labor unions, he starts from the fantasy that employers in competitive markets can “dictate” the wages that they pay their employees. The obvious rejoinder is that workers will play one employer against another, so that competitive wages will rise in times of high demand, and fall in times of slack demand. Reich then fails to acknowledge that the entire fabric of labor law since the passage of the 1935 National Labor Relations Act has conferred government-backed monopoly power on unions who, when recognized, have the exclusive bargaining rights to all workers within the appropriate bargaining unit.

The exercise of this monopoly power is far more dangerous than the power held by firms, because it can lead to the imposition of grotesque work rules, while increasing the risk that strikes and lockouts will shut down essential services when the two sides butt heads. The system also tends to collapse under its own weight as new nonunionized firms, both domestic and foreign, can deliver better goods at lower prices, to low income families, than firms hobbled with onerous union contracts. It is no wonder that the percentage of union membership in the private sector has dropped from a high of about 35 percent in 1954 to about 6.6 percent in 2014.

It is only the rise of public union membership, which now stands at about 35 percent that keeps overall union membership at around 11 percent today. Many of those public employee union members are teachers who exact a heavy toll in their nonstop efforts to maintain a public school monopoly in the United States. Reich wants to invest the proceeds from higher taxation into education, but at no point does he discuss the dangers teacher unions pose to that mission. Nor does he mention the possible role that nonunion charter schools play in improving education. There is no doubt that charter school kids in New York, for example, decisively outperform non-charter public school students—which is why parents are clamoring to get their kids into charter schools. There is a stark choice here. Does Reich think that a commitment to unions should take priority over educational excellence?

Next there is the question of how to fund Reich’s ambitious, if misconceived, program of income redistribution. Reich is silent on the question of what programs advance growth, and his prescription for higher taxes on the wealthy for ordinary income and for capital gains only makes matters worse. He gets no quarrel from me on the proposal to tax unrealized gains (i.e. those from unsold stock) at the time of death, and, similarly for allowing deductions for unrealized losses. These have been part of the classical liberal agenda for ages, given that any exemption of large quantities of income from the tax system casts extra burdens on others, which slows down the rate of capital formation and voluntary exchange.

Yet his call for progressivity that targets the top one-percent will backfire. He cannot grow the economy by fleecing the most productive members of the workforce or on investment income from a low-growth economy. Reich laments the inordinate power of the nameless rich, but never explains how that amorphous group contrived in 2012 to pay roughly 38 percent of the taxes on 21.9 percent of income, when the bottom 50 percent paid about 2.8 percent.

Nor does he consider the risk that higher levels of taxation on ordinary income will tend to dull the incentive to work, inclining people to retire sooner or pass up on second jobs. Likewise, he is oblivious to the risk that high capital gains rates make investors reluctant to dump low performing stocks which would then allow them to invest in more productive companies—the very mistake that Hillary Clinton made in her problematic proposal to increase short-term capital gains rates.

Reich is also not alert to the dangers of subsidies to certain well-connected political groups. The ever-expanding subsidies for wind and solar energy that he recommends are ill-advised. If these forms of power can make it in the marketplace, no one should block them. But if they cannot compete with fossil fuels without the subsidy, then so be it. They should be allowed to languish. The basic point is subject to the simple caveat that fossil fuel subsidies are inappropriate as well, and that all forms of energy should have to take into account whatever externalities they create, be it from polluting the air or killing endangered birds. The same judgment applies most emphatically to lavish ethanol subsidies, which manage to distort both energy and food markets in one ill-conceived program.

There is a large point that comes out of Reich’s social agenda. Notwithstanding his long service in government, he seems to have no understanding of the enormous slip that takes place between an ambitious program for social reform and its successful implementation. I have spent most of my academic life in the weeds, looking at the specific operations of government action as it applies to pharmaceuticals, to the environment, to housing, to securities, to education, to employment, banking, insurance, and other social institutions.

In all of these areas, I have come to the conclusion that the modern progressive state has wrought untold damage for two very simple reasons. First, it has no sense as to when government should intervene and when it should stay its hand. The regulation of competitive labor markets is almost always a loser, and the ever-heavy hand of government in this area does much to explain the decline in working class incomes.

Second, the government has no sense of which means work and which do not. If the risk is monopoly, control it with an antitrust law that is limited to monopoly. But don’t wreck competitive industries, and by all means don’t use government power to prop up monopolies, as in labor markets.

But Reich is blind to all this. There is not a single proposal for deregulation in his disjointed book. Unfortunately Saving Capitalism won’t help the many as it promises to. If its policies are implemented, it will wreak economic and social mayhem on everyone.

 

[a_majoor]

Hardly a surprising development, as the authoritarian streak of Progressivism rises to the surface. (This is mirrored in other public arenas by such devices as speech codes, using tactics like disqualifying or shouting down/shutting out speakers who do not hew to the "narrative"). Free speech islands like Army.ca will become more of an exception, and are vulnerable to being attacked and taken down by law fare much like Free Dominion was. As well, since this is a special interest community, there is also the fact that it has a limited circle of readers or even people who would be interested to "test the waters", so the ability to influence will also decline under these circumstances.

http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2015/10/27/the-lefts-war-on-comment-sections/

THE LEFT’S WAR ON COMMENT SECTIONS
by ALLUM BOKHARI
27 Oct 20155,105

The internet was born open but is becoming closed everywhere. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the rush to shutter readers’ comments sections at major news organisations. Cheered on by intolerant, snobbish cultural elites, news organisations from The Verge to The Daily Beast have, in recent months, informed their readers to take their opinions elsewhere.

Dozens of progressive blogs and news outlets are following suit, citing “abuse” and “harassment” as the primary reasons they no longer want to hear the opinions of their readers. But that’s not what is really going on.

There was a time when comments sections were seen as the next step in a golden age of democratised communication, particularly by the political Left. “For the first time ever, we are thinking aloud, unfiltered by mass media gatekeepers,” wrote a former Hillary Clinton advisor in 2008. “Never before has the global discourse been so accessible, recursive, and durable.”

In 2009, the former online editor for the Washington Post wrote that despite their problems, readers’ comments allowed readers to “complain about what they see as unfairness or inaccuracy” and remind editors that they “do not always agree with journalists about what is important.”

The late Georgina Henry, former editor of the Guardian’s online commentary pages, wrote in 2010 that “journalism without feedback, engagement, dispute and opinion from below the line no longer feels complete to me.” Indeed, the Guardian was once so enamoured of its comments section that it ran a weekly feature, Below the Line, in which “delightful, prolific, or controversial members of  the Guardian comment community” were invited to profile themselves.

The rise of comments sections coincided with the rise of another high-minded idea: the Crowd. If TED talks from the early 2010s are to be believed, the Crowd was set to revolutionise government, end poverty, and cure cancer. In an age when the Crowd was going to fix the world’s problems, it stood to reason that they should fix public discourse as well.

But the era of Silicon Valley-led optimism is over, at least for the journalists and publications that once eagerly reported on it. Today, the tone is misanthropic, not utopian, and the Crowd – at least as it appears in the comment boxes – is portrayed not as saviour, but as a sort of barbarous horde at the gates of politically-correct progressive society.

“Vibrant online communities? Or cesspits of abuse?” asked the BBC in a recent feature on the closure of comments sections. “Alongside shouting, swearing and incivility, comments sections can also attract racism and sexism,” the article continued.

This refrain can be found in almost every left-leaning publication these days. The Pacific Standard: “Even if [comments sections] aren’t vile and psychologically damaging, most of them aren’t worth your time.” Brooklyn Magazine: “Most comment sections are vats of poison, filled with grammatically questionable rants at best and violent hate speech at worst.” The Atlantic: “Online comments are often ignorant, racist, sexist, threatening, or otherwise worthless. But you knew that already.”

At the risk of sounding too self-congratulatory, here at Breitbart we embrace our readers’ opinions. We love hearing from you guys! And there are a lot of you: 1.2 million comments, not including Facebook, are left on Breitbart.com each month. We are in fact one of the most enthusiastically commented-upon sites anywhere on the internet.

There’s a gross double standard in what’s going on in the progressive mediasphere, of course. Many of the columnists who complain the loudest about spiky comments are themselves professional provocateurs. Consider Guardian columnist Jessica Valenti, the most recent commentator to complain about the “noxious thoughts” and “sea of garbage” in the comments section.

But Valenti is paid to write deliberately inflammatory columns, with titles like “Feminists don’t hate men, but it wouldn’t matter if we did.” She is also notorious for wearing a shirt bearing the slogan “I bathe in male tears.” Valenti is a great example of what one savvy blogger called an “above-the-line troll.” She may write columns rather than comments, but, like any troll, her words are designed to inflame and antagonise.

It’s no accident that so many of the loudest voices against online comments sections are also political zealots. Jessica Valenti, Arthur Chu, Tauriq Moosa, Anita Sarkeesian: all have come out against comment sections. This isn’t an accident, of course. Psychologists have long been aware that political extremists have the most negative reactions to contrary information. Combine that with a disdain for free speech, a core cultural authoritarian value, and you get a frantic rush to remove the opinions of ordinary people.

But there are also more sinister, elitist motivations. A study conducted by The Washington Post and USA Today found that readers who viewed articles with comments sections were more likely to develop a negative opinion of the news media. Curiously, this effect was seen even when commenters praised the article in question. In other words, when the opinions of journalists and the opinions or ordinary members of the public are placed close together, it leads readers to question the competence of the mainstream media. What horror!

Another study found that reading assertive, aggressive comments could actually sway the opinions of readers. “Don’t read the comments,” warned Ars Technica, “they can make you mistrust real experts.”

It’s a piece of advice that captures the war on comments sections perfectly. Having initially cheered on the death of the “gatekeepers of information,” cultural elites are now scrambling to reinstall those barriers. Too late, they have discovered that people don’t always agree with them – and now they want to push that disagreement into the wilderness of the internet.

For a while online, authoritarian progressives forgot that vanishingly few people in the real world agree with their feverish and silly “hot takes” on current news and their bizarre ideas about racism and sexism. Now the whole population is tech-savvy enough to have their say, authoritarians are scrambling for a return to the era of broadcast news, in which viewers were left with calling up the station and ranting down the phone as their only means of robust criticism.

Follow Allum Bokhari @LibertarianBlue on Twitter. Or let him know what you think, in the comments section. 

Breitbart Tech is a new vertical from Breitbart News covering tech, gaming and internet culture. Bookmark breitbart.com/tech and follow @BreitbartTech on Twitter and Facebook

 

[a_majoor]

SJW's in operation, and an example of a pretty good defense. The blogger points out that using dialectic to combat rhetoric is a losing cause, and as some of have seen even on this board, the typical SJW/Progressive response to being confronted is to move the goalposts and try to claim they are talking about something else:

http://voxday.blogspot.ca/2015/10/exposing-true-face-of-sjw.html

Exposing the true face of SJW

Rosarior beats back and exposes an SJW entryist attempting to impose a Code of Conduct on the Awesome-Django project:

great project!! I have one observation and a suggestion. I noticed you have rejected some pull requests to add some good django libraries and that the people submitting those pull requests are POCs (People of Colour). As a suggestion I recommend adopting the Contributor Code of Conduct (http://contributor-covenant.org) to ensure everybody's contributions are accepted regarless of their sex, sexual orientation, skin color, religion, height, place of origin, etc, etc, etc. As a white straight male and lead of this trending repository, your adoption of this Code of Conduct will send a loud and clear message that inclusion is a primary objective of the Django community and of the software development community in general. D.

A few things about this. First, the name is generic. Second, this comment is literally the SJW's first "contribution to the project. Third, while the SJW uses the correct terminology, he offers no evidence whatsoever for his claims. Fourth, his claim that the people whose pull requests were rejected are People of Colour are likely false considering that he doesn't know that the individual he is addressing is Hispanic, not white.

Fortunately, rosarior recognizes the nature of the stealth attack. While he politely addresses the nominal suggestions, he makes it clear that this project is not a soft target and shuts down the SJW's line of entry

The pull request was rejected not the person. Of the people who did not had their patches accepted at least one submitted another pull request and was accepted or are contributors in my other repositories, disproving your basic premise.

There is no need for a code of conduct, there hasn't been a conduct related incident with the repository and nothing about a contributor comes into play when rejecting or accepting a patch (as proved above). An explanation is provided when a patch is rejected, and some have been left open to re-asses in a future time.

I'm not white and please don't make any other assumptions about me, they hold no relevance to the matter at hand.

I already work on several projects that hold inclusion as one of their primary goals.

I'm closing this issue based on the explanations given.

The wording allows just a little more wiggle room than is ideal, but it is a strong and effective response, particularly the implicit statement that "inclusion" is not a primary goal of this particular project. Perhaps due to the wiggle room, the SJW tries again.

You seem to have taken personal issue with well the issue I opened this issue not to attack you or your decisions,but to help improve a part of the project in which it seemed lacking. Most projects on Github have adopted the Contributor Covenant or a variant of it. It is a very straight forward document that protects all parties,I don't understand your negative attitude towards that philosophy. You may not be "white" [ in your profile picture you sure seem white ] but you are not a woman or a trans-gendered person so you can't possibly understand what they go through (harassment,exclusion,threats) and why a code of conduct is necessary. Even the Django Software Foundation has adopted one to protect it's future,for me it's very obvious Django related projects would naturally follow suite and adopt the same if not similar Code of Conducts. I urge you to reconsider for the good and future of this project Thank you

Now the rhetorical gloves come off. The SJW tries to play on rosarior's insecurities and emotions, then throws out an appeal to the herd animal instinct before issuing an implicit threat. The code of conduct is now declared "necessary" in order to protect the future of the project, which is twice mentioned in a threatening manner. Notice that the SJW doesn't even address the fact that his original claimed concerns were addressed, thereby negating any need for the requested code, he simply moves the goalposts and moves on to more high-pressure rhetorical tactics. This is why dialectical arguments are totally useless; the SJWs simply ignore the effective ones.

1- You opened an issue to raise concern about the relationship of a contributor's race and the rejection of their patches.
2- Only I can accept or reject patches in this repository.
You made it clear who this was about.
Apart from this issue, we've had no conduct problems, so no need for a code of conduct.
I'm very certain of my race: I'm Latino, Puertorican, a Mestizo from a Castiza mother and a Mulato father. There are many more races than just black and white (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miscegenation).
Yes, I'm not a woman or a transgendered individual and I don't intend to even try to understand what they have to put up with, never said that. But you assume women and transgendered individual are the only targets of harassment, exclusion and threats.

English is not my first language and I hope I'm mistaken but your last line "I urge you to reconsider for the good and future of this project " sounded like a threat, please clarify.

This response could be described as overly long and dialectical; rhetoric has ZERO informational content so responding to the feigned issues serves no purpose unless one is doing it to expose pseudo-dialectic on behalf of any onlookers. However, expecting a programmer to not respond in a systematic manner to the issues raised is rather like expecting sight hounds not to chase running rabbits, so it's harmless. What is particularly important, however, is the way rosarior calls out the SJW for his implicit threats and requests clarification; in doing so he causes the SJW to unmask completely and show his fangs.

I really have no idea why you are responding the way you are! Really!! Code of Conducts are not JUST about conduct,they cover all the spectrum of behaviours expected from civilized human beings that are more and more absend in the software industry. You are evading the topic at hand and I can only wonder why,why deny equal opportunity for all to join and contribute to your project Roberto?

That you have not "seen" harassment doesn't mean it is not happening all around us. And turning a blind eye makes it worst. I was not threaning you,but your reaction is a projection of your feelings and now I feel threated by you. Reading the links you posted I only have one thing to say to you:reevaluate your actions,you are becoming a toxic individual who is harming the Python and Django communities and haven't even realized it yet. You are a member of the Django Software Foundation and are supposed to be setting the example. I will be forwarding the content of this issue to the Chair to evaluate your continued presence in the DSF. best regards.

It's all there. Threats, point-and-shriek, playing the victim, false accusations, and the inevitable appeal to the amenable authority. In the interest of Social Justice Convergence, the SJW demonstrates that he will try to destroy the project rather than permit it to continue if it cannot be captured and forcibly submitted to the SJW Narrative. Rosarior's response was the best one I have seen in technology yet, as he not only defeated the assault, but exposed the SJW for what he is in the process.

This is not a joke. These people are genuinely dangerous and will destroy everything they touch. Resist them. Expose them. Seek them out in your own organizations, hunt them down and root them out. SJW delenda est.

It's time to go on the offensive. If your group or organization has a Code of Conduct, start the campaign to get rid of it now. There is a reason the SJWs are so intent on imposing them everywhere; that is how they intend to institute their thought policing.

And since you know the SJWs are going to be coming after him, show the man he's got support behind him. If you're on Twitter, follow the man.

"Those who can code do, those who can't write code of conducts."
- Roberto Rosario

 

[a_majoor]

A very long article in City Journal, which actually covers lots of topics (education, public service unions, corruption etc.) and well worth reading on its own. I am including an excerpt which discusses the growth of the "underclass"; and while it is specific to the US situation, many elements could be transposed here in Canada to explain the "welfare traps" of Atlantic Canada or the grim situation among the aboriginal peoples. It isn't about money (in the United States, the African American population was making steady gains up until @ 1964, and despite the oceans of money spent since, their situation has catastrophically collapsed), but rather culture. For more about how culture matters, I also recommend Trust by Francis Fukuyama.

http://www.city-journal.org/2015/25_4_city-journal.html

You will find this hard to believe, but in 1994 I didn’t understand why underclass women were having so many out-of-wedlock children. After all, I reasoned, with my 1960s assumptions, doubtless everybody wants to have sex, but everybody also knows about cheap and universally available birth control. It was Kay S. Hymowitz who set me straight. Women, she explained politely but firmly, want to have babies. Accordingly, underclass girls, she argued from many interviews in a landmark City Journal article, have a different vision of life from that of middle-class girls. They haven’t been nurtured by diligent parents to develop the sophisticated cultural traits—orderliness, self-discipline, deferral of gratification, goal-oriented ambition, and so on—that prepare middle-class girls to go to college and professional school, defer childbearing, get married to Mr. Right, and become doctors or dealmakers.

Everything in underclass culture, where fathers are absent and marriage is dismissed—as useless as a bicycle to a fish—tells girls that sex before 14 is normal, and an out-of-wedlock baby at 16 is the mark of maturity. The grandmas in their thirties are as excited about the new baby as the teen moms, who imagine that finally someone will love them unconditionally and who revel in showing off their shiny new strollers and cute baby outfits. When the babies begin to toddle, their signs of independence and contrariety spark maternal disappointment. An all-too-common underclass cultural pattern has the oldest sibling left in charge of the younger ones when the grandmother won’t babysit, while the mother goes off on new adventures. As for careers or even work, most of Kay’s informants had only adolescent dreaminess, not plans.

Here, then, was striking confirmation of how the 1960s transformation of mainstream American culture had indeed produced seismic changes at the bottom of society, creating a self-subsisting underclass subculture with its own mores—its own life-script, in Kay’s apt phrase—which policymakers had to decode to understand underclass behavior, let alone change it. In years of wise, carefully observed, and irrepressibly witty articles on women, marriage, sex and sex roles, child rearing, and early education, Kay never lost sight of this central insight. And given the thinness of underclass culture, starting with the many fewer times that underclass mothers talk to their children than middle-class mothers do, with the result that their kids start school with much smaller vocabularies and fewer concepts than their middle-class counterparts—some teen moms themselves haven’t learned to do a budget or brush their teeth—it’s hard not to worry that even the best schools can’t fully make up the deficits in childhoods that are so culturally, intellectually, and often emotionally impoverished.

 

[a_majoor]

For people who wonder where the:Fascism-right wing" meme comes from:

http://pjmedia.com/instapundit/219147/#respond

And with this, Communism apologists come full circle. Or as Jonah Goldberg wrote last year:

Stalin championed the idea that all of his political opponents should be dubbed fascists, including many of his fellow Bolsheviks, such as Leon Trotsky (whom Stalin had assassinated), and much of the Red Army’s officer corps (whom he had executed), and countless Ukrainians (whom he had liquidated). Stalin insisted that even mentioning the man-made – i.e., Stalin-made — Ukranian famine was evidence you were an agent of the Nazis.

Under Stalin’s “theory of social fascism,” any socialist, social-democratic, or progressive group or party not loyal to him had to be called fascist. Hence, for a while Moscow insisted that FDR and even Norman Thomas (head of the Socialist Party of America) were fascists.

Ultimately, Communist propagandists and their allied intellectuals would reflexively blame fascism for everything, regardless of the facts. That’s what prompted George Orwell to remark that “the word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable.’”

 

[a_majoor]

Progressivism tracked back to its roots. Wilson's presidency was marked by some pretty remarkable thuggish behaviour, not to mention his own virulent racism. Wilson in his own words:
(Part 1)

http://www.heritage.org/initiatives/first-principles/primary-sources/woodrow-wilson-asks-what-is-progress

Woodrow Wilson Asks “What Is Progress?”
1912
Introduction

In this 1912 presidential campaign speech Woodrow Wilson, the governor of New Jersey, frankly describes his principles for the revolutionary reform of America. Wilson seeks no less than to sever America from the Declaration of Independence and Constitution. Wilson’s speech distills a distinguished career of Progressive scholarship that would replace the old Constitution of individual rights and the separation of powers with an evolving, “living Constitution” of growing and virtually unlimited powers.

After all, Wilson remarks, Americans have never been “stand-patters” who resist change. And “Progress is the word that charms their ears and stirs their hearts.” Wilson would therefore “like to make the young gentlemen of the rising generation as unlike their fathers as possible.” His speech outlines the political education for these young men: they must reject their fathers’ ways and the Founding Fathers’ ideas, thereby leading to a renewed America. Wilson, like other early Progressives, was clear in his contempt for the “conservatism” of the Constitution.

Wilson maintains that both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution have outlived their usefulness—and their now outmoded truths. The scientific facts, Wilson coldly concludes, call for cooperation among the parts of government, not checks against one another.

Living political constitutions must be Darwinian in structure and in practice. Society is a living organism and must obey the laws of life, not of mechanics; it must develop. All the progressives ask or desire is permission—in an era when “development,” “evolution,” is the scientific word—to interpret the Constitution according to the Darwinian principle….

Wilson’s Darwinian constitutionalism means that an evolving human nature wipes away the need for the protection of individual rights by the separation of powers. Liberated from the old constraints demanded by an unchanging and flawed human nature, a government of now unlimited powers is unleashed to deal with the new political and economic conditions of corporations and political bosses.

Wilson laments that “Some citizens of this country have never got beyond the Declaration of Independence” ; they are not fighting today’s tyrants. The Declaration of Independence was an “eminently practical document…not a thesis for philosophers, but a whip for tyrants; not a theory of government, but a program of action.” His “new declaration of independence” enables Americans to fight the tyranny of “special interests,” of political machines and “selfish business.” Whatever the ills of the early 20th century, one might ask Wilson whether replacing the Declaration and the Constitution would not lead to even worse evils.

Despite his trust in evolution, Wilson would not reconstruct the house of America overnight. After all, we must still live in it, making such home improvements a “very dangerous task.” But we political architects and engineers today should steadily rebuild our house “until finally, a generation or two from now, the scaffolding will be taken away, and there will be the family in a great building whose noble architecture will at last be disclosed, where men can live as a single community, cooperative as in a perfected, coordinated beehive….” Wilson would transform Jefferson’s “empire of liberty” into a beehive. Earlier, in his essay on Public Administration, Wilson justified rule by a class of experts. As drones in a beehives, men would submit to central authority.

Professor Wilson had bold ideas. Presidential candidate Wilson was bolder still.

 

[a_majoor]

(Part 2)

http://www.heritage.org/initiatives/first-principles/primary-sources/woodrow-wilson-asks-what-is-progress

“What Is Progress?”
Woodrow Wilson
1912 campaign speech published in 1913 as chapter 2 of The New Freedom

In that sage and veracious chronicle, “Alice Through the Looking-Glass,” it is recounted how, on a noteworthy occasion, the little heroine is seized by the Red Chess Queen, who races her off at a terrific pace. They run until both of them are out of breath; then they stop, and Alice looks around her and says, “Why, we are just where we were when we started!” “Oh, yes,” says the Red Queen; “you have to run twice as fast as that to get anywhere else.”

That is a parable of progress. The laws of this country have not kept up with the change of economic circumstances in this country; they have not kept up with the change of political circumstances; and, therefore, we are not even where we were when we started. We shall have to run, not until we are out of breath, but until we have caught up with our own conditions, before we shall be where we were when we started; when we started this great experiment which has been the hope and the beacon of the world. And we should have to run twice as fast as any rational program I have seen in order to get anywhere else.

I am, therefore, forced to be a progressive, if for no other reason, because we have not kept up with our changes of conditions, either in the economic field or in the political field. We have not kept up as well as other nations have. We have not kept our practices adjusted to the facts of the case, and until we do, and unless we do, the facts of the case will always have the better of the argument; because if you do not adjust your laws to the facts, so much the worse for the laws, not for the facts, because law trails along after the facts. Only that law is unsafe which runs ahead of the facts and beckons to it and makes it follow the will-o’-the-wisps of imaginative projects.

Business is in a situation in America which it was never in before; it is in a situation to which we have not adjusted our laws. Our laws are still meant for business done by individuals; they have not been satisfactorily adjusted to business done by great combinations, and we have got to adjust them. I do not say we may or may not; I say we must; there is no choice. If your laws do not fit your facts, the facts are not injured, the law is damaged; because the law, unless I have studied it amiss, is the expression of the facts in legal relationships. Laws have never altered the facts; laws have always necessarily expressed the facts; adjusted interests as they have arisen and have changed toward one another.

Politics in America is in a case which sadly requires attention. The system set up by our law and our usage doesn’t work,—or at least it can’t be depended on; it is made to work only by a most unreasonable expenditure of labor and pains. The government, which was designed for the people, has got into the hands of bosses and their employers, the special interests. An invisible empire has been set up above the forms of democracy.

There are serious things to do. Does any man doubt the great discontent in this country? Does any man doubt that there are grounds and justifications for discontent? Do we dare stand still? Within the past few months we have witnessed (along with other strange political phenomena, eloquently significant of popular uneasiness) on one side a doubling of the Socialist vote and on the other the posting on dead walls and hoardings all over the country of certain very attractive and diverting bills warning citizens that it was “better to be safe than sorry” and advising them to “let well enough alone.” Apparently a good many citizens doubted whether the situation they were advised to let alone was really well enough, and concluded that they would take a chance of being sorry. To me, these counsels of do-nothingism, these counsels of sitting still for fear something would happen, these counsels addressed to the hopeful, energetic people of the United States, telling them that they are not wise enough to touch their own affairs without marring them, constitute the most extraordinary argument of fatuous ignorance I ever heard. Americans are not yet cowards. True, their self-reliance has been sapped by years of submission to the doctrine that prosperity is something that benevolent magnates provide for them with the aid of the government; their self-reliance has been weakened, but not so utterly destroyed that you can twit them about it. The American people are not naturally stand-patters. Progress is the word that charms their ears and stirs their hearts.

There are, of course, Americans who have not yet heard that anything is going on. The circus might come to town, have the big parade and go, without their catching a sight of the camels or a note of the calliope. There are people, even Americans, who never move themselves or know that anything else is moving.

A friend of mine who had heard of the Florida “cracker,” as they call a certain ne’er-do-well portion of the population down there, when passing through the State in a train, asked some one to point out a “cracker” to him. The man asked replied, “Well, if you see something off in the woods that looks brown, like a stump, you will know it is either a stump or a cracker; if it moves, it is a stump.”

Now, movement has no virtue in itself. Change is not worth while for its own sake. I am not one of those who love variety for its own sake. If a thing is good today, I should like to have it stay that way tomorrow. Most of our calculations in life are dependent upon things staying the way they are. For example, if, when you got up this morning, you had forgotten how to dress, if you had forgotten all about those ordinary things which you do almost automatically, which you can almost do half awake, you would have to find out what you did yesterday. I am told by the psychologists that if I did not remember who I was yesterday, I should not know who I am today, and that, therefore, my very identity depends upon my being able to tally today with yesterday. If they do not tally, then I am confused; I do not know who I am, and I have to go around and ask somebody to tell me my name and where I came from.

I am not one of those who wish to break connection with the past; I am not one of those who wish to change for the mere sake of variety. The only men who do that are the men who want to forget something, the men who filled yesterday with something they would rather not recollect today, and so go about seeking diversion, seeking abstraction in something that will blot out recollection, or seeking to put something into them which will blot out all recollection. Change is not worth while unless it is improvement. If I move out of my present house because I do not like it, then I have got to choose a better house, or build a better house, to justify the change.

It would seem a waste of time to point out that ancient distinction—between mere change and improvement. Yet there is a class of mind that is prone to confuse them. We have had political leaders whose conception of greatness was to be forever frantically doing something—it mattered little what; restless, vociferous men, without sense of the energy of concentration, knowing only the energy of succession. Now, life does not consist of eternally running to a fire. There is no virtue in going anywhere unless you will gain something by being there. The direction is just as important as the impetus of motion.

All progress depends on how fast you are going, and where you are going, and I fear there has been too much of this thing of knowing neither how fast we were going or where we were going. I have my private belief that we have been doing most of our progressiveness after the fashion of those things that in my boyhood days we called “treadmills,” a treadmill being a moving platform, with cleats on it, on which some poor devil of a mule was forced to walk forever without getting anywhere. Elephants and even other animals have been known to turn treadmills, making a good deal of noise, and causing certain wheels to go round, and I daresay grinding out some sort of product for somebody, but without achieving much progress. Lately, in an effort to persuade the elephant to move, really, his friends tried dynamite. It moved—in separate and scattered parts, but it moved.

A cynical but witty Englishman said, in a book, not long ago, that it was a mistake to say of a conspicuously successful man, eminent in his line of business, that you could not bribe a man like that, because, he said, the point about such men is that they have been bribed—not in the ordinary meaning of that word, not in any gross, corrupt sense, but they have achieved their great success by means of the existing order of things and therefore they have been put under bonds to see that that existing order of things is not changed; they are bribed to maintain the status quo.

It was for that reason that I used to say, when I had to do with the administration of an educational institution, that I should like to make the young gentlemen of the rising generation as unlike their fathers as possible. Not because their fathers lacked character or intelligence or knowledge or patriotism, but because their fathers, by reason of their advancing years and their established position in society, had lost touch with the processes of life; they had forgotten what it was to begin; they had forgotten what it was to rise; they had forgotten what it was to be dominated by the circumstances of their life on their way up from the bottom to the top, and, therefore, they were out of sympathy with the creative, formative and progressive forces of society.

Progress! Did you ever reflect that that word is almost a new one? No word comes more often or more naturally to the lips of modern man, as if the thing it stands for were almost synonymous with life itself, and yet men through many thousand years never talked or thought of progress. They thought in the other direction. Their stories of heroisms and glory were tales of the past. The ancestor wore the heavier armor and carried the larger spear. “There were giants in those days.” Now all that has altered. We think of the future, not the past, as the more glorious time in comparison with which the present is nothing. Progress, development—those are modern words. The modern idea is to leave the past and press onward to something new.

 

[a_majoor]

(Part 3)

http://www.heritage.org/initiatives/first-principles/primary-sources/woodrow-wilson-asks-what-is-progress

But what is progress going to do with the past, and with the present? How is it going to treat them? With ignominy, or respect? Should it break with them altogether, or rise out of them, with its roots still deep in the older time? What attitude shall progressives take toward the existing order, toward those institutions of conservatism, the Constitution, the laws, and the courts?

Are those thoughtful men who fear that we are now about to disturb the ancient foundations of our institutions justified in their fear? If they are, we ought to go very slowly about the processes of change. If it is indeed true that we have grown tired of the institutions which we have so carefully and sedulously built up, then we ought to go very slowly and very carefully about the very dangerous task of altering them. We ought, therefore, to ask ourselves, first of all, whether thought in this country is tending to do anything by which we shall retrace our steps, or by which we shall change the whole direction of our development?

I believe, for one, that you cannot tear up ancient rootages and safely plant the tree of liberty in soil which is not native to it. I believe that the ancient traditions of a people are its ballast; you cannot make a tabula rasa upon which to write a political program. You cannot take a new sheet of paper and determine what your life shall be tomorrow. You must knit the new into the old. You cannot put a new patch on an old garment without ruining it; it must be not a patch, but something woven into the old fabric, of practically the same pattern, of the same texture and intention. If I did not believe that to be progressive was to preserve the essentials of our institutions, I for one could not be a progressive.

One of the chief benefits I used to derive from being president of a university was that I had the pleasure of entertaining thoughtful men from all over the world. I cannot tell you how much has dropped into my granary by their presence. I had been casting around in my mind for something by which to draw several parts of my political thought together when it was my good fortune to entertain a very interesting Scotsman who had been devoting himself to the philosophical thought of the seventeenth century. His talk was so engaging that it was delightful to hear him speak of anything, and presently there came out of the unexpected region of his thought the thing I had been waiting for. He called my attention to the fact that in every generation all sorts of speculation and thinking tend to fall under the formula of the dominant thought of the age. For example, after the Newtonian Theory of the universe had been developed, almost all thinking tended to express itself in the analogies of the Newtonian Theory, and since the Darwinian Theory has reigned amongst us, everybody is likely to express whatever he wishes to expound in terms of development and accommodation to environment.

Now, it came to me, as this interesting man talked, that the Constitution of the United States had been made under the dominion of the Newtonian Theory. You have only to read the papers of The Federalist to see that fact written on every page. They speak of the “checks and balances” of the Constitution, and use to express their idea the simile of the organization of the universe, and particularly of the solar system,—how by the attraction of gravitation the various parts are held in their orbits; and then they proceed to represent Congress, the Judiciary, and the President as a sort of imitation of the solar system.

They were only following the English Whigs, who gave Great Britain its modern constitution. Not that those Englishmen analyzed the matter, or had any theory about it; Englishmen care little for theories. It was a Frenchman, Montesquieu, who pointed out to them how faithfully they had copied Newton’s description of the mechanism of the heavens.

The makers of our Federal Constitution read Montesquieu with true scientific enthusiasm. They were scientists in their way—the best way of their age—those fathers of the nation. Jefferson wrote of “the laws of Nature”—and then by way of afterthought—“and of Nature’s God.” And they constructed a government as they would have constructed an orrery—to display the laws of nature. Politics in their thought was a variety of mechanics. The Constitution was founded on the law of gravitation. The government was to exist and move by virtue of the efficacy of “checks and balances.”

The trouble with the theory is that government is not a machine, but a living thing. It falls, not under the theory of the universe, but under the theory of organic life. It is accountable to Darwin, not to Newton. It is modified by its environment, necessitated by its tasks, shaped to its functions by the sheer pressure of life. No living thing can have its organs offset against each other, as checks, and live. On the contrary, its life is dependent upon their quick co-operation, their ready response to the commands of instinct or intelligence, their amicable community of purpose. Government is not a body of blind forces; it is a body of men, with highly differentiated functions, no doubt, in our modern day, of specialization, with a common task and purpose. Their co-operation is indispensable, their warfare fatal. There can be no successful government without the intimate, instinctive co-ordination of the organs of life and action. This is not theory, but fact, and displays its force as fact, whatever theories may be thrown across its track. Living political constitutions must be Darwinian in structure and in practice. Society is a living organism and must obey the laws of life, not of mechanics; it must develop.

All that progressives ask or desire is permission—in an era when “development,” “evolution,” is the scientific word—to interpret the Constitution according to the Darwinian principle; all they ask is recognition of the fact that a nation is a living thing and not a machine.

Some citizens of this country have never got beyond the Declaration of Independence, signed in Philadelphia, July 4th, 1776. Their bosoms swell against George III, but they have no consciousness of the war for freedom that is going on today.

The Declaration of Independence did not mention the questions of our day. It is of no consequence to us unless we can translate its general terms into examples of the present day and substitute them in some vital way for the examples it itself gives, so concrete, so intimately involved in the circumstances of the day in which it was conceived and written. It is an eminently practical document, meant for the use of practical men; not a thesis for philosophers, but a whip for tyrants; not a theory of government, but a program of action. Unless we can translate it into the questions of our own day, we are not worthy of it, we are not the sons of the sires who acted in response to its challenge.

What form does the contest between tyranny and freedom take today? What is the special form of tyranny we now fight? How does it endanger the rights of the people, and what do we mean to do in order to make our contest against it effectual? What are to be the items of our new declaration of independence?

By tyranny, as we now fight it, we mean control of the law, of legislation and adjudication, by organizations which do not represent the people, by means which are private and selfish. We mean, specifically, the conduct of our affairs and the shaping of our legislation in the interest of special bodies of capital and those who organize their use. We mean the alliance, for this purpose, of political machines with selfish business. We mean the exploitation of the people by legal and political means. We have seen many of our governments under these influences cease to be representative governments, cease to be governments representative of the people, and become governments representative of special interests, controlled by machines, which in their turn are not controlled by the people.

Sometimes, when I think of the growth of our economic system, it seems to me as if, leaving our law just about where it was before any of the modern inventions or developments took place, we had simply at haphazard extended the family residence, added an office here and a workroom there, and a new set of sleeping rooms there, built up higher on our foundations, and put out little lean-tos on the side, until we have a structure that has no character whatever. Now, the problem is to continue to live in the house and yet change it.

Well, we are architects in our time, and our architects are also engineers. We don’t have to stop using a railroad terminal because a new station is being built. We don’t have to stop any of the processes of our lives because we are rearranging the structures in which we conduct those processes. What we have to undertake is to systematize the foundations of the house, then to thread all the old parts of the structure with the steel which will be laced together in modern fashion, accommodated to all the modern knowledge of structural strength and elasticity, and then slowly change the partitions, relay the walls, let in the light through new apertures, improve the ventilation; until finally, a generation or two from now, the scaffolding will be taken away, and there will be the family in a great building whose noble architecture will at last be disclosed, where men can live as a single community, co-operative as in a perfected, co-ordinated beehive, not afraid of any storm of nature, not afraid of any artificial storm, any imitation of thunder and lightning, knowing that the foundations go down to the bedrock of principle, and knowing that whenever they please they can change that plan again and accommodate it as they please to the altering necessities of their lives.

But there are a great many men who don’t like the idea. Some wit recently said, in view of the fact that most of our American architects are trained in a certain École in Paris, that all American architecture in recent years was either bizarre or “Beaux Arts.” I think that our economic architecture is decidedly bizarre; and I am afraid that there is a good deal to learn about matters other than architecture from the same source from which our architects have learned a great many things. I don’t mean the School of Fine Arts at Paris, but the experience of France; for from the other side of the water, men can now hold up against us the reproach that we have not adjusted our lives to modern conditions to the same extent that they have adjusted theirs. I was very much interested in some of the reasons given by our friends across the Canadian border for being very shy about the reciprocity arrangements. They said: “We are not sure whither these arrangements will lead, and we don’t care to associate too closely with the economic conditions of the United States until those conditions are as modern as ours.” And when I resented it, and asked for particulars, I had, in regard to many matters, to retire from the debate. Because I found that they had adjusted their regulations of economic development to conditions we had not yet found a way to meet in the United States.

Well, we have started now at all events. The procession is under way. The stand-patter doesn’t know there is a procession. He is asleep in the back part of his house. He doesn’t know that the road is resounding with the tramp of men going to the front. And when he wakes up, the country will be empty. He will be deserted, and he will wonder what has happened. Nothing has happened. The world has been going on. The world has a habit of going on. The world has a habit of leaving those behind who won’t go with it. The world has always neglected stand-patters. And, therefore, the stand-patter does not excite my indignation; he excites my sympathy. He is going to be so lonely before it is all over. And we are good fellows, we are good company; why doesn’t he come along? We are not going to do him any harm. We are going to show him a good time. We are going to climb the slow road until it reaches some upland where the air is fresher, where the whole talk of mere politicians is stilled, where men can look in each other’s faces and see that there is nothing to conceal, that all they have to talk about they are willing to talk about in the open and talk about with each other; and whence, looking back over the road, we shall see at last that we have fulfilled our promise to mankind. We had said to all the world, “America was created to break every kind of monopoly, and to set men free, upon a footing of equality, upon a footing of opportunity, to match their brains and their energies.” And now we have proved that we meant it.

 

[a_majoor]

Perhaps the best deconstruction of modern Progressivism ever: Progressivism is a system designed to avoid reality...

http://www.scifiwright.com/2015/12/point-deer-make-horse

Point Deer, Make Horse
The Federalist has an article stating that for the Left, their God is Caesar, that is to say, the State, that is to say, themselves.

After a disaster or lost battle, the Jews of old said it was it is the punishment rightfully delivered for not being faithful enough to Jehovah, not giving him what he demanded for their good: an upright heart and pure more sacred to him than any ritual sacrifice.

After every crime-spree or disaster or terrorist attack by persons who never turn out to be white rightwingers, the Left says that it is the punishment rightfully delivered for not being faithful enough to Caesar, not giving him what he demanded for our good: not giving Caesar enough power, property and control over our minds and souls to solve the problem.


Mollie Hemmingway for the Federalist writes as follows:

http://thefederalist.com/2015/12/03/the-left-prays-after-san-bernardino-shooting-to-its-god-of-government/

At least 14 people were killed and 17 others injured in San Bernardino, California, by Syed Farook and Tafsheen Malik, a couple who later died in a shootout with police. As with the tragic rampage in Colorado just a few days prior, there’s a frustrating lack of details. Many in the media at first focused, as they tend to do during mass shootings, on their anger with the National Rifle Association, a large gun rights and gun safety organization. Some focused on the fact that the shooting took place about a 25-minute walk from a Planned Parenthood facility. Really.

Progressive and liberal politicians called for gun control. And other politicians prayed for the victims and their families while waiting for more information.

That’s when things got super weird. For some reason, much of the media began mocking the efficacy of prayer. This was happening while victims of the shooting were actually asking people to pray. I mean, the critiques were everywhere. An editor at ThinkProgress said, and I quote, “Stop thinking. Stop praying.” There’s a bumper sticker for you!

Here’s how The Huffington Post put it:

Screen Shot 2015-12-03 at 3.27.40 AM

Stunning. “Public officials are the people society trusts to solve society’s ills?” Their “useless” thoughts and prayers?

She goes on to say:

blasphemously, the New York Daily News attempted to get page clicks with this cover, seemingly stolen straight from the progressive echo chamber but amped up a notch:

CVSPGtqWcAEyC2Y
I’m honestly not sure what possessed all of these media types to choose “people who pray” as the target of their anger. It was really weird and revealing.

My comment: while Leftism has much in common with a mental illness, it is not a mental illness. The sick behaviors of the Left are affixed to certain topics of thought, not to the machinery of thought. Nor can it be explained as stupidity, or ignorance, or innocent lack of knowledge.

One might ask: how many people will the Muslims have to shoot before the Left realizes that the Muslim doctrines telling them God wants them to shoot people is the source of the problem, and not the lack of a government-enforced static global climate system? How long until they wake up?

(I am assuming that those who oppose climate change are in favor of climate stasis, with no change to the weather ever to be permitted again, but none have ever openly said so. By what means they will control the weather is never specified, albeit I have it on good authority that such things were done in Camelot, at least in the musical version.)

I am not kidding about Global Warming/Cooling/Unstasis being cited as the cause of worldwide Islamic terrorism. See cf http://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/presidential-races/260210-sanders-doubles-down-climate-change-causes-terrorism

and

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/bill-nye-climate-change-paris-terrorism_565ccdebe4b079b2818b810b

How long until the Left wake up? The answer is: NEVER.

The Left will never wake up to reality for precisely the reason that Leftism is a mental system of excuses and psychological tricks and traps meant to allow the Leftist to escape from reality.

That is what all their rigmarole, jabberwocky, lies and evasions, all their complex obfuscations, and penning endless tomes of endless nonsense from Marx to Keynes to Al Gore, all their riots, marches, protests, sit-ins, think-tanks, media moguls, money laundering, awards shows, convulsions, antics, stunts, clamor, libel, slander, and cacophony is for: Reality avoidance.

That is all that it is for.

It was not always thus. Perhaps a generation ago, there were Leftists who joined the Democrat Party for what were political reasons, to promote labor unions, impose regulation on banks and businesses in response to some threat, real or imaginary, posed by the free market, or to encourage the welfare state to help the poor.

Perhaps two generations ago, there were real Marxists who really believed that socialism was more efficient and more productive of human wealth than the free market. But after the Fall of the Berlin Wall, no honest person can maintain that socialism is more efficient at encouraging wealth and creating and distributing goods and services than a free market.

All socialism produces are mounds of corpses in mass graves, and gulag-states surrounded by barbed wire, with all guns pointed inward.

Even Bill Clinton, a weasel without an honest bone in his body, announced the era of big government to be over, and took the first step to dismantling the American version of Marxism, Johnson’s Great Society. If he saw socialism as a failure, anyone can see it.

And so the criticism changed strategy. In the shadow of the Holocaust of Jews by the Nazis, where Nazism became the synonym for evil in a world which has ceased to speak of the Devil, racism was identified as the main scourge and flaw of the West, and attempts to eradicate racism by means of embracing multiculturalism became the norm.

This is ironic. Tribalism, racism, and the presumed superiority of one’s own bloodline over any foreigners is the norm of human existence, and only the Christian religion gives anyone any reason to condemn it. Here in the West and here alone is anyone even concerned at calling it evil or trying to eliminate it. It would be like the West trying to wipe out polygamy, when we are the only ones whose culture rejects polygamy. No one else sees it as wrong.

Be that as it may. Multiculturalism is not a doctrine, it is an attitude: the attitude is to praise inferior and savage societies in any ways in which they differ from Christendom, and to blame, scold, vilify and upbraid Christendom for any ways in which we differ from Utopia. It is the attitude of a nagging wife unwilling to divorce a hard-working husband and provider she hates and loathes.  Multiculturalism is nagging.

The nagging is based on the idea that all cultures are equal, and all equally provide for human liberty and human happiness. Skyscraper and yurt: the same. Cathedral and igloo: the same. Wright Brothers and the Cargo Cult of Melanesia: the same. American cosmetics industry and pre-Western Chinese practice of breaking the bones in baby girls’ feet for footbinding: the same. Western abolition of slavery and Hindu caste system: the same. Medical Doctors and Witch-Doctors: the same. Scientific agriculture and Maori cannibalism: the same. Progress and stagnation: the same. Christian martyr and Muslim suicide bomber: the same. Jesus and Mohammed: the same.

See how it works?

The Christian West, with our industrial and scientific revolutions (the byproduct of our Christian metaphysics, university system and Christian individualism) not to mention our legal and juridical advances are held by hypothesis not to have made any particular advances in human liberty and happiness.

Any use of discriminatory judgment between the cultures of, say, the British Empire and he Aztec Empire is the product of bigotry, bias, or race-hatred.

After 9/11, it became clear that not all cultures equally provide for human liberty and happiness. Indeed, it is clear enough to any honest observer that come cultures are productive of vast misery and vast oppression, especially oppression of women, of children, of the weak and helpless. The growing slave trade in underage boys used as catamites by the Muslim is a clear enough sign of this, as well as the rape statistics that follow Muslim migrants entering Europe.

In recent years, with the cult of multiculturalism dead, and Marxism rightfully tossed into the crematorium of dead yet stupid ideas, the only thing left for the Left to do was to break all ties with honesty.

Political Correctness has its roots in Stalinism, and is as old as Marx himself, as old as the first lie every told by a snake in Eden. But since 9/11, with both their idols of multiculturalism and socialism smashed, the press and the Left generally expelled their less extreme elements from their midst, or shamed them into silence, and embraced falsehood as the source and summit of all good.

This is what I call ‘the Unreality Principle’ which is the principle that a lie is better than the truth because to lie and to believe a lie proves one’s loyalty. To lie and believe lies is morally superior than to tell and believe the truth, and the more outrageous the lie, the greater the moral superiority one can award oneself.

The Chinese have an epigram for this, as they have for most things political and practical.

It is written this way: 指鹿為馬 (zhi lu wei ma). Literally translated, the four characters mean  ‘point deer, make horse’.

The word 為 for ‘make’ also means ‘to transform’ or ‘to serve as’ or ‘to make believe.’ So the epigram means ‘Calling a deer a horse.’

As with all Chinese epigrams, there is a story behind it:

16815952_1360049877Dw3s

Zhao Gao was contemplating treason but was afraid the other officials would not heed his commands, so he decided to test them first. He brought a deer and presented it to the Emperor but called it a horse. The Emperor laughed and said, “Is the chancellor perhaps mistaken, calling a deer a horse?” Then the emperor questioned those around him. Some remained silent, while some, hoping to ingratiate themselves with Zhao Gao, said it was a horse, and others said it was a deer. Zhao Gao secretly arranged for all those who said it was a deer to be brought before the law and had them executed instantly.

(hat tip to https://bloodyshovel.wordpress.com/2015/06/03/the-purpose-of-absurdity/ quote is from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhao_Gao#Calling_a_deer_a_horse)



You see how the Unreality Principle works. Bringing in a pony and calling it a horse won’t do. Someone might honestly mistake a horse for a pony. Only lies that are breathtakingly stupid, things no sane person could say or believe, are sufficient to show where one’s loyalty rests.

It is for this reason that Hillary Clinton announced that acts of terrorism carried out by Islamicists in the name of Islam as defined, promoted and commanded by Islam now and for all centuries past not only had nothing to do with Islam, but, in her words, ‘nothing whatsoever to do with Islam.’

Islam is not the enemy. The deer is a horse.

The problem with loyalty to the Unreality Principle is that in order to be truly loyal, you have to believe, actually to believe, nonsense you should know is nonsense.

I have wasted endless hours debating to what degree the various followers of the Unreality Principle are complicit in their own self-deception, and have finally resigned from the debate in disgust. The question is a paradox. When a man is trying to deceive himself, he is his own victim, deceiver and deceived at once. And successful self deception results in his not knowing himself to have successfully deceived himself: so arguing that he really does not know better is merely to say he is skilled at something akin to auto-hypnosis.

If any Leftist is being deceived about what Leftism truly is or truly says, it is deception by invitation.

Therefore, to me, it is a meaningless question to ask whether President Obama or anyone else ‘actually’ believes that Global Warming causes terrorism, or ‘actually’ thinks we should not pray for the victims of a mass shooting because Caesar is more potent than God. There is no ‘actually’ with these people: there is nothing below the surface appearance.

The surface appearance, by design, is all that there is. Intellectual honesty and introspection are what their mental system is designed to avoid.

So, yes, the Left ‘actually’ believes (1) if only given control over the economy, that the State has the power to stop the weather from ever changing again and (2) the fact that weather changes makes Muslims (but not Christians or Jews living in the same villages, same area, same clime) plan and carry out large-scale sneak attacks against random innocent civilians and (3) we, and not Mohammed, are responsible for what Mohammedans think, say, believe and do.

From this, the Left ‘actually’ conclude that, ergo, if only we gave Caesar more control over our money, time, property, speech, press and inward thoughts, then Caesar would force us to do the right things and say the right things, and then the Mohammedans, who are actually controlled by us, would all become yuppie Democrats as peaceful as campus protesters and race rioters and occupy anarchists and the KKK and whatever other movement Democrats have started and maintained.

These are not beliefs in the sense that you and I believe that Washington crossed the Delaware, or that Proxima is the nearest star, or that the square built on the hypotenuse of a right triangle is equal to the combined areas of the square built on the remaining legs of the triangle, or that infanticide is evil, or that all men are created equal. Those beliefs are based on historical witness, on scientific observation, on geometric deduction,  on moral and political reasoning.

No, their belief that gun control solves rather than encourages gun violence, their belief that junk science overrules real science, their belief that minimum wage laws diminish rather than promote  poverty, their belief that a diversity in cultures and races benefits rather than erodes social bonds, their belief that gay marriage is the same as marriage, their belief that throwing petrol on a fire quenches it, this and countless others are beliefs taken on faith.

This is not the time-tested and endlessly proven faith of the Christians, mind you, but a blind faith in the wisdom and candor of anonymous pundits in the press or entertainment industry.

The most narrow-minded Christian can point to the specific passage in the catechism or the scripture to justify what he takes on faith, for he can say in whom he has faith, on whose testament he is relying, or name the martyrs whose witness convinced him or convinced his ancestors.

But the allegedly broadminded Leftist cannot name a single experiment or observation on which their belief in Global Warming is based, or any of their beliefs.

Do not be deceived by their willingness to quote sources. It is never worth your time to follow the paper trail of a Will-o’-the-Wisp.

It was a revelation if not an apocalypse to me when I discovered the footnotes in Marx’s allegedly scientific research in DAS KAPITAL did not support the points he was making. It was make believe research; junk science.

I have found this in my own life, when a Leftist links to an article of mine in order to prove the point about how horrible I am for having said some quote, only the quote either is not present in what I wrote, or when taken in context means the opposite.

If they do this to an author whose writing I know, namely me, why should I assume their quoted authorities, extracts, summaries, and whatnot actually say what they say they say? Like the Constitution, for them, all documents are living documents. Like Humpty Dumpty, words mean what they say they mean, nothing else.

Leftism has more in common with conspiracy theories about faked moon landings than it does with any economic theory or political policy.

Leftism is a convenient way for postchristians to signal to the warren that they are virtuous: by screaming about imaginary danger, hunting witches, and ignoring real dangers, they show their utmost loyalty to unreality, and their absolute defiance of their enemy.

Their enemy is reality.

Their enemy is nature, is the cosmos, is the world, and the author whose hand created nature, the cosmos, and the world.

Why else would they be jealous of prayers directed toward heaven, and not at their idol? Why else such disdain? Why else such scorn?

We are at war. The Islamic terror masters, the Imams of Iran and the House of Saud in Saudi Arabia is only the visible, open, violent arm of the enemy war machine. We have barbarians within the gates already, for years, who are not only within, but are our elite leaders, social and political.

The riots and commotions on our campuses, the Occupy Wallstreet movement, the Obama-inspired race riots and cop-killings, the disgusting treachery of our Supreme Court, and the flaccid laxity of our Congress, the corruption in the Justice Department and the IRS, and on and on, are the visible manifestations of an invisible war.

The invisible war is spiritual, and it is wages with principalities and powers, dominions and angels loyal to the Prince of this World and all his false glamours.

Prayer is your weapon in the invisible war just as bucks and ballots are your weapon in the culture war, and bombs and bullets your weapon in the shooting war.

The enemy wants to make it costly, eventually illegal, to use campaign contribution or votes to influence the culture. Hence the furor over campaign finance laws and voter ID laws.

The enemy wants you not to be carrying a firearm when a jihadist or the BATF shows up to shoot you and your loved ones. Hence after every mass shooting, there are more calls to disarm the victims even more.

Of course the enemy wants you not to pray. This is war. What did you expect?

 

[a_majoor]

One man's journey in to and out from SJWism:

https://archive.is/rd8cZ#selection-2305.0-2395.122

[–]NeilAndJorie 129 points 10 hours ago*

Changing was a long process. I initially got into SJW groups sort of through popularity- feminism was supposed to be THE thing for equality, and I wanted everyone to be treated well, so I joined a bunch of feminist forums, which branched into more garden variety SJW circles. Initially I had no idea there was a dark side to it.

I had some weird views before; I think in a lot of ways I was a stereotypical white knight. I was depressed at the time, and being applauded for being progressive definitely was an ego boost. Fighting people I perceived as bigoted made me feel better about myself. My SJW tendencies were based mostly out of self loathing- I felt weird, like an outcast, had never had a girlfriend, hated myself, and thought that I was fixing myself by jumping deep into feminism. I armed myself with a lot of bad statistics (like the 1 in 4 rape stat) and felt smart because of it.

After a while it becomes second nature; you just sort of convince yourself that you're on the right side and see your opponent as a stereotype out of reflex. That can happen here too, but SJW's actively encourage it. You become utterly convinced that you're part of an elite, enlightened group fighting an aging generation of uneducated racists and sexists.

But eventually I started to realize that I had incomplete information. I lost a lot of arguments to people I'd stereotyped as being dumb. The people I called allies just jumped to ad hominem attacks and semantic arguments, and that made them secure in their beliefs. That's how they operate; when they lose, their mental gymnastics aren't supposed to convince you. It's to convince themselves, to justify not changing their sources or beliefs. And it's very effective at that. It worked for me for a while.

But eventually it wasn't enough for me. I started trying to revise feminist arguments with new, accurate sources. I'd correct people on my own side on forums and whatnot. They hated that, and jumped right to calling me a rape apologist and a woman hater. I was blown away, it contradicted my notion that we were the logical side.

At the same time I started college, my grades were pretty awesome and college was way less stressful for me than high school had been. I had so much more time I took an active interest in learning some real skills for the first time. I'm making my own indie game now in between my regular job, based on the skills I learned my first couple years of college in my free time. I also got a girlfriend for the first time.
She was (and is) amazing, best thing that ever happened to me.

This stuff gave me a little bit of pride that was extremely harmful to the communities I was in. Whereas before when someone generalized most men as rapists, it had given me an opportunity to feel superior to other men while still hating myself, now all of a sudden it offended my new-found self worth. Their communities thrive on self loathing disguised as elitism. And then the womens' studies class I took in college cited people absolutely insane- like Andrea Dworkin. Even as indoctrinated as I was at the time, I still knew that class was too far.

I still find it funny that, though most of the class started out conservative and was roped into SJW mentalities, I started out SJW and by the end of the class it had practically ruined feminism for me. Because I'd been a part of it before. I knew when the professor was wrong. I knew how hollow the "peace and acceptance" spiel they preached was. I knew the counter points to their sources. It felt like a bad joke to me at the time; I knew how my classmates felt, I'd felt the same way months earlier. But I was powerless to actually explain that to anyone, they just demonise and talk in circles until the argument goes away. As I had done months earlier. At first I felt bad, ashamed, for going against everything. I wanted to be convinced again, I wanted to be a good SJW again. And all of a sudden I realized it wasn't going to get better. I was in a university class about feminism, overrun with SJW's, and they had worse arguments than I'd seen online. There was no smarter next level to feminism that I was just too stupid to see. That was it. I was at the top and our arguments still sucked.

The last straw was when I made a desperate, ditch effort to convert my brown female girlfriend to feminism with me. It failed; she said feminists in her country were crazy. We argued a bit. Finally it felt like a curtain was being pulled back and I realized the ridiculousness of it all. I was a stupid white knight arguing with a brown girl that she should be more feminist. I deconverted on the spot. I stopped being ashamed of myself, a lot of things changed about the way I see myself and the world. Ironically, I stopped seeing every situation as a men vs. women or race vs. race binary. SJW's insist their goal is to make everyone equal, and for a long time I believed it, but their communities actually enforce factionalism and division.

I know this post makes me look bad, I cringe every time I think about the things I used to believe and say. I feel bad about the good people I insulted and wrote off. The good news is, I'm not the same person as I was in my mid-late teens. My life actually functions and has a purpose now, so that's nice. I try to see every situation in terms of individuals now, not sides. I'm not depressed any more, I have a regular decent paying job, I'm developing a game on the side, and I'm about to marry my wonderful fiancé'.

Sorry for the tl;dr, it ran way longer than I expected. Once I started typing I felt like I needed to get it off my chest.

 

[Kilo_302]

"One man's quest to avenge his family and rid the world of progressivism. It's a hard, lonely job, but someone's gotta do it." 

 

[a_majoor]

MLK offered a devastating criticism to Socialism (and its major subset communism). Interestingly enough, if you were to offer this today without attribution of the source, you would probably be accused of various forms of "wrong think" in an attempt too disqualify you:

http://historynewsnetwork.org/blog/135514

During the Christmas holidays of 1949 I decided to spend my spare time reading Karl Marx to try to understand the appeal of communism for many people. For the first time I carefully scrutinized Das Kapital and The Communist Manifesto. I also read some interpretative works on the thinking of Marx and Lenin. In reading such Communist writings I drew certain conclusions that have remained with me as convictions to this day.

First, I rejected their materialistic interpretation of history. Communism, avowedly secularistic and materialistic, has no place for God. This I could never accept, for as a Christian, I believe that there is a creative personal power in the universe who is the ground and essence of all reality-a power that cannot be explained in materialistic terms. History is ultimately guided by spirit, not matter.

Second, I strongly disagreed with communism's ethical relativism. Since for the Communist there is no divine government, no absolute moral order, there are no fixed, immutable principles; consequently almost anything-force, violence murder, lying-is a justifiable means to the 'millennial' end. This type of relativism was abhorrent to me. Constructive ends can never give absolute moral justification to destructive means, because in the final analysis the end is preexistent in the means.

Third, I opposed communism's political totalitarianism. In communism, the individual ends up in subjection to the state. True, the Marxists would argue that the state is an 'interim' reality which is to be eliminated when the classless society emerges; but the state is the end while it lasts, and man is only a means to that end. And if man's so-called rights and liberties stand in the way of that end, they are simply swept aside. His liberties of expression, his freedom to vote, his freedom to listen to what news he likes or to choose his books are all restricted. Man becomes hardly more, in communism, than a depersonalized cog in the turning wheel of the state.

This deprecation of individual freedom was objectionable to me. I am convinced now, as I was then, that man is an end because he is a child of God. Man is not made for the state; the state is made for man. To deprive man of freedom is to relegate him to the status of a thing, rather than elevate him to the status of a person. Man must never be treated as means to the end of the state; but always as an end within himself."

- See more at: http://historynewsnetwork.org/blog/135514#sthash.TIuQtkNv.dpuf

 

[a_majoor]

How "Codes of Conduct" are used as means of SJW entryism, and how SJW's refuse to separate personal, political and professional in order to attack opponents. I had been somewhat bemused by the kerfuffle surrounding the 2015 Hugo awards for Science Fiction, where SJW's essentially tore down the event rather than allow anyone not "approved" from being nominated or winning an award (this probably explains why so much SF written in the last decade or so is so crappy), and am aware of "Gamergate" (SJW's with personal and professional relationships with various media organizations using their leverage to attack projects and games they don't like under the comer of supposedly "unbiased" reviews in the media), but trying to infiltrate open source code efforts makes me wonder where they draw the limits? Is there anything SJWs are not interested in infiltrating?

http://paul-m-jones.com/archives/6214

On the Proposed PHP Code of Conduct
2016-01-19 pmjones Management, PHP, Programming

Recently, Anthony Ferrara opened an RFC for PHP internals to adopt and enforce a code of conduct. Even leaving aside for the moment whether this is an appropriate use of the RFC system, the RFC generated a lot of discussion on the mailing list, in which I participated at great length, and for which I was hailed as abusive by at least one person in favor of the RFC (a great example of a kafkatrap).

To restate what I said on the mailing list, my position on the RFC is not merely “opposed”, but “reject entirely as unsalvageable” (though I did make some attempts at salvage in case it goes through). I continue to stand by everything I said there, and in other channels, regarding the proposed Code of Conduct.

Normally, if you had not heard about this particular discussion, I would say you were lucky, and probably the happier for it. In this case, I have to say that you should be paying close attention. The Code of Conduct as presented enables its enforcers to stand in judgment of every aspect of your public, private, professional, and political expression. I understand that’s a bold assertion; I will attempt to support it below.

The Contributor Covenant version on which the RFC is based is authored and maintained by intersectional technologist and transgender feminist Coraline Ada Ehmke. Ehmke believes that open source is a political movement:

From the onset open source has been inherently a political movement, a reaction against the socially damaging, anti-competitive motivations of governments and corporations. It began as a campaign for social liberty and digital freedom, a celebration of the success of communal efforts in the face of rampant capitalism. What is this if not a political movement?

– Why Hackers Must Welcome Social Justice Advocates

Whether or not this description of open source is accurate, it is true that Ehmke thinks of open source as a political arena. As such, one must read the Contributor Covenant as a political document, with political means and political ends. Specifically, it is a tool for Social Justice.

As a tool for Social Justice, it recognizes no boundaries between project, person, and politics. This attitude is written into the Contributor Covenant with the text, “This Code of Conduct applies both within project spaces and in public spaces when an individual is representing the project or its community.” So, when is a project participant not representing the project? The answer appears to be “never.”

That is, a project participant is always representative of the project. We can see one example of this from the “Opalgate” incident. In reference to a Twitter conversation where Opal is not the subject, Ehmke opens an Opal project issue, and then attempts (with a Social Justice mob of backers) to intimidate the project managers into removing one of the Twitter conversants from the project because of his non-project-related speech.

This is Social Justice in action. Remember, it is the author of the Contributor Covenant acting this way. To look at this incident, and simultaneously opine that the Covenant as a tool of Social Justice is somehow not political, or that it does not intend to police speech unrelated to the project, reveals that opinion as obviously incorrect. This kind of behavior is not “abuse” of the Contributor Covenant; it is the intended application of the Covenant. The Covenant is designed specifically to enable that behavior under cover of “safety” and “welcoming” and “respect”.

But “safety” and “welcoming” and “respect” are the primary goals of the Covenant, aren’t they? I assert they are the curtain behind which the true goal is veiled: power over persons who are not sufficiently supportive of Social Justice. I think is it appropriate to mention the motte and bailey doctrine here:

[The doctrine is compared] to a form of medieval castle, where there would be a field of desirable and economically productive land called a bailey, and a big ugly tower in the middle called the motte. If you were a medieval lord, you would do most of your economic activity in the bailey and get rich. If an enemy approached, you would retreat to the motte and rain down arrows on the enemy until they gave up and went away. Then you would go back to the bailey, which is the place you wanted to be all along.

So the motte-and-bailey doctrine is when you make a bold, controversial statement. Then when somebody challenges you, you claim you were just making an obvious, uncontroversial statement, so you are clearly right and they are silly for challenging you. Then when the argument is over you go back to making the bold, controversial statement.

Sentiments like “safety” and “welcoming” and “respect” are the motte of the Covenant: the defensible tower from which challengers are ridiculed. (“It’s nice! Who doesn’t want to be nice? Why do you think we should enable harassers and abusers? Why do you want to exclude women, LGBTQ, etc?”) But the real purpose of the Covenant is to enable work in the bailey: that is, to gain power over the political enemies of Social Justice, by using project membership as a form of leverage over them.

We saw that bailey-work in the Opalgate example above. As another example of attempting to use leverage, we have the following incident in the Awesome-Django project, run by Roberto Rosario. Rosario turned down a pull request, and thereafter received this demand to adopt and enforce the Contributor Convenant. (Interestingly enough, Github deleted the issue entirely, as far as I know without comment, and without notification to Rosario; the archive.is link appears to be the only evidence of the issue’s existence.)

After Rosario declined, the issue-opener ended the conversation with an attempt at intimidation: “You are a member of the Django Software Foundation and are supposed to be setting the example. I will be forwarding the content of this issue to the Chair to evaluate your continued presence in the DSF.”

Thus, the issue-opener began in the motte (“welcoming” and “respect”) but ended on the bailey (threats to leverage refusal of the Covenant into rejection from a project). Again, this is not an abuse of the Covenant. As a tool of Social Justice, that is its author’s intended purpose: to give cover for threats and intimdation against those who do not support the author’s politics.

Since threats and intimidation are the end-game, consider what else might be threatened by being insufficiently supportive of Social Justice in general, and the Contributor Covenant in specific. Any project leader, any conference organizer, any publisher, or any employer, might be approached regarding your politically-incorrect opinions as expressed on any non-project forum or subject, and be threatened and intimidated into distancing themselves from you. This leads to ejection from projects, denial or disinvitation from conferences, rejection of manuscripts, and refusal-to-hire or outright firing, based on political (not professional) concerns.

This is not the kind of behavior found in a free and open society. It is instead the behavior of a society that is totalitarian, even fascist-with-a-smiley-face. You are not allowed to disagree with the Social Justice proponents, in any capacity. You are not even allowed to “not care” – you will be made to care.

As such, I assert that the Contributor Covenant, and any other codes of conduct originating in Social Justice, are to be opposed out of hand, both in PHP, and in any other place they are suggested.

Postscript

While reading in preparation for writing this piece, I came across a lot of information that didn’t really fit, but might still be useful. Here’s a partial list of links.

Why Hackers Must Eject the SJWs by ESR, about the Rosario incident in specific and meritocracy in general.

Why Hackers Must Welcome Social Justice Advocates by Coraline Ada Ehmke, in response to ESR.

Open source is not a political movement at all by Jay Maynard, arguing that “free software” is political but “open source” is not.

On Opalgate by Coraline Ada Ehmke, discussing the Opalgate incident.

Codes of conduct are a shakedown game for ideological control by Redditor IE_5, describing how codes of conduct are “entryism.”

Social Justice In Action

Purge the Bigots: Brendan Eich is just the beginning. Let’s oust everyone who donated to the campaign against gay marriage by William Saletan, arguing in favor of purging political enemies.

Donglegate (among other links) as a reminder of how codes of conduct can be weaponized by their proponents.

Tech Conference Bans Speakers for Their Politics by Allum Bokhari, talking about Curtis Yarvin being uninvited from the Strangeloop conference after complaints about his politics.

How Twitter quietly banned hate speech last year, by Annalee Newitz, pointing out how Twitter “now emphasizes safety and free expression rather than lack of censorship.”

No, there’s no “hate speech” exception to the First Amendment by Eugene Volokh, pointing out that so-called “hate speech” is protected speech.

Discussions About Codes of Conduct

RFC: Adopt Code of Conduct, a Reddit thread regarding the proposed PHP code of conduct.

Grap your popcorns for a bit of PhpDrama, a Reddit thread about the above Reddit thread.

Postgres is discussing a Code of Conduct as well.

Alternative Codes of Conduct

The Citizen Code of Conduct, apparently another Social Justice code.

The Open Code of Conduct by the TODO Group, apparently another Social Justice code.

A Decoupled Code of Conduct, by myself, an attempt to convert the proposed Social Justice code into a non-Social Justice one, and to restrict its scope to project channels only.

A contribution policy for open source that works, by Jay Maynard, apparently a non-Social Justice code.

The Code of Merit, by Roberto Rosario, apparently a non-Social Justice code.

The existing PHP mailing list rules might be called an existing code of conduct, at least for the PHP mailing list. Social Justice or not? You decide.

 

[Kilo_302]

MLK offered a devastating criticism to Socialism (and its major subset communism). Interestingly enough, if you were to offer this today without attribution of the source, you would probably be accused of various forms of "wrong think" in an attempt too disqualify you:

http://historynewsnetwork.org/blog/135514

Any analysis of Marxism based on religious grounds holds less water than one based on political/economic grounds. We should also remember that MLK was wary of appearing too "socialist." There were many facets of the civil rights movement that WERE rooted in socialism, but to be politically palatable to sympathetic whites, they had to be glossed over.

If anything, the continued economic repression of blacks in the US underlines that capitalism (as it exists in the US) isn't really equipped to address racial inequality, as structurally much of the US depends on that inequality.