Men's Rights and the Anatomy of Reaction

 

http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/women-battle-online-anti-women-hate-manosphere/story?id=20579038
The Southern Poverty Law Center--a bunch of commies, jews, fags, and slags who've appointed and proclaimed themselves supra-Christian accusers of all evil in this world, holier than Jesus--think Chateau Heartiste and other assorted bloggers who operate from a realistic male perspective are evil, violent, malicious, mendacious. The "manosphere" is increasingly a branch of the "reactosphere" since (except the Christian reactionaries) both are grounded in reality--a reality which both political parties deny. When the leftist media comes down on you, it's a sign of headway. Also, a lesser light among the lefties just did a typically incompetent and inaccurate hit piece on Nick Land, the British philosopher who writes "Outside In." If you look at the map of Dark Enlightenment thinkers below, the connections are telling: with the exception of the Christians, all of these groupings revolve around some key aspect of reality that the Left denies or omits. Eight groups are listed, three count:

1. Techno-Capitalists,
2. Ethno-Nationalists,
3. Christian Traditionalists.

The relations among these three are predictably problematic. In theory the first and second or the second and third could come to terms in formulating a new dispensation--though difficulties abound. But, the first and third can only clash. Of course, 'twas was not always so. In centuries past capitalist and techno were not so tightly aligned, and capitalism itself is not an existential threat to Christian life and thought. Catallaxy is not anti-Christian. But, in these days of genetic engineering and evolutionary science, of neurological pharmacopeias and expanding machine intelligence--the technological underpinnings of twenty-first century capitalism represent conceptual catastrophes for Christian theology. In practice, it may be that two camps will coalesce--the Techno-capitalists with some sympathetic Ethno-nationalists, and the Christian Traditionalists with another contingent of Ethno-nationalists.

The future lies with the Techno-capitalists, whether they achieve more power in the West or not. The Christians cannot countenance the nano- and bio-tech revolutions. If empowered, they will crash the technoplex and render their realm geopolitically prostrate, as Land's "relentlessly self-enhancing" oriental realms scout new destinies. As to the Ethnos, though their present importance shines clearly through dusky leftist miasmas, what does the meaning of ethnicity reduce to when time comes that all humanoid inceptions aspire to become genetically engineered triumphs of power and aesthetics? Their perspective on reality would have to evolve so radically in face of such techno-leaps as to vanish their identity. Or, they could turn techno-denialist like the Christians. Either way, tide-taken relics of advancing storms, the time of the Ethnos draws down . Science has grown to the dimensions of a Demiurge--learned to throw lightning--and, cast under His dominion, the lesser deities will learn their place soon enough, or be new made in his image.

Maverick Wisdom

This is my rather lengthy selection from an interview of Edward Luttwak in Tablet Sept 2011
http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/76739/qa-edward-luttwak?all=1

I'm especially interested in his interpretation of the trajectory of Iranian society, his compare/contrast of intelligent government with "innocent" leaders against ineffective government with clever leaders, and his insight into the typically third world government of Pakistan, a government with "no institutional integrity":


Why are so many Jews so stupid about politics?
They have not had a state for 2,000 years, they have had no power or responsibility and it will take centuries before they catch up with the instinctive political understanding that any ordinary Englishman has. They don’t understand politics, and of course they confuse their friends and their enemies, and that is the ultimate political proof of imbecility.

When you look at the current conduct of American policy in the Middle East, do you see any coherent policy or strategy?
Obama is no different than most previous administrations that come into office with ready-made solutions to the Arab-Israeli conflict. Jimmy Carter was the first one, and his plan was redacted by Zbigniew Brzezinski. It led to Sadat’s journey to Jerusalem because his brilliant idea was to subject Egyptians and Israelis to a Soviet-American condominium, which was a terrible idea, and so Sadat created his own reality. It was really one of the funnier moments in history. The national security adviser officials, and I believe Brzezinski himself, came out with a lot of negative statements when Sadat first made his announcement because he was ruining their policy scheme, which was, of course, impossible.
Obama is in that tradition. He came in with an impossible policy scheme, which is first you get Israelis to stop agreeing to settlements, and then you proceed. Of course, that doesn’t make any sense. When you draw a border that is what matters. The Israelis removed all the settlements from Sinai without any American involvement in two minutes after the agreement was made with Egypt.
There’s nobody involved who is anti-Israeli like there were in the past, when there was a strong Arabist position in the State Department. The people in the Obama Administration read the New York Times and they don’t know Arabic, and therefore they are operating systematically with false categories. The fundamental error with regard to settlements is a very simple one: When borders are established, borders are established, and settlements are neither here nor there. This notion that when some faction of Israelis puts a camper on a hilltop that this changes anything is a fantasy.

A fantasy both on the part of the people who put the campers on the ground and also American policymakers.
They’re both equally deluded.

Do you anticipate violence this fall between the Israelis and the Palestinians?
I don’t anticipate violence this fall. War leads to peace. Peace leads to war. So, now logically we should have war. And the Iranians, of course, would love to pay for one. But the moment there is an intifada, the Palestinian regiment collapses and gangsters take over. So, the moment the violence escalates they stop fighting and they start talking peace. The moment the talking appears to be approaching an actual peace, they start an intifada.

Do you think the cost of the violence and other social ills that come out of the stalemate you are describing is something Israeli society can easily afford, or do you think there is any alternative to it?
I’m not sure it’s a cost.

Because the strategic depth that it affords and the control over those borders is more important?
Listen, my wife is a very good cook. And we have a housekeeper, who is an even better cook. It’s a weird situation, but I think my housekeeper is a better cook than any restaurant in Washington. She is a simple woman with no education, from Chile, and she just happens to have a superhuman talent. She being such a good cook, she achieves wonderful effects with very strange ingredients, and strange combinations of ingredients. Israel’s success as a state has been made possible by Arab threats of different kinds. Arab violence or threats of violence are part of the Israeli soup. There are certain levels of violence that are so high that they’re damaging, and there are also levels that are so low they are damaging. There is an optimum level of the Arab threat. I would say for about nine days of the 1973 war, the level of violence was much too high. Even when Israelis were successful, the level of violence was destroying the tissue of the state. Most of the time, the violence is positive.

When you say that the effects of Arab violence are positive, you mean that they generate social cohesion inside Israel?
Lenin taught, “Power is mass multiplied by cohesion.” Arab violence generates Jewish cohesion. Cohesion turns mass into power. Israel has had very small mass, very high cohesion. If only the Palestinians understood that, they would have attacked the Jews with flowers.

Shimon Peres says, “Iran is a decaying corpse of a country and the idea that they are any long-term threat to anybody, based on demographics and based on the rickety state of their economy, is a joke. So yes, it would be terrible if they ended up with an atomic bomb, but otherwise, Iran is not a long-term strategic threat to anybody.”
I think to get a good view on Iran you have to put yourself in the shoes of Hezbollah. Hezbollah is wholly dependent on Iran. Without Iran, Hezbollah is just a band of hotheads with a few thousand highly trained men. So, view Iran from Hezbollah’s point of view. What do you see? It’s a regime that has been around since 1979 in one way or the other. Is it consolidated? Is it functioning better and better and getting more and more support? It’s not. Is it getting more dependent on police repression or less? The answer is more. So, from the Hezbollah point of view, you realize that your days are counted because the regime is in a downward spiral.
There is a good measure of social control in Iran, and that is the price of genuine imported Scotch whiskey in Tehran, because it’s a) forbidden, and b) has to be smuggled in for practical purposes from Dubai, and the only way it can come from Dubai is with the cooperation of the Revolutionary Guard. The price of whiskey has been declining for years, and you go to a party in north Tehran now and you get lots of whiskey. And it’s only slightly more expensive than in Northwest Washington.
But on the other hand, the regime is doing something for which they will have my undying gratitude—that is, they have been manufacturing the one and only post-Islamic society. They created a situation in which Iranians in general, worldwide, not only in Iran, are disaffiliated. They are converting Muslim Iranians into post-Muslim Iranians.

One way to look at the place of Israel in this landscape is “Wow, you have a functioning neo-liberal state with a tech economy second to Silicon Valley amidst the rubble of all these failed Arab states. Imagine the Syrian army trying to attack anybody. Egypt’s army is incapable of doing anything despite $10 billion worth of American weapons, Iran is falling to pieces, Lebanon is still a mess, Jordan is a joke of a country with a Palestinian majority.” On the other hand, you could look at it and say, “Israel is a tiny country in a chaotic neighborhood where it will always get sucked into conflicts with its neighbors and will never have a moment of peace.”
Yes, everything you say is correct, but there is a third element you are omitting. The very innermost circle of Israeli security is actually within the 1967 borders. And there you have almost 1.5 million Arabs, some Christian, some Muslim. The current situation is helping consolidate their loyalty to the Israeli state. If you ask them, “Are you loyal to the Israeli state?” They will say, “Oh no, we hate them all.” Are they involved in terror plots? The answer is that out of the 1.5 million, the ones involved in terror plots or even plain criminality of any sort, they could all sleep in my house. Or if not, they could sleep in a motel.
But there is even a more fundamental issue within Israel, which is the functioning of the Israeli economy and its impact on Israeli society. What’s happened, as you know from these latest demonstrations, is that the Israeli economy has become so successful that it has generated big numbers of millionaires, which means that four-room apartments in Tel Aviv cost as much as they do in New York. Israel is becoming Aspen, Colo., where normal people have to travel 20 miles to go to sleep because they can’t live anywhere within Aspen proper.

Are strategic minds nurtured through upbringing and education, or is the ability to think strategically an inborn gift, like mathematics?
It’s a gift like mathematics. The paradoxical logic of strategy contradicts the logic of everyday life, it goes against all normal definitions of intelligence we have. It only makes sense if you understand the dialectic. If you want peace, prepare for war. If you actively want war, disarm yourself, and then you’ll get war. Virile and martial elites understand that kind of thinking instinctively.

Here’s an easily falsifiable statement, but there’s something in it that interests me and I want you to pick it apart. I would start with the moment when George W. Bush met Vladimir Putin and said, “I looked into his eyes and saw this was a man I could really trust.” So, my thesis is this: If you’re Vladimir Putin, and you rise to the top of this chaotic and brutal society after going through the KGB, you must be some kind of strategic genius with amazing survival skills, because the penalty for failure may be torture or death. This kind of Darwinian set-up exists in many countries around the world. What does it mean to be head of the security services in Egypt? It means that you had to betray your friends but only at the right time, and you had to survive many vicious predators who would have loved to kill you or torture you, or otherwise derail your career. By the time you become Vladimir Putin or Omar Suleiman, your ability to think ahead and analyze threats has been adequately tested.
By contrast, what does it take to become a U.S. Senator? You have to eat rubber chicken dinners, you have to impress some rich people who are generally pretty stupid about politics, and smile in TV commercials. The penalties for failure are hardly so dire. And so, American leadership generally sucks, and America is perennially in the position of being the sucker in the global poker game. That’s the thesis. So, tell me why it’s wrong.
Even if your analysis is totally correct, your conclusion is wrong. Think about what it means to work for a Putin, whose natural approach to any problem is deception. For example, he had an affair with this athlete, a gymnast, and he went through two phases. Phase one: He concealed it from his wife. Phase two: He launched a public campaign showing himself to be a macho man. He had photographs of him shooting a rifle, and as a Judo champion, and therefore had the news leaked that he was having an affair. Not only an affair with a young woman, but a gymnast, an athlete. Obviously such a person is much more wily and cunning and able to handle conflict than his American counterpart. But when such a person is the head of a department, the whole department is actually paralyzed and they are all reduced to serfs and valets. Therefore, what gets applied to a problem is only the wisdom of the aforementioned wily head of the department. All the other talent is wasted, all the other knowledge is wasted.
Now you have a choice: You can have a non-wily head of a department and the collective knowledge and wisdom of the whole department, or else you can have a wily head and zero functioning. And that is how the Russian government is currently working. Putin and Medvedev have very little control of the Russian bureaucracy. When you want to deal with them, and I dealt with them this morning, they act in very uncooperative, cagey, and deceptive ways because they are first of all trying to protect their security and stability and benefits from their boss. They have to deceive you because they are deceiving their boss before he even shows up to work. And they are all running little games. So, that’s the alternative. You can have a wily Putin and a stupid government. Or an intelligent government and an innocent head. There’s always is a trade-off. A Putin cannot be an inspiring leader.

You believe the story about the courier who led us to bin Laden?
I believe it and I believe it categorically. Look, the Pakistanis had been sheltering Bin Laden. But in these matters, the only way to proceed is to develop thoughts that are based only on uncontroversial facts. Any analysis of the Bin Laden story tells you that there was active Pakistani complicity simply because people cannot go to Abbottabad and live in a compound without somebody asking questions. For one thing, Pakistan has this system where foreign citizens have to obtain the residence permits and renew them, and there are foreigners including Arabs living there, and they would be asked to show their papers. Pakistani complicity is certain. That’s point one. Point two: The guy uses couriers. Therefore, if you’re going to find him, you had to find the courier. The courier story is not the cover story.

Why kill him?
They were under orders to kill him.

Wouldn’t Osama Bin Laden be a source of useful intelligence? Alternately, one good reason to kill him is that you have a deal with the Pakistanis—“we’re gonna get rid of this problem”—then you need to kill him, because otherwise he might start talking about who protected him for the past 10 years.
There was no deal with the Pakistanis. There’s no institutional integrity. Therefore you cannot make deals with the Pakistani system. They would betray each other. There was no deal.

They killed Bin Laden simply because of the inconvenience of a trial?
They killed him because of the fact that if we captured Bin Laden, every Jihadist in the world would have been duty-bound to kidnap any American citizen anywhere and exchange him for Bin Laden.

Shepherding

http://www.youtube.com/watch_popup?v=D9vQt6IXXaM&hd

It's not surprising that the great gay mafia is developing a talent for visual propaganda--though their patrimony seems mainly verbal propaganda, a compelling visual element was always present for the dross of the earth. The irony is that the policies of the fetus-murdering Democratic party are, at core, probably as "Christian" as those of Mammon-worshipping Republicans. And both sides consider themselves morally superior. It's a beauty contest between a rat and a snake.

The Conservative Climate

This climate change denial is just a case of anti-science populism, driven by the fact that conservatives believe reductions in emissions will rob them of their last freedoms. Aggressively opposing efforts to conserve the environment is not conservatism, it is selfish stupidity. Keep in mind this problem could largely be solved by going nuclear--especially by using either fast breeder reactors or liquid flouride thorium reactors, for both of which we have effectively unlimited fuel supplies. A massive system of nuclear reactors could also produce liquid fuels for transport and allow America to be energy independent and environmentally responsible. The military certainly believes in climate change and has policies in place to guard against the international security contingencies it will create.

As a general principle of thought and action, conservatives ought to think of ways to improve the world, rather than inflexibly hold to all that is just because it is. If conservatives continue their present braking strategy, the socialists will once again take the initiative on an inescapable issue and transform it into another step toward dystopia. Instead of choosing a conservative response to the threat, they will be run over again by the socialists. The current conservative "leadership" deserves to be run over.

Islam and the West

http://www.tnr.com/book/review/citizen-islam-zeyno-baran

The link is to a review of a book, Citizen Islam: The Future of Muslim Integration in the West, by Zeyno Baran, on Muslim citizens in Western countries. It's a sharp, concise, excellent review, worth reading. The reviewer wrote a highly regarded book on this subject a couple of years past, Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam and the West. Both authors agree that the most essential question the rise of the Muslim population puts before us is what form of Islam these people will ascribe to. I agree with this assessment, though in those countries with relatively modest Muslim populations the issue of the magnitude of future Muslim immigration is almost as important. The politically correct view, of course, in America and Europe, is that mainstream Islam is distinct from "Islamism" (the interpretation that Islamic values and rules ought to prevail in the political sphere).

That the priests or imams should want mastery accords with the natural order of things. Why shouldn't the arbiters of the ultimate things requite their pious followers with the gift of effectual earthly guidance?

“Islamism shares the most fundamental aim of Islam and all religions,” Baran writes, “to bring the world closer to God.” In so saying, she removes us from the cocoon of cant that swaddles most public—and all governmental—discussion of Islam’s role in terrorism.

The motive force behind Islamic terrorism is thus conceived by its practitioners as transcending the civil laws of merely secular governments. And, since its inception, the Quran has seemed to certain numbers of its adherents interpretable in this direction. If confined to a few extremists or to marginal lands, this might be of minor consequence, and it has been little more than a nuisance through most of Islamic history. However, massive Muslim immigration into the West has changed things, and rendered this disease much more contagious, if not also more virulent.

Islamists are, by definition, politicized Muslims. They are better at politics than their apolitical coreligionists. European officials made a mistake in the 1980s and ’90s, when they “granted asylum to many immigrants who presented far more of a threat to democratic rule than the regimes they had fled.” The core of Baran’s book is her description of the tactics by which Islamists co-opted, infiltrated, bamboozled, and overwhelmed Muslim institutions of long standing. Islamists generally preferred subverting existing bodies to setting up their own, Baran writes, because it “required less effort and offered greater recruitment possibilities.” Her account of such subversion will remind readers of the history of Communists in the trade-union movement. As Baran shows, boards of directors staffed with doddering old-country patriarchs do not stand a chance against young, modern, Internet- and media-savvy “professional Muslims.”

One might also analogize Islamists to a special interest group in politics. Though constituting a small number, they care about their monomania more than the great mass of the polity, and often use their focus to achieve goals against the interest of the nation. This looks to be something of a vicious circle. Revolutions, though, tend to burn themselves out as the youthful vanguard becomes less youthful and settles heavily into power. But, by a similar process of energetic youth overcoming apathetic age, the nonpolitical version of Islam is losing power also in many Muslim nations. Turkey is cited as a clear case of this. It has proceeded in Pakistan, Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran--and the Arab Spring may yet prove another step in furtherance of this trend.

The threat of Islamism in the near and medium term arises from its manifest terrorist tendencies. Any irrational belief system, including any religion, may become dangerous. "The problem is that religion itself is a conveyor belt to radicalism in this way." The remedy for this, the action Western governments ought to undertake, according to Baran, is this:

  They should “shift their current focus from countering extremist violence to preventing extremism from taking hold in the first place.” The strategy she suggests might indeed be a better one. But there are two reasons it cannot be carried out. One is that Americans are too frightened of being disciplined and punished for breaches of political correctness to discuss honestly any aspect of any policy touching on Islam. Even this term—“political correctness”—does not do justice to the Zhdanovite lockdown that the government enforces when it comes to discussing Islam.

Apparently, even the Ft. Hood massacre of American soldiers by a radicalized Islamist soldier was dismissed by DOD as unrelated to Islamism.

Secondly, Americans don’t know Islam well enough. The distinction between “Islamists who renounce violence” (the people we are empowering now) and the “moderate Muslims who reject Islamism” (the people Baran would like us to empower)—these distinctions might be meaningful for a literary Turk with a good Koranic education. They will be lost on a galoot congressman from the mountain West who has never met a Muslim. And to draw such distinctions in the first place would reveal what a big, intransigent problem traditionalist Islam poses for Western societies. It is a problem that already has a long record of forcing those societies to weigh their commitment to diversity against their commitment to freedom.

We observe all this with a complacency born of the amateurism and incompetence of our domestic Islamic foes. In many Western nations, including America, their numbers are too small still to present a great danger. And the problem may well, by a variety of possible mechanisms, be self-correcting. The two most likely forms of this are the senescence of the revolutionaries or a change in attitude in Western nations should the threat become grave. That said, I see no benefit for the West from continued large scale Muslim immigration. Also, the radicals ought to be deported. We do not need the distraction and the drain on our powers political Islam involves--certes we do not benefit this way. Proliferation of WMDs, China's rise, and socialism-induced internal decay are quite a sufficient platefull of problems.

The Final Solution to Climate Change

The American public has no understanding of science. Our politicians cover the whole spectrum of human character from cowardice to cynicism. From this one may conclude that the human species will fail even to approach an optimal response to the threats posed by climate change. Fortunately, I have long believed that the Bio Wars will solve this problem. The witless wonders who have no capacity to conceptualize the climate science issue will mostly be wiped out, along with most of the rest of us. And, as a bonus, we'll never know for sure how great a threat global warming might have been--an unresolved mystery that no doubt provides great relief to those for whom scientific knowledge represents an affront God.

Secession, Part II

http://www.economist.com/node/17467202

The harping on the 1964 Civil Rights Act seems disingenuous to me. I doubt more than 10-20% left the party for that reason: look at the graph. What really turned white southerners against the Democrats over the long term was the explosion of the welfare state and the advent of federally mandated anti-white racism. And these monstrous outgrowths of political correctness were all the more damaging in the South, since blacks are so heavily represented there. It is only surprising that the Democratic decline has taken so long--but, most people hold to their political beliefs unto death, seized by the mania for consistency, that "hobgoblin of little minds." I think the die-off dividend has been collected at this point, which means the Democrats are roughly at their nadir there--and our immigration policies promise a bright future to the socialists and their darkling dependents.

The Non-Debate

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/10/02/how-the-other-half-thinks/

Krugman is perhaps too kind in this post: the other half by and large does not think. Republicans have been consistently stupid or dishonest on the economic issues we face. Their policy solutions are an invitation to a prolonged slump a la Japan over the last 20 years. On macroeconomics, the democrats have a better approach right now--except insofar as they intend to expand entitlements. But, apparently, the story Krugman has clearly explained on multiple occasions is too counterintuitive for most to grasp.

There may also be some deeper motives at play--deliberately extending the recession to discredit Obama, for example. Or, squeezing government revenues so hard as to force a reconsideration of the whether we can afford an ever-expanding welfare state. Or, waiting for increasing unemployment to lead to an anti-immigration political consensus that will evolve at least far enough to end illegal immigration, preferably all non-strategic immigration. All worthy motives to my mind. But, are they worth the price? Also, can they be this way achieved? The second and third seem unlikely to happen, and they are more important in the long run than Obama's political fortunes. The welfare state strategy may even backfire. FDR invented the welfare state during the Depression.

Political Cycles

A couple of things occurred to me after reading a WSJ editorial about Obama's birth certificate issue, with a diatribe postulating Obama as a mere puppet of greater powers. The former issue is a joke on the two digit IQ redneck crowd, the latter an assertion with no more basis than could be presented for any other modern President. I find the WSJ editorial page a bit mysterious, though it's little worse than the NY Times editorial page. Who reads this stuff? Who buys it? Both papers offer such superficial propagandizing for the most part. Given the typical level of discourse in the "best" newspapers in this country, it sometimes surprises me that we have not experienced a still more pronounced collapse in the standards of governance than even Bush or Obama have managed to achieve.

Contra the WSJ's promotions, Obama is not a stupid man. His political and moral principles, however, are not traditional in America. He promotes socialism, in speech and action. Collectivism is not characteristic of America politically, socially, economically, psychologically. It represents an ever-advancing imposition of the elite upon the American people. And Obama has made himself a figurehead in one of the periodic revivals of the elitist tendency to promote socialism in America.

The Fourth Rail: Public Sector Unions

This is something people need to be educated about: public sector employment, especially when it involves unions, can develop into a self-reinforcing cycle of ever larger government workforces and ever lower efficiency. But, these public sector unions are powerful special interests. And, like all special interests, they benefit from a political dynamic whereby their advocacy produces major direct benefits for themselves and inflicts a diffusem mostly concealed burden on the rest of the country. Consequently, they are always more motivated and organized than their opponents--and both their numbers and their wages keep growing. 

Another Country

The first article is a bit long, but exceptionally well told and the basis of the follow-on pieces.

The problem with the death penalty: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/09/07/090907fa_fact_grann?currentPage=1

The morally bankrupt prosecutor attempts (rather ineffectually) to respond to the evidence against him:

http://corsicanadailysun.com/thewillinghamfiles/x46870434/-08-28-09-JACKSON-Guest-Commentary-Willingham-guilt-never-in-doubt

Response to the prosecutor's defense: 

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2009/09/david-grann-response-to-jackson.html

The guilty, negligent Governor (Rick Perry) engages in corrupt practices to cover up his malfeasance:

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2009/10/david-grann-a-sudden-dismissal.html

Now, tell me, what was the underlying cause of this result? I would call it lack of accountability among the prosecutorial class and their allies. We ought to consider a murder trial in which they stand as defendants.

 

 

I support the death penalty. To justify it, though, the trial process must be clean, competent, transparent, and imbued with legal mechanisms that hold legal officers accountable for maintaining this high quality. Having achieved this level of fairness, and so reduced the odds of erroneous conviction, I am willing to accept the inevitable, yet rare, instance in which an innocent is executed. Anyone who supports the death penalty must confess that such a miscarriage of justice is an unavoidable, yet acceptable, risk.

Capitalistic Climate Change Mitigation

http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/228779/new-socialism/charles-krauthammer

There is no necessary connection between reducing GHG emissions and increasing socialism. In principle, a low carbon economy can be just as capitalistic as a high carbon economy. The difficulty presented arises from the fact that the republicans have ceded leadership on environmental issues to the democrats, who are inclined to adopt socialist solutions to every issue they encounter. The cap-and-trade program created by Bush the First to limit sulfur emissions from coal plants was an efficient, free market solution to an environmental problem. A cap and trade system for carbon and methane emissions could be designed in a similar way--but it will not be unless republicans get involved and exert some influence. At this point, climate change mitigation appears to be ultimately unavoidable in this country. Instead of abstaining from the process and playing at populist denialism, republicans would be well-advised to make efforts to de-socialize the legislation so far as possible.

More on the Climate Change Email Issue

Some of the emails posted as evidence of horrendous immorality are merely casual banter between close colleagues. Others betray the possibility of unethical activities and intentions. Much of what seems offensive to readers results from the fact that people do not understand the way science works. It is a competitive enterprise. It always has been. In the heat of competition some competitors exercise poor judgement to gain an advantage over their adversaries. The presumed ethical lapses here displayed represent an excessive zeal whose momentum apparently carried several individuals outside the boundaries of the game.

 

What concerns me more is the scientists and (more often) politicians who stand before the public and tell outright lies. The habitual liers seem more frequently to fall in the "denialist" camp, though both sides are prey to this temptation. Both sides are tempted to dogmatize on an issue which is too complicated by far to be susceptible to the simplifications and stupidities inherent in any dogmatic stance. Both dogmas being necessarily false, their prophets speak falsehoods. To assume either the certainty that global warming is occurring or the certainty that it is not--is to be an absolute fool and an ass. But, this is what dogmatic tendencies lead to.

 

But how does dogma arise? I believe it proceeds along two parallel paths. First, scientists must construct interpretive analyses based on the data they collect. Otherwise the data would be random and meaningless. This the beginning of scientific dogmas or theories, and the scientists in the field then attempt to use new data to continuously improve the theory. If some scientists do not think the first established theory is the best fit for the raw data, they may formulate another theory in opposition to it. From this point, the scientific process becomes explicity competitive between the adherents of the two theories. Competition can lead to such excesses as the emails seem to reveal. But, on the whole, competition is as salutary to the progress of science as it is to economic progress: it is a motivator that uses selfish priorities of vanity and ambition to promote social benefits.

 

The second parallel path of dogma follows upon the advent of competition between scientific theories and essentially amounts to a vulgarization of those theories for popular consumption and to political ends. The adulteration and distortion of the science in the course of this secondary process often becomes so extreme, as in this case, as to lead to results completely at variance with the underlying science. Result: the public is either misled or confused, and the competition between the two dogmas becomes indistinguishable from a propaganda campaign.

Only intelligent people, who invest some time in learning about this issue and who are willing to take the threat seriously, are even capable of arriving at a minimal understanding of the its nature and implications. Popularization of such an issue is impossible in any meaningful sense. Most people are not fit for it because they are too stupid, too lazy, and too malignant.  

Illiberal Indoctrination

A blog post from halfsigma below. Between the "indoctrination advantage" possessed by leftists and the continued influx of Mexicans, it's hard to see how the Republican party, as currently constituted, can sustain its competitive position. Recovering power in at least some of the institutions mentioned ought to be one of the highest priorities for conservatives. Also, the recession ought to be used to blacken the perception of illegal immigration and thereby reduce Mexican immigration to the reasonable levels permitted by law. And there is no reason why conservatives cannot capture a significant number of religious Hispanic voters, if they formulate a real strategy to do so.

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Iran Policy

http://townhall.com/columnists/charleskrauthammer/2009/06/19/hope_and_change_-_but_not_for_iran/page/full/

 

Apparently Krauthammer has forgotten what happened to Iraqi Shia and Kurds when Bush I encouraged them to rebel against Saddam. They rebelled, Saddam crushed them, Bush I sat stupidly watching. The same would happen here, and our overt support would provide Khamenei with the excuse that he wasn't merely crushing Iranian rebels--he would claim that he was crushing American puppets. This latter excuse would fly high among Iranians, and dissent from the regime would be discredited for a generation. Krauthammer is simply dead wrong on this question. He is ignorant of Iran and making cheap, shallow criticisms of a careful and considered policy posture.

 

Here is a discussion of the issue on Charlie Rose which includes Bush's Iran expert making essentially the argument I make above:

http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/10385

Corruption by Ethanol

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124389966385274413.html

This policy is the predictable result of violating a fundamental principle: government should not select the means of achieving pollution reduction; it should confine itself to determining the scope of the reduction and the maximum cost to the economy. Bush the First followed this principle in establishing the highly successful and efficient sulfur emissions-trading regime in the early nineties. They did not mandate which technologies coal plants had to implement. They simply set a price on the emissions and let the private sector figure out the best way to reduce emissions. But, these morons today are trying to micromanage environmental policy and they are failing. This is a bipartisan failure, by the way. And it is induced as much by political corruption as it is by outright stupidity. Yet, given the ever present temptations of large scale corruption and the Democratic tradition of grotesque misapprehension of free market economics, I suspect we will see more of this costly stupidity in the grand cap-and-trade program currently in the offing.

The Left and Reality: An Untenable Connection

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fwIQmWSh6ds

Apparently Obama believes that because he possesses rhetorical skills superior to Bush's he can juke the public and convince them that his plan is a move toward a constitutional detention regime. Renaming the process does not constitutionalize it. Maddow does a fine job breaking down into digestible pieces Obama's inconsistencies.

 

This is a good explication of the dilemma Obama has inherited (watch from 2:55 on):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xsT1vw_EGOg&feature=related

This is the actual qoute from Justice Brandeis that the professor attempted to paraphrase:

 

"Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government's purposes are beneficent. Men born to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evil-minded rulers. The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding."

 

I think this warning applies to Bush and to Obama. Of course, the latter, as a former "professor" of constitutional law, ought really to know better. And maybe he would, if he had actually been a professor instead of the beneficiary of a sinecure with the title of "professor." What Obama does not mention is the reality of a trade-off here. Do you want to play nice and adhere to the constitution or do you want to risk some blowback from deporting and potentially releasing some of these guys? Like Bush, Obama wants to have it both ways. But the contours of the constitution will not succumb to inventive euphemisms.

Macro-Speculations

A perspective on European socialism and the psychology that underlies it (warning, contains not-nice truths and a high order of political incorrectness the offensiveness of which is compounded by a flagrant display of intelligence):

 

http://www.halfsigma.com/2009/05/if-it-didnt-suck-to-be-poor-why-europe-is-different.html

I tend to agree that socialism is more odoriferous in a society with differenct races, most particularly when those races manifest differences that make a difference (eg, IQ and propensity to violence). Perhaps, on this line of reasoning, the partial Islamization of Europe will provoke it to a renewed appreciation of competition and virility--a renaissance of the higher orders, a reclamation of powers once renounced.

We, however, we Americans, who have pursued the tenebrous temptation so far, find ourselves on the brink of some unknown threshold by pressure of mere numbers, by gross failure to understand the fundaments of demographic fate--in the newest generation, America is already a white minority nation. But, the meaning of this is unknown, especially since the non-whites races possess such different characteristics that their numbers vis-a-vis each other may come to matter even more than the degree of white decline. The tremendous socialist momentum from the New Deal to the Great Society and its Nixonian aftershocks, a revolutionary 40 years, has largely dissipated over the last 40 years. And this latter period happened to coincide with the dramatic demographic eclipse of white Americans. An accident of history, no doubt.

Too Much Dross

Most conservative writers these days pretty much just throw the kitchen sink at "Obama's policies"--many of which are simply a continuation of Bush's. But, you cannot wish away the financial crisis. You cannot reject decisive action in the face of it because that action happens to conflict with some narrow ideological prejudices. Even the Bush administration was constrained to engineer a massive government intervention in the financial system and to take over Fannie and Freddie. Why does the kitchen sink approach trouble me? The problem is that, by casting up such an indiscriminate cloud of details and false claims, it obscures the serious threats Obama's agenda poses; also, it confuses the general audience and discredits the sink-throwing sources. The Republicans have already cried wolf so many times in the last few months that when, his hour come round at last, the beast finally arrives (as surely he will)--no one will be paying attention. Instead of playing these childish ideological games, what the Republicans ought to do is to adopt a pragmatic approach to oppose forcefully two or three key policy threats--and, also, ideally, to concoct some form of constructive agenda of their own, which, at present, they seem, signally, to lack.

Perhaps, on the other hand, the propaganda strategy here is to so associate Obama with failure, incompetence, corruption, etc. so consistently, so insistently as to render his aura, the atmosphere he inhabits in the imagination, permanently infected and impervious to any rational defense. This may even work on a large portion of the idiocracy.

Romney on Detroit

His prescription runs counter to mine, and he fails to answer my main objection to bankruptcy: it will frighten off too many customers for the automakers to survive. Otherwise, he makes an intelligent argument. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/19/opinion/19romney.html?_r=1&hp