The term "racism" should be called out for what it is and retired.
My column, "Racism: Requiem for a Word," generated much discussion. As it was this, and not the endorsement of my position, that was my primary aim, I have much satisfaction knowing that it has been achieved. As for those who made this discussion possible, those, that is, who made a conscious and sustained effort to treat this issue with the intellectual seriousness of which it is so richly deserving, who have proven themselves both willing to participate in a thoughtful and civil exchange and capable of doing so, I have nothing but appreciation. The topic of "racism" is undoubtedly the most emotionally charged and incendiary issue of our time, and the expression of any views regarding it that are antithetical to the conventional politically correct wisdom are invariably met with the swiftest and harshest of condemnations, a fact to which legions of individuals can readily attest. Those who dared to oppose the party line, who refrained from launching sorely misplaced, indeed, outright mindless (but all too predictable) attacks, reveal themselves as bearers of integrity and courage.
Still, there seems to be some confusion over what my position is. This could, in part, at any rate, be due to a lack of precision on my part. Let me rectify my oversights.
I attempted to do what, as far as I know, has yet to be done: I subjected the term "racism" to precisely the same sort of merciless interrogation to which it has been employed to subject others. My chief objective was to show that while the term "racism" is commonly used to designate a phenomenon that is thought to be both pervasive and deeply immoral, of all of the possible accounts of "racism," not only is there not one that accommodates this popular, unreflective notion, but all of them positively belie it. Since it does not denote a virtually omnipresent and especially awful kind of thing, and since it is used primarily as a rhetorical weapon to intimidate (mostly) whites into acquiescing in the demands of the juggernaut of our politically correct culture, the term "racism" should be called out for what it is and retired.
First, I argued that, from what I could determine, there are four fundamentally distinct, mutually irreducible (and possibly incommensurable) understandings or models of "racism" that exhaust anything that the term could mean: every charge of "racism" is some variation of one or the other of these four models. This alone suffices to prove that, contrary to what the singularity of the term suggests, it is anything but a unified concept. This in turn is of considerable significance because if there is a plurality of meanings of "racism," this implies that there is no reason to suppose a priori that the term has to make reference to something that is pervasive and deeply immoral. That is, the mere establishment of a multiplicity of conceptions of "racism" suffices to cast in doubt the popular conception of "racism" that is the focus of my critique.
But I go further. Next, I look at the four models of "racism." They are: (1) Racism as "Racial Hatred" (RH); (2) Racism as "Racial Discrimination" (RD); (3) Racism as "Doctrine of Innate Inferiority" (II); and (4) Racism as "Institutional Racism" (IR).
The RH ("Racial Hatred") model, though the most superficially plausible, actually divests "racism" of any claims to moral distinctiveness. My criticism, in short, boils down to a dilemma. If hatred is always wrong — a belief that relatively few people outside the Christian tradition hold and, thus, a proposition for which a convincing argument is needed — then there cannot be anything particularly awful about hating on the basis of race. "Racism," that is, is no more wrong than hatred of mathematicians, hatred of people under five feet tall, hatred of Republicans, hatred of Nazis, and so forth. That hatred is rooted in race is rendered irrelevant.
If, on the other hand, hatred isn't always wrong but is wrong when racially oriented because race is an irrelevant characteristic that, as such, invites neither praise nor blame, reward nor punishment, then "racism" is neither more nor less immoral than hatred of people who are left-handed, short, tall, heavy, thin, blue-eyed, pimple-faced, and so on. There is nothing distinctively awful about racial hatred, for the fact that the hatred is rooted in race is not as much to the point as is the fact that the hatred is rooted in an irrelevant characteristic.
Either way, the RH model not only fails to satisfy but actually undermines the popular but vague idea of "racism" as something profoundly horrible.
The RD ("Racial Discrimination") understanding of "racism," I went on to show, fares no better. In fact, it fares worse. There are two reasons for this.
First, "racism" is supposed to be something deeply immoral, that is, unconditionally impermissible, but racial discrimination is something that everyone acknowledges is at least occasionally unobjectionable. Whether it is the Chinese restaurant owner who hires only servers of Chinese extraction, Disney World insisting that its employees at the Lands section of Epcot Center hail from the countries of which its exhibitions are replicas, or people marrying within their race, only the most fanatical and silly of ideologues would object to these instances of racial discrimination. Furthermore, those who are most outspoken against "racism" give the lie to the notion that "racism" is tantamount to racial discrimination when they advocate "affirmative action," race-based preferential treatment policies that systematically discriminate against whites in favor of blacks and other racial minorities.
Second, the RD model of "racism" also threatens to relegate "racism" to the moral periphery. If racial discrimination isn't always immoral, but racial discrimination is "racism," then "racism" isn't always immoral. If, however, racial discrimination is immoral only when race is irrelevant, then "racism" (racial discrimination) is no worse than any other sort of discrimination conducted on the basis of an irrelevant consideration. That the discrimination is racially-oriented is itself irrelevant.
The II ("Doctrine of Innate Inferiority") model need involve neither hatred nor discrimination against the members of the group deemed inferior, a fact that contributor Bob Stapler amply substantiates through the illustration of his relative, an abolitionist whose support for preferential treatment for blacks was informed by her belief in the innate inferiority of blacks. Indeed, it is far from obvious that belief in inferiority is incompatible with at least a certain type of love.
What this means is that while the belief in the innate inferiority of blacks, or of any group, for that matter, may be incorrect (I certainly think that it is not only incorrect, but incoherent), it isn't necessarily immoral. There are all sorts of ideas, probably most, that are incorrect or unsound, but this in itself is no evidence for the immorality of the persons who endorse them. As the (black) writer Thomas Sowell contends, it is not ideas that are immoral, but the uses that they are made to serve. The belief in human equality, for instance, has been enlisted in the service of the abolition of slavery and oppression, but it has also been used to support the most poisonous versions of communism and totalitarianism.
This criticism, also, can be reduced to a dilemma. If the belief in the innate inferiority of (just?) racial groups is immoral because it is false, then we have to draw the wildly implausible conclusion that every other false belief is also immoral. So it isn't the racial component of the belief that is of any moral importance, but its falsity. If, on the other hand, belief in innate racial inferiority is immoral just because race is an irrelevant principle on the basis of which to formulate judgments regarding inferiority and superiority, then the fact that the judgment is racial is of marginal moral significance. "Racism" is no worst than "left-handism," or "long nosism," or "long hairism," etc.
Once more, "racism" is robbed of its distinctive moral worth. Also, insofar as relatively few people any longer embrace the idea that races can be ranked in terms of varying degrees of innate inferiority and superiority, if this account of "racism" is accepted, then "racism" can't have the ubiquity that it is said to have either. In fact, it is rare and becoming rarer. Barack Obama's election to the presidency in a country the majority of the population of which remains white is alone sufficient to establish this.
It is to laws requiring formal equality of opportunity — so-called "color blind" laws — that leftists who wax indignant over the omnipresent and all destructive force of "institutional racism" typically point as the principal purveyors of "racism." Behind a veil of race-neutrality, such laws conceal the "dominant" culture's biases and prejudices, developed over the span of centuries, regarding both themselves and racial minorities generally, blacks specifically. Race-neutrality is fiction, and "color blind" laws are "Eurocentric" devices for advancing the interests of the white majority.
From this vantage point, we need to recognize, individual whites need not and, in fact, do not have any racial animus whatsoever toward blacks. Furthermore, either severally or collectively through their government, whites labor tirelessly to insure that blacks are not only not discriminated against, but given every possible opportunity to succeed at their endeavors. Scholarships, contracts, social programs of all sorts, and "affirmative action" policies have proliferated endlessly over the last several decades so as to insure that blacks (and other minorities) would no longer be at a disadvantage vis-à-vis whites. Finally, on the IR ("Institutional Racism") model, whites consciously abhor the very suggestion that blacks could be innately inferior to themselves.
There are two major problems with this understanding of "racism."
First, the IR conception of "racism" is intrinsically incapable of supporting the popular image of "racism" as grossly immoral, for moral appraisals are applicable only to intelligent agents and their relations with other intelligent agents. F.A. Hayek spoke to this point in his The Mirage of Social Justice, and Michael Oakeshott did as well in On Human Conduct. An impersonal mechanism or procedure, like the requirement that race be treated as an irrelevant characteristic in hiring policies, though a human invention, can no more be said to possess a moral defect like "racism" than can other human inventions like cars and houses. Put simply, it is proper to judge persons good or bad, virtuous or vicious. In contrast, the institutions (or what are alternatively called "structures," "procedures," "practices," or "processes") by which they live their lives may be desirable or undesirable, efficient or inefficient — not courageous, wise, temperate, loving, etc.
Second, even assuming that there is some sense in speaking of "institutional racism," the whole case for it depends on nothing other than statistical disparities that exist between blacks and whites with respect to a host of social indicia. Blacks have substantially higher rates of crime, illegitimacy, HIV-AIDS, unemployment, and poverty than whites. That this remains the case in spite of the tsunami of measures designed to promote the flourishing of blacks, the explosion of the black middle and upper classes, and a transformation of the majority's overall attitude regarding blacks, is considered proof that "institutional racism" is a reality.
This is neither the place nor time to explore in detail all of the problems with this line of reasoning. But just a couple of considerations suffice to bring its speciousness to the surface.
(1). The statistical disparities between blacks and whites upon which proponents of the IR model seize to substantiate their claims are arbitrarily selected. For instance, blacks are overwhelmingly represented among the perpetrators of interracial violence, and whites are overwhelmingly represented among the victims of interracial violence, yet of these statistical realities those who are indefatigably indignant over "institutional racism" say not a word. Nor are they any more concerned over the fact that both absolutely and relative to their numbers in the general population, blacks far outnumber whites in several areas of professional sports and the entertainment industry — multi-billion dollar enterprises. This logical inconsistency should at a minimum raise questions as to what motivates the proponents of the IR model.
(2). Statistics aren't self-interpreting. Before a statistic can be transformed from an unintelligible curiosity into a "fact," it must be contextualized. Those numbers exploited by apologists for IR obscure a plurality of critically important intra-racial distinctions that alter almost totally the picture of an America mired in "institutional racism" that they strive so mightily to depict. Writers black, white, and other have expended much energy exposing the monolithic racial categories relied upon by the IR's proponents for the insidious pieces of fiction that they are. These thoughtful writers inform us, for example, that when variables like marriage, education, occupation, age, and geography are controlled for, some of the gaps between "blacks" and "whites" that had been cited as proof of "institutional racism" disappear entirely. Sometimes, blacks wind up besting their white counterparts of the same subgroup (see the work of (black) writers Thomas Sowell and Walter E. Williams).
(3). Even assuming that every disparity between blacks and whites that place the former at a disadvantage relative to the latter accurately reflects reality, we are no more justified in concluding from this that "racism" is the explanation than we are justified in concluding that blacks are born inferior to whites, are possessed by the Devil, or any other hair-brained proposition. To reason that since "institutional racism" would produce interracial disparities and there are interracial disparities, there must, then, be "institutional racism" that is the cause of these disparities, is to reason in a circle. It is to beg the question.
My apologies for reiterating much of what I previously said. Yet I did so just to insure that there would be no confusion regarding my position, as well as to elaborate on points that I didn't previously make explicit. Again, a special thanks to the more thoughtful contributors to the discussion on "Requiem" for provoking me to strive for greater clarity.
There is one final comment that I need to underscore. That every account of "racism" is beset with serious difficulties, that none can accommodate the unreflective, popular notion of "racism" as a pervasive, deeply immoral phenomenon, and that I urge for the abandonment of the term "racism," most definitely should not be taken to mean that I deny that racially-oriented injustice is a profoundly disconcerting reality. Whether it is Mugabe in Zimbabwe confiscating the lands of white farmers, the Long Island Railroad gunman Colin Ferguson who admits to having been motivated by his hatred of whites and Asians to shoot and kill seven train passengers, the abduction, gang rape, and murder of Tennessee's Channon Christian and her boyfriend Christopher Newsom by five blacks, the Wichita Massacre in which two brothers sexually assaulted, robbed, beat, and eventually murdered, execution-style, five whites (one of whom, a woman, survived), racially-oriented injustice is a problem that demands addressing.
Yet just as 19th century-style classical liberals eventually ceased to refer to themselves as "liberal" because "liberalism" had been hijacked by socialists and/or welfare-statists, and for the same reason that contemporary "liberals" refuse to be regarded as such but instead insist on calling themselves "progressives" or something of the sort because "liberalism" has assumed in our time negative connotations, so we should drop the term "racism": the term has been subject to abuses that render it a greater problem than it is worth.
If “racially-oriented injustice is a profoundly disconcerting reality,” does that mean that “racism” should be replaced with those three words when reality dictates it be referenced as something?
Don’t get me wrong. I agree that “racism” is running out of gas fast (unlike “gay,” which seems to be picking up steam as a word to describe something “ridiculous” or “stupid.”)
But words have a life of their own and run their course, as you point out in closing. I don’t think there is much sense in trying to pull the plug on them until they are ready to go.
They die like any fashion, and their dying often is useful. Use of the word past its time will reveal much about those clinging to it, just as wearing bell-bottomed pants and platform shoes in 1990 said a lot about the wearer.
Words are laughed out of existence, not chased away by serious or thoughtful commentary. Here’s for a natural and funny death of “racism.”
A year ago it was not, but today “racism” is officially laughable if applied to “white” America – the one that just elected a black man to the White House.
If irony is the root of humor, then Obama’s election is a funny thing on multiple levels.
Perhaps, racism as used (and misused) in the common parlance is best understood as racial prejudice. I would contend that racial prejudice is probably pervasive and certainly immoral. With thanks to the online version of the American Heritage dictionary, 'racism' (or racial prejudice) could be expanded as "an adverse judgment or opinion formed beforehand or without knowledge or examination of the facts" due to "the belief that race accounts for differences in human character or ability".
To my way of thinking, such a clarified definition is both specific enough to be accurate and broad enough to account for such disparate racist phenomena as slavery, lynching, segregation and even subtle hiring disparities.
To me the problem isn't that we can't accurately define racism. The problem is that we can't always accurately correlate it with a specific action (even if and when we strongly suspect it).
That disparity between perceptions and reality is a boon to race hucksters who wish to see racism everywhere (and proceed to invent novel 'proofs' of its existence). We should not tolerate the mere charge of 'racist' to be a conviction (anymore than we should permit the mere charge of 'rapist' to be a conviction). We should not yield to the race hucksters.
But simultaneously, we should not give them extra ammunition by an ultimately indefensible claim that racism is a meaningless term.
It is NOT meaningless.
Rather it is far too often allowed to be used without any need to reference its true meaning.
We should not stand for its misuse.
We should increasingly marginalize anyone making an unsubstantiated claim of racism.
""Racism," that is, is no more wrong than hatred of mathematicians, hatred of people under five feet tall, hatred of Republicans, hatred of Nazis, and so forth. That hatred is rooted in race is rendered irrelevant."
Well, no. Your examples are flawed. People under five feet tall, much like people of a certain race, have no choice in being so. Height, like race, is a physical trait; uncontrollable by its possessor. Mathematicians, Nazis, and Republicans, however, all have chosen to adopt their respective occupation or ideologies. These choices define them and therefore, are open for scrutiny. Frankly, as a young man of seventeen, it scares me to think that a man who authored such an ignorant commentary on a delicate social issue is considered "an emerging conservative voice in the discussion of modern-day political ideology."
nogods
The author puts forth that “racial hatred” is the most superficially plausible. You simply pointed out the plausible argument to which he refers, then declared his commentary ignorant and scary.
In doing so, you placed yourself among those he describes in the paragraph following the one you referenced. There he makes the point that “racism” is not the most hideous form of hatred, but equal to any hatred of human beings for characteristics that are irrelevant – such as the color of their skin.
It is interesting to ponder the implications of this argument. If it is legitimate for a black man to shout out that he loves Barrak Obama because Obama is a fellow black man, then it must be legitimate for someone to shout out that he hates Obama because he is a black man.
It also is worth exploring how few challenges I would receive if I were to state that I hate Nazis, compared to if I made the statement, “I hate black people.”
Hundreds of thousands of Nazis were just regular guys soldiering for their country. They were not war criminals, not privy to these crimes (purposely, because it was feared they would revolt against Hitler) and were horrified when they learned of them after the war
As a statement: “All Nazis are bad. “All Blacks are bad?”
As a question: “All Nazis are bad?” “All blacks are bad?”
If I hate long hair on men, is it OK to hate men (male human beings) who have it growing on their head, also?
M Panetta, – part I
Unfortunately, I was not able to respond before the close of posting on the earlier article by Kerwick, so I am posting my responses to you here (see http://www.intellectualconservative.com/2009/02/12/requiem-for-the-word-racism/ ). Don’t think because I have been laggard that means you’ve carried the day. You ended your last comment with the saucy remark “I hope we have cleared one or two things up here”, which I find baffling as you managed to raise more questions than answers (unless we now count mere denial as answers). My intention in giving you a long list of liberal talking-points was not to trigger a blow by blow defense of them, but, rather, to demonstrate today’s PC convictions are as subject to revision as long-ago 1835 convictions. However, as you appear undaunted by such a possibility, I must debunk further if others are not to be drawn to simplistic notions. You left me with an awful lot to debunk; so bear with me (due to its length, I am posting this as a series of comments).
Liberals of today are no less ‘on the ropes’ defending the indefensible than slaveholders were defending their cherished beliefs not so very long ago. They too had convoluted arguments in defense of the indefensible that sounded as pleasant to the injudicious ear. Every single one of those liberal assumptions I gave you was an example of a baseless argument, and some of them (e.g., abortion, communism) are as morally repugnant as slavery. Yet, you stepped bravely into them. At bottom, socialism is state-sponsored enslavement; and justifiably despised for that reason. Similarly, abortion is state-sponsored euthanasia of the innocent and defenseless. Times change, and (assuming you live long enough) you may be surprised to find that by sticking to these stances, the world regards you the relic.
In post #10 of the original article, you said "… conservatives are fond of introducing problems without solutions." That is ridiculous if for no other reason everyone proposes solutions. It’s human nature to do so, and conservatives are no different from liberals in that respect. However, it is in the nature of conservative solutions that they be … well, you know … ‘conservative’ (i.e., not radical). Liberals, on the other hand, prefer draconian solutions; including a great many with no actual problems attached. Or, to be more precise, liberals lean to radical solutions that go way beyond simple repair. The real difference, then, is liberals have a ‘solution obsession’, and aren’t happy unless fixing that which isn’t actually broken (and sailing right past real problems). This exacerbates and/or creates more problems, which usually fall to conservatives to clean up. There is an axiom we conservatives are fond of liberals would do well to consider: “If it isn’t broke, don’t fix it.” A droll wit once remarked, “G-d always answers your prayers. It is just the answer is sometimes ‘No’”, which, of course, is no answer at all to those unwilling to take no for an answer. The upshot here is liberals view conservative solutions as “non-solutions” simply because ours are insufficiently radical or novel. Indeed, sometimes the right answer is to ‘do nothing’, which, to a liberal, is anathema. In part, you don’t see ours as solutions precisely because they are not your answers; and so, like petulant children, you fume and berate us as unhelpfully obstructing you. In truth, though, it matters not how many or how perfect our solutions as you will insist none were offered at all simply because you can’t stand the idea we have ideas worthy of consideration. Take the same solution and slap a liberal label on it and you will praise it to the skies.
Politicians live or die on being ‘seen’ addressing problems, and liberal-politicians are the extreme case. When there are no real problems, the liberal-politician feels compelled to concoct some if only to be seen addressing them; and, the more dramatic the problem the better. Regardless the problem is real or manufactured, the liberal-politician must push matters into crisis-mode to be certain he will be seen reacting. Race-conflict (in manageable proportions) is tailor-made for this purpose. Little wonder, then, they don’t want us dousing the fires.
Kerwick’s article was a case in point of a conservative trying to deal with the fallout from one such solution. It is easy to bewail conservatives don’t produce solutions to problems like race that don’t measure up to liberal standards when the solutions we offer (and we do suggest them) aren’t ambitious enough to satisfy liberal demands for something more radical. Yet, a better case can be made conservatives don’t pursue solutions precisely because we’re not the ones creating them, problems that make still more solutions a political necessity. A society wracked by radical social change is inherently chaotic, and the more chaotic, the more some will be harmed by them. Your preference for affirmative-action is, in fact, no solution at all. It has not achieved the improvements with which you credit it (actually slowed progress down by creating distortions, distractions, and disincentives to integration). Rather, it has become a permanent vote guarantor.
Civil Rights broke the log-jam, and that was necessary. But, liberals just couldn’t leave well enough alone or wait for that change to play out. Possibly, more might have been necessary, but we can never know that now because affirmative-action took us well past the middle ground where all may have been well. The radical types insisted on payback, protections and status enhancements; and so determined on legislating state-mandated discrimination out of existence by casting federally-mandated discrimination into stone. Two generations past Civil-Rights, we ought to be much closer to a color-blind society. America took less than a generation adjusting to independence, still less to industrialize, one generation adjusting to government pilfering our paychecks, and half a generation forgetting Irish, Poles, and Italians can’t possibly get along. Surely, once the acceptance threshold is crossed (and that was long ago), the crutches can be safely discarded for the hindrance they become. That is why Kerwick asks: might not now be the time to try something else; and, while we’re at it, let’s turn down the intentionally hostile, boiling rhetoric.
Where you said “I have been privy to so many conversations of an inappropriate nature … I know the basic pieces of racial prejudice are still alive and strong in many.” – Really? Gee, so have I! So, what? So have most people old enough to remember Selma. We also have had plenty of contact with people across a wide spectrum, and we don’t find nearly the lingering racism you do. We do encounter some, but it is a far cry from the 1950s or, even, the 1980s. Diversity advocates will, of course, take credit for that, but mostly it was a matter of attrition with most of the change achieved before ‘diversity’ entered the lexicon. 20-years ago, most of us still encountered racist sentiments with some regularity, but most of that was a relic of a dying generation which the rest of us ignored while getting on with the nuts and bolts of closing the gaps.
The problem I have with your remark is it assumes racism an exclusively or primarily “white” behavior (as well as pervasive), while ignoring things like quotas, diversity-indoctrination and speech-codes cause as much class-warfare as they pretend to avert. These are substitute discriminations that reverse without actually addressing the only practical part of the problem it ever made sense to address: unequal legal treatment. Yes, racism exists and is as old as there has been contact between races. Even Polynesians and Eskimos, thousands of miles from civilization are guilty of it. Long after the white-black problem is resolved by the gradual mixing of the two, racism will survive with light-browns discriminating against dark-browns (or visa versa). It is silly thinking we can eradicate bias completely, and any policy we create for reducing friction ought to balance the costs (both fiscal and social) of pursuing a policy that is essentially punitive.
You complain “Affirmative Action just isn't all that important to me.” Yet, you spend considerable ink and invective blasting others for dismissing it. If not all that important to you, why make such a fuss of others opining its inappropriateness. You seem to be arguing against your own rationale here in attacking Kerwick, who did nothing worse than make the same point about language you now make about policy (while, incidentally, defending your own bias). Clearly, then, what got your goat was not that Kerwick bucked convention; what got your goat was a conservative bucked convention. Apparently, even the mere mention of ‘race’ by a conservative is enough to set you off. You assumed ‘If conservatives are discussing racism, it must be they have a white-supremacist agenda’. Otherwise, you’d have taken a completely different approach, perhaps defending affirmative-action on its merits (which you so far have not attempted) inviting us into further discussion without portraying article, author, and chorus as “garbage”, “pathetic”, “typical … conservative rantings”, and “bigotry”. Be that as it may, you persist in trashing us while denying that you trash us (and, yes, you did manage to slam us right along with Kerwick). What else is that “Master Bob” guff of yours if not insulting others who have done you no insult? I invited you to drop the hostile-act the better have a civil exchange, yet the best you can manage is additional name-calling and objecting strongly to having your rudeness put on display. Well, I am sorry, but your snide remarks ‘are’ juvenile, and there is no reason we should put up with that. Your responses have gotten a little better, but you still can’t resist making the odd digs demonstrating your insincerity. Work on it.
Next you say, “Minorities as a whole, and blacks in particular, have progressed.” – No argument from me if by “progressed”, you mean: blacks are no longer shut out of jobs and housing once barred them, then, yes, they have and that is, indeed, a measure of progress. However, if by progress you mean: some part of them (plus whites hoping to score points) now indulge in tit-for-tat reverse-bigotry, street intimidation, and blatant remarks every bit as noxious as those previously practiced by whites; then, no, I don’t call that progress. Our ideas of what constitutes progress are often warped by an obsession with justice (aka, punishment) that can never be realized. This progress of yours, then, is flawed by the failure to achieve a ‘color-blind’ society; a goal affirmative-action’s originators assured us would be the result. Rather than achieve balance, right wrongs, or eliminate racism, AA has, instead, kept racism alive in mutant form to be exploited for political and financial gain. At the same time, it traps millions of black Americans into a thralldom of political expedience (can’t have demands if you no longer have victims) by indulging in dysfunctional, belligerent, fictional behaviors that sustain the illusion of oppression. This is a self-perpetuating agenda; one that can never achieve the laudable purpose intended and can never to be abandoned for fear of a black backlash. One definition of insanity is to keep repeating the same mistakes in the hope it will work if you just keep at it. If things like affirmative-action and reparations are a bust, then it is crazy to keep pushing them and long past time we tried something else. The simple and obvious route to a color-blind society (or the nearest thing to it) from this point forward is to simply drop all such distinctions and quotas.
There are almost no whites who’d today be the least interested in resurrecting segregation (other than the rare neo-Nazis with an axe to grind). By now, many of us have mixed families, mixed work environments, mixed neighborhoods, have ‘cross-dated’, and accept blood-transfusions without the slightest concern as to origin. If some of us are old enough to have been part of the problem, some of us are also old enough to have been part of the change, and still passionate in our conviction. Many of those you now vilify as racists are precisely those who once stood up to the racists (the real kind, not the every-conservative-is-a-closet-racist nonsense you preach). It was Republican more than Democrat politicians who pushed Civil Rights legislation through Congress, and it was socialists and the Democrat rank-&-file who mostly fought against it. It was a combination of liberals AND conservatives who stood up for race rights, so that prigs like you can make unkind remarks today. We have not turned cold where we once blew hot, but we did learn from hard experience that blind passion overshoots the mark. So if we are conservative, a great part of what we now conserve is the very gains you think we obstruct. We, more than you, recognize in reverse-discrimination the potential for destroying that very achievement.
Too much has changed to go back, but that does not automatically make forward an improvement; and that is the real measure is time to drop the artificialities. It is pushing too far, too long that risks a reaction. So, okay, it’s not perfect and never will be, but it is enough for now and time to consolidate gains. I realize this is strongly opposed by those who still feel victimized or too little accomplished, but I am convinced there can be no further progress until we retire affirmative-action, drop the reparations nonsense, and cease condoning racism in blacks we no longer condone in whites.
You said “… how can you decide that punishing wrong thinking is more wrong than allowing some racist thinking to persist? Also, I have no intention of punishing wrong thinking with government as my ally.” – Simple, I know neither I nor government nor anyone else has the right or capacity to control thought. ‘Control’ is the antithesis of ‘free’; and nothing in the world could be more destructive of freedom than government policing thoughts. If that means I have to put up with some garbage in the mix, so be it. We have gotten so politically-correct, we can’t say boo to one-another without someone taking offense when none is intended. This creates a sterile, humorless culture without a healthy means of venting. As I am for that which optimizes freedom, I err on the side of (prefer, actually) government staying out of our heads as well as out of our interactions (warts and all). It is laudable you abstain from government punishing wrong thinking. However, it would be far more convincing if you also objected to those many statist who insist on punishing and curtailing ideas? So far, I have not heard that from you. Later in the same paragraph you wrote, “I prefer to attack it [racism] where I see it.” So do I, but, as I have already shown, you have proven indiscriminate in what and whom to attack. If racism is wrong, so too is pouncing on those innocent of it. Therefore, maybe you should forego the attacks until you improve your aim.
Of course I “got the Ptolemy thing”, as was clear from my response. Clearly, you missed the irony in the response and clarification. I apologize for not making the irony clearer. What I challenged you to show is by what measure you construe Kerwick’s usage racist. He wasn’t using it to defend racism as you imply. It was you who expanded his statements to imply racism where none was spoken. You really shouldn’t pounce on a single gaff (assuming it was a gaff); a pattern of such gaffs perhaps, but only when it’s unmistakable. Your case against Kerwick, then, barely rose to the level of ‘suggestive’, and, then, only by projecting your own bias. ‘Racism’ is a very serious charge and should not be made without incontrovertible proof. In making your initial rant against Kerwick, et al, you were guilty of the very bigotry you attribute; and not just suggestively. How, then, do you square that with an insistence Kerwick’s is damnable but yours is okay? Had Kerwick’s remarks been racist as you allege, I would be the first to join you in denouncing them. As they were not, it is you who acted the bigot and attacked unjustly.
M Panetta, – part II (… continued from previous comment)
You said “For my part, I would have liked to get the government to stimulate SOLELY with public works and basic research projects; things the government tends to do anyways. That way when things improve we can cut back government spending commensurately and maybe pay down some debt. But we have to appease the idiots who still think tax cuts stimulate growth. How does cutting taxes make someone hire? I owned a pizza shop. There was only one reason I hired: I had more work. I manage a large retail store now. I am in the middle of hiring. You know why? We have more work than we can get done with the staffing we have now.” – You toss off "things government tends to do anyways" as if legitimate for government to do anything without first consulting us. Government does nothing just "anyways". Government does things either because we clamor for it or as a power grab. Taking as just one example, what rationale can you give for government funding ‘basic research’ in preference to funding it privately? All government funding does is create a dependency; one that is not really in the best interest of what you call 'the common good'. It does little to nothing enhancing the quality or direction of research. It concentrates research into the hands of favorites, thereby stifling whole lines of research uninteresting to government. It can only, therefore, be in the best interests of those who rule, not those ruled. There are legitimate areas of research where it makes sense for government to fund and control output (e.g., defense), but casting this net over-wide has resulted in stifling, politicization, and more than a little corruption (e.g., FDA & pharma). Once again, the problem I have with government taking control of everything under the sun is not that business is inherently good, but that government is unavoidably corruptible and impregnable. Corruption in the private sector is correctible where excessive. Corruption in government is nigh impossible to remedy.
Regarding appeasing "the idiots who still think tax-cuts stimulate growth", this is far too lengthy a topic to answer here, so I will refer you to a study done at Berkeley ( http://www.econ.berkeley.edu/~cromer/RomerDraft307.pdf ) in which the authors found raising taxes 1% retards GDP 2% to 3%. There is some debate whether the impact is this large and when, but not really much as to whether or not cuts stimulate. The better economists agree there is an inverse relation between tax margins and GDP growth. Rothbard, however, is convinced neither tax-cuts nor pump-priming stimulates. I will concede this much (and here I am odds with some conservatives), that the stimulus value of cuts is overstated, unpredictable, and depends on timing. Cuts work best stimulating bull-markets; meaning it is unlikely cuts will stop a slide, but are useful reviving a flagging market. The effectiveness of tax-cuts on the economy may also depend on how large a share of GDP a cut represents. Obviously, a 1% tax-cut when taxes are half of GDP have more of a stimulus effect than a 1% cut from a 10% taxed GDP.
What is certain is you can't stimulate your way out of recessions. That has been tried more than once with disastrous results. What you can sometimes do is increase taxes broadly to pay down debt, because paying off debt frees up capital; but only if you concurrently limit spending. At best, increased spending may stimulate narrow sectors of an economy to the disadvantage of others, but (as usually happens when government decides what needs stimulating) will squander most of it; and only until the money runs out and the monkey still wants feeding. What you have to do is cut-out the fiscal irresponsibility, cut costs, and (more than anything else) get to work making stuff people actually want and need – not research we can't eat or public works projects that more often become gang turf.
The only real difference between a 'depression' and a 'recession' is despondency. The real problem in the Great Depression was not that they were in financial straights. The real problem was they lost confidence, sat on their hands, and waited for 'government' to snap them out of it (New Dealers were reluctant to do that because then there’d be no more need of them). FDR with his confident boasting that government (and only government) would/could make things better while simultaneously restraining business, reinforced that kind of thinking to the point there was no shaking loose from it by those who'd given up.
Regarding your: “If scum bag companies like First Energy and At&t would have avoided using this recession as an excuse to lay off when they really didn't need to, and instead all got together and invested some money to end the recession, it would have been just as good or better.” – There’s that bigotry of yours again. Why is it liberals invariably regard layoffs as unfair and corporations as “scumbags”; and how do decide someone else’s layoffs are “unnecessary”. Had there been no situation in need of avoidance (i.e., a business slump), there would have been no layoffs to complain of because business hates layoffs almost as much as workers. Layoffs are bad for business because companies invest a lot in training, benefits, and employee satisfaction. Proficient workers are as much an asset as the tools and systems they operate. Laying-off these workers means competition can scoop them up at bargain wages; so loosing workers to a business slump is unprofitable and uncompetitive. Laying-off workers is the last thing any business wants to do and is an act of desperation – not greed.
How, then, do you have the chutzpah to decide for business operators (who are trying hard to prevent whole companies from tanking) when is the right time to lay off workers. When did it become the business of business to guarantee jobs? Those laid-off are lucky to have had good jobs as long as they did; and now that business can’t carry them, it is up to them to find or create new work for themselves. Let’s say business does as you demand and companies hang onto those workers knowing there’s no work to offer them. Holding onto them too long puts the company at risk? What do you think happens to the rest who were not laid-off when the company then goes under in deference to your dictum? So, to save a handful in the short run, we wreck all in the long. Whatever happened to ‘greatest good of the greatest number’, or to quote Mr. Spock “The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few … or the one.” I thought all you sanctimonious liberals believed in that rot.
I have lost a couple of good jobs and watched managers agonize over which of us to cut; and just because the stress hits workers more does not mean managers are unfeeling. Even assuming a few are, you won’t find companies anywhere in the world more protective of its workers than right here. Few non-Western countries offer any kind of worker assistance. Most American companies help workers retrain and find new jobs; and give preference to hiring back those laid-off. Some countries don’t just lay them off, they kick them out of the country so they don’t have to feed them or risk rioting. Some still have slaves who are squeezed for every last erg.
You singled out First Energy and AT&T for not preventing this recession, your reasoning being layoffs and a failure to prop up the economy with their own money. I can find no economists of any merit (liberal, conservative, or neutral) supporting such a claim. You seem to be one of those who are under the impression the function of business is providing jobs rather than earning profits. I have to assume, therefore, you singled out these two for that misconception plus some unrelated offenses such as environmental slowness (First Energy) and rate disputes (AT&T). The suggestion private companies should be singled out to bear the cost of bailing out everyone is ludicrous and assumes they and only they made this mess. Or even more ludicrous, that it happens because business types conspire to create economic conditions anathema to themselves out of pure spite.
It has already been established the root causes and triggers of this recession were 1) unsecured lending across multiple financial sectors, 2) government holding the prime-rate too low, too long, 3) government-sponsored mortgage entitlements (the Fannie-Mae Freddie-Mac debacle), 4) risky derivatives, 5) inter-banker loan-extension default anxiety, 6) proposed and existing governmental energy and environmental mandates (when you subsidize something, you create unreasonable, unsustainable demands that show up as tax and rate hikes higher than the originating costs), unchecked governmental spending-borrowing (budgetary irresponsibility), 7) the unchecked, government-sponsored expansion of bank credit and money, 8) proposed and existing governmental healthcare mandates (prescription drug program, SCHIP, universal health insurance initiative, &c), and 9) an obsession with stimulating the economy almost as bad as regulating it. To this we can probably add things like court decisions depriving people of ownership (eminent domain abuse); but causality would be difficult to show without a lot of research and discussion, and is minor thus far. Harping on environmental (unlikely) and phone rates (minor) causes to explain the recession is fixing on least probable causes. Blame for this one lands foremost on government for having mandated irresponsible lending & money practices, on healthcare advocates clueless as to the real costs and disadvantages of what they advocate, cost-indifferent environmentalists, and alternate-reality armchair-economists convinced they can manage chaos. Another possible factor here in triggering the recession (if not causing it) was the politicizing of a shaky market combined with the current administration's insistence on predicating both bailout and stimulus on social agendas signaling this administration is less than serious about recovery that has resulted in an unwillingness by business to the assume risks and accept the blame (i.e., what's in this for us). Topping it off, Obama wants to steal our businesses and investments right out from under us. Taking control of a business is indistinguishable from taking ownership, and is socialist piracy in which at least some managers are complicit). I don’t think I could have devised a better scheme for scuttling the economy.
Instead of creating jobs, suppose enterprise foresaw the churlish response we get from employees today convinced business owes us jobs. Knowing the result, they'd have said "to heck with that" and stayed small; thereby avoiding the hassle of employees demanding job security. Instead they took a chance in creating those jobs; out of which they benefitted, but so also did employees who got a sweet deal (decent income, kids able to go to school, wife happy, nice home and furnishings, health benefits, profit-sharing, long vacations, &c). Business owners create jobs primarily to make money for themselves, but, in so doing, create prosperity for others. If employees are dissatisfied with this, they are free to seek better opportunities. Yet companies are highly paternalistic as they regard worker wellbeing key to sustained productivity. If you think it unfair working for them at a lowly wage, you are free to compete and make as much as you can satisfying customer needs. Lots of people do and earn more than those of us who prefer soft jobs to riches; so don’t complain we are shut out.
As for keeping the planet healthy, it is corporations (more than activist) who do the heavy-lifting in what you call "the health of the planet". It is corporations, taking responsibility for their share of the mess that has accomplished the donkey work of cleanup; not some fast talking activist in a three-piece suit (and making a pretty fair killing stirring up the masses) or finger-pointing, campus-radical pseudo-Marxist. To be fair, they [business] also created much of what you object to, but so to do private citizens never held to the same account. You can't keep blaming corporations when it is they more than individuals who do most of the cleanup. I went to a trade-show only last month, and did not find a single manufacturer or vendor who was not genuinely of the Green persuasion. I even got into a debate with one of them regarding the global-warming nonsense. As for the so-called "health of the planet", you really need to get past thinking of it as a person.
“The only way you EVER get out of [a] recession is to spend.” – Wrong. It has never been accomplished that way. Recessions occur because spending exceeds means. Fortunes have been made in the midst of depressions by those who realize they are the only ones still plugging away. The obvious correction then is to curtail excessive and unnecessary spending, thereby allowing things to correct. I know you believe the FDR myth because liberals just love citing him as the blueprint for how it is done [aka, defy gravity]. In point of fact, he didn’t. Rather than get us out of the Great Depression, it was New Dealer policies that turned a serious recession into the worst economic nightmare in U.S. history. The recession itself was natural enough; it was the New Deal overreaction that prolonged and broadened it. The claim is oft made FDR’s policies got us out of the Depression by war’s end (1945). In fact, the Depression did not end until early 1947 and only after a coalition of Republicans and conservative Democrats reversed the worst New Deal policies and nipped Truman’s ‘Fair Deal’ in the bud. Rather than pulling us through and out of the depression, FDR alternated between punishing business and relaxing hostilities when (inescapably) things got so dismal even he couldn’t put a happy face on it. The result was two more crashes within the larger slump (1936 & 1938). The Great Depression lasted from early 1933 through early 1947, a span of 14 years or about 8-times longer than the average depression and 15 times longer than the average recession.
Ignored by most of his historiographers was an incident at the outset of FDR’s presidency in which FDR refused to assist outgoing President Hoover in averting the 1932-1933 banking collapse. Hoover is generally assigned all the blame for that fiasco because, technically, he was still in charge. As lame-duck president facing an already seated, hostile Democrat Congress, Hoover did not have the authority or backing to close banks and needed FDR’s endorsement. So, he made a discreet appeal to Roosevelt several weeks prior to FDR’s maiden inauguration to get Congress to take the action. Neither Roosevelt, Congress, nor New Dealers voiced any opposition to the plan, and, in fact, did order bank closures not long after they were ensconced in power. But FDR, rather than share credit with an opponent, made a decision to sit on it until after the inauguration. There is even reason to suspect he did so as to make Hoover look worse and himself better. We know this to be true because Hoover sent several go-betweens to sound Roosevelt out, each returning with vague assurances FDR was considering it and would probably comply. The worse the collapse, FDR probably reasoned, the more effective would be his image of hero riding to the rescue of the nation. In fact, he never did rescue the nation and only succeeded in sinking the nation beyond recovery when too late.
Like Obama, FDR was convinced he could spend the country out of depression, and remained stubbornly wedded to that plan. Along the way, however, he managed to create a political machine that punished disloyalty, rewarded cronyism, was funded using public monies, misappropriated recovery programs for use as party favors, and a myth of infallibility no rival could quite dispel. That left it to a post-FDR Congress to sort out the mess. His infallibility was built entirely on an ability to create and maintain illusions that gave comfort without actually fixing problems. So, the real key to his success came from keeping the dependencies going. Like Obama, he too had an inflated sense of his ability to understand and guide what can't be controlled; that and a bunch of loony sycophants propping up his sometimes flagging confidence. FDR wasn't so much an ideologue himself, but he was a political-animal willing to surround himself with ideologues because they provided the quackery needed to fool voters into going along, and kept his quirky political machinery turning out miracle cures (new labels, same snake oil). Republicans tend to lose elections in these situations because desperate people don’t want to hear it is up to them to dig themselves out. Desperate people want miracles and willingly suspend judgment of anyone who promises them salvation.
The way you get out of a depression is to stop feeling depressed, realize you are the thing most holding you back, and get back in the game. In all of his speeches, FDR got one thing right when he said “We have nothing to fear but fear itself!” But, then he spoiled the effect by insisting people needed government [him] to put them back on their feet.
Next you said “Right now the government has to do some of that spending because no one else has the money and is willing to play.” – Man, the gaffs just keep coming! What money? Where do you thing the government gets its money? Do you mean the money government is going to have to pilfer from us to pay for pork? Or do you mean the money government will have to print with no backing whatsoever except as will hyper-inflate prices? Or do you mean the money government is going to stick to future generations? Willing to play?! Yeah, playing with our nest eggs!
M Panetta, – part II (out of order, jump to next comment then back here)
On Liberal Myths
a. Regarding the AGW Consensus: You responded “There is consensus. Hate to break it to you.”
Really? Have you bothered to check into the source of said consensus, or are you taking the word of liberal know-it-alls (none of whom ever fibbed to score political points)? I hate to bust your bubble, but the ‘consensus’ you’re so convinced of is a well-documented fraud concocted by activists hoping to silence debate (and nearly pulled it off, too). Consensual-science is bad science because it has no bearing on validity. I reported on this in some depth at http://www.intellectualconservative.com/2008/02/27/a-show-of-hands-one-mans-take-on-climate-change-consensus/ . As for your belief in the pseudo-science itself, please allow me to recommend a little further reading that should dissuade any intelligent reader AGW is not the slam-dunk presented:
http://www.amazon.com/Unstoppable-Global-Warming-Updated-Expanded/dp/0742551245/ref=sr_1_5?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1236719564&sr=1-5
http://www.amazon.com/Climate-Confusion-Pandering-Politicians-Misguided/dp/1594032106/ref=pd_sim_b_1
http://www.amazon.com/Shattered-Consensus-State-Global-Warming/dp/0742549232/ref=pd_sim_b_4
Or, if you’d rather not spend the money, try: http://www.junkscience.com/Greenhouse/.
I could give you far more, but these suffice to illustrate the lack of consensus, irrelevance of consensus, and inconclusive evidence of AGW. I have to warn you, I have been involved in this and related debates some 20+ years; and confident I can debunk any ‘proof’ you choose to offer in rebuttal.
You argued “It [inflating tires] would help. A better course of action would be to forgoe the tax cuts in the stimulus bill and spend that money developing a new fuel and deploying the needed infrastructure. That would really stop the need to import oil and let us move on in peace” – Well, when you find that miracle substitute with a real chance of replacing oil and with better production and burning characteristics, let me know because I’ll be the first to buy stock. Actually, we already have one, but the Green maniacs won’t let us touch it. It’s called ‘nuclear’. It requires no tax-cut cancellations, no debt increasing stimulus package, and no 11th hour miracle. Yet, even nuclear lacks the economics and utility of fossil fuels, especially with respect to transportation. Now, before you leap to the defense of ethanol, wind, wave, hydro, solar, and biomass, I have done the analysis on those also, and the best you can say of them is they help a little; but only in niche applications and not when regulated and subsidized to undercut fossil. All that subsidizing uncompetitive alternatives do, is create unsustainable unnecessary boondoggles, complexity, and blight.
Inflating tires does indeed save a tiny amount of fuel, but we already knew that and most of us practice it realizing under-inflation uses more gas and, more importantly, wears out expensive tires. So the next obvious ploy is to punish those who fail to keep said tires precisely inflated at all times. But, what is precise proper inflation and how do you enforce it? It varies from tire to tire and context to context. It is a dead certainty your inflation will be noncompliant half an hour after you correct it. You can’t see an under-inflated tire spinning at 900rpm unless it is so deflated it affects your driving. The little bit you are loosing in fuel in a month is less than the couple of miles it takes to find a filling stations still equipped with a courtesy tire filling station. Rather than assuring greater mileage, then, all this guarantees is we spend an inordinate amount of time, fuel, and money adjusting tire pressure (both pumping in and letting out). More to the point, it provides government with one more revenue stream with which to bleed us dry (the real reason Obama prefers it to, say, letting us decide when to inflate). Alternatively, we could redesign cars so that tire pressure is automatically maintained, but that just automatically increases the waste in energy. Now, if we really want to get silly, we can insist on equipping all cars with compressed air storage that both inflates and deflates but also stores energy; a technology that has so far proved ineffective. It doesn’t really improve mpg or Detroit would already be marketing it, but it would add a couple hundred to the sticker-price and is just the kind of ‘solution’ you liberals adore. If you liked that solution, I can come up with dozens more like it that are equally tantalizing and equally useless (though, I admit even with my skill-sets, I am not nearly as proficient as liberals in coming up with boondoggles).
Regarding paying carbon-taxes as a means of halting global warming you said “It won't halt global warming but …I would rather tell the world that if they want to import goods into our country they have to meet both our living wage standards and our environmental rules or be charged a tariff for their failure. This should keep American industry competitive and make the rest of the world do its part” – Wow, really? How very democratic of you to tell the rest of the world (those folks you liberals insist we mustn’t exploit) they must pay to play. Tariffs never work because ability to control commerce is a two way street. It favors countries supplying raw and precursor goods over finished goods, and those having a positive exchange (not currently our situation). Try to remember; those other countries are keeping us supplied more than we supply them. That means your tariff will hurt them a little, but us a lot. Tariffs were popular here back when we were more the supplier than consumer. They [rest of world] have far less invested in maintaining a steady supply of goods, and can either cut back or sell those goods elsewhere. It is bad enough your wage controls and entitlements discourage our own poor from working, now you want to discourage third-world countries from working too? Regardless of tariff results, that doesn’t answer how carbon-taxes are to reverse something not shown to exist.
b. On taxes, stimulus, and bailouts:
Regarding the widely-held liberal belief ‘tax-cuts are stealing from the poor’, you say you’ve not heard of it. All I can ask, then, is ‘What planet are you on?’ I have no doubt you’ve both heard and said it. A simple internet search turns up hundreds of such claims. It is taught in all our colleges as gospel, and even our children are subjected to it from an early age. This is one of the oldest and most frequent gripes of the left. You will find it in the writings of Saint-Simon, Proudhon, Marx, Debs, Trotsky, Mann, FDR, and Bill Haywood. It screams at us from the media, and there isn’t a liberal politician alive who doesn’t insist tax-cuts rob (hurt, harm, deprive, undermine) the poor. It is also a favorite of Hollywood, and, if you had no other source that one is sufficient to saturate our consciousness. If utterly convinced the rich only get theirs unjustly off the sweat of the poor (i.e., theft of labor), then it follows confiscating it from the rich (progressive taxation) to give back to the poor is the antidote to the rich-man’s avarice; making cutting taxes in a welfare state tantamount to theft. The problem with this argument is it assumes poor people have no alternative but to work for rich people. To this we can add that the bulk of all taxes are paid by the rich and those officially designated ‘poor’ pay almost none. Therefore, if corporate production is stealing from the poor (most of whom don’t work or work very little), and progressive taxation is redress of said theft, then it follows cutting taxes would also be stealing. This is as precise a statement of the doxology of the left I or anyone can make. You can argue the theft thing all you want, but cannot deny the vast majority of liberals are convinced of this Marxian axiom, have been for many decades, and, if they (not necessarily you personally) are so convinced, then they must equally be convinced tax-cuts steal from the poor.
My own rationale for tax-cuts is far simpler: unlicensed taxation is just plain wrong. It is theft by government. It has never been a question of stealing from the poor; it has always been a question of government stealing from all of us (rich and poor) to expand their own role and power; of taking more than is justified and without our consent. The tax revolt now in progress is the result of runaway taxation and careless spending. We provided in our Constitution for government to tax and spend to meet specific, limited ends – and no others. Taxing beyond those ends, therefore, is a breech of contract and outright theft. If you want to expand the legal objects of taxation, then the contract needs amending; which so far has not been attempted knowing we’d reject it. What you are condoning, then, is government taxing us well beyond those original objects and without our consent.
Next you wrote you’d “raise [taxes] on the top brackets and make some serious budget cuts once the recession ends to get things back under control.” Raising taxes on top taxpayers only cuts fuel to the real economic engine; and, if budget cuts are in order, then now rather than later is the time to make them. Once the economy is back on track, only conservatives will still voice any interest in cutting taxes. Therefore, your ‘let’s-make-these-cuts-later-when-there-is-no-need-of-them’ is bogus because we both know that will never happen – especially with Democrats running things. Instead, you liberals will be busy figuring out new ways to spend us into debt.
Seriously, would you run your own business or household the way the current bunch is running our country? By their logic, we should spend like drunken-sailors just when business is collapsing. Who does business that way?! Sensible folks cut cost when in trouble; and, we don’t agonize the cuts are ‘socially irresponsible’. Yes, businesses do spend to capture more business as you say, but they don’t do that in the middle of a recession just when business is hemorrhaging. Capital investments assume a) there is market hungry for more of a given product, b) the investments can be made without risking the business, and c) there is a reasonable expectation of a positive ROI within an economically short time-span. What Obama &Co propose meets none of these criteria. Most of what Obama, Geitner and Congress propose spending on things that make our products more costly (negative ROI), have no potential for capturing new markets, and any ROI is so many years out as to be meaningless. So at the end of a year and a half (when all the money is gone), the Oba-maniacs will have nothing to show for it that continues to stimulate growth: no infrastructure, no jobs (other than non-producing government and NGO jobs), and no competitive market edge. Even supposing the things paid for could make us a little more productive, no one has done the analysis that they will or can. Nobody invests in new capacity when broke and invest only as captures or creates known, measurable assets. Even then, we first utilize what we already have and only buy or build new capacity when existing capacity is inadequate. Therefore, Obama’s plan may be short-term smart (politically, not economically), but long-term stupid and arrogant (both politically and economically).
The spending itself (with no one but government underwriting it) means government must print lots of new money (or its electronic equivalent) with nothing measurably backing its value. A lot of people believe we need to return to the gold or silver standard as a means to prevent this type of inflation, but fixed standards unnecessarily inhibit growth (both a virtue and a liability). Yet, having no standard invites government printing money faster than the economy expands, and the current situation is the one most abused. In olden days, kings melted down and re-minted their gold and silver coins and reissued them with a lower gold/silver content (‘devalued’ or ‘debased’). Printing unsecured greenbacks does the same thing. At the end of the day, you have lots of greenbacks, but everything cost a heck of a lot more than it did (hyper-inflation). Finally, because you have so inflated the cost of things, you have to keep feeding the monster created or the whole thing collapses. Biting the bullet now would, at least, reduce the size of the hemorrhage we'll see later when Obama is done attempting the impossible. (See more on this at: http://www.forbes.com/2009/04/24/inflation-deflation-dollar-price-opinions-columnists-federal-reserve.html?partner=daily_newsletter )
If raising taxes without authorization and outside of legitimate objects is wrong, then raising them on those already taxed more than others is doubly wrong. If you were serious about being fair, you’d insist those ‘additional necessary taxes” be raised first on those who have yet to pay any. Better yet, scrap the income tax and adopt the Fair Tax ( http://www.fairtax.org/site/PageServer?pagename=about_main ), or similar variant that discriminates and discourages less than does the present system.
You allege “No one really believes…” Biden’s gaff about paying taxes. I realize and appreciate why Biden said it, but that doesn’t get him off the hook. It also doesn’t mean a whole bunch of liberals aren’t now firmly convinced of it and defending it as though gospel. You’d be surprised what people can convince themselves of when their ideology is on the ropes. All partisans get wrapped up in defending the nonsense spewed by our leaders and partisans (though liberals do seem do this a lot more often). Defending the indefensible makes you retreat into falsehoods so convoluted no one can keep them all straight (good indication you’re out on a limb). The best indication for this is your opponent resorts to emotional arguments and avoids answering simple questions that would easily put the matter to rest. The smart ideologue knows to cut bait, but most aren’t that savvy.
I have seen this particular nonsense weirdly defended more than once since the gaff was made, and by some inarguably intelligent people. The arguments have, at times, been near brilliant; despite which they remain (for liberals) embarrassingly lame. Thomas Friedman, no less, made the argument it ‘is’ patriotic in a NYT op-ed. There are some folks (see http://www.webweavingherbals.com/samuel/2009/03/31/paying-taxes-is-patriotic/ ) so passionate in their defense of the gaff they are now convinced it is both patriotic and a great investment. Most liberals aren’t that courageous (i.e., willing to put your money where your mouth leads you), and that to me is another indication you’re in defense-mode blowing smoke. I see almost no liberal offering to pay more than their allotted taxes, though a whole bunch of not-so-economically-brilliant Democrat appointees caught underpaying their taxes and making embarrassingly small charitable contributions. Nor was Biden’s the first time liberal pundits have argued paying is patriotic, convincing me Biden got it from others. Thomas Friedman has his moments of lucidity, but he’s no Milton Friedman, and Biden meant it when he said “paying taxes is patriotic”; even if the real point he was trying to make was you libs have a ‘better, more generous America’ to offer. Trouble is you aren’t nearly as generous as you pretend and, then, only with someone else’s money.
(continued in next comment …)
M Panetta, – part III-a
c. Fascism, nationalism and patriotism:
You wrote “Never heard that one. But fascism does require ardent nation[a]lism. I love my country, but I am willing to see its faults. I am willing to attack the problems in the voting booth, the coffee house, the classroom, city hall, or on the Internet. I don't appreciate it when people who hear what I have to say about what is wrong with this country tell me to go to another country though. That is just plain rude.” – Ruder than calling conservatives ‘fascists’, ‘pigs’, and ‘racists’ the way liberals routinely characterize us? I agree ordering liberals out would be rude … if true. I have to wonder, however, if you have been personally ordered out, or, as is more likely, you are taking affront at retorts directed more prominent, radical liberals who made a huge fuss they’d leave should such-and-such happen – and then didn’t. Moreover, I am pretty sure you are exaggerating the strength of the commendation. Here is what really happened. Some celebrity nitwit backhandedly malign conservatives by insinuating it is unsafe staying in a conservatively run America. Usually, this happens around election-time. To make this point, bad-boy celebrity hotheads like Alec Baldwin, Robert Altman, & Pierre Salinger loudly proclaim they’d move to France (Canada, Switzerland, Bora Bora, &c) should Bush win in 2000; only to deny later they’d ever said or meant any such thing. The press and liberal talking heads instantly second the sentiment; giving the impression of a mass exodus should the unthinkable happen. Nor was it just liberal elites, because we conservatives hear the same sentiments repeated among rank-and-file liberals making the same point we conservatives ‘ruin the country’ for everyone else. So, when the unthinkable did happen, we conservatives could not then resist the urge to tweak you liberals over it. The liberal media then spun our derisive remarks as ‘See, those nasty conservatives ARE and HAVE BEEN demanding we get out! What barbarians!’ So, what you are claiming as a rude demand by conservatives for liberals to get out is, in truth, no more than the mocking you liberals so richly deserved for making pompous promises you had no intention of carrying out. In other words, you created a situation with which to vilify us, and we called you on it.
Who here asked you to leave? Certainly not I, nor any conservative I know. Who would we then have to mock for making such empty-headed remarks? Where are all these exit demands by conservatives of yours in actual print (other than as phony liberal media concoctions)? The last time I heard or saw the ‘love it or leave it’ comment by an actual conservative was during the Vietnam War. We may ask why you don’t leave when you so clearly despise the culture, and we may ask why you haven’t left after making such a backhanded fuss you’d have no other option but to leave, we may even comment among ourselves how much nicer it might be with out you, but rarely do conservatives ‘demand’ any but convicted traitors and subversives leave (or, better yet, given an all expenses paid vacation at Club Gitmo).
If you have never heard the ‘patriotism is fascism’ garbage, I have to wonder what gated community or alternate reality you’ve been hiding the past 50 years. You claim to not having heard a lot of things that have been mainstream liberal dogma since well before any of us were born.
Moreover, you are wrong as to nationalism and patriotism. Fascism does not require nationalism in the least. Read up on fascism and its history and you will see why. Fascism is at core belief in a type of socialism (syndicalism); and not especially country or people (note: FDR’s policies and wartime alliances loosely fit the fascist model, and the New Dealers drew from many of the same ideas). Syndicalism assumes a middle-ground between socialism and capitalism superior to capitalism alone (i.e., that mixed economy thing of yours), and pit trade-unions against owners. Thus, syndicalism (and, by extension, fascism) is a policy of the state confiscating ownership and redistributing it between owners and workers on the assumption owners unfairly acquire holdings (entitling the workers to a share of ownership). With subtle variations, this is also what Obama is proposing via bailouts (hostile takeovers in reality). Of course, syndicalism didn’t work any better than communism, so Mussolini turned to plundering his neighbors to solve his economic dilemma. Fascism is state-oriented in that the state supersedes the individual, and leans to expanding autocratic government, centralized economic planning, and generally leans toward regulated enterprise and unionism. Nationalism, on the other hand, is simply a desire by people that government, governed and culture coincide; independent of form of government. Thus, a monarchy in which the monarch must by law be a native and title cannot be transferred to a foreigner is ‘nationalist’. Yet, no one confuses this kind of government with fascism. Laws restricting ownership of property, industries, resources and assets to natives are similarly ‘nationalist’; as is the confiscation by government (nationalization) of whole industries. Both of which do share traits of fascism, yet are not true fascism. Fascism was rooted in a combination of ‘corporatist’ economic policies popular in the interwar period combined with earlier ‘national awakenings’ of the 18th century (starting with the French Revolution) resulting in a highly unstable, fragmented political environment (balkanization). Large parts of Europe were torn down and recombined to satisfy late 18th-century nationalist (movement to reorder Europe according to national identity) preferences, and the WWI peace terms included demands for such ‘national self-determinations’. Thus, nationalism was one of the objects of the fascists, but was not really necessary to fascism.
Romantic nationalism gave us the works of Rousseau, Beethoven, Chopin, Wagner, Delacroix, Hegel, Kant, Emerson and the Brothers Grimm; and the resurrection of ancient languages, histories and usages. The same impulse to nationalize that helped shape fascism also shaped the Monroe Doctrine, Manifest Destiny, anti-colonialism, and The League of Nations. Rearranging borders and frameworks according to national-identity resulted in some winners and losers, and caused serious power vacuums in places like Italy and Spain where monarchies collapsed. Thus, nationalism was a movement in which Europeans (tired of capricious changes in regal ownership) wanted states to correspond to recognizable peoples and borders having a shared identity; and with the expectation better governance would be a result. So, nationalism was not all negatives; and it is only because it was taken to extremes we discourage it today.
Italy had a long history of factionalism, disorganization, fractiousness, corruption, and weakness (the latter being the most galling to Italians) to overcome; which the fascist saw as opportunity to bring order out of chaos. It was this combination of political disunity, economic anxiety, and an unrealistic faith in state solutions that gave rise to fascist power and excess; not love of country. Concurrent to fascism, there were a number of movements, some of which were subversive of national sovereignty (internationalists, communists, anarchists, &c). The fascists were held suspect in some quarters, but were generally regarded patriots in the sense they counted on to favor Italian interests; whereas, the internationalists, communists, and anarchists were out to subvert those interests for their own. The fascist determined, therefore on a policy of quashing communists and anarchist as the natural enemies of their own statist program and of their country. Acknowledging fascists were ruthless, however, does not mean socialists were any less ruthless. Had they prevailed over the fascists, it is just certain they’d have been the butchers establishing their own hegemony if only because they had more resistance to overcome. It has been debated often whether the speed of the fascist takeover may have been due to public concerns of a communist victory. If so, it may have been a preference for local dictatorship that gave the victory to the fascists.
‘Fascism’ refers to bundled reeds; which individually are weak, but bound together become strong. That was the fascist idea and the emblem of their movement. At the time, European nationalists of all stripes (republicans, monarchists, parliamentarians, social-democrats, and fascists) were equally losing ground to the international (socialist) movement (aka, communists), who demanded Italy be absorbed into the new Russian union, and used subversion and bullying to impose its ideology. The problem in Italy was, although the communists were a tiny minority, they had greater cohesion and determination than any other faction. The fascists and communists, then, were rival minority extremists in a war of national (local) versus international interests in which the communists were gaining. Desperate to stop this, a group of like-minded syndics and nationalists forged a common-cause coalition of otherwise rival nationalists and anti-communist socialists to counteract the communist threat (hence the bundled reeds symbolism) in was a many-sided tug-o-war. The fascists emphasized nationalism mainly as a means of differentiating themselves from the internationalists. Thus was fascism was born. In this sense, fascism was perhaps inevitable as the alternative was a communist takeover.
Fascism, then, consisted in a collage of nationalism, national interests, militarism, propaganda and censorship, and the cult of the “Leader”. Yet, those cannot be said to be distinctive traits, because the same are found in all socialist implementations (even communism, regardless the dogma). The main characteristics of fascism, then, are syndicalism, coalition, and a preservation of sovereignty. Regardless of implementation, fascists tend to: corporatism (e.g., regulation, public-private partnerships) over free-trade, intimidation, scapegoating, (e.g., blaming Jews for war reparations and capitulation, New Dealers attacking business as having caused depression, blaming parents to push intrusive/excessive interventions, singling out SUV’s as causing global warming, &c), radical agendas, rampant cronyism, corruption, rigged elections, ignore or reject religion (though not universally), and some degree of disdain for individual rights (statist). Fascism, nationalism and patriotism are neither synonymous nor inclusive, and, if you believe they are, it goes a long way to explaining your distain for unstinting-patriotism.
Strip away both jingoism and patriotism and it is still fascism. All ideologies exploit patriotism to gin up support, but that does not make patriotism any more a necessary or sufficient ingredient of fascism than is nationalism. The main problem with the assumption patriotism begets fascism is it puts effect before cause. Totalitarian regimes (of whatever stripe) demand blind loyalty to party and state, rather than patriots demanding loyalty ushering in totalitarianism. People for whom country matters so much it becomes an unthinking obsession are so few they can be safely ignored as a political force; whereas statist ideologues cannot. The Soviets exploited Russian patriotism every bit as much as did the Nazis (to this day, Russians refer to WWII as ‘The Great Patriotic War’). So did Mao, Ho Chi Minh and Kim Il Song. That makes patriotism an exploitable human value, but less an ideological ingredient. Moreover, alienation and infidelity are still more exploitable (would you mistake those for an ideology?). Look closely at the inner circle of every despot that has stalked the earth and what you won’t find are ardent patriots. What you do find are ruthless people willingly to swear patriotism as cover, who easily shed this patriotic skin when it gets in the way. The real patriots are found in the opposition precisely because real patriotism involves putting country, family, and freedom ahead of party and state. More importantly, it takes a passion at least as strong as ideology to motivate us against dangerous ideologues; and, if not in patriotism, where will you find it. Love of country, then, is something tyrants can manipulate, but only through perversion and only for as long as it takes patriots to figure out we’ve been suckered. Then, it is the tyrant who needs to watch out. Ultimately, patriotism proves more a hindrance than a help to tyrants.
Alienation is even easier to master, and has the virtue (from the tyrant’s viewpoint) of shared goals. Infidelity is likewise exploitable, but also fickle and unpredictable. So, from the totalitarian view, both patriotism and infidelity are okay, but alienation is best. The fascists and Nazis did, indeed, exploit patriotism, but so too have Russian, Chinese, Vietnamese, Korean and Cambodian communists as a means to spread their ideology. Yet, it is disaffected people who genuinely embraced socialist notions of how things work, goals, and methods. It isn’t love of country that makes ideologies dangerous, but too much power in concentrated into the hands of tyrants (most of who see themselves as benevolent).
Patriotism has been a part of culture as long as there have been nations and peoples. Ancient Celts, Jews, Greeks, Persians, Egyptians, Franks, and Han had patriotic societies complete with triumphal marches, banners, jingoism, and loyalty-affirmation. Though sometimes competitive, or even dangerous, patriotism is most often generous, high-minded, and steadfast, and to say otherwise is to ignore the contributions of patriots. Love of country, like love of self, means you are wedded to a particular group and land, share its values, share in its bounty, and are secure in who we are and need not fear those who’d tear us down or drive us apart. Whatever patriotism’s flaws may be, one thing is certain. Without real patriotism to wed us to country and each other, our country’s days are numbered; for when a people stop loving country so passionately we are unwilling to sacrifice for it, when we lose sight of those virtues that made it great, we begin to trade on our legacy as though a cheap commodity having no greater value than personal comfort.
M Panetta, – part III-b
Only socialism has achieved the degree of frightfulness with which you liberals conflate patriotism. The fascists (Italians and Spanish-nationalists), if not for their alliances with the Nazis probably would not have shed as much blood as they did (which was not greatly above the average for the period, as was the case for Germany and Russia). The two regimes best matching your depiction, then, were the Nazis and Soviets; both of whom enjoyed similar levels of patriotic fervor. On the other hand (and unlike Germany-Russia), Chinese, Vietnamese, and Cambodian communists lacked that kind of intense patriotism. In fact, those countries defy your requisite of fascist-patriotism because, in the period of greatest unrest and revolution (post-WWII), those lacked a similarly unified culture making them indifferent to nationalism. In fact, nationalism, in that quarter, was generally stigmatized as and equated with colonialism. China was the extreme case of mixed sub-cultures, each having its own language, customs, religions, and symbols and identity. The other two countries were similarly cobbled together. The only thing keeping China together in the mid-19th century was a common government, and even that warred against itself for supremacy. Modern China has since evolved a national identity complete with patriotism and values that has resulted in less strife overall because, whereas suppressing rivals was the focus early in the regime, satisfying citizen interests has become the greater focus today.
Soviet-Russia is responsible for more political death than Germany, and Chinese-communism killed more than Russia within comparable time frames:
Germany (1933-1945), 21-million killed or 1.75-million/yr
Russia (1917-1987), 62-million killed or 0.9-million/yr
China (1949-1987), 77-million killed or 2.0-million/yr
Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge (1975-1979) 3-million or 0.75-million/yr
See: http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/20TH.HTM for details
Totalitarian regimes/cultures mostly kill their own people, whereas ‘democracies’ mostly kill outsiders. That would seem to argue democracies are deadlier to outsiders, but, in fact, are not because when we subtract out citizens killed by their own governments, totalitarians still rank highest.
Will you argue, then, it was patriotism rather than communism that caused all that death? Just for comparison, Rummel (a liberal) accuses the U.S. of 1.6-million democides (though he tends to favor non-U.S. ‘democracies’ over ours) in the period 1900-1987 or 0.018-million per year. Even allowing Rummel’s bias, totalitarian regimes still rank about 50-100 times deadlier than democratic republics. A similar comparison of autocratic governments (e.g., Indonesia, Sudan) ranks those 2-3 times deadlier than us. Mexico, in the same period, was 8.73 times deadlier than us. In fact, the gap between us and most others is nearly twice what Rummel argues, because he counts as ‘democide’ things we’ve done that he ignores in others and that are not ideological, not government policy, and not particularly cultural (to believe Rummel, then, you’d have to believe Americans exceptionally guilty of things like homicide, racial-violence, and non-genocidal massacres; things he leaves out in his estimates of others). Therefore (and this time with confirmation from a highly regarded liberal), it is not patriotism that is to blame but radical ideologies.
The modern-left never accuses itself of the ‘sin of patriotism’, and that includes soft-socialists. Yet, even the left makes a grab at the ‘patriotic’ label the moment it needs it. A key tenet of Marxism is that patriotism produces injustice. If ‘love of’ and ‘identification with’ country (aka, patriotism) are unjust, why would any self-respecting liberal-socialist tar himself with it? No, the claims of patriotism are dust thrown up by liberal-socialist politicians, pundits, and partisans to hide a more general distain of patria. They’d prefer ‘patriotism’ be so stigmatized they never again be held accountable for all the apologetics. Confess it, you’d much rather we abandoned patriotism and got on-board the one-big-happy-planet kumbaya bandwagon. We can read in your remarks the aversion you feel toward those of us who are unabashedly patriotic. You pepper every patriotic remonstration with slippery qualifiers that belie the utterance. Patriotism has become so strongly associated with ‘conservative’ in the liberal mind, you feel you must either one-up our claim to the greater patriotism or, failing that, degrade patriotism as dangerous jingoism. For nearly a century, liberals have vacillated between these two extremes so often and so comically it has become a standing joke. So, whenever liberals proclaim the greater patriotism, every sensible person (including fellow liberals) can’t help but giggle.
I, too, sometimes criticize my country. But, that is not the same as finding every fault in it. We find fault when there’s fault enough to warrant it; no more. Admittedly, our reaction may be to leap to the defense of patria when in the wrong, but isn’t that one of the measures of love? Have you never flown to the defense of your wife or child before realizing she just might be wrong? Was she a horrible person because she was wrong, or just having a bad day? So, why should country be any different from family? Liberals bend over backwards the other way, discounting patriotism wherever it intersects your multiculturalism; and feel you must do this every time the subject comes up. Conservatives more often assume innocence where country is concerned, whereas liberals have a reputation for assuming guilt. Real patriots don’t just love country when caught being unfaithful, and not just when it’s safe to say so. “My country, right or wrong” is not an expression of unthinking servility; but one of unflinching loyalty. Patriots stand up for country when in the right, but also by her when in the wrong because she is the land of our being and repository of our values. Liberals swear undying affection when safe to do so, but disassociate your selves the instant she’s ‘uppity’. So, yes, there is a qualitative difference between a conservative’s and a liberal’s patriotism. Maybe, not every liberal, but close enough I’d rather have conservatives defending her.
Liberals, understandably, get in a snit at being told ‘you aren’t patriotic’. Your most common reaction is to claim an equally valid patriotism and redefine things like heroism to drive your point home. I can’t tell you how lame it is hearing liberals go on and on about the ‘heroism’ of some anti-smoking tort-lawyer ‘fighting the good fight’ or the ‘heroism’ of community-workers and social-workers forced to rub elbows with bums and prostitutes or the ‘heroism’ of underpaid teachers who work long hours (hey, so do I!) or the ‘heroism’ of overbearing environmentalist busybodies. Liberals even have the audacity to label pet politicians as heroes. Just like those kings of old who cheapened their coinage, people who equate posturing with heroism debase the meaning of the term. I aspire to patriotism, but know I can’t prove it except through sacrifice. Unlike you liberals, I don’t compete for the title. I accept mine as the lesser kind that honors the real-deal. That is because, as with the true hero who sacrifices his utmost cherished possession on the altar of humanity, the true patriot sacrifices his on the altar of country. Our greatest patriots, then, are precisely our truest national heroes who give that last, unstinting measure of devotion. Anything less debases the meaning of the word. As I cherish the true patriot, I respect the honor that the term bestows, and refrain from making false claims to it. I settle for the lesser designation of conservative-libertarian.
Unlike liberals, we conservatives don’t need reminding to wave the flag. When was the last time you felt tears well up on hearing the anthem? Liberals are notorious for scorning the pledge and leaving the heart uncovered (or, as in one famous instance, of covering the wrong side); whereas conservatives are perfectly happy renewing our pledge each day. Our hearts swell proudly on seeing the flag wave or anthem sung. Worse, many liberals openly discourage patriotic display in others, just as you discourage public expressions of faith. When I traveled overseas and experienced how others live, I was made to appreciate just how blessed I am having been born here. Liberals do also, but then the oily caveats follow (e.g., “I love my country, ‘but’ …, but think there’s nothing special about us … but stop raping the planet … but it is unfair … but needs to be more sharing … but should be more like others, &c). Where I see the good America bestows on the rest of the world simply by existing as an extraordinarily free-society, the typical liberal feels compelled to list its faults as if that somehow makes it okay to microscopically take pride in country. The liberal-socialist apologist sees the glass 3/4 empty where the proud-American sees it 9/10 full.
We do get tired of those liberals who endlessly and shamelessly mock America, indifferent to how that feels to the rest of us. Among fellow conservatives, we indulge love of country because that is the only setting in which we can be sure of the shared sentiment; and only feel truly at home among those who share this love unguardedly. Can you really imagine we’d be fooled, then, into believing the half-hearted patriotism of a liberal insisting his is the real-deal even as he finds new objections to make? It may fool your liberal buddies, but, please! We accept some of you do love your country and willingly defend it (or some part of it), but, always, there are those tacky qualifiers you feel compelled to add on. So, it isn’t inconceivable some of us just might wish some of you (the ones who do spit on the flag) would just up and leave if they find us and our culture so heinous. What surprises us is that genuinely patriotic liberals (you?) don’t share our distaste for these fake patriots. Rather than call their bluff, you instead defend them and attack us. Understandably, that makes us doubly doubtful of liberal sincerity.
I know you don’t mean it like that, because I am surrounded by liberal family and friends who do it too; but, really, you should hear how noxious it sounds from where we sit. Imagine your kid sister (who was never disciplined as a child) is going around telling anyone who will listen that your dad ‘abused you’ when you know it was nothing more than tough-love from a parent scared you’d turn-out a hoodlum. You know kid-sister is just doing a ‘me-too’ cry for attention, and abuse stories are all the rage. Naturally, she gets huffy when you beg her to knock it off. Next thing you know that’s the word on street and there’s no putting a lid on it; and, predictably, little-sister is clueless how her neighbors ever got such an idea. You know perfectly well your sister loved dad too. But, try convincing the neighbors of it! That gives some rough idea how we conservatives view liberals bad-mouthing the country and culture while insisting they are doing no such thing. There’s just something pathetic about a liberal convinced he’s every bit as patriotic as the next guy, who, nonetheless, bad-mouths country in the very next breath.
M Panetta, – part IV
d. Regarding the liberal fallacy ‘communism never killed anyone’, you responded: “Agreed. Stalin did though. He was a real bastard wasn't he?” – You really think communism never killed anyone, and chalk it up to a lone madman? Socialist totalitarianism is responsible for more genocide, politicide, and mass murder than all other ideologies combined. Even if you exclude Nazis and fascists from the socialist tally, communism still ranks worse than non-socialist governments. Don’t take my word for it; read through liberal-socialist, peace-activist Professor Rummel’s website (link in previous section). Nor is he alone in this assessment. Yes, Stalin was a bastard, but he was also a product of a political culture that brutally put the interests of state-objectives ahead of individuals and moral constraints. Lenin, Beria, Molotov, Khrushchev, Mao, Pol Pot, Ho Chi Minh, Kim Il Song, Kim Jung Il, Castro, Che Guevara, and Duvalier were/are as bad (or nearly so) as Stalin, and shared the same socialist-statist mentality. Those were just the heads of states and their henchmen; but, behind these were legions of alienated, hostile-to-tradition, radical-socialist sycophants lending support. Stalin did not murder all those millions single-handed – he had lots of help. They were (and remain) the product of the same Marxist ideology and obsession with making drastic changes indifferent to consequences; most of whom have the ‘very best of intentions’ and with similar demands for ‘justice’, ‘equality’, ‘brotherhood’, &c we still hear today.
e. Regarding Media Bias
You said “The media is definitely biased. Some of it is conservative, some is liberal. Depends on the day and the channel or periodical really. What's your real point?” – Two real points, actually. First is, liberals overwhelmingly believe theirs is anything but bias while assuming ours is all bias. Second is, that the media bias is overwhelmingly liberal. The first is analogous to the guy with halitosis who never quite gets it. Not only is the media biased (and I agree with you some of it is conservative), but it is only liberals who get their shorts in a bind when confronted with the quality of their reporting is less than objective. Your media guys are in deep, deep denial – and, I gotta tell ya, from where I sit, it’s a hoot! When confronted with it, the liberal media invariably denies it all the more. We conservatives mostly acknowledge when ours is opinion; yet, unlike most liberal bias, ours is usually backed by something more than tired clichés. For example, it is only my opinion G-d exists. Conversely, I can make a darn good case that going on the offensive is a valid means of defeating terrorism. Both of these are things liberals regard provably false, yet they (you) have no better evidence to the contrary for the first, and none whatsoever for the second. Liberals (other than a few new-age spiritualists) are convinced they have ‘scientifically’ spiked the “god thing” beyond resurrecting and regard confronting bullies as insanity beyond discussing.
As to my second point on bias, by any honest headcount (and several have been made) the media is overwhelmingly in the liberal tank by a 4 to 1 margin. We can debate whether this is 3:1 or 5:1, but the fact will remain there is far more liberal bias than conservative bias in the media. A decade ago the numbers were even more overwhelmingly leftward, and it is only due to talk-radio in the mid-1980s and the internet in the 1990s that conservative voices have found media of our own. Prior to that, the media was almost entirely liberal, though it maintained better standards of reporting. I don’t know if you are old enough to remember, but there was a time when TV and radio set aside a few minutes at the end of each news program for station spokespersons to air views. This made clear what was opinion and what was fact (or pretty close). During the rest of the program, they kept the delivery sparse. A number of people complained delivery was too ‘dry’, so stations began spicing up the news with ‘human interests’, but also more hyperbole. That was an open invitation to compromise integrity. The Murrow-like stern/flat visage was next attacked as disinteresting, so the vacuous grin (whether reporting market shares or death & mayhem) became the new standard. It didn’t take long for hyperbole to become the norm in reporting and, as reporters are more often liberal, it was mostly liberal hype. Also, when I was a kid, parents and teachers taught us how to sift out bias for ourselves; something anyone born since the early 1970s pretty much has to learn on his/her own. We realized bias is inescapable, but also respected those reporters who keep it to a minimum. To be fair, platform size is not the same as reach, and conservative platforms have demonstrated they sometimes reach right past the liberal media stranglehold. This despite props and protections favoring the liberal-media (e.g., publicly funded liberal programming and ‘Fairness Doctrine’).
The problem is they [liberal media] are now regularly serving up radical talking points as though fact-based news to an audience mostly unaware of the distinction. I gave you the example of global-warming consensus earlier, which the media reports with a straight face knowing it to be logically inconsistent to have a scientific consensus before you have a science. Soon, people like you are uncritically repeating this rubbish as if you’d seen the evidence first hand; never quite realizing the IPCC committee and a ‘consensus researcher’ cum ideologue pulled a fast one on the media, who, in turn and despite realizing the fraud, passed it right on to you. That’s just one example, but this deception has been practiced so long it is mostly unconscious. The unsuspecting audience then carries said bias into the voting booth, jury box, workplace, social encounter, boardroom, and battlefield. A responsible and honest media would present fact as fact and opinion as opinion, leaving it to viewers to make up our own minds regarding the latter. That our media no longer does, speaks volumes regarding the low opinion they have of us.
M Panetta, – part V
f. Agenda based Sex-education
You said “Opposing sex education is pretty irresponsible. So is endorsing sexual promiscuity. But I have to remind you that telling kids not to do it isn't going to work. Also, sex ed has nothing to do with teaching children how to have sex or that sex should or shouldn't be had. Its about anatomy and physiology, maturity as it pertains to puberty, and awareness of birth control and STD's.”
You have to remind me? Teach your granny to suck eggs, youngster!
A little girl asks her daddy where babies come from. So, being the good, new-age sport he is, the father launches into the whole gristly story how daddy mounts mommy and sticks his thingy inside her, the sperm come out and race to find the egg, the egg slowly grows into a baby inside mommy’s stomach, and finally, after nine months of vomiting, bloating and staggering under the load, mommy goes to the hospital where (after a lot of screaming and crying and sweating and grunting) the baby erupts out her vagina. His daughter big-eyed and taking it all in says, “But, Becky says baby’s are brought by the stork, and I said that’s stupid ‘cause mommy told me last Christmas she wouldn’t mind if Santa brought her another one. Did we have a baby, daddy?” The point of this joke is that innocence is precious and, once lost, there’s no getting it back. We only get to be innocent once, yet your manic ideology seems determined to rid us of it.
First of all, I said nothing about “opposing” sex-education. What I said is: liberals are convinced that opposing “the teaching and endorsing of unrestricted sex” to our kids is “irresponsible parenting”. Or to put it another way: it is less a question children should be prepared to deal with sex than the way it is being taught is inappropriate. What is currently taught in our schools is scandalous and driven by a tiny minority of an already small community of like-minded people pushing a radical agenda with no real interest in children other than as a means of imposing their will. Those changes have to do with the legal and social status of adults – not children. When the frontal approach didn’t work, these hooligans decided to take the backdoor approach where we dare not oppose them – through our children. Even many gays are appalled this has been done in their name. Quite a few gays have kids, but it doesn’t take a doctorate to figure out there are at least some gays who don’t, won’t, and are far less interested in the wellbeing of children than in promoting their own ‘lifestyle’. To this end, radical-gays have been exploiting our kids for some time; ramming through an agenda (gay-rights) at our and our children’s expense.
It is clueless to think “… sex ed has nothing to do with teaching children how to have sex or that sex should …be had”. Here are just a few of the things currently taught our kids in the guise of girding them against ‘unsafe sex’: 7-year olds asked sexually explicit questions about themselves and others, condoms on cucumbers (explicit demonstration of contraceptive use taught to children as young as 10), lessons in homosexuality taught to 8th and 10th graders, condom-hunts in retail stores, condom-races in which mixed teams of boys and girls compete to see which gets the condom on the dildo first, conceptualizing ways to get closer to the object of your desire (body massage, bathing together, masturbation, watching porn together, erotic gifts, feeding each other sensuously), lubricants, experimenting, and role-playing (including homosexual role-playing; and if you refuse are stigmatized as a homophobe). Essentially, our kids are being taught to stalk one another ( http://www.heritage.org/Press/Commentary/ed082703b.cfm ).
Real sex-education does not take years to teach, it takes a few sessions of one-on-one with some serious follow up to see the right lessons are mastered. What does take a long time is teaching judgment and abstinence. More critical than covering the entire Kama-Sutra and piling on porn is recognizing when it is time to teach the basics and when too soon. Teach it too soon, and you’ve pushed a sexually unready child into the adult world unequipped. Teaching more than the basics is both unnecessary and leaves nothing for them to discover as adults (when sexual self-discovery is more appropriate). There is no half-in, half-out to sexual awareness. It is either there or not. Once there, the child is no longer the innocent he/she was, and begins seeing every thing in the new sexual context. You must have experienced this yourself, so you know it to be true. We know children vary as to when this happens by as much as 7 years, yet our schools insist all children of a certain age and grade must get the same instruction as though equally ready to absorb that kind of information; and, they’ve been teaching it at the earliest possible age guaranteeing at least some will be traumatized. Sexually explicit information forced on an innocent is mentally and morally confusing, and more than a little frightening. Imagine you are a 7 year old girl and told that one day not so far in the future a baby the size of a cantaloupe will be yanked out of your vagina.
Despite knowing this can be traumatic and despite teacher misgivings, our schools spend an inordinate time and resources guaranteeing the sexual awareness of children. Don’t kid yourself they are teaching abstinence because that’s barely mentioned (other than to justify having it in the course title to mollify parents). This can have no other object, then, than to endorse promiscuity. Why not just give them subscriptions to Penthouse and be done with it? The learning of sex at the right point can be magical, but that too is stolen from us as young adults having already been brutally enlightened to the finer points.
The people teaching your kids have no special training or qualifications for this, and no particular vested interest in teaching it right (denials to the contrary notwithstanding). Tell me, how many hours did your child’s middle-school health-teacher spend verifying that teaching little Johnny the proper technique for installing a condom actually decreases or increases his chances of unintended impregnation or of contracting sexually transmitted diseases? Does she/he understand there is still some debate regarding the effectiveness of latex condoms? Or has she dismissed the possibility as poppycock not worth verifying and blithely telling her kids not to worry? Is he sufficiently impressing his students that ‘safer’ is not the same as ‘safe’? Does she realize condoms occasionally tear during coitus? Does he know condoms don’t protect against all STDs equally? Or, realize latex condoms sometimes go bad? Do they understand that by teaching ‘sex is safe’ they create an unrealistic expectation of safety that encourages promiscuity, and greater promiscuity increases the rate of disease and accidents regardless the precautions? What visual interactive demonstrations and evidence are they giving students accidents do happen with some regularity? Do they emphasize it to the point every child gets it, or are they satisfied thinking half are (maybe) ‘inoculated’ and that this somehow means ‘their kids’ are a little safer (when, in fact, they are more exposed)? How about counseling knocked up teens? Are they credentialed to do that? How many clinical hours have they logged? How many times have they successfully counseled a teen out of giving it up [virginity]? How many times have they wised up a bunch of giggly teens competing to see who gets pregnant first?
The only certain way to prevent pregnancy and STDs is abstinence, and the best means so far devised for increasing abstinence is to withhold sexual knowledge as long as is reasonable, and to consistently and insistently preach abstinence thereafter. This is not opinion, but fact. In the mid-1970s (when sex-education became the norm) teen pregnancy rates more than doubled. They continued to climb, thereafter, through the 1980s, but eased slightly in the 1990s as teacher training improved. Recently, however, they’ve begun edging up again; indicating we’ve gotten all we’re going to out of beefed up teacher training. Proponents love to cite the recent improvement as proof sex-education is working; stubbornly ignoring teen-pregnancy rates remain inexcusably high compared to pre-1970s rates.
I have had ample opportunity to observe my own son and his friends discussing the ‘highly scientific’ training they got at school, and can tell you the number of misconceptions they harbor are indistinguishable from those of my generation. I am still correcting misconceptions years later in my adult son and his peers, most of whom indulge in highly questionable practices with the normal cockiness of their age; convinced ‘that will never happen to me!’ This, despite most of them have already contracted STDs and gotten girls pregnant, but secure in the ‘knowledge’ they are practicing ‘safe’ sex. So, again, sexually-educated has not made these particular kids any safer or, for that matter, more knowledgeable in any meaningful sense.
Among the values slipping from our cultural grasp are monogamy, faithfulness, abstinence as virtue (i.e., saving it for the right person), sexual mutual respect (teens regularly refer to each other as “slut”, “ho”, “my pimp”, “my woman”, “my b^+ch”, “c#nt”, &c as though acceptable forms of address), marriage as a sanctified state, and the ability of men and women to see each other outside the sexual context. I don’t know when you grew up, but in my day very few had this level of sexual awareness prior to high school; and, even those, generally approached sex with something akin to awe and anxiety. Girls may have been perceived as sexual objects, and were sometimes verbally abused (usually after a breakup), but rarely were girls slandered by their own boyfriends at the height of or in pursuit of a relationship. So, the best we can say of this new culture is young girls are no more objectified than before sex-education. The worst we can say of the new culture is it brazenly despises and slanders girls barely cognizant of their role as sex-toys as early as age-11; and that that is a widely held teen attitude. To this, we can now add young boys as systematic sexual targets of the more predatory gays and their recruits.
This is nothing against teachers (I am married to one), but even teachers are bullied and brainwashed (against better judgment) into teaching garbage. It is not usually teachers who set the curriculum, even if many now defend it. That distinction goes to politicians and radicals. Had you asked teachers 40-years ago if they wanted the responsibility of teaching sex to other people’s kids, you’d have gotten a resounding “NO WAY!” Teachers are no more ‘expert’ in teaching sex to teens and pre-teens than are the parents of the teens they now trump. Most parents have had several years of dealing with kids, know their own kids far better than can teachers (for whom the individual student is one among many), and are at least as savvy as the average public school teacher. I have found teachers to be more than a little naïve and idealistic, to the point it overrides their judgment when every new ‘feel good’ agenda comes along. Moreover, teachers overwhelmingly balk at opposing school authority and their union (NEA) whom they regard as infallible; whereas parents don’t hesitate when it comes to protecting our kids from agendas. The typical highly-dedicated-to-her-profession, public schoolteacher is convinced the overall curriculum is something ‘scientifically’ worked out by greater minds than their own. They have faith in their system, and it is this faith which makes them susceptible to pressure. Despite knowing the average schoolteacher lacks critical experience and, sometimes, critical judgment, we expect them to do a better job raising our kids than we do ourselves; despite we are the ones with the greater interest in doing it right. A teacher may have a couple of sleepless nights knowing her sage advice fell on deaf ears, but she’s not the one who has to support that 14-year old through the next 9-months of pregnancy and (depending on values) many years of her and a child just when we had emptied-nest syndrome in sight.
The supposedly ‘professional’ sex-pert arrives unbidden from radical groups like GLSEN and Planned Parenthood volunteering unsolicited advice; few of whom have credentials that would stand the light of day. So, now, we have a case of the unready being taught by the unprepared co-opted and brainwashed by unofficial, unaccountable charlatans. Meanwhile, the ones with some real experience of life and a greater interest in the outcome (parents) are told this is a matter for ‘professionals’; and crowded out. Gee, how could any parent possibly object to that?!
We can debate indefinitely whether or not it is the teaching of unrestricted sex or opposition to it that is the more irresponsible, but you can hardly deny liberals fly to the defense of what is, in truth, an assault on innocence and on every parent’s right to a superior say in what, when and how our children are introduced to sex. If you must insist on forcing this drivel on our children, then at least have the decency to permit parents to teach it. There’s nothing particularly arduous in teaching sex (golly, folks have been doing that since way before post-modern education enlightened us), so it shouldn’t take a lot to get us up to speed. Then, maybe, teachers could get back to teaching little Johnny how to count and read.
M Panetta, – part VI
g. Regarding ‘Charter-schools are bankrupting public-schools and lowering teaching standards’, you responded “Charter schools are a joke. We should nation[a]lize education. Private schools should exist, but be completely private. I'm fine with that. But the cost to teach a student would go down dramatically if it were nationalized. Having more buildings, principals, payroll services, electric bills, etc. is ALWAYS more expensive than having less.” – No doubt you get your factoids straight from NEA.
In all the history of nationalizing things (utilities, oil wells, healthcare, agriculture, highways, &c) the impact on cost has been up, not down. Moreover, nationalization eliminates the competition driving improvement; resulting in stagnation. This principle is no different as applies to education. Nationalization is just monopolization-by-government, with all the negatives that implies.
Charter schools are ‘not’ private schools because they are regulated in all states to provide the same curricula, level, and quality of instruction as public schools. The cost of operating charter schools, however, has been shown demonstrably less than public schools (average charter receives less than 2/3 the funding of average public school per student – http://www.edreform.com/charter_schools/funding/ ), making them a taxpayer bargain. Charter schools educate 11% of our students enrolled in just 3.5% of our school facilities (i.e., 3 times as many students per school). Many students of charter-schools are non-white of lower-class and poor families; for whom private schooling is out of the question. 40% are from families poor enough to qualify for federal lunch subsidies and half are minorities (compared to a third in public schools). Charters have been getting a good many special-needs kids farmed out by public schools. One effect this has had is to lower charter school scores relative to public schools. Public-school advocates then exploit this as proof charter schools do a ‘poorer job’ of educating; when, in fact, they are comparing apples to persimmons. Parents of charter school students, however, are delighted with the results far more than is the case among public school parents. Partly, this is an attitude they bring with them (dissatisfaction with public schools is the prime reason most switched), but also it is a reflection of schools that do a better job, target needs, and genuinely encourage parent participation (not just the usual PTA banter). The National Center for Educational Statistics bias is predictably pro public-school (it is, after all, a government creature); despite which, NCES consistently finds no discernable difference between charter and public school test scores. Predictably, NCES’s comparisons ignore the many ‘extras’ with which charter school augment standard instruction.
Over the past century, as government has tightened its monopoly on education, quality of education has suffered measurably. The emphasis in education has shifted from turning out leaders to turning out drones, from quality to quantity, from emphasizing performance to least-common-denominator equity, from getting-ahead to no-child-left-behind. In a minority of cases this is beneficial, yet overall it is contrary to the true purpose of having an educational system. If the main object of education is to provide leaders, then emphasis should be given to fast-tracking the most promising. Our culture, however, has developed a strong aversion to standout individuals at odds with our foundational notions.
Once upon a time in America, you had to take an entrance exam to get into most high schools. Samples of pre-WWI high school entrance exams are impressive and, easily, the equal of modern college entrance exams. High school graduates, then, were expected to know something and be prepared to step into the leadership roles we now expect of advance-degreed college grads. There were social impediments to entrance, and needed correction; but the principle of a multi-track education system is still sound. Essentially, that means we all we have succeeded doing is delaying the age at which our best and brightest are prepared to start because politicization now trumps good sense by pushing one-size-fits-all standards for all pre-collegians. We have created a situation in which the mentally-ordinary are encouraged to fail and the mentally-challenged can’t help but fail. To get around this, we create thinly disguised subclasses of students (gifted, challenged, &c), all of whom are, nonetheless, streamed together for socialization purposes to brainwash them out of realizing they are not unequally endowed; when that is patent nonsense to all but the most dense of kids. This is an unhealthy fiction to foist on children smart enough to realize the fraud, yet so trusting of their teachers they willingly make themselves believe the fiction (as do many parents). And, this is just one of many such fictions taught in our schools. Any wonder, we have a generation of children in therapy?
Because our workforce culture both stigmatizes those who fail to earn at least a high school diploma and disdainfully defines a wage not worth accepting, we guarantee at least some will depend on government to provide basic needs when they could be gainfully employed at less demanding tasks solely because they lack that all important sheepskin (now fairly worthless) for jobs just don’t rate that artificially set wage. We turn out hordes of tolerable technocrats, but few generalists having both a broad and deep understanding of the forces defining the world they’ll inherit and expect them to manage. A big part of the reason this happens is the emphasis put on equal outcomes; a fantasy which educators are especially apt to take to heart. We know to a dead certainty not all of us are born or develop equally. Some may excel for reasons we can’t even quantify. So, to make the average and ungifted feel more equal, we create labels and sops with which to offset natural differences (at the same time maintaining a secondary fiction gifted students are not fast-tracked). You can’t make ordinary students perform as if superior. The only way then to get equal outcomes is to damp the progress of those more capable (i.e., cripple the gifted scholar through unequal and inadequate measures of accomplishment). The gifted student can still get a decent education, but only by going outside the lines. The scholar has, thus, been denied the kind of motivation that used to be the norm and is now more often stigmatized as ‘unfairly advantaged”. Before they can overcome this barrier to their personal progress, the gifted student must recognize these disadvantages thrown in their way are artificial and unfair. If I were a bright student today, realizing there are barriers deliberately created to hold me back, I would look for ways to bypass any and all teachers favoring artificial outcomes.
Teachers and our education czars are not entirely to blame for this; parents and voters are also to blame for not expecting and demanding better. Some are even complicit in demanding the bar be lowered and flattened. If public schools were not so abysmal, I might agree with some (if not all) your assumptions. As they are turning out an increasingly shoddy product, I approve innovations (like charter) having some potential for pressuring educators (public and private) and school-boards into salvaging something. Failing that, we should increasingly privatize until, once again, we are turning out students taught how to lead. Charter schools are just a first step toward demanding better. This is not to say average and special-needs kids are to be abandoned. We have resources to do both and it doesn’t involve throwing more money at ‘the problem’. All it involves is restoring the paradigm and attitudes of the past we know to have been more successful. It is the obsession with educational equity that has resulted in a squandering of human potential, not any lack of money, resources, qualified teachers, or private schooling.
http://www.hoover.org/publications/digest/3062866.html
So what have we learned? We have learned: charter schools teach all the required stuff, plus extracurricular stuff for which they get no credit, have been doing a comparable job to public schools despite some obvious handicapping, and all at a bargain price. We have also learned that the change in emphasis in education from producing leaders to producing drones has cost us our competitive edge just to indulge a fantasy everyone must get the same education.
M Panetta, – part VII
h. On characterizing ‘objections to the homosexual agenda as bigotry’
You said “What is the homosexual agenda Bob? I think they pretty much just want you to stop beating them when you see them out and they probably wouldn't mind getting married. I say let them. I don't care what anyone else does. Just don't ever force a church to marry gay people and we are okay by me. Marriage, because of the way people are, is not a religious institution any more but a legal one. All the other value it has comes from you. Gay marriages can't make your marriage mean less.” – It is really sad when the best rejoinder you can come up with is to accuse your opponent of “beating up gays”. When is the last time you heard a report of straights beating up actual gays? The last time I read of it was over a decade ago. Do you seriously not get it that some gays are equally intolerant and violent? Gays are no more prone to violence, but also no less. Instances of straights abusing gays are pounced on by the media, so we have little reason to worry that will go unpunished. What doesn’t get reported, however, are instances of gays assaulting heterosexuals. Invariably, when this, happens, the media fails to mention the sexual nature of the assailant or that the assault was bias driven; instead, vaguely characterizing it as an altercation, mugging, or senseless attack. The media is thoroughly disinterested in violence and intolerance by gays. The image of straight-America still and overwhelmingly abusing gays (after decades of cultural abhorrence) is hype by radicals with which to silence critics. What has reversed the incidence is a prevailing culture and legal strictures that now shield gays where once it protected straights. That means we have a situation in which gays can attack in confrontations with some impunity (both from the media and the law, and with the full support of citizens ignorant of the reality). Meanwhile, straights in the same situation, avoid mixing it up with gays knowing the media will pounce on them and accuse them of starting it. We’ve seen the same shift in race and gender relations (courts, media, and opinion siding with the perceived abused group) and for much the same reasons. Whichever side overwhelmingly has the law on its side, you can be pretty sure they will be the ones exploiting the advantage that gives them, and the ones disfavored will be the ones avoiding trouble and abjuring feelings. This is just human nature independent of our orientation.
You are wrong regarding marriage being a legal institution. It has been a religious institution from time immemorial. Until recent times, couples looked to religion to bless our unions with children, a feat same-sex union can’t match and without which marriage has no real meaning. Only by stripping marriage of its primary function (childbearing & rearing), can the two be equated. What you misattribute as “… because of the way people are, it is not a religious institution any more …” assumes it was people who dropped the religious angle. Either that or you are suggesting people are, now, fundamentally different (funny I don’t recall any fundamental change in my makeup). So what you really mean is: because gays are the way they are you demand we reduced marriage to a legal status only. But, and despite gay claims to the contrary, actual gays (those with no interest in a hetero relationship) represent a tiny minority. To that you can add a few who are sexually indiscriminate. The rest of us are overwhelmingly straight, regardless our tolerance.
It has only been in the last two centuries that government has assumed the role of religion in defining marriage by converting it into a legal and tax status. Throughout time, every culture and every straight couple has sought the blessings of religion to sanctify our marriages. Never, in all that time, have people instituted marriage primarily as a legal status. Always, that has come later and always with the proviso it remains a religious matter foremost. Also, in all that time, never before did homosexuals conceive of a need to be matrimonially equal (making the notion a modern ideological one). Government is the interloper here, and too much meddling by government has always resulted in impediments to marriage, with long-term effects that are destructive of civil society, of that which binds us together as a culture with a vested interest in a future. I suppose we should have seen this coming when government first offered us tax-breaks in exchange for taxing our incomes. Soon, government was insisting we have marriage certificates to prove our married state in order to get tax-breaks it cooked up to better guarantee our complicity with the theft. Next, government signaled hospitals (and other venues) to restrict patient access else bear liability should anything go wrong. Now, government wants to reduce marriage to the status of economic unit devoid of sanctity; effectively destroying the one real reason adult males have for entering into and honoring permanent, monogamous, stable, child-benefitting relations. We, the people, did not make or cause this shift in attitude; government in the guise of a handful of unelected judges and ideologues did that to us and against our protestations.
I do not doubt gays want something akin to marriage, but why insist on it having the same meaning and sanctification when that is not possible. Gays are free to concoct their own rituals and religions if they feel this same need, but are no longer unsatisfied with that. Now, they insist we must bend our religions and values to conform to them and theirs. Well, I am sorry, but I do not share their view of religion and have no desire to have my beliefs compromised. I can empathize they cannot accomplish a thing they most ardently desire, but, all this accomplishes is to trivialize something important to the vast majority of us who are not gay.
That raises another dimension to this debate you have not thought fit to consider, so I will. Not all of the proponents of this change are as high-minded as you. Some are less interested in sanctifying “gay-marriage” than in destroying marriage as an institution and a blessing. They care less a few million gays are made happy than that religion is, hereafter, ridiculed and abandoned. A few of these are gay, but that is incidental to their religious antipathy. I, of course, refer to extreme-secularists. They are hoping this drives a nail in religion from which it cannot recover as billions of straight couples find less reason to forge sanctified unions if it is to have no greater meaning than a secular sexual pairing. We can argue same-sex unions would have served as well, but these radicals were not mollified by that because satisfying religious-gays was never the real goal. No, they wanted this pushed farther. To these extremists, the destruction of marriage itself was always the goal knowing this is the most effective way they can spike religion.
You ask “What is the radical gay agenda.” Okay, since you asked, here it is:
• toleration of public displays of gay sexual behaviors not generally tolerated in the general population heretofore (be it homo or hetero)
• indulgence of public sexuality among heterosexuals, the better to breakdown resistance to the more flamboyant homosexual culture
• the elimination of any and all restraints on sexual pairings (sanctions pedophilia, bestiality, and similarly predatory behaviors)
• forced sexual indoctrination of children emphasizing homosexuality
• relegate any and all valid complaints against this agenda to the status of ‘hate-crimes’
• specially protected minority status having no legitimate justification
Again, this is the agenda of a minority of extreme gays misrepresenting the overall gay community; who, nonetheless, influence that community strongly and define its imperatives. It is not homosexuality, per se, to which conservatives object, rather, we object to having thrust on us, our families, and our culture values offensive to our natures and G-d. We are no longer allowed to isolate ourselves from this culture because, then, we are homophobes in dire need of diversity training and similar brow-beating until we acknowledge and accept the establishment of homosexual values in our midst and on our children. Nor is it just us ‘homophobes’ complaining. There are plenty of conservative gays speaking up against this agenda; among them Tammy Bruce, one time champion of the gay-feminist left (see http://www.amazon.com/Death-Right-Wrong-Exposing-Assault/dp/1400052947/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1241557202&sr=8-1 ). And, there are many gays pushing for greater acceptance and recognition (also mistaken regarding conservatives), but without the radical agenda ( http://www.indegayforum.org/about/ ).
Demands of homosexual activists stated in “1972 Gay Rights Platform”:
• “Repeal all laws governing the age of sexual consent.” (i.e., legally enable pedophiles to have access to our children and teens for their sexual gratification — so long as said children “consent” to having sex.)
• “Repeal all legislative provisions that restrict the sex or number of persons entering into a marriage unit.” (Once marriage is redefined, there can be no logical or ethical objection to any conceivable “marriage” combination, including polygamous “marriages.” By watering down marriage, “gay” activists and like-minded politicos [usually activist judges] remove this foundational institution’s intrinsic value.)
Demands of homosexual activists stated in 1987 (Homosexual) “March on Washington”:
• “The government should provide protection from discrimination based on sexual orientation in employment, public accommodations and education just as protection is provided on race, creed, color, sex, or national origin.” (forces all religious business owners, landlords and schools to abandon — under penalty of law — sincerely held and constitutionally protected beliefs and adopt a view of sexual morality that runs entirely counter to central teachings of every major world religion.)
• “Anti-homophobic curriculum in the schools.” (government-mandated homosexual orientation at taxpayer expense; already occurring in thousands of public schools throughout America; children are being taught the absurd notion that male-male anal sodomy is a perfectly acceptable, “alternative” sexual “orientation”; taught, despite the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has acknowledged such behaviors put participants at extreme risk for dangerous and often deadly infectious disease.)
• “The government should ensure all public education programs include programs designed to combat lesbian/gay prejudice … Institutions that discriminate against lesbian and gay people should be denied tax-exempt status and federal funding.” (Punishes churches, religious schools and religious businesses persisting in teaching traditional mores. Some jurisdictions have begun removing tax-exempt status from church related ministries refusing to provide “commitment ceremonies” to homosexuals.)
• “Public and private institutions should support parenting by lesbian or gay couples” (now mandated in many states such as California and Massachusetts. In Massachusetts, Catholic Charities’ adoption service was recently forced to close down because it refused to assign children to homosexuals for adoption.)
Noted homosexual activist/pornographer Clinton Fein addressed the “gay” agenda in a 2005 article titled, “The Gay Agenda” in which he made the following incitements: “Hate Crime laws are just the beginning. Once those are passed either federally or in all 50 states, begin campaign to eliminate homophobia entirely.” “Homophobic inclinations alone, even without any actions, should be criminal and punishable to the full extent of the law.” “Make sure that gay representation permeates every level of governance.” “Demand the institution and then wreck it. James Dobson was right about our evil intentions. We just plan to be quicker than he thought.” “Reclaim Jesus. He was a Jewish queer to begin with, and don’t let anyone forget it.” So, here, we have acknowledgment from the pen of a radical gay that 1) there is a gay-agenda, 2) suppression of heterosexual preference and thought is part and parcel of that agenda, 3) a program to secure unassailable gay power, 4) the wrecking of traditional society, institutions, and mores, and 5) a malignant antipathy against both religion and people of faith. Whether or not you agree with it, even you must acknowledge this constitutes an agenda. More than that, it is an assault against society and its preferences, the vast majority of whom are not gay.
By the way, if you are straight and conventional, you are homophobic in the eyes of at least some radicals. Being liberal is no excuse.
M Panetta, – part VIII
i. planes flown into the Twin Towers and Pentagon were a Bush plot
To which you responded “…there are no educated people that really believe Bush masterminded 9/11 … Let the dead rest in piece.” – Really, then who are these guys: http://www.911truth.org/ . Members of this group include college professors, engineers, scientists, theologians, human-rights activists … in fact a pretty fair cross-section of the intellectual left. Nor are they the only tin-hats still convinced of and decrying it. Among middle-eastern Muslims (including most of their media and academia), the “Bush-did-it” theory is an undisputed ‘fact’. By “Let the dead rest in” [peace], do you mean we should give it a rest because the left is uninterested in our nation’s security? Or do you mean the 9/11 dead no longer rate our consideration?
j. putting healthcare in the hands of government results in better, less costly care with greater access
To which you responded “It will cost less(Medicare costs 11% less per participant than an average health care plan) per person, but the important thing is that getting sick shouldn't bankrupt you.” – Medicare cost are 11% less "per participant" only because the rest of us are subsidizing the difference, and it doesn’t bankrupt you now, unless of course you are willing to spend everything you have to keep breathing; which is, of course, the same situation we’ve had as long as we’ve had medical practitioners (aka, witch doctors). You are comparing unequal things. When you add in payroll deductions and employer contributions, Medicare/Medicaid costs us more rather than less. You can’t make something cost less simply because you have added a layer of bureaucracy to it. It still takes the same amount of doctor hours to diagnose and prescribe, the same clerical and nursing staff, the same consumption of medical supplies, the same housekeeping and sanitation costs, the same utility bills that must be paid, &c. When government takes over (assuming all the same services are maintained), that just adds another layer of administrative costs. The only way to reduce cost, then, is to start cutting something. Assuming you are right and the cost are indeed 11% lower, that means either 11% of something (actually more than that because we have to account for added government layer) must have been cut in the form of denied services, forcing doctors, hospitals, or doctors, hospitals and drug companies have to shave profits, and substituting cheaper (lower quality) equipment and supplies. Over time, doctors and hospitals stop investing in improvements. Their suppliers respond by making and selling fewer units, driving per unit costs up and sales further down until a new equilibrium is established. Fewer sales means slower technology advances. Quality of care suffers many times over what the savings represent. Lives that might have been spared or health maintained are lost, but there is no way of knowing by how much because there is no remaining benchmark once the last capitalist healthcare system has been scuttled. The remaining benchmark then is mediocre government run care.
I did a study of my own a couple of years back, and surprisingly found the total cost of healthcare in Britain (fully socialized) is slightly higher per person served than here. Conversely, health services there are atrocious (i.e., people sometimes die waiting months or years for services we get here in a few days. Resources stretched to the max, underpaid indifferent doctors, medical rationing, unsanitary conditions, people having to take taxis to hospital, shoddy recordkeeping, gross inconsistencies, black-market drugs, &c). Conditions are improving in Britain in some areas, but only to the degree they've realized you only get as good as you are willing to pay. Britain began paying doctors a little more because all the good doctors were emigrating out. Yet, in the same period, many of Britain's medical trusts have begun denying specialist referrals for a variety of 'social' reasons (e.g., smokers and fat people on the theory it will force them to adopt healthier habits). Your main complaint was the lack of access to the poor. So, I suppose I have to grant you this one point because under socialized medicine the access is, indeed, more equal – equally bad. But, the nurses are warm and caring I am told.
You began from at least one false assumption: that ours is not already a mostly socialized health system. OECD published comparative statistics by country in 2005 listing healthcare spending by country as a percent of GDP. OECD says 45% of ours was paid by government where in Britain it was over 90%. With the additions of PDP and SCHIPS, that figure is now above the 50% mark (OECD's figures are a little understated, however, in that it leaves out a lot of British self-care, black-market care, and alternative-care people in socialized countries are forced to turn to when sick and their system ignores them; and because OECD may be deducting taxes from GDP), with most of that going to those classified as 'poor'. That means our healthcare is at least 50% socialized. Poor Americans, therefore, already get 100% of their medical costs met; and even lower-middle class Americans are getting benefits that close some of the gap. Further socialization, then, is mostly a matter forcing the other half (you know, us ‘rich’ folks who don’t actually need it to get by) into accepting the same dependency.
The only thing still keeping this country from falling into the kind of medical morass socialized countries are in is wealthy and middleclass people who, by directly paying the cost of care, provide feedback in the form of demands for high quality care as a condition of the large sums we shell out. Remove this direct relation between provider and customer, and you have destroyed the only remaining reason providers' have to deliver high-quality goods that set the standard further down the feeding chain. Instead, you get providers looking to government for compensation for every service, referral, scan, lab test, and aspirin dispensed. There are plenty of fools who see 'free care' as beneficial, never quite realizing it isn't free and the quality of healthcare suffers the more you give someone else control over your health choices because quality turns on ability to pay.
In the U.S., those unable to pay can walk into any hospital in the country and demand services for anything from aspirin to brain-surgery, and cannot be denied basic services to the point some of our hospitals are now declaring bankruptcy. Medicare, Medicaid, SCHIPS, the Bush prescription drug plan, FDA drug regulation, &c are all socialism. It is programs like Medicare-Medicaid and bloated malpractice awards that are primarily responsible for the soaring cost of health. But, so too is our own insatiable demand for the best care possible.
Now, before you leap to the conclusion I just agreed with you, I see this demand as a good thing and the reason is simple. You willingly pay more for a high-definition TV or safer, more-efficient car, but whine over higher-cost, state-of-the-art medical equipment with a far better chance of saving and extending your life a few years. How much is a year of life worth to you? How much is getting your health back when disabled and unable to earn a living? Just as in any other market, demand for better, more efficient, life-enhancing products results in a higher cost, but also, over time, falling prices. As supply and efficiency grow and more doctors get in the game, cost drop from the level of luxury medical procedure to reasonably priced consumer item. If price falls too low, provider interest lessens, causing a shortage and demand for something now expected by the consumer. Let's say you have arterial congestion and can't work at age 45. You should have had another 20-years to retirement in which to build up savings; but are now looking at 60% of current earnings forever. Inflation grows at 3.7%, so by age 65 that 60% of earnings is effectively 28.7% and still falling. But, not to worry, you can count on government to maintain you in the style to which you are accustomed, right? Instead of retiring on disability and praying you make it, let’s say you decide to pay $25,000 out of your own pocket to get some greedy doctor to clean out those choked arteries of yours. Instead of sitting home on disability then, you get back to work after just a few weeks of recovery, resume 100% of earnings, and an expectation income will pace inflation. Let's say you currently make $69,000 gross (average for a white guy). 40% of that is $27,600 representing your lost income. That means by paying out of pocket, you recoup the loss you would have suffered in less than one year. Moreover, you get to claim most of that as a tax deduction. More likely, your company-paid health plan will pay 80%, so you only have to pay $5,000 out-of-pocket and your payback is just over two months. Put in those terms, $5,000 is a bargain.
My parent's healthcare as a percentage of income was much considerably than mine, but, then, they did not have nearly the choices I have today. I can still get the kind of care they got and at a fraction of the cost they paid for it. But, why would I want to pinch pennies that way? Doing that, I can die young the way my father did. It is not 'medical costs' that have soared past inflation; it is ‘medical miracles' that have soared. If you only look at the cost of medical to everyone then, yes, it is going up. But if you look at each new medical technology and track its cost as it applies to you, it comes down from the introductory cost and, at some point soon, becomes both affordable and indispensible. Most of the soaring costs are born by the rich (where they belong), but socialist healthcare proponents never mention that. They just report the more alarming picture skewed by luxury items going to keep super-rich centenarians breathing. The real medical cost then, like every other new commodity that comes our way, goes down as both supply and demand for it increase.
Let's say that instead of being able to manage your own medical destiny, we get fully socialized care as they have in Britain. There, you don't get to decide you need that surgery or MRI. Government decides that for you; and, assuming they decide the cost/benefits of having you healthy are less than leaving you on disability … well, I guess you are just S.O.L. That happens in Britain far more than Brits care to admit. Don't think Britain is a fair comparison? Canada's not much better, and getting worse so quickly that Canadians are jumping the border to get their major care here (Canadian government has even been advising people to sneak over). Sweden? They have the same problems as Britain and a drug black-market that puts Britain's to shame. So, be careful what you ask for.
Access to health is not restricted by wealth, as you claim (unless you want to count those of us who have been denied services for our kids because we make 'too much' to qualify – something I have experienced directly). I have also seen situations where access is bad for poor and middleclass alike, but that has to do with bureaucratic penny-pinching and constraints on what can be charged for services, both artifacts of governmental interference. Even so, we manage with a little persistence (as do the poor) to get what we absolutely must have. People are not dying in the streets as in third-world countries nor from waiting interminably as in Britain. Those too poor, go right in little different from you or me. The truly rich pay premium to get preferential treatment, but I am far less inclined to begrudge that than the preference given the poor, many of whom take advantage of those of us who pay; and I don't even begrudge that so much as how it undermines our values. I do agree the quality of care the poor get is not as good as that of the ultra-rich, but so what. It is almost the equal of yours and mine (by law), and that isn’t so bad and better than anywhere else on the planet. Sorry, but the picture you paint of our health system denying people because they don't or can't pay is bogus.
Next you said“Access to doctors and medicine should not be restricted by wealth. Socializing insurance is a moral imperative.” – Applying this standard, there are no material objects for which there is not a “moral imperative” (immaterial objects too, for that matter). To rise to the level of a moral imperative demands a stronger argument than just “we need it” or “want it”. Hey, I need food. Is it now a moral imperative you supply me with food? How about if I am perfectly capable of supplying my own food (however much of an effort that may be)? Next you’ll be claiming piracy is a moral imperative or that forced blood-donations are a moral imperative. Where does this mandated ‘yours is mine’ nonsense stop? As to your claim "I don't support socializing health care …", stop kidding yourself. You do and you just did. Mandating health coverage IS socializing healthcare! Anytime government interferes in personal or private outcomes, by definition that is socialism. Dictating insurance companies (private entities) provide services to people unable to pay, is interference in both the private and the personal.
You go from there to state “There is no advantage to competition among insurance companies. Cutting costs for them amounts to reducing coverage and violating the rights of patients. I don't support socializing health care itself though, just the insurance companies” – By “just the insurance companies”, I assume you mean you favor socializing private companies as opposed to socializing the services they provide; ignoring there is no real difference. No advantage? None? How about the price reduction that comes from companies competing to get your commerce? When there is only one source for a product, we call that a monopoly and the company (or government) that has such a monopoly is free to charge whatever we are willing to pay. It doesn’t even have to be conscious gouging, the company or bureaucracy simply becomes indifferent to us and to what is reasonable. Competition, then, is an important feedback mechanism informing suppliers when they are overcharging because someone else is supplying it for less. In point of fact, there is no single right price for the things we buy; only what we are willing to pay. If too much, we don’t buy and demand drops; the seller lowers his price to get the best profit overall. That, then, defines the ‘right price’.
How, then do you arrive at cutting costs violates ‘the rights of patients’? What rights? Patients do have rights. They have a right to decent care, but decent care is contextual. Are you now arguing we should pay more for healthcare rather than less? We [patients] have no more ‘right’ to a higher [set] price than a lower price for any given commodity; only the best price we can negotiate. Cost-cutting is mostly something outside our control and involves eliminating things we either don’t pay for or refuse to pay for. The only way that results in a lower quality of care, then, is either when we [patients] choose to cut costs or no longer have any further say. Making government the arbiter of what services will or will not be allowed is the surest means of guaranteeing that happens, and it is that which violates our right to choose or refuse a higher level of services that may cost us a little more. What you are defending, then, is ‘entitlement’ to services you can’t afford but, nonetheless, expect others to pay for you. In that instance, cost-cutting simply means you can no longer demand a level of service you’ve come to expect but have not earned. ‘Rights’ in that context is piracy.
Here’s a rule-of-thumb to follow: anything we can do for ourselves, we should do ourselves and keep government out of it. That which we absolutely can’t do without and can’t do for ourselves (without governmental assistance), can be negotiated with government to arrive at some least invasive formula. Everything else not fitting cleanly into one of these two categories, by its very nature, is socialism. Socialism, then, consists of any unnecessary intrusion by government into private matters large and small; having as an implicit or explicit object a commonly desired yet unnecessary need.
Perhaps you never heard the Golden Rule either, i.e., 'Those with all the gold make the rules'. In markets, the means to pay for a thing is indistinguishable from the thing itself. When government dictates to private companies the services they must or can provide, the resulting costs must either be spread over remaining (non-entitled) consumers or else services must be curtailed to keep costs from rising. Either way, it is those who pay who are fleeced. Those who control the cash call the tune and, invariably, the tune they call is to cut costs. No one does this more than does government because we have no recourse against government. Once government mandates that poor people get free care, the next higher tier realizes they are now at an economic disadvantage. So, what do they do? They start clamoring they can't afford it either and demand comparable benefits. And, so on, until enough of our least productive denizens take what began as charity has become an 'entitlement'. This is true whether we are talking about healthcare, housing, heating-oil, food-stamps, condoms, jobs, transportation, communications or luxury goods having no discernable justification. So, all you have really done is created an expectation undermining self-reliance.
M Panetta, – part IX
k. Your response to the ‘socialism inherently superior to capitalism; path-to-wealth’ liberal myth was: that only so-called “mixed-economies” work. What rot!
I wish I had a nickel for every time I've heard that old bromide: “Our economy is mixed, capitalism alone doesn’t work!” Capitalism worked perfectly for many centuries before socialism came into the picture, and has been part of human civilization since the first man bartered flint for food. It works because it is natural as opposed to the contrived interactions of socialism. What has never worked is pure socialism, and even a little socialism is a burden on markets. What you call a “mixed economy”, is nothing of the sort. That is because socialism is uneconomic and does nothing to stimulate or complement economic activity. To the contrary, it bleeds the economy for its own ends. Why, then, should I work hard or risk my earnings in a market which socialists just want to suck the life blood right out of? The more we pile on socialism, the more disinclined entrepreneurs and workers refrain from making an effort. Why should they if government is going to provide their needs. This is especially true of those convinced of the economic benefits of socialism. So, the more socialism you add to the mix, the more damped becomes the economic response (motivation); killing investment in both capital and effort, until the whole thing collapses because the blood-suckers are demanding more than those still working can produce. People, in this situation, look to government to make up the deficit, but government does not produce anything so it can’t. Capitalism is economic; socialism coexisting within capitalism is merely parasitic.
As an example of your mixed-economy argument you cite “Education is something that we all need.” – So what? There is no correlation between getting a good education and socialism, other than as a negative. Education, like government is merely a service, not a product. Education’s benefits are intangible, long-term, and only add to GDP to the extent it turns out people capable of competing. If the focus is on producing drones and esthetes, education will not contribute to GDP. The permeation of socialist bilge disconnect from reality is one of the principle reasons our graduates enter the workforce functionally and intellectually unprepared, so, there too, your capitalist-socialist mix fails the economic test.
The fact healthcare is something “we all need” is a false proposition, and the fact you “need” or, more accurately, ‘want’ something does not automatically make it a “government issue.” Did we ‘need’ advanced medical procedures before they existed? Or did we only ‘need’ what was available and within our reach. What makes a thing something government ‘should’ provide is it is something only government ‘can’ provide and is unavoidably necessary. Defense against nuclear attack meets this criterion, the personal needs of every member of a society does not and can be safely left to us to handle. Beyond that it, is only a government question if we 'choose' to make it one. If it can be proved to be more efficient doing it that way (rather than privately), then you have a case for considering government as a supplier. Even then, you need not make it a monopoly. However, that is not a sufficient argument in and of itself. It also needs to meet the test of unavoidability. Otherwise, you are forcing one-size-fits-all solutions on everyone. Following your logic, a car to get to work, food, clothing, shelter, also meet your criteria of ‘need’ and, therefore, subject to government. How the heck did we survive thousands of years, then, without government providing us all these things? Nor does government do a particularly good job of providing even our most basic needs. Once you make us dependent on government, you live or die at the whim of an indifferent bureaucracy. I’d rather take my chances in a tank full of sharks.
Gay sex is not a moral issue, as you pretend. You are conflating what are mere desires and preferences with needs and values. There is no ‘need’ of gay sex and, therefore, no moral basis for it. There are only moral questions regarding its governance within a predominantly heterosexual society. Heterosexual values have virtue not simply because they are ordained by G-d or meet our approval, but also because they are species and cultural survival issues. Heterosexual society meets all the criteria of a self-perpetuating, internally-consistent society which homosexual society does not. Homosexual society cannot long exist without a robust heterosexual host; whereas, heterosexual society can both survive and thrive without homosexual society. This, like your healthcare demand, makes homosexual society parasitic. To be more than that requires it add something to the mix that improves our survival potential or creates tangible advantages within our culture. In the latter case, you could, at least, make a case gay society complements hetero-society (aka, symbiotic). Unfortunately for gays, it does no such thing. Gays add to our society as individuals, but nothing is added to the culture simply as an expression of sexual orientation. That leaves only the question of our shared humanity. Gays, as individuals, are entitled to the all the respect and protection any of us deserves. No more and no less. But, that does not entitle them to respect and protection of their sexual proclivities; and certainly not of any behaviors that are predatory or abusive anymore than we’d tolerate theft, drunk-driving, or crack-use. Will those, then, be the next socially-acceptable and protected ‘lifestyles’? Exploiting our schools to systematically stigmatize heterosexual values among our children is one such abuse. Public debauchery is another. The problem is and has always been gay extremists are unsatisfied keeping it to themselves, feel a need to recruit among the young and vulnerable, and push our tolerance beyond all limits.
M Panetta, – part X
l. To: all religions teach basically the same things and are, therefore, morally equivalent –you responded: “I doubt they all teach the same thing, but the believers all think they are right despite having differing views on what right is. What I glean from this is that there is no cosmic right and wrong. What I believe religiously has a lot more to do with where and when I was born than anything else. So if we are conditioned through parental teaching to believe something without question, to take it on faith, how can we be so sure its right? I question everything.”
Your claim you “question everything” obliquely implies we don’t; whereas, in reality, you don’t appear to question much of anything. Your opinions are so safely PC, there can be no question you dare not think outside the lines. Therefore, it must be you allow others to do your thinking; taking all you ‘know’ from biased sources as though indisputable simply because they are palatable. If you questioned ‘everything’, as you say, then palatable would be suspect and all such assumptions invalid; including every assumption you’ve made within these pages. At some point, however, we all have to make some assumptions because every inquiry into the nature of things has a minimally observable limit beyond which we cannot see. For example, we assume the cosmos had a beginning, measure its rate of expansion from that, and, thereafter, theorize a Big Bang; only to find out later not all is neat and tidy because we started from an assumption not in evidence. Assumptions, then, are unavoidable if we are to make headway figuring things out, but always with the proviso we limit those assumptions and be ready to correcting those as prove weak or unnecessary. Also, questioning everything constantly and repeatedly is a sure way to go crazy because, then, you can never know where you stand or in what to trust (i.e., schizophrenic). Your remark implies I should do a better job of limiting my assumptions. Yet, I am the one offering facts and proofs to your assumptions whereas you have yet to produce a single proof of anything. The trouble is you are all assumption and no proof, no reasoning from facts, no evidence, no source checking, no bias correction, no openness to conflicting information or ideas, and, most seriously, no curiosity how things actually work. I gave you a list of liberal assumptions with which you could have had a field day. Instead, you blew more liberal assumptions my way as if that settled each matter.
Regarding your assertion there is no cosmic right or wrong. Humbug. Next you’ll be telling us you are non-judgmental. Had you believed that, you would not have been so quick to attack Kerwick on a presumption of racism. The idea there is no cosmic right or wrong is one of the more dangerous ideas about in the world. Stalin, Hitler, Manson, and any number of radicals and terrorists have resorted to that craven argument to justify evil or encourage it in others. Consider, then, the company you keep. The ‘no cosmic right or wrong’ argument is so much moral and intellectual dissimulation. Just because we differ in our opinions as to exact meaning and implementation does not mean it does not exist or is incapable of discovery. Rather, the insistence it doesn’t exist at all simply because our philosophies and theosophies imperfectly capture it means we have work to do getting it right. You are right that belief is just belief, but an imperfect belief in no way validates your nihilism any more than it disproves G-d. When you come hard up against your own fallibility, you may realize this; and, also, just how ‘blessed’ you have been despite our/your shortcomings. For all its accomplishments (and they are many), our science doesn’t even begin to fathom our universe or the existence of life; or replicate either. Our best medical science can’t restore a life once gone from the body or transfer mind and memories to a substitute. The best we've been able to manage is postponing death a little. So, unless and until we can do those things, we are just speculating as to the existence/non-existence of G-d; and even our understandings of ‘right and wrong’ continue to depend on a presumption of that existence.
Where next you say “What I believe religiously has a lot more to do with where and when I was born than anything else. So if we are conditioned through parental teaching to believe something without question, to take it on faith, how can we be so sure its right?”, then have you no free choice in the matter? G-d gave you free will that you can find him and rejoice in him, not cower and blindly worship. Turn your question around to ask ‘Whether or not because you have been conditioned to think a certain way, does that make the way, itself, wrong or just in need of refinement?’ Surely, there is something you can salvage from the wreckage of your theosophy? The problem I have with atheists is not they question religion, the problem I have is they throw the baby out with the bath water. Knowledge of G-d, like all knowledge, is a process of refinement with each generation adding something to the narrative. We can’t be sure, but we can reason as far as knowledge will take us. The rest depends on faith. Faith is simply the gap between knowing and trusting. When you get on an airplane full of jet fuel and rocket into the sky, you are putting faith in man and machine to return you safely to earth. That faith is predicated on some knowledge of the workings of aircraft and the machinations of men, but also on past results and, even, a little on that G-d at whom you scoff but worry may be annoyed by your indifference. Similarly, when you judge another guilty of murder and sentence him/her to death or long incarceration, you are putting faith in formulas and G-d sanctioned behaviors worked out long ago by folks wise enough to emulate that you are doing the right thing. You could, of course, chuck all that accrued wisdom and start from scratch each day, but who of us have that much time and intellect to waste?
No, not all religions are “morally equivalent”; nor are most religions responsible for all the evil we attribute to them. Religion is not G-d. Religion is man’s accumulated understanding of G d, our search for G d, our awe of G¬-d, and our reverence for G¬-¬¬d. To that degree, all religions are similar. However, none of those are moral questions. Therefore, to say all religions are morally-equivalent requires you look at each religion’s moral dictates and measure outcomes against a common standard. I say “dictates” rather than presumptions, opinions, musings, divinations, or preference, because it is ‘dictates’ (i.e., things religion demands of its devotees) against nature that define the moral culpability of each religion. We should be able to agree a religion that insists its devotees systematically and forcibly convert, enslave and/or slaughter the followers of its rivals is less moral than a religion that does no such thing. Yet, that is the equivalence you are making when you argue all teach the same things; that a religion we know to dogmatically promote religious dominance and violent expansion is the same as religions that do no worse than defend their own; confusing a religion founded, enlarged, and sustained primarily on the blood and debasement of its rivals with religions so tame as it takes a rebellion from religion for these others to survive against it. This is the same moral distinction we make for individuals, so why would we not admit this principle applies to groups of individuals attacked for their religious beliefs.
M Panetta, – part XI
m. Regarding liberal position on abortion you responded “Abortions should never happen. But making them illegal won't help stop them anymore than making guns illegal will help stop murder by hand gun. The only way to stop abortions is to improve the education and quality of life of all our people. The better off we all are, the less bad things like this will happen. The answer is not more laws and illegality. We can compromise on partial birth abortions though. There is no reason for their existence.” – Wow! That’s quite an admission. If abortions are something you believe “should never happen”, then what has legal status to do with it? Wrong is wrong, and to the degree you support, participate or ignore it makes you complicit. Slavery was legal once too and people made similar arguments in defense of their apathy, so let’s rephrase your statement substituting slavery for abortion. Still okay with ducking the moral obligation? Do you really want to be in the position of condoning or defending something you believe to be that wrong? I can’t stop my kid from taking drugs either, but that doesn’t mean I condone it or tolerate laws that enable it. I take a stand against such laws. And, if my opposition to that behavior does not altogether stop the behavior, the simple fact of citizens objecting matters. We do what we can to push back against this corrosive trend. So, whether legal or illegal, if you know a thing to be wrong, why won’t you do your part to get it changed? Like the man said, “Evil is what happens when good people do nothing.”
No, we can’t stop it altogether, but we can cut down the number of murders. We know this to be true, because the number of abortions rose sharply with legalization and has remained high since. It is important that people are taught aborting a child is murder so they take pregnancy and its consequences seriously. Abortion and has gotten out of hand because we surrendered our responsibility to states and allowed courts to decide for us things properly decided by legislatures; and failed to hold either to account for passing laws incompatible with our mores.
The abortion rate among unmarried women under-44 jumped from 23.9 per 1,000 in 1973 (Roe v Wade) to 44 per 1,000 in 2005 (down from 49.2/1,000 in 1991). Recently, this rate has edged back up a little. The overall abortion rate was 1.4% women of all ages in 1973, and reached 2.4% by 1979 (a 71% increase). The ratio of abortions to live births was 196/1,000 in 1973 but almost double that (358/1,000) by 1979. Most of the increase, then, occurred from 1973 to 1980, the very years in which our courts and legislatures legalized and subsidized abortion. We don’t know the real number of abortions before 1973 because some states still outlawed the practice (though many states permitted abortion even before the court ruling, and more had changes in the works). However, we can take the 1973 numbers as a starting point approximating the true rate from there onward. We also no the official numbers for abortion varied little in prior years. In roughly the same period, we saw a drop in live-births from a steady 24/1000 in the 1950s and 1960s to 15.8/1000 in the 1980s and settling down to an almost constant 14.2/1000 from 1995 on. Therefore, it is false to claim legalized-abortion has no effect on the abortion rate, with many women (and couples) now relying on abortion as part of their contraceptive scheme in lieu of abstinence. These rates tell a story of women overall delivering 70% fewer children, with contraception and abortion representing principle factors of birthrate decline. Recent claims by abortion advocates of declining abortion only masks abortion is still nearly 70% higher than was the case before legalization and unlikely to come down much further regardless the hype or education so long as virtue and abstinence are not the focus of conduct or teaching.
Arguing current abortion rates can be reduced through education assumes two things: 1) teens getting pregnant have no idea what causes babies and 2) the current system has not been teaching this to the max for the past 22-years. I agree what is taught has not reduced teen-pregnancy very much, but I disagree that is due to a lack of teaching. Rather, the problem is the curriculum, as taught, is adding fuel to an already blazing fire. The 1970s marked a major paradigm shift in our attitudes toward government, from one of government should butt out of the personal to the ‘it takes a village’ mentality in which bureaucrats determine cradle-to-grave interventions that undermine parenting and weaken family structures. The result has been socially disastrous.
Similarly, arguing poverty as determinant ignores people (of all classes) today are far better off materially than we were a few decades ago (i.e., when abstinence and innocence were the norm). Your suggestion, then, that people get pregnant because they are poor and uneducated ignores welfare guarantees the poor have even less rather than more reason to practice abstinence; to which education can’t hold a candle. It also ignores the overall pregnancy rate of women of childbearing age has not changed nearly as much as the abortion rate (mature women are having fewer while immature women are having more). Ask yourself which of two cases is more apt to encourage/discourage abstinence. Case 1: the government guarantees you a stipend for each child conceived. Case 2: there is no such stipend and every child you conceive means you bear that much more burden. Either way, your typical welfare recipient isn’t especially bright or determined, or he’d have found ways out of his poverty; but, as he didn’t we can assume he didn’t make the obvious (to us) leap that deferring sex and focusing on skills have some bearing on his situation. Or, if he does, it takes backseat to other priorities. Assuming you are a young poor guy, you look on getting girls pregnant as a male prerogative, proof of virility, and ego trip (I can’t get my act together, but I am a ‘good daddy’ – based solely on you love your kids enough to hang around so they at least know they have a daddy). You are also up against considerable group hostility against advancement out of the group. Moreover, you heard all that abstinence stuff in school before you dropped out a year short of graduation until you felt like popping that dumb bunny if she said it one more time (so we see how well education works on this group). A similar profile can be made of poor-women with the main motivators consisting of getting out of the house at the earliest possible age, finding a protector, and getting and staying on welfare. Given these priorities, do you really expect education makes much of a dent? Given a choice between the uncertainties of breaking out versus guaranteed welfare when all you’ve ever known is relative poverty and a culture that preaches a stacked deck against you, you decide it just isn’t worth it and no reason you should try. In this culture, both ignorance and reproduction are assets to be exploited; whereas reaching for an education and deferred sex seem hopelessly stupid. So, a bunch of middleclass do-gooders insist the problem is we need to ‘educate’ these poor, dumb slobs; and pat ourselves on the back for the sentiment. How, do they react? Well, naturally, they tell us to shove our altruism where it doesn’t shine and with a stuck up attitude like ours, we deserve to pay their freight. Go figure!
Poor people prior to welfare had fewer kids than is the norm today precisely because the cost of kids is now underwritten by government. Poor people of today, even the poorest, ‘are’ materially better off than some middle-class of the pre-Roe era; yet the number of pregnancies and abortions soared the moment there was a combination of welfare, contraception, and subsidized-abortion. These rates have remained stubbornly high despite these advantages and despite a government effort and costs spanning three generations dwarfing the 40% of GDP we spent fighting WWII. Pregnancy does, indeed, interfere with job and earnings. Your argument, however, assumes other policy and paradigm shifts (weak family and marital attitudes, roles, entitlements, workplace changes, &c) don’t also play a role in creating the ‘single-welfare-mom’ phenomenon and dissipative lifestyle. Overwhelmingly, the girls getting pregnant and their boyfriends know perfectly well what causes babies but no longer care because there is no immediate downside to promiscuity. We have taught them it is okay to take risks because the nanny-state is there to bail them out; and free-of-charge abortion-on-demand is the chief way they are bailed. Between producing welfare babies and aborting unwanted babies, then, is simply an economic consideration.
We did not just make abortion legal; we made it profitable. Abortion-on-demand means you (the pregnant girl, boyfriend or parent) no longer bear the brunt of your mistakes because that is passed along to the rest of us. Bad enough we eliminated the economic deterrent, we wiped the stigma clean also, making double sure the way is open for kids to fornicate and abortion clinics to reap government payments. Had we kept abortion a private and privately funded matter, we probably would not have seen the huge surge in abortions that resulted. Roe cleared the way for doctors to practice abortion, but federal and state legislatures responded to feminist demands made that an entitlement. The effect has been three-fold. First was a tendency to take pregnancy less seriously. Second was doctors and clinicians began viewing and treating the unborn as appendages unworthy of the consideration given patients. Third, and most shockingly, was the creation of an industry devoted almost entirely to killing the unborn and to defending the practice. Prior to Roe, Planned Parenthood was an advocacy group devoted to abortion. But, with Roe, PP morphed into moneymaker and a powerful lobby protecting a vested interest in taxpayer-funded, legally-sanctioned infanticide. Technically required to counsel pregnant women (mostly teens) regarding their options, PP has no vested interest in actually doing so. Instead it emphasizes the joys of abortion, mutes the negatives, and deplores term-pregnancy as an abuse of women. PP has made frequent claims abortion is far safer than delivery, whereas the reality it is the opposite. Thus, PP’s advocacy, at best, puts women at greater risk and, at worst, subjects women to a combination of desensitization (to the loss of their unborn children) and traumatizing those incapable of desensitization; not to mention the 49+million children so far snuffed to which the rest of us have become indifferent.
Advocates insist there is no downside to abortion (other than to the ‘fetus’), but we know this to be untrue. At least some women complain they suffer significant mental anguish as a result of abortion, most of which goes unseen and untreated. For some this is immediate, but for many (perhaps most) it happens later as the doubt grows in them they made the wrong ‘choice’ (see http://www.nrlc.org/news/2006/NRL08/NewStudy.html ). PP claims it offers follow-on counseling to these women, but at least some women claim otherwise; that this consists only of counseling women to abort. On the other extreme, many women have become so desensitized to terminating children that abortion means little more to them than an alternative contraception. Little surprise, then, the largest single demographic of women repeatedly availing themselves of abortion is prostitutes capitalizing on taxpayer generosity to cover their costs.
One recent European study claims 3.5-times as many women now die from abortion than die giving birth ( http://www.afterabortion.org/PAR/V8/n2/finland.html, http://www.theinterim.com/2004/apr/03abortion.html ), whereas PP’s decades-long image of abortion ‘saving lives’ is built on a now disputed 1936 medical study. The more recent study is from a country more abortion-friendly than here. State of the art medicine has rendered both abortion and pregnancy safer than the 1936 study relates. Besides the mortality and mental risks of abortion, there are also significantly greater risks of cancer, injury, infection, premature & handicapped children, and trauma to women’s reproductive organs that can interfere with pregnancy and long-term health issues ( http://www.pregnancycenters.org/abortion.html ).
Wrap up
We’ve thus far covered affirmative-action, racism, environmental hype, tire-inflation, taxation, abortion-fallacies, sex-indoctrination, the gay-agenda, Biff Biden’s gaff, patriotism v nationalism v fascism, Keynesian fallacies, the proper identification of socialism, fairness (what is and isn’t), the non-equivalence of religions, logical inconsistencies, thought-suppression, job-loss responsibility, death-by-government, media-bias, educational-failures, the myths of socialized-medicine, and confuting ‘preference’ with ‘morality’. There was more in what you say that needs comment, but this covers the main points. I doubt we’ve “cleared things up” as you suggested, as, so far, you seem indifferent to what we have to say on these or any topic. But, at least I gave it my best shot and there are always others to read and reflect.
This concludes my long-winded reply. My many thanks to the proprietors for the use of the hall.
MPanetta, interesting aside to your 'gay-agenda' dismissal and my response (comment 13) to it at: http://www.virtueonline.org/portal/modules/news/article.php?storyid=3650 (very thoughtful remarks by a gay man regarding the gay movement, intellectually dishonest methods, and one of the movements more egregious deceptions).
Like Lobos' bookstore window, gay-marriage, gay-religion, and gay-inclusion are part and parcel of a façade carefully crafted to make the more naive gays (and straights) feel less threatened, less different, and the gay lifestyle more acceptable. This is not to say the many gays demanding a place at the communion table aren't sincere (or individually welcome), just that the whole premise that a sin is not a sin is built on a weak foundation.
Interesting point he makes about straight supporters buying into the whole gay-is-okay agenda because it gives straight-liberals license to do as you please too; suggesting you see through the façade but are complicit in the deception. Or, to put it another way, you aren't exactly getting babes falling all over you, but fantasize it happening enough you want that door kept open? And for that, you'd willingly scrap centuries of human progress, stability, security, success and dignity? No, I don't count you personally among the debauched, but the remark rings true of a great many liberals who do support it, in whole or part, for that and like reasons. There is an interlocking logic to all such minority movements that coerce changes against prevailing wisdom and feeling. It is the logic of ‘strength in numbers’. Like Mussolini's fascists, the plethora of radical causes are a bundle of weak reeds so different one to another as to seem unlikely of combination or strength; yet joined together overcome most resistance – only to cannibalize each other in the final act. Some movements are strong in principle and don't, therefore, need to combine to prevail. Others are so weak they can only prevail through combinatorial coersion – meeting at least one of the criteria we associate with fascism. Perhaps, then, when we recognize such combinations we ought to recognize their underlying weakness and rethink our support of them.
Tradition and mores are also carefully crafted frameworks, but ones that have been hammered out over many centuries and oft tested and approved. This framework is sometimes constricting and unwieldy; but, unlike the bookstore façade, is inherently strong, serves real purposes, serves us well, and ought not to be lightly altered.