In Confessions of an Ex-Moralist, Joel Marks blithely, even happily, describes his descent from believer in God to atheist "secular moralist" to contented denier of the existence of morality.
It takes very little imagination to imagine a world run by people such as Marks. And, apparently, Marks is a man of little imagination.
When one's own likes and dislikes represent the apex of moral thought, then virtually any monstrous behavior can be justified -- or, rather, doesn't even need to be justified -- as a result.
Marks writes: "For instance, I used to think that animal agriculture was wrong. Now I will call a spade a spade and declare simply that I very much dislike it and want it to stop."
So Marks would like us all to be vegans, apparently, and since he acknowledges no moral truths, there would be no barrier, were he to be in a position of power, to him implementing his dislike in whatever way he deemed most effective.
Marks is so blinkered, he sees his lack of morality as some magic empathy-enhancing condition: "For to argue that people who use animals for food and other purposes are doing something terribly wrong is hardly the way to win them over. That is more likely to elicit their defensive resistance."
Well, that's great Mr. Marks, as long as you are working from a position of weakness. What if you are in a position where their defensive resistance isn't a barrier to you achieving your goals?
He goes on to write "I now acknowledge that I cannot count on either God or morality to back up my personal preferences or clinch the case in any argument. I am simply no longer in the business of trying to derive an ought from an is. I must accept that other people sometimes have opposed preferences, even when we are agreed on all the relevant facts and are reasoning correctly."
Has Marks even considered the marriage of this idea with the natural human tendency toward coersion and totalitarianism? It is as if he has never even considered the parallels between his happy amorality and every single society that has attempted to govern from such a world view?
Does he comprehend what happens when the people in power think like him? "Morality has nothing to do with it." "I very much dislike it and want it to stop." "I desire to influence the world in such a way that my desires have a greater likelihood of being realized."
When a person whose world view and ethics are guided by statements like that has power in his hands, there is nothing to stop him from exercising that power. You can't rely on him to have some innate respect for the rights of others, because in his world view unalienable rights don't exist! We have numerous edifying recent examples, starting with the USSR, so it is sometimes astounding to me that people like Marks exist, so wrapped in the comforts of a nation that respects his individual rights that he can't even recognize the value of it.
There are existing countries -- North Korea, the Peoples' Republic of China, and numerous other uniformly terrible societies -- where the fact that the leaders desire an outcome is sufficient justification for them to use whatever brutal methods they desire to implement it.
This article appeared in the New York Times -- the same newspaper where Thomas Friedman is allowed to repeatedly wax wistfully about Chinese governmental efficiency and the wonderful things that could be done in the U.S. if only we could be "like China for a day."
By surface observation, people like Marks and Friedman -- the New York Times constituency -- are the epitome of civilized leftism. They've probably never beaten the crap out of someone, kicked a dog, or stolen candy from a baby.
Yet, they are monsters. They blithely endorse a mentality and a mindset that disparages individual rights and liberties, that sets the stage for totalitarian horrors.
They live in a society where they are free to do this, because it was founded on the idea that "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed"
Yet they want to replace that with "I very much dislike it and want it to stop."
Men like this are to be despised and opposed as thoroughly as one would oppose a terrorist with a vest full of explosives, because they, by seeming so reasonable and civilized on the surface, are an even more pernicious threat than the terrorist, whose essential brutality is on display for all to see.
Monday, August 22, 2011
Friday, August 19, 2011
Thoughtcrime
You are not allowed to disapprove!
In the link above, a Florida teacher has been suspended because he expressed objections to gay marriage on his Facebook page -- his personal page on his personal time, not even in the classroom.
Note this comment:
Michael Slaymaker, president of the Orlando Youth Alliance, told the newspaper that gay students might feel uncomfortable in Buell’s class.
How come this never works both ways? Why is there never concern that a straight student might feel "uncomfortable" in an openly gay teacher's class? You know what would happen? The kid would be called a homophobe and told to "suck it up."
If straight people have to just get over their discomfort with gay people then ought gay people just have to get over their discomfort with people who don't approve of them?
Since when was there a right to not have anyone disapprove of you?
This teacher could lose his job because he doesn't hold the politically correct views. He holds views that are legal and by no means uncommon in this country, but they're not the views the academic elite wants him to hold.
Hopefully if he loses his position, a good Christian or Catholic school will be happy to have this talented teacher who was once voted "Teacher of the Year."
I've always urged parents to abandon the public schools. Home school, private school, pick any option other than to allow your child to be propagandized by those government indoctrination centers.
Thursday, August 18, 2011
Kids and Guns
In the article California Police Sticking to Guns in Defense of Letting Kids Hold Automatic Weapons some of the anti-gun types are pretty funny about their irrational fear of children being allowed anywhere near guns:
Wow, community organizer, eh? That tells us a lot right there.
Well, Attila, it's my fervent hope that it will encourage the kids to use guns in the future, just as millions of Americans safely do every year.
As near as I can tell this supposed "controversy" was almost entirely ginned up by Mr. Nagy. That, of course, is what "community organizers" do.
Community organizer Attila Nagy, who took the photos, told FoxNews.com that he was concerned it might encourage kids to use guns in the future.
"My main concern is for kids who handle these things. They're fascinated by them, and it makes them familiar with guns," he said.
Wow, community organizer, eh? That tells us a lot right there.
Well, Attila, it's my fervent hope that it will encourage the kids to use guns in the future, just as millions of Americans safely do every year.
As near as I can tell this supposed "controversy" was almost entirely ginned up by Mr. Nagy. That, of course, is what "community organizers" do.
Tuesday, August 16, 2011
Eagles vs. People vs. Climate change
It turns out that wind power kills about 80 eagles per year in California alone.
Environmentalists seem to be always sticking the foot of unintended consequences in the mouth of grand plans to "save" the environment.
Back in the 60s they banned DDT to save eagles, which led directly to the deaths of millions of people to malaria, and the science later showed that the DDT to thin eggshell link was falacious in any case.
But, eagles are more important than people by several orders of magnitude to environmentalists, so I'm fascinated to see how they'll come down on this latest conundrum. To environmentalists:
Eagles, good.
Wind power, good.
So, how will they prioritize? On the side of the Eagles (good), wind farms (good) are run by humans (bad), and corporations (worse!), for the benefit of humans (bad), but they supposedly help mitigate climate change (good).
By my accounting, eagles, an unmitigated good in environmentalist-speak, trump wind power, which carries a lot of bad baggage.
Oh, but I forgot the most crucial factor! $$$$! The big government money being doled out these days is to renewable energy, not to saving eagles. As they say, follow the money. Sorry, eagles.
Ironically if hunters were killing 80 eagles a year in California, they'd want their heads, and to ban hunting, and guns, and rednecks. But I'm afraid with renewable energy involved, well, if you want to make the omelet of saving the planet, you've got to, ahem, break a few eggs.
Environmentalists seem to be always sticking the foot of unintended consequences in the mouth of grand plans to "save" the environment.
Back in the 60s they banned DDT to save eagles, which led directly to the deaths of millions of people to malaria, and the science later showed that the DDT to thin eggshell link was falacious in any case.
But, eagles are more important than people by several orders of magnitude to environmentalists, so I'm fascinated to see how they'll come down on this latest conundrum. To environmentalists:
Eagles, good.
Wind power, good.
So, how will they prioritize? On the side of the Eagles (good), wind farms (good) are run by humans (bad), and corporations (worse!), for the benefit of humans (bad), but they supposedly help mitigate climate change (good).
By my accounting, eagles, an unmitigated good in environmentalist-speak, trump wind power, which carries a lot of bad baggage.
Oh, but I forgot the most crucial factor! $$$$! The big government money being doled out these days is to renewable energy, not to saving eagles. As they say, follow the money. Sorry, eagles.
Ironically if hunters were killing 80 eagles a year in California, they'd want their heads, and to ban hunting, and guns, and rednecks. But I'm afraid with renewable energy involved, well, if you want to make the omelet of saving the planet, you've got to, ahem, break a few eggs.
Friday, August 12, 2011
AP's Misleading "fact check" on the first Iowa GOP Debate
The AP has produced a "fact check" of last night's Iowa GOP Presidential candidate debates that I thought was notable mostly for being a series of uninteresting minor quibbles, but the first item really stands out. It's a pet peeve of mine and really burns me up:
It's also deeply undemocratic and anti-intellectual. When President Bush signed the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform act, he notoriously admitted when signing that he thought parts of the bill were unconstitutional, but decided to leave it to the courts to decide.
Instead of exercising his obligation to use his veto power to protect and defend the Constitution, he ceded his responsibility to another branch of government, burdening the country with an unconstitutional law. Congress had already shirked its responsibility by passing such a clearly unconstitutional law, and the issue is still being fought out in the courts at great cost and great expense, when it was in the President's power and obligation to save us this trouble with a simple exercise of his veto power.
There is a reason not all Constitutional authority is vested in the courts. The Supreme Court is just nine unelected, fallible human beings. By the theory that the AP proposes, Congress and the President can violate the Constitution in the most egregious fashions (they routinely do), but citizens, such as Mrs. Bachman, are not allowed to identify the actions as unconstitutional unless the courts say so?
That's utterly ridiculous and puts us at the mercy of the courts. It is any citizen's right to label a law unconstitutional if she believes it to be so and if the courts do not yet agree with her that does not make her wrong: if we cannot exercise our own judgment as citizens about the nature of our Constitution and act on it in the public sphere, then we are not citizens, but subjects.
It is incumbent upon a candidate for President even moreso than ordinary citizens to clearly and publicly state her views on the Constitutionality of major issues with which she will have to deal as President.
As President her opinion of the Constitutionality of laws carries weight and force with the power of her veto pen and she, as both candidate and President, should not be timid about holding forth on her view of the Constitutionality of various laws of the land, nor should she be timid about vocally disagreeing with the judgment of Congress and the courts -- that tension is deliberately built into our system to protect our Constitution from any one branch of government.
Even if the courts find a law Constitutional or unconstitutional, that does not mean they are right! If that were the case, then we would still be bound by the Supreme Court ruling in Dred Scott. Instead, the unwillingness of a great portion of the public, and of Republicans, to accept the consequences of the ruling led to the abolition of the shameful practice of slavery in the U.S. If the public, President and Congress had simply accepted the primacy of the Supreme Court in this matter, then slavery might logically still be a "Constitutionally" protected practice today.
BACHMANN: Spoke of "the unconstitutional individual mandate" several times, a reference to a requirement for people to carry health insurance, a central element of the 2010 federal health care law.Members of all three branches of government as well as the armed forces take oaths to protect and defend the Constitution. This is not accidental. Nowhere does the Constitution grant the court system the sole power to make Constitutional judgments. Not only does this grant the courts undue power, it strips the legislative and executive branches of their own Constitutional obligations.THE FACTS: Nothing is unconstitutional until courts declare it to be so. The constitutionality of the individual mandate has been challenged in lawsuits in a number of states, and federal judges have found in favor and against. The Supreme Court will probably have the final word. But for now, the individual mandate is ahead in the count. And the first ruling by a federal appeals court on the issue, by the 6th U.S. Court of Appeals in June, upheld the individual mandate.
It's also deeply undemocratic and anti-intellectual. When President Bush signed the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform act, he notoriously admitted when signing that he thought parts of the bill were unconstitutional, but decided to leave it to the courts to decide.
Instead of exercising his obligation to use his veto power to protect and defend the Constitution, he ceded his responsibility to another branch of government, burdening the country with an unconstitutional law. Congress had already shirked its responsibility by passing such a clearly unconstitutional law, and the issue is still being fought out in the courts at great cost and great expense, when it was in the President's power and obligation to save us this trouble with a simple exercise of his veto power.
There is a reason not all Constitutional authority is vested in the courts. The Supreme Court is just nine unelected, fallible human beings. By the theory that the AP proposes, Congress and the President can violate the Constitution in the most egregious fashions (they routinely do), but citizens, such as Mrs. Bachman, are not allowed to identify the actions as unconstitutional unless the courts say so?
That's utterly ridiculous and puts us at the mercy of the courts. It is any citizen's right to label a law unconstitutional if she believes it to be so and if the courts do not yet agree with her that does not make her wrong: if we cannot exercise our own judgment as citizens about the nature of our Constitution and act on it in the public sphere, then we are not citizens, but subjects.
It is incumbent upon a candidate for President even moreso than ordinary citizens to clearly and publicly state her views on the Constitutionality of major issues with which she will have to deal as President.
As President her opinion of the Constitutionality of laws carries weight and force with the power of her veto pen and she, as both candidate and President, should not be timid about holding forth on her view of the Constitutionality of various laws of the land, nor should she be timid about vocally disagreeing with the judgment of Congress and the courts -- that tension is deliberately built into our system to protect our Constitution from any one branch of government.
Even if the courts find a law Constitutional or unconstitutional, that does not mean they are right! If that were the case, then we would still be bound by the Supreme Court ruling in Dred Scott. Instead, the unwillingness of a great portion of the public, and of Republicans, to accept the consequences of the ruling led to the abolition of the shameful practice of slavery in the U.S. If the public, President and Congress had simply accepted the primacy of the Supreme Court in this matter, then slavery might logically still be a "Constitutionally" protected practice today.
Thursday, August 11, 2011
How smart is Obama?
I can't deny that this article, "How Stupid is Obama," has a disrespectful title (and to an extent, the tone matches), but I also can't find much in it with which to disagree.
It is interesting that Obama's grades and academic history at Columbia and Harvard are nearly a complete mystery. I wonder how Obama would fare if all the products and records of his college days were subjected to the same scrutiny given Sarah Palin's emails. Or, comparing apples to apples, I wonder how Obama's emails as state and U.S. Senator would compare to Palin's emails.
It is very odd that there are no teams of citizens and journalists poring over those.
A lot of the comments on the above article debate whether Obama's actions are due to stupidity or ideology.
The two aren't mutually exclusive. There are many educated, high-IQ people who are proponents of Keynesian economics and socialist, redistributionist leftist policies. However, despite their intelligence, there must necessarily be a strong thread of "stupid" running through the brains of anyone who supports these destructive policies. There's nothing shocking about that -- I work with many Ph.D.'s in my profession. They are clearly highly intelligent people, but they are capable of impressively stupid behavior outside their areas of expertise.
What is really impressive, and sadly common, are intelligent people who are persistently stupid within their supposed areas of expertise. They may have an impression command of individual facts, but they arrange those facts in a wholly fictitious narrative. Being intelligent doesn't prevent you from having enormous blind spots in your world-view that are created by your upbringing and education.
One of the most pernicious and persistent base assumptions of the left is that people are, by default morally neutral, or even good, and that deviations from accepted morality can be corrected by state action. The state can make you eat better, manage your health care better, plan for your retirement better, and direct your charitable contributions better than you can yourself: if you disagree with the state choices, you are mistaken, and if you agree with the state choices, well, then you should be happy they're saving you the trouble of managing it all yourself!
I think the individualist film "Serenity" captures it well in two brief sections of dialog:
River Tam: "People don't like to be meddled with. We tell them what to do, what to think, don't run, don't walk. We're in their homes and in their heads and we haven't the right. We're meddlesome."
Capt. Malcom Reynolds: "Y'all got on this boat for different reasons, but y'all come to the same place. So now I'm asking more of you than I have before. Maybe all. Sure as I know anything, I know this - they will try again. Maybe on another world, maybe on this very ground swept clean. A year from now, ten? They'll swing back to the belief that they can make people... better. And I do not hold to that. So no more runnin'. I aim to misbehave."
It is interesting that Obama's grades and academic history at Columbia and Harvard are nearly a complete mystery. I wonder how Obama would fare if all the products and records of his college days were subjected to the same scrutiny given Sarah Palin's emails. Or, comparing apples to apples, I wonder how Obama's emails as state and U.S. Senator would compare to Palin's emails.
It is very odd that there are no teams of citizens and journalists poring over those.
A lot of the comments on the above article debate whether Obama's actions are due to stupidity or ideology.
The two aren't mutually exclusive. There are many educated, high-IQ people who are proponents of Keynesian economics and socialist, redistributionist leftist policies. However, despite their intelligence, there must necessarily be a strong thread of "stupid" running through the brains of anyone who supports these destructive policies. There's nothing shocking about that -- I work with many Ph.D.'s in my profession. They are clearly highly intelligent people, but they are capable of impressively stupid behavior outside their areas of expertise.
What is really impressive, and sadly common, are intelligent people who are persistently stupid within their supposed areas of expertise. They may have an impression command of individual facts, but they arrange those facts in a wholly fictitious narrative. Being intelligent doesn't prevent you from having enormous blind spots in your world-view that are created by your upbringing and education.
One of the most pernicious and persistent base assumptions of the left is that people are, by default morally neutral, or even good, and that deviations from accepted morality can be corrected by state action. The state can make you eat better, manage your health care better, plan for your retirement better, and direct your charitable contributions better than you can yourself: if you disagree with the state choices, you are mistaken, and if you agree with the state choices, well, then you should be happy they're saving you the trouble of managing it all yourself!
I think the individualist film "Serenity" captures it well in two brief sections of dialog:
River Tam: "People don't like to be meddled with. We tell them what to do, what to think, don't run, don't walk. We're in their homes and in their heads and we haven't the right. We're meddlesome."
Capt. Malcom Reynolds: "Y'all got on this boat for different reasons, but y'all come to the same place. So now I'm asking more of you than I have before. Maybe all. Sure as I know anything, I know this - they will try again. Maybe on another world, maybe on this very ground swept clean. A year from now, ten? They'll swing back to the belief that they can make people... better. And I do not hold to that. So no more runnin'. I aim to misbehave."
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