What happens when the Nanny State thinks it knows how to run your life better than you know? In California cops tasered a man who was no threat to anyone else — in his own living room, for his own supposed good.
If someone wants to destroy his own life, the state has no business stopping him. This intervention by police and their use of tasers to take an old man down is outrageous. What’s next, people being arrested because they don’t go in for their yearly check-up?
The Tea Party movement represents the best hope of halting the federal Leviathan. We have written many words on the subject. In fact, several of us have participated in events for the first time in our lives. However, the whole affair elicits trepidation and pause. While a lot of the slogans, statements, and views are refreshing and spot on, a popular movement attracts those who would get out in front of it and use it to achieve real power.
Its decentralized nature is a blessing and a curse. The lack of central leadership means that no one person or group controls the message; its fractious nature engenders distrust of anyone who would try to do so. In a way, this makes the tea party a marketplace of ideas: the best ones garner the support and crackpots get shunted to the periphery. But with this dispersion comes the risk of a tent too open, unprincipled and unable to advance its ends effectively. The tea party movement rallied in support of Scott Brown’s election to the Senate to replace the late Ted Kennedy. He scared the dickens out of the Administration because he could play a pivotal role in blocking their agenda. But he’s already playing politics as usual, and displaying his superficial support for limited government. These sorts of hollow victories will continue to plague the tea party movement until and unless it firms up its core set of principles.
The left has gathered itself, picked itself up and brushed itself off about the Ground Zero Mosque issue. For months it seemed that only opponents of the mosque were saying anything about it. It was not an issue on the left until their man in the White House spoke up about it. Now the left is fighting back.
Now, when I write “fighting back,” what do you think this means? Does it mean assembling air-tight philosophical, political and economic arguments grounded in empirical facts? Or does it mean name calling and smearing the other side?
Yes, you guessed it. Josh Marshall explains it for you:
The institutional Republican party has fully (though with some notable and honorable exceptions) hoisted its sail to xenophobia and religious hatred. And as Halperin notes, at least for motivating their own voters, it’s simply good politics. This is not something anybody happened into.
Well, there you go. Those creeps on the right are appealing to xenophobia and religious hatred because that works with the stupid American people. Marshall’s argument is classic leftist thought: forget any subtleties of the issue, just cut to what is important — how the immoral GOP manipulates the American masses with their lies.
Eugene Robinson argues along the same lines:
Lies, distortions, jingoism, xenophobia — another day, another campaign issue that Republicans can use to bash President Obama and the Democrats. First it was illegal immigration. Now it’s the so-called “Ground Zero mosque,” which is not at all what its opponents claim.
A new book, The Great Global Warming Blunder: How Mother Nature Fooled The World’s Top Climate Scientists by Roy W. Spencer argues that global temperatures are determined by the Pacific Decadal Oscillation rather than man-made CO2.
Claude Sandroff sees this book putting the anthropogenic global warming idea in the grave — if people listen to Dr. Spencer, and with MSM serving as the propaganda arm of the Democrat Party, that’s a big if.
At the end of Spencer’s careful analysis, a simple picture emerges. The PDO is a long-lived ocean-to-atmosphere heat transfer process (similar to the better-known El Niño and La Niña) but of much longer duration. Cloud cover decreases significantly during the positive PDO phase, allowing more sunlight to reach the earth’s surface. In the ocean, this extra energy is stored as heat. In its negative phase, the PDO acts in reverse and cools the atmosphere. And all of this occurs in roughly thirty-year cycles. While this mechanism is operating, mankind is dumping a small, vanishing amount of CO2 into the atmosphere. Big deal.
It’s outrageous that buffoons like Al Gore have led this nation to the brink of Cap and Trade legislation that would devastate the economy in the name of a fantasy.
According to this article in the Washington Times, Kenyans are voting for a new constitution. I did a search for a copy of it and found one here.It’s a long document and it seems to be trying to address every possible contingency. While I haven’t read the whole thing, there are some things I like in it but far too many I don’t. I’m afraid the fingerprints of collectivism and a really bad epistemology are all over it leading to contradictions and and just plain wishful thinking. [Read more →]
At a polling place yesterday Aug 3rd I was handing out literature for a Republican candidate who is running against the U.S. House seat of lifer Democrat Sander Levin whom I want out. I took a lunch break at home and decided to catch up on my email. [Read more →]
I went to the doctor today. At the check-in desk a sign read, “ID REQUIRED. For your protection, the federal government requires that all patients provide photo identification when presenting for an appointment.”
A chill ran up my spine when I read that. Several questions came to mind:
1) What gives the federal government the right to dictate that all health care providers look at an ID?
2) Why would the federal government think this law was needed?
3) Why is it for my protection? If someone gets medical care under my name, that’s the clinic’s problem, not mine, is it not?
I will start out by saying that I agree in principle with the Standard Objectivist Position On Immigration. The central solution to most current problems is to reform immigration law and abolish quotas so that the black market is removed, much like the whole war on drugs mess.
However.
I think that the way I most often see this position presented is, at best inaccurate or oversimplified and at worst naive or suicidal. I will call this presentation, “Open Immigration” because that is what its presenters call it and also because that name highlights the key point of what is wrong with it. [Read more →]
The Wednesday July 14th Detroit News carries an op-ed by NYT writer David Brooks who wants us to know there are two kinds of people in the business world. But Mr. Brooks, like so many in the educated class, has a hard time forming concepts in any hierarchy or at least doesn’t want us to. [Read more →]
Terry Savage, in a column on a lemonade stand encounter, argues that this experience “sum up what’s wrong with U.S.” I would suggest that she’s correct in her evaluation but dead wrong in the source of her consternation.
The children running the lemonade stand in question were giving away their product for free to all comers. Savage, flush with indignation, contradicts her companion’s statement that this represented the “spirit of giving”:
“No!” I exclaimed from the back seat. “That’s not the spirit of giving. You can only really give when you give something you own. They’re giving away their parents’ things—the lemonade, cups, candy. It’s not theirs to give.”
Bill Gates is the Andrew Carnegie of our era. Like him, Bill Gates generated incredible wealth by creating a company singularly driven to be the best in its industry but gradually came to agree with his detractors. And by the time he stepped down as a leader, he had committed himself to spending the rest of his life making up for his honestly-earned success. His acceptance of altruism in the midst of pursuing his own selfish values blinded him to the possibilities of economic freedom.
Most recently, he told {via} a charter school trade conference that they represented “the only place innovation will come from.” [Read more →]
It’s time I weighed in on on the Great NY Mosque controversy at this point in time.
I wish to note that there are in fact, two huge issues at play for me in this discussion.
The first is the issue itself, which is the debate over whether we should support the immediate use of certain innately arbitrary legal powers (zoning laws) by government in order to stop the construction of a mosque near Ground Zero. I will discuss this issue here.
The second issue, is how Objectivists handle disagreements like this. That’s of greater long-range interest to me, and I will address it at some point; however, that will have to wait until I have gathered all the data and the discussion has more-or-less played out.
The very quick summary, to set the initial direction, is this: I am in agreement for now with Paul and Diana Hsieh, in their posts here and here, and the reader may wish to also note my comments there.
For the Record: I remain open to being convinced that the construction of the mosque represents a sufficiently immediate and pronounced danger to our liberty and country, that it should be stopped by *any* available means.
As yet, I have not yet seen the countervailing argument that meets the necessary conditions: to wit, that demonstrates a grasp of the opposing argument. I have chosen to respond to this post by New Clarion co-blogger Embedded I to illustrate and clarify my position.
It seems to me that some of our admired Objectivist friends do not sufficiently appreciate how widespread and insidious the Islamic threat actually is. This is a war, and not simply of ideas.
Lies, Damn Lies, & Muslim Lies: The Muslim, and especially Islamic, ethics fully endorses the use of dishonesty to non-Muslims. An article at the Middle East Forum site, makes this point very clear, explaining how the same Imam speaking in English says very benign things and then, in purportedly the same context in Arabic, is jihadist. When the former explanation ends, The Mainstream Media end thinking. See, The Two Faces of the Ground Zero Mosque.
Particularly notable about this mosque is that
Were certain American communists, during the 1940s, given a pass when it became known they being funded and guided by Russia? [Read more →]
On this Fourth of July, let us look at what the current president of the United States of America thinks the country is all about. In a recent speech on immigration Obama said,
Being an American is not a matter of blood or birth, it’s a matter of faith.
There has been an argument among Objectivists on the mosque that some would like to build at Ground Zero. Leonard Peikoff opposes the mosque and holds the US government should prevent its existence. Others disagree. Amy Peikoff has two posts supporting her husband.
The argument is complicated and certainly not self-evident. It’s a matter on which good people can disagree. I see in the various comment threads people I respect on both sides.
What would be worse for the rule of law in America, our government violating property rights of those who would build a mosque or giving the enemy in a time of war an enormous morale boost by seeing a mosque built where militant Islam scored its greatest victory?
This strikes me as the kind of argument one finds in a mixed economy. Our government is bad and getting worse. It intervenes now in so many areas that it seldom does anything significant that is limited to the scope envisioned by the writers of the Constitution. Good is packaged with bad, and sorting out what is fundamental or most important can be maddening.
The New York Times has an article about a school that encourages children not to have best friends, but to have many friends.
“I think it is kids’ preference to pair up and have that one best friend. As adults — teachers and counselors — we try to encourage them not to do that,” said Christine Laycob, director of counseling at Mary Institute and St. Louis Country Day School in St. Louis. “We try to talk to kids and work with them to get them to have big groups of friends and not be so possessive about friends.”
Doesn’t this sound like a leftist attempt to turn children into little collectivists? Selfish individuals, you see, find friends they value. But modern education since Dewey seeks to socialize children. Don’t be “possessive” about friends, just relax and be friends with everyone.
Who know? Maybe American educators will succeed where the Russians failed in creating homo sovieticus.
I just want to draw your attention to a piece by Steven Den Beste called “A Feature, Not A Bug.”
Devastating our economy and making us economically uncompetitive is a feature, not a bug. The whole “global warming” scam has been about throttling the industrialized world, especially the US, by restricting use of energy. It was never really about saving the world climate, it was always about trying to bring about international equality. You could tell that because the Kyoto accord restricted use of energy by rich nations, but permitted poor ones to increase their use of energy.
It important to remember that the left’s goal is egalitarianism. To make us all equal requires destruction, not prosperity. Obama’s presidency is a radical departure from what we knew before. I think many Americans are afraid to see this truth in all its horror.
(I’m sorry that I have not been blogging much of late. I’ve been acting a lot. I just finished doing Bottom in Midsummer-Night’s Dream, Capulet in Romeo and Juliet and the Ghost and Claudius in Hamlet. Awesome roles! At the moment I’m doing another great role, Shylock in Merchant of Venice. How could I resist playing a guy who wants to cut a pound of flesh from a Christian? [Come on, now -- that was a joke.] I’m busy this summer, but I have not given up blogging, and I expect to get back to it later, especially when we get into election season. Oh, yeah — you know we’ll have plenty to say then.)
Directly on the heels of the discussion about the Civil Rights Act and its consequences for freedom of association, comes this gem of incipient fascism built upon the precedent established thereby:
Having recently taken a class on self-defense and the law, I would caution the “purple people eaters” of SEIU to not try this stunt in states like Utah, Arizona or Nevada.
At PajamasMedia, conservative Clayton Cramer (who, resemblances notwithstanding, is not to be confused with the commenter Clayton Jones here) takes up the discussion over Rand Paul’s recent controversial comments about the Civil Rights Act and its overreach into the private sphere. The following started as a comment on his article, but fits better here as another instance of epistemological primitivism — which I hereby rename as the Cargo Cult Epistemology series.
Italicized Quotes are Cramer’s.
