The New Clarion

At PajamasMedia, Amit Ghate shows off a fairly straightforward application of principled thinking as he tackles the common, yet artificial distinction between “force” and “violence”, first noted by Ayn Rand during the ’60’s.

The comments, as usual, are full of the usual pragmatism that shows up when an Objectivist op/ed shows up at PJM.  They are usually of this sort — a conservative who chides the writer for “errors” which are merely artifacts of his own incomprehension.  (The most advanced of these are the ones that dimly recognize that principled thinking is afoot, but chide the writer for burdening his point with “amateur philosophy”.)

What suddenly jumped into my head was the realization that this sort of thing exactly parallels a well-known phenomenon from history, which not only concretizes the “epistemological primitivism” I’ve been writing about, but is an instance of it: the Cargo Cults of the South Pacific.  (Ironically, the reason why it was fresh in my mind was because I’d read some comments on conservative blogs recently, aptly applying the label to some Leftists.)

From the Wikipedia article:

“A cargo cult is a type of religious practice that may appear in traditional tribal societies in the wake of interaction with technologically advanced cultures. The cults are focused on obtaining the material wealth (the “cargo”) of the advanced culture through magic and religious rituals and practices, believing that the wealth was intended for them by their deities and ancestors.”

Lacking any kind of grasp of the nature of what they saw, including its causal origins, the islanders imagined that by re-creating the accidental surface details of American military personnel — i.e. what they could perceive — they could somehow enjoy the full benefits of their presence once more.

That isn’t merely an apt description of how conservatives view the U.S. Constitution — and liberty itself; it’s precisely the same phenomenon (even down to “traditional”,  “Deities” and “ancestors”).

The only difference, is that the ignorance of the South Sea natives was not deliberate.

In the past, I have illustrated how pragmatism cripples the intellect, especially among conservatives.  Today’s case, however, is not one of the Internet pundits that we’ve seen before, but is one of conservatism’s stars, one of its best pretenders to the intellectual mantle: Anthony Daniels, perhaps better known as Theodore Dalrymple.

(more…)

Many years ago, I read a fascinating short story by Theodore Sturgeon, entitled “If All Men were Brothers, Would You Let One Marry Your Sister?”

(A key spoiler follows below the break.  It is not necessary to read the story first to grasp my point, but I highly recommend it; it is a good one.)

(more…)

Myrhaf offers some advice to the Democrats on how to proceed in the aftermath of the Scott Brown win: he says that they need a crisis.

I don’t expect them to actually precipitate one on purpose, but the basic premise — that the American Left is in a do-or-die position — is very likely correct.

Objectivists have been saying for years that the Left is at the end of its intellectual road, and that its position in control of the academy is slowly slipping away.   I think the Left knows this as well.   I believe that the core Left is afraid that if they don’t succeed in pushing America over the tipping point during this administration, they may never get this chance again.

What is this goal — this “tipping point” to which I refer?

(more…)

While most of our posts here at the New Clarion focus on the big wide picture of our culture’s ever-weakening resistance to primitive tyranny, here’s an instance of this “progression’ on the local scale, which nonetheless includes two key elements: an emboldened, overreaching authority, and a cowed, malfunctioning media.

Adventures in Activism: A True Story of Protest, Arrest, and Release

The Greenville News — Corrupt from Core to Top

The next time some conservative invokes state’s rights or some other such variant of “locality of government power” as a check against government power, slap him (or her) with this one.

Via Diana.

With the tide steadily turning against Obamacare, I am reminded of why electing Obama was certainly risky for this country… but may yet work out far better for American than would have a McCain presidency.

Yes, the policies Obama wants to pass are likely worse than what McCain would have done (though certainly not the gaping differences that many conservatives would have us believe). The tradeoff involved with the risk of such policies being passed, however, is that even if you grant that McCain’s less socialistic version of health-care reform (for example) would have done less damage in the short term than Obama’s, McCain’s would likely have passed.

(more…)

Back in July, I pointed out a certain mainstream view of the U.S. Constitution, in particular the Ninth and Tenth Amendments, as an example of that epistemological primitivism we all know and love as pragmatism.  In that post, I linked an article that outlines the legal argument that conservative pragmatists use to defang the Ninth Amendment (the author of that article, Clayton Jones, shows up in the comments, and puts on a clinic in pragmatist “thinking”).

Against that backdrop, now observe how a Leftist builds upon the mainstreaming of the defanged view of the Ninth and Tenth Amendment in coining a new epithet: “tenthers”, which is a classic smear of the principled view as being on a level with 9/11 “truthers” :

More important, there is something fundamentally authoritarian about the tenther constitution. Social Security, Medicare, and health-care reform are all wildly popular, yet the tenther constitution would shackle our democracy and forbid Congress from enacting the same policies that the American people elected them to advance. After years of raging against mythical judges who “legislate from the bench,” tenther conservatives now demand a constitution that will not let anyone legislate at all.

The author, Ian Millhiser, is telling us, with a straight face, that a clause which restricts State authority, is “fundamentally authoritarian“.  Earth to Millhiser: “shackling our democracy” was literally the precise and exact point of the entire Constitution.  Millhiser has just told us that the Founders were authoritarians.

This, I submit, is obviously insane, and conservatives will simply dismiss it as the usual Leftist insanity.  But they evade the real point here in doing so.

What IS the point, is that Millhiser is in fact correct in describing the principled view of the Tenth Amendment as “fringe”.   This Orwellian insanity is mainstream — the “American Prospect” is hardly fringe, and neither is The New Republic, who echoes their dismissal of the principled view as “mad ravings” (!)

What sets the stage for Millhiser’s bold-faced contradiction?  What — or who — is responsible for the “fringe” status of the so-called “tenther” (principled) view?

You get one guess.  Without this marginalization of the principled view by pragmatists, it would be Millhiser and his insanity which would be on the fringe.

The left-right synergy of the insanestream marches on.

By now, everyone’s heard of the takedown of ACORN by two undercover conservative activists, enough to spur the Senate to vote 83-7 to defund them.

Among those seven votes supporting ACORN was junior New York senator Kirsten Gillebrand:

“While Senator Gillibrand finds the actions of certain ACORN employees to be reprehensible and will ask ACORN leaders for a full investigation and plan to prevent any further abuse, the truth remains that thousands of New York families who are facing foreclosure depend on charitable organizations like ACORN for assistance.”

As always, altruism is the great whitewash, the ultimate shield for evil of any size.  “But they help people!” is the whine of ACORN’s apologists everywhere.  This isn’t new.

The real story here is the wider pattern of which ACORN is merely a small part: how altruism deters and disarms our culture’s moral immune system.

(more…)

Once more, a comment of mine takes on a life of its own and demands its own post.  This one is in response to a comment left by Greg Paulhus, one of the remaining Canadians who have yet to be disillusioned by the ongoing collapse of their socialized medical system.

In it, Paulhus attempts to claim that the stories of misery in Canada are emanating primarily from Alberta and Ontario, where there are smidgeons of private health care being permitted for the moment — so therefore, those little smidgeons of private health care must be the root of the problems there!

While Mr. Paulhus catches up on his basic logic skills, the rest of us can dig into the facts he’s evading.

But first, let us give him some credit: by trying to tell us that Ontario and Alberta don’t count anymore, he nonethless admits thereby that things really aren’t all candy-stripers and balloons in the Great White North.  Instead of telling us how nice the system is in Canada, now it’s all about how great things are in Saskatchewan!

As I am familiar with this playing field, this moving of the goalposts by Paulhus will avail him no good.  The facts on the ground must be pretty bad in Alberta and Ontario for the Canadian socialists to be chewing their own legs off in the trap like that.  Of course, what Paulhus fails to note for our non-Canadian audience is that Ontario and Alberta together contain half or so of the population.  Those are big legs.

The stories like this that I know of through personal connections and direct experience all predate the advent of that smidgeon of private medicine that is currently permitted in Ontario.  This privatization was undoubtedly prompted by the Chaoulli case in Quebec that I noted earlier; that case is only binding in Quebec at present, and yet Ontario and Alberta have since found it necessary to permit that smidgeon to order to alleviate the ongoing slow collapse (and likely Chaoulli-inspired legal consequences) of the system. This failure has been long in coming, and was thoroughly manifest long before the privatization; the latter is obviously  a *response* to the crisis, not its cause.

(I’d be interested in knowing more about what is going on in Quebec, where Chaoulli has legal force. That Paulhus fails to mention it makes it a good bet that Quebec also breaks his narrative to some extent.)

But wait, there’s more! (with apologies to Billy Mays, RIP): the “transfer payment” subsidy.

These payments are part of an interprovincial welfare program, which the federal government uses to redistribute tax wealth from the “have” provinces to the “have-not” ones. You can bet that Alberta (oil) and Ontario (manufacturing base) are “have” provinces… while Saskatchewan, the birthplace of Canadian socialism, has long been a “have-not”.

The extent to which things are medically “better” in Saskatchewan is the extent to which their system is subsidized — by Alberta and Ontario. Paulhus and his ilk are no better than those Easterners in the early ’80’s who crowed about the National Energy Program and the low gas prices it brought about… while carefully failing to look too deeply into what that cheap gas was costing Albertans.

UPDATE: well, I’d almost have lost that bet; Saskatchewan has been a relatively small net recipient of transfer payments of late, and won’t even qualify for any in 2009-2010.  Ontario and Alberta, however, remain the net losers in this deal.

Often in debates regarding government programs, the advocates thereof usually fail to account for what is unseen — i.e. for what might have been in the absence of this or that government destruction.

Recently, Stephen Hawking made this error when he said that “he would not be alive if it weren’t for NHS”; he does not account for what would have existed in its place: the superior medical facilities that would have existed in the unseen free market.

The irony of all this is that despite Mr. Hawking’s protestations, the fact remains that one of the things that was very nearly “unseen” by the NHS was in fact Dr. Hawking himself.

(Via Billy Beck)

There is a big controversy brewing over one of the “unintended consequences” of recent legislation intended to protect children from lead in toys: children’s books printed before 1985 are disappearing from the market.

Whether they meant to do it or not, this “cleansing” of the children’s book market in favor of books printed after 1985, will do the same for the ideas printed after that date.

Note in particular this comment from the linked article at The Atlantic:

Burning or banning books is one of the worst things that can happen in an open society. But in this case it is not the CONTENT of the books that is being restricted, but the potentially dangerous materials that were used to create the books.

The following simply could not be more apt:

You don’t want some recalcitrant hacks to come out with treatises that will wreck our entire program, do you? If you breathe the word “censorship” now, they’ll all scream bloody murder… But if you leave the spirit alone and make it a simple material issue – not a matter of ideas, but just a matter of paper, ink and printing presses… [y]ou’ll make sure make sure that nothing dangerous gets printed or heard – and nobody is going to fight over a material issue.

– Dr. Floyd Ferris discussing Directive 10-289, from Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged”.

This passage was already close to the mark vis-a-vis McCain-Feingold (“Money is not speech”); it’s nearly literal in this case.

In an earlier post, I characterized pragmatists as “epistemological primitives”. Today I have two groups of examples to demonstrate this kind of primitivism in action.

Some time ago, Arnold Kling did so when he proposed that individual states should perhaps “experiment” with government health care — as if  the experiment has never been tried before, all over the world and here in the United States at least twice (Tennesse and Massachusetts), with ample results.

(more…)

Over at Big Hollywood, Andrew Breitbart makes the oft-noted observation that modern-day bills such as the stimulus bill and the Cap and Trade bill just passed are huge (973 and 1200 pages, respectivel) — while the ostensive ultimate law of the land, the Constitution, is only 12 pages long.

Sadly, he does not grasp that the difference is due entirely to the fact that the Constitution was and is a magnificent expression of principled thought, while modern laws are expressions of pragmatism.  From an epistemological standpoint, the Constitution is like an artifact of a long-vanished, advanced civilization, incomprehensible in its nature, origins or workings to the primitives who venerate it without comprehending it.

I am reminded of the third and most famous of Arthur C. Clarke’s “three laws“:  “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”   What we are seeing dramatized now, here and elsewhere, is the philosophical root of what Clarke said: any sufficiently advanced product of principled thought is, in the eyes of pragmatists, indistinguishable from luck.

This post was born as a huge comment to Myrhaf’s post here.

As Milton Friedman correctly wrote, inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon. By extension, therefore, so is deflation — which is why, contrary to mainstream economists, we are not in a truly deflationary period at present, insofar as there is no reduction in the supply of *money* that has happened over the last two years. Rather, it is demand destruction that has been happening, and that’s a horse of a different color.

(more…)

A few weeks ago, conservative John Derbyshire posted a revealing item over at National Review Online.  It is revealing, in that it exposes one of the fundamental commonalities between conservatism and the Left, that sets them in opposition to Americanism: the idea that there are different (and contradictory) “kinds” of freedom.

Notice that Derbyshire characterizes these four “notions of liberty” originally described by David Hackett Fischer, as being “subtly different”.  Let us examine these differences, to see how “subtle” these differences are.

(more…)

TARP Looking More Criminal by the Minute

Ya think?  Tel me, Mr. Luskin, how it could possibly have been otherwise?

Via Billy at two–four.net, who puts it down succinctly:  “If you have to ask, then you’re not even in the game.”

Below the fold is a comment I posted earlier on Dr. Helen’s blog entry  “If you made it yourself,….Why shouldn’t you keep it, you made it…”

It contains my argument on why it is contradictory for altruists to define themselves as “people that care”.  I am addressing a commenter “Laura”, who identifies herself as a Christian, but seems to embody a more individualistic version of such than I’ve ever encountered.

It’s one of the essays I’ve had bouncing around in my head for years that I planned to write on my own blog, not in someone else’s comments… but it came together well enough there that I’m going to call it done and post it here.

(more…)

Paul Hsieh comments on a DC EXaminer article about the fast-moving expansion of government servitude organizations now likely to occur under Democrat rule — and likely to pass with Republican support.

From the Examiner article Paul links:

The bill also summons up unsettling memories of World War II-era paramilitary groups by saying the new program should “combine the best practices of civilian service with the best aspects of military service,” while establishing “campuses” that serve as “operational headquarters,” complete with “superintendents” and “uniforms” for all participants. It allows for the elimination of all age restrictions in order to involve Americans at all stages of life. And it calls for creation of “a permanent cadre” in a “National Community Civilian Corps.“

Americorps, Peace Corps, and now more “corps”?

While the Examiner is correct about the WWII-era feel of this proposal, I myself am also reminded of a time period just a few years earlier, a place several thousand miles further east, and another word with similar quasi-military connotations:

“With the creation of the German Labor Front, co-ordination became an elemental force, drawing all Germans in its wake.  With sudden changes of name, the organizations of economic and cultural life co-ordinated themselves, and a country, which had always been rich in clubs and societies, was suddenly bristling with “fronts”.

–from “Der Fuehrer” by Konrad Heiden (1944 edition)

On March 13, Ed Cline wrote an excellent article on the Left’s startled reaction to the groundswell of interest in Ayn Rand and her book “Atlas Shrugged”.  As he puts it:

“So the collectivist and altruist elite become very touchy when the people for whom they are “doing good” for their own sake, even to the point of enacting coercive and felonious legislation, exhibit signs of intelligence, resistance and anger. How dare these yokels!

And nothing raises their hackles higher than any mention of Ayn Rand. “

Ed’s article says everything that I would say about the anti-Rand reaction in general.

There exists, however, another sort of anti-Rand reactionary, who is not a member of those elites but desperately wants to be.  This sort of person hates Ayn Rand and her ideas too, but instead of being threatened by her rising profile, see in it an opportunity for themselves — the same sort of opportunity that a brand new ship represents to young barnacles. (more…)