The New Clarion

The Friday Jan 6th print edition of the Detroit Free Press carried an oped by Leonard Pitts Jr of the Miami Herald titled “Ron Paul is foolishly consistent in his extremism.” He starts it out with this Ralph Waldo Emerson quote: “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds” I’ll skip the fact that there may be some debate over the contextual meaning of that quote in some circles and just focus on how Mr. Pitts uses it as received wisdom. I will quote a few passages with my comments in brackets. (more…)

In my previous post fisking Jonathan Chait, commenter Michael asks:

“How do you reconcile individual rights with something like private discrimination?”

“Discrimination”:

1
a : the act of discriminating b : the process by which two stimuli differing in some aspect are responded to differently
2
: the quality or power of finely distinguishing

Source.

Discrimination, in its original meaning, means to be carefully selective — to recognize and choose between “finely distinct” alternatives, e.g. a “discriminating” customer. We discriminate every day, as part of living — between food and poison, between the road and the shoulder, between good deals and bad ones, between the trustworthy and the untrustworthy.

Doesn’t it seem odd to you that *this* is the word has come to mean prejudicial choice, and highly evil prejudices at that — such as racism?

This isn’t an accident of semantics; it’s a clue to the ideological causality underlying and driving Leftist ideas like Jonathan Chait’s  — and to the biggest “Trojan Horse” in American ideological history.

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“Take a look at them now, when you face your last choice—and if you choose to perish, do so with full knowledge of how cheaply how small an enemy has claimed your life.” 

– John Galt, from Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand

At New York magazine, Jonathan Chait posts an example of the kind of tendentious, on-plantation tract that seems intended solely to reassure its denizens that it’s the right place to be.  The logical fallacies present therein are sufficiently obvious that the reader will either spot them in just a few minutes — or see nothing on account of having his eyes closed.

The point of my critique is not the refuting of it, as formatting this text will take more brainpower.  The point is to supply an illustrative example of a well-known and commonly used fallacy, but in a context where people usually fail to recognize it — unless one is armed with the principle of ideological causation.

Chait’s article is entitled “How Ron Paul’s Libertarian Principles Support Racism”.  That’s a pretty big, unambiguous claim isn’t it?  Chait’s going to show us how libertarian principles support racism.  Chait is saying that he intends to establish causation between “libertarian principles” and racism.  That would be huge, wouldn’t it?  He’d be refuting the core of the Enlightenment in one fell swoop!

So let’s see what he actually does.

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Some more passing thoughts on OWS:

Their primary impetus seems to be that someone read Marx and told them that the rich are taking their wealth from the rest of us. This was untrue in the 19th century when it was written (excepting government-backed monopolies which were anti-capitalist, anyway). And it was a baffling confusion of capitalism and the feudal system. But, more to the point, it is patently ridiculous in this day and age. The problem is, the writings that these people are ultimately basing their complaints on predate the modern age of the welfare state and its progressive tax systems.

Don’t get me wrong – we need to abolish both as the immoral and impractical monsters that they are. But, since they are here, they do make the cookie-cutter Marxist complaints of OWS a bit of a poor fit. Not only don’t the rich steal their wealth from the rest of us, but they pay the largest share of the taxes in this country, by a wide margin. Both in terms of percentage of their income, and in absolute terms. Even accounting for people like Warren Buffet.

But let’s back up for a minute. Theirs is, on a much more fundamental level, a silly idea.

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Lately, there have been some proposals in the political mainstream for a flat tax system. Such proposals are very much worth considering. The current tax code, with its system of deductions and penalties is grossly immoral – the government has no right to reward or penalize our non-criminal behaviors.

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Every hand’s a winner,

And every hand’s a loser.

–Kenny Rogers, The Gambler

Just this morning, the following items came across my radar. Can you detect the basic alternative that is common to all of them?

At the New York Times, Eddy Nahmias asks: “Is Neuroscience the Death of Free Will?” (A very good read in its own right, I’m not linking it just for the title!)

Via Twitter, Linda Cordair (@CordairGallery) tweets:

The bond that links your true family is not one of blood, but of respect and joy in each other’s life.

From Jennifer Casey, at her blog “Rational Jenn”:

Morgan said the most interesting thing to us the other day. It was something like this:

“There are three people who can invent me–you two [pointing at me and Brendan] and ME!”

That statement led to a fascinating conversation about how, yes, we created her, but she is primarily responsible for inventing herself.

Because she is. We gave her the raw materials, but she must learn and figure things out and integrate concepts and make decisions, all things which will shape her mind and sense of self and sense of life–each of which will in turn affect future decisions and her thinking (and even the decision to think).

Emphasis mine.

Those of you who have read enough of my writings about ideological causation should already be able to suspect what’s coming, as I have touched on this connection before.  The obvious form of the alternative, is free will versus determinism, yes — but I want to discuss a closely related expression of this alternative: ideological versus physical causation as the motor of human action.

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The “Occupiers” are shamefully ignorant. Ignorant of the other 99%: the 99% of corporations that do nothing wrong.

And another point of their ignorance is: what is the distinguishing attribute of the 1% who aren’t innocent? That 1% isn’t the biggest 1%. It isn’t the richest. It’s the group that are in bed with the government; that use government power rather than free market acumen to gain their wealth.

This, then, leads to the third question they are blind to: who is ultimately to blame for this? When a man with a gun and a man with money make a deal, who is wearing the pants?

And, then, one last question I’d like to highlight, that goes unasked by OWS: Who put that man with the gun in power? They won’t ask this because it is them. THEY put a government in power that meddles in the free market. They got exactly what they asked for; they’re just ignorant of the implications of what they’d asked for. And now they’re screaming for more. MORE! MORE OF THE SAME!

“Here is the tragedy of theology in its distilled essence: The employment of high-powered human intellect, of genius, of profoundly rigorous logical deduction—studying nothing. In the Middle Ages, the great minds capable of transforming the world did not study the world; and so, for most of a millennium, as human beings screamed in agony—decaying from starvation, eaten by leprosy and plague, dying in droves in their twenties—the men of the mind, who could have provided their earthly salvation, abandoned them for otherworldly fantasies.”

– from Dr. Andrew Bernstein’s “The Tragedy of Theology: How Religion Caused and Extended the Dark Ages” at The Objective Standard.

The Dark and Middle Ages are a gaping maw of a weak spot in the arguments of primitive religionists who seek to usurp the fruit of the secular Enlightenment — in particular, liberty and America — for themselves and their Judeo-Christian beliefs.  For the most part in Internet fora, religious conservatives pushing this line will run like hell (or drop to schoolyard invective) from anyone with even a passing knowledge of Dark Ages history.

The only exceptions I’ve seen invariably revolved around some variant of the idea that the Dark Ages weren’t dark at all, but had merely been misrepresented as such by anti-clerical thinkers during the Enlightenment.  If this claim could be solidified, then those fleeing religionists might finally have a card to play.  In light of this demand, it should be no surprise that Rodney Stark’s book is exactly what the doctor of theology ordered: an attempt to give that weak evasion some intellectual traction.

It is telling that the only one so far that is equipped to recognize and call out this fraud, is an Objectivist like Dr. Bernstein.  Thank you Dr. Bernstein for this ammunition; I’ll be putting it into my ideological holster, ready for use when the Dark Ages apologists start deploying Stark.

Features distorted in the flickering light,
The faces are twisted and grotesque.
Silent and stern in the sweltering night,
The mob moves like demons possessed.
Quiet in conscience, calm in their right
Confident their ways are best.
The righteous rise
With burning eyes
Of hatred and ill-will.
Madmen fed on fear and lies
To beat and burn and kill.

– from “Witch Hunt” by Neil Peart for the band Rush

Uncle blogs a pithy, yet profound quote summarizing the difference between the Occupy Wall Street movement, and the Tea Party:

The Tea Party wants to remove the Crony from Crony Capitalism.

OWS wants to remove Capitalism from Crony Capitalism.

The profundity here lies in the fact that capitalism is liberty; notwithstanding the contradictions which may yet prove fatal to the Tea Party movement, liberty *is* the essential difference between that movement and the Occupy Wall Street movement.

What is of interest here, is the pattern of apologia I am seeing in and around the Occupation movement — not only in the movement itself and its historical parallels, but also in the response to it elsewhere in the culture.

The Occupation movement itself is easy to figure out; it is following the same pattern as all similar Leftist movements in history. The development of these movements always share the same stages. For now, we are concerned with the first stage, where the movement is at its most apparently benign.

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1. Peter Hitchens looks at the science fiction world called Japan.

2. A great idea.

3. The Taranto Principle.

4. The Obama administration plumbs new depths in divisiveness using the First Lady as an attack dog.

5. The last time I posted about EMP, the idea was debunked in comments. But if it is really impossible, a lot of people have not heard the news.

6. Alexander Marriott shows how to detect fake internet quotes.

If you put a link in a comment — which is great, keep it up — we have to approve the comment before it is posted. So if your comment does not appear immediately, that is the reason.

We get an awful lot of spam comments here. They make me laugh because they are written as if english were a spammer’s second language, or maybe third.

“I am learning good informations from your prolific writings. I love this blog!”

“This is being so deep! I must tell all the peoples about your blog!”

Gotta love it.

UPDATE: Got this one today, October 22, 2011:

I am really satisfied with this posting that you have given us. This is really a stupendous work done by you. Thank you and looking for more posts

Ideological causality usually operates over the span of years, in a man and in a society.

Usually.   Sometimes, however it can cover ground damn fast.

From the source:

One Oakland police supervisor said that the participants first appeared to him as “freethinking activists” but have since devolved into something more sinister. He said it was “interesting for a group that claims to be against current civilization and rules to set up a far more oppressive society than our own.”

(Via Instapundit & American Glob.)

When they turn the pages of history

When these days have passed long ago

Will they read of us with sadness

For the seeds that we let grow?

– from “A Farewell to Kings“, by Neil Peart of Rush.

In discussing conservatism’s peculiar emphasis on local and state-level power, often under the rubric of “federalism”, a member of HBL termed it “this democracy theory”.  While this pernicious idea of “localism” is indeed usually advanced in democratic terms and in regard to (currently) democratic governments in the United States, in fact it finds its ultimate origins in a political context which is both anti-democratic *and* anti-liberty.  As those of you who follow me (@jimm_eh) or Yaron Brook (@ybrook) on Twitter may have seen, I recently wrote:

“The idea that one fights tyranny by localizing it, is a long-standing conservative absurdity.”

In fact, it has stood far longer than most modern conservatives would admit, if they knew — much longer, in fact, than America.  And when one shines the sharp light of ideological causality upon the context of ideas that underlie it, the roots of the absurdity are revealed to run deep.

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On the OActivists list, Rick Kiessig linked this post at his blog 12 Know More, where he proposes a way to “fit” the idea of individual rights into the prevailing “Left-Right model” of politics.  As readers of my posts will know, I do not believe this is possible, and would lead to the same sort of dead end as the well-known libertarian “diamond” graph, and for the same reason: it attempts to integrate valid knowledge and concepts with *invalid* ones.  In writing my answer to Rick on the list, it became necessary for me to finally lock down and explain what precisely IS wrong with the “Left-Right model”.  I’ve given pieces of that answer in many posts, but never put it all into one place.  This is that place.

Before I begin, however, I would like to segue in via a slight detour first.  Rick’s graphic reminded me of the visual aids to a joke I told to a teacher many years ago, to express my distaste for the conventional political “spectrum”:

I first drew the conventional spectrum on the blackboard, with fascism to the “right” and communism to the “left”, and then drew a dollar sign above it to make a triangle like Rick’s.  I explained that in this view, I was neither Left nor Right, but “Top”.  I then said that I didn’t care whether my opponents were “left wing nuts” or “right wing nuts”, because “they are all wingnuts, and they are all Bottom feeders!” and then circled the “bottom” to collapse it into a *point* on the vertical line.  He got quite a laugh out of it, but I know he got my idea.  (That was good ol’ Dr. Schlotzhauer.  He is who I think of when I refer to “old guard liberals” whom I could respect — and like that style of American liberalism, he is likely no longer with us.)

OK, down to brass tacks.
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The Nazis scapegoated the Jews; the communists scapegoated the bourgeoisie; the New Left scapegoats the rich. The Occupy Wall Street noise is an attempt by the Democrats to keep the narrative on point: to keep the American people’s anger directed at the left’s favorite scapegoat, the rich, and to keep the blame away from the Democrats.

Unlike the Tea Party, which was a spontaneous reaction to the Democrats’ frightening power grabs, OWS (or the Flea Party) is a calculated movement orchestrated by the leadership on the left. An ad in Craig’s List offered people between $350-$650 a week to protest. Behind the ads is the Working Families Party, which is tied to ACORN. The money for the “Occupied Wall Street Journal” comes from George Soros, among others.

So there is something happening here. But what exactly? Here is my explanation, as informed by my understanding of Austrian economics.

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Very quietly, with Obama’s compliant media looking the other way, America is being fundamentally transformed. Congress and the Supreme Court are not involved. Few people are paying attention.

The EPA is regulating industry to death.

First, check out this video promoting a new book from Encounter.

Second, read about the EPA violating property rights in the name of protecting “wetlands.”

Third, read how the EPA will shut down 28 gigawatts of energy.

Of course, to the MSM anyone who sounds off about these power grabs is a nutty extremist and probably a racist. Nothing to see here, folks, move along.

I would say that if you’re not afraid, you’re either a leftist or you’re not paying attention.

I heard the clip on the radio. I can’t force myself to watch the video. A smarmy rich liberal asks Obama, “Would you please raise my taxes?”

So why don’t these rich leftists start a campaign to get the wealthy to volunteer to give more money to the federal government? They don’t need to wait for the state to confiscate it.

They don’t do it, I believe, because there is something more fundamental than money at stake here. They want state control of the individual. This is not about more or less money in the US treasury, it’s about liberty vs. power.

Should the individual be in control of his own life for his own selfish ends? Or should the state force the individual to sacrifice for the collective?

The smarmy rich liberal feels uncomfortable without chains tying him down. It’s too bad his opposition to freedom will have us all in fetters.

Since altruism holds that sacrificing oneself for the sake of others is man’s highest moral duty and any concern whatsoever with one’s self is condemned as selfish therefore evil, I wondered what it would be like to live in a society where the concept trade and all related concepts were outlawed. It would mean I think that such concepts as buy and sell would also be taboo. It would be a society in which people could only present their needs to each other. How would that work? (more…)