The New Clarion

“One of the methods used by statists to destroy capitalism consists in establishing controls that tie a given industry hand and foot, making it unable to solve its problems, then declaring that freedom has failed and stronger controls are necessary.” — Ayn Rand

At Pajamas Media, there is an appalling post declaring that “the American experiment has failed”.  I was disappointed, but not surprised, to find that it was authored by a conservative — and one that I have already fisked before, here at The New Clarion.

Once again, Matt Patterson gives us another striking example of ideological causality.  Here, Patterson demonstrates how conservatism plays off the Left in attacking their common enemy: America, and the Enlightenment ideals it concretizes.

Have you ever wondered why conservatives insist on ascribing the term “liberalism” to the Left, despite the clear contradictions between actual American liberalism and Leftism?  Why would they aid and abet the Left’s co-opting of liberalism?  The answer lies in conservatism’s essential anti-Americanism.  The Left seeks to discredit and destroy liberalism — i.e. Americanism –  from within, by passing off illiberal ideas in its name.  When these ideas have their logical, destructive results, the conservatives point to the wreckage and declare “thus fails liberalism.”

Either way, it is genuine liberalism — Americanism — that is discredited, diluted, and floated away as if it never existed.  This underlying, collusive synergy between the soi-disant “opposites” against their common target is itself a function of ideological causality; that is, most of the participants are unaware of the synergy.  (I don’t envy you the unpleasantness should you ever encounter one of the few Leftists or religionists who DO know it).  This is why Objectivists and all defenders of liberty must remember that at a certain, fundamental level, we are dealing with a single enemy.

I’m quite certain that Patterson would genuinely recoil from the accusation of moral treason that I direct against him in the comment I posted on his article, and which I reproduce below.  It doesn’t matter.  His terms of thought, his underlying premises, manifest themselves according to their own internal logic no matter what Patterson tells himself he believes…. and down that road he goes.

Ideological causality is a bear.

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A Portrait, in Links, of Philosophical Panic

(Built from Randex links, OActivists posts and a Google search, with apologies to Tennyson.)

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Today is different
And tomorrow the same
It’s hard to take the world
The way that it came
Too many rapids
Keep us sweeping along
Too many captains
Keep on steering us wrong
It’s hard to take the heat –
It’s hard to lay blame
To fight the fire –
While we’re
Feeding the flames

– Neil Peart “Second Nature”, from the album “Hold your Fire”by Rush

Billy Beck is beating the drum over the murder of Jose Guerena in Arizona, and rightly so.  What I wish to highlight here is the horrible spectacle of mainstream minds raising the alarm over the increasingly violent intrusions of the government into our lives, even as their underlying ideologies move them inexorably towards that end-of-road.  To judge by the reaction around the blogosphere, both Left and Right are aghast and angry over Guerena’s death — but I will show how, in fact, both “sides” are, at root, complicit in it.

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In my previous writings on the topic of ideological causality, I have emphasized the “end of road” of an idea and/or of ideologies, as determined not by one’s intentions, but by the logic and flow of these ideas.  Even a completely passive-minded individual does not sit still; he will still drift slowly, “downhill”, towards its destination.

Today, I will sketch out the flow of ideas with a “triangle”, going both ways along the conservative road.  I start with an article by one conservative and work backwards (or “uphill”) to its root premises — and then logically back “downhill” to another article, by another conservative, which is superficially unrelated, but fundamentally trapped within the same premises.

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1. How to understand Rush Limbaugh.

2. Republicans give up trying to repeal Obamacare.

3.Environmentalist farmers returning to animal power. I wonder if these people are more interested in farming or impressing their fellow environmentalists.

4. George Monbiot despairs because environmentalism seems to be out of touch with reality.

5. Jay Cost argues that Obama will lose in 2012 because we are in the worst economic recovery in 50 years. Karl Rove says the electoral math does not look good for Obama in 2012.

6. Quin Hillyer makes a good argument that Willie Mays was the greatest baseball player ever.

UPDATE: Added the Willie Mays link.

Today we celebrate the killing of Osama Bin Laden. There has been little to celebrate in our long, muddled effort against totalitarian Islam, so let’s relish this triumph.

I think of this as a tactical victory in the context of our strategic defeat in this war. We have yet to get serious and fight this war the way it should be fought. Altruism and egalitarianism have us so submissive to world opinion that we can’t even name the enemy. The existence of the Department of Homeland Security shows that our government would rather keep its own citizens in a permanent state of terror than destroy the enemy.

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I saw Atlas Shrugged Part 1. There were 21 of us in the theater at an 8:05pm showing on Friday night. 21 is a lot more than were in the house for Kill The Irishman or The Way Back.

I liked it. It’s not the great work of art the novel deserves, but it has enough of the original in it to be entertaining and interesting.

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Another blow to the Constitution’s guarantee of free speech was delivered this time by Michigan’s 19th District Court when it recently ruled that there is a no-free-speech zone around a Mosque in Dearborn. In this zone it shall be illegal for pastor Jones to criticize and/or protest Jihad and Sharia Law in any way. Understandably many people are outraged at this obvious violation of the right to free speech. (more…)

Now that Obama has released his long form birth certificate — which shows he was born in a manger in Hawaii, surrounded by sheep and three wise men — can we move on to more important things?

Like why does a guy who has been around intellectuals and effete leftists all his life talk like a hick? Obama says ya instead of you and doin’ instead of doing. Is this something a Democrat must do to show he’s a man of the people?

(And boy, does this author look stupid.)

1. Daniel Henninger looks at Obama’s nasty character.

2. Ed Schultz uses a chart to prove we need higher taxes, but the chart looks like an indictment of spending to me. He is right that Republicans in Congress should have spoken up about Bush’s spending — then he rationalizes Obama’s spending because “every economist on both sides of the aisle said you’ve got to spend money to get out of this problem.” I can think of a few economists who didn’t say that.

3. Today’s young leftists.

4. From Gus Van Horn we read that

Bolivia is set to pass the world’s first laws granting all nature equal rights to humans.

From Wikipedia:

Reductio ad absurdum (Latin: “reduction to the absurd”) is a form of argument in which a proposition is disproven by following its implications logically to an absurd consequence.

Reductio ad absurdum is a polemical technique used against an opponent. But what do you call it when a side follows its own premise to absurdity?

5. Part 2 of Rational Public Radio’s intervew with Yaron Brook.

6. Evan Sayet is insightful about the left.

1. The Objective Standard reviews the week every weekend.

2. “The prose, like the author, belongs in hell.” P.J. O’Rourke has fun with the Chinese Tiger Mother’s book.

3. Andrew McCarthy asks two good questions:

First, why should we give a damn about the Afghan people? And second, why are we sacrificing American blood and American treasure to build an Islamist post-nation that hates America?

Peter Wehner says we should give a damn because we are all made in God’s image. Although the word never comes up, this is a dispute between two conservatives about altruism.

4. I love the look on this bird’s face.

5. Check out Rational Public Radio. These guys are good.

6. Islamic infiltration. When will we get serious?

At Cato Unbound, C. Bradley Thompson is in the middle of an unfair fight.  He is defending the thesis of his book, “Neoconservatism: An Obituary” against multiple opponents, in a series of essays — and encountering no actual intellectual opposition (if “actuality” here is measured by reference to “dealing with ideas”) from the defender of neoconservatism.  I can almost see Thompson wandering the intellectual battlefield wielding his book like Connor McLeod with his sword, asking “Why won’t they fight me?”

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In my last post, I defended the idea of unions by re-asserting the fundamentality of the right to bargain individually, versus the derivative “right” to bargain collectively.  The error involved is a hierarchy error, an exceedingly common epistemological corruption born of the inability to think in terms of principles.

Described in that manner, it seems rather academic and not really all that big of a deal, does it?  Today, I will tie together the ideas presented in that post with those I wrote about in “The Road to Hell“, to present a textbook demonstration of ideological causality in action — how ideas flow from concept to action in the real world, of how “good intentions” lead people to a hell they may in all sincerity have not intended, and defines in what manner such people remain responsible for that outcome.

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I thought 100 Voices: An Oral History of Ayn Rand by Scott McConnell might be tedious. How many times can you read that Frank O’Connor didn’t say much? (About 100 times.) The book turned out to be fascinating. I could not put it down.

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Never let a good crisis go to waste, right? With thousands dead and a staggering loss of wealth in Japan after the earthquake and tsunami, the left sees an opportunity to create hysteria over nuclear power. Lots of misery? Oh, boy — let’s use it to score political points! Gus Van Horn posts with plenty of thought-provoking links.

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The recent events in Wisconsin have brought about a sudden full-court press by the Left against Republican governor Scott Walker and his plan to rein in the state’s public sector unions.  This action is noteworthy in that it shows the same subtle desperation pattern we see deployed against certain other threats to the Left, Ayn Rand and the Tea Parties being two current and ongoing examples.

The particular pattern and degree of hyperbolic demonization, MSU (making sh#t up) and disregard of basic principles of conduct presented in both examples and in Wisconsin represents a “tell”, an indication that the Left is particularly spooked about something, something that they believe can do a great amount of damage to them and their causes.  Particularly noteworthy in this respect is that they are doing this so soon after their failed Tucson “civility” gambit — too soon for the memory of that particular bad-faith action to have faded from the mainstream memory.  Evidently, in their political calculation, they consider that particular damage to be worth it in comparison to whatever it is that has them scared in Wisconsin.  As well, there is the sharpening of anti-union sentiment across the country.

This seems odd, doesn’t it?  Why would the Left risk turning national sentiment further against one of their purported pillars — unions?  In the pursuit of what goal are they sacrificing unions per se, in favor of just the public ones?

To find the answer, one must begin by examining one of the key premises underlying unionism as the Left sees it: the notion of the “right” to bargain collectively.  Is there such a thing as the right to collective bargaining?  The answer is: yes, and no.
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I’ve attacked Hugh Hewitt many times over the years for being a Republican homer. I’m happy to give him credit now for leading the charge against the House Republicans for failing so far to cut the budget or cut government in any meaningful way.

House Republicans lost the first round of the messaging battle over the budget last week with a lame attempt to cut less than $40 billion against the Pledge to America’s goal of at least $100 billion, but then President Obama forfeited round two with an absurd budget that elicited a genuine bipartisan reaction of scorn for his fecklessness.

Proving themselves equal to the challenge of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, the new GOP majority promptly proceeded to block what looked like a clean attempt to defund Obamacare sponsored by Representative Steve King of Iowa and then followed with a series of failed amendments to cut spending featuring numerous senior Republicans voting to defend appropriations for, among other programs, the Legal Services Corporation.

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Alex Epstein finds something better than Punxsutawney Phil to celebrate today:

Most of us do not take much note when February 2 passes–and if we do, it’s just in reference to Groundhog Day. But February 2nd marks something much more important than a mythical, weather-forecasting rodent. It is the birthday of the late, great author and philosopher Ayn Rand, the woman who gave us “Atlas Shrugged” (1957), one of the most influential works of the 20th century.

Although “Atlas Shrugged” is a must read for everyone, it is particularly the case for anyone in the business world. If you ask any hundred successful businessmen chosen at random to name the book that has most inspired them, you will undoubtedly hear “Atlas Shrugged” repeated over and over. Why?

Because, in the form of a thrilling novel with inspiring heroes, “Atlas Shrugged” does something no other book has ever done: it presents the pursuit of profit, the essence of business, as a profoundly moral activity.

“Great minds talk about ideas; mediocre minds talk about events; small minds talk about people.” — Unknown

Whatever one might think about that well-known quote, it certainly describes the vast majority of Ayn Rand’s critics, ever incapable of dealing with her actual ideas. Instead, they talk about the *person*, jumping on minor aspects of her personality or conduct, or isolated passages of her writing, looking for excuses to justify their scared evasions. Two recent ones are the “speed freak” meme (the comments at that link actually do a good bit of fisking that one), and the “serial-killer fan” meme.

One of the smaller minds at BoingBoing.net, Mark Frauenfelder, brings us another example, sourced from Michael Ford at that paragon of journalism, the CessPit. This one recycles an old argument, often directed at small-government advocates of all kinds, to accuse Ayn Rand of “hypocrisy” for taking Medicare and Social Security assistance while opposing the existence of such programs.

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After reading news articles on Michigan’s new Republican Governor Rick Snyder’s State of the State address I’m disappointed. He ran on a platform of making the state government smaller, more efficient and called for a return to free market principles. But it looks to me like Mr. Snyder is not going to be the solution to Michigan’s woeful economic problems. (more…)