The New Clarion

Well, my kitchen is clean, which means I’m avoiding novel writing. (I have only one resolution this year: at least 1,000 words a day, which is 4 pp.) Let me put it off a little longer by writing my first blog post of 2013.

I just read Obama’s election night speech because a recent PJTV show reminds us of a remarkable passage:

What makes America exceptional are the bonds that hold together the most diverse nation on Earth, the belief that our destiny is shared — (cheers, applause) — that this country only works when we accept certain obligations to one another and to future generations, so that the freedom which so many Americans have fought for and died for come with responsibilities as well as rights, and among those are love and charity and duty and patriotism. That’s what makes America great. (Cheers, applause.)

This is one of Obama’s many explicit statements of collectivism. He doesn’t hide his collectivism; it’s out there for anyone to think about and judge.

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Dated 12/14/2012:

I’m not going to talk about guns right now. I’m sure someone is going to call for some law at some point, and drag me into that. But, right now, I want to highlight that sick, murderous freaks are a product of a sick society.

Ours is a sick society. One that does not value reason. One that does not value control over one’s faculties. One that does not have a proper concept of a healthy self, and therefore no concept of healthy self-esteem – genuine, real self-esteem, not the fake imitation they make with gold stars.
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I thought Romney would win in a landslide. I was not alone. There was a lot of confidence on the right. Even Romney’s campaign, with all its super-secret polling that is supposed to be so much better than anything we laymen see, was surprised by the defeat on November 6, 2012.

How could we get it so wrong? Was our thinking the triumph of hope over experience?

Here was my thinking: Obama was campaigning to shore up his base. Romney already had his base — where else would they go? — and was campaigning to win moderates and independents. Therefore, Romney would get more votes. Moreover, the polls are all wrong due to liberal bias and the Bradley Effect, in which a small percentage of those polled lie that they will vote for a black man because they do not want to be thought of as racist.

This entire line of thinking turned out to be wrong. The polls were right. The Democrat base was energized and turned out on election day. Most astonishing, Romney did not have his base. Romney got 3,000,000 fewer votes than McCain in 2008 and 7,000,000 fewer than Bush in 2004. If he had just won what McCain got, he would have defeated Obama.

So what happened?

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The men who are not interested in philosophy need it most urgently: they are most helplessly in its power.

The men who are not interested in philosophy absorb its principles from the cultural atmosphere around them—from schools, colleges, books, magazines, newspapers, movies, television, etc. Who sets the tone of a culture? A small handful of men: the philosophers. Others follow their lead, either by conviction or by default.

On September 27, I tweeted that Conor Friedersdorf “does not understand the Left, at any level”.  I did so on the grounds of this article by Friedersdorf, which included this line:

I don’t see how anyone who confronts Obama’s record with clear eyes can enthusiastically support him. I do understand how they might concluded that he is the lesser of two evils, and back him reluctantly, but I’d have thought more people on the left would regard a sustained assault on civil liberties and the ongoing, needless killing of innocent kids as deal-breakers. (Emphasis mine.)

I, who do understand the Left, immediately thought: *Why* would anyone ever think that?

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Naturalist writers who don’t have the imagination to come up with new ideas run out of stories to tell. They make a big splash with a novel about their youth or their particular racial niche, and then they are pretty much done. They “write themselves out.”

Barack Obama’s speech at the 2012 Democrat National Convention was the work of a man who is written out. He has nothing new to say; he lacks even the energy to make it look like he’s trying. But that didn’t stop him from going on for 37 empty minutes. Stalin and Castro were famous for droning on for hours before a (literally) captive audience. I believe Obama and Clinton would do the same if they could. Standing before a large, adoring audience must be the peak experience for a collectivist.

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Had H.L. Mencken been revived from his grave to watch the last night of the Republican National Convention, he would have recognized the scene. He would have heard the anecdotal, folksy speeches, the paeans to family and God, and he would have understood that the booboisie is alive and well in America. He would have said something wittier than even Mark Steyn or James Wolcott could come up with and then asked to be killed and returned to his grave.

I understand that the Obama campaign and their Democrat PAC’s have spent, according to one number I read, $120 million attacking Mitt Romney. (Obama has outspent Romney three to one so far, but that does not stop him from whining because Romney now has more money.) I understand that the American people, in our dumbed-down age, are susceptible to such an idiotic argument as Romney is mean because he ran a company that, in the course of restructuring businesses, fired people. (And that attack is the Democrats at their most intellectual. When you descend below that, you get nonsense about Romney being mean to his dog. Seriously. This is what the left has become.)

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Mitt Romney chose Congressman Paul Ryan of Wisconson to be his Vice-President running mate. This is the boldest and most impressive move of Romney’s political career so far. He chose his intellectual superior to run with him, the opposite of what Obama did when he chose Joltin’ Joe Biden, man of a thousand gaffes.

Let’s be clear up front: Ryan is not the perfect candidate. He has HUGE problems. He is a religious conservative, an enemy of abortion, and has voted for such statist power grabs as the prescription medicine bill and TARP. In other words, he is a Republican. He is most certainly NOT an Objectivist, although the left seems to think it will help them to pin that label on him.

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The goal of the “liberals”—as it emerges from the record of the past decades—was to smuggle this country into welfare statism by means of single, concrete, specific measures, enlarging the power of the government a step at a time, never permitting these steps to be summed up into principles, never permitting their direction to be identified or the basic issue to be named. Thus statism was to come, not by vote or by violence, but by slow rot—by a long process of evasion and epistemological corruption, leading to a fait accompli. (The goal of the “conservatives” was only to retard that process.)

Ayn Rand, “Extremism”, or the Art of Smearing

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Blogger Ann Althouse comments on the knee-jerk Leftist response by E.J. Dionne to yet another mass “gun-free zone” shooting incident:

I’m fascinated by this notion that we do sometimes pass laws and therefore that means that we should pass laws. The resistance to passing laws is some nasty dysfunction caused by a nefarious interest group — here, the NRA — but good people want to do something.

My comment to her post follows:

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The federal government long ago expanded its powers far beyond anything James Madison and his fellow framers imagined. The Constitution is in reality meaningless, but the Supreme Court, whose purpose is to make sure our laws conform to the Constitution, twists its reasoning to justify interventionist laws as the mixed economy marches toward fascism.

Yesterday the court upheld Obamacare as a tax increase, and sure enough, Congress has the power to levy taxes. It’s right there in the Constitution; you can see for yourself.

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“Great minds discuss ideas. Average minds discuss events. Small minds discuss people.”

– attributed to Eleanor Roosevelt

As many Objectivists, myself included, are the geeky sort, today’s XKCD has already become the subject of some discussion, particularly at Jenn Casey’s place.  The following is a refined version of the comment I left there.

Randall Munroe is an extraordinarily sharp guy, whose geeky sense of humor I love.  More than once he’s written about an idea or thought that I’ve had and never heard elsewhere; one of my favorites is the notion of using tranducers and a phase inverter to mess around with the idiots with big booming car stereos.

He has referenced Ayn Rand in the past here, in the mouseover text.  I didn’t find that one particularly offensive; I saw that one as more of a good-natured sort of ribbing rather than the usual sort of gratuitous diss we normally get, in contrast to Trey Peden who was more offended.  Disappointingly, Randall Munroe’s latest jab confirms that Trey’s call was right the first time.

However, in joining the cottage industry of garden variety Ayn Rand bashing, Munroe’s ultimate joke ends up on the others in that cottage.

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