Moderates United

I get banned from leftwing websites constantly.  Most recently David Brin deleted comments asking either for the $100 he bet me I could not respond to him, or ANY form of substantive response.  I’m used to the use of force to suppress ideological others.  It is the only option they have, and since their creed is based on hate and irrationality, they see nothing morally or intellectually objectionable in it.

Here is my honest belief: having spent more time than 99.99% even of those who are interested in politics testing my views against opposition, I have more defensible views than virtually anyone I COULD meet on the internet, or elsewhere.  It is like building a castle, then asking someone to attack it.  You take that feedback, then do it again, and again, and again, and again, and again, for up to four hours a day for years.  The result at the end is defensible.

I mentioned David Brin.  He is wonderful and brilliant (just ask him or one of his fawning acolytes).  Best selling author, futurist, savant, bon vivant, and the inspiration for the Dos Equis commercials.

What is about to follow will be a bit lengthy, but I will summarize it here: the best and the brightest on the left have been reduced to repetition of tired talking points, and the on-going invention of lies which WOULD be true if their version of reality had any validity, but which DON’T because their worldview rests upon misunderstandings compounded by long habit.  

Here is a repeat of the crux of a longer Peter Bauer quote: 

In academic study unwarranted claims are apt to inhibit the
advance of understanding. Attempts to justify unfounded claims, or to
mask the failure to live up to them, encourage the proponents of such
claims to shift their ground. For example, when certain policies widely
canvassed by development economists as necessary for raising living
standards, such as large-scale public investment, domestic production of
capital goods, or the collectivization of agriculture, fail to bring
about the expected results, the policies themselves come to be regarded
as the very stuff of progress rather than as what they are, unsuccessful
instruments for its promotion.

The policies themselves become the object of veneration, even idolatry.  I would further submit that one of these ideals, one of these idols with feet of clay, is the very notion that the Left CARES about the poor.  They don’t.  “By their fruits ye shall know them”.  Their fruits are “fleurs du mal”.


As I now realized, even sybaritic leftists are prone to the necessity of groupthink that defines Cultural Sadeism.  They are pre-zombies, who have rejected in principle the Enlightenment pursuit of rational discourse, and the idea that all minds are equal, if they pursue reason dispassionately. 

But they have not rejected the IDEA that they are rational.  On the contrary–Dr. Brin.  Let me quote you this eminence grise:

we may have a chance to
create a fantastic new civilization on this planet, by returning to and
enhancing the Enlightenment methods that brought us to this party.
 Methods like transparency and reciprocal accountability and divided power and pragmatic negotiation that
have nothing whatsoever to do with “left” or “right” but that are
deeply threatened by one side in our current culture war.[note that he says they have nothing to do with “left” or “right”, except that the “right” is by definition wrong.  Irony is apparently above his intellectual capacity, a common enough affliction among such savages.]

Again: one wing of
American political life — the same one that was wrong in all the
previous stages of civil war — has veered away from the logical,
courteous, cautious, pragmatic and intellectually cogent conservatism of
giants like Goldwater and Buckley, into fevered fact-aversion
unparalleled in the U.S. since the pre-1861 Know Nothing party. I’d love to see a mature conservative or Libertarian movement present at the negotiating table, standing up sensibly for the role of competition in a mixed and agile civilization.  

These are nice ideals, are they not?  But does he practice them?  Of course not.  Here is one response from him, his last one which even attempted lucidity:

Mountain Goat, you are just as crazy on the right as Akra is on the
left. You declaim counter-facts with blithe assuredness that is simply
astonishing. But it is flat out nonsense.

Tax rates are at near
their lowest levels in 70 years. That is a flat-out fact. It is a fact
fact fact and no armwaving you do can even remotely make actual real
facts go away.

Supply siders have said repeatedly that lowering
taxes on the wealthy would result in investment in plants and equipment
and productivity that would result in increased tax revenues and thus
lower public debt. NOT ONE OF THESE THINGS EVER EVER EVER EVEN REMOTELY
CAME CLOSE TO HAPPENING. The rich, especially, do not invest tax
largesse in plants and equipment and productive assets. They… do….
not.

You appeal to nonexistent facts. You appeal to authority.
You make grand declarations about your superiority as a debater… all
of which are cheap tricks of high school freshmen and I tell you now,
you are a very bad debater.

I CHALLENGE YOU AGAIN with money
behind it. If you cannot come up with one counter-example to my broad
accusations, then you leave those accusations on the table as the
assumed leading hypotheses.

I have defined terms perfectly well.
I have asked you to name ONE clade of intellect not under attack by
Fox. ONE unambiguous metric of national health that improved under
Republican rule. Name one. Name it now.

Start with Clinton’s
surpluses and debt payback. Now subtract the iraq and Afghanistan wars
and Bush’s tax cuts. That leads directly to precisely the debt you are
now screaming about. Show us how the math comes out any different in
your world. Show us.

Show us now. I offer you $100 to show us. Do the math. (I can. I have. You’d lose.

This is 100% a GOP deficit.)

I responded substantively.  You can read the full thread here.  Even now, if anyone reading this who wants to challenge anything I said, have at it, here.  I take all comers and always will.  My claim to want to learn, to be rational, is quite sincere, as I show over and over and over. 

I won’t summarize all my responses (I will note in passing that I am using I a lot.  Since I am talking about me, it is hard not to), and post his contribution to show in his own words his attitude and overall tone, which are not at all consistent with civil discourse, or respect for Enlightenment ideals, or even the concept of FACT.  I offered him sundry facts, and he didn’t respond AT ALL.

I will note, first, that I asked him at least 4 times to define “Progress”, since he self defines as a “practical/pragmatic progressive”.  He refused repeatedly, then falsely claimed he had done it.  I came up with what I felt and feel was a good set of definitions–one per cultural activity–which I posted in the last week or two under “Progress”, I think.

The details are boring.  They amount, among other things, to pointing out that Fox, per se, includes dissenters like Alan Colmes, and that calling every news story on every day an assault on the intellect is ITSELF an assault on the intellect.  All you have to do with leftists is wait for them to accuse you of something, and you will know what moral or cognitive norm they are violating.

Budget: no President before Obama has spent $3 trillion.  What else do you need to know to falsify the farcical claim that Bush even now is the cause of our deficits?

Etc.  The details are there, and include an 11 page refutation of Keystone Cops Economics, aka Demand Side, aka Keynesian, aka Anti-Rationalist economics, which I also linked on a post in the last week or two.  Net tax revenues went up under Bush AFTER the tax cuts, which the Demand-Siders claim, counter-factually, is impossible.  We know what income tax receipts are.  There is no need for theoretical speculation.

Again, the story here is not another failure of a high-IQ, highly educated leftist to fail to defend their ideas.  It is common.  I just want to emphasize that what you see here represents ALL THEY HAVE.  There is NO argument that they make which withstands scrutiny.

When you look at modern China or the Soviet Union, or Cuba, what you see is the physical expression of intellectual psychopathology.  The question is not whether or not leftist ideas work or not: they plainly do not.  The question is why sane people continue to advocate them, and the answer is that either they are not sane–the core meme generators–or they are complacent, and never actually ask hard questions about the doctrines they are taught from an early age.

Oh: the task of the rational is a hard one.  You have to face down frothing hatred with equanimity–which often fails me, as in the Brin “debate”–and do far more research and thought.  On the left, they are handed talking points at school, and merely need to repeat them. 

Finally, I will note that the right also has talking points.  The LARGE difference is that the talking points of the right survive under a microscope, and leftist ideas cannot.  They die in the light.

That’s enough for now. 

 

I like to debate.  It sharpens my mind, forces me to learn my topic, and develops emotional stamina and humility when practiced with sincerity. I have reached a point where I would RELISH the opportunity to take on ANYONE on the planet that wanted to cross swords.  Krugman would be easy, but I would even be willing to take on Stephen Hawking or Daniel Dennett or Richard Dawkins on the topic of ontology. Worst case I learn something, best case they learn something.  Usually what happens in practice, of course, is my opponents (and it is an agonistic enterprise: truth telling almost of its essence involve emotional violence, since setting aside complacency and unexamined but core assumptions is painful) first try to change the topic, then insult me, then shut up.

And self evidently, most of the time that silence is nothing like acquiescence or learning: it is first brooding, then forgetting.  Einstein posited that human stupidity is infinite.  It is not: human VANITY is, and vanity, when wounded, does not adapt through thinking new thoughts, but in anger at the unwanted intruder in a once-happy home. I know this.  I continue to debate to make my own arguments stronger, and to learn new things.  I am often forced into learning things I did not know.  This is a good outcome. I also come across new thoughts, which is VERY useful even when the discussion itself had no persuasive value at all.

That is the prologue.  I would simply, here, like to ask once again that in regard to a debate started on this thread that David Brin, the author, either respond to me with arguments based upon actual facts, and proper use of reason, or pay me the $100 he wagered me that I could not address what, truth be told, were some childishly inane and even propagandistic themes, that scarcely rose to the level of argument.

But SUCH IS THE STATE OF DEBATE IN THIS COUNTRY, and in large measure around the world.  Educated, VERY educated people with 150 plus IQ’s say demonstrably STUPID things, over and over, and over.  How are the less educated, less intelligent supposed to sort through the horseshit on NBC and NPR and New York Times?  They can’t, and they don’t, which is why it is ESSENTIAL that the people capable of dealing skillfully with abstraction DO SO.

All they do is posit, once and for all, that, say, Medicare is the best way to protect the health of the old, then simply repeat it.  The abstractions they propose depend upon assumptions they are eminently unwilling to examine.  As I have said often, one stops deserving the label moderate, or liberal, when one no longer CARES about the effects of policies, and focuses all effort simply on the implementation of those policies.  Mao’s agricultural policies killed tens of millions, but he DIDN’T CARE.

I keep seeing that “Republicans have no jobs plan”.  This assumes that it is the job of politicians to create jobs.  But ask yourself: when a local architectural firm decides they need a new draft engineer, did the government make that decision?  When a Wendy’s franchise owner decides to build a new location, employees several dozen entry level workers who would otherwise be without jobs, does the government make that decision?  Of course not.

I keep getting accused of repeating talking points.  To the extent I use talking points, they are my own.  Here is today’s: The government can only create jobs it first stole from the private sector.

Look at the deficit projections for nearly any nation on Earth (with the possible exception of China, whose economic situation is interesting, but far less robust than commonly supposed) and you will see burgeoning debts for decades into the future.

At the same time, the Bank for International Settlements group is planning to increase required banking reserve ratios over the next decade.  A shrinking money supply and growing debt will collide in about 5 years.  How this will not result in a financial meltdown is far from clear to me; nor is it clear that this is not the desired outcome.

Given that monetary policy is set entirely by an entirely unelected and unaccountable set of bankers, would it not be accurate to describe the monetary component of our economy as centrally planned?  The Fed more or less determines interest rates, reserve ratios for banks, and sets banking policy generally.  It is in charge of our banking system, but does not answer to Congress or the President.  A small group–a Politburo, shall we call it?–meets and decides, and thus it is done.

On a tangentially related note, consider Fort Knox.  The Federal government bought up hundreds of tons of gold or more, using taxpayer money.  It did this because until 1934 or so dollars were technically redeemable in gold.  It did this because until 1972 or so foreigners could technically redeem their dollars in gold.  Then we went off the gold standard.

Who owns the gold?  The Federal Reserve, which is to say a committee representing the interests of the largest banks in the United States.  So, it was paid for by the American public–much of it confiscated at what amounted to gunpoint by FDR–and then abandoned rather than sold.  Why?  It’s a good question.

And given that the Fed answers to no one, reports to no one, why should we not assume they simply sold the gold off for their personal enrichment?  What would stop them?  Why wouldn’t they?  Were there any laws governing the matter?  I seriously doubt it.

Hell is a thorn within your soul which you nurture, embrace, and feed.

There is an unexamined assumption that a properly “designed” society is safe.  You are free from the risks of unemployment, physical injury, war, natural disaster, etc: substantially everything but death, and they are working on death (literally: the plan is to “download” our personalities, presumed to effectively be software, onto non-perishable hardware, and to live forever; to what purpose, I don’t think they can say).

But I would question this assumption.  Why do people ride motorcycles?  Is it to increase safety?  Why do people snow ski, or climb mountains?  As I have posted earlier, the research clearly shows that children who are not exposed to real risk–which in any large demographic will lead to real injury, even death–are less meaningful (my word) as adults, less able to wrestle with ambiguity, less able to manage fears, less able to march forward towards the Sun.  I picture them huddled down, near the ground, unable to stand up for want of a skeleton.

Historically, this is the role war played: it energized people, mobilized their spirits, demanded and received great and heroic efforts.  Yet, war is stupid.  It is the last recourse of exhausted minds, who have for long period of time failed to see far enough ahead to make intelligent countermoves.

Doris Lessing wrote an interesting book called, if memory serves, “The marriages between Zones 3, 4, and 5”, in which the protagonist, a queen in an utterly feminine realm (think Sweden) has to marry a soldier from an eminently manly realm.  [I will note in passing that one can perceive, I think, echoes of her Communist past in her positing the Canopeans as benevolent rulers whose dictates were always correct, even when incomprehensible; she mentions organizing an society as an army again in Mara and Dann.  I think for the more sensitive it is hard not to see the suffering of the world, and not want to find and elevate an enlightened ruler to make things calm and rational.  I may of course be completely off the mark here.]

At first, she is disgusted with how course and unrefined they are.  Over time, she comes to respect their discipline and comraderie.  Then, the order comes for the king to marry a princess from another zone, one completely wild, and apparently modeled on Afghanistan.  The queen realizes you need wildness, you need chaos, you need the unpredictable, in order to grow. 

Upon realizing this, she decides to visit Zone 2, which is a rarified realm (note: I read this twenty years ago, so I may be a little fuzzy on the details).  She cannot quite breathe the air, but she realizes it is better than her own Zone.  It took the events of her marriage and contact with Zone 5 to make this connection.

Metaphorically, I think this symbolizes how life should be lived.  I don’t think a perfect society will be free of random death, or even disease.  We may conquer all these things, then decide to reintroduce them, particularly once it is generally realized that death is not final at all, that we are spirits who come here to grow.

And I think we can see shades of this in some utopian scenarios.  Take the Hunger Games.  A people achieves complete material abundance, but still feels the need to participate–albeit vicariously–in the chaos of violence and death.  The shades of death and despair, pain and fear and hunger and desire–and love, a chaotic force that both creates and destroys in its emotional form–will always haunt us.

For my own purposes, I have found the work of the Tibetans the most practical.  And it is interesting that as wonderful as some of their practices are, they find the need to incorporate death, in the form of bone flutes, and terrifying masks, and even drinking from skulls, if I have understood correctly.

As long as we are on earth, Halloween will always be with us.  The task is to integrate these energies usefully.  There are many ways to do this.  I have suggested a few.

When it comes to minimum wage laws, there are three possible outcomes: that the State mandated wage is less than those already paid; that it is equal to them; or that it is more than market conditions would normally allow.

In the first two cases, it is unnecessary.  The third condition, then, is the one which matters.

Labor, like any other commodity, is subject to supply and demand.  When there is a superabundance of work and not enough workers, wages rise.  When unemployment is high, and work is scarce, wages fall.  In all cases, business owners need workers to make money.  It is never in the interest of anyone who wants to grow a business not to grow a business by not hiring people.  Hiring always means more money for the business owner, IF there is money left over after he has paid his expenses, of which the largest is usually labor.

Let us say that a business owner collects $1,000 a week in revenues, and pays out $600 in costs.  If he can hire someone for $200 a week, he can still clear a profit, and free himself up for marketing.  If, however, he is forced by law to pay $400 a week, he will not hire anyone. He can’t afford it.

Let us say that someone desperately needs work, and would be willing to work for $200, but is forced by law to charge $400.  Both people lose.

Leftists do not ask themselves what the people who are competing for low wage jobs want.  They ASSUME they would rather either be paid more than they are perceived as being worth, or be unemployed.  This is almost certainly an error, though.

We have some 50% unemployment in black neighborhoods and poor rural areas, which is close to the high school drop out rate in both areas, and there is probably a lot of overlap between the two.

Kids who have not even graduated high school offer very little in terms of job and life skills.  If they are going to get hired by anyone to do anything, they will in most cases need to discount their labor.  Such a first job would amount to an apprenticeship.  By law, they can’t do this, and so in many cases they go years without getting that first job, never learn work skills, and never become optimally productive as citizens. 

Minimum wage is not intended for people who have careers, who put their time in over a period of years.  Even Burger King and the like pay more than minimum wage for virtually anyone who has worked there more than six months.

These laws do not raise up anyone.  On the contrary, they represent a barrier for entry to the job market for people who in many cases really, really need a job.

Spent the day writing this.  Not quite happy with it, but I am tired, and know the rest of my week will be busy, and the likelihood is I will never return to it.

My last post got me to thinking, and rather than append this to that, I decided to do a separate post.

I have long felt a qualitative difference
between the blues and country music.  I enjoy the blues.  On my iPod I
have albums by Robert Balfour and  Junior Kimbraugh, a few singles from
John Lee Hooker (I should note I have a VERY old iPod that I have maxed
out at perhaps 500 songs), and have spent many happy hours at blues
bars, particularly in Memphis and Chicago.

At the same
time, though, I have never felt the blues as cathartic.  It is music
which entrances you, or makes you move.  But it fundamentally feels–to
me, and this is paradigmatic subjectivity–like time is standing still,
that no matter what you do the situation cannot be transcended.  Blues
is a break from existence, not a deepening of experience, of tragedy,
from which you emerge renewed.  There is no form which it is trying to
create.  It is merely trying to prevent emotional stagnation.

There is no code in blues music, no sense of honor and dignity, which is abundant in country music.

Country
has many songs about boozing, jail and cheating.  It also has many
songs about hard work, patriotism, God, honor, and family.  It is a
comprehensive look at life as it is actually lived by most of us: full
of contradictions, high and low moments, tragedy and comedy, with most
of us looking ridiculous most of the time, but also capable of quiet
moments of dignity.

This is one man’s opinion.

Edit: I will add that this basic mindset was inherited fully by rock and roll and all its off-shoots, including techno, heavy metal, rap, and others.  I read yesterday that Michael Phelps liked Deadmau5, who I had never heard of.  Watch this video.  Is this life affirming music?  The one mouse symbolically kills the other.  Nobody cares.  This is music in which fantasy is all.  Nothing is real.  It is a break from reality, presumably fueled for many by marijuana or Ecstacy.

Or consider the image of the rock star, which I’m pretty sure I’ve talked about.  What does it say about our culture that our icons are self absorbed and self destructive narcissists whose lives revolve around the most primal of sensations?  What does rock music build?  Nothing.

On the contrary, the rock star says to you that your life is insufficient if you are not “living large”.  If you are raising kids, paying your bills, living a quiet life, that is not enough.  You are losing out.  There is so much out there, if you just go get it.  And people try. They try and go get it.

I lived in California for a number of years.  What I remember, particularly in northern California, is that virtually everyone I met who grew up there has some sort of grotesque  and ridiculous story of their home life, of self involved and selfish parents putting their kids through ridiculous exercises.  This is the outcome of the hippy movement, which oriented around unstructured sensation.

Life is not just about the pursuit of sensation.  In fact, such a pursuit leads to the destruction of all the worthy sensations, particularly true love, which involves loyalty, the capacity to put your own immediate needs aside, and time.

In my honest view, it is only barely an exaggeration to say that it is country music fans, nearly alone, who have prevented the wholesale decline of this nation into complete moral mediocrity.  They are the large red segments seen in every State when the national votes are tallied.

We see bright, shiny lies up in the elevated halls of our political elite.  We see bright spotlights, and adulatory media coverage of its chosen true sons.  But none of it is real, and common sense alone is needed to see this.