Apples, oranges, and pears, Oh my!

Fossil-Fuel Divestment

I would have thought these are 6 separate and politically separable issues.

1. Do we need or want to leave some significant portion of fossil fuels unused in order to prevent horrific damage as a result of the added climate change using it would cause?
2. Should someone pay reparations/compensation to someone for black slavery? Do we want to, if "someone" is us?
3. Should someone pay reparations/compensation to someone for colonialism? Do we want to, if "someone" is us?
4. Should someone pay someone to defray costs associated with climate change? Do we want to, if "someone" is us?
5. Ought to or does one have a positive/negative attitude toward capitalism/socialism?
6. Ought to or does one prefer Republicans to Democrats or vice versa?

I assume, of course, that what matters in the end is what we want even if we fall for the moral schlock people dish out for us.

But, as for me, I think morality is bunk and I want no part of 1 through 4.

See the posts on amoralism for an explanation of those schlock and bunk bits.

I have a positive attitude toward both capitalism and socialism, though either can do devastating harm if overdone or handled carelessly.

And I have a distinctly negative attitude toward both major parties, but less so toward the Democrats owing to their position as the lesser evil in the class war and their not being quite so bad on foreign affairs.

Anyway, Stanley Kurtz is running all 6 questions together.

Now, if the Republicans would just dump their blockhead conservatism they could continue to oppose the Democrats on all the rest and what he thinks is the crucial point, the attitude of the young toward the differences between the bare-knuckle capitalism insisted on by the conservative-dominated Republicans and the moderate progressivism of the Democrats, won’t matter.

The Republicans having seen the light on American social democracy, people will choose between the Republicans and the Democrats in the voting booth on other issues.

Social issues, say.

Or issues 1 through 4, say.

Not a chance in hell the conservatives in control of the Republican Party will even consider letting things play out that way.

When you get down to it, they’re in business for one thing only, to repeal a century of progressivism.

And they can’t do that by letting the Republican Party escape their death-grip.

And that, by the way, works out just fine for the liberals, too.

Right now they know well they are still getting a lot of votes exactly because they are, on matters of social democracy and traditional progressivism, by a pretty fair distance the lesser evil.

If that distance narrows, Democrats look out!

And then say goodbye to social liberalism, global redistribution, and the prospect for global liberal interventionism.

Two paths diverged in a wood

House has its own bipartisan immigration plan

The significant difference between this and the White House, Democratic plan is that there is no special, streamlined road to citizenship and voting, just for the illegals to be legalized.

Both plans would mean they needn’t hide and are safe from the ICE-man.

I don’t know what difference that makes as regards earned benefits eligibility (Social Security, Medicare).

But I think it means the folks affected would under either plan enjoy the normal rights of US labor.

Under either plan, their children born here are and would be citizens.

But it looks like both sides are aware that unless a special pathway is created to citizenship most of these illegals, even if legalized, will never get there.

Hence the Democrat/Republican split on the issue, given the universal expectation that if these folks get to vote at all they’ll mostly vote Democratic.

Racial attack-ninja goes at Scalia, again

Voting is no ‘racial entitlement,’ Justice Scalia

Nor, of course, did he say it was.

Nor did he say anything inconsistent with the truth of her brief history lesson.

What he said was about the politics of renewal of Section 5, and what he said was true.

Irrelevant to the question whether intervention under Section 5 continues necessary, but true.

Anyway, attacks of this kind have been going on for days, I guess in preparation for an expected adverse ruling on Section 5 later this year.

Do they think he is the judge most likely to be shouted into changing his vote?

Do they think he is the judge most likely to resign out of stress-fatigue from being beat up this way?

Do they think they can set him up for impeachment?

Or is this just more of the usual identity politics hoopla wherein Democrats flood the world with accusations of Republican racism to enhance the loyalty of their black and other non-white constituencies?

In any case, I have seen nothing said by anyone making these attacks that lends support to the claim that Section 5 intervention is still needed.

Or anything that supports the claim that the court owes deference to the Congress on this matter.

Much less have they said anything to show that what Scalia irrelevantly said is untrue.

There is nothing to all these attacks but the politics of personal destruction, as Bill Clinton called it at one time or another.

And to think I used to like this woman.

Not so much, any more.

No, I wouldn’t say so.

Not exactly reality-based

Romney: heart told him he'd win, until he saw FL.

I feared he would win but, though I briefly thought he might pull it off in the aftermath of the first debate, I never actually believed he would.

Well, religious people more than others have a knack for thinking what they want to be true actually is true.

And Romney is reputed a religious man.

American Nietzsche

American Nietzsche

A lot of very interesting history presented in a rich cake of fashionable academic bullshit.

As all bright people know, there are many dishonest ways for an unscrupulous and arrogant person to make a living.

Some of them bring accolades and high regard, too.

All the better.

An awful lot of trouble for what?

Return of the Wild: Will Humans Make Way for the Greatest Conservation Experiment in Centuries?

Only if they are made to by someone much more powerful than themselves.

Just as he intends, no doubt.

What’s in a word?

Body of Proof

It is no accident one of her male victims asked about her at his first exposure, “Is she always that emasculating?”

To which the answer from a male of much more experience was, of course, “Yes.”

Though the truth is she’s every bit as much the insane, hyper-PMS bitch all the time with everybody, women included.

So why “that emasculating” rather than “such an insane bitch”?

Consider her fans.

Consider what they want.

In a recent episode she willingly helped the villains to prepare to blow up an airliner, meanwhile throwing off the cops, to save the life of her daughter.

Once she realized they would kill her and her daughter, anyway, she sabotaged their efforts out of spite.

Nothing like that unconditional love of a Mom.

Democracy and mob rule

Even those most sympathetic to popular government among the men who wrote and adopted the US Constitution generally shared the view of the ancients – and everybody else up to their own time – that actual democracy, literal rule by the people at large, is mob rule.

Quoting Plato against democratic idealism, Hamilton reputedly once said (though I forget the occasion), “Your people, sir, is a great beast!”

The people are, after all, willfully ignorant, shockingly stupid, imprudent, incompetent, often malign, and led and misled only by demagogues.

Hence Madison’s pride that the republics of the states of the union and of the United States featured no assembly and gave no direct power of decision to the people.

Rule by full-time officials delegated for the purpose was supposed to avoid the down-side of popular government in the form of outright democracy.

But that can work only if the delegated officials are not in the statistical sense a representative sample of the people themselves and if they are to a degree insulated from popular influence while in office.

That is to say, this can work only if the peoples’ representatives and rulers really are their betters: more educated and intelligent, more prudent, and more competent even if not reliably less malign.

A caveat.

The greater and more direct the role of the people in selecting officials for the most important offices the more the entire process is dominated by demagogy, chicane, and what Bentham called sinister influence.

On the other hand, as the role of the people is attenuated the opportunity is improved for their rulers to exploit them mercilessly and totally neglect their interests, even as a necessary support for their loyalty and obedience to the government is diminished.

However and as to that, on the whole it is less important that the role of the people be strengthened than that the power of the few to use the government to have their way with the many be minimized.

Government can never literally be by the people.

It is always and by its nature government of the people.

The trick, for the democrat, is to make it government for the people.

A bug or a feature?

The Democrats’ reliance of a very long sequence of primaries and caucuses to select a candidate gives a huge role to the big money men (the so-called “money primaries”) and to liberal political activists.

The previous system, much briefer, gave much more power to party officials and party elected officials and much less to the money men and the activists.

The activists and their favorites at a series of conventions, notably including the convention of 1972 at which George McGovern was nominated, forced the change.

Was this an improvement for the country?

Good lord, no.

A bug or a feature?

A Republic, Not an Empire

Pat says we went off the rails of pacific republican virtue when we left the continent and sought conquests, not of new territory for eventual incorporation as states, but to sustain global power.

Ralph Kecham points out in his introduction that a very common worry among the anti-federalists who opposed the constitution in which PB finds only the perfection of republican virtue and wisdom was that the new national government to be created by it, by intention far stronger and more unified than the government then current under the Articles of Confederation, would lead directly to standing armies, high taxes, wars, and empire.

The Anti-Federalist Papers and the Constitutional Convention Debates

And it was, in fact, the intention of the nationalists, deceptively re-baptized “federalists,” to make of America a strong, rich, and expansive nation and a world power.

Pat simply blinds himself to that and to the entire history of America’s westward sweep to the Pacific and the continuity of our subsequent “rise to globalism” with that expansion.

The whole was a single movement that began almost immediately after the Constitution was adopted.

The predictions of the anti-federalists were fully borne out by history.