The robot future is coming

So says Jonah Goldberg at NRO, today.

And when the robots do all the work?

Creative and scientific and cultural - all the work?

Jonah will starve unless Jonah owns robots.

Only robot owners - capitalists - will eat.

They will do nothing for their command of all the wealth.

But they will be owners, and so not takers.

Right?

But it's a very small step from a robot economy to a robot planet.

No?

No philosopher Kings

If he is wise, the philosopher is an atheist and an amoralist.

Judging by the general run of men, he is in some degree averse to the distress of others but, personal acquaintances aside, he is for the most part indifferent to their fate.

Indeed, again judging by the ordinary run of men, he fears his fellows more than he loves them, and his feelings and preferences are colored accordingly.

All the same, his preferences don't suffice to decide many questions that others among that same general run can decide only by appeal to moral or religious beliefs, if at all.

Assuming, of course, that he has no personal stake in the matter, nor does anyone whose fate concerns him personally.

But that is what, according to the classical view, the wise man, the philosopher King, is supposed to do.

Decide all those controversies.

Make law for all those cases.

But with no stake in the matter and neither moral nor religious convictions to guide him, absent both a love for others unnatural as hen's teeth and a not so unnatural general malevolence, he must truly be indifferent.

Let's put the question a little differently.

Don't imagine you had to make all those decisions.

Imagine someone else with no stake making those decisions, and able to make them with complete impunity.

Scary thought, eh?

Too many people like to wreck anthills or torment helpless animals . . . . or children.

Ordinary people, sufficiently informed, can sometimes decide which of the major parties is, based on its policy commitments, likely the lesser evil or the greater good, judging by their own interests and, though in most cases it counts for much less, by those of their acquaintances.

A more interesting question is how the ordinary politician arrives at the preferences that will enable him to decide what to support and what to oppose, once in office.

Assuming he isn't simply for sale.

In any case, it's not wisdom.

The left bails on the sex biz

Too young to be old hat, the KOS gang, rather than deploring them for blue-nosed absurdity, rejoice in prosecutions in Texas of male noncoms for recruiting female troops into a prostitution ring as an attack on or proof of sexual harassment in the military.

Not even a hint the girls are being or should be prosecuted.

Much less that the trade should be legal.

Numerous writers at left venues, mostly women, are mad as heck and beating up the military for its "corrosive gender culture," blah, blah, blah.

Coercion is as taken for granted in this case as Zimmerman's guilt in the Trayvon Martin affair.

Not to say it might not have been involved, perhaps even as the main inducement.

But nothing could be further from the minds of any of these irate feminazis than the possibility that prostitution might be an uncoerced choice that ought to be legal and - gasp! - morally acceptable.

I think we need a few new words, here, friends.

Whoreophobia, perhaps.

Or Johnophobia.

Pocahontas for president

On the money and class war issues, anyway, Elizabeth Warren is to the left of both Clintons and most office holding or office seeking Democrats.

I find it difficult to think she's more hawkish or more in Israel's pocket than Hillary, though of course she might be.

So, pending dissuasion, I think I am with her.

Besides, it's time.

Really, it's time for America to put a female redskin in the White House.

Don't you think?

Yes, that's a joke.

Look it up.

But I mean it about supporting her.

Ukraine’s future is not our problem

Ukraine's future in peril under President Yanukovych

Nor was the Russo-German partition of Poland in 1939, any more than the three previous partitions of Poland.

Why does America spend a fortune on the military?

Why can’t America go more than a decade or so without a new war?

People just like it, I guess.

So guys like this Freedom House fellow have always been able to bully, cajole, and wheedle Americans into ridiculous wars.

Honest, disinterested advice to the young? 

Leave the country and don't even look back. 

America will not change in this regard in the foreseeable future. 

Nor will its political right be less revolting or less powerful. 

Canada is cold but good.

Excellent, in fact. 

Too late for me, but not for you. 

Things there ought not to be

There really shouldn't be a “national Christmas tree,” unless some church or private party in DC or somewhere wants to put one up on its or his own property.

Separation, etc.

Which is not to say the president can't have one in the White House or on the lawn, I suppose.

Interesting question.

Good grief. The man has a skull full of mush.

The pope, I mean.

Reading the passages of his "The Joy of the Gospel" that deal with the economy, one gets that impression.

The rest might be worse, for all I know.

But this is quite bad enough.

This does seem to take us outside traditional Catholic social teaching, mostly in the direction of ick and ooze.

 

And muddle.

Yes, that's it. 

Ick, ooze, and muddle.

Here.

Yes, there are sentences that make some sense and might have been written by a secular progressive.

But they are very few, and there is far too much extravagance, goop, muddle, and religious silliness for liberals to find much of an ally in this clownish priest.

Have you ever read "Being There"?

The left is basically just spinning this guy like mad.

The right are beside themselves.

Limbaugh more bush every day

Now he has angrily denounced the pope as, you guessed it (but how could you miss?), a Marxist.

Just barking like some demented, exceptionally stupid, rabid dog.

Free exercise

It's clear as day.

To interfere with your free exercise of your religion I have to stop or hinder you doing something.

Going to mass, for example, or receiving communion.

Or attending prayers at your mosque or synagogue.

Or teaching or studying your religion.

Or indoctrinating your children in your religious beliefs, however objectionable or obviously false, or contrary to the scientific view of things.

A free-exercise absolutist would insist forbidding animal or human sacrifice, polygamy, or ritual prostitution are also interferences that, like any other, are prohibited to the federal government, but not the states, by the First Amendment.

After all, how many ways are there to understand "Congress shall make no law"?

Forcing you to act contrary to your religious beliefs is a different thing, though apparently many think it is not.

And even more remote from such interference would be requiring you to do something that enables somebody else to do something prohibited not by his but by your religious beliefs, though it does not ensure that he will.

Such as, say, requiring Quakers to pay taxes that are partly used to fund the military and actual wars.

Or requiring employers to cover medical services forbidden by their own religions.

Think of blood transfusions and Jehovah's Witnesses.

Or, as in the present case, contraceptives.

But it's not really the First Amendment at issue, here, but a federal law purporting to clarify it by forbidding any law to substantially burden free exercise without compelling reason.

Leave aside that statutes can no more clarify than change the constitution.

Leave aside that this statute appears to lack foundation in any of the congress's constitutionally assigned powers.

Leave aside that this statute, intended by conservatives to strengthen protection of free exercise, instead weakens it.

All the same, the considerations above still apply.

Interfering with free exercise is stopping you doing something required or urged by your religion.

Making you do something forbidden or discountenanced by it is another.

And making you do something that enables somebody else to do such a thing is yet another step away from interference with free exercise.

Yet even those who support this requirement of Obamacare grant what is not true, as in this ungrammatical clause by Jill Filipovic in The Guardian, "Free religious exercise is burdened when the government forces an individual to participate in activities that violate their [sic] religious beliefs[.]"

And perhaps this is what lawyers generally think - mush heads that they are, despite their endless, ludicrous crowing about logical rigor and clear thinking - and plausibly reflects legislative intent.

But it's nonsense.

And the truth, by the way, is that lawyers by trade specialize in pettifogging obfuscation and obscurantism, not to say the most egregious lying.

An honorable profession, indeed.

And don't later federal laws just trump earlier ones in case of conflict, anyway?

Which came later, Obamacare or RFRA?

Lesbians and man-haters unite in Europe

Prostitution - selling sex - is legal in much of Europe.

But the feminist myth is gaining strength there that when women make men pay for it it's the men who are exploiting the women.

And so there is a push by the long-establised alliance between feminist and religious blue-noses in France and Germany to criminalize buying but not selling sex.

The same alliance that, in America, gave us the 19th amendment in a failed effort to cement in place the 18th.