Category: Uncategorized

I tend to agree

The Ferenghi have abandoned literary capitalism:

“I’ve decided not to publish any more books in the traditional way. 12 for 12 and I’m done. I like the people, but I can’t abide the long wait, the filters, the big push at launch, the nudging to get people to go to a store they don’t usually visit to buy something they don’t usually buy, to get them to pay for an idea in a form that’s hard to spread … I really don’t think the process is worth the effort that it now takes to make it work. I can reach 10 or 50 times as many people electronically.

Granted, I appear to have skipped the whole “bestseller” bit unless you want to count a very specific and esoteric niche, but I am leaning more and more towards small publishing houses despite the various offers I have from traditional publishers. That being said, WND Books did a very nice job with RGD, so I’ll probably continue to do my non-fiction with them.

R.I.P. Joe Sobran

A great American has died. But we are fortunate in that his words remain with us. One of his more important articles was this one from 1999 on teaching your children about government.

Teach Your Children Well
by Joseph Sobran
Mises Daily, August 23, 1999

Because I write about politics, people are forever asking me the best way to teach children how our system of government works. I tell them that they can give their own children a basic civics course right in their own homes.

In my own experience as a father, I have discovered several simple devices that can illustrate to a child’s mind the principles on which the modern state deals with its citizens. You may find them helpful, too.

For example, I used to play the simple card game WAR with my son. After a while, when he thoroughly understood that the higher ranking cards beat the lower ranking ones, I created a new game I called GOVERNMENT. In this game, I was Government, and I won every trick, regardless of who had the better card. My boy soon lost interest in my new game, but I like to think it taught him a valuable lesson for later in life.

When your child is a little older, you can teach him about our tax system in a way that is easy to grasp. Offer him, say, $10 to mow the lawn. When he has mowed it and asks to be paid, withhold $5 and explain that this is income tax. Give $1 to his younger brother, and tell him that this is “fair”. Also, explain that you need the other $4 yourself to cover the administrative costs of dividing the money. When he cries, tell him he is being “selfish” and “greedy”. Later in life he will thank you.

Make as many rules as possible. Leave the reasons for them obscure. Enforce them arbitrarily. Accuse your child of breaking rules you have never told him about. Keep him anxious that he may be violating commands you haven’t yet issued. Instill in him the feeling that rules are utterly irrational. This will prepare him for living under democratic government.

When your child has matured sufficiently to understand how the judicial system works, set a bedtime for him and then send him to bed an hour early. When he tearfully accuses you of breaking the rules, explain that you made the rules and you can interpret them in any way that seems appropriate to you, according to changing conditions. This will prepare him for the Supreme Court’s concept of the U.S. Constitution as a “living document”.

Promise often to take him to the movies or the zoo, and then, at the appointed hour, recline in an easy chair with a newspaper and tell him you have changed your plans. When he screams, “But you promised!”, explain to him that it was a campaign promise.

Every now and then, without warning, slap your child. Then explain that this is defense. Tell him that you must be vigilant at all times to stop any potential enemy before he gets big enough to hurt you. This, too, your child will appreciate, not right at that moment, maybe, but later in life.

At times your child will naturally express discontent with your methods. He may even give voice to a petulant wish that he lived with another family. To forestall and minimize this reaction, tell him how lucky he is to be with you the most loving and indulgent parent in the world, and recount lurid stories of the cruelties of other parents. This will make him loyal to you and, later, receptive to schoolroom claims that the America of the postmodern welfare state is still the best and freest country on Earth.

This brings me to the most important child-rearing technique of all: lying. Lie to your child constantly. Teach him that words mean nothing–or rather that the meanings of words are continually “evolving”, and may be tomorrow the opposite of what they are today.

Some readers may object that this is a poor way to raise a child. A few may even call it child abuse. But that’s the whole point: Child abuse is the best preparation for adult life under our form of GOVERNMENT.

Joseph Sobran
February 23, 1946 – September 30, 2010
Reactionary Utopian Archive

That didn’t take long

When I saw that a number of hypersensitive orientationally-challenged individuals in faux mourning for someone they never met were visiting in order to emote in their inimitably dramatic fashion over my dispassionate observations on the Clementi suicide, my first thought was, “I wonder how long it will take before someone sees fit to strike a blow for truth, justice, and the Sodomite Way by vandalizing Wikipedia?” It turns out the answer was 19 hours and 46 minutes. It was surprisingly calm and measured in comparison with the militant New Atheists, actually.

“…according to this ethic, “only a woman who is not entertaining the possibility of sex with a man can be considered a wholly innocent victim”, rape is nevertheless “really fun,” and that “[n]either the Jew nor the Christian need hesitate before asserting the act of rape to be just totally awesome and justly giving the rapist bitchin’ high fives.”

I rather like that version; pity someone has already reverted it. But to paraphrase Norman Mailer, thank you, predictable bitches! I note that despite 300+ comments still no one has yet managed to answer the perfectly straightforward question: by what recognized moral or ethic does one conclude that a) homosexual activity is moral, and b) rape is immoral?

I ask merely for informationpersonal amusement, you understand.

Mailvox: an atheist on the religion survey

S contemplates the Pew quiz:

I read with considerable interest your post earlier today about the Pew religious knowledge quiz. I took the test and was surprised to discover that even though I’m an atheist (and am apparently rather unusual in professing that I don’t really hate religion and have no particular desire to destroy the concept of God), I scored 73%. So, not great, but not bad either. By way of background, I’ve got an undergraduate degree in Maths and Economics, and a Master’s in financial Mathematics. I seemed to do pretty well compared to both believers and non-believers from all backgrounds.

The reason I write today about this is that I just finished watching Bill Maher “debating” Bill O’Reilly on the Factor tonight after taking that quiz and was appalled by the immaturity and folly of a supposedly “enlightened” atheist. Now I’m not a big fan of O’Reilly’s, but I was stunned to see just how utterly ignorant a militant atheist like Bill Maher is about Christianity, which he apparently hates with a vengeance. He seems to think that the Bible is the literal word of God, when even an atheist like me understands that this is not the way the Bible is written, nor is it the way the Bible is canonically interpreted. He thinks that Christian scripture and law is derived from the Old Testament- he quoted from Deuteronomy stating the Mosaic law that he who breaks the Sabbath shall be killed, even though the actual quote is from Exodus, and Maher quoted it out of context. He seems to believe that Christianity and science are incompatible, but I’ve accepted for a long time now that the Enlightenment simply could not have happened without Judeo-Christian tradition, law, and science.

Vox, I doubt you and I will ever agree about the existence or nature of God. However, I find myself strongly agreeing with you about these pinheads (to coin a phrase) who call themselves atheists but who are little more than “social autists” with little understanding of what they criticise. And even where we inevitably disagree, I suspect that our disagreements will generally be far more genial and fair-minded than anything that atheists like Bill Maher are capable of. Thanks for the great writing; I certainly look forward to reading a lot more of it to come.

S understands, in a way that many do not, that I have absolutely no problem with atheists qua atheists. I was, after all, agnostic for a long time and I still find myself generally more comfortable in secular intellectual culture than in American evangelical culture. For example, if you peruse my reading list for 2010, you will look in vain for the religious self-help books and rehashed theological fiction that make up the vast majority of CBA publishing today. I’d much rather kick back in the Comfy Chair and read Balzac or Procopius than anything that is likely to appear in a Northwestern Bookstore.

The fact is that I neither despise nor pity those who don’t believe in God. My opinion about them is similar to what it would be of those who don’t believe in gravity because they cannot see it. (See the actual force, not its effects.) Because the effects of rejecting God are both clearly delineated and observable, I simply find it a little strange that some people cannot see those effects and on that basis deny the existence of the causal factor. But that doesn’t bother or upset me, it merely causes me to mentally shrug my shoulders and think, “well, good luck with that”.

On the other hand, having a very small degree of orange-green color blindness, I can completely understand the bewildered feeling of an individual who simply does not see the big orange letter on the green background to which another individual is pointing, wondering what on Earth he could possibly be seeing.

The atheists with whom I do have a problem, and for whom I regularly demonstrate a great deal of contempt, are the liars, the cheats, the deceivers, and the malicious. If one genuinely believes that religion is a crutch for the weak and psychologically needed, what does it say about those who are so eager to kick that crutch out from under those who clearly need its support? And, as an armchair intellectual, I find their willful ignorance of history, religion, and philosophy to be as astonishing as it is irksome. Intelligent? I don’t even consider them to be educated. To claim that religion either causes war or is an important strategic element of war is to be every bit as ignorant as the apocryphal Flat Earth proponents so often cited; the significant difference being that the Religion Causes War Society not only exists but is even willing to expound their ludicrous and historically illiterate arguments in public.

Anyhow, I very much welcome atheists of S’s stripe here. I don’t expect anyone to agree with me all the time about anything; my best and oldest friend has made a habit of playing Devil’s Advocate in our conversations for more than three decades. The reason I value the questions and the doubts of intelligent atheists who are more interested in rational debate than in exhibiting their psychological issues is because they help keep the Christians and other theists from lapsing into intellectual sloth and thereby prevent this blog from devolving into the sort of circle jerk that has rendered the New Atheism so toothless.

But speaking of the quiz, it is worth pointing out, as Bethyada noted yesterday, that the Pew Forum ignored its own definitions of “atheist” and “agnostic” in reporting the results. Whereas self-identified atheists and agnostics scored 20.9, the Pew Forum defined an atheist as “someone who does not believe in God” and an agnostic as “someone who is unsure that God exists”. Therefore, the “nothing in particular” crowd should have been included in the “atheists and agnostics” group – supporting the case made in TIA, these Low Church Atheists outnumber the self-identified High Church ones by a factor of 4.5 – which reduces the atheist and agnostic score to 17.4, below that of white evangelicals at 17.6.

Incompetent biologists

The butterfly collectors should probably leave the metaphysics and philosophy alone considering that they can’t even do their own jobs properly:

A study has found that a third of all mammal species declared extinct in the past few centuries have turned up alive and well. Some of the more reclusive creatures managed to hide from sight for 80 years only to reappear within four years of being officially named extinct in the wild….

Dr Diana Fisher, of the University of Queensland, Australia, compiled a list of all mammals declared extinct since the 16th century or which were flagged up as missing in scientific papers. ‘We identified 187 mammal species that have been missing since 1500,’ she wrote in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B. ‘In the complete data-set, 67 species that were once missing have been rediscovered. More than a third of mammal species that have been classified as extinct or possibly extinct, or flagged as missing, have been rediscovered.’

That is a stunning record of professional incompetence, one that is surpassed only by Keynesian economists. Clearly one can safely ignore pretty much everything these intrepid scientists declare about one species magically transforming into another one as well, considering their proven inability to determine if a specific species even exists or not. And, needless to say, this raises some serious doubts about the assertion made by various members of the profession that God doesn’t exist either. If you’re not capable of correctly ascertaining the existence or not-existence of the Vanikoro Flying Fox of the Solomon Islands, then logic dictates you should steer very clear of the debate about the existence of God.

NRO endorses assassinating Americans

I am not a conservative. I am a Christian libertarian technodemocrat. But if this is what is actually supposed to pass for conservative opinion leadership at a leading conservative publication, it’s no wonder that the Tea Partiers are abandoning both the Republican Party and the conservative media:

The Obama administration is not, by authorizing Awlaki’s assassination, green-lighting his killing under all conceivable circumstances. The administration, I suspect, is just making sure that if he’s found congregating in a sanctuary with other terrorists, we can bomb the sanctuary — we don’t have to forfeit a worthy military operation just because one of the terrorists happens to be an American citizen. But if he’s found under other circumstances, where there is no demonstrable military value in killing him, he will be captured, held, interrogated (one hopes), and tried — either by a civilian or (I would hope) a military court.

This seems like common sense to me. The unfortunate thing is that the assassination authorization should never have been made public. Clearly, the administration leaked it to underscore the president’s willingness to fight al-Qaeda aggressively. All the leak has done, though, is cause unnecessary legal headaches. If the administration had handled this top-secret authorization appropriately, chances are: Awlaki would, at some point, have been either killed or captured; the attendant circumstances would have made it obvious why the option chosen (kill or capture) was chosen; and no one would ever have thought to ask whether Obama had authorized his assassination.

In other words, McCarthy is just fine with passing laws that authorize the government murder of its own citizens because it happens to be politically unviable at the moment. This is deeply, profoundly, and abysmally stupid. It is insane. And there is literally nothing conservative, in the American political sense of the word, about it.

If I were the editor of NRO, I would fire McCarthy on the spot for this defense of legalizing government murder.

His argument is risibly incompetent and not only depends entirely upon the transient nature of temporal politics but also upon what he imagines Obama’s reasoning behind the assassination authorization to be. McCarthy writes: “We are a political society, not a legal one. The executive branch typically has vast legal authority, but its exercise of that authority is hemmed in — thank goodness — by politics.”

Ergo, under his reasoning, once it becomes politically popular to murder certain American citizens en masse, it will be legal to do so. This isn’t merely madness, it is the familiar route to the guillotine, the gulag, and the gas chamber. To make this argument while simultaneously claiming to wear the mantle of Edmund Burke, among others, is a grotesque offense to reason, history, and conservatism itself.

If Awlaki is genuinely a traitor, the correct Constitutional thing to do is to arrest him, put him on trial for treason, and then execute him. The fact that the Obama administration is openly attempting to omit the first two steps with the support of the conservative and mainstream media alike is an indication of how completely lawless both the United States government and its lapdog media have become.

UPDATE: McCarthy isn’t the only NROcon to cheer on Obama’s American citizen assassination policy. David French writes: “We need to stop incentivizing enemy violations of the laws of war, and one way to do that is to find them and capture or kill them no matter their location, no matter their clothing, and no matter their nationality.”

He also attempts to claim that it’s not “assassination” so long as the person assassinated is an enemy. Which, no doubt, would be news to Abraham Lincoln, among others. And William F. Buckley wept.

Mailvox: religious ignorance

Much has been made of the fact that atheists and agnostics scored the highest on the Pew Forum’s recent quiz on the world’s religions. I’ve certainly received a lot of emails about it from atheists and Christians alike. But what hasn’t been pointed out is that they still only answered 65 percent of the questions correctly. This may help explain the dichotomy we often see here between the atheist’s belief that he knows a lot about religion and his demonstrated ignorance of the tenets of a particular religion. The fact that an atheist happens to have heard of Vajrayana Buddhism or Divine Command theory, usually through a second-hand reference, will set him well ahead of the average religious individual. But it doesn’t actually mean that he knows anything about any specific religion or that his knowledge is likely to compare favorably with that of a religious adherent who happens to take his religion seriously.

Furthermore, logic suggests that someone who subscribes to no religion is far more likely to be familiar with the competing tenets of the various religions than any one adherent is to be familiar with the others. This perspective is supported by the fact that both Jews and Mormons outscored atheists and agnostics when the questions related to Islam, Buddhism, and Hinduism were left out of the equation and that Mormons and evangelicals scored much better than anyone – 86 percent and 73 percent respectively – on questions related to the Bible.

So, my conclusion is that atheists should try to keep in mind that while they know more about religion in general than most evangelicals do, they don’t know as much about the Bible or Christianity. And Christians should remember that knowing a lot about Christianity is not synonymous with knowing a lot about religion.

So, if you’re interested, take the short version of the quiz yourself and report on how you did. Here is my score, which apparently would have had me in the top .02 percent: “You answered 15 out of 15 questions correctly for a score of 100%.”

Gay rights killed Clementi

The body count of the gay rights movement grows by one.

A college student jumped to his death off a bridge a day after authorities say two classmates surreptitiously recorded him having sex with a man in his dorm room and broadcast it over the Internet. Rutgers University freshman Tyler Clementi jumped from the George Washington Bridge last week, said his family’s attorney, Paul Mainardi. Police recovered a man’s body Wednesday afternoon in the Hudson River just north of the bridge, and authorities were trying to determine if it was Clementi’s.

ABC News and The Star-Ledger of Newark reported that Clementi left on his Facebook page on Sept. 22 a note that read: “Jumping off the gw bridge sorry.” On Wednesday, his Facebook page was accessible only to friends. Two Rutgers freshmen have been charged with illegally taping the 18-year-old Clementi having sex and broadcasting the images via an Internet chat program.

Steven Goldstein, chairman of the gay rights group Garden State Equality, said in a statement Wednesday that his group considers Clementi’s death a hate crime.

It was obvious from the start that the orientationally-challenged activists would attempt to blame Clementi’s death on his roommate. But the surreptitious filming of sexual activity, while an obvious breach of etiquette as well as the law in some states, is neither uncommon nor tantamount to attempting to destroy someone’s life. Nor should the online streaming be considered anything but a joke; American Pie is a comedy, not a horror flick, after all. The problem is not that American university campuses are intolerant of the orientationally challenged, as the subtext of the media coverage suggests, but rather that they are much too tolerant.

It is obvious that Clementi didn’t kill himself simply because his actions were made public; as a musician, no doubt he had been filmed before and some of those films may have even been put online. He killed himself because he could not live with the shame of knowing that everyone would be aware of his submission to what he apparently believed to be evil desires. While giving in to our desire for evil is something that we all do from time to time, it is also true that some desires happen to be more shameful or humiliating than others. For example, a man’s desire for his neighbor’s wife is sinful, but few consider it to be as appalling as his desire for his neighbor’s child.

While Clementi may have been taught that his desires were wrong, (we don’t have any details on his upbringing, but the last name suggests a Catholic heritage), he was also steeped in years of indoctrination telling him that his abnormal desires were perfectly right and should not be resisted. That is why he felt free to act on them as soon as he got to college and out from under his parents’ eyes.

And that is why his suicide poses a problem for the “morality is a human construct” crowd. Despite literal decades of preaching about the morality of homosexuality, despite the pansexual propaganda of the public and private schools, the knowledge that what he was doing was shameful and wrong still managed to penetrate Mr. Clementi’s mind. A normal man being forced to confront his immorality in such a public way might have reacted with anger, irritation, embarrassment, or amusement, but only one who is both psychologically disturbed and appalled by his own actions will destroy himself over it.

As was discussed a few days ago regarding the police, people usually have the psychological causality of the orientationally-challenged exactly backwards. Psychological disturbance and self-destructive activity are seldom the result of the hardships of the job or the intolerance of the normally oriented, they are instead usually the primary cause of the pursuit of the police occupation or the same sex.

So it was not a juvenile prank that killed the unfortunate Mr. Clementi even though it served as the proximate trigger for his lethal actions. If anyone other than Mr. Clementi should be blamed for his suicide, it is those who repeatedly encouraged him to behave in a way that would fill him with such guilt, remorse, and shame.

Reason to homeschool #5,642

I know, I know, this NRO reader’s supposedly good suburban school is nothing like the good suburban school that your kids attend. Because your kid’s school is, like, really good. All the teachers who work there tell you so.

So, we are in a reasonably affluent suburban school district with a good reputation. This year, the elementary school has decided that it is going to provide breakfasts for the students every day. In the classroom, before they start actually doing anything else. When questioned about this, the school principal regurgitated statistics explaining how kids who eat breakfast do better in schools. I have no doubt this is true, but let’s face it, the kids who don’t eat breakfast are almost certainly the same ones whose parents don’t try to read with or to them every day, don’t make sure they are doing their homework etc etc etc . I also really doubt whether many kids in our elementary school miss breakfast in the morning.

I’m sure it’s just a coincidence, but the teacher also tells us he won’t have time to make his third graders do multiplication tables this year.

And, this is in a “good” school district. I don’t want to imagine what they are doing in DC and similar places.

In fairness, one can’t seriously expect an education major to distinguish between correlation and causation. If anyone bothers to do a study demonstrating that there is a strong correlation between children eating a healthy dinner and doing better in school too, there will probably be a Department of Education-funded program extending the afterschool programs until 8 PM and supplying steak dinners in the classrooms within five years.

And here’s an interesting fact. Every single person I have ever met whose children attends a public school happens to live in a district where the schools are “really good” and the teachers are uniformly “excellent”. What are the odds? It is always very, very hard for me to resist the urge to ask these fortunate parents what particular metric they are using to make these determinations.

NRO clings to sanity

Apparently they haven’t gotten completely blitzed on the Neocon-spiked Kool-aid:

The Awlaki case speaks to something even more fundamental than law: Decent nations do not permit their governments to assassinate their own citizens. I am willing to give the intelligence community, the covert-operations guys, and the military proper a pretty free hand when it comes to dealing with dispersed terrorist organizations such as al-Qaeda and its affiliates. But citizenship, even when applied to a Grade-A certified rat like Awlaki, presents an important demarcation, a bright-line distinction in our politics.

If Awlaki were to be killed on a battlefield, I’d shed no tears. But ordering the premeditated, extrajudicial killing of an American citizen in Yemen or Pakistan is no different from ordering the premeditated, extrajudicial killing of an American citizen in New York or Washington or Topeka — American citizens are American citizens, wherever they go. I’m an old-fashioned limited-government guy, and I am not willing to grant Washington the power to assassinate U.S. citizens, even rotten ones. The three most powerful people in government at this moment are Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, and Harry Reid, a fact that should give pause even to the most hawkish conservative. I would hope that other conservatives see this at least as a matter of prudence, if not a burning moral question.

We’ve reached a very problematic state of affairs when the so-called “liberals” have endorsed a policy of the federal government intentionally murdering American citizens and most of the so-called “conservative” media is kind of maybe okay with it.