Politics and Psychology

Why do some people become liberals and others conservatives? It's one of those things that can't be explained by income level, region, family upbringing, etc., though many of those do have an impact. But an article a few months ago shed some light on this, I think, if only indirectly.

The Internet article had to do with gifted children and why they have a higher tendency to experience depression, or to be more specific, "existential" depression. Said gifted children, devoting more of their time to abstract thought rather than mundane matters, are considered more likely to be idealistic, perceiving the world as they think it ought to be. But since it is not how they think it ought to be, they frequently become frustrated with reality, withdraw into themselves, and become depressed and experience a deep feeling of meaninglessness that their dream world won't be realized.

Now, this article (here's the link) may not be worth much. It's one writer's musings, based in some scientific studies but not scientific itself, so take it with a grain of salt, of course. But from my own experience, I think there is some truth to it, so let's just say that his argument is broadly true. What application does this have for politics?

Well, for youngsters of such a mindset, it's not hard to see how they would be attracted to leftist ideologies. They see an imperfect world, they're more upset by this than others, they get more upset that these imperfections don't bother everyone, and they begin casting about for a solution, some philosophy or proposal that claims to solve everything. That's....pretty much textbook "ism" formation. Rousseau, Marx, Lenin, all those lovely people started out as frustrated young men searching for a way to make the world perfect, so it makes sense that other people of a similar temperament would be drawn to their collectivist solutions.

And as the article notes, the gifted have an especially weak connection to "irrational" justifications like tradition. Granted, the youth in general tend not to hold the status quo in such high regard as older generations, but this tends to be a bigger problem for the smarter kids, who put much greater stock in logic and consistency, and don't want to hear some policy or institution being defended because that's how it is, or changing it would be too disruptive. It doesn't make sense to them, therefore it is indefensible.

There's more that goes into it, of course. But this explanation seems to me to make a lot of sense. It also explains the common myth that liberals are smarter than conservatives--the Left tends to draw in smarter individuals, but for reasons only indirectly related to their intellect.

It's also worth noting that this process doesn't always play out. Take me, for instance--not to toot my own horn, but I was certainly closer to what you would call "gifted" than anyone else I knew growing up. Very smart, kind of a bookworm, introverted to the point of being socially awkward--you know the drill. However, I never had this existential crisis the writer describes. Why, I can't really say. But I think it's because I had a consistent outward tug--if not to get a wide net of friends, at least to associate with other people somewhat--that kept me from disappearing completely into my own little world. Also, I had (and still have) a great love for my little hometown, as poor and redneck as it may be, and I suppose that appreciation for my surroundings as they were kept me from buying into schemes for a perfect world and whatever. It's not that I didn't notice flaws, but I preferred the warts-and-all reality to any prospect of radical change.

I think that sentiment was a key to my evolution into an active conservative. So if you want to keep your kids from becoming liberals--well, I don't know, nothing's foolproof, but maybe find ways to get them to take joy in their current situation, rather than get mesmerized by some ideal. That might or might not be enough, but I think it would help.

.....

On a different note, this will be my last weekly post for some time. Graduate school, never a cakewalk, is making some impossible demands on my time for the next few months, so I have to give that first priority. Hopefully I can come back and contribute some posts more regularly after that's done, but in any case, I'll still be around somewhat for the commenting. Until then, thanks for reading and commenting on my occasionally-useful articles. :-)

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Minimum Wage Daze

If there's one issue on which liberals are almost always bound to get some public traction, it's an argument for raising the minimum wage. Even in my reddish neck of the woods, clear majorities support it at the polls. So it would be foolish for me to crap all over the idea of a minimum wage...but of course I'll do it anyway.

If you've followed the news lately, this issue has come up once again, as a number of states have raised their wage levels. One community around Seattle, in fact, now requires at least $15/hour pay from every business. And Democrats are only too happy to take this nationwide, demanding a hike in the federal minimum wage to $10.10 per hour. And of course there were all those protests recently by the fast-food workers, for whom, apparently, only making $7.25 an hour is the equivalent of having to stand in line at a soup kitchen. Sigh.

The minimum wage has always annoyed me, for mathematical and philosophical reasons. Firstly, having taken an economics course or two, I've been struck ever since by the public's ignorance that labor, like all commodities, follows the law of supply and demand: If you raise the price of it, buyers will demand less of it. In other words, the minimum wage tends to lead to higher unemployment. Proving this with economic data is tricky, because there are always so many factors at play, but consider this. States which have (or had) no minimum wage laws, such as Switzerland or Hong Kong, have historically had very low unemployment rates--around two to four percent. On the other end, there are the large European countries (France, Germany, the U.K.), which are famous for generous workers' benefits and chronic double-digit unemployment. These examples don't show causation, but they do suggest a very strong correlation between high minimum wage requirements and high unemployment.

Also, let's not overlook the fact that relatively, a very small number of people only earn minimum wage. The most recent numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics peg the number at less than 1.6 million out of a workforce of about 75 million, or barely two percent of the whole. And as is always the case, this small number is skewed toward the youth--the 16-19 age bracket alone makes up over 30 percent of that number. This makes the above argument even more compelling; a bunch of the people "suffering" from minimum wage are just teenagers in entry-level positions they'll quickly move out of anyway. Indeed, one could easily make the argument that an increase in the wage levels will make upward mobility more difficult, keeping employees at a lower average income during their career than they would have otherwise.

But hey. Let's throw all that out. Because no matter what, some liberal will inevitably come up with a case of some single mother with three or four kids who has to work two jobs, at night, has to eat off the Dollar Menu at McDonald's, and can't even afford a First-Aid kit, because the minimum wage is so terrible. Shouldn't we do something to help her? (By "something," of course, I'm referring to government aid, because that's what liberals are referring to. Private charity and other forms of voluntarism aren't at issue here.)

This is purely my observation, but it seems that all of our rational, statistical analyses don't really move people. It's not that the numbers are wrong, but the knee-jerk reaction seems to be "Well, at least the Democrats are trying to do something to help! Why do you have to be such naysayers?" The mindset on injustices and other social problems seems to be that anything, even a bad attempt at a fix, is better than the status quo. And that's a difficulty conservatives have not yet mastered.

The problem, in this as in so many other cases, lies with the failure to recognize that suffering is a part of human life. And it's not just liberals who have this problem; if it were, measures like this wouldn't be so widely popular. I don't think most people would disagree with the statement that mankind is not perfectable save by God (though I can think of a few who would), but in practice, we've all fallen into the trap of thinking that whenever some social ill raises its head, it must be legislated out of existence. Which is to say, in matters like the minimum wage we can see liberalism completely on display--the technocratic urge to tinker with society until everyone is fat and happy.

It's not good politics, and I'm not suggesting we make it our banner or something, but conservatives need to embrace the fact of suffering. Or rather, to embrace the notion that some forms of suffering are better than a random proposed panacea, which probably won't work anyway. And besides, in this case it's fairly certain that for a lot of people, a minimum wage of $10 or $12 will make things worse instead of better.

Conservatives shouldn't be falling into the trap of showing they want government to care about the right people, on this or other issues--especially when "showing you care" means throwing around lots of taxpayer money. Rather, they should focus on creating the conditions that will minimize these social ills as much as possible, while keeping it in mind that they will always be with us. That's why the minimum wage debate is so misguided.

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Read Any Good Books Lately?

As you can see from the title, this article will be all about gardening....and whales. Sure, why not. Whales. And maybe record players too.

As is natural with my line of work, I voraciously snap up books on history and politics. Being a conservative, I go more specifically for ones that challenge the conventional wisdom concerning liberal awesomeness and progress and all that nonsense. But they should also be well-written and serious works, not Limbaugh's "Rush Revere And The Whatever It Was Because I Took One Look In The Bookstore And My Eyeballs Rolled Into The Back Of My Head."

So, here are three fairly recent books the Commentarama community might enjoy.

Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944-1956. By Anne Applebaum. I want to stress something: No credible college professor, not even an Ivy Leaguer, will today deny that the Soviet bloc was not a fun place to live in; the evidence of oppression and economic failure is simply too great. But many of them will pooh-pooh the idea of the USSR as "totalitarian" and claim that Stalin and Co. were just reacting to American aggression, blah blah blah.

Applebaum, who won a Pulitzer for a previous book on the Russian gulags, relies on a lot of newly available archival evidence to show that in the Eastern European countries which fell under their control, the Soviets were not "reacting," but very definitely intended, from the beginning, to stamp out democracy and civic society, and to create something very close to the totalitarian ideal. Their ultimate goal was nothing less than the creation of a new sort of man, a Homo Sovieticus, if you will. It's a sad story, and pretty dark; but Applebaum also shows that traditional Western values persisted, despite the official persecution, and played a significant part in the fall of the Iron Curtain decades later. Definitely worth checking out.

Inventing Freedom: How the English-Speaking Peoples Made the Modern World. By Daniel Hannan. Hannan is one of the few prominent Europeans to be a conservative in more than name. Which he is in name as well: He represents Britain's Tories in the European Parliament, and some of his speeches are awesome to watch, if you have the time and access to YouTube. (Which presumably you do, if you're reading this.) Anyway, his latest book can best be considered an ode to the Anglophone world--Britain and all its former colonies, including America. Basically, he argues that all the rights and institutions we take for granted today (private property, the rule of law, etc.) can be traced back to the ancient traditions of the first Anglo-Saxons, who preserved "English liberty" and handed it down to the present day.

Some of his characterizations are a bit sappy, if you want my honest opinion, and I don't agree with every single one of his interpretations, but he makes some compelling arguments for why the Britons went in such a different (and far more stable) political direction than, say, continental Europe. And I can think of precious few academics--certainly none in the "Colonial Studies" section--who would let you know there were instances when, yes, British subjects beyond the island did love the Empire and all it stood for. Bottom line: Don't be afraid to go rah-rah for your country and your culture once in a while.

The Great Degeneration: How Institutions Decay and Economies Die. By Niall Ferguson. Ferguson being, of course, another of those rare truly conservative Europeans--so much so that I've heard more than one liberal express a wish that he would just drop dead already, so you know you can trust him. Not quite as optimistic an author, I'm afraid, but then Ferguson does concern himself with the long-term rise and fall of civilizations. Short and to the point, he identifies some common characteristics of prosperous Western societies--democracy, capitalism, the rule of law, and civil society--and argues that all are threatened today by the ever-expanding state. It's already become such a behemoth, in America and Europe alike, that you can't relate to it except in a purely technical sense: noted in his comparison between "The Rule of Law" and "The Rule of Lawyers." (Sorry, Andrew.)

If you've read some of Ferguson's other work, you know he can get a little grim when contemplating the future. Still, he draws on his personal experiences to argue that none of these trends are irreversible; action from below, in the form of ordinary people taking an active interest in their government, or even their own neighborhood, can mitigate a lot of these problems.


So there you have it--three of the latest books to catch my eye at the bookstore. All worth a read, I think. But I'll turn it over to you guys. What have you read lately that's good, and does any of it have a strongly conservative message? Because books are important, yo.

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Stick-It-To-The-Man....eosis

In which I string a bunch of loosely connected thoughts together and try to make a post out of them.

Well, it ended this week. Our long national reprieve from bureaucratic Idiocracy nightmare is over, as Congress has finally reached a deal to reopen the government. Hurting people everywhere rejoiced! (Except the markets, which promptly tanked early the next morning.) So yesterday and today, we got to hear or see a bunch of headlines querying who are the winners and who are the losers in this fight. (Spoiler alert: It's the Republicans, because they're always the losers.)

My reaction? Meh. For one thing, I personally didn't care about getting the shutdown terror resolved anytime soon--I was kind of enjoying it, frankly--and for another, I got tired of the 24/7 coverage after a while. I mean, how many times can you watch the CNN timer display, down to the second, how long it's been the shutdown started? But more importantly, I was jonesing for more displays of citizens sticking it to SHUTDOWN THEATER. Let's be honest, the best thing about the shutdown was really one of the best things we've seen in a while--WWII vets charging the barricades thrown up around the National Mall and the D.C. war memorials (the ones it probably cost more money to put up than it would have to keep the sites open in the first place). Sure, it was a nice little bit of mud in Obama's eye, but more than that, it was an increasingly-rare middle finger to the petty bureaucracy that does his will.

Being the young and embittered soul that I am, I spend a lot of time thinking about what problem, what fundamental problem, this country has that needs to be fixed for everything else to heal itself. At the moment, I'd have to say it's this habit of obedience we fall into. Think about it. Usually, at least once a week we hear about some story somewhere, usually involving a court or a government agency, that gets us a little riled, like "ACLU sues to get Christian organization off school grounds" or "NSA enacts new round of humiliating stop-and-frisk procedures" and so on and so on. And what do we do? Yeah, we get mad. Yeah, we say "People shouldn't stand for this crap!" or something to that effect. And then what? And then we leave the house for the commute or go back to our homework or turn on the game or whatever. Let's face it, 90% of us, and probably more, are not going to get out into the streets, ever, to show our outrage at something. Because we can't be bothered.

I should note that I'm indicting myself here as well. I talk a good game online or in Letters to the Editor, and I like to imagine myself folding my arms and telling the dern guvmint to get off my property if they know what's good for them, but who am I kidding? Come next spring, I'll pay those taxes that are going to useless agencies or to subsidize SEIU, just like everyone else. I'll grumble about it, maybe I'll give the IRS some snippy and sarcastic feedback, but I'll pay them. And it's not a thought that occupies me 24/7, anyway. Still, it irritates me. I can't shake the feeling that if the Founding Fathers were transported to the year 2013, after taking part in the Boston Tea Party and the Stamp Act boycotts and all that, they'd think we're all sheep. (If you're thinking of replying that 90% of people didn't take part in that revolutionary stuff either, which is not really true anyway, shut up. I'm on a roll here.)

Indeed, this is something conservatives have always come up short on against the Left. We joke all the time that we don't have time to protest because we're too busy having real jobs and so on. Which is true. But hey, the squeaky wheel gets the most grease, doesn't it? The descendants of those dumb hippies and spongers who made a mess of things in the '60s and '70s, they're the ones running Washington right now.

All of which is to say that if the Right wants to profoundly change America, back to what it ought to be, it will have to take part of large-scale civil disobedience. I'm not saying that it will happen. I'm not even saying that it should happen. Hey, I don't want to spend a bunch of time out protesting and get my name put away in a surveillance file somewhere (assuming it isn't already, of course). What I'm saying is that, if we want Y to happen, X will have to happen first. Someone, somewhere, is going to have to tell the EPA to come out here and stop me from putting a fence on my own land, tell the --th Circuit Court my business will cater to whom I want it to and not to whom I don't want it to, tell the IRS it can have my tax money when it can prove it's stopped abusing my tax money.

It's a tall order, and I'm not going to be the one to lead it. I don't have the stomach for it, so I'm not saying someone ought to start it. You can't say that if you're not willing to step into the line of fire yourself. But if we want to get anything substantial accomplished, then this will have to happen.

So that's my opinion on where we're at right now. Thoughts?

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Throwing Around The Ol' Redskin

Football is becoming increasingly....well, difficult. Fun to watch, but there are so many stories that get on one's nerves. Take the "new" controversy over the Washington Redskins.

No doubt you've heard a little about this already. For at least the second or third time, some people with nothing better to do have observed that "Redskin" is (or was) slang for Indian, and apparently this is a bad thing. So for the past few weeks, there's been a handful of very noisy activists trying to put pressure on the organization to change its name. To what, I don't know. A few years ago, a fan from West Virginia suggested they should end the controversy by re-naming themselves the Washington Rednecks, but I sense that's not in the cards. Anyway, now President Obama, whose many roles apparently include Spokesman For Any And All Even Theoretically Oppressed Minorities, has weighed in and said that if it were up to him, he would of course consider changing the name. And some sportscasters have announced that they will no longer refer to the team as the Redskins, but simply as Washington.

So far, the team's owner, Dan Snyder, has pretty much told these activists and sundry concerned people that they can suck it, noting in a letter the other day that the team has had this name for eighty years--and it was the "Braves" before that--that it's not meant to be offensive to Native Americans but rather to celebrate them, and finally, that they've gone this long without changing it and they're certainly not going to now. A handful of people in the media have declared that this position is so offensive it will inevitably trigger a backlash and a boycott, but let's face it--as long as Snyder is the owner and his determination holds up, they won't ever put the team under enough pressure to change its name.

More to the point, though--I always shake my head at stories like this, probably because it's so blasted familiar. Having spent years in the wacky circles of academia, I should point out that to the Left, it means nothing if you say your mascot is meant to invoke themes of bravery, ferocity, being a great warrior--which the Redskin mascot is obviously intended to do. To them, any representation of Indians or other minorities doesn't give them their due as individuals and Noble Oppressed People, so trying to stress their positive qualities is still an insult somehow. So, in a nutshell, that's their thinking here.

Not that it makes any more sense, of course. Because I haven't heard any of these people complaining about the name of the Minnesota Vikings. The old Scandinavian seafarers are also being stereotyped by the sports mascot, reducing them to ferocious warriors; why isn't anyone speaking on their behalf?

I'm being facetious, of course. We all know why. The Vikings are (were) white--not just white, but pure Nordic white. Therefore, they can't really be oppressed. Besides, they can't be made into objects of sympathy by activists the way Indian tribes can.

And anyway, it's not like there's an overwhelming feeling of offense from Native Americans today about the name. What polls there have been on reservations about the issue show that while a significant minority would prefer a name change, a majority are either fine with it or don't care. Some pointed out that they have bigger things to worry about, like their job, or paying their bills. Not that it would really matter if there was more negative opinion, because look--the Redskins are a private organization, and unless there's actual discrimination going on by that organization against Native Americans, there's nothing here. End of story.

Though, as someone mentioned on Twitter, a different kind of change might be in order. Perhaps Snyder should consider renaming the team the "Maryland Redskins." Now that would be much less offensive.

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Books By Pundits Don't Change The World

Once again, my poor brain found itself subjected to talk radio last weekend. I’ll spare you the debunking. I will instead focus on an issue that arose which has long troubled me: conservatives don’t understand what interests the public. This is vital to our turnaround.

I first noticed this issue in the 1990s. When Bill Clinton went on the Tonight Show, it was a brilliant move. It allowed him to connect with a part of the public that wasn’t particularly tuned in to politics but did still vote. It also let him craft an image that appealed to the public. In fact, it played into one of the most-loved of American caricatures: the loveable rogue.

Conservatives responded in unison by condemning this for lowering the office of the presidency, and they scoffed at Clinton: “Who could possibly want to see their president on a comedy show talking about his underwear? Harrumph!” Then they were upset the public “didn't get it”: “Why isn’t the public outraged? Hasn’t the public read Bill Bennett’s book on moral decay? What about Cal Thomas’s laments about the culture in which he spells God as G-d? What is wrong with people!” Then someone in the Clinton camp said that everything is political and conservatives laughed themselves silly: “Nonsense!!” I still remember Rush mocking this point for days.

See, it turns out that in conservative minds, politics lives in a box. Politics is speeches given by politicians. Politics is books written by pundits and treatises prepared by think tanks. Politics is what you get on talk radio and political talk shows. Nothing beyond that is real politics. Moreover, conservatives seem to believe that politics defines culture. Thus, Bill Clinton wasn’t reflecting the culture, he was warping it, and if only we could get rid of Bill and get people to read Bill Bennett’s book, then the culture would snap right back to Leave It To Beaver times.

That is fundamentally wrong on all points.

Books like those by Hayek or Milton Friedman are great foundations for our ideology. Reagan’s speeches are inspiring and insightful as well. But political books and speeches don’t penetrate the culture and they certainly don’t move the needle on culture. You could pass out every book written by Thomas Sowell or Bill Bennett or Glenn Beck’s monkey to every American, and not a thing would change... the public doesn’t work that way.

Culture is as the public defines it. They define it through their opinions about a vast array of topics. And their opinions drift according to any number of events. Movies make something seem more or less scary. An event occurs that shocks people. Wall Street inspired people to become stockbrokers and to get rich; Oliver Stone laments this. Close Encounters made belief in aliens acceptable to the mainstream. Walt Disney redefined American history through his television shows. Dirty Harry gave voice to the public’s desire to undo the liberalism put into the criminal justice system... no political book or speech did that, a movie did. All those monogamous, happy gay characters on television made people comfortable with gays. Rosa Parks exposed the perversion of Southern racism. The person in Tiananmen Square showed that dictatorships are helpless against a good cause. Rick Santelli’s rant about a second Tea Party was just a commentary on a financial show. A crying Indian taught us not to litter. Smokey and the Bandit taught us to embrace the New South, and country music did the rest. This is what really changes culture. Culture is changed by these lightening-in-a-bottle moments where someone does something that gives the public a chance to say they changed their minds. And here’s the key point: it’s almost never politics that causes those lightening-in-a-bottle moments!

This is something conservatives need to learn. Too many conservatives blind themselves to the culture because they wrongly think culture is a byproduct of politics. It’s not. The reverse is true: culture drives politics. And the only way to change culture is to engage it on its own terms... to start offering our own works for people to latch onto and be inspired by.

This was the point to my Fifty Shades article awhile back. Conservatives want to dismiss that book and the buzz around it as “just perverted porn.” But in so doing, they completely miss what is really going on. That book has been the catalyst which has let women everywhere declare that they are done with the peer pressure feminists have imposed that required them to compete with men. Conservatives missed this because they don’t grasp that people change the culture outside the political process. And since this book wasn’t written with a political purpose, they don’t grasp that it can lead to a political change. But it can. I guarantee you that Fifty Shades has broken feminism in ways that a million books by Bill Bennett or Christina Hoff Sommers never could have. Likewise, Kim Kardashian can sway more voters than all the talk radio hosts combined. One powerful movie about leftist hypocrisy would do more to break the left’s claim of moral superiority than every treatise or book written by every pundit, think tank or historian. Lament it all you want, that doesn’t change the fact that this is how it happens.

And there’s more. There are opportunities that conservatives completely miss because they have intentionally blinded themselves on this issue. Take the issue of rap music. Say “rap music” to a conservative and the results get pretty ugly and insulting. More to the point though, none of them will grasp that rap music represents an opening for conservatives: “What? How could it? It’s just rude black people being anti-cop!” No, it’s not.

Rap music should be siren song to conservatives. Not only does it tell us that young black males can be reached, but it tells us how to reach them. Rap is about independence. It’s about reclaiming manhood that has been stripped away by social workers and fathers who vanished into jails or welfare. It glorifies wealth and success. These are all things conservatives claim to support, and here are blacks listening to music that treats these things as the very thing they want. You couldn’t have a better roadmap for how to reach blacks. But conservatives can’t see this because they can’t get over the fact they don’t like it themselves and because they can’t understand what rap music has to do with politics.... it doesn’t fit in the box... “We need to get them to read Bill Bennett’s book about the effect of single-parenthood!” Yeah, right.

Not only do we, as conservatives, need to start embracing the culture on its own terms by writing songs and films and books that push our values without being political, but we need to learn to recognize trends and opportunities when they appear. More people pay attention to the issues surrounding black quarterbacks than the Voting Rights Act. The left uses black quarterbacks to talk about discrimination. How about using it to talk about the end of discrimination and that this was achieved through individual skill rather than affirmative action?

Rather than condemning the buzz around Fifty Shades as “perverted women reading porn,” how about pointing out the feminist war on women and demanding that women be given a real choice, including the choice not to compete with men? Harry Potter was written by a leftist, but why not embrace the books as highlighting the dangers of large, strong, invasive government? Why not tell blacks that we hear what they are saying in rap and that if they want independence... if they want success... if they want the good life... if they want to claim their manhood, then we’re the only ones offering that with our message of economic and personal freedom. You’re never gonna be a man with Uncle Sam wiping your ass.

This is how we win back the public: we grasp what they are thinking about and we talk to them on their terms. Forget hoping that another book by another talk radio host will finally save conservatism.

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The Return of the Irrational

Okay, so it's no secret that conservatism has a lot of problems right now. Some of these have already been addressed on the blog, but I thought I'd go in a slightly different direction and bring up a moral flaw we and American society in general suffer from. And no, I don't mean that kind of moral.

I was started thinking along these lines by an article in Spectator magazine last fall, essentially discussing how "moral relativism" has become more a conservative bugaboo than a real thing. Long story short, there are people who claim to be relativists, but no one who can consistently hold to it. You know the drill: Dogma is bad, you can't categorically say that something is wrong, unless it's racism, sexism, homophobia, blah blah blah. It just goes to show how liberalism is a completely contradictory "philosophy," if you can even call it that. In any case, pure relativism is losing ground with the public and even pop culture, as a look at the popularity of principled heroes at the movies will tell you.

No, the real problem, according to Spectator, is a particular kind of morality we modernites are susceptible to: utilitarianism, for lack of a better word. What this simply means is that it is possible, still, to make objective moral statements. BUT, they can only be made if based on statistical or technical data. Want to say something is "good" or "bad" for society? Find study X or survey Y to back you up. Once you have the numbers on your side, then you're getting somewhere; otherwise, you're just fishing in the dark.

There are several reasons why this is bad for conservatives.

First, it makes argument in general a very dicey thing. As the whole healthy/unhealthy food studies prove, there is rarely such a thing as conclusive scientific proof on a social issue, of any kind. Take gay adoption, for example (something closely tied to the larger gay marriage debate); no sooner can I find a study showing that children raised by gay parents tend to do worse than those raised by straight parents than my debate opponent can put out one saying the former turn out just hunky-dory. In cases like this, desirable as such statistical information can be to buttress your argument, relying strictly on a scientific basis for moral points doesn't really do much to advance the debate. The veracity of the science itself just comes under fire.

Furthermore, this kind of approach constrains our battlefields. In arguing on whatever subject, if we restrict ourselves to statistics alone in supporting our position, we make ourselves dependent on what has and hasn't been done on it, not to mention what can and can't be done on it. Illegal immigration and drugs, for example, are subjects inherently somewhat secluded from outside analysis, so we can't argue with fully accurate data at our backs.

But there's a broader way in which this is problematic. Conservatives (and by extension the GOP) have often been branded "the stupid party," people who cling to tradition and prejudice to make decisions. There is truth to this; yet I don't consider that an insult necessarily. As a political philosophy following in the footsteps of Burke and others, conservatism is not, in the main, concerned with purported scientific "laws" of society--even valuable market-based ones such as Smith's and Hayek's--but with proposals about how we should act, individually and collectively; proposals which cannot be proven by social science. The statement that change should not happen for its own sake, for example, is one most conservatives would agree with, but you can't whip out an academic study confirming or denying this. Nor can you produce one showing that the collected wisdom of our ancestors should be considered when making a political or economic decision.

At bottom, conservatism (like other philosophies) asks questions about life, liberty, community, etc. And while the natural and social sciences can inform us about portions of those concepts, they can't tell us why those concepts are good and desirable in themselves. Nor can they tell us everything about how to best pursue and preserve those things. We have to be okay with the fact that reason alone can't answer all this. Or at least, the overvalued pure empiricism we rely on can't.

I don't have a concrete suggestion on how conservatives should proceed with this in mind. Ours is a society extremely wedded to what can be empirically proven, and nothing else. But as we go forward, we need to keep in mind that this is not the only branch of human knowledge, and maybe not even the most important one. We ought to look for a way to demonstrate that what we can't quantify has just as much to say about life and society as what we can.

Thoughts? Suggestions?

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Breitbart's Rules For Righties

Following Andrew Breitbart's death early this year, I bought his memoir/call to action Righteous Indignation, in which he explains his career and how it serves as a model for conservative behavior. In the interests of effectively pursuing our bitter war on liberals, I thought I would discuss his tactics a bit and how we can follow his example.

Keep in mind, these are activist, in-the-trenches methods, not a coherent ideology. I doubt many people on either side have much idea what Breitbart actually stood for, except that he didn't like liberalism (with good reason, I might add). Nonetheless, he was the best warrior for conservatism we've had in some time, mainly because he was so good at confronting the Left and showing its lies and hypocrisy for all to see. Sadly, Breitbart isn't here to fight our battles anymore, so we have to do it ourselves. With that in mind, here are a few of the ground rules he laid out in his book for battling liberals.

Rule #1: Don't be afraid to go into enemy territory. Heck, it's kind of a requirement. Think the Agents in The Matrix: Liberals hold all the levers of power; they are guarding all the doors; they are holding all the keys. They control academia, the media, the unions, one of the major parties, etc. We have a few institutions on our side--Fox News, talk radio, and...that's about it. You want to reach more people with conservative ideas, you have to engage the Left on its own ground. Our message won't get out otherwise. You don't think I'm in grad school for my health, do you? There's got to be more conservative professors and other opinion-shapers.

Rule #2: Expose liberals for who they are--in their own words. Fortunately, the advance of technology (much as I sometimes hate it) makes this easier all the time. Today, we have Twitter, the ability to record things with our phones, enormous "paper trails" to dig through on the Internet--all sorts of ways for the Left to inadvertently reveal its true nature and for us to get it on the record. Use them.

Rule #3: Be open about your secrets. As part of a religion whose pastors are periodically caught with young girls (or sometimes boys), I place special stress on this rule. If you're going to say X is wrong and take a big stand on it, either make sure you're not guilty of X, or admit that you are up front. And then never do it again. Your opponents will find out, and people don't like hypocrisy, so if you're honest about the skeletons in your closet, that deprives them of one of their biggest rhetorical weapons.

Rule #4: Don't let the Left shape the narrative. Breitbart himself was a master at this. As everyone knows, liberals' favorite line of attack is to call conservatives racists/sexists/homophobic. Don't--do not--get defensive and start trying to prove that you're not in those categories. That's just playing their game (see also: Todd Akin). Dismiss the charges out of hand, simultaneously accuse the Left of using red herrings and lowering the tone of debate, and move on with the argument before they can recover.

Rule #5: Control your own story, don't let the Left do it. Again, something Breitbart did to perfection, as the famous O'Keefe videos proved. If you have something good on the Left, don't release it all at once. Instead, release a little bit to begin with, then let the liberals make up whatever kind of narrative they want, saying it's a lie or an isolated event--give them enough rope to hang themselves. Then, let more of it go and catch them in their own words.

Rule #6: Ridicule is man's most potent weapon. Mock their sacred cows. As Breitbart puts it, "Tina Fey, not the MSM, sullied Sarah Palin's image." If level-headed arguments aren't winning the fight against liberals, use public ridicule. Bust up Pelosi and Reid's press conferences, infiltrate Letterman's or Maher's audiences of trained seals--whatever works to make them look foolish. It's cathartic--well, it is to me, at least--and it might force the other side to take things a little more seriously.


There are more of Breitbart's rules I could add with more space, but I'll end with one of my own: Do. Not. Play. Fair. The Left doesn't believe in showing any mercy, so we should show them none as well. Personally, I would rather win my arguments with reason and calmness. But if those aren't working--and they apparently aren't--I have no problem going with mockery and bomb-throwing. Like I said, it feels good.

Anyhoo, those are some rules for combating liberals. Any suggestions?

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Hollywood: The Political Weathervane

We’ve talked about this before in the comments, but I think it’s worth elevating this to article status. There have been a number of celebrities who have recently “come out” as Republicans by endorsing Romney or by flat-out saying they are Republicans. And many of these are minorities, like Stacy Dash and Dwayne “the Rock” Johnson. I think this is significant.

Click Here To Read Article/Comments at CommentaramaFilms

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Fighting Fire With Fire

ScottDS and I had an interesting discussion yesterday, related to the Andrew Breitbart’s Bigs. Later in the day, Rufus at Threedonia, posted some similar thoughts. So this is probably worth discussing. Right now, the Bigs are kind of annoying. . . BUT here’s why they are actually doing a good thing.

The reason the Bigs are annoying is because they are jumping on minutia and mercilessly pounding it into the ground. Game Change had some inaccuracies, but is it worth 500 articles calling Tom Hanks everything from a truth rapist to the last American communist? Tom Hanks also appears in a video with someone in blackface. Is that worth pounding away? Bill Maher says much worse things than Rush ever said, but do we need to hear about it 10,000 times? Etc. All of this seems petty and it’s somewhat hypocritical in the sense that the Bigs are judging these people under politically correct standards which conservatives don’t accept. And frankly, I don’t personally like it. I don’t find this interesting and I would rather they were more constructive.

So it’s bad, right? Well. . . no.

Here’s the thing. For at least two decades now, the left has worked to isolate conservatives from the culture and make them pariahs. Every time a conservative spoke their mind, the left attacked them using some faked-sleight invented by the left. They would feign offense at some non-offensive word or act and then smear the conservative as racist, sexist, homophobic, etc. It didn’t matter that leftists routinely said the same things, they still attacked. In fact, they would hound these conservatives until the conservatives either left the public sphere or surrendered to the mercy of their persecutors. In this way, they made it impossible for conservatives to have their voices heard because every time a conservative got noticed, they were destroyed personally and professionally. The idea literally was to make sure conservatives were afraid to speak.

And how did conservatives respond? Most cringed and did nothing. And when they saw leftists saying or doing the exact same things the left had attacked conservatives for doing, they remained silent. Why? Because they decided to take the high road. They reasoned that if it wasn’t fair to attack conservatives because of X, then it wouldn’t be fair to attack liberals for X either, so they refused to attack. This was stupid.

For twenty-plus years now, conservatives have let the left destroy conservative after conservative with hypocritical attacks without a peep of challenge except to whine about the hypocrisy. Public life became intolerable for conservatives (look at what they did to Palin for example), while liberals got to skate through saying and doing anything they wanted, secure in the knowledge that conservatives were unwilling to attack them.

No more. The Bigs have declared war. They have taken the same pathetic, petty attacks the left has used to smear conservatives for years and they are now applying those same attacks to leftists. They are fighting fire with fire, because that's the only way to stop what the left is doing. When someone has a weapon they can use with impunity, they will. But when they suddenly realize that others will use it against them, they will stop. Think of it as the cultural version of Mutually Assured Destruction: if you want to try to destroy a conservative as racist/sexist for using a particular word, then we will destroy every liberal who uses that word. This may not make for a pleasant world in the short term, but it is the only way to put an end to these attacks.

Indeed, fighting fire with fire is the only technique which works against the left because they win through incremental progress. In other words, they can win by getting a little bit at a time each time they come to power unless conservatives roll back their gains. For example, for decades, the left concentrated power in the executive branch and the courts. They used that power to force leftist ideas onto businesses, schools, state governments, charities, churches and individuals. When conservatives came to power, they would stupidly declare that they would take the high ground and not use the powers created by the left. The left laughed. And once the conservatives lost power again, the left picked right up where they were before and kept right on pushing -- secure in the knowledge that conservatives lacked the will to use these instruments of power against them.

All of that changed under Bush, particularly in education where Bush used the levers of power liberals created to push liberalism onto schools as a means to impose conservatism instead. Suddenly, the left started howling about state’s rights and attacks on personal freedom and they did their best to strip away the powers they had created. Ditto in the courts, where the left now squeals about legal principles like stare decisis, binding precedent and judicial restraint. . . things they ignored for fifty years while the courts were pushing the country to the left.

It’s the same thing here. Taking the high ground equals surrendering. Conservatives must learn to make the left pay for creating these weapons. This means using the government to bring lawsuits against liberal businesses that violate the laws, sending the IRS after liberal churches, unions and charities which engage in politics, going after race hustler groups and black racist organizations under the civil rights laws, targeting Obama-crony companies like GE with the environmental laws they demanded. . . and making life hell for liberal celebrities who step into the traps liberals have set for conservatives.

That’s what the Bigs are doing. And while I don’t personally enjoy it, I absolutely recognize the value of what they are doing. They are firing back the same nuclear weapons the left has been lobbing at us, and they’ve been rather successful at it. And when the left starts to realize that they are living under an unfair microscope of their own making, they will surrender. . . just as they have every other time conservatives have fought back.

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Kris Kardashian's Butt: Capitalism In Motion

In honor of the pending death of capitalism, thanks to American conservatives deciding that Rick Santorum somehow should represent conservatism, I figured I would explain why capitalism served us well. . . before we kill it. To aid me in this, I’m going to use the Kardashians, the NFL and the reasoning techniques of the famed Greek philosopher Rambloniclese. Onward!

There is nothing redeeming about the Kardashians as far as I can tell. They’re like a combination of the Manson Family, the Addams Family, and a porno. But I do like one thing about them. See, I never would have made them famous, but somebody else did. And that’s what makes capitalism great. Stick with me here.

The Addams Family Porno

Capitalism works because it allows 310 million Americans to look around themselves every single day and make their own decisions. If they see something they think the rest of us would like, they have the right to try to sell it to us. And we have the right to buy it or not. And nothing proves the value in this system more clearly than the fact that I never would have looked at Kim Kardashian’s butt as a money-maker, but somebody else did.

Ditto with the NFL. The NFL combine begins on Thursday as a large group of male sportswriters and NFL types get together to take nice long looks at a bunch of male athletes and judge them on how they look in their underwear. And no, I’m not kidding. Sounds kind of gay, doesn’t it? But more importantly, it sounds kind of dull. But get this, people watch it. Not only that, they talk about it, they write about it, and somebody even included it in a videogame. Just like Kris Kardashian’s butt, somebody guessed right.

The point is simple: if it were up to me to run the world, there would be no Kardashians and I never would have thought to put the NFL draft on television. It’s only because our system doesn’t rely on me that we have these things. Now imagine what else the world wouldn’t have if it were up to me to decide what people could watch, read, buy or believe?

Now let’s consider a man named Gary Lineker. He’s an a-hole from Britain who announces soccer games. I’m told soccer is some sort of sport. Old Gary, who hosts a program on the BBC, says that soccer players earn too much. Indeed, he thinks they shouldn’t be paid more than nurses or teachers. Gary’s a flaming hypocrite because he gets paid £2m a year for basically flapping his lips. But let’s not worry about that because hypocrisy is the new black in fall fashions. Instead, let me ask a series of questions to see if I can enunciate the problem with Gary’s line of “reasoning.”

What happens to the rest of the money soccer earns if it doesn’t go to salaries? It would go to club owners. So really Gary has decided that some people shouldn’t be made millionaires because that’s unfair to billionaires. But how can all these billionaires be so stupid as to pay this amount of money to the players if they aren’t worth it? And what gives Gary the right to decide that he knows better than the billionaires how much to pay the millionaires?

In truth, Gary doesn’t care about the billionaires. He’s just a spiteful little turd who doesn’t like some people earning more than others. But why pick teachers? Why not convenience store clerks? Why even pay soccer players at all? They should be like government employees should be and they should play for room and board. . . and live on a plantation. In fact, now that I think about it, why do teachers earn so much? Teachers should earn $1 an hour. And my opinion is as valid as Gary’s so why don’t we go with my opinion?

Also, while we’re readjusting the world to our own prejudices, I don’t like really soccer and people shouldn’t be allowed to watch it because I don’t like it. And before you try to tell me that people want it, let me just cut you off and say that I don’t care what people want, because I know what’s best.

Get the point?

Here’s the thing. Capitalism works because it lets millions of people try to sell their ideas to millions of other people in the form of products and services. When a want or need appears, somebody fills it, they don’t have to wait for me to decide if it should be filled. And through the trillions of decisions made each day by every single one of us, the human race goes about making each other happy.

It’s only when the *ssholes get involved and decide they want to control what people get paid or what products can get made or what ideas can be brought to life or which companies should be winners and which losers that things fail. That’s when there are no Kardashians or NFL draft or new cars or butter or health care. . . just lots of lousy GM cars nobody wants. And every dollar the government sucks away from us and every regulation they impose to help some crony is a decision the government deprives us from making. Government is the enemy of freedom.

So let’s all raise a toast to Kris Kardashian’s butt, to rap music, to overpaid athletes and a million other things we don’t like but which somebody else does, and let us thank God that for a brief moment our country was bright enough to adopt capitalism. It shall be missed.


P.S. There’s a Politics of Trek article up today at the film site.

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Commentarama Dating Advice Goes Scientific

You laughed when we gave dating advice, but we knew what we were doing! Indeed, science has now proven what Commentarama already knew: successful dating is all about ideology.

The study in question took a look at married couples and tried to determine what factor or factors were most likely to predict a successful marriage. And what did these scientists find? Well, it turns out that political affiliation is by far the single most important factor. Yep. It’s more important than looks or personality or anything else. In other words, matching up with someone with the same political views is your best shot of finding someone to marry and staying married after you do the deed.

Said researcher John Alford:

"It turns out that people place more emphasis on finding a mate who is a kindred spirit with regard to politics, religion and social activity than they do on finding someone of like physique or personality. It suggests that, perhaps, if you're looking for a long-term romantic relationship, skip 'What's your sign?' and go straight to 'Obama or Palin?' And if you get the wrong answer, just walk away."

Yes, walk away. Don’t even waste your time trying to sway over that stupid liberal/conservative/libertarian/communist/fascist/socialist/anarchist/Ron Pauler/independent, it will only end in a messy divorce with shots fired and a heartbreaking division of the commemorative Elvis plates.

Now that you know this, you should feel happier. Do you know why? Because we’ve narrowed your choices and that makes you happier. . . I’ll bet you didn’t know that? It’s true though. Another recent study found that the more choices a person is given in terms of choosing partners for dates, the less happy the person was and the less successful they ultimately were at dating. They aren't really sure why this is true, but it seems to be.

Personally I would say it's "choice paralysis" caused by a combination of having too many inputs to make a rational decision combined with an increased fear that you made the wrong choice. . . like when you see more than 12 donuts you want.

In any event, this makes me wonder. People are marrying later and having fewer kids all over the globe. Many explanations are offered for this, but none of them actually work consistently across countries. In other words, if something like economic success were the cause, then we would be seeing a consistent fall in each country as they get richer. . . but we’re not, the falling rates are not consistent. The same problem is true with other explanations like availability of birth control, employment of women outside the home, culture, religion or lack of religion. I wonder if the problem isn’t staring us in the face in this study?

In the past, people tended to live in the towns they grew up in and they really only got to know a small circle of people, i.e. they had limited opportunities to marry. Thus, this study says they should have been more successful at finding mates and happier with their choices. Today, by comparison, people live in different cities at various points throughout their lives and careers. They're also more likely to run into possible mates at college or at their jobs than in the past, and then there is the internet. Perhaps all this extra choice is causing "choice paralysis" and ruining it for everybody?

Hmmm.

Any way, don’t date outside your politics and start ruling out more of your choices before you even start looking. You’ll be a dating monster in no time!

You're welcome.

Thoughts on any of these theories?

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Angry Feminism Hits A Wall

By the time I went to college, feminism was entering a truly vile period. Gone was the talk about equality, respect and giving women “choices.” In its place was the hateful agenda of identity politics: affirmative action, squeals for equality of outcome, groupthink, suppression of opponents, and nasty misandry. At the time, this seemed to be the future of feminism. But three recent statistics tell me this version of feminism has played out.

I don’t think doctrinaire feminism was ever what it pretended to be. It claimed to want equality of opportunity and respect, but like many such 1960s movements, its leaders had a different agenda. Indeed, under the guise of equality of opportunity feminists soon began pushing for equality of result. This was particularly true in the economic sphere in the 1970s where they pushed things like the ERA, which sought not only to award equal pay within a profession, but identical pay across professions based on leftist notions of labor comparability.

Moreover, the harder-core adherents quickly devolved into man-hating. For example, feminist academics began writing papers claiming that our entire history was nothing more than a male plot to oppress women and that all sex is rape because women, lacking economic power, can never consent -- an identical argument made for why blacks "can't be racist." They also demanded the erection of gender studies departments in colleges, the appointment of women to positions for which they weren’t qualified, and the removal of gender references from the language.

By the late 1980s, this twisted view became feminist doctrine. Thus, sensible ideas like “no means no” were twisted into “no means no, even when it isn't said until after the fact.” Colleges started having rape awareness nights where everyone was supposed to walk around in the dark to protest a rape epidemic that didn’t exist -- we were told for every real rape, ten somehow go unreported and we heard ludicrous statistics like “one in four women will be raped.” College professorettes started doing things like demanding “Herstory” departments to counter “History” departments, they designed re-education programs, and they tried replacing the generic "he" with "she" in textbooks (which is a dead giveaway about their mindset because they claimed the use of "he" was oppressive; in other words, rather than looking for a gender neutral word, they simply wanted to become oppressors). They also took the stance that if there weren't enough women's sports teams, then schools had to eliminate men's sports teams. Meanwhile, extremely unkempt girls started showing up in literature and history classes talking about “male oppression,” claiming that all the female characters were lesbians, and whining that our very language keeps them down boo hoo hoo (fyi, "unkempt" because grooming standards were male attempts to oppress. . . seriously, there's feminist theory on this). And angry girls went to law school, where they would proudly (and unethically) proclaim that they would only represent “womyn.” This is what feminism became.

This version of feminism had three main planks that it pushed: (1) the forcing of women into “power professions,” (2) unchecked abortion, and (3) the destruction of marriage.

The power profession thing was easily the most interesting. Feminists kept talking about giving women “choices,” but that was a lie. What they really wanted was to force women into occupations that feminists believed would let them oppress others. This meant that any woman who chose to stay home and raise a family would be ridiculed by feminists -- even Hillary Clinton stumbled into this when she denigrated cookie making, which was common jargon among feminists at the time as a way to insult stay-at-home mothers. Moreover, women who chose “inferior careers,” i.e. traditional female occupations, were typically branded with the bimbo label. Basically, the only "allowable" choice for women was to go into politics, law or finance.

The abortion thing resulted from the realization by feminists that so long as women cared more about their children, they weren’t going to be as successful as men in the power professions. This meant women had to be kept childless so they could climb the career ladder, which meant breaking the motherhood bond. Thus, in the 1990s, you saw an assault of studies claiming that children actually benefited from being abandoned by their mothers, and you saw a strong push to ensure ideological rigidity on the abortion issue, with feminists uniformly portraying all women as being pro-abortion and portraying abortion opponents as creepy, male religious freaks intent on enslaving women. There was even a study claiming that having an abortion made women healthier.

Finally, the destruction of marriage was key because women who marry tend to drop out of the workforce. Thus, feminists pushed the idea of no-fault divorce, and single motherhood was glorified. But what really became a big issue for feminists in the 1990s was whether or not women should take their mate’s last names if they married. Indeed, if you read any feminist-infused magazine from the period, you will see that it was assumed that all women would (and did) keep their own names and the only question was whether or not to add the husband's name as a hyphenated name. Women who didn’t toe this line were dismissed as hopelessly old-fashioned and usually religious zealots.

Well, now things are falling apart for feminists. Every month I get bar journals from various states. Last month, I came across a very shrill article by one veteran feminist who was horrified that the number of women entering law school has been dropping for several years now. In the 1990s, when the number of women exceeded the number of men, feminists proclaimed that one day women would run the legal profession, and thereby the world. Apparently not. The number of women is now below the male number again and falling fast. The woman who wrote this article bemoaned the failure of young women to go to law school and openly feared that this will result in the oppression of women. . . no, I’m not kidding. The number of women in politics seems to have petered out too. And what’s worse, many are the “wrong kind” of woman, i.e. conservatives.

Then I came upon an article that talked about marriage rates and how marriage rates in the US are on the rise and people are no longer divorcing at nearly the rate they used to. Almost the next day came a study lamenting that the number of women keeping their own name in marriage (in any form) peaked in the 1990s at 23% (far less than the nearly 100% figure portrayed in the media) and has been falling steadily since. It is currently 18%.

Now, we hear from Gallup (which has a consistent left-ward bent) that only 27% of people believe abortion should be legal under “any circumstances,” i.e. the feminist position.

What this tells me is that "feminism" peaked in the 1990s and has been in steady decline ever since. What seems to have stopped it is the emergence of vocal conservative women who demanded that feminism actually be about choices as advertised. When this group of women demanded that feminists stop denigrating stay-at-home mothers, the end was near for modern feminism because that undercut the entire purpose of radical feminism.

Does this mean radical/angry feminism is dead? No. It lives on and it always will. But like Marxism or cults, its appeal is now limited to an ever shrinking fringe. The question now is: how do we use this lesson to take the radical out of other worthwhile movements that have gone astray, e.g. environmentalism?

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How Far Is Too Far With Anonymous Posting?

One of the greatest things about the internet is also one of the worst things about the internet: anonymity. Anonymity allows people the freedom to say their most truthful and deepest thoughts without fear of social sanction. But it also makes it too easy to express vicious and hateful thoughts and to try to manipulate others. To combat this, people have adopted various tactics -- everything from deleting anonymous comments to the creation of fake posters to refute the haters. But how far is too far?

The incident that raises this question involves Scott Adams. Adams, for those who don’t recognize the name, is the creator of the comic strip “Dilbert.” Adams, who describes himself as a “libertarian minus the crazy stuff,” found himself in trouble in March of 2011 when he wrote a blog post on the topic of men’s rights after his readers suggested that be his next topic.

In typical Adams style, Adams relied heavily on sarcasm as he suggested that men treat women differently for the same reason men treat children or the mentally handicapped differently, i.e. because it is an effective strategy. He then suggested that men should take the path of least resistance when dealing with women. This generated significant outrage both from men’s rights advocates and from feminists, neither of whom can take a joke.

Adams eventually deleted the post after pointing out that people had failed to grasp his use of sarcasm and satire, and he wrote that this furor showed that it was impossible to “have a rational discussion on any topic that has an emotional charge.” But that didn’t end the problem. Following this, Adams found himself subject to repeated nasty criticism on the internet by anonymous posters. Adams responded by creating a fake person (called a “sockpuppet” in internet parlance), who would visit sites like Reddit and Metafilter pretending to be a fan of Adams and would defend Adams. Eventually, he was caught, and in April 2011, he confessed. This unleashed ferocious criticism of his tactic. But was he unjustified?

This is an admittedly complex question and answers that appear clear at first glance turn cloudy very quickly. For example, in general, we shouldn’t condone fraud or deceit. Pretending to be someone else is classic fraud. But then, the entire internet is anonymous, and why should we condemn Adams when we don’t demand to know the identities of the equally anonymous attackers?

Also, if our concern is just his pretending to be someone else, then he could fix that by hiring someone to defend him -- like a public relations firm. But that’s the same thing we call fraudulent when a salesman does it by planting a shill in the audience to talk up their product. So isn’t that just swapping one problem for another? Or should we factor in the difference anonymity makes today? In the past, you had to make your claims in person, which toned them down and gave people a person to judge the allegations against. But not today. Today, people have the power and right to slander you without ever disclosing their real names, much less their motivations. Shouldn’t that grant some leeway in how people choose to fight this threat?

Of course, we should also point out that people should know not to trust what they read from anonymous sources. So caveat reader seems to be the order of the day. But do people really get this? I can tell you from experience that the perception of independence matters, even when it’s a false perception. For example, we’ve seen that a link posted by one of you at Big Hollywood will consistently drive many times the amount of traffic to our site that the same link posted by one of us would. Yet, those visitors have no way to know if any of you is real or if you are just Commentarama sockpuppets. So clearly, there is something to the idea of an independent recommendation that people find attractive, even when there is no way to confirm the independence.

But before we start advocating some new rules, we should also ask: does it matter? Sure, humans tend to believe far too much of what they read. But most of the criticism found on the net is just subjective opinions and falls into the “he said, she said” category which people tend to ignore. Moreover, if either side pushes too far into truly damaging statements, then readers start to suspect a motive. . . that’s how Adams got caught and how the Washington Redskins got caught when they did the same thing -- they pushed too hard in their own defense. Also, massive organizations like Media Matters regularly flood comment streams with pro-leftist posts today, but the public still has turned against Obama and the Progressives. So maybe this type of attack just isn’t very effective?

Ultimately, maybe this whole issue comes down to a bit of a contradiction. For example, I find that I cannot condemn Adams for wrongdoing. He has the right to defend himself. He did nothing more than use the same tools used by his critics to attack him. And he never left the realm of subjective opinion into making false claims about the physical properties of products, i.e. the kinds of things I would see as fraudulent. But at the same time, I can’t condone what he’s done either as it feels dirty. And I have to wonder if maybe the best policy when faced with this kind of attack isn’t simply to challenge the anonymous posters under your own name? People respect that and they tend to give instant credibility to the “known” entity over the unknown attacker. So maybe, the answer was there all along -- Adams should have just stood up for himself as “Scott Adams”?

What do you think?

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And Yet, I'm Alive. . .

Thank God I’m alive. I had no idea what for a dangerous life I’ve lived until busybodies started telling me. How could the adults in my life have been so careless. . . I should sue someone.

What am I talking about? Well, let me go down the list. I owned a car without seat belts. Yep, a 1961 Ford Falcon. Sure, it took 20 minutes to get to 60 mph, but its dashboard was pure steel baby. Want more? I never had a helmet for my bike. I even had three serious falls, two on my head. I’m still not sure how I lived through that. More? Ok, I played dodgeball, wiffleball, kickball and red rover. I even had flammable pajamas and toys I could fit into my mouth all the way through high school! No, I’m not some sort of daredevil, I’m just an innocent victim. Sniff sniff.

Ok, enough of this crap. I am truly sick of the modern thinking that kids need to be bubble wrapped. Seriously, W.... T.... F....?!

When I was kid, we still enjoyed a good deal of freedom vis-à-vis the world. But not today. Helmet laws make parents criminals if they don’t strap their kids in before putting them to bed. Dodgeball was yanked from schools years ago after it was designated a crime against humanity after some assh~le decided someone could get hurt by that huge soft, rubber ball floating through the air with all the force a flabby nine year old can muster. . . clearly, this was not a physics major.

Recently, New York State “Health Department” losers tried to ban wiffleball, kickball and red rover. Why? Because they’re “dangerous.” Seriously? Have you ever seen a mobster use a red rover technique to do anyone in? "Hey, red rover, send Jimmy the Weasel over." And do you know how hard it is to hurt someone with a wifflebat? Trust me, you can beat for hours without breaking the skin! Stick with aluminum bats, they're easier and nothing satisfies quite like that great ringing sound.

This is ridiculous. When I was a kid, people understood that slamming into things and falling from moving vehicles was all part of life. Sure, you could get hurt. But serious injuries were incredibly rare, and were well worth the risk of enjoying your childhood. To sort of quote Evel Kneival: “Bones heal, chicks dig scars, pain is temporary and the character you build in childhood is forever.”

These days, it seems that any time you engage in any activity that involves motion or touching, some whiny, failed parent is out there screaming how their kid is too delicate to endure the horror that they might end up with a skinned knee or hurt feelings. Pathetic. How can kids possibly grow up to handle anything if “parents” try to put them into bubble wrap to keep away the insidious forces of gravity, friction and childhood?

And if you are one of these people who is growing one of these delicate creatures, note I did not say “raising,” all you are producing is an effete victim-in-waiting. Congratulations. You have failed as a parent.

What's even worse, did you hear about the 10 year old kid who was arrested because he found a broken BB gun on school grounds and dared to play with it? Yep. Arrested, taken away in cuffs, spent 2 days locked up, appeared in court shackled, and was charged with a felony. Now school officials are trying to expel him. . . at least it wasn't a dodgeball, these dipsh~ts probably would have tried to hang him. The principal, the arresting officer, and the prosecutor seriously should all lose their jobs or worse.

Maybe we need a gulag for idiots?

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Your 15 Minutes Are Up. . . Now Get Out

I guess we should hit this topic since everyone is still talking about it, loathe though I am to even mention it. Charlie Sheen is an almost perfect example of what is wrong with celebrity culture.

Let me start with a disclaimer. Unlike most Americans (disturbingly), I am not in love with celebrity. I don’t tune into a worn out sitcom just because some plastic chick who is famous for a sex tape or some disgraced politician who is famous for a different kind of sex tape will be on tonight. I don’t care. I don’t tune into Celebrity Apprentice, Celebrity Rehab, or Pimp My Celebrity.

At one point, celebrity had to be earned. You had to invent something useful, create something beautiful, or achieve something monumental. Heck, half our Presidents weren't even celebrities because they didn’t do anything worth mentioning. But that changed and now celebrity requires no achievements -- in fact, it disdains achievement.

I lay the blame for this firmly at the feet of that most evil generation: the 60’s hippie/self-love.... er, free-love generation. That’s the generation that created Andy Warhol and his crew, who were famous for being famous. That’s the generation that made celebrities of specific hippies for no other reason than they were there. . . Wavy Gravy? Are you idiots serious? That’s the generation that glorified serial killers (see e.g. Charlie Manson and Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood) and professors who liked drugs (Timothy Leary). They even gloried the failed presidency of JFK and tried to turn the whole family into American-princelings for no reason that I can possibly see. This is the generation that divorced achievement from celebrity.

And because of their egotism and narcissism, we are now cursed with the likes of Britney Spears, who is famous for gyrating to a song someone else wrote and then imploding on youtube; Lindsay Lohan who is famous for being drug-addicted white trash and her parents, who are famous for being white trash with a famous daughter; Paris Hilton, who is famous for a sex tape and making out with girls at ritzy parties; Perez Hilton who is famous for being an obnoxious homosexual; Bristol Palin who is famous because the left hates her mother obsessively and because she got herself knocked up; Snookie who is famous for having a bad tan; "The Situation" who is famous for being an obnoxious unaware-metrosexual; and the King of Them All. . . Charlie Sheen.

Sheen gained some fame for being an actor who looked like his father. But he became a celebrity when he started doing so many drugs that he lost touch with reality and began ranting like a lunatic. Sheen is the poster child for everything that’s wrong with celebrities. He’s stupid. He’s harmful to everyone around him, including his kids and multiple wives. He thinks he’s entitled to do whatever he wants. And not only is he allowed to get away with being an obnoxious turd, but people go out of their way to coddle him. Indeed, despite the fact he should be locked up and medicate somewhere. . . possibly lobotomized, Hollyweird is falling all over itself to exploit and enable his implosion.

Come on people, let this sad chapter in American culture end. Their fifteen minutes has run 50 years too long now. Stop paying attention to people who have nothing to offer other than being trainwrecks of human beings. The damage these people are doing to our culture is immense, and we need to stop making heroes out of them.

And if we're going to insist on making these idiots heroes, then I say we start a new program. . . a live action, not-faked version of Celebrity Death Match. Now that I would pay to see.

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Top 10 Reasons We Like Top 10 Lists

Ok, I lied, I'm not giving you ten reasons for anything. But I will tell you why people are so obsessed with top 10 list and why this is normally a waste of time.

Human beings are by their very natures classifiers. We classify everything. We group by color, shape, weight, width or any other distinguishing characteristic. We feel compelled to put our books in a particular order, as we do with our CDs, which are kept separately. We put labels on species, trees, rocks, and each other. We even match our socks.

The reason for this is the nature of our brains which are designed to gather information and put it into a format that is easy to understand. Think of it this way. Take everything you own and put it into a pile. How long would it take to find two socks? And how much easier does this become when you create a system for storing your junk? The same holds true for the facts stored in your brain. Our brains literally hold trillions of pieces of information. Categorizing makes it possible to search this information in a fraction of the time it would otherwise take, because each category eliminates trillions of possible alternatives that otherwise would need to be sorted through: “Let's see. . . human (ignore animals, minerals and vegetable), white (ignore Bill Clinton), male (ignore Perez Hilton), fat, red coat and hat. . . must be Santa!”

This ability is perhaps the single most important ability we have. If we could not categorize and process the world around us, we could never know what is relevant to our lives, what is dangerous to our persons, or what we need to survive. Without this ability we would not know what is edible, we could not spot family members, we wouldn't know when we need to run or duck, and science would be impossible. This ability to spot patterns and bring order from the chaos lets us live and grow.

But this ability doesn’t always work perfectly. There is a psychological phenomenon called Pareidolia, where we have a tendency to see faces in random objects. This is a subset of something called Apophenia, where humans see patterns in randomness that aren’t there. This is our brain trying too hard to categorize the world around us. Essentially, these two phenomena result in us trying to group things that can’t be grouped. Coincidentally, this is where most conspiracy theories are born.

And that brings us to Top 10 lists. The problem with most Top 10 lists is that the list maker usually is trying to group together items using subjective judgments. For example, they are looking for the "best" or "worst" somethings. But subjective judgments are meaningless as they vary from person to person based on personal preference. Thus, these lists only offer us a glimpse into how this particular person has classified these items inside their brain.

So why do this and why listen? My first instinct is to say that both the list maker and the list reader are engaging in a form of Apophenia, as the list maker is trying to categorize that which can't be categorized to bring order to their world, and the reader is hoping to piggyback on their efforts. But that explanation isn't entirely satisfying because both should know that the list is subjective in nature and thus useless.

So what is really going on? Maybe the list maker has learned that they can exploit the human herd instinct? Maybe people continue to look at “best” lists despite the obvious meaninglessness of the information because they are looking for someone to affirm their own choices. In other words, if this guy lists “Melt With You” as his favorite 1980s song, then you were right to feel the same way. . . your behavior is consistent with the herd. And maybe the list maker knows this and making the list is their way of trying to lead the herd?

Or possibly, people are just trying to check their brain's functioning against how other people's brains function?

Or maybe it really is that our need to categorize is just so strong that we will accept false data, even knowing it is false, so long as it offers the promise of further categorizing our world?

In any event, think twice the next time someone offers you a "best" or "worst" or "most overrated" list. Ask yourself what criteria they are really using before you add their lists to your brain.


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Feminists: “Pay No Attention To The Tiger Mom”

I have long had a problem with liberal feminists. I make a distinction because I know many conservative women who consider themselves feminists and I think they get it about right. Their goal is equal opportunity and respect. That’s fair. But liberal feminists are something else, as their response to the Tiger Mom demonstrates. . . once again.

Liberal feminists are a disgusting species. Ostensibly, they want “equality” for “womyn.” But their version of equality is pretty skewed. For one thing, it involves a lot of oppression theory, and like all oppression theorists, their goal is to replace the oppressors rather than ending the oppression. Secondly, the only thing they despise more than male oppressors are women who chart a “traditional” course of motherhood -- the derision they pour out on stay-at-home mothers is truly vile. Third, their view of equality isn’t about equality of opportunity, it’s about equality of result. Thus, for example, they are offended that women don’t earn as much as men, regardless of the fact women make choices that harm their income potential.

Moreover, because they equate income with power, their entire philosophy is premised on forcing women to become Alpha Males. Thus, they disdain the hallmarks of femininity and they aim their philosophy at making women enter and remain in the work force. Indeed, this is why feminists are so obsessed with abortion: according to feminist literature, children are an obstacle to women achieving their full economic potential, so we must eliminate children. Thus, even when they can’t convince women to have abortions or avoid sex with males (in college you hear: “all sex is rape” and “the phallus is a weapon”. . . sure, try robbing a bank with one), they push for things like government sponsored day care, with the idea of getting women back to work as quickly as possible.

Many women find this troubling because they don’t like being separated from their children, and there is a vast amount of data showing that such a separation is bad for children. But feminists will not be deterred. Thus, they routinely put out intentionally flawed studies to try to con women into thinking their kids are better off in these environments. That’s where the Tiger Mom comes in.

The “Tiger Mom” is Amy Chua (above left). She’s a Chinese-American lawyer who wrote a book explaining why Chinese mothers are “better” than Western mothers. Her reasoning comes down to permissiveness and laziness. According to Chua, Chinese mothers push their kids to the edge of insanity. They control every aspect of their kids’ lives, from imposing three hours of homework a night to keeping them from participating in wasted classes or activities in schools to forcing the appropriate hobbies upon them. Naturally, this caused an uproar. But she also caused a good deal of introspection because many modern parents fail to place any expectations on their kids or impose any sense of discipline.

Liberal feminists were not amused. Although few women want to emulate the Tiger Mom’s parenting, the vast majority of mothers apparently concluded they should at least be a little more like the Tiger Mom. But this runs directly counter to the efforts of liberal feminists. Clearly, something had to be done to defuse this, and fast.

Enter Rahna Reiko Rizzuto (above right), a Vermont college professor. She’s been making the rounds of day time television, e.g. the Today Show, etc., where she’s being presented as the Western response to the Tiger Mom. Rizzuto says she never wanted to be a mother because “I was afraid of being swallowed up by that.” So when her sons were 5 and 3, she decided she didn’t want to be a parent anymore. She divorced her husband, moved to Japan and chose not to be the custodial parent. How did that turn out you ask? Well, you wouldn’t believe how great it was! Everyone should dump their kids. In fact, she’s a better mom for it, and her kids love her and turned out way better than they possible could have if she had stuck around like the oppressive Tiger Mom or those stupid stay at home slave women.

In an article at Salon.com, she said: “I had to leave my children to find them.” How Zen. And by being a part-time mother, she “get[s] concentrated blocks of time when I can be that 1950s mother we idealize who was waiting in an apron with fresh cookies. . . and wasn’t too busy for anything we needed.” Isn't that great? That's why kids are always asking parents to divorce, so they get to spend concentrated days with each parent. By the way, note the disdain for 1950s mothers, that’s a common theme in feminism.

Backing Rizzuto up is Talyaa Liera, a “spiritualist” and author of a parenting book. She moved 3,000 miles away from her kids. Sure, she felt conflicted at first, but then she “realized that by being so nurturing, I was in some ways keeping my children from growing to their potential.” Gee, no wonder all the best and brightest people come from orphanages or foster homes, they weren't hindered by being nurtured! According to Liera, she doesn’t regret abandoning her kids because she had the opportunity to grow personally:

“I have the unique opportunity most women don’t get to have, of being able to truly create the life I wish to have, do something in the world that makes a difference, and model this kind of independence for my children.”

Let me translate. First, her business opportunities are more important than her kids. Second, other women are suckers. Third, raising kids is not important nor does it make a difference. Fourth, “my being important is enough to inspire my kids.” What a selfish as~hole!

And of course, no liberal feminist diatribe would be complete without an assault on "the double standard that lets men do what we're doing." Right, that's why we celebrate absentee fathers rather than condemn them for abandoning their families.

But in the end, none of this is aimed at you. It's aimed at women who are doing what they've been told by feminists and are starting to have doubts. Make no mistake, the reason these absentee-mothers are getting play right now is that feminists are concerned the Tiger Mom has struck a chord that will revive the maternal instincts of womyn and will irreparably harm the feminist cause of turning women into economically-powerful oppressors. The idea here, just like with the fake studies that claim day care is good for kids, is to trick women into thinking they don't need to act like a parent to be a parent.

That’s what’s wrong with liberal feminists.

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