That said, I know what he meant. Christie is definitely a breath of fresh air in the morass of contemporary politics — not necessarily because of his substantive policies, the full impact of which remains to be seen — but simply because he treats the people of his state like adults. He doesn’t pretend that the hard choices aren’t necessary, or that they can be made without pain, and he believes the public is mature enough to grasp the facts, evaluate them and act appropriately.
It’s a sad comment on the rest of our political leadership, on the left and the right, that that alone is enough to make Christie stand out from the crowd.
Herewith my and Anne’s entries. You will note that Anne is a much better artist than I am.
For those interested in more drawings of Mohammad, Craig Biddle has a collection over at the Objective Standard website. And for those who just can’t get enough, check out the Mohammed Image Archive.
While trundling around Usenet, I stumbled over a piece of spam by a religionist with the subject “What have atheists ever done for humanity?” The question struck me as interesting, not because of its contents but because of the way it frames the conflict between the religious and non-religious worldviews. The poster wants to provoke the following line of thought: ‘What have atheists done for humanity? Well, let me think of some famous atheists… hmm, nobody really comes to mind. I guess there were the Communists, and Madeline Murray O’Hare. Gee, I guess all we’ve gotten from atheism is mass slaughter. Wow, I guess religion really must be a good thing!” And, indeed, he is correct that overt atheists are pretty sparse on the list of great benefactors of humanity. But does his conclusion follow?
The problem comes from the way the distinction is framed: religion versus atheism. But is this the right way to think of the dispute? Atheism, per se, is a purely negative doctrine. It indicates the lack of a specific kind of belief. But men act on the basis of what they do believe, not what they don’t. I’m an atheist, but that isn’t the essential defining characteristic of my beliefs. Fundamentally, I’m an advocate of reason. Atheism is a derivative consequence, not a primary. I don’t believe in God because there is no rational basis for doing so.
If you reframe the question in terms of reason and faith, the entire playing field changes. What has reason ever done for humanity? In a modern industrial society it’s difficult to identify a concrete value that doesn’t flow from reason. Science, technology, medicine, industry, political freedom — all are children of the age of reason. (Stephen Hicks has a nifty diagram of the connections in his book Explaining Post-Modernism; on-line version available here.) Now consider the contrary question: What has faith ever done for humanity? The era of history in which faith was most dominant is aptly named the Dark Ages — a time when the average lifespan was approximately 30 years and everyone existed in what we would today consider grinding poverty. Disease ran rampant, literacy was extremely rare. Heretics were burned at the stake. Men who took their faith the most seriously, like Saint Francis, would use rocks as pillows, drink laundry water, and sprinkle sand on their food to dull the taste.
Reason is man’s basic means of survival. In essence, the answer to the question “What has reason ever done for humanity?” is “Allowed it to live and prosper.” The answer to the question “What has faith ever done for humanity?” is “Led it to suffer and die.” The religious men whose actions benefitted humanity created those benefits to the extent that they acted rationally, i.e. to the extent that their faith did not interfere with their reason.
Attempting to think about this issue in the terms laid out by the religionist is futile. The setup leads down a blind alley to a false conclusion. The lesson is that one should never uncritically accept the terms in which an intellectual opponent wants to frame a debate. Concepts matter. Don’t let your enemies pick the ones you use.
Anyone paying attention to the news knows that 2010 is shaping up to be a Republican year. A growing grass-roots backlash against the Democrats is reflected in both election results and polls. But one should never underestimate the ability of the GOP to blow an advantage, and here’s an example of why — they don’t understand the power of narrative. The left is expert at setting up narrative lines that provide the structure for media coverage of events. Facts that play into the narrative get picked up, repeated, elaborated. Facts that run counter to the narrative are ignored, suppressed, abandoned. And the narratives are almost always ones that benefit the left and damage the right.
One of the narratives the left has been setting up recently is the classic “conservatives are just a bunch of racist rednecks”. They’ve been particularly anxious to set this frame up around the Tea Party movement in the hopes of scaring off and/or driving away the independent voters who have been attracted by the Tea Party’s message of fiscal responsibility, but they’ll use it on mainstream Republicans too. It never gets old. Now, if you want to fight a narrative line, you must not do anything that feeds into it and gives it credibility. Any fact that even seems to support the narrative may be seized upon, repeated endlessly as ‘proof’ of its accuracy, and used to cement its power in the upcoming news cycle.
Rick Moran writes, of the Tea Parties, that he has “been very critical of those in the tea party movement who seek to use anger and fear as a wedge to gain support for their cause.” The implicit assumption here is that anger is somehow an inappropriate response to recent political events. Excuse me? Let’s take one example: ObamaCare. In my judgment, the Democrats passed a bill which was:
Profoundly immoral.
Ruinously impractical.
Defended mendaciously.
Supported corruptly.
Enacted through procedural abuse, in the face of strong public opposition.
Exactly which of these things should I not be angry about? Anger is a response to perceived injustice. Condemning anger means one of two things: either the object of the anger is not in fact an injustice, or we should be emotionally indifferent to questions of right and wrong.
Moran goes on to note that “that reason wins a lot more converts than screaming” — which is true. But reason and anger are not mutually exclusive. The appropriate response to our current political situation is anger, rationally grounded. It is the rational identification of the facts which gives rise to the anger, and the anger provides the motivation to act to correct the injustice. This is not an academic exercise. Our lives are, quite literally, at stake. If we’re not allowed to get emotional about that, when is anger appropriate?
I just received the following e-mail from my father, which I assume is circulating around the underbelly of the Internet. (I have edited it lightly, mostly by removing repetitions of the line about “Serving in Congress is an honor, not a career. I got the point the first time, thanks.)
Subject: This makes sense to me!
I think we should print this off and send it to our congressmen…..over and over again until they “get it”!!!
THIS IS HOW YOU FIX CONGRESS!!!!!
Congressional Reform Act of 2010
Term Limits: 12 years only, one of the possible options below.
Two Six year Senate terms
Six Two year House terms
One Six year Senate term and three Two Year House terms
No Tenure / No Pension: A congressman collects a salary while in office and receives no pay when they are out of office.
Congress (past, present & future) participates in Social Security: All funds in the Congressional retirement fund moves to the Social Security system immediately. All future funds flow into the Social Security system; Congress participates with the American people.
Congress can purchase their own retirement plan just as all Americans.
Congress will no longer vote themselves a pay raise. Congressional pay will rise by the lower of CPI or 3%.
Congress loses their current health care system and participates in the same health care system as the American people.
Congress and the President must equally abide in all laws they impose on the American people. Signing statements will not be used nor honored.
All contracts with past and present congressmen are void effective 1/1/11. The American people did not make this contract with congressmen, congressmen made all these contracts for themselves.
Serving in Congress is an honor, not a career. The Founding Fathers envisioned citizen legislators, serve your term(s), then go home and back to work.
If you agree with the above, pass it on to all in your address list. If not, just delete.
I thought that, as a list of proposed solutions to the problems afflicting our government, this largely misses the point. Herewith, my response.
That stuff feeds an emotional desire for vengence, but doesn’t really address the fundamental problem.
The Founding Fathers envisioned a government whose sole function was the protection of the individual rights to life, liberty, property and the pursuit of happiness; the purpose of the Constitution was to establish such a government, with powers limited to those necessary and proper to the fulfillment of that end. Our government has thrown off those restrictions, arrogating effectively unlimited power to itself. Our leaders are contemptuous of the very idea that the Constitution limits their power — you may or may not have noticed the derision with which House Speaker Pelosi dismissed a question regarding the constitutional authority enabling a government takeover of the health care system. (She said that “wasn’t a serious question” and refused to answer it.)
Unsurprisingly, the power we have allowed our government to amass attracts unsavory people, whose personalities are marred by narcissism and power-lust. Is it surprising that such people fasten themselves to jobs that give them the power they lust for, refuse to give them up, and proceed to act as rulers while treating the American people as serfs?
As long as you have a pot of honey, you will have flies attracted to it. You can’t stop the process by putting a lid on the pot — you have to get rid of the honey. Restore the limitations on the government’s power. A Congress that has no authority beyond protecting the individual rights of the people would be a Congress with no ability to dispense favors to favored constituents or special interests. Such a government would not need multi-trillion dollar budgets, and would not be in a position to bail out the connected or punish the productive when they refuse to abase themselves.
It is widely acknowledged today that our government is thoroughly corrupt — but what does that really mean? A government action is corrupt when it directs government power and resources to an inappropriate end. But since the proper end of government is the protection of individual rights, this means that any government action not directed to that end is inherently corrupt — and that is 90%+ of what the government does today. Corruption is the norm, not the exception, and the problem is not structural, but functional — specifically, that our government officials have lost their understanding of what their proper function *is*.
If we wish to reclaim our government and halt the ongoing theft of the liberties envisioned for us by the Founders, this is the issue we must push. We must insist that our Congressmen understand the purpose of their jobs, and we must replace those who reject that purpose with new Congressmen who do. This job starts by finding such candidates and supporting them in the upcoming primaries, wherever possible. I suggest contacting your local Tea Party organization as a good starting place.
Look, cretins. They’re either money, or they aren’t. You don’t get to have it both ways. Or at least you wouldn’t, if the world hadn’t gone insane and decided the law of identity is politically negotiable.
I assume the motivation here is that the state government has financial obligations it can’t fob off with IOUs; if they were to accept them for tax payments they’d get eaten alive by Gresham’s Law. Still, I have no sympathy. If you go long enough spending wealth that doesn’t actually exist, you burn through your savings and go bankrupt. Reality wins. Every time.
Yesterday, Anne and I swung by the San Jose Tea Party protest. We didn’t have time to prepare anything, so we simply wandered around taking pictures and chatting with people. I was fairly impressed with the turnout, considering that San Jose is a fairly liberal city in a very liberal state. I know nothing about estimating crowd sizes, but the San Jose Mercury News reports the turnout at 1000. (I’ve been told that the local talk radio station estimated 2000, but since they helped organize they’re likely to skew high. So I’d guess somewhere in the middle.) We don’t have a decent panoramic shot, but here’s a couple of the crowd:
There were a lot of signs, ranging from the clearly home-made to the professionally printed. The overall theme was, sadly, political, with objections to taxation, excessive government spending and rapidly increasing debt. There was a lot of talk about what people were against, but much less about what people were for. That’s a problem, which I’ll talk about a bit more towards the end of this post.
Congress took some well-deserved hits for passing the so-called stimulus bill without actually reading it first.
There were some people with a more positive message. Nice to see a good word for capitalism.
I didn’t see any giant puppets, but large revolutionary-era flags are always a winner.
These guys probably win the award for “Longest Trip To The Protest”. It must be scary to flee socialist oppression in one’s homeland only to witness the same thing rising in your new country, aided and abetted by people who should damn well know better.
In spite of the attempts by the port side to present the Tea Party movement as a purely partisan affair, it isn’t. George W. Bush and profligate Republicans took a fair amount of smacking right along with Obama and the Democrats. There’s discontent brewing here, but it isn’t going to automatically turn into votes for the GOP on election day unless they take steps to earn them.
Not everything was serious. This guy wanted Obama to help him. Well, sort of.
Get a group of a thousand people together and there’s always going to be a few people who are off-message.
(For those who don’t follow sports, the Sharks are San Jose’s NHL team.)
Speaking of folks who were off-message, we had a small group of left-wing counter-protesters show up. Oddly enough, their focus was on amnesty for illegal aliens, which is just weird given that the Tea Party was about fiscal policy. I don’t know if they were hoping to provoke a fight with the racist right-wingers who turned out for the Tea Party in their minds, or what, but the people I talked to were mostly bemused. There was some back-and-forth chanting, but for the most part we ignored them. This guy pretty much sums up my reaction.
the protest turned tense when a competing group of about 40 people began circling the tax protesters, banging drums, shouting epithets, screaming about immigrant rights and promoting anarchy. At one point, the smaller group stormed the stage of the tax protesters, and more than a dozen San Jose riot police separated the groups. Meanwhile, dozens more officers stood guard on mounted patrol, in police cars and on foot to maintain peace. No arrests were made.
I didn’t see the charge on the stage, but that does sound like the kind of behavior I expect from leftists. There was a point later in the rally when the police were separating the lefties from the rest of us, but both groups were just standing there.
The Tea Party people I spoke to were almost uniformly calm, friendly, smiling and open to discussion. (I did chat with one hard-core religious nut who was, frankly, scary. I’ve got an invitation to a class on Biblical Prophecy. I won’t be going.)
Here’s me in black next to the woman with the pro-capitalism sign. I want one of those tri-corn hats.
There were a couple of other Objectivists around who had taken the time to put together signs. Here they are in Q&A format.
No literature, though. I understand that the Golden Gate Objectivists had something a bit better prepared for the San Francisco Tea Party.
Overall impression: the people I saw and spoke to are very unhappy with where they see the country going, but they lack ideas to explain why the country is going that way. Lots of outrage, little reasoning. This is a serious problem, because ultimately it is ideas that drive cultural and political change. If you can’t explain why you’re outraged, what would be a better alternative to the status quo, and why, you’re dead in the water. That’s the bad news. The good news is that people are looking for the answers they need. This suggests that bringing literature to these protests for free distribution should be a high priority for the next wave. Literature at multiple levels of information density would be even better, ranging from simple one-page fliers at the low end, to pamphlets and article collections in the middle, all the way up to copies of Atlas Shrugged at the high end. On this note the Ohio Objectivist Society did something brilliant, collecting together a number of excellent articles on aspects of the current crisis, its roots and Ayn Rand’s relevance to the solution into a reprint booklet called The Portable Objectivist. (They also have a web version. And yes, they got permission from the copyright holders — Objectivists respect property rights, and try to practice what we preach.) Something I’m hoping will emerge from the various write-ups I’m seeing is a set of ‘best practices’ for working future protests. There’s a learning curve here and we need to move up it, fast.
I was very pleased to read that a number of Objectivists spoke at various Tea Parties. Rational Jenn had a short recorded video which was played before the 16,000 people at the Atlanta Tea Party. Greg Perkins of Noodlefood was the kickoff speaker at the Boise Tea Party, and on short notice at that. John Lewis gave a good speech focused on moral fundamentals at the Charlotte Tea Party, and there’s YouTube video of that that I can’t resist using to wrap things up. More like this in Boston on the 4th of July, please.
Ok, I lied… there’s also a post-speech interview with Dr. Lewis, and I’m going to wrap up with that instead. He’s bang-on… we need a moral change if we’re going to get a sustainable political change. The American people are divided in spirit, and we send inconsistent signals to our elected officials — we want free stuff, but we don’t want to pay for it ourselves and we don’t want to go into debt for it either. Something there has to give, and if we want to avoid a total loss of freedom it had better be the desire for free stuff.
For many years, environmentalists have been criticizing Americans for consuming too much. We were a wasteful “consumerist” society, and they wanted people to learn to live with less. The Obama administration is clearly sympathetic to viro ideology — his appointments and the cap-and-trade provisions in his budget proposal make that clear. But the administration is also telling us that the current economic crisis is caused in part by a lack of consumer spending — i.e. by people consuming less. In other words, consuming less is simultaneously a moral imperative and is contributing to a practical disaster.
I sense inconsistency. I wonder what Obama’s viro supporters think of the so-called stimulus package?
