What's the continuing attraction of communism? Real, actionable answers only, not feel-good ones.

From a discussion on the Heterodox Forum started by John Faithful Hamer:

John Faithful Hamer: WHY IS COMMUNISM STILL COOL?: “Why is it still acceptable to regard the Marxist doctrine as essentially accurate in its diagnosis of the ­hypothetical evils of the free-­market, democratic West; to still consider that doctrine ‘progressive’ and fit for the compassionate and proper thinking person? Twenty-five million dead through internal repression in the Soviet Union (according to The Black Book of Communism). Sixty million dead in Mao’s China (and an all-too-likely return to autocratic oppression in that country in the near future). The horrors of Cambodia’s killing fields, with their two million corpses. The barely animate body politic of Cuba, where people struggle even now to feed themselves. Venezuela, where it has now been made illegal to attribute a child’s death in hospital to starvation. No political ­experi­ment has ever been tried so widely, with so many disparate people, in so many different countries (with such different histories) and failed so absolutely and so catastrophically.”—Jordan B Peterson, preface to the new edition of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago (2018)

---

John Crouch

Questions like this call for real answers, not comforting ones -- they need steel-manning. (Did you coin that term, John?)

---

Quentin Montagne

Simple. Communism offers righteous struggle. The ideologies of liberal democracies do not.

(And it is STILL cool, because the struggle it proposes burns on beyond it's regularly updated objectives, until everything has been consumed by it)

---

John Goethe

Quentin Montagne

 Reminds me of Orwell's 1940 review of MK:

"He has grasped the falsity of the hedonistic attitude to life. Nearly all western thought since the last war, certainly all ‘progressive’ thought, has assumed tacitly that human beings desire nothing beyond ease, security, and avoidance of pain. In such a view of life, there is no room, for instance, for patriotism and the military virtues. The Socialist who finds his children playing with soldiers is usually upset, but he is never able to think of a substitute for the tin soldiers; tin pacifists somehow won’t do. Hitler, because in his own joyless mind he feels it with exceptional strength, knows that human beings don’t only want comfort, safety, short working-hours, hygiene, birth-control and, in general, common sense; they also, at least intermittently, want struggle and self-sacrifice, not to mention drums, flags, and loyalty-parades. However they may be as economic theories, Fascism and Nazism are psychologically far sounder than any hedonistic conception of life. The same is probably true of Stalin’s militarized version of Socialism. All three of the great dictators have enhanced their power by imposing intolerable burdens on their peoples. Whereas Socialism, and even capitalism in a more grudging way, have said to people ‘I offer you a good time,’ Hitler has said to them ‘I offer you struggle, danger and death,’ and as a result, a whole nation flings itself at his feet."

Obviously Orwell is talking about fascism here, but he even says the same thing applies to socialism.

---

Andrei Neagu

Hard pill to swallow: Because the core values of Communism overlap a lot more with the core values as well as vectors of Liberalism than any Liberal (which includes JBP, whether it is prefaced by "classical" or not) would ever care to admit.

The general explanations which are echoed above (no true Scotsman, teachers' conspiracy, ignoring economics, overemphasis on Utopia etc.) are pertaining to the methods by which sympathizers wash Communism's feet and present it in a good light. This however, does not explain the pervasiveness of the ideology- so much so that it has not only survived its incarnation in the USSR, but some might argue it currently thrives, albeit under different guises - as well as the extremely high degree of acceptance it receives in the West, especially among highly educated elites. Why is the same not happening to even a remotely similar degree to Fascism which everyone (all Liberal, be it of the "classical", libertarian or socialist persuasion) agrees is pure evil despite having killed far fewer people, if we go strictly by the numbers (in a purely Utilitarian fashion)? After all, the Fascist ideology also has about 1000 years of Utopia in store for everyone on board with its tenets. Fascism glorified elites to the expense of everyone else. Fascism also doesn't require extensive reading of economy or history to grasp its core tenets. Shouldn't elites at least love an ideology glorifying elites? Apparently, no. Why?

Simply put, because the core tenets of Fascism are at odds with both the core tenets as well as opposed to the vectors of Liberalism, while the Communist ones are not. This is why so many "wide eyed idiot youths with no knowledge of history or economics" gobble up Communist ideals, because they are simply an extension of the oppression-fighting egalitarian-seeking society that their (classical?) Liberal great-great-grandfathers fought to create. The same ideals they are taught ever since they can walk that are good and just and true. That men are all (created? What happens if we remove the God that creates?) equal, that each person should be free from oppression, that everyone should fight tyranny, that all systems of government that centralize power in the hands of the few (or a single person, even worse) are pure evil because power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. These are all normal values which are to be expected in a largely Liberal society.

Communism only overly exaggerates the egalitarian aspect which it deems the only true moral aspect to the detriment of the libertarian aspect of liberalism which is thrown down the wayside because it is seen as both selfish and elitist - both epithets associated with the tyrannical monarchy and the plutocratic aristocracy which Liberals, again, fought so hard to overturn a couple centuries ago. This also, partly, explains why Liberal elites try so hard to appear as if they are anything but elites.

This isn't a value oriented comment, it simply seeks to answer the original question: Why is communism still cool? In my view, try its hardest, liberalism cannot shake Marx's grim prediction: That it will inevitably lead to Communism or at least something very similar. The core liberal values are certainly pointing towards that direction if stretched towards a puritanically egalitarian extreme.

---

Alex Simonelis

By appealing to unselfishness , vanity and ego.

---

Ollie Craig

This isn't all that difficult to answer. Now before anyone starts frothing at the mouth, Stalin and Mao killed more people than Hitler; the following is not a defense of communism as practiced in history or today.

The THEORY of communism is actually quite attractive to people who desire a caring more egalitarian society. "Let's govern ourselves in a manner that is egalitarian and flat structured where everyone gets a voice and is respected. Let's ensure everyone is cared for, valued and can live decently with proper housing food and clothing."

There is nothing wrong to preferring that ideal society to an individualist, capitalist, winner take all and devil take the hindmost society.

Please refrain from citing Pol Pot's killing Fields, Mao's great leap forward or the Holomodor under Stalin -- I am aware.

It is normal for idealistic young people (and old ones) to look at our western capitalist societies and yearn for a more humane system that helps everyone flourish not just the richest/most powerful/most able/most successful. A system that also crushes huge swathes of the population.

The problem with THEORETICAL communism is it doesn't account for human nature and communism in practice and in history.

And yet, there are instances of communist movements (which were in fact more socialist) in the developing world that did in fact increase education, literacy, women's equality and ability to learn and work while also combating government corruption. Such movements sent bright young village girls in Indonesia to the Sorbonne in Paris to study at University. It's not ALL a human rights disaster. But US foreign policy was to snuff out those political parties by any means necessary during the 1950s and 1960s - even if it meant funding and arming foreign regimes and militaries that would ruthlessly kill and disappear tens of thousands of people in mass terror operations. Who knows whether Indonesia wouldn't have been better off as a secular socialist democracy rather than living through the brutal Suharto regime and a current government now under the sway of Islamists? [Source:. The Jakarta Method, Vincent Bevins]

---

John Crouch

In my limited experience, the main driver, keeping people on board who otherwise should know better, is the belief that wealthy, privileged interest groups are actually waging an ongoing war against the rest of us, actually killing people sometimes with direct violence, other times by disease, famine, impoverishment, disenfranchisement ... . For most people, when you're in an actual war, the values of democracy and civil liberties become secondary, command and obedience are necessary as a matter of life and death, and you evaluate everything primarily by how you think it affects the war.

---

Susanna Newhart

I think people inherently want an easy way out. Thats why fad diets and get rich quick schemes work so well.

---

Daniel Jordan

Intrinsic theories of values and peoples general acceptance of altruism and self sacrifice as some kind of moral standard are the main reasons.

---

John Crouch

I've always heard that Communism works great in India's Christian state, Kerala, and that it's been Communist ever since independence. That may be a cruel myth, but it's worth checking out.

Alex Simonelis

Then check it out and let us know.

John Crouch

OK, it looks like they are officially communists, but in practice, they're a shining example of truly democratic socialism. And in politics, as distinct from economics or culture, they're liberal. It's hard to say if their economic model works in the very long run, because it's so interconnected with the rest of the world -- people get great educations and then earn their livings in the Gulf, the UK, the US ... . But it's hard to say if any real-life economic model works in the very long run, if it has one. (And personally I'm a hard-core libertarian.):

• One of the few places where a communist can  still dream
• Communism in Kerala
• Don't Call The CPM In Kerala Communists, Call Them Social Democrats
• The Revolution That Always Was: How Communist-Led Kerala is Leading India

Libertarians -- Not Utopians, Not Cynics

[Letter to the Editor published in Washington Post ca. Dec. 11, 1993. I was at a conference of libertarians near Washington on the day it was published, but none of them mentioned it to me.]

There is no factual basis for E. J. Dionne's charge that libertarians are "utopians." ["Libertarian Lure," op-ed, Dec. 6] It is an easy label to slap on anyone, and Dionne will get away with it because few readers are familiar with us, but no one who has even glanced at our publications could believe that we ignore "messy realities." Most libertarians think that because reality is so irremediably messy, voluntary cooperation under a strong, impartial common law system is the most practical, flexible way to deal with it. Unprovoked threats, force and extortion tend to have socially mischievous effects, and we think it is foolish to expect better results when well-intentioned governments use them than when private citizens do.

Unlike utopians, we don't hope to transform humans into angels or to make them cogs in some wonderful new system. We simply want governments to stop doing harm, and to let society manage its own problems by lawful means. Human societies have always had ways of looking out for children and old people, helping the poor and making people be responsible. For example, to adapt to the massive changes of the late 19th century, all sorts of voluntary mutual help groups, insurance and pension funds developed. Governments supplanted these (and outlawed some) not because they failed, but because of a Utopian faith in technocrats and large monopolies.

It will take a few years for society to wean itself from government, because much of its immune system, its shock absorbers, its lubrication, its ability to adjust, has been taxed and regulated away. As Meng-tzu observed 2200 years ago, "When taxes exceed 10 percent, the very old and the very young are rolled into canals and drainage ditches." It's especially hard to be generous and tolerant when nothing we own is secure, and everything is up for grabs by one political faction or another.

It seems that when libertarians aren't being called utopian or euphoric, we're accused of being cynics. Actually, we are squarely in the middle on the question of human goodness: we believe that people are pretty much good enough to govern themselves, but not good enough to govern each other very much. That is the view of human nature upon which America's system of government is founded.

John Crouch
Williamsburg, Va.

Why are liberals liberal?

I don't think it makes sense to trace a single psychological/character/personality trait as the cause of political beliefs. How do you like it when they do that to us?

Progressives have a lot of notions in common, but they can arrive at them for various personal and environmental reasons, including that that's what the people around them and raising them believed. The most common thread seems to be a belief that sublime, transcendent abstract entities like "society" or "the international community" are not merely metaphoric tools for describing people's interactions, but are actually more real and more important than real live individuals; that these abstractions have more agency and authority than all individuals put together.

This is supported by the common sayings, valid in some ways and dangerously wrong in others, that things are "greater than the sum of their parts," and that people should live for "something larger than themselves."

A contempt for individuality, for individual rights and responsibilities, is more a result of this than a cause, and for some liberals it presents an irrepressible conflict with other truly liberal beliefs that they have drawn from their patriotism, religion, or just from being thinking and humane people. That's the stage I was at for a while, when I didn't know anything about economics, but I could tell that the government wielding economic power over people would constrain their political freedom.

-- John Crouch, responding to the great Robert Bidinotto, who wrote:

UNDERSTANDING THE LEFT. After nearly six decades of direct experience, observation, and study, I have come to some firm conclusions about the ideological left (as opposed to those "liberals" who are simply compassionate toward others). I think it all revolves around the left's war on self-responsibility. They HATE that concept. In their worldview, if you create something good in the world, "You didn't build that"; but if you do something bad, "You couldn't help it." Either way, they HATE the notion that anyone (meaning: themselves) should be held accountable for their status in life. ... Ideological leftism is all, only, and *always* about advancing the Narrative of Personal Irresponsibility. It is the morality play that holds individuals responsible for every other man, woman, child, tree, plant, animal, or degree of temperature on the planet...but not for *themselves* as individuals.

 

To See How "Hate Speech" Came to Mean "Speech People Hate," Read Haidt.

The definition of a "hate" group has been in constant flux, no, expansion, for so long now that it's easy to forget that it was stable for generations. I always thought that the standard use of it for Nazis and other organized racists was unimaginative, and risked underestimating how dangerous they actually were, but at least everyone knew what it meant. American Nazi Party leader George Lincoln Rockwell used it to describe his group's product as least as far back as the early 1960s, when he founded Hatenanny Records. In a 1991 college newspaper column titled "Bad Words to be Purged from the Language," I wrote,

"Hate speech, groups etc. As angry as they make us, Doug H. [prominent campus racial slurster] and friends are still expressing opinions, not hate. They probably have feelings of superiority, entitlement, self-pity, fear, envy, and contempt, but I doubt that many racists are possessed by hate or anything else unknown to the rest of us. The ones I know espouse sociological theories that were dominant until the 1940s, and think their own experiences empirically support them. They don't even dislike minorities, as long as they stay in their familiar and inferior "place."

With more space or forethought, I would have added that they often aren't expressing anything, they're just looking for words that will hurt, humiliate and enrage whoever they're using them against, or they're just trying to fit in with others, or show them that they can think of something powerful to say, and so on.

But this was still a "sidelines" kind of comment -- it wasn't about anything that was threatening me, or people I respectfully disagreed with, or any core values. It was just at that stage where you sense something "off" about someone's word choice, something that bespeaks some unknown, idiosyncratic, quirk in how they process the world, that might suddenly turn vicious under pressure if you had to trust or rely on them.

But now, Lord, ain't we got fun! At some point in the gay marriage movement, which itself had been outside the Overton Window of acceptable opinion until the early 90s, someone decided to label its opponents as "hate" advocates. Never mind that those opponents included Senators Clinton and Obama, at least officially. And now that the monopoly on "hate" victim status is broken open, everybody wants a piece of it.

In 2012, Randall Parker broke this ongoing process down in "On Labeling Opponents Of Multiculturalism As Hateful", citing and building on Jonathan Haidt's study showing why "The right gets the left better than the left gets the right":

That the Obama Administration would label a video that lampoons a religion as hate demonstrates why I so distrust Barack Obama. The primary use of the term "hate" is to label someone as outside of civilized discourse and deserving of pariah status. But lets get to root causes. Why use the term "hate" for this purpose? The role of hate looms so large in the elite liberal mind in large part because liberals lack the ability to understand non-liberal minds. The left has elevated their own psychological blindness and misunderstanding into a campaign of marginalization where they label their opponents as hate groups. This blindness of liberal minds to half the moral considerations used by conservative minds creates a condition very much like the Dunning-Kruger Effect where someone lacks the ability to detect the extent of their own misunderstanding, ignorance, and incompetence. ... This is the part that scares me. Will multi-culturalism and the desire to placate ethnicities at home and abroad cause an even larger reduction in freedom of speech than it already has? Speech codes in workplaces are already left-liberal. I'm expecting them to become more strictly enforced and for that enforcement to extend beyond the workplace.

The reason for this, as revealed in Haidt's study and vividly described by John Faithful Hamer:

Jonathan Haidt has found that when you give conservatives a questionnaire and ask them to answer it like a liberal, they’re able to do so with ease. When you ask them to answer like a libertarian, they’re able to do that too. Libertarians aren’t nearly as adept as conservatives, but they’re still fairly good at imagining how a conservative or a liberal might answer the questionnaire. Alas, the real outliers are the liberals.

In numerous studies, with respectable sample sizes, Haidt has demonstrated that liberals simply don’t have a clue. When you ask them to answer the questionnaire like a conservative, they answer it like a fascist. When you ask them to answer it like a libertarian, they answer it like a sociopath. The liberal conception of what makes the average conservative or libertarian tick is, Haidt concludes, way off.

Are liberals less imaginative than conservatives and libertarians? I highly doubt it. The virtues and vices are, it seems, to be found everywhere to varying degrees. Why, then, do liberals do so terribly on this “ideological Turing test”? And why do conservatives do so well? Haidt maintains that conservatives do well because they base their moral thinking on all six of the moral foundations (Loyalty, Authority, Sanctity, Liberty, Care & Fairness). Liberals do poorly because they base their moral thinking on only two of them (Care & Fairness).

Haidt’s explanation is fascinating. But it’s got way too many moving parts and a fatal flaw: namely, it implicitly presumes that liberals are somehow spectacularly deficient in imagination. I find it hard to believe that any sizable group of human beings could be spectacularly deficient in any virtue (or vice). That’s why I’ve come up with a simpler explanation for Haidt’s robust findings: liberals suck at this test because shutting down certain parts of your imagination has become central to what it means to be liberal.

Liberals haven’t just demonized their political opponents, they’ve demonized the very act of trying to think like their political opponents. Trying to sympathize with, say, a Trump supporter, has come to constitute a kind of thought-crime for many liberals (and almost all progressives). So it’s not that liberals have less imagination than conservatives or libertarians; it’s that they’ve set up mental firewalls that actively prevent them from even going there. Just as Odysseus’s men stopped up their ears with wax so they wouldn’t be tempted by the seductive song of the Sirens, many liberals have, it seems, set up taboo boundaries which more or less ensure that they’ll never have to empathize with a conservative or a libertarian. This is decidedly unwise, as it often leads to group polarization.

...

Just as the violent suppression of the labor movement pushed a lot of good people into the communist camp in the twentieth century, I fear that the outrageous attacks on nonconformists like Jordan Peterson may radicalize a lot of middle-of-the-road moderates in the twenty-first century. As Malcolm Gladwell makes clear in David and Goliath (2014), when you crack down on terrorism by demonizing an entire community, you invariably end up strengthening support for the terrorists; and when you crack down on the civil rights movement in a draconian fashion, you invariably end up strengthening support for the civil rights movement. What’s happening on the left at the moment is striking similar. Demonize everyone who seems to disagree with you and you’ll invariably end up strengthening support for those who actually disagree with you.

Telling people off on Twitter and preaching to the choir on Facebook can be fun. But it’s a dangerous kind of fun. Because you get intellectually lazy. Because you start speaking in a specialized jargon that no one outside of your safe space can understand. Because you develop a contempt for everyone outside of your élite group of cool kids that frequently leads you to dehumanize those who disagree with you. Live in your little bubble long enough, and you’ll become downright delusional, like the emperor in that Hans Christian Andersen tale.

-- John Faithful Hamer, "In Praise of Listening", also published in Hamer, Social Media Land, 2020

More:

• "Why Won’t They Listen?" by William Saletan, NY Times, March 23, 2012
• "Hateful speech on hate groups" by Dana Milbank, Washington Post, August 16, 2012

 

The Final Wedge Cleaving Liberals from Progressives: Justice Alito's Speech and the "Two Minutes' Hate" Reaction.

"If you step on my foot, don't get angry when I . . . say 'Ouch!'" -- Minister Don Muhammad

---

When I was a campus ACLU leader in the 80s and 90s, I agreed with everything U.S. Supreme Court Justice Samuel J. Alito said in his speech to the Federalist Society last week. (Transcript here; video here, substance of speech starts at 17:30.) I still do. I realized even back then that some of my farther-left collaborators didn't agree with all of it, just most of it. But now, many of them don't agree with hardly any of it, especially suddenly controversial ideas like freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of conscience, and an independent judiciary. In case there was any doubt, they made that clear in their instant reactions to Justice Alito's speech. No longer "liberals," they now call themselves "progressives," after the late-1800s-early-1900s reformers who declared that democracy and constitutional limited government were outmoded, and that a nonpartisan expert elite should rule instead.

In college, we were taught what was called a "Marxist" critique of the "progressives": Whether foolishly or intentionally, they viewed their own cultural and economic elite interests as impartial, non-political, universal, benevolent and scientific. They were politically, culturally and economically anti-democratic. Back in the 1970s and 80s, it was a liberal and generational imperative to make sure that everything was done absolutely democratically and inclusively. But sometime in the 90s, this was replaced by a new prime directive: to be in harmony with "the international community" of unelected, unaccountable elites.

So the Progressives are back now, in force, and apparently trying to prove the truth and urgency of everything Justice Alito said about them. Kind of like threatening violence against someone who calls you violent. He criticized the growing intolerance of even mainstream beliefs, and thousands of tweeters and Facebookers responded by calling for him to be impeached for it. He criticized five Senators who had openly threatened to "restructure" the Court* if it did not rule the way they wanted, pointedly mentioning a foreign judge who told him about having judicial independence on paper, but with a tank pointing at his courthouse -- and Senators responded with more threats, saying he shouldn't be allowed to criticize them because that's "political." ( *Well, they now say they didn't say "restructure," their amicus brief just happened to quote a poll of people who said the court should be "restructured.")

Senator Elizabeth Warren tweeted: "Supreme Court Justices aren't supposed to be political hacks. This right-wing speech is nakedly partisan. My anti-corruption bill restores some integrity to our Court by forcing Justices to follow the ethics rules other federal judges follow." Looking at her summary of the bill, that may be the only thing the bill does that is harmless or constitutional -- for now. But what she probably intended it to impose is a proposed reform to the judicial ethics rules, now withdrawn (for now), banning judges from the Federalist Society but not the American Bar Association. Because of course, in the fine old Progressive tradition, the ABA considers itself nonpolitical while advocating for thousands of left-wing public policies.

Los Angeles Congressman Jimmy Gomez tweeted, "Homophobic rhetoric isn’t a matter of free speech. It’s a matter of hate speech. These are stunning, harmful words from Justice Alito." To be clear exactly what he was calling homophobic, Constitutionally-unprotected "hate speech," he quoted the Justice: “'You can’t say that marriage is a union between one man and one woman' any more, Justice Alito said. 'Until very recently, that’s what the vast majority of Americans thought. Now it’s considered bigotry.'” 

Which part of that do Congressman Gomez and the other critics even disagree with? That "you can't say" it? That the vast majority agreed with it until recently? That it's considered bigotry? If anyone would disagree with that, wouldn't it be the "religious right"? Are they still around?

Many of the instant reactions seemed to be reacting to what people imagined Alito might say, not anything he actually said. For example, that he was against masks and shutdowns. Some headlines quoted his sentence, "The pandemic has resulted in previously unimaginable restrictions on individual liberty," as if that meant that he must be denouncing all such restrictions, not just stating a universally-recognized historical fact. Actually, he criticized a recent court decision that let a state single out churches for much stricter limits than casinos and other businesses. And more broadly, he warned that the now-necessary restrictions, and the executive branch's authority to impose them, were still subject to judicial review, and should not become permanent once the pandemic is over. The Young Turks, oddly, played a clip that included him saying that he was not criticizing most of the restrictions, and only questioning the legality of a very few of them, but then they spent ten minutes responding as if he had criticized mask mandates, calling him "insanely irresponsible."

An article titled "Jurists Shocked by Justice Alito's 'Wildly Inappropriate' Attack on LGBTQ Equality, Reproductive Rights, and More" merely played a game with the common versus the obscure meanings of the word "jurist" --

"Although it means any attorney or legal scholar, jurist popularly refers to a judge." West's Encyclopedia of American Law.  

It quoted no judges, only two prominent legal journalists with law degrees, one lawyer/commentator, one law professor/former prosecutor, and the director of strategy at a "legal advocacy group." People certainly qualified to opine, but whose job is politics and advocacy -- very different from the impartial eminence "jurist" connotes.

Journalists who know better, or their editors who at least officially don't, began piling wild-eyed adjectives and warlike metaphors onto sometimes otherwise objective and balanced stories about the speech.  CNN called it "ireful ... infuriated" with a "gnashing ideological tone ...". Roll Call, more subdued, said he "stepped into the ring ... to throw a few punches ..." and "targeted Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse." The New York Times called it "unusually caustic and politically tinged," but admitted that it did not violate any rules and reflected his already published "judicial opinions, which have lately been marked by bitterness and grievance,"  and that several experts "said it was unexceptional for justices to describe positions they had already taken in their judicial work." 

Slate, though, was in a class by itself, taking great pains to misrepresent the speech as unethical. It led with "Grievance-Laden, Ultrapartisan" ... "railed against COVID restrictions, same-sex marriage, abortion" [uh, no, he didn't actually criticize any of those, except for the restriction that singled out churches] and put an URL ending in "insane.html" on its article. "These comments revealed early on that Alito would not be abiding by the usual ethics rules, which require judges to remain impartial and avoid any appearance of bias" ... "a bitter partisan out to settle scores with the left. Flouting his ethical obligations, Alito waded into fierce political debates" ... "notoriously cranky, but he seemed to be in relatively good spirits ...".

Hundreds of Facebook commenters immediately called for impeaching him, some saying to throw in the Black guy while we're at it. Many claimed that the speech "revealed his bias," and they really seemed to believe that now that he had publicly revealed his beliefs about the issues he has ruled on, that that actually justified impeaching him, or demanding his resignation. Some said that he must be gay, sometimes using pretty graphic terms. Some demanded that the Federalist Society, too, must be abolished. Basically, there are a lot of fascists (I'm sorry, I mean "progressives")  out there who believe -- or who pretend to believe so hard that they may actually come to believe -- that having conservative, libertarian, or mainstream-liberal-but-not-progressive beliefs should legally disqualify one from public office, and that actually advocating or working to implement such beliefs should be illegal.

I wonder what would happen if Senator Warren and the rest of the ProgMob found out that judges and Justices not only give speeches about the Bill of Rights and the need for an independent judiciary, and bristle at threats from politicians -- they actually write long opinions about every case they decide, even ones that involve political or controversial ideas, and the government actually publishes them! And they've been getting away with it for almost 700 years!

Clarification: was joke. Senator Warren was a professor at America's best law school, so of course she knows better. She just thinks that if enough of us pretend not to, for just long enough, we can pretend to rationalize court-packing by claiming the other side broke all the norms and packed the court first. And as a progressive, she honestly believes that only other people have ideologies or politics.

Before I had even finished watching the speech, my Facebook filled up with progressives suddenly convincing themselves that of course, we have always known that Justices aren't allowed to make speeches about Constitutional issues, evidently suppressing all their memories of a once-celebrated Justice named Ginsburg:

• "How can anyone have a fair hearing in front of this justice? He does not belong on the Supreme court. Who can take him on?"
• "He has abdicated his credibility and moral authority as a judge and must resign."
• "He doesn't even pretend to be impartial. Judicial sleeze."
• "Get rid of the Federalist Society."
• "They should never be allowed to put there personal ideas out publicly ...."
• "Omg....wow....what a nutcase! ... He, along with Trump, should be charged with murder for all these deaths."
• "Alito should be removed from the bench. He is making a political statement with his words about infringement of freedom."
• "Alito Outs Himself as Total Whacko."
• "He must recuse himself on all arguments involving these issues. He has revealed his bias!!"
• "Start the Impeachment process immediately. His ideas are too bias for his position."
• "Another one who could use a good boot in the neck."
• "Alito outs himself as full-on partisan crusader." -- U.S. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse
• "Such prejudicial opinions should disqualify him to sit as a Supreme Court Justice."
• "Time for partisan Supreme Court justices to be elected by the people rather than appointed for life."
• "Alito should be censured and removed from the Court. He violates his position."
• "Republicanism is a mental and social disorder. Alito needs to be impeached for speaking to a Republican Nazi organization like the "Federalist Society." They should be declared a domestic terrorist organization like the GOP, NRA, and a dozen others."
• "It shouldn’t be permissible for a sitting Supreme Court (or any other) justice to speak to radical organizations like the Federalist Society."
• "Appalling and sickening ... There really should be ways to remove justices with mindsets that are contrary to the very core of the Supreme Court's Constitutionally mandated role."
• "When a Chief Justice in the Supreme Court feels like he has to publicly make a political statement, he should lose his seat. That is not seperation of Church & State."
• "Religion is a lifestyle choice. Sexuality isn't."
• "'Justice Alito's wildly inappropriate speech is a reminder that Republicans have packed the Supreme Court with extremist politicians in robes -- and they're planning a partisan revenge tour,' said Aaron Belkin, director of Take Back the Court, a progressive group advocating court expansion."
• "'If there were enforceable recusal standards at the high court, this would be a ripe opportunity for a motion to disqualify,' said Gabe Roth, executive director of Fix the Court, a nonpartisan independent watchdog group ..."
• "How can he continue on the court with such a publicly revealed bios! I believe this is impeachable for an associate justice!"
• "Diarrhea of the mouth with prejudice aplenty!"
• "He needs to get the fuck out of OUR Supreme Court!"

 

Happy Birthday to the self-deprecating vice-president who saved the Supreme Court and the independent judiciary

My cousin and contemporary John Nance "Cactus Jack" Garner III (born November 22, 1868, d. 1967 when I was three weeks old) is known only for saying the vice-presidency "isn't worth a bucket of warm spit," or something like that. But he is actually one of the most important vice-presidents. In 1937, FDR relied on Garner, a former Speaker of the House and legendary back-room politicker, to get his "court packing" bill through Congress. The bill would have let the President appoint enough additional justices to create a compliant majority on the court. But 

"From the start, Garner loathed the plan and thought that it would be a threat to party harmony. He began covertly to rally the opposition."

-- "Court-Packing Plan of 1937," by Lionel V. Patenaude, Texas State Historical Association, citing Lionel V. Patenaude, "Garner, Sumners, and Connally: The Defeat of the Roosevelt Court Bill in 1937," Southwestern Historical Quarterly 74 (July 1970). Lionel V. Patenaude, Texans, Politics and the New Deal (New York: Garland, 1983). Bascom N. Timmons, Garner of Texas (New York: Harper, 1948). 

Garner and his allies managed to make the environment for the bill so toxic that he finally was able to tell FDR he had to withdraw it. "Eventually, Garner was given credit for smoothing over the crisis, but he had also rendered himself persona non grata with the administration." So we have John Nance Garner to thank for the U.S.'s independent judiciary, which has given us everything from racial integration to gay marriage.

H. P. Lovecraft's Republicans seem largely fictional, but unfortunately not quite ...

This is some of the best political vituperation I've ever seen. I thoroughly disagree with Lovecraft's disdain for human freedom and his childlike faith in Central Planning, but he finds several genuine weak spots, and makes the most of them. Weak spots that Republicans still have, and need to watch out for. I don't know if he's just blindly swallowing, and brilliantly regurgitating, a cartoonish portrayal of conservatives by the media and politicians at the time, or if this is based on some firsthand observation -- probably a lot of one and a little of the other.

"As for the Republicans — how can one regard seriously a frightened, greedy, nostalgic huddle of tradesmen and lucky idlers who shut their eyes to history and science, steel their emotions against decent human sympathy, cling to sordid and provincial ideals exalting sheer acquisitiveness and condoning artificial hardship for the non-materially-shrewd, dwell smugly and sentimentally in a distorted dream-cosmos of outmoded phrases and principles and attitudes based on the bygone agricultural-handicraft world, and revel in (consciously or unconsciously) mendacious assumptions (such as the notion that real liberty is synonymous with the single detail of unrestricted economic license or that a rational planning of resource-distribution would contravene some vague and mystical 'American heritage'…) utterly contrary to fact and without the slightest foundation in human experience? Intellectually, the Republican idea deserves the tolerance and respect one gives to the dead."

—Lovecraft in a letter to C. L. Moore, exact date unknown, mid-October 1936

Posted on "The Rising Tide: Strategies for a Sustainable Future"

The Malthusian crisis doesn't loom in our future, because it already happens every day

Country Mice Rebounding After Chaste, Stressful Summer

By John Crouch, in the Amicus Curiae, College of William and Mary

Copyright John Crouch 1992


The nondescript jumble of buildings just beyond the Gradplex looks like the place where lawn mowers go to die. Actually, it is the place where Professors C. Richard Terman and E. L. Bradley explore a question of growing urgency to mankind: How do populations control their numbers?

The Laboratory of Endocrinology and Population Ecology is no typical lab. Its genetically diverse mice live off the land in woods around Williamsburg, mingling freely. Though provided with nests, they prefer to build their own. And though they live in what Dr. Terman calls "a mouse welfare state" where their population might be expected to expand exponentially, certain natural forces, not yet understood, induce them to limit their growth non-violently.

Dr. Terman is an animal behaviorist and a population ecologist. His interest in populations was sparked by lemmings. He wondered how most species avoid doing the lemming thing, and whether some species may meet similar fates as they increase. He found that when he released a few mice in a large enclosure and provided unlimited amenities, they did not increase to the point of suicide, fratricide, or cannibalism. They became inhibited.

More formal experiments with deermice in the "Pop Lab" established that this asymptote, or population plateau, occurred while much living space was still unoccupied. They also revealed that there is no particular density or absolute number at which population levels off. Four populations in identical cages stabilized at 7, 13, 29 and 47.

Nearly all mice stopped reproducing or failed to experience puberty, for no apparent reason. The few newborns were mothered so enthusiastically that it just wore them out. The celibate mice spent practically all their time in one huddle, as if trying to lose their individuality. 

Dominant females from the populations' founding pairs began hoarding food, though Dr. Terman always provided more than enough. Three or four handmaidens helped stock the hoards. Any mouse could dine there, but the hoarders fiercely berated those who tried to carry food away. 

Dramatic though these results were, their relevance to life outside laboratories was unclear. So for the last ten years, Dr. Terman has moved his research into natural environments, where he has observed the same trends.

Populations of white-footed mice around Williamsburg do not level off permanently, but they stop breeding from May to July, a time of plentiful food in which a pair of mice could have a litter every 25 days. Each offspring could be a parent after 45 days.

Instead, the mice's reproductive organs remain minute during these three months. If they are taken to the lab, however, they quickly develop and reproduce. Dr. Terman has not yet discovered what change in the mice's environment triggers the asymptote. He tried providing surplus food, but it produced no effect. Nor does the chastity result from the weather, because in August and September all their organs swell tenfold and do what they were designed to do. And just as in the early experiments, there is no typical population density at which breeding stops.

Dr. Terman and Dr. Bradley, an endocrinologist, suspect that the mice are sexually stunted by adrenalin which they produce in response to stress. In each population, one or two dominant, fertile mice seem somehow to induce stress in the others through subtle signals which do not even appear aggressive to human observers. Dr. Terman thinks that these cues are given primarily by touch, rather than by odor, sound or visual body language. He has put pairs of inhibited mice in cages where they can see, hear, and smell their neighbors, but not touch them, and each time they have developed and reproduced.

Key questions about the phenomenon remain unanswered. Why does this happen from May through July? How exactly do the mice stress each other out, if indeed that is what they do? More importantly, what kind of natural selection has favored the evolution of this behavior?

Dr. Terman stresses that his project is "basic research," and discourages law students and other humans from directly comparing their plight to that of his mice. His research reminds mankind, on the one hand, that scenarios in which trillions of future humans live in hives or die in droves may make for exciting science fiction, but they are poor science. There will be no millenarian Malthusian apocalypse, because individual people, like Terman's mouse colonies, hit the Malthusian wall in small ways every day. 

Terman's work further discredits the notion that prosperity automatically produces overpopulation. On the other hand, it also warns us that species limit their numbers by countless and unforeseen methods. To Dr. Terman, the question is not whether human populations will be limited, but how.

American Library Association condemnation of "Little House" attacks everything the ALA should stand for

The American Library Association and its subsidiary, the Association for Library Service to Children, have voted unanimously to remove Laura Ingalls Wilder's name from an award given to children's book authors and illustrators for the past 64 years. They take pains to say they're only removing her name from the award, not trying to remove her books from libraries, but what they're really doing is far more fundamental: a leading organization is declaring a major children's author to be racist. And not just any major children's author, but one of the liberal heroes of the field, who obviously  disapproved of the racist attitudes that were common during her childhood and even long after her death, who gave us strong, independent female main characters, and showed that the female perspective on life and on historical events was every bit as valid and important and compelling as the male. But the actual evidence they cite does not even purport to show that Wilder expressed or encouraged racism; it consists of subtle critiques that show how Wilder's racial liberalism could be improved upon; or that she is not where to go for a well-rounded, intensive, informed exploration of Indians' history and culture; or that any story told from the white settlers' perspective will include much that will irritate Native Americans.

Looking around the internet for Wilder's alleged racist passages, initially all I could find anyone complaining about are places where Wilder describes and portrays her parents' and other adults' varying attitudes. The whole point of these is that the author disagrees with those attitudes, and wants her readers to disagree with them, but wants them to know they existed and were predominant at the time. That, and the fact that some of the ALSC's statements seem to be specifically about those depictions, make it seem unlikely that there is anything actually racist about the books. That's also what I remember from reading them as a child and as a parent. The actual  ALSC/ALA statements and background materials [links below] don't cite any particular racist messages in the books; they take for granted that Wilder's work has already been deemed racist, problematic, etc. One ALA memo says "her books reflect racist and anti-Native sentiments." The memo cites two academic articles on the subject:

One of the articles, Reese, Debbie. “Indigenizing children’s literature” (2008), Journal of Language and Literacy Education [Online], 4(2), 59-72, does not reference anything that you could call racist in Wilder; it criticizes what facts or memories about Indians Wilder chose to highlight, but can't even convincingly speculate that there were other stories she knew and could have included instead in a childhood memoir. It laments the inclusion of a home visit from Indians wearing skunk glands, but doesn't say that that event didn't happen. The article's actual, legitimate, point is that reading Wilder's books is not the best and most balanced way to learn all about Indians generally and the Osage in particular. Not that anyone ever said it was.

The other article, Kaye, Frances W., "Little Squatter on the Osage Diminished Reserve: Reading Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Kansas Indians" (2000), Great Plains Quarterly, 23, finds Wilder to be racist only on the grounds that any story told from the white settlers' perspective is racist. It actually makes sound, admirable, resounding arguments for that view, but the arguments do not support the message that educators, librarians, students and the public will take away from the ALA's move, which is to single out Wilder as racist and inappropriate. Kaye's article admits that Wilder, and her character in the books, have advanced and humane views for her time. And in fact, that

"The reader of Little House on the Prairie does not identify with the unthinking dislike of Indians demonstrated by Caroline Ingalls or the family bulldog, Jack, nor with the 'only good Indian is a dead Indian' philosophy that Pa explicitly rejects."

Kaye argues that Wilder's very liberalism is what makes her view of Indians so "insidious": By portraying them as suffering victims, she makes their exclusion from the land seem inevitable, and tolerable --

"The myth of the necessary tragedy ... that arises when the determined farmer meets the nomadic wanderer, the tragedy played out in Judeo-Christian myth from the time of Jacob and Esau."

Wilder portrays "good Indians" and thus implies that they were better than "bad Indians" who fought back, Kaye argues. Pa's "good Indian" friend is like Uncle Tom, which makes Wilder as racist as Harriet Beecher Stowe. And that fighting back was justified by a long history of treaties that the settlers were breaking. Kaye provides much interesting history and subversive description of the Osages. She makes valid criticisms of little Laura's views of certain historical events and land-use questions -- she should not have considered farming superior to buffalo hunting, nor complained about the government removing her family and the other white settlers for having no legal right to settle there.

But those have very little to do with what children read the books for, or what they remember from them. Nobody reads these books to learn about Indians. In the 1930s, maybe the Little House books were how some kids got their impressions of Indians, but for at least two generations there have been books widely available that let us at least try to see native and white American history from the natives' side.

If the ALA is relying on Wilder's depictions of racist attitudes that she obviously disagrees with, that means that an organization devoted to popular literacy and critical thinking is endorsing blatant intellectual dishonesty, by willful, simplistic, misunderstanding, in order to be "doing something" about racism even against a victim who isn't guility of racism. Pretending that readers can't distinguish between portrayal and approval, and shouldn't have to learn to do so. (Meaning that obviously Huckleberry Finn will be back on the banned list, and Jack in the Beanstalk must be suppressed for saying giants should grind Englishmen's bones to make bread.) With the predictable result of toppling a literary giant just because she could not see quite as far as the Lilliputians who stand on her shoulders; and permanently shelving a set of books that really do turn kids on to reading, and to history, when there is no reason to believe that other books can do the job just as well.

If on the other hand they're relying on the subtler academic critiques cited in their memos, then they are calling Wilder's books racist based on completely misrepresenting their own evidence, unless they're actually saying that all stories from the pioneers' point of view are now inappropriate.

Dr. Seuss is next. I'm not making this up. See p. 2 of the "ALSC Awards Program/ Strategic Plan" memo

ALA statements and materials on Laura Ingalls Wilder:

• ALA/ALSC statement regarding the Wilder Medal Name Change
• About the Children's Literature Legacy Award
• ALSC Awards Program Review Task Force Recommendation: Laura Ingalls Wilder Award
• Background Document memo: "ALSC Awards Program in Context of Strategic Plan"

 Response from  Laura Ingalls Wilder Legacy and Research Association

POLITICAL CORRECTNESS IS A THING OF THE PAST. AND THE FUTURE.

By John Crouch in the Brown Daily Herald , Brown University, Providence, R.I., 1991

"Because I do not learn their words, I am called a heretic."

--St. Jerome

I once tried to compile a history of "PC." As a Southerner, I knew that the highest form of history is genealogy, so my inquiries first led me to some ancestors who were Presbyterian Covenanters. They were having some differences with the Puritan Commonwealthmen, led by Oliver Cromwell. Each of these sects had an exclusive contract with God, stating that the other was headed for a bad place and should be expedited there. (Think about it: these covenants were not contradictory, but complementary. God knew what he was doing.) After a pitched battle, Cromwell suggested that everyone should come together and cooperate with him in an exciting new broad-based ecumenical venture known as Persecuting Catholics. He offered my forebears exciting public service jobs as military policemen in exile. They agreed, and in return he deferred his natural inclination to confiscate their heads. 

Soon they were in Ulster, doing the Lord's work. Then it was off to Barbados to practice their techniques on rebellious slaves, and then to Maryland, to do it to the Indians and Catholics. In time they settled down and became highly useful members of the community, raising tobacco and sailing to Africa to buy slaves. In occasional fits of public-spiritedness they would lynch a papist or two, but they mostly minded their own business for six generations until some outside agitators built Washington, D.C. in their neighborhood.

A more recent forefather of PC and related irritations was Horace Mann '19, who dominated the debating societies of Manning Chapel. These groups combined the functions of class discussion sections, dorm unit "workshops", the student government, and the Herald letters page. Kathleen Kendall, a rhetoric professor, wrote that Mann proved his points with "overstatements," "name-calling," "sophistry," "chest-thumping chauvinism," and "an abundance of star-spangled prose ... No one challenged his sweeping generalizations or lack of pertinent evidence." Doubtless the alumni pined for the grand old days of discipline, morality, and western culture.

Then again, Brown's administration didn't set a very mature example for Mann. They once fined him for violating their ban on Independence Day observations. This holiday was considered disruptively democratic, divisive, and deeply offensive to the Federalist community, which always felt left out.

Brown has a venerable tradition of expelling the politically incorrect, including President Bennie Andrews '70. Wildly popular, he was especially admired for his success in exhorting students to fulfill their human potential by volunteering for the Spanish-American War (once fabulously PC). So the trustees were especially shocked when he began advocating silver coinage. A man who believed in that could be neither sane nor moral, so they had to banish him before he poisoned the whole community. 

PC flourished in Athens at the same time the Spartans were perfecting communism, so I hardly think either idea can have permanently "died" in the past year. It is true that, like Stalinism and McCarthyism, it had lost its real power before mainstream liberals began anathematizing it, or even giving it a name. (Four years ago, "PC Person" was a classist, fattist, WASPist, smartist term for a typical scholar at Providence College.) But while political circumstances change quickly and unpredictably, human nature changes too slowly to measure. Like some observers of political savagery in past decades, I would blame PC's inhumanity not on the counter-culture, communism, anti-communism or fundamentalism, but on certain strains of the human personality: control freaks, conformists, trendies, groupies, and opportunists. At least in my experience here, the intolerance that provoked so much resentment and ridicule was practiced not by political activists, but by encounter-workshop facilitators and a few administrators. Likewise, it should be obvious that Dartmouth's persecution of conservative journalists, and the Brown administration's rudeness toward liberal protestors and union organizers, relate not to the politics of left and right but to simple institutional self-interest.

But some cultures and ideologies may prove more PC-resistant than others. By "culture," I mean something we each help shape, not a genetic heritage that pre-determines us. Many people presume there is a certain inviolable space around individuals, and that all are equally human. In cultures that take such ideas seriously, certain rules develop: People are to be persuaded only by reason, and not manipulated, lied to, or forced around at gunpoint. People are given the benefit of the doubt, and not charged with unworthy motives or mental infirmity without proof. But at the same time, they are seen as ultimately responsible for their beliefs, having reason and free will. At times, concepts of "gentlemanliness" and "sportsmanship" have been current (and it is worrisome that our new less-sexist language has no words for them yet). They advise that an unfair advantage should not be pressed, that abandoning the moral high ground only hurts you in the long run, and that no disagreement may break the bonds of civility and charity. Where most people are willing to defend such standards, the PC might abandon their own tactics as counter-productive. In such a culture, Horace Mann went on to show that one can outgrow PC in the course of a mentally active life.

Our present culture, though, admires a no-holds-barred 100% dedication to one's chosen cause, fad or crisis, overriding all rules and distinctions, by any means necessary. So we should be grateful for our PC education -- it's probably excellent preparation for success in American politics, media, and business.

Jefferson is why the modern world values equality, democracy, and human rights

By John Crouch

On his 275^th birthday, Thomas Jefferson is in danger of getting run out of town on a rail, his statues teetering on a slippery slope which we had been told would become dry and level as soon as Robert E. Lee was cast down it. We already knew he was a slaveowner and probably a race-mixing unwed father, but lately we’ve been confronted with the inhumane cruelties that slavery involved even at Monticello, and some are calling him a rapist and a child molester because Sally Hemings was a slave and was 16 when she first became pregnant.

But at the  same time, without Jefferson, we would not have today’s movements for racial equality and other human equality, we wouldn’t have had the Civil Rights movement and its imitators, and even Abolitionism would have been very different and less popular. Now, it’s well known that he is where Americans think that we get most of our ideas about liberty. But what we forget, in these days when we’re focused on a mostly false opposition between liberty and equality, is that he is much more uniquely, and crucially, the source of our beliefs in equality, democracy, and universal human rights. As the author of the Declaration of Independence, as the founder of the Democratic Party, and as a powerful, lifelong agitator for expanding political liberty and equality.

Without him, the American Revolution, and the American idea, would likely have been about defending the hereditary rights of free-holding Englishmen. Perhaps inspiring enough to achieve independence, perhaps not. But not much of an inspiration to the rest of the world, and far less appealing to Christians and philosophers than declaring our independence by announcing:

"That all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness."

This ideology and theology of radical human equality was not Jefferson’s invention: it had colorful, eccentric champions during the English Civil War and Commonwealth era (1640s-50s), Quakerism seems consistent with it if not based on it, and Hobbes and Locke used it in different ways as a starting point for their philosophies. The idea had recently been expressed in Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, and in George Mason’s Virginia Declaration of Rights. But Jefferson put it at the top of America’s founding document, its public statement of what its war was about, where everyone read it or had it read to them.

And Americans would not have their wide and deep belief in equality and democracy if it were not for the ongoing work of Jefferson and the political party he founded, which was always the democratic party even when it was still named “Republican” or “Antifederalist.” Even when it fostered and exploited racism, it did so using democratic rhetoric that ultimately arcs towards equality for all. Even now and in the days of Woodrow Wilson when it seems like the more elitist and “Progressive” party, it pays truly valuable lip service to democracy and believes it can reconcile all such contradictions; it contains multitudes with more consistently democratic impulses, which they carry with them to other parties if they leave the party in disgust, fear and sorrow. Even the Whigs and the modern Republican party inherited more from it than from the old, aristocratic Federalists.

Lately both the elitist Progressives, and a few loud, immature, shallow Libertarians, like to pit liberty and equality against each other. They envision a wealthy and antisocial Individual exercising individual liberty for his own amusement and benefit, at the expense and indulgence of a democratic government that seeks to constrain him for the common good of the many and the poor. But that wasn’t the situation in Jefferson’s time, nor for most of our history, nor today. Jefferson and generations of his contemporaries feared governments that suppressed individual rights in order to suppress the majority and subvert or prevent democracy. They saw absolutist governments create privileged elites, not equality. They knew that democracy can’t function as democracy if individuals aren’t free to express their actual beliefs, spread news, and try to persuade each other and their representatives. Nor without the other freedoms in our Constitution. And they fought for individual liberty, not because it let them do selfish things or express their unique selves, but to be free to do what they thought was their duty to God and to society.

On Jefferson’s birthday, we remember that he was far from perfect on issues of liberty and of equality. But he worked to expand both of them, and so should we.

"Corporations are people" is irrelevant to "Citizens United" and other federal-law cases -- just read the case's name!

The phrase "corporations are people" deliberately conjures up images of huge money-grubbing businesses that don't care about people, getting favors from a government that cares more about them than people.  It's widely known to come from from early, "Gilded Age" pro-business interpretations of the 14th Amendment. And yet the very name of the "Citizens United" case should be a giveaway that the freedom of non-profit groups of citizens, advocating about political issues, was at stake in the case. Do those who scoff at Citizens United, for supposedly saying corporations are people, really believe that civil rights groups, women's groups, antiwar groups, veterans' groups, and religious groups, have no Constitutional rights?

The second half of the case's name, "v. Federal Election Commission", is a big clue that 14th Amendment case law about "persons" has nothing to do with it. The part of the 14th Amendment about persons and rights, Section 1, solely restricts what states can do to people or "persons". It reads:

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside. No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

But the First Amendment, which works directly on the federal government, and indirectly on states through the 14th Amendment, focuses on prohibiting the government from violating freedom of speech, press, or religion, with absolutely no exceptions concerning who or what is speaking, publishing, etc.

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; ...

There is a reference to "the people" in the second half of it:

"... or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."

Justice Kennedy's majority opinion in Citizens United does not say corporations are people. Instead it points out that the First Amendment does not make exceptions for who is doing the speaking or publishing; that all effective speech costs money, and that an argument that "corporations aren't natural persons" is not wrong, but irrelevant to the First Amendment.

Joe Albanese pointed out this crucial but apparently never-noticed distinction today, reveling in the irony of Ben & Jerry's using its free-speech rights to argue against corporations having free-speech rights, in "Is Big Ice Cream Trying to Hijack Our Democracy?" Former Federal Election Commission member Brad Smith says more about groups' free speech rights, and another threat to them, in "Tester’s assault on corporate rights is an assault on people’s rights."

I wish people would read the case opinion before criticizing it, but if you don't do that, you could at least read the case's name and the most important sentence in our Constitution.

Social ideologies, consumerism, matriarchy, propagate through entertainment, commercial ads

Since the 1970s, the non-political media has taught us that everyone is essentially a consumer, not a producer or a citizen; men and masculinity are silly, and women are super-competent. The 80s added safety-mania to this mix. And that children (the ultimate consumers) are superior to adults and nothing's more important than focusing on children, no matter how excessively nor what else we sacrifice for what kids supposedly need or want. 

This article by Carrie Gress reminds us how such ideas spread, and how often we need to notice and resist them, instead of passively absorbing them from sources that we don't think are selling ideology. That's extremely important even though I don't necessarily agree with most of her perspectives on such issues.

Also, this process happens even when there's no top-down conspiracy to spread ideas -- advertisers and entertainment producers use these common themes because they want to be fashionable, soft-newsworthy, and "relevant", to flatter their target audience, and not to shock or alienate them (except for faux-shocking that's actually conformist).

Of course it can be intentional and coordinated, like the Clinton administration's stealth attack on Congressional "economic extremists" via the women's magazines, supposedly non-political because they were reporting on threats to government spending programs that they pretended were non-political. This at a time when the administration felt too weak to attack the new Republican majority in Washington or in the political media, but they instead laid the groundwork for the lasting unpopularity of fiscal conservatism. Even while flattering Gingrich that he had won and that "the era of big government is over."

The Patriarchy Has Been Replaced By A Stifling Matriarchy

Instead of skirt lengths and eye-shadow hues, the matriarchy suggests harmful intellectual trends that we scarcely know are being dictated to us through every possible avenue

 

By Carrie Gress on thefederalist.com

 

Related Post: The more TV you watch, the more authoritarian you are. Regular TV, not cable news/talk.

Leftists master the game of long-term policy change, tacking against strong headwinds. Can libertarians or conservatives do it?

Whatever you think about the merits of the issues, you've got to admire gun controllers' and other social-change movements' strategy and tactics, but also recognize their dishonesty -- their eternal cycle or ratchet between "This legislation merely imposes slight restrictions that hardly inconvenience any reasonable person, we would never try to take away your rights", and "That legislation has failed to seriously reduce the underlying problem and it's time to just ban everything" --  as Daniel Payne does in "Gun Controllers Know Their Policies Won’t Stop Murder. They’re Playing A Different Game", at The Federalist:

... If their proposed remedies would be so obviously and demonstrably unlikely to solve the very problems they claim to intend to solve, then why do gun controllers keep advocating these ridiculous and counterintuitive laws? 

The answer is not hard to see. Gun control advocates, like most political actors, are pragmatic and practical. They understand that certain legislative goals and ambitions must play out over a period of time rather than in a political instant. You can see this type of long-game strategy in, say, the American health-care debate: after seven years of Obamacare, Democrats are increasingly pursuing single-payer, something that was much less feasible before the Affordable Care Act. Indeed, Sen. Harry Reid has explicitly stated that Obamacare is intended solely to be “a step in the right direction” towards single-payer, nothing more.

So it is with gun control: liberals propose these useless laws and regulations not in an attempt to honestly curb gun violence but rather in a long-form attempt to pass other laws down the road. It will be much easier to ban large classes of semiautomatic rifles, after all, after five or ten years of banning scary-looking AR-style “assault weapons.” It will be far easier, too, to sharply restrict firearm purchases after a decade of regulating ammunition sales, the latter of which will soon begin in California.

This doesn’t have to be some grand conspiracy theory or dark, shadowy intrigue. Gun controllers are not stupid. They understand long-form political action as well as anyone. They do not like guns and they are more than patient enough to play the drawn-out politics necessary to curtail American gun rights.

... To be fair, I get it: if the situation were reversed, and I were starting from a legal position in which gun rights were severely restricted in this country, I would play the same game if necessary. It’s the smart thing to do.

Caught in lies, Left just rides out the controversy, then carves 'em in stone when no one's looking

Todd Seavey writes:

I notice that now that the chronic con artist Brianna Wu is running for Congress in the Boston area, the New York Times seizes the opportunity to define Gamergate as simply an Internet harassment campaign -- no debate necessary, I guess -- and CNN casually describes Gamergate (inaccurately) as a movement that believes there should be no women in gaming.

Disturbingly, the establishment left is perfectly willing to just ride out the storm and then carve its lies in stone once everyone's attention has moved elsewhere. I'm not sure how people interested in telling the truth can match that relentless, tireless evil.

That's how they do. That's one of the parts of politics that I learned on the playground: people's reality is what they start repeating because it's what people are saying and what they think people want to hear them say. 

The greatest example of this silent switcheroo that I've witnessed is how in the early 90s, the Soviet Union fell, a wider swath of policymakers and educated people learned about market economics, and everyone conceded that socialism didn't work. Democratic President Bill Clinton proclaimed, "The Era of Big Government is Over." Newt Gingrich took over Congress and for a couple years, no one in Washington told him he wasn't the best and the brightest. Ever since the backlash from his hubris in the 1995 government shutdown (which White House chief of staff Leon Panetta later bragged about orchestrating on NPR), the GOP has been afraid to make public arguments for why free markets work, fearing to scare away some fraction of its precarious majority coalition. In that vacuum, leftist academics, writers and politicians rushed back in like the tide, teaching whole generations that market economics was totally disproven. Not by actually engaging with what free-market economists and philosophers actually taught, but just by sidestepping it and repeating that all of that had been discredited at some point.

Media says "#Reeling" & "Under Siege" because that's how they like us. Can #JohnOliver change that?

It took a Brit to have the daring, and the permission, to effectively poke a hole in the American media's universal chorus about how Londoners are Reeling, Traumatized, Quivering, Disoriented, Shell-Shocked, Incapacitated and Under Siege. 

John Oliver - Britain Reeling

Because in Britain you can straightforwardly argue for Fabian Socialism or whatever Oliver believes, without having to convince yourself that you speak for a consensus of all responsible and respectable members of the community. But in the US, generations of progressives have learned not to advocate socialism directly, or at least to dare not speak its name, when addressing the general public. Instead, around 1970 the media started talking to us as if we were not citizens but a mass of passive Consumers, overwhelmed by events too large for individuals or voluntary groups to handle.  A view of ourselves that typical Americans had always vehemently rejected, but it was central to the views of Progressive-Era leaders, New Dealers, and establishment leftists.

Not all leftists -- the old Populist farmers, the Civil Rights organizers, and many 60s radicals believed in self-help and self-organizing. But the Progressive leftists, who already dominated all mainstream social institutions, feared and loathed as "false consciousness" anything that made individuals feel self-sufficient, empowered, free, etc. Everything from driving cars instead of relying on public transportation, to civilians owning weapons, to any way of providing for our needs or wants that was not governmental or government-dependent. 

So the media started pounding us with one too-big-to-comprehend Crisis after another: Gas shortages. Random terrorism. Inflation. Unpredictable "lone gunman" assassins. Global Cooling. The Population Bomb. Random Urban Violence. Drug Epidemics. (I'm not saying they conspired or fabricated these things; it's about how they began to portray them, which was based on, and/or encouraged, the Progressive view of individuals and "Society".) What could an individual do about anything? Wait for government experts to solve the problem. And tie a yellow ribbon on something -- we only started doing that sort of thing during the 1979-81 Iran hostage crisis, and we're still at it.

Little things that reinforce that view of mankind still bug some of us. Everything from the ribbons being yellow to the obvious connotation of pronouncing the Sept. 11 attacks "Nine-Eleven". Needlessly shortening "terrorism" to "terror" probably has something to do with it too.

9/11 seemed to radically dethrone this paradigm, at least for a while. It began with World Trade Center management telling everyone to stay at their desks until safety officials assessed and determined, etc. It ended with passengers organizing an unarmed assault and making their 737 explode in a field before it could kamikaze the White House. But the herd mentality is strong, the left-wing "hive" endures for generations and knows when to tactically retreat or change the subject temporarily, and they've trained us to want what they're selling. 

Oliver has given us a widely-publicized chance to re-evaluate the whole passivity paradigm. I hope we'll take it. After all, from the time of the Battle of Britain through the Berlin Airlift, the news spin about our allies under attack was completely different.  

And on the eve of WWI it was even differenter: the English were proud of their resistance and their Reeling, with more than one beer in hand:

The Rolling English Road

BY G. K. CHESTERTON

 

Before the Roman came to Rye or out to Severn strode,

The rolling English drunkard made the rolling English road.

A reeling road, a rolling road, that rambles round the shire,

And after him the parson ran, the sexton and the squire;

A merry road, a mazy road, and such as we did tread

The night we went to Birmingham by way of Beachy Head.

 

I knew no harm of Bonaparte and plenty of the Squire,

And for to fight the Frenchman I did not much desire;

But I did bash their baggonets because they came arrayed

To straighten out the crooked road an English drunkard made,

Where you and I went down the lane with ale-mugs in our hands,

The night we went to Glastonbury by way of Goodwin Sands.

 

His sins they were forgiven him; or why do flowers run

Behind him; and the hedges all strengthening in the sun?

The wild thing went from left to right and knew not which was which,

But the wild rose was above him when they found him in the ditch.

God pardon us, nor harden us; we did not see so clear

The night we went to Bannockburn by way of Brighton Pier.

 

My friends, we will not go again or ape an ancient rage,

Or stretch the folly of our youth to be the shame of age,

But walk with clearer eyes and ears this path that wandereth,

And see undrugged in evening light the decent inn of death;

For there is good news yet to hear and fine things to be seen,

Before we go to Paradise by way of Kensal Green.

 

Related Posts: 

Trump, Clinton push "learned helplessness", poisoning this election and our character

Press deploys its worst bureaucratese against Portland's anti-Muslim killer, Constitution-burning mayor

A horrible example of the passive voice obscuring life-or-death questions in the classic "bureaucratic style", from the AP in the Washington Post, the paper I was born and raised on and really expected better from:

"Taliesin Myrddin Namkai Meche, 23, and Ricky John Best, 53, were killed Friday as they tried to stop Jeremy Joseph Christian from harassing the women, one of whom was wearing a hijab, authorities say. Another who stepped in was seriously injured."

The passive-voice obfuscation makes one wonder if the killer was this "Christian" guy, police, other Muslims, or someone else whom the writer doesn't want you to think about. Only way down deep in the story, in a quotation, do we learn who did what:

"And then we turned around while they were fighting, and he just started stabbing people, and it was just blood everywhere, and we just started running for our lives."

Even that doesn't say who started the physical fighting, or who was fighting. That quotation is the first specific first description of anything physical. Then there's this:

"A day before the attack, cellphone video confirmed by police Sgt. Pete Simpson shows Christian using expletives as he rants about Muslims, Christians and Jews on a train."

It would be interesting to know if he was ranting for or against Christians and Jews. But at least they left in what's really important, the fact that he used profanity and the name of the police officer who confirmed the video. And then:

"The mayor says his main concern was participants 'coming to peddle a message of hatred,' saying hate speech is not protected by the Constitution."

Um, that last gerund is a grave accusation against the mayor, saying he expressed beliefs that disqualify him from active citizenship, not just from holding public office. So I think he deserves to have what he actually said quoted. (When I read the evolving story, the headline was about that. The characterization of his anti-American beliefs is accurate, though. See "‘Hate speech is not protected by the First Amendment,’ Portland mayor says. He’s wrong." byKristine Phillips in the Post)

The story is by Martha Bellisle of the AP. ("Portland mayor aims to nix free-speech rally, fears 'hatred'" -
By MARTHA BELLISLE, Associated Press). But the AP and Post editors are both independently responsible either for creating this dog's-breakfast or for not fixing it so that it delivers the news.

For more on the bureaucratic style and all the important questions it intentionally obscures, see "The Elements of Bureaucratic Style" by Colin Dickey. My own small contribution to that analysis is "When the people who had all the power say the victim forced them to use force ...".

Postscript: As if all that wasn't Orwellian enough, the Post  link this was about now points to a Post AP story with a different headline and  byline, with the first thing I complained about now totally fixed, and other major topics removed:

Portland uneasy; suspect shouts ‘you’ve got no safe place!’

By Gillian Flaccus and Steven Dubois | AP May 30 at 7:53 PM

. . . "Authorities say Jeremy Joseph Christian started verbally abusing two young women, including one wearing a hijab. When three men on the train intervened, police say, Christian attacked them, killing two and wounding one."

 

When the people who had all the power say the victim forced them to use force ...

I've heard good arguments for both sides about United bumping the passenger off the flight, IF it was the only flight, on any airline, that could get the pilots to where they needed to be so that whole planeloads of passengers could fly as scheduled. For picking people to bump at random instead of calling for volunteers, and calling police and dragging a guy off, a doctor whose patients would be waiting for him, not so much.

But the CEO's non-apology does something that we allow far too many people in power and authority to get away with: Talking as if they had no choice in what they did to someone, as if their victim was a free agent who could choose differently, but their own response was an automatic consequence, an impersonal force of nature, etc.

United CEO on Flight Removal Video: ‘I Apologize for Having to Re-accommodate These Customers’

                         By Jennifer Calfas, Apr 10, 2017

Civil forfeiture's worse than we thought; blurs difference between cops & robbers, compliance & bribery.

I already knew Civil Asset Forfeiture was often horribly misused and somehow started affecting people who hadn't been convicted of crimes. But people who aren't even charged? In some places, it has taken America back to the bad old days where it isn't safe to travel if you're a minority or from out-of-state. Worse, some counties have become like those corrupt third-world countries where there's no real difference between cops & robbers; bribes & "fines". Where innocent travelers might get stopped at any time for a bogus crime and have to sign over whatever cash they have with them to get out of jail and -- a particularly American twist on this barbarity -- to not have their children taken away.

And sometimes, as described below, public servants are so focused on grabbing the cash etc. that when they do stop actual, serious drug-runners, they let them go, as long as they literally "get the goods" off them. 

There have been bipartisan efforts in many states, most recently Virginia, to reform "civil forfeiture" so it only applies to convicted criminals. (If something's actual evidence of a crime that someone's charged with, it would still be kept temporarily as evidence anyway.) But what this New Yorker article has to say makes it far more urgent than I knew.

TAKEN: Under civil forfeiture, Americans who haven’t been charged with wrongdoing can be stripped of their cash, cars, and even homes. Is that all we’re losing?

 

By Sarah Stillman in The New Yorker

Bland "token" Black characters: a huge improvement, a necessary first step, Kenneth Kelly told Charles Schulz

Us kids of the 70s uncomfortably recall all the plain-vanilla TV and movie characters who merely "happened to be black". Perhaps none was plainer-vanilla than Franklin from Peanuts. But it turns out our discomfort was shared by their creators, even when they were considering whether to introduce them. And it was answered powerfully by moon-lander designer and housing discrimination activist Kenneth C. Kelly, who wrote to Charles Schulz after hearing that Schulz was considering adding a Black Peanuts kid but was worried about "patronizing" tokenism:

"... on the subject of including Negro kids in the fabric of Peanuts, I’d like to express an opinion as a Negro father of two young boys. You mention a fear of being patronizing. Though I doubt that any Negro would view your efforts that way, I’d like to suggest that an accusation of being patronizing would be a small price to pay for the positive results that would accrue!

"We have a situation in America in which racial enmity is constantly portrayed. The inclusion of a Negro supernumerary in some of the group scenes in Peanuts would do two important things. Firstly, it would ease my problem of having my kids seeing themselves pictured in the overall American scene. Secondly, it would suggest racial amity in a casual day-to-day sense.

"I deliberately suggest a supernumerary role for a Negro character. The inclusion of a Negro in your occasional group scenes would quietly and unobtrusively set the stage for a principal character at a later date, should the basis for such a principal develop.

"We have too long used Negro supernumeraries in such unhappy situations as a movie prison scene, while excluding Negro supernumeraries in quiet and normal scenes of people just living, loving, worrying, entering a hotel, the lobby of an office building, a downtown New York City street scene. There are insidious negative effects in these practices of the movie industry, TV industry, magazine publishing, and syndicated cartoons."

 From "Why Charles M. Schulz Gave Peanuts A Black Character (1968)" by Paul Sorene on flashbak.com

 

Kenneth C. Kelly with Franklin and Franklin advocate Harriet Glickman, above, and profiled in Ebony, Dec. 1962, below

 

The judgments Dr. Kelly expressed in his letter were also at the core of his housing rights work, as this excerpt from a 1973 article from the Van Nuys News [bad scanning and all] shows:

"Two of Southern California's biggest residential developments were accused in federal court yesterday of fostering housing discrimination by depicting only white persons in their advertising. . . . Twin suits brought by organizations called fair housing councils charged that pictures of blacks and o t h e r minorities were "systematically excluded" from sales brochures and newspapers and magazine ads, thereby subtly conveying a message that blacks were unwelcome. A spokesman for the Irvine Co. said "we may not have been sensitive" to the issue raised in the suit and said advertising would be changed to meet the complaints. He said the company has vigorously pursued a policy of open housing and was surprised at being named in such a suit.

"NAACP Council

"The suit over advertising for the development known as Irvine Villages was filed by the Orange C o u n ty Fair Housing Council. The suit against Westlake was filed by the San Fernando Valley Fair Housing Council. Attorneys in both cases were supplied by the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund. Identical issues were raised in both, namely that by depicting only white families the ads tended to discourage blacks and other non-Caucasians from trying to buy homes in the developments. Discrimination in real estate sales and rentals is prohibited by state and federal civil rights acts.

"Recalls Past

"Amplifying on the issues raised in the suits, Kenneth C. Kelly, of the San Fernando Valley Fair H o u s ing Council, told newsmen: "We believe that the advertising has the effect of keeping alive within most minority persons those feelings that were inculcated during the many decades in which rank and brutal discrimination against minority persons w e r e almost the rule a m o n g housing developers' sales staff.. . . . "

Even more fascinating background is at: "La storia del primo personaggio di colore dei Peanuts" by Andrea Fiamma in STORIE

A Pogo Strip For Our Time: "Go Away, You Frighten Our Children" vs. "Everybody's Lost But Me"

I've finally encountered one of those alt-right people -- so they aren't a myth after all. A Facebook commenter talking about "Cucks" and leaving a picture of their Egyptian frog god, Kek AKA Kuk AKA Pepe. I decided to look it up to see what on earth it was all about, and it just left me feeling soiled and stupider than before. It's mostly defined in even more obscure and irrelevant terms, in the language of guys who feel they have no stake in society and just want to spout abuse. Also numerology and "magick". But it kept dimly reminding me of something, and after a few days, I remembered what it is. The Pogo series about the "Kluck Klams" may be the most heartstring-tugging Pogo strips ever. Not because of the unrealistically easy happy ending. Certainly not the stuff about "Go away, you frighten our children", which has long since become a sick, control-freaky liberal cliché, and just makes me mutter, "You wish your children were scared!" What gets to me -- and did even when I first read it back in grade school, when I had hardly any ability to pick up on emotions in other people, or in books -- is the smart, plucky little boy's unquestioning devotion to his horribly misguided, quite likely evil and criminal, father ...

 

Johnson hasn't aimed at his most likely voters, is "maximizing his minimum" -- Brad Smith

I long ago signed up for the Johnson campaign's Facebook feed and e-mails, and curiously, nearly all of them seemed tin-eared and off-note, to be participating in a barely relevant conversation. Many had a content-free student-government-elections vibe, essentially, "Why not try a third party?" pointlessly saying a two-party system wasn't fair, etc. The ones that attacked Trump and Clinton just repeated the same old accusations people have already heard a million times, and in Hillary's case, the non-ideological "Crooked Hillary" stuff or the left-wing attack on her as an insider. I can't recall ever seeing an attack on her far-left, progressive-elitist IDEOLOGY, including her hostility to the traditional American libertarian ideals shared by many conservatives, moderates, and even many liberals (anyone remember Civil Libertarians?).

Professor and former Federal Election Commissioner Brad Smith discussed this in depth in a brilliant public post on Facebook. My only quibbles with him are:

1. Posing as the sane moderate isn't incompatible with being the sensible, electable conservative alternative, the leader of the remainder of a split Republican party. Doing a better job at both of those would have made him the natural candidate for "Never Trump" Republicans.
2. There's much more to be said, especially this year, for libertarianism as the real moderation. It doesn't erase, but defuses and declaws, most cultural and religious differences. The main theme of my libertarian folk song (temporary working titles: "Goons & Droogs" or "Johnson We Hardly Mentioned Ye.")

Smith writes:

I think basically the strategy was to try to present themselves as the "moderate, sane alternative," and to appeal to millenials, who are more likely to pull the third party lever. The hope was to peel off a bit from the left, and a bit from the right, and get into the debates with 15%. To do this they heavily emphasized social issues, to the point of abandoning tradition libertarian and Libertarian positions, such as supporting freedom of association, and viewing private anti-discrimination laws as a rare exception to be used only in rare situations. Instead, they aggressively attacked the idea that religious people (or others) should be free not to provide services for same sex marriages, etc.. They devoted considerable effort to courting Clinton and Sanders voters. They also talked quite a bit about foreign policy, a very unwise decision given Johnson's apparent lack of prep there, but they wanted to court anti-war voters.

In my view, the only real hope for a third party is always to become viewed as the alternative to one of the major parties. Otherwise, "don't waste your vote" mentality kicks in (and it is a logical mentality), and third party support always drifts away.

Their smart play, therefore, would have been not to campaign as the moderate alternative to Corrupt Hillary and Crazy Donald, but as the Republican alternative to Trump, much as Evan McMullen has done in his 1 state campaign in Utah. As two former GOP governors, this would have made sense and had some credibility. Further, Republicans who don't like Trump tend to not like him because he is not libertarian enough (this is not true of the neocons, but it is true of the free traders, the pro-immigration voters, and much of the limited government crowd. Liberals dissatisfied with Hillary tend not to like her because she's not statist enough--the Bernie voters. There's really no room to her left on the social issues that Johnson/Weld wanted to emphasize, and on economics, their libertarian views are as much or more a turnoff to the Sanders/Warren left as Hillary's cronyism.

Rather than Weld citing Breyer as a great Supreme Court justice, they should have been on one page that they would support people like Thomas, who is very popular with Republicans and probably the most libertarian justice on the Court. They should have finessed abortion through a federalism argument and aggressively defending the Hyde Amendment and attacking efforts to fund Planned Parenthood (a good libertarian position, defunding most any private group), require employers to provide particular coverages in health plans, or require individuals to perform non-essential services (the traditional libertarian position). Most importantly, they should have pounded on regulation and the growth of government and executive power. The idea would be to become (as McMullen has become in Utah) a credible alternative for conservative voters. As we see with McMullen, his support is not fading in Utah in part because he is seen as an electable alternative to Clinton.

Would such a strategy have worked? Probably not. Always a longshot, right? But I think they played a strategy to maximize their minimum, when this was the election for the LP to try to maximize its maximum.

Or as Matthew Finn put it in a comment:

He misidentified which demographic his campaign should've been targeting. Trump is enormously unpopular with small government conservatives. These voters would've been ripe for picking. Yet Johnson seemed to snub them in favor of running a campaign targeted at youthful millennial voters and, oddly enough, the Sanders sect of the Democratic Party (who are, by nature, ideologically opposite of Johnson). In doing so, he created an image (and remember, perception is truth in politics), of a half-baked, middle aged stoner who is treating running for president with the same amount of seriousness that he would treat running a fantasy football league. That alienated a good portion of his ideal demographic (small government conservatives) who tend to be older and, to an extent, value based voters. In short, rather than painting himself as a sensible conservative alternative to Trump, he painted himself as a wacky caricature and in doing so alienated the voters who could have actually put him in the national discussion.

Candidates' science report cards misleading if you only read the headline or summary. Like most science stories.

Scientific American's "Grading the Presidential Candidates on Science" article is not without value, but it has some eccentricities that make it seriously misleading to just read the candidates' scores without reading the whole thing to see what the questions actually were, and how they were graded. It does not test candidates' scientific literacy or mastery. And even the breadth, detail and seriousness of their science-related public policies takes a back seat to some oddball factors that don't matter that much to anyone but the authors:

1. The test puts surprisingly great emphasis not on scientific literacy or policies, but on following instructions in detail when taking the test. They asked for very specific policies on specific questions, not overall generalities. Even though describing overall general policy preferences and methods can be useful and instructive, and is often the best use of  candidates' and the public's time in a campaign. Gary Johnson came off more like he answered it on the fly without reading the instructions, and so didn't get credit for a lot of detailed, solid, moderate policies on energy and other science-related issues that are described on his web site or on an independent "candidates on the issues" site. 
2. Though the graders didn't look outside the test answers for material that bolstered a candidate's scientific literacy, they did so to find positions and statements that would lower a candidate's grade or would, in their view, contradict their answers to the test. That hurt all candidates but Hillary. 
3. A significant fraction of the test was government-funding issues, which it treated as showing whether a candidate would be good for science, ignoring any economic arguments about whether that's the best way to do things. (Or penalizing all market-based arguments, relying on a single study, far outside the graders' expertise, that they treated as authoritative on all economic questions.)
4. The graders also got extremely, unscientifically doctrinaire on a couple issues: Stein was deemed an ignoramus for having misgivings about nuclear power, whereas apparently there's a total scientific consensus that nuclear is hunky-dory. Who knew? And although Johnson says global warming's a man-made program that needs governmental solutions, he's severely penalized for saying we should be open-minded to various dissenters and that some widely proposed solutions aren't necessarily worth the cost. 

Grading the Presidential Candidates on Science: Scientific American evaluates responses from Clinton, Trump, Johnson and Stein to 20 questions

By Christine Gorman and Ryan F. Mandelbaum in Scientific American

Clinton too extreme, rejects First Amendment's core rights: political speech, democratic participation

The most important reason not to vote for Clinton is her hostility to the First Amendment -- several positions that are neither extreme liberalism nor extreme conservatism, as we have usually understood those terms, but are all the more extreme for being totally unplugged from liberal or conservative traditions.

As for everything else, a lot of her imperfections are things we've had before in presidents; obviously she's not the first big-gov't economic lefty, nor the first to tactically hatemonger and demonize her fellow-citizens who disagree with her on that. I don't remember how Wilson, FDR, Truman, Johnson & Nixon did that, but Bill & Obama at least sounded like they still valued all Americans and beckoned the misguided back to the fold, while the media happily did the dirtier work for them. They usually singled out legislators & advocacy group leaders as the evil extremists. HRC, on the other hand, pretty clearly indicates that if you're opposing or obstructing anything, then none of your rights or interests matter, you don't matter, and you should just get swept off the chessboard.

But that's not what disqualifies her: it's the hostility to the First Amendment and her vow to amend it. First there's all the attacks on people's right to morally disapprove of, and choose not to participate in, certain actions that their religion has disapproved of for millennia. That's already been going on in the Obama administration and at every level of government. And the campaign finance reform, extending the notion not just to giving money to officeholders and candidates, but against any political speech against candidates, or even about referenda, if the speech costs money or involves banding together in groups, e.g. Citizens United. Which means any speech that's significant & effective enough to make any difference.

The First Amendment is what makes us America. We'll always have differences about where to draw lines in the gray areas around it, but somehow liberalism has turned around 180 degrees from when I was a proudly liberal Democrat in the 70s and 80s, and it now wants to cut out the heart of the 1st Amendment as it has always been understood from the founding up through the present: political speech and freedom of conscience.

Can there be an objective verdict on Hillary's ethics history? We begin at the Travel Office ...

Everything I needed to know about Hillary Clinton* [*until now], I learned in the first year of law school, the first year of Bill's presidency. We didn't have the internet, so we had to remember news events and utterances that were important to us, and we couldn't -- and weren't required to -- whip out a shareable web link to prove everything we said. (Such exercises were reserved for the junior law review editors, miserable creatures who lived in the library seeking citations to back up such statements as "The sun rises in the East".). I didn't have a TV, and newspaper reading varied depending on exam preparation, internship work, etc. I heard a lot but I missed a lot. Like most people who nonetheless think they have a right to express opinions about their government.

Since 1993 or '94 I haven't been much interested in anything purporting to prove Hillary's criminal or corrupt, because I already knew I wouldn't vote for her based on what I "knew" about the Travel Office firings and her "Let them eat cake" moment -- saying she wasn't responsible for "every undercapitalized entrepreneur in America" as a way of shrugging off any concern about her health care proposal's effects on small businesses and jobs. This piled elite nonchalance on top of an ugly tactic I was then observing in bullies everywhere, from brutal, racist cops to university administrators to politicians who would leave a market half-free, half-constrained, and then blame the resulting chaos on the free market. Cuffing a guy's hands behind your back, knocking him down and then laughing at him and belittling him because he can't pull yourself up by his bootstraps, can't hold his pants up, etc. Or saying students, employees or customers needed to be "responsible", but only as a way of disclaiming any responsibility for what you and your institutions do to them.

The Travel Office firing was chilling and clearly very wrong to five or six of its seven employees, but there's a whole history of investigation that shows no crime Hillary could be reasonably prosecuted for, and only ambiguous scraps of evidence that might point to her being flagrantly unethical. And likewise, even a cheat sheet covering a lifetime of possible scandals, by the unsympathetic Washington Examiner, shows nothing really damning. Bottom line, her character is dingy and battered, grungy, and if she has committed crimes herself, the most likely and numerous ones are the administrative/regulatory kind that many respectable people accumulate over a lifetime. But her zeal and anger inspire loyal staff to do cruel and unusual, perhaps criminal, things on her behalf, for reasons ranging from Arkansas patronage, to foiling potential enemies, to transcendent ideology.

Whoever really was responsible for the firings was pretty clearly acting (1) legally and (2) unethically, meanly, nastily, and with utter disdain for ordinary working people and how one's actions affect them. Which fit perfectly with the "undercapitalized entrepreneur"  attitude. The Travel Office staff formally served "at the will of the President" and could be dismissed at any time, so it was totally legal to fire them. But in practice they were non-political career employees, just like the kitchen and housekeeping staff. Five "had no financial authority in the office."

 The director of the travel office, who had worked his way up from the bottom from 1962 to 1982, may have been doing a fine job getting travel arranged for everyone, but he had no use for, nor knowledge of, conventional accounting, and devised his own "country storekeeper" method for collecting advance payments from media businesses sharing the costs of press pool travel, and refunding or collecting any difference afterwards. It sounds like whenever paper records were left over he piled them in a closet. All of that was not necessarily illegal -- this wasn't a business that had to pay taxes, and I don't know what kind of record-keeping the law actually required for that government office, but it reasonably could dovetail with the only criminal charge against any of the travel staff --  embezzlement of $54,000 from refunds and $14,000 from petty cash, using a personal account as the office's petty cash fund. He was tried for that, and acquitted. But the White House can't be blamed for investigating -- it would have been a scandal not to.

But White House had fired the entire seven-person staff at once and meanwhile called in the FBI to investigate the office's finances, announcing both actions to the press at once. On top of the usual effects of being fired, this certainly made it look to any potential future employer, and everyone else they interacted with, as if they had all been fired for some criminal wrongdoing.  All seven later "testified that the accusations by the Clinton White House had ruined them financially by forcing them to incur massive legal bills to clear their names," the LA Times said. And replacing them with the Clintons' associates and cousin, who had been lobbying for the investigation and the positions, made it look as if the Clintons had not only fired, but tried to incriminate and prosecute, ordinary, innocent working people simply to make jobs for their cronies. As if, as Vince Foster wrote in his suicide note, "Ruining people is considered sport." That's probably not a crime, but it's still vile.

But Hillary's actual involvement is not so black-and-white. After all the investigations by Kenneth Starr and his successor, long after I had stopped listening, it sounds like all she had to do is indicate once that she implacably wanted those people gone, and the Clinton's senior staffer did the rest, leaving the Clintons' hands sort of clean. Like with Henry II and St. Thomas à Becket. Well, she also apparently kept reminding aides that she wanted the situation resolved through swift action, but she may not have had to get any more specific than that, at least on paper. The Special Prosecutors' verdict was thatHillary had testified falsely when she said two years later that she had no involvement at all, but that there was insufficient evidence to convict her of knowing or intentional perjury or obstruction of justice. Indeed, it looks like the firing was mostly the doing of staffers who firmly believed from experience that they had to move ruthlessly to not only remove, but discredit and destroy, anyone who stood in the way of what Hillary wanted. As Clinton aide David Watkins wrote,  "We both know that there would be hell to pay [if] we failed to take swift and decisive action in conformity with the First Lady's wishes."

There is a remarkable level of consensus about the known facts of this scandal. Even a site claiming that all Clinton scandals have been debunked has nothing to say about this one except that the firings were legal and the Special Prosecutors found insufficient evidence of perjury or obstruction of justice by Hillary. The White House later issued a self-critical report, apologized to the staffers and found jobs for five of them; the director and one other staffer retired.

Sources:

• "For White House Travel Office, a Two-Year Trip of Trouble" By Toni Locy, Washington Post, Monday, February 27, 1995
• "Memo Places Hillary Clinton At Core of Travel Office Case" - NY Times 1/5/96
• "Travelgate Inquiry Suggests Signs of Lies by First Lady" - LA Times 6/23/00
• "In old memo, a glimpse of conflict ahead for Hillary Clinton?" - LA Times, March 15, 2014|By Cathleen Decker
• "White House Rebukes 4 In Travel Office Shake-Up" By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN, NY Times July 3, 1993
• "A brief guide to Clinton scandals from Travelgate to Emailgate" By WASHINGTON EXAMINER STAFF • 5/17/16
• "Hillary's Arrogance" - October 13, 1993|By Tanya K. Dietrich
• "An archetypal analysis of Clinton: Her former mentor reflects on where the first viable female presidential candidate may have gone wrong."LA Times May 12, 2008|By Robin Abcarian

Hillary rejects Bill's economic policies that made his time prosperous

Willingly or not, Bill Clinton presided over mildly free-market policies and welfare reform. The federal budget grew during his time but shrunk as a share of the economy. Federal deficits were reduced, then eliminated and turned into surpluses. He was enthusiastically for free trade. His very early attempt at an artificial "stimulus" was defeated, with money instead going where it was actually wanted, needed, and productive of things consumers valued and could afford. Hillary is rejecting all of that, as we saw in the first debate, Peter Suderman writes in Reason:

Hillary Clinton Wants the Economy of the 1990s Without Its Policy Agenda:

On budgets, trade, and more, the Democratic nominee rejects Bill Clinton's economic initiatives.

Peter Suderman|Sep. 27, 2016 

Is the WASHINGTON Post right to ding Trump for race speech in city named for big slaveowner?

"It’s worth noting ...  that the North Carolina town Trump spoke in was named for a man from a slaveholding family,"  Elise Viebeck wrote in the Washington Post last week about Trump's speech about Black Americans in Kenansville, N.C., reiterating what the Post's Jose DelReal had written the day before.

Wait -- you better not say anything about this if you're in Washington, DC, Washington State, Washington County, Jacksonville, Madison, Monrovia, Leesburg, Jefferson City, Fairfax County, Carroll County, Henry County, Polk County, Van Buren County, Cobb County, Clay County, Bolivar Heights, Bolivia, Grant Park, Hannibal, Hancock, Houston, or at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science & Technology, George Washington University, or George Mason University. Or at Little Caesar's. Or in July or August. Or at the Errol Flynn Marina or Brown University, named for self-confessed slave traders.

But ... those places weren't named for those guys BECAUSE of their slaveowning or slave-trading. Well, neither was Kenansville. What -- you thought they named it for Kenan when he made it into Slaveowner Magazine's annual "Top 40 Slaveowners" feature? Actually, James Kenan was an early leader of Stamp Act protests and the prewar Committees of Safety, a state militia general, sheriff, state senator, and state-constitution convention delegate. He was also a delegate to a 1774 provincial convention that banned the slave trade. In the state's U.S. Constitution ratifying convention, he chaired the crucial "committee of the whole" that studied debated, and put together the final Report on the Constitution, amendments, and on the dicey, crucial question of how to hold out for what became the Bill of Rights without abandoning the Union. 

Just goes to show, you can be as right and pure and as good as they come and your opponent may be every depraved varmint in "Would You Like to Swing On a Star" rolled into one, but just shoot one cheap shot from your glass house, and that's all that some people will focus on, completely devaluing and discrediting all your valid arguments, and it'll all come down to this:

 

Sick Hillary debates bearded manchild from "The Hangover" -- You've never seen her like this before.

Here's how Hillary dealt with "Hangover" breakout star Zach Galifianakis's bizarre, improvised interview questions on his talk show, "Between Two Ferns", in which he's pretty much the same guy he plays in the "Hangover" movies. Except she was pretty sick with pneumonia at the time, as you may have heard, and "There was a laugh or two from her – a really big laugh – that we had to edit out because it wasn’t icy enough for us in a weird way ...", Galifianakis told the Los Angeles Times. 

If we send Hillary to the Oval Office, she had better have her lucky ferns flanking her at all times, like her Haldeman & Erlichman, her Rosenkrantz & Guildenstern, her Stan & Huma ...

Galifianakis doesn't plan to have Donald Trump on the show, he continued: 

"He’s the kind of guy who likes attention – bad attention or good attention. So you’re dealing with a psychosis there that’s a little weird. I wouldn’t have somebody on that’s so mentally challenged. I feel like I’d be taking advantage of him. And you can print that."

I guess Trump will just have to talk to Mr. Chow.

 

 

CBS edit totally changes what Bill Clinton told Charlie Rose on Big Question of the Day -- HRC health

If you saw the headline you may have thought, as I did, that it was a vague hook about something that probably amounted to nothing ("CBS News Edits Out Embarrassing Verbal Slip"). Well, it's not nothing, it's big. CBS, in its broadcast, removed Bill's first and most revealing answer and retraction, changing “frequently—well not frequently, rarely”  to simply "rarely". The full sentence and other context are in CBS's article about the interview:

“Well if it is, it’s a mystery to me and all of her doctors,” he said, “because frequently—well not frequently, rarely—but on more than one occasion, over the last many, many years, the same sort of thing happened to her when she got severely dehydrated.” 

Sorry, if anyone, but ESPECIALLY Bill Clinton, says something like, "frequently, I mean rarely, multiple occasions, but I mean over many many years", the public deserves to hear all of that and decide for themselves which parts to believe, which part of his teeming brain to listen to as its more and less honest and dishonest hatchlings jostle and trample each other in the rush for his mouth. The guy is a master: he really doesn't hardly ever lie, he talks in a way that makes you want to believe he's totally on your side, and to stop listening before he gets through all of the qualifiers and reversals at the end of the sentence, but you have to doggedly listen to all that while reserving all judgment on what impression to form, or you'll misunderstand him every time. So if you ever take a jot or a tittle out of one of his sentences, you'll change the meaning a hundredfold.

Depressing that this was with Charlie Rose. Rose gives every impression of setting the gold standard for thoughtful, nuanced discourse and intellectual honesty that brings everyone together around his table. "Talking with Charlie Rose" is almost a sacred rite, even more so than testifying to a court under oath on penalty of perjury. 

I may have only clicked on the story because the part of the article that showed up in Facebook's link had a word missing, and I have a pet peeve about people who leave mistakes uncorrected when they are criticizing someone else's minor wording mistake or writing about how important good grammar is. But that typo had been fixed in the article although it remains in Facebook's display, and it wasn't in an article about a trivial mistake, as it turns out.

CBS News Edits Out Embarrassing Verbal Slip in Bill Clinton Interview

By Alex Griswold on mediaite.com

Bill Clinton Says Hillary Has Had Fainting Spells ‘On More Than One Occasion’

By Chuck Ross on The Daily Caller. (The key part of the story is "below the fold" -- or rather below the ribbon of "Sponsored Content" ads.)

CBS article that contained the full sentence as of this writing, 4:00 p.m. 9/13/16: 

Bill Clinton: Hillary Clinton "doing fine" after incident at 9/11 ceremony

By EMILY SCHULTHEIS

 

"Lincoln endorsement" isn't quite right

According to YouTube, Libertarian candidates Gary Johnson and William Weld have Abraham Lincoln's vigorous endorsement:

This Hilarious (But Accurate) Ad For A Gary Johnson Vote Is The Best Political Ad Ever

By Brandon Morse on redstate.com

One serious caveat and one quibble:

1. Abe's criticisms of the two leading candidates are indeed hilarious and pungent, but all his arguments against Hillary are about how she's "crooked" -- nothing about her ideology. She originally achieved mass unpopularity because of how far left she was, and it's really worrisome that things have shifted so far left that that's no longer a safe line of attack. I just can't see liberals caring much about the kinds of "crooked" stuff she has plausibly been accused of. 

2. Abe wasn't exactly a third partier -- he was a Whig until the Republicans formed in the wake of the Whigs completely breaking down and fracturing. But it's a valid point that even political parties aren't forever: they can die like the Federalists and then the Whigs, and new ones can form and become major parties, like the Whigs and then the Republicans.

Gary Johnson is no libertarian purist. That's normal, for a serious candidate of a real party.

My friend Woody Wood, a textile lobbyist, and I were pondering our presidential choices. When we came to Johnson, he said he said something like, "Well, in a purely, perfectly, libertarian society,  . . . "

I can't tell you the rest of what he said, because it started me thinking -- we don't refuse to consider liberal or conservative candidates because of what we imagine pure liberalism, or pure conservatism, might be. Indeed hardly any of us even try to imagine those things, because they're so unlikely they're irrelevant. We vote for parties and candidates to move the ball in our preferred direction, not to go all the way with it. And sometimes our vote is more for the party, or for a particular wing of the party, than for our ideal candidate.

Johnson and Weld are pretty great candidates with a lot of experience in and out of government, but neither of them is libertarian on everything, any more than I am. But that means the Libertarian Party is maturing into a real, functioning, electoral political party, just when the Republican Party seems to have entered its second childhood -- OK, to be frank, it entered it somewhere around the Palin nomination and now with the Trump nomination its aging process has left the cute codger phase and gone into the nasty, belligerent, feces-flinging throes of full-blown senile dementia, the kind where you no longer recognize your friends and relations, and invest all your hope and trust into intimate, intricate imaginary relationships with strangers or people who don't even exist.

Anyhow, back to the serious candidates and parties. Jack Hunter spells out all the ways in which -- 

"Gary Johnson isn’t a perfect libertarian. Here’s why that doesn’t matter."

By Jack Hunter on rare.us

 

The problem is more character and manners than ideology -- Paul Greenberg's 2-page masterpiece

One of my all-time favorite political texts, as timely now as when it appeared in 1999, is Paul Greenberg's short column, "The Problem With the Right." And likewise, his "The Problem With the Left."

Many of our current problems arise not so much from being too conservative or insufficiently conservative, or too socially versus economically conservative or vice-versa, as from the bad habits that Greenberg identified, and which Obama provides such a glaring contrast to.

I often feel like the Transcendentalist who lamented of the Whigs and the Jacksonian Democrats, “One party has all the good men, the other has all the good principles.” Our party nominates sneering bullies who value their own power over principles; longtime election losers who believe that it’s “their turn”; and easily corruptible guys with no principles whatsoever; and in 2006 we really started getting punished for it. But that's not all the Greenberg has to say. Read it and weep for your country.

Advice from the "Moderate" Republican Left

These have many good points and the Whitman piece, particularly, calls on us to face some tough mathematical/geopolitical truths about the party's future. However, a long-standing problem with leading GOP moderates is that most of them don't seem to be conservative, or even any different from liberals, on ANYTHING -- at least not on any issue the left and the media really care about and want to play hardball about. Oh, maybe on old-timey conservative issues like crime and national security, but those are issues where the Democrats have said "me too" since around 1990. I think most of my positions are moderate, but the problem is that the liberal establishment can pick any issue and force you to choose between abandoning your position or getting labeled an extremist. Like with the ca. 1995 sudden invention of  "economic extremists."

Blueprint for a comeback -- baltimoresun.com.By Chrysovalantis Kefalas.

Free the GOP: The Party Won't Win Back the Middle as Long As It's Hostage to Social Fundamentalists, By Christine Todd Whitman and Robert M. Bostock