House of Eratosthenes

Speaking of Rick, I was thinking about this disturbing quote from last week that he’s resurrected to haunt Sen. Charles Schumer. It seems the accident that befell Chief Justice John Roberts has the potential to be more serious than I, for one, was led to believe.

Of course, Schumer’s partisan ramblings are no more tasteless now than they were before the accident. That is not the point. Lord knows, I’ve got my share of salty things I’ve said about political opponents, and I hope no harm comes to those opponents but you never know. And of course I’d feel awful about it, and my words would stand as an albatross around my neck. So Schumer’s embarrassment here, assuming he’s decent enough to have some, is something I see as a “There but for the grace of God” thing.

But with apologies to the senior Senator from the state of New York, I do think there’s something worth inspecting here. The issue is this legal principle that so recently was sensibly enshrouded in elitist cloaking and dead language, called stare decisis.

Were we duped? Were we hoodwinked? Were we too easily impressed with the charm of the nominee Roberts and the erudition of nominee Alito? In case after case, our most recently confirmed justices have appeared to jettison decisions recently authored by their immediate predecessors. Although Roberts and Alito both expressed their profound respect for stare decisis at their confirmation hearings, many of their decisions have flouted precedent.

Now, Latin is a language that was never in common use in the United States. Someone in American history, therefore, made a conscious decision that this principle would be a good one to insulate from the knock’em sock’em robot arena of populist frenzy. I wonder what that someone would think about an elected official trying to agitate the elecorate into a convenient sentiment that the judicial branch is due for a shakeup due to stare decisis issues.

The complete phrase is stare decisis et non quieta movere which translates roughly to “stand by decisions and don’t disturb settled matters” or “stand by decisions and do not move that which is quiet.”

And my observation is this:

Lately, whenever liberals complain about stare decisis, it seems to me they’re never addressing that which is quiet. Quite to the contrary, the issue at hand is something rather tempestuous, officious, vibrant and lively…anything but settled. I can’t think of a single exception to this.

In fact, I’ll go further. Lately, it seems whenever the Supreme Court hands down an opinion that “flouts the principle of stare decisis” by sending a fox running over the grave of previous decisions our liberals would just as soon see undisturbed — if you look at those previous rulings, you’ll find about as much stare decisis as you’ll find under my toenails when they need a good clipping.

In other words, liberals like decided opinions to stay decided, if & only if those decided opinions, themselves, stirred everything up and shook it all upside-down.

It’s a good thing I’m not on the Supreme Court. My decisions, of course, would be quite correct because I make a lot of sense. But the comments I’d be unable to restrain myself from making in the aftermath, would be disastrous. I’d defend myself by saying something accurate and profoundly stupid, like “Hell yeah I promised I’d uphold stare decisis, and that’s why I voted to overturn that decision from the Warren/Burger courts that they’re mad at us for overturning. Because man, that pig-in-a-poke just sucked at stare decisis.”

And that would get me run out of town on a rail. But I believe it would have the potential to start a debate we desperately need to have in this country. There are a lot of decisions from the Supreme Court, still on the books, that suck at stare decisis. Liberals like Schumer have taken on this unfortunate and insulting habit of using that obscure Latin phraseology, which they damn well know their constituents don’t understand overall, to inflict a great assault on stare decisis under the guise of presumably defending it.

Anyway. Best wishes go out to John Roberts. He seems to be, personally, a very decent man and he’s exactly what the Supreme Court needs at this time. Signs look good. Once my wish is granted that he resume his station in full possession of his health and faculties, I’m sure history will record him to be President Bush’s second-greatest achievement.

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Russ Vaughn
Monday, July 30th, 2007

Via blogger friend Rick we learn about Russ Vaughn, at Old War Dogs. I’m not sure what to make of this…I’ve been beaten upside the head with this notion that everybody who supports the war is a “chickenhawk” and hasn’t served, and we got all these armies & armies & armies of peacenik vets who understand this is just a bloodthirsty war for oil, and President Bush took down Saddam Hussein out of revenge for an assassination attempt on his Daddy, and they know this because of their military experience. That’s the relentless drumbeat I’ve been hearing, anyway. And here and there, there’s an example or two to back it up.

People who served, properly despise George W. Bush and “his” war. People who haven’t, are cowardly chickenhawks and they’re they only ones who see any value in the invasion of Iraq.

And along comes some direct evidence to the contrary.

It’s yet another moment of What am I gonna believe, the steaming propaganda or my lyin’ eyes…

Schlock Troops

The liberals say they support our troops,
Which they’ve a funny way of showing;
Like publishing false atrocity scoops
Bout which they’ve no way of knowing.
They’ll gleefully publish unverified crap
From the dark mind of a wannabe writer,
Hoping they’ve set another antiwar trap
With crimes claimed by a liberal fighter.

The troops that liberals truly admire,
Aren’t the brave who fight uncomplaining,
But deserters who flee, avoiding the fire,
And the misfits can’t handle the training.
But liberals save their true veneration,
Like front page at the New York Times,
For soldiers willing to attack their own nation,
Trumpeting charges of brutal war crimes.

This pattern was set during my own war
By a traitorous, vainglorious politician,
A treasonous, poisonous, political whore,
Feeding future presidential ambition.
Liberals back then sucked up his schlock,
Proving to the world that they’re dupes,
Establishing a pattern now become stock,
For these America-hating Schlock troops.

Russ Vaughn
101st Airborne
Vietnam 65-66

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Memo For File XLIV
Sunday, July 29th, 2007

The BBC News has taken note that there is a wedge being effectively driven between the American Republican party and Christian fundamentalists.

America’s so-called “religious right” has been one of the pillars of Republican Party support in recent decades, but signs are emerging that those once secure foundations might be shifting.

In both George W Bush’s presidential victories, he managed to secure a vast majority of the evangelical Christian vote.

In 2004, the “hot button” policies curtailing abortion and same-sex marriage were seen as being crucial to Republican electoral success in, for example, the key swing states of Ohio and Florida.

But in last November’s Congressional races - where Democrats regained control of both the House and the Senate - some Republican defeats came at the hands of a new religiously-inspired movement, which some are calling the “evangelical left”.

Left unstated in this story, is the simple statement that this wedge-driving is accidental. We are left to simply assume this is the case…based on…nothing. Whether this was actually engineered by someone, whether there were some real dollars involved in it, is a fascinating subject but one that is — suspiciously, in my mind — completely untouched here.

Especially when you read passages like this:

“Questions like climate change, poverty and international human rights are coming to the fore, in a community that didn’t used to talk about these things at all,” [John] Green [of the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life] said. [emphasis mine]

Just for the record, if I had to bet my own personal fortune on it, I would put my coin on the square that says we have some verifiable surface temperature readings that say the average temperature has increased between 0.8 and 1.6 degrees Fahrenheit over the last hundred years or so. I think that’s pretty well established. I do think human activity might have something to do with this…it can’t be ruled out. Does this then portend a future in which life on this planet is jeopardized? Or reduced? Or simply altered? Or do we have the wherewithal to prevent an injurious catastrophe now, and is our continuing foolishness about to thrust us past some point of no return where said wherewithal is to be diminished?

I don’t know that.

I don’t know of any hard evidence that would persuade me to think that.

I do know of lots of politically-motivated people and groups who would like me to think that. And here’s the really strange thing: If I show some reluctance to believing this, they consider me a lost cause, and start arguing with the next person in the queue. Perfectly sensible if you’re soliciting donations to a non-profit or to a political action committee. Not reasonable at all, if you’re really trying to save a planet from unbridled and reckless human activity. Not reasonable by a damn sight. If human activity is destroying the planet’s ability to sustain life as we know it, and I’m one of the sinners, you should be camping out on my front porch like a Star Wars fan waiting for a new movie to come out.

ANYTHING you can do…to get me to mend my ways. Follow me around. Shame me. Bribe me. Blackmail me. Eat a big bowl of penises in front of me. Whatever it takes — because if my neighbor buys up carbon vouchers like there’s no tomorrow, but I continue to do my damage, the cause is lost, and with the cause, the planet, and all persons and things upon it you hold dear.

That isn’t the way the global climate change Chicken Littles behave. They behave just like footsoldiers in a massive paramilitary super-political theater. They roam the streets, in vehicles that get half as many miles per gallon of gas compared to what I drive…trying to get people to vote differently. Not to live more cleanly, just to vote for different parties.

The continuing survival of our planet is supposed to depend on these efforts. Would any intelligent person really think so?

And here’s a BBC article that comes out and says — all this talk about anthropogenic global warming, is causing a rift between the Republicans, and the demographic groups they have been able to most consistently count on for support.

It was engineered that way…or not. The article won’t say one syllable one way or t’other.

Well — I think it was engineered that way. The notion that Christian fundamentalists vote for Republicans, and that this has an effect on the way elections come out, is hardly new. I’ve seen people argue that point my entire adult life, and I’m an old man now. What kind of money do we sink into elections…chump change? Hardly. It’s a billion dollar industry, one directly affecting the expenditure of trillions of dollars every year.

Here we have the outcome of those elections affected directly by all this talk about global warming. Nobody’s willing to put their balls on the block and say it’s an accident. Meanwhile — what do we really know about the global warming crisis? We got a bunch of pictures of confused looking polar bars floating around on presumably-diminishing chunks of ice…as if polar bears ever look like anything besides confused. And the temperature went up by a degree over the last century. We don’t know a lot besides that. And heavily-funded political groups stand to gain a great deal if we do a lot of talking about it.

I just think it’s somewhat interesting, that’s all. Oh, and one other little thing…it might explain everything we’ve been told, for a couple of generations now. It’s certainly worth looking at, anyway. Looks like a political stunt, sounds like one, smells like one…it just might be that, and nothing more.

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Accepting My Challenge
Saturday, July 28th, 2007

Challenged to a Duel I have been challenged to, and accepted, a duel with JohnJ at RightLinx, whom I understand to be one and the same with Johnjrambo2000 at Bullwinkle Blog. At issue is the ninth installment of Yin and Yang, and the points of disagreement, as stated by my opponent, are these:

Freeberg’s basic point is that individualism is better than collectivism. This is, of course, a value judgment. Since not everyone has the same values, individualism cannot be better than collectivism for everyone. Some people will prefer collectivism because it corresponds to their values. What would Freeberg do with these people?

And…

Freeberg also claims that there is no middle ground between Yin and Yang. I have to disagree with that point as well. Yin, as he defines it, are those people who, basically, lack social sense, but who can often make up for it mechanically. Yin will never achieve the natural social sense that Yang has, though. It seems to me, though, that there’s no basis for assuming that people don’t have various levels of use of the Orbito-Frontal Cortex, a part of the brain that is used in socialization. I don’t see any reason to assume that it’s all or nothing. If anything, the assumption should be just the opposite. The vast majority of people should fall between the two extremes.

We’re still in the stages of defining the points of disagreement, but I’ll have to cut in at this point because there’s disagreement in this definition. If there is a value system to be promoted in recognizing the Yin and Yang bifurcation, I would hope it is limited to leaving well enough alone. To hold one of these halves above the other in a universality of situations, such that one is innately superior and one is innately inferior regardless of whatever challenges would come up, would not only be inaccurate but also unkind. Somewhere within the thousands of words I’ve written about this, that message may have been blunted or even lost. But the Yang, while largely a mystery to folks like myself, accomplishes things we need to get done. So what would I “do with these people?” The question answers itself. They are here; they are doing stuff; the stuff they do cannot be done by anybody else.

But if I get to decide what the Yang are going to do, I would scribble down one preference. I would like the Yang to leave others alone.

There’s something about the strongest Yang, and I gather it comes from the lifelong habit of viewing all challenging exercises to be social. They tend to be controlling. They tend to want others to resolve problems the way they resolve them. I touched on this somewhat in the Fourth installment, which was inspired by a story that mothers-of-brides in some Asian cultures force their daughters to cry at the wedding. There’s nothing inherently Asian about this, it’s universal. Yin think; Yang feel. The thinker is touchy about how he is allowed to do his thinking, nevermind what everybody else is doing — but the feeler must control the feelings of everyone in proximity.

This explains my many references to the construction of a giant wall. Imagine a room containing twenty people, a piano and a computer. If the piano and computer are both to be used, friction will inevitably result. A piano must be a social vehicle. A computer — notwithstanding YouTube clips and photo albums — is not. Whoever wants to use the piano is going to want to control the feelings of the other nineteen people in the room…that is what a piano does. A computer processes information. Or — it looks at porn. It is, mostly, a device to be used in solitude.

The point is, the guy using the computer will be likely oblivious to what others in the room are doing. They can do what they want as far as he’s concerned. He’s a Yin, and the first step to what he is doing is to draw a boundary around what he is doing. Working on a drawing, writing up a post on his blog, testing a computer program…all of these things work within a system. Even if the system is complex, it is a system of interrelated parts that function within a perimeter, and anything outside that perimeter will be disconnected.

Some will argue, with a kernel of truth to it, that the concept of disconnection is mythical — all things are connected. There is truth to this only if one regards trivial or irrelevant things to be somehow important. The computer is connected to other things because there is an Internet…and there is power. These things are true, but they’re ultimately meaningless. The program, or the drawing, or the blog, all these things are essentially isolated systems. A stimulus crosses the perimeter surrounding the system, and the system with it’s interrelated parts is supposed to provide a proper response. If the response is correct, a task is complete, and if it isn’t, more work needs to be done. This is how the Yin see the world. Not just the computer…but every little thing they do. And they’ve been looking at it that way since they were little kids.

Contrast this with the piano. There is no meaningful boundary that surrounds the piano. Someone plays it, and “we” are going to listen to it. “We” are going to feel whatever the song being played on the piano, tells us to feel. If one person starts singing along, everyone else will feel compelled to start singing too (unless the song is something like Ailein Duinn).

If these are both happening at the same time, there is going to be friction. Screwing around on the computer, after all, is not what “we” are doing. “We” are gathering around the piano, and you should not be doing what you are doing on the computer. Come over and join us.

Note — if the lone-wolf was watching a football game or wrestling match on television, this would make so much more sense. That would intrude on the piano-playing. But with goofing off on a computer, or doing work on a computer, this doesn’t apply. Yet anyone who’s been in such a situation, understands that the urgency involved in getting the computer-guy off the keyboard, to come join the crowd, is just as pushy as it would be if he had the TV cranked at full volume.

There is no explanation for this, other than the Yin and Yang theory. The Yang want all things in proximity to work in a uniform way. It has to be that way, because a mission to defeat all borders within visible proximity is what being social is all about. It isn’t disrespect or unfriendliness. It’s quite the opposite. When you’re socializing, you want to bring everybody into the fold.

And so John and I have a disagreement about what I said. I do not want to banish people or wish them away to the cornfield. But I do think building a wall would be educational. I’m convinced it’s part of the human nature to repeatedly stir up friction of the “piano and computer” variety, friction that has no real reason to be there, and in response to such friction, do anything but what would make the most sense. We tend to put up with it, we irritate each other, we schedule our daily activities in such a way as to stir up the same useless friction at the same time every day.

I do have the sense that the Yin tend to build things used by the Yang. That is our place. We are “systems builders.” We draw lines around things, we wait for the loud sociable people to leave us the hell alone, and then we get things within those perimeters to work the way they should. The Yang do exactly the same thing — except to them, the perimeter is whatever they happen to understand at a given moment. Within line-of-sight, everything has to work the way they want.

The Yin get stressed out if the perimeter or something within it, starts to slip out of their control. One sign that a person is a Yin, is if he curses his own bad memory. Yang seldom do this. God damn it, there’s something else I was supposed to get right…what was it? The Yang, to my long-standing envy, seem to be spared from this. You see this most definitely when you see them hosting a party. Good heavens, is there anything we can do that is more demanding of detail, achieving pre-defined tasks within a boundary, than hosting a party? It gives me a huge migraine. Nevermind that socializing-with-people thing you have to do.

But the strongest Yang pull it off effortlessly. If their definition is strong, they are extraverts, and that means as the party goes on they recharge their “batteries” while mustering up the energy to carry dirty dishes out to the kitchen and bring out new plates of food, coordinate the entertainment, switch the music around, etc. etc. etc. Yes, they need to do things a little bit out of their turf, but they’re up for it. All evening long, they are in the mode of being fully charged. People like me, see the “chore” of socializing with folks as an ancillary task, one we could barely manage — even if we like the people — without all these minute-to-minute cleanup details we have to do. But the Yang see it as the payoff.

Yet another reason why I wouldn’t banish them anywhere. We need them.

And some Yang don’t even mind the details. They are spared the Yin headache of remembering details, because they simply…don’t.

The Yin are spared headaches too, though, that plague the Yang. This is in the form of other individuals doing things in a way different from the way we would do them, if we were they. Doesn’t bother me one bit. I’m a guy who types away on a computer. Now honestly, John & everybody else…how many people do you know who are the exact opposite of that? We’ve all had the acquaintance of some Yangy-type person who constantly has a problem — something that is easily seen by others as a great source of concern, giving her an upset stomach and sleepless nights — something to do with someone doing things the wrong way? This is their cross to bear. And I doubt it’s an act, I think it is an ongoing source of real tension.

Tolerance, John. That is my solution. Good old-fashioned tolerance, the kind our liberals say they support (although seldom do). Tolerance, respect, empathy. Let the Yin support the Yang in all the things that Yang labor day-to-day to get done…and vice-versa.

Now to your second point, that there is no middle ground. On this issue, you are half right in understanding where I’m coming from. But as I said in the ninth installment that inspired your challenge, we have to dispense with the latent skills that can be nurtured by highly intelligent and functional individuals in their more mature stages of life. If you’re sufficiently talented, obviously you can make up for what you left undeveloped in childhood. “Yin” can figure out how to socialize; “Yang” can figure out how to solve puzzles. And when they do this, they end up being what I believe you’re describing with this “middle ground.”

But we have to dispense with that when we consider how these people are going about these tasks upstairs, between their ears. And this is what we need to do when we talk about Yin and Yang, because that’s what the divide is all about. What kinds of pathways did you dig out in your brain tissue, in the “old-growth” parts. The thinking you learned how to do before you lost all your baby teeth.

That’s important because any other kinds of things you learned to do, much later, after your teenage years — functional as all that stuff may be, it’s still stilted and awkward. If you’re highly adaptable, the best you can do is to cover up the awkwardness. But it’s still like a right-handed person writing with the left hand. You’re attempting a task, perhaps completing it, perhaps netting satisfactory results, maybe even super-satisfactory results. But it’s not something that comes naturally to you.

The Block Let me introduce a theory to help explain this. Let’s call it the “Big Gray Building” theory; we will take all of your formative years, stretching deep into adulthood in which, as your maturing personality develops skills to meet rising challenges in the business world, you do this crossing-over. This writing-with-the-other-hand.

Imagine this vast expanse of time, from birth to age forty or fifty or so, as a walk halfway around a block. You are born on one corner of the block — you pop out of your mother’s womb there, with no skills whatsoever. There is a “business convention” at the opposite corner, which I’ve represented here with a great big red X. When you get to the big red X, you’re going to have to show functionality in both Yin and Yang endeavors. That goes without saying. This is an important business conference, and we’ll need the participants to have social skills (Yang), as well as problem-solving skills (Yin).

Here’s the challenge: As any informed parent will agree, young children have an amazing talent for learning whatever it is they want to learn. Regardless of intelligence, the pace at which micro-toddlers learn their things, is amazing. If we could keep this pace up into adulthood, we’d all be geniuses. But we don’t.

And so, as this micro-toddler, you can “crawl” along these avenues toward the business convention, at a rocket-like pace.

But — you can’t turn corners.

And there’s this big gray building between you and the red X. It is a monolithic building. There is no alley. All entrances on the building (save for the one at the X) are locked shut tight.

And I think this is our real point of disagreement. I’m contradicting hundreds of years of dogma in the education of children in asserting this…but based on what I’ve seen, it’s true. Children crawl toward the business conference that demands a functional representation of all skill sets. They develop one half of the needed skill sets…or the other. They’ll neglect one of the other. There are two paths toward the X, from which each child can choose only one — neglecting the other.

Appearances notwithstanding, that’s the way things will stay. Until at least the teenage years, one path will lie neglected.

Library If they lack the maturity to build a network involving peers or parents, they’ll have to be forced into it. But if that’s the situation, they won’t naturally take to it. They’ll do it when forced to do it. And meanwhile, if they have any intelligence at all, they will become adept at solving problems. This is simply path of least resistance. Being children, they will have to challenge themselves, and if the socializing presents too much of a challenge they’ll find a challenge that doesn’t involve socializing. They will crawl — more like shoot — due North along the street I’ve called “Rain Man Lane” — developing cognitive ability while neglecting, to some degree, social skills. And they can’t turn corners, so they’ll be stuck up there once they reach the end. They’ll become “nerds,” seeking out more and more challenges that don’t involve interacting with people. Let’s say there is a “library” up there. They will pop over to this virtual library at around age five, and stick around there. They’ll remain there until, roughly, the age they can start driving.

They’ll be “nerds.”

You don’t want to deny there is such a thing as a “nerd,” do you John? The nerd has become a staple in American culture, for good reason.

Now, some children will have the maturity to build the above-mentioned parent-peer network. And at a very early age, on the light side of two years old, they’ll shoot off Eastward along “Valley Girl Street,” toward a “social club.” These sociable kids can’t turn a corner any better than their nerdy counterparts, even if they’re very mature and intelligent. This favored pastime of socializing people, just burns too brightly and is too tempting for them. Even with homework and exams and so forth, there is little point to nurturing problem-solving skill. The need just isn’t there.

But — I’m sure you want to ask this — these are the kids who tend to get the best grades. Surely you’re not suggesting they’re all “socializing” by cheating on their tests?

No, there’s a huge bundle of evidence here that the babies shooting off to this “Social Club” can indeed solve problems. They can do their homework, with little error, and they can get sky-high scores on pop quizzes.

But here’s the rub. Their advantage dissipates when there is re-interpretation involved. They excel at multiple-choice questions, but their impressive achievements start to taper off with essay questions. If they can complete an essay question, they aren’t often known to re-word the phraseology they’ve learned, to construct synonyms — to show true comprehension. And most impressive of all: I’ve noticed this in childhood as well as after I’ve come to maturity. They tend to lack the ability to retain.

This is a big hole in our educational system, in public schools as well as private. Testing a student’s ability to truly absorb concepts as well as text, is a highly difficult chore. Again, we’re at path of least resistance — this time with regard to the teacher instead of the student. And path of least resistance is, you test short-term retention. Study on the week that ends on the 10th, and we’ll have our test on the 15th.

So these Yangy kids, for the most part, are allowed to wind through the school system being tested only on their ability to memorize things; to mimic. True understanding of concepts, and problem-solving, is something tested only rarely. Far more often, the exercise at hand is repeating things back. When this is a prelude to socializing, the social-minded kids tackle it with gusto.

Many will disagree with this. Want proof? Go to your high school reunion, approach a dozen of the brightest, most socially-outgoing kids who got the best grades. Ask them a textbook question they could easily have nailed in the days-gone-by. At least ninety percent of the time, you’ll get a deer-in-the-headlights look back.

Memorize a concept, you’ll never forget it. Memorize text, you’ll forget it in a week. By and large, school tends to force kids to memorize text.

Complete Block So now our block is complete: You’re born at a corner, there is a library at one corner, a social club at another, and then there’s a business convention going on at the far corner where you won’t arrive, until you’ve become a mature adult. Not a twenty-something, but someone with the maturity to achieve functional command of the spectrum. Since kids lack the ability to round corners, and childhood itself runs light on challenges that make real demands to do such corner-rounding…each set of child is stuck in his respective corner. Adulthood, probably, will bring a fresh wave of challenges. These challenges will, at long last, demand this corner-rounding — accepting no substitute for it. The child who crawled East will have to crawl North, and vice-versa…the business convention is at that inconveniently-located corner after all.

And both kids will work hard at it. But now they’re nurturing talents in adulthood. They aren’t learning as quickly or as definitively as they did before.

So they both arrive at the business conference, which demands all this Yin-and-Yang skill from everyone present.

This is the part John missed: Yin and Yang is about the path they have taken, not where they end up. This determines how their brains are wired, and how, between the earlobes, they tackle each perplexing problem that comes up. At least, the problems that have no pre-fabricated solution. The route they have taken to the business conference, dictates the method they’ll use to solve these problems.

Paths Taken And as far as the path they have taken, there is no middle ground. At least, that’s the theory. Remember, the big gray building is monolithic. For a socially-exuberant child to develop real problem solving skills, is improbable because it’s unnatural. Children develop skills wherever need intersects with opportunity. They have to have both, or the development is highly unlikely to take place…and the socially-energetic kids don’t have need. As for the socially-interactive skills developing in the nerds, that’s a matter of opportunity. It’s absent, and so they go for the next best thing. They develop the ability to think out unorthodox challenges through a cognitive process, an ability their more friendly and outgoing counterparts invariably lack.

So I think those are the points of disagreement between John and myself. I don’t want to banish the Yang…and the divide between my kind and theirs, is clean and decisive. That doesn’t mean we can’t work together. In many ways, we have to work together.

But I do think I need to pick on them a little bit. They get in trouble with people like me, from time to time, because of this controlling behavior. Their superior skills in the realm of engaging their peers socially, gives them an unfortunate tendency to behave as if all problems can be solved this way. Not some — all. And this, in turn, saddles them with a weakness in the department of looking at reality as it objectively exists…along with an ego too fragile to acknolwedge that this might be the case.

And this brings me to Macmic, the deep-thinker with the .ca e-mail address who attached two impressively-sized epistles to the end of the Michael Moore post in the week just past. He, I am gathering, is exactly what I’m talking about. Now that I think about it, so is Michael Moore himself. As I wrote about Mr. Moore…

Why does Moore have anything to do with America? Every time he comes out with a movie he keeps returning to his “Bowling For Columbine” theme that there is something wrong with America, something rotten in its core — something that compels us to be afraid of things and shoot each other all the time. He makes his films in Canada. He claims to be from Flint, MI — not too much of a drive to go from there, into Canada, for good. I’m not saying it to be derisive or dismissive — watch his movies sometime. Any one. The dude really likes Canada, and I don’t know of a single good thing he’s had to say about the U.S. by comparison. What’s he doing here?

It’s a question I might as well have posed with regard to a lot of other folks besides Michael Moore.

Now take a good look at what’s going on here. Just take a long, hard look at the world. We have all these countries that are not America. Hundreds of them. They have all embraced socialism, in one way or another. First world, second world, third world. Oh sure, they have different rules, different programs in place that address different things, and they all allow “businesses” to operate in some crippled form. But America trails behind all of them in this path to socialism. America, alone, struggles along awkwardly as a half-breed society, kinda socialist, kinda not, with some semblance of longing for true individualism still trickling through it’s veins.

In all other places, the need comes up for the individual to sacrifice something for the “public good” — and it’s done. We have a social problem and we need a curfew — okay. There is violence at nighttime and we’ll have to ban alcohol after seven o’clock — done. Traffic is congested so we’re going to install round-abouts to force your errand to take longer than it should — we comply. We’re disarming, please present all your guns to the sheriff in the town square tomorrow at noon — alright.

Only in America is there some remnant of healthy, cantankerous protest on behalf of the individual. We waver a lot here & there, but we still have it.

And along come passionate, all-controlling collectivists like Michael Moore to stamp it out. Here. It is not a case of live-and-let-live. Michael Moore could live in Canada, which already manages healthcare exactly the way he wants it done. He could live anywhere. He could let America sink or swim.

But he has to mount a crusade to get one country on the face of the globe, to do things the way he wants them done, when all other countries already do it more-or-less the way he wants. He’s got to stamp out the last remnant of resistance. Why, if that isn’t controlling, I don’t know what is.

Macmic makes the same point about countries that John makes about people: I have neglected the middle-ground. China has socialism and capitalism, both. So does Japan. So do many, many other countries.

Macmic’s logical error, here, is to presume all these societies are at rest. That is untrue in all his examples, and it cannot be true anywhere. It simply can’t hold up, because in human history all efforts to control others are prolonged struggles. My point about the collectivists is that the desire will always be there. Remember what I said about the Yang — we are all gathered around the piano, gathering around the piano is what we are all doing. Individualists can live in harmony with collectivists, but collectivists cannot abide individualism.

And so, when Yin and Yang are placed in proximity, there will be an enthusiastic and energetic effort among Yang to convert the Yin. Yang, obviously, foster an environment friendly to collectivism, so this bleeds over into the interaction between individualists and collectivists; where they exist in proximity, there will always be a mission among the collectivists to eradicate all others.

And that’s why I referred to socialism as the Terminator robot of economic models. It really is. Michael Moore proves it — he’s got the entire world, sans America, and it isn’t enough. His physical obesity and obvious mode of gluttony, turn out to be convenient metaphors for his desire that socialism should cover a few more square miles, until it has gobbled the globe.

No, I don’t think the Yang are inherently unfeeling or evil. I don’t think they want to eradicate humanity. I don’t even think they want to kill Sarah Connor. I don’t think they’re all collectivists or socialists…all they do, to my mind, is create an environment that allows collectivism to spread. If someone must erect a breakwater so this attack on the individual can be stopped, or slowed down, it is up to the Yin to build it. But the collectivists must run everything, every square inch all over the globe, or else they are perpetually hungry for more. “Terminator” fits the collectivists very, very well. That’s why socialism always ends up being unimaginably hostile and dangerous, even though it is never designed to be that way.

Listen. And understand. That terminator is out there. It can’t be bargained with. It can’t be reasoned with. It doesn’t feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are dead.

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Our Downslide
Friday, July 27th, 2007

The day I heard about the federal judge striking down Hazleton’s anti-illegal immigration law, a law which we saluted way back here, this wonderful, underrated movie showed up in the mail.

Last Supper I find this to be ironic. This movie should be considered a warning to all bloggers, conservative and liberal — and overzealous activist judges who run around striking down any law they personally dislike, under some rancid and overly-delicate “interpretation” of the “Constitution,” jotting down any ol’ text to justify the decision they’ve already made before they cooked up a single word of the opinion. The movie applies to this pretty well. It, like all great ones, is about two stories: The cosmetic one that skims along the surface, and the deeper one that labors on in parallel far beneath. The visible and shallow story has to do with five grad students living in a cottage, growing vegetables, going to school, wallowing in their liberal-ness and feeling really smug about it. They pontificate a whole lot and they actually ponder very little. Their only point of disagreement, at first, is about whether it should be allowable to turn on the boob-tube when a certain bloated conservative media icon, obviously modeled after Rush Limbaugh, spews his hated right-wing venom on television.

They have no visible means of support and no visible need for any. Of course, in the first act there is no need to think anything out. Things are crystal clear. Liberals good, conservatives bad. But there this sense of frustration that a civil war is taking place, and people like the conservative demagogue are winning and the liberals are losing. They aren’t doing anything to advance their cause. Clearly, something must be done.

Like a Hitchcock masterpiece, the film forces the main characters downward through a bunch of layers of moral decay to the point where they’re killing people, without once making the audience go “oh, come on now.” The main characters make bad decisions, and you identify with the character even though you know the decision is bad. You have to keep watching because you want to see what consequences develop. And this is the deeper sequence of events grinding away far beneath the surface. The protagonists “know” what is right and they “know” what is wrong, they have moral certitude, but they are bored with isolationism. They become righteous warriors and end up perpetuating what nobody can deny is darkly evil. And the magnitude of evil is stepped up gradually, expertly, as the situations that motivate the evil are gradually muted, until our heroes are tempted to do anything while being provoked by nothing.

Not much point to spoiling this movie or doing anything that would approach that. The ending is deliberately left open to multiple interpretations. You should purchase or rent it, see it all the way through to the last frame, and see what you think. Debating it is interesting (link requires registration).

But anyhow. I said this applied to the Hazleton situation, and I should explain. This seems a convenient metaphor with what’s happening with illegal immigration. Not the real debate about illegal immigration, which I see is this: We understand the law becomes a tool of oppression as opposed to liberty when it is enforced selectively, and we have some greedy businesses who want it enforced selectively so they can use illegal labor and pump up their profits by breaking the law. Not that — the other one. Our bigot liberals want us to respect people with “good” skin colors, which means “non-white.” So there is the law, and then there is this big old moldy notebook binder filled with sniveling excuses they can add to on the spot. Oh, our “undocumented migrant workers” work so hard. We need them. They’re just trying to feed their families. You don’t want to pay six dollars for a head of lettuce, do you. Snotty, whining excuses like those. Our liberals have learned they can add to the snivel-book by pulling brand new excuses out of their asses to fit whatever situation arises, whereas the law has to be legislated, negotiated, reviewed, appealed.

They like the snivel-book better than the law. The law just gets in the way. It is unclean. It incorporates the viewpoint of people who aren’t all glorious and wallowing in their own liberalness, like the liberals.

Granted, poisoning some conservative person and burying him in a tomato patch is a terrible thing to do, compared to sneaking across the border of an overly-permissive country to feed your starving family. But the two situations are exactly the same, and I would further argue it isn’t just liberals who are susceptible to such a moral down-slide. But the situations are identical. We have our illegal immigrants who’ve chosen to make a lifestyle out of breaking the law. We have our crooked businesses that employ them, and then we have our political agitators who give them cover and manufacture all these fairy tales about how our illegal immigrants follow the law every single day after breaking it by coming here. All these people have decided the law simply gets in the way of what they’re trying to do. Their mission is so incredibly glorious, that in working toward it they can commit crimes that are serious enough that if someone committed the same crime in opposing them, they’d all scream, cry, wail, bitch and moan…

…in other words, the remarkable thing isn’t that they break the law to achieve their glorious missions. You might say the incredible thing is that the mission is glorious enough to righteously float on a bed of hypocrisy. The law, then, becomes a tool used to entangle and subdue their opponents, while they escape the same tentacles by means of a convenient, self-granted license. Their mission is glorious and noble, after all. And so, corrupt, illegal businesses can keep on employing contraband labor, and the trespassers can continue to slip across the border. And our everyday liberals can insist that “hate crime laws” be rigidly enforced while border laws…aw, well, here’s today’s excuse why they don’t and shouldn’t matter.

The liberals in the movie want to propagate their values by killing off anyone who doesn’t share them. The liberals we have in real life, want to propagate their “respect” for non-white people, by declaring America’s borders null and void. Both fall prey to rather elementary failings in logic. You can only invite so many people to supper and your tomato patch is only big enough to hold so many bodies; there is no correlation, statistical leanings notwithstanding, between being an illegal alien and having a certain skin color; if you’re so “right,” you should be able to use the dinner table to talk the issue out instead of to murder someone with arsenic; if someone’s willing to break a law by hopping a border, they may be willing to break a law by doing other things.

It’s an expensive proposition to get a civilized society humming along under a set of laws that are open to re-inspection, negotiation, appeal, and that apply to all classes. It’s far easier to undo such a society, by declaring some among us to be exempt from the laws because they’re toiling away on a mission that is so noble, laws ought not apply. I think that’s what we’re starting to learn now. If the illegal aliens should be granted a license to skip across our border, then you have to grant them a license to do as they please while they’re here. Can’t grant one without the other. The mission of the illegal immigrant is far too noble, as is the mission of the everyday liberal, who wants to let the illegal immigrant in. And so of course, our system of justice has to be undone one layer at a time, while we slowly slip toward insanity. We become confused, muddled, babbling and incoherent just like the liberal heroes in the movie’s final scenes. Everything that would have made us sensible, along the way, has to be undone. Sense of right and wrong, restraint, ability to reason, language itself. They all have to be unfastened so the noble goal can be achieved, and the tomatoes can be fertilized.

Decision here. Arguing that the regulation of immigration is an “intimate affair,” it concludes that Hazleton is messing around in areas where the municipal authority does not belong. Better to let the feds retain autonomous authority over that intimate affair, even if little is being effectively done, than to let a more energized body step in. Add another page to the snivel-book. Now it’s the duty of every layer of authority, beneath the federal government, to let drug deals go on, to let cars get vandalized, to let women get raped — as long as it’s the right class of people doing the dealing, vandalizing and raping. That’s for the feds to handle, and if they’re not handling it, you just mind your own business. That’s what Judge Munley says. The affair is intimate.

You know, we can certainly survive someone tearing the tag off a mattress here and there. What we can’t survive is a law that means something when it’s applied to one class of people, and nothing at all when applied to another — and a retinue of black-robed stewards adding pages to the snivel-book any time our country’s borders are about to actually mean something. To accommodate that, we have to become enemies of logic and common sense. And we’ll end up fertilizing the tomatoes ourselves.

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On Michael Moore
Wednesday, July 25th, 2007

Michael Moore has just released a movie, and I’m starting to hear the same nonsense abo

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On Stare DecisisTuesday, July 31st, 2007

Russ VaughnMonday, July 30th, 2007

Memo For File XLIVSunday, July 29th, 2007

Accepting My ChallengeSaturday, July 28th, 2007

Our DownslideFriday, July 27th, 2007

On Michael MooreWednesday, July 25th, 2007

On Stare Decisis
Tuesday, July 31st, 2007

Russ Vaughn
Monday, July 30th, 2007

Memo For File XLIV
Sunday, July 29th, 2007

Accepting My Challenge
Saturday, July 28th, 2007

Our Downslide
Friday, July 27th, 2007

On Michael Moore
Wednesday, July 25th, 2007