Is America Racist? | Stately McDaniel Manor

Is America Racist? | Stately McDaniel Manor

Is America, and particularly, are America’s police, racist?

To believe that, one must ignore the last 60 years of American history. One must ignore Brown v Board of Education (1954). One must ignore the Civil Rights Act (1964). One must ignore all of the laws, and the sacrifices of the civil rights pioneers, and every advance, every accomplishment, that changed America for the better. One must ignore the inherent decency and continuing good will of Americans. One must ignore the black female and male Secretaries of State, cabinet officers, captains of industry and business, and men like 2016 Republican presidential candidate, Dr. Ben Carson, a brilliant pediatric neurosurgeon. One must ignore black Attorneys General, male and female, and the first black President of the United States.

The civil rights movement was a brilliant success, and every American of good will acknowledges and celebrates it. Every sacrifice so dearly bought bore glorious fruit. Actual racists are rare, and are justly treated as the social pariahs they manifestly deserve to be. Goodness, truth, and justice won! People of all races work together, attend the same churches, schools, patronize the same businesses, date, intermarry, serve together in the military, socialize and live in the same neighborhoods. This is a nation about which Martin Luther King dreamed, a nation where his children–all children–would be judged not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.

America is not racist. Above and beyond all nations, America is accepting of all, and equality of opportunity is denied none, but equality of outcome depends on individual effort.

America’s police officers are drawn from the American public. Police agencies, in fact, are even less likely to harbor actual racists than the public at large, because, in recruiting and hiring, they specifically screen for that trait, as well as other troubling psychological disqualifiers. In addition, supervisory practices are established to detect and deal with such damaging personality faults.

In reality, identifying racists is not difficult. They generally identify themselves. They’re proud of their beliefs and are compelled to share and act on them, just like the Dallas killer.

Even in the Baton Rouge shooting, and the Minnesota shooting, there is no actual evidence of racial animus. The investigations into those shootings are only a few days old, and what little information is available seems to indicate that the officers fired not due to racial animus, but because they believed themselves to be in deadly danger.

Just as very few police officers are actually racists, there is no national police conspiracy to kill young black men. There is no regional conspiracy; there is no local conspiracy. To think otherwise is to descend into dangerous, truly racist, paranoia.

Finding the Real Conservative | FreedomWorks

Finding the Real Conservative | FreedomWorks

As yet another primary election season heats up, how do we cut through the rhetoric and evaluate candidates? One sure way is to have a measuring stick based on more than personal opinion.

One such standard is the word “conservative.” I hear candidates and elected officials use it all the time. What does it really mean? In my opinion, the late Russell Kirk spelled it out better than just about anyone. This all-but-forgotten man laid out ten principles of conservative thought many seem to have forgotten. See how many you recognize.

First, conservatives believe in an enduring moral order. This concept is much broader than religious dogma. Kirk said that human nature was a constant, and moral truths were permanent. That’s not surprising considering that 94% of Americans believe in God, according to pollster George Barna. Surprisingly, Kirk said that a society in which men and women are governed by an enduring belief in moral order—by a strong sense of right and wrong—and by personal convictions about justice and honor—that would be a good society, regardless of the political machinery. Politics do not determine the trajectory of a nation—the people do. Nancy Pearcy put it well when she said that politics is downstream from culture.

Second, tradition in a culture is important and should not be tossed out on a whim. Kirk actually calls this “continuity.” What he meant is that order and justice and freedom are the result of centuries of trials and reflections and sacrifice. Change should be gradual and calculated—never undoing traditions as a knee-jerk reaction. Often times, an election cycle bring cries for “change,” but true conservatives should always be wary of change. Wary doesn’t mean completely closed to some change though. It just means “slow change.” If you look at how our bi-cameral system of government loaded with checks and balances was designed, clearly our founders thought “slow” was good. For this reason, Presidential Executive Orders should be used sparingly.

Third, conservatives adhere to Edmund Burke’s mantra that the individual is foolish, but the species is wise. Using that advice, real conservatives stand on the shoulders of those who have gone before them and look to enduring wisdom. That means not only the Ronald Reagans, but other great thinkers and statesmen beyond our lifetime like T.S. Eliot, Adam Smith, Sir Walter Scott, and of course, Burke himself. Not sure you will see any of these authors on display as you walk in your local library.

Fourth, true conservatives look at the long-term consequences of laws and policies. I fear this principle frequently gets tossed in favor of reelection. Kirk said that rushing into legislation or policies without weighing the long-term consequences will actually create new abuses in the future. We should slow down and look as far as we can into the future.

Fifth, conservatives know good and well that you can’t totally level the economic playing field, and in fact, we should not aspire for it. Robbing one taxpayer to pay another truly violates conservative thought because it is not sustainable. In our society, we have tried to make charity the government’s job, and true conservatives have to take issue with that practice. Churches and non-profits should take serious their role in culture.

Sixth, mankind is messed-up. Kirk didn’t exactly quote the Bible, but conservatives believe that because man is flawed from birth that no perfect social order can ever be created. All that we can reasonably expect, Kirk said, is a tolerably ordered, just and free society, in which evil and suffering continue to lurk. Can morality be legislated? Kirk would say that all laws are an effort to legislate morality, and that is okay.

Seventh, conservatives know that great societies are built upon the foundation of private property. We see it in the Ten Commandments. Policies that seek to redistribute wealth and property should be an anathema to the real conservative. That is one of my issues with COP21, the Paris Agreement on the reduction of climate change, and the EPA’s Clean Power Plan. Both are a form of wealth redistribution. While getting rich should not be the conservative’s chief aim, the institution of private property has been a powerful instrument for teaching responsibility, shaping integrity, creating prosperity, and providing the opportunities for people to think and act. It is the opportunity to go from rags to riches. This opportunity has given us the Truett Cathys (of Chick-fil-a fame) and others who worked their way up from nothing.

Eighth, conservatives favor smaller government at a federal level, and champion small governments such as county commissions and city councils. Decisions most affecting the lives of citizens should be made locally, and as Kirk would say, voluntarily. That is how I got started. I ran a city council race for a friend. A strong, centralized, and distant federal government tends to be more hostile to human freedom and dignity.

Ninth, the conservative believes in flattening the power—or limiting government. Real conservatives know the danger of power being vested in just a few even it is called benevolent. Constitutional restrictions are necessary, political checks and balance a must, and enforcement of the law a must—all the while balancing the claims of authority with the claims of liberty.

Finally, conservatives should be slow to change. Any thinking conservative would be resistant to hastily throwing out the old way of doing something in favor of something completely new—even in the name of “positive change.” Progress, or change, is important—for Kirk said a society would stagnate without it. Change has to be reconciled with the permanent though, and both are important.

When Kirk revised these ten principles in 1993 before his death in 1994, he said that the word “conservative” was being abused. If alive today, he probably wouldn’t be surprised that the distortion has not stopped.

The New Intolerance - WSJ

The New Intolerance - WSJ

In the increasingly bitter battle between religious liberty and the liberal political agenda, religion is losing. Witness the media and political wrath raining down upon Indiana because the state dared to pass an allegedly anti-gay Religious Freedom Restoration Act. The question fair-minded Americans should ask before casting the first stone is who is really being intolerant.

The Indiana law is a version of the federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) that passed 97-3 in the Senate and that Bill Clinton signed in 1993. Both the federal and Indiana laws require courts to administer a balancing test when reviewing cases that implicate the free exercise of religion.

To wit: Individuals must show that their religious liberty has been “substantially burdened,” and the government must demonstrate its actions represent the least restrictive means to achieve a “compelling” state interest. Indiana’s law adds a provision that offers a potential religious defense in private disputes, but then four federal appellate circuits have also interpreted the federal statute to apply to private disp

utes. The federal RFRA followed the Supreme Court’s Employment Division v. Smith ruling in 1990 that abandoned its 30-year precedent of reviewing religious liberty cases under strict scrutiny. Congress responded with RFRA, which merely reasserted longstanding First Amendment protections.

In 1997 the Supreme Court limited RFRA’s scope to federal actions. So 19 states including such cultural backwaters as Connecticut, Rhode Island and Illinois followed with copy-cat legislation, and Indiana is the 20th. Courts in 11 states have extended equally vigorous protections.

Indiana was an outlier before the new law because neither its laws nor courts unambiguously protected religious liberty. Amish horse-drawn buggies could be required to abide by local traffic regulations. Churches could be prohibited from feeding the homeless under local sanitation codes. The state Attorney General even ruled Indiana Wesleyan University, a Christian college which hires on the basis of religion, ineligible for state workforce training grants.

Becket Fund Executive Director Kristina Arriaga discusses the controversy surrounding the Hoosier State’s religious freedom law. Photo credit: Associated Press. In February, 16 prominent First Amendment scholars, some of whom support same-sex marriage, backed Indiana’s legislation. “General protection for religious liberty is important precisely because it is impossible to legislate in advance for all the ways in which government might burden the free exercise of religion,” they explained.

That hasn’t stopped the cultural great and good from claiming Indiana added the religious defense in private disputes as a way to target gays. If this is Indiana’s purpose, and there’s no evidence it is, this is unlikely to work.

The claim is that this would empower, say, florists or wedding photographers to refuse to work a gay wedding on religious grounds. But under the RFRA test, such a commercial vendor would still have to prove that his religious convictions were substantially burdened.

And he would also come up against the reality that most courts have found that the government has a compelling interest in enforcing antidiscrimination laws. In all these states for two decades, no court we’re aware of has granted such a religious accommodation to an antidiscrimination law. Restaurants and hotels that refused to host gay marriage parties would have a particularly high burden in overcoming public accommodation laws.

In any event, such disputes are rare to nonexistent, a tribute to the increasing tolerance of American society toward gays, lesbians, the transgendered, you name it.

The paradox is that even as America has become more tolerant of gays, many activists and liberals have become ever-more intolerant of anyone who might hold more traditional cultural or religious views. Thus a CEO was run out of Mozilla after it turned out that he had donated money to a California referendum opposing same-sex marriage.

Part of the new liberal intolerance is rooted in the identity politics that dominates today’s Democratic Party. That’s the only way to explain the born-again opportunism of Hillary Clinton, who tweeted: “Sad this new Indiana law can happen in America today. We shouldn’t discriminate against ppl bc of who they love.”

By that standard, Mrs. Clinton discriminated against gays because she opposed gay marriage until March 2013. But now she wants to be seen as leading the new culture war against the intolerant right whose views she recently held.

The same reversal of tolerance applies to religious liberty. When RFRA passed in 1993, liberal outfits like the ACLU were joined at the hip with the Christian Coalition. But now the ACLU is denouncing Indiana’s law because it wants even the most devoutly held religious values to bow to its cultural agenda on gay marriage and abortion rights.

Liberals used to understand that RFRA, with its balancing test, was a good-faith effort to help society compromise on contentious moral disputes. That liberals are renouncing it 20 years after celebrating it says more about their new intolerance than about anyone in Indiana.

Can We Know Right and Wrong Without God? | PJ Lifestyle

Can We Know Right and Wrong Without God? | PJ Lifestyle

Believers commonly assert that, without God, there can be no “objective right and wrong.” Yet, such an assertion ignores what it means to be objective. When we identify something as objective rather than subjective, we’re saying it can be observed in the real world. We’re saying it can be perceived, or conceived through reason applied to our perception. Even the most fervent believer must confess that God transcends our human perception, and therefore cannot be cited as a source of objective morality.

Believers offer our appeal to God as the source of “objective morality” in answer to such blatant subjectivism or moral relativism. Right and wrong can’t be left to whim, we argue. But our appeal to God doesn’t solve the problem.

Subjectivism – whether personal, social, or “supernatural” – wreaks havoc on human life and happiness. Until we can answer it with (genuine) moral certainty – that is, until we can show that morality is based on facts – it will continue to do so. From muggings and rapes, to school shootings and truck bombings, to concentration camps and gulags, to religious “inquisitions” and divinely inspired acts of terrorism – all such mayhem is caused by subjectivism. And the is-ought dichotomy is what makes subjectivism seem plausible.

The “Is-Ought” Dichotomy

This “is-ought dichotomy” is the philosophical dead end in which believers spar with secular subjectivists. Our culture has given up on the task of discovering a truly objective morality, because we have largely bought into the notion that values cannot be derived from facts, that we cannot discern an “ought” from an “is.”

The Natural World Provides Guideposts for Appropriate Human Action

The primary such guidepost is a standard of value from which to judge the appropriateness of all other conceived values, an end unto itself which all other ends support.

An end is a goal toward which one acts; a means is the action one takes toward a goal. For instance, if a student studies in order to get an education, the education is an end toward which his studying is the means. Likewise, if a person works in order to earn a paycheck, the paycheck is an end toward which his work is the means. But notice that such goals are not ends in themselves. A student gets an education so that he can pursue a career – which he pursues in order to support himself and earn a paycheck – which he earns in order to buy things – which he buys in order to use for various other purposes – which he pursues in order to accomplish still other goals – and so on. Each end presupposes another. So where does it all end?

If we are to establish an objective, fact-based morality, we need to discover a final end – one toward which all of our other goals and values are properly aimed. Such an end is by that fact our standard of moral value – the standard against which we can objectively assess the value of all our choices and actions. So the question becomes: What is our ultimate goal?

When we identify this ultimate goal, the question of what we ought to do becomes objectively answerable. That, and only that, is how we discern an objective morality.

As this series continues, we will present and evaluate this objective standard of value. Biddle offers it as an alternative to religion. But one need not be an atheist to accept it. Indeed, the discovery of an objective standard for moral action should embolden the believer and deepen our appreciation of God.

As a father, I may answer any challenge from my son with the proverbial “because I told you so.” In doing so, I don’t offer an actual reason. I merely assert my authority. While that authority proves legitimate, my ultimate desire for my son is that he one day understand why my instruction and rules serve his interest.

Similarly, the appeal to God as a moral authority may prove correct, but says nothing of why his prescriptions are good for us. A consideration of objective morality works to bridge that gap.

I Am Not Nice

From a post, made years ago, in the Pagan news groups.


Hilda Marshall, citing the Rules of Acquisition to All, said:

In an attempt to neutralize a slanderous and utterly unfounded rumor regarding myself, propagated amongst the Pagan community as a whole by I know not whom, I offer this open letter as a rebuttal.

I am not nice.

If the only people who Truly Understand are those who let you use them for whatever you want to use them for, I do not Truly Understand.

If the only Healers are those who let you deplete their personal energy and other resources, I am not a Healer.

If the only True Witches are those whose only reply to your tales of woe is "There, there, dear, of course you were right all along, and anyone who disagrees is evil," then I am not a True Witch.

Since my limits are so clear-cut and appear to be unusually extreme in this community, let me detail what I *will* allow.

You may visit me if I invite you, and stay for however many days we agree upon ahead of time.  You may not invite yourself or extend your stay without my permission, and you should not expect me to keep up with your changes in plans without reasonable advance notice.

You may not prevail upon my housemates.  If I invite you, I'm responsible for setting boundaries; and for informing you if you overstep those boundaries.  My housemates did not invite you, and should not be held responsible for asking you not to eat their food, talk at them when they're not interested, or instruct them on how to take care of their health, their pets, or their lives in general.

You may call me on the phone to request advice or a sympathetic ear.  You may not do so after 10:00 PM or before 8:00 AM unless it is an emergency.  Nor may you do so at ANY time if your sole intention is to whine the I Can't litany at me.  I hate that song.  Save it for the government.

You may borrow my stuff, provided you ask first, and return it to me in the condition in which you first borrowed it within a reasonable amount of time.  You may not loan or give it to other people without asking me first, and I reserve the right to take back anything that is being misused, broken, or left on a wet floor and trampled.

You are VERY welcome to participate in the many fun projects in which I am involved!  I only ask that you think hard about what you're promising and don't agree to do anything that you'll likely decide later not to do, for whatever reason.  ("Things just got too crazy" is not a reason.)  And if you do end up breaking a promise, please tell me as soon as you decide to, rather than waiting until the last minute, so that I can formulate a backup plan.

I understand that there are many Witches who are doing their best to create a world that runs on Pagan Standard time.  I fully comprehend that there are large numbers of Witches who think that all property belongs to all people and anyone who objects has "control issues."  I know from experience that incredible numbers of Witches believe that they are owed attention and support whenever they need it from whomever they choose.  I realize that there are many, many Witches who hope, work, and dream to create a world free from courtesy.

I am not one of them.

Repeal the Minimum Wage | National Review Online

Repeal the Minimum Wage | National Review Online


The minimum wage and other regulatory systems create entities that stand between the employer and the employee.

The relationship between employer and worker does matter. The employer who cannot set his business’s wages, or who must, whether or not he can afford it, increase wages, is an employer who is less likely to invest in his relationship with his employees. He is also less likely to hire and more likely to use a temp agency, to “nickel and dime” in the way that progressive cartoons mock. States and towns rarely supply institutions as wonderful as the Andrew Carnegie libraries. When rules intrude, the loss to personal ambition, workplace satisfaction, and civic culture is great. So great that perhaps someone will eventually figure out a way to quantify that. 

The Minimum Wage Makes Depressions Worse

Many of us have always suspected that upward pressure on wages in the 1930s can’t have made it easier to hire. But only lately, in the last 10 or 15 years, has newer research formed a complete picture of what happened in the 1930s. It seems that the policy of upward pressure on wages, which is the idea of the minimum wage, made the Depression worse.
Here’s what happened. Back in the teens and ’20s, an era of technocrats and progressives, employers dropped wages in downturns — heck, that was better than laying people off. But employers wondered aloud whether higher wages would be good for business. The most famous of these was Henry Ford, who paid above market level on the theory that workers would use any extra money to “buy back the car.” In an individual business this can be true, especially when that business is simultaneously introducing technology, such as the Ford assembly line, that radically increases productivity.
Politicians who followed Ford but had not yet heard of John Maynard Keynes thought the same high-wage policy might work across the economy. President Herbert Hoover liked the idea enough that within months of the 1929 crash he hauled business leaders to Washington to browbeat them into sustaining higher wages. Ford actually committed to raising pay, to $7 a day from $6. Within two years Hoover also signed the Davis-Bacon Act, which mandated that government offices fulfilling construction contracts in various regions pay the “prevailing wage” for the workmen’s trade and for the region. The act put additional upward pressure on wages at a time when the economy could ill afford that. Unemployment abided and rose, rather than disappearing, as it had in a depression of the early 1920s.

Things Progressives Know That Just Aren't So, Part I - Greed [WeirdDave]

Things Progressives Know That Just Aren't So, Part I - Greed [WeirdDave]

This is the first in a series of occasional posts in which I will muse upon things that our progressive brothers and sisters take as a given, and why they are so wrong.
Greed. This is one of the big arrows in the prog's ad hominem quiver. "Why are you conservatives so greedy?". "Corporations are greedy.". "The greed of the 1% keeps us sterling OWS 99%ers poor! Wah!". And so on, and so on, and so on. Let's examine this, shall we?
Conservatives are far more greedy than progressives Really? The core of our philosophy is the right of the individual to keep the fruits of their labors. We're not the ones who seek to take more and more money from other people in order to "do good". We don't think that it's right to redistribute wealth by force in the name of "social justice". Conservatives believe "Keep it, you earned it" while progressives say "Gimmie, I can use it better than you can, you don't deserve it, I do". Conservatism is a philosophy of greed while progressives are altruists? In a pig's eye. Greedy conservatives even give more to charity than kind hearted progressives. Which philosophy encourages greed again?
Greed is good? Good old Gordon Gecko. The famous "Greed is good" diatribe, liberal Hollywood's distortion of the words of Milton Friedman, deployed to make the business community look like heartless bastards. The thing is, most conservatives, listening to that speech, find it hard to discount it completely, because it comes so close to expressing the core principles that we believe. Seeing our hesitation, the prog pounces: "HA! You DO think greed is good! Greedy right wing bastard!" and then uses this straw man to dismiss our arguments. Greed is not "good", because greed implies the desire to possess something not earned, something that one is not entitled to. In the climactic paragraph, Gecko says "greed-for lack of a better word-is good". Well, I have a better word, several in fact. If billionaire Gecko could have spent $4.95 on a thesaurus, he might have come out with something that every conservative would embrace and defend without hesitation. Try this:
"Ambition is right. Desire works. Drive clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. An individual's desire to better them self, in all of its forms -- in life, financially, in love, in knowledge -- has marked the upward surge of mankind. And that drive -- you mark my words -- will not only save Teldar Paper, but that other malfunctioning corporation called the USA."
Same basic speech, same basic words, but now it's a clear statement of conservative principle that I would be proud to claim as my own. This is tactic # 5 in the progressive playbook: Distort the clear meaning of words to muddy the argument. So, if greed is not good, what is it?
Greed is natural Greed is part of the flawed human condition. Everyone is greedy to a greater or lesser extent. Some people are greedy for money. Some for power. Some for love, some for recognition, some for fame, some for Hummel figurines. Some for all of these things, some for none. The fact of the matter is that greed lives in the human heart, and all of the wailing and moaning in the world won't change that one simple fact. Even progs recognize this, though they're loath to admit it, which brings us to the final point on our journey.
Greed must be constrained And here's where the prog goes completely off the rails, although he winds up in the
same place he always does. His solution to containing greed is to empower the government. More rules, more laws, more regulations. Tighter and tighter control. Gotta reign in those evil conservatives, those nasty corporations, those distasteful free thinking individuals. Tighten the screws, lock down the hatches, Mr. Spock, we need governmentwarp factor 10! You can blow this all out of the water with one simple question, and in so doing the only answer left to the prog is the same sad one that's been repeated throughout human history. "Mr. Prog", you will ask, "What makes you think that people in government are any less greedy that people outside of government?"
Stammering will ensue, but if he's real hard core, he'll give you the only answer left to him: Well, government can train greed out of people. Yup, all we need is total control, we'll teach children not to be greedy, we'll stigmatize greed right out of the human condition. In other words, the solution is to create the New Soviet Man, again. As soon as humans stop being human, why, it'll be Nirvana. Anyone who has studied history knows how that ends.
The conservative knows that in order to constrain greed, we need a system that does it naturally. Fortunately, we have just such a system: The free market. Corporations and governments may both be inclined towards greed, but the market naturally punishes corporations for indulging. How long would Wal-Mart stay in business if it made a habit of screwing its customers, priced its goods exorbitantly or really abused its employees the way leftists want you to believe that it does? Not long. Everybody would go to Target. The market naturally restrains greed. Government, on the other hand, protects greed. Over 1000 vets died so that government workers in Phoenix could get their bonus checks. Nobody went to jail, nobody has even lost their job. Can you honestly say that a corporation that callously killed 1000 folks would walk away unscathed? Of course not. That corporation would be out of business (spare me cigarette companies please, they provide something that an individual uses to kill himself. Different situation altogether. Guns too), people would stop patronizing them. Let me say it again: The market naturally restrains greed. Government, on the other hand, protects greed. Progs believe the opposite.
And that right there is what progs know about greed that just isn't so.

From the Weekend Interview -- Wall Street Journal

===================

Jonathan Haidt: He Knows Why We Fight

Conservative or liberal, our moral instincts are shaped by evolution to strengthen 'us' against 'them.'

By HOLMAN W. JENKINS, JR.

Nobody who engages in political argument, and who isn't a moron, hasn't had to recognize the fact that decent, honest, intelligent people can come to opposite conclusions on public issues.
Jonathan Haidt, in an eye-opening and deceptively ambitious best seller, tells us why. The reason is evolution. Political attitudes are an extension of our moral reasoning; however much we like to tell ourselves otherwise, our moral responses are basically instinctual, despite attempts to gussy them up with ex-post rationalizations.
Our constellation of moral instincts arose because it helped us to cooperate. It helped us, in unprecedented speed and fashion, to dominate our planet. Yet the same moral reaction also means we exist in a state of perpetual, nasty political disagreement, talking past each other, calling each other names.
So Mr. Haidt explains in "The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion," undoubtedly one of the most talked-about books of the year. "The Righteous Mind" spent weeks on the hardcover best-seller list. Mr. Haidt considers himself mostly a liberal, but his book has been especially popular in the conservative blogosphere. Some right-leaning intellectuals are even calling it the most important book of the year.
It's full of ammunition that conservatives will love to throw out at cocktail parties. His research shows that conservatives are much better at understanding and anticipating liberal attitudes than liberals are at appreciating where conservatives are coming from. Case in point: Conservatives know that liberals are repelled by cruelty to animals, but liberals don't think (or prefer not to believe) that conservatives are repelled too.
Mr. Haidt, until recently a professor of moral psychology at the University of Virginia, says the surveys conducted by his research team show that liberals are strong on evolved values he defines as caring and fairness. Conservatives value caring and fairness too but tend to emphasize the more tribal values like loyalty, authority and sanctity.
Conservatives, Mr. Haidt says, have been more successful politically because they play to the full spectrum of sensibilities, and because the full spectrum is necessary for a healthy society. An admiring review in the New York Times sums up this element of his argument: "Liberals dissolve moral capital too recklessly. Welfare programs that substitute public aid for spousal and parental support undermine the ecology of the family. Education policies that let students sue teachers erode classroom authority. Multicultural education weakens the cultural glue of assimilation."
Such a book is bound to run into the charge of scientism—claiming scientific authority for a mix of common sense, exhortation or the author's own preferences. Let it be said that Mr. Haidt is sensitive to this complaint. If he erred, he says, it was on the side of being accessible, readable and, he hopes, influential.
As we sit in his new office at New York University, he professes an immodest aim: He wants liberals and conservatives to listen to each other more, hate each other less, and to understand that their differences are largely rooted in psychology, not open-minded consideration of the facts. "My big issue, the one I'm somewhat evangelical about, is civil disagreement," he says.
A shorthand he uses is "follow the sacred"—and not in a good way. "Follow the sacred and there you will find a circle of motivated ignorance." Today's political parties are most hysterical, he says, on the issues they "sacralize." For the right, it's taxes. For the left, the sacred issues were race and gender but are becoming global warming and gay marriage.
Yet between the lines of his book is an even more dramatic claim: The same moral psychology that makes our politics so nasty also underlies the amazing triumph of the human species. "We shouldn't be here at all," he tells me. "When I think about life on earth, there should not be a species like us. And if there was, we should be out in the jungle killing each other in small groups. That's what you should expect. The fact that we're here [in politics] arguing viciously and nastily with each other, and no guns, that itself is a miracle. And I think we can make [our politics] a little better. That's my favorite theme."
Who is Jon Haidt? A nice Jewish boy from central casting, he grew up in Scarsdale, N.Y. His father was a corporate lawyer. "When the economy opened out in the '50s and '60s and Jews could go everywhere, he was part of that generation. He and all his buddies from Brooklyn did very well."
His family was liberal in the FDR tradition. At Yale he studied philosophy and, in standard liberal fashion, "emerged pretty convinced that I was right about everything." It took a while for him to discover the limits of that stance. "I wouldn't say I was mugged by reality. I would say I was gradually introduced to it academically," he says today.
In India, where he performed field studies early in his professional career, he encountered a society in some ways patriarchal, sexist and illiberal. Yet it worked and the people were lovely. In Brazil, he paid attention to the experiences of street children and discovered the "most dangerous person in the world is mom's boyfriend. When women have a succession of men coming through, their daughters will get raped," he says. "The right is right to be sounding the alarm about the decline of marriage, and the left is wrong to say, 'Oh, any kind of family is OK.' It's not OK."
At age 41, he decided to try to understand what conservatives think. The quest was part of his effort to apply his understanding of moral psychology to politics. He especially sings the praises of Thomas Sowell's "Conflict of Visions," which he calls "an incredible book, a brilliant portrayal" of the argument between conservatives and liberals about the nature of man. "Again, as a moral psychologist, I had to say the constrained vision [of human nature] is correct."
That is, our moral instincts are tribal, adaptive, intuitive and shaped by evolution to strengthen "us" against "them." He notes that, in the 1970s, the left tended to be categorically hostile to evolutionary explanations of human behavior. Yet Mr. Haidt, the liberal and self-professed atheist, says he now finds the conservative vision speaks more insightfully to our evolved nature in ways that it would be self-defeating to discount.
"This is what I'm trying to argue for, and this is what I feel I've discovered from reading a lot of the sociology," he continues. "You need loyalty, authority and sanctity"—values that liberals are often suspicious of—"to run a decent society."
Mr. Haidt, a less chunky, lower-T version of Adam Sandler, has just landed a new position at the Stern School of Business at NYU. He arrived with his two children and wife, Jane, after a successful and happy 16-year run at the University of Virginia. An introvert by his own account, and never happier than when laboring in solitude, he nevertheless sought out the world's media capital to give wider currency to the ideas in the "The Righteous Mind."

Mr. Haidt's book, as he's the first to notice, has given comfort to conservatives. Its aim is to help liberals. Though he calls himself a centrist, he remains a strongly committed Democrat. He voted for one Republican in his life—in 2000 crossing party lines to cast a ballot for John McCain in the Virginia primary. "I wasn't trying to mess with the Republican primary," he adds. "I really liked McCain."

His disappointment with President Obama is quietly evident. Ronald Reagan understood that "politics is more like religion than like shopping," he says. Democrats, after a long string of candidates who flogged policy initiatives like items in a Wal-Mart circular, finally found one who could speak to higher values than self-interest. "Obama surely had a chance to remake the Democratic Party. But once he got in office, I think, he was consumed with the difficulty of governing within the Beltway."
The president has reverted to the formula of his party—bound up in what Mr. Haidt considers obsolete interest groups, battles and "sacred" issues about which Democrats cultivate an immunity to compromise.
Mr. Haidt lately has been speaking to Democratic groups and urging attachment to a new moral vision, albeit one borrowed from the Andrew Jackson campaign of 1828: "Equal opportunity for all, special privileges for none."
Racial quotas and reflexive support for public-sector unions would be out. His is a reformed vision of a class-based politics of affirmative opportunity for the economically disadvantaged. "I spoke to some Democrats about things in the book and they asked, how can we weaponize this? My message to them was: You're not ready. You don't know what you stand for yet. You don't have a clear moral vision."
Like many historians of modern conservatism, he cites the 1971 Powell Memo—written by the future Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell Jr.—which rallied Republicans to the defense of free enterprise and limited government. Democrats need their own version of the Powell Memo today to give the party a new and coherent moral vision of activist government in the good society. "The moral rot a [traditional] liberal welfare state creates over generations—I mean, the right is right about that," says Mr. Haidt, "and the left can't see it."
Yet one challenge becomes apparent in talking to Mr. Haidt: He's read his book and cheerfully acknowledges that he avoids criticizing too plainly the "sacralized" issues of his liberal friends.
In his book, for instance, is passing reference to Western Europe's creation of the world's "first atheistic societies," also "the least efficient societies ever known at turning resources (of which they have a lot) into offspring (of which they have very few)."
What does he actually mean? He means Islam: "Demographic curves are very hard to bend," he says. "Unless something changes in Europe in the next century, it will eventually be a Muslim continent. Let me say it diplomatically: Most religions are tribal to some degree. Islam, in its holy books, seems more so. Christianity has undergone a reformation and gotten some distance from its holy books to allow many different lives to flourish in Christian societies, and this has not happened in Islam."
Mr. Haidt is similarly tentative in spelling out his thoughts on global warming. The threat is real, he suspects, and perhaps serious. "But the left is now embracing this as their sacred issue, which guarantees that there will be frequent exaggerations and minor—I don't want to call it fudging of data—but there will be frequent mini-scandals. Because it's a moral crusade, the left is going to have difficulty thinking clearly about what to do."
Mr. Haidt, I observe, is noticeably less delicate when stepping on the right's toes. He reviles George W. Bush, whom he blames for running up America's debt and running down its reputation. He blames Newt Gingrich for perhaps understanding his book's arguments too well and importing an uncompromising moralistic language into the partisan politics of the 1990s.
Mr. Haidt also considers today's Republican Party a curse upon the land, even as he admires conservative ideas. He says its defense of lower taxes on capital income—mostly reported by the rich—is indefensible. He dismisses Mitt Romney as a "moral menial," a politician so cynical about the necessary cynicism of politics that he doesn't bother to hide his cynicism. (Some might call that a virtue.) He finds it all too typical that Republicans abandoned their support of the individual health-care mandate the moment Mr. Obama picked it up (though he also finds Chief Justice John Roberts's bend-over-backwards effort to preserve conservative constitutional principle while upholding ObamaCare "refreshing").
Why is his language so much less hedged when discussing Republicans? "Liberals are my friends, my colleagues, my social world," he concedes. Liberals also are the audience he hopes most to influence, helping Democrats to recalibrate their political appeal and their attachment to a faulty welfare state.
To which a visitor can only say, God speed. Even with his parsing out of deep psychological differences between conservatives and liberals, American politics still seem capable of a useful fluidity. To make progress we need both parties, and right now we could use some progress on taxes, incentives, growth and entitlement reform.

Mr. Jenkins writes the Journal's Business World column.

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The Wheel of the Year: Now available on Amazon Kindle

The Official Manual for Spice Cadets: Now available on Amazon Kindle

The Asymmetry of Ideology

The Asymmetry of Ideology

via PJ Media by Rand Simberg on 4/26/12

Liberals are unable to understand the moral universe of conservatives.

University of Virginia psychology professor Jonathan Haidt has been doing some interesting research on what makes “liberals” (that is to say, Leftists, since they’re not really liberal at all) and conservatives tick and recently wrote a book on the topic. It explains a remarkable amount about current (and not-so-current) events. It is all the more interesting because he seems to be a recovering “liberal” himself.
....

A recent issue of Reason magazine for which he was the cover child (literally, in a sense) elaborates. The work is based on research in which he asked value-loaded questions of two thousand self-described liberals and conservatives. A third were asked to answer in their own opinions, a third were asked to answer with what they imagined would be “typical liberal” opinions, and the remaining were asked to answer with what they thought a “typical conservative” would think:

This design allowed us to examine the stereotypes that each side held about the other. More important, it allowed us to assess how accurate they were by comparing peoples’ expectations about “typical” partisans to the actual responses from partisans on the left and right. Who was best able to pretend to be the other?

The results were clear and consistent. Moderates and conservatives were most accurate in their predictions, whether they were pretending to be liberals or conservatives. Liberals were least accurate, especially those who described themselves as “very liberal.” The biggest errors in the study came when liberals answer care and fairness questions while pretending to be conservatives. When faced with statements such as “one of the worst things one can do is to hurt a defenseless animal” or “justice is the most important requirement for a society,” liberals assumed that conservatives would disagree. If you have a moral matrix built primarily on intuitions about care and fairness (as equality) and you listen to the Reagan narrative, what else could you think? Reagan seems completely unconcerned about the welfare of drug addicts, poor people and gay people. He is more interested in fighting wars and telling people how to run their sex lives.

Clearly, the Left views Cheney through the same Alice-in-Evil-Land mirror, to the point that they don’t believe that he deserves to live. Haidt elaborates:

If you don’t see that Reagan is pursuing positive values of loyalty, authority and sanctity, you almost have to conclude that Republicans see no positive value in care and fairness. You might even go so far as Michael Feingold, theater critic for The Village Voice, when he wrote in 2004, “Republicans don’t believe in the imagination, partly because so few of them have one, but mostly because it gets in the way of their chosen work, which is to destroy the human race and the plan…Which is why I personally think they should be exterminated before they cause any more harm.” One of the [many] ironies in this quotation is that is shows the inability of a theater critic -– who skillfully enters fantastical imaginary worlds for a living — to imagine that Republicans operate within a moral matrix that differs from his own.

My Starfish Story

My Starfish Story

via The American Spectator and AmSpecBlog by Christopher Orlet on 4/7/11


My son being one of the smart kids, I am obliged to attend a lot of high school functions. All these events tend to feature the obligatory inspirational-type speaker (a politician, lawyer, or clergyman) who unfailingly parrots the same message. And it's not the virtues of capitalism, trust me. Rather, it's some version of the old saw that "to whom much is given much is expected."
But don't expect much in the way of variety. Nearly all the speakers begin by telling the same tale. I'm guessing you have heard "The Starfish Story." It's the one that begins with the speaker strolling down a beach when he comes across a fellow chucking starfish back into the ocean. The speaker approaches and says something to the effect that there are tens of thousands of starfish washed up on the beach. He can't possibly make a difference. The man patiently smiles and skips another fish into the salty brine. "Made a difference for that one," he says.
At this point my son will glance at me from the stage and roll his eyes. We are both having the same thought: "I'll tell you what kind of difference you made. You just deprived some starving baby seagull of its dinner! And I didn't see you helping those poor jellyfish that washed ashore. Is it because they are not as pretty as sea stars and hurt like hell when they sting you?" My son is only 17; he can look forward to rolling his eyes through "The Starfish Story" for many years to come.
I have never been asked to give one of these inspirational speeches, for obvious reasons, but that doesn't keep me from imagining what I might say. Being a natural-born contrarian, I am inclined to view with a jaundiced eye the notion we can improve the world. I might quote Voltaire: "We shall leave the world as foolish and wicked as we found it." Or Samuel Beckett: "The tears of the world are a constant quantity. For each one who begins to weep somewhere else another stops."
Or I might really mix things up by reading from Loren Eiseley's original essay, "The Star Thrower," which I happened to come across the other day:

In a pool of sand and silt a starfish had thrust its arms up stiffly and was holding its body away from the stifling mud.
"It's still alive," I ventured.
"Yes," he said, and with a quick yet gentle movement he picked up the star and spun it over my head and far out into the sea. It sunk in a burst of spume, and the waters roared once more.
..."There are not many who come this far," I said, groping in a sudden embarrassment for words. "Do you collect?"
"Only like this," he said softly, gesturing amidst the wreckage of the shore. "And only for the living." He stooped again, oblivious of my curiosity, and skipped another star neatly across the water. "The stars," he said, "throw well. One can help them."
..."I do not collect," I said uncomfortably, the wind beating at my garments. "Neither the living nor the dead. I gave it up a long time ago. Death is the only successful collector."

Eiseley's parable is Darwinian in its stark "Nature, red in tooth and claw" conviction. Quite another thing from its sentimental successor.
Fortunately for thousands of after dinner speakers, Eiseley later undergoes a philosophical shift. He dumps Nietzsche for Oprah. As a scientist Eiseley knows nature's inclination is to thin the herd. At the same time, he recognizes man often contradicts his Darwinian dictates (contraception, anyone?). He knows man can be altruistic and compassionate even to strangers, that we can, in that horrible clichéd phrase, make a difference:

"But I do love the world," I whispered…. "I love its small ones, the things beaten in the strangling surf, the bird, singing, which flies and falls and is not seen again…I love the lost ones, the failures of the world." It was like the renunciation of my scientific heritage.

Eiseley then joins the star thrower on the beach, and concludes: "It was men as well as starfish that we sought to save."
Yeah, we got that.
Liberals love this story. But the irony is that to a great extent big government liberals, in their zeal "to save" men through social engineering schemes, oftentimes take on the role of "Nature, red in tooth and claw." Their utopian ideas devastate the least fit, and all too often destroy their chances for a better life.
Maybe that's what I would tell the smart kids. This doesn't mean we shouldn't make a difference. Just realize you're hardly giving back when you throw some starving kid's breakfast into the sea.

MercatorNet: Who’s afraid of the slippery slope?

Link: http://www.mercatornet.com/articles/view/whos_afraid_of_the_slippery_slope (via shareaholic.com)

More than a scare tactic
The problem with this point of view is that it fails to appreciate the many and varied ways in which 'slippery slope' scenarios (as opposed to arguments) actually function. Indeed, an excellent paper by UCLA Professor of Law Eugene Volokh from 2003 undertook the noteworthy task of demonstrating actual mechanisms that underlie the various 'slippery slope' metaphors.
Volokh discussed mechanisms such as 'cost-lowering', 'attitude-altering', 'small change tolerance', 'political power' and 'political momentum' as examples of mechanisms whereby X can in fact lead to Y.
One intriguing example is that gun registration – itself a seemingly innocuous practice – could 'lower the cost' for government control and restriction of gun ownership. A similar example from the world of bioethics is that IVF technology 'lowered the cost' for research on human embryos and human cloning. Not only did IVF 'lower the cost', it was also 'attitude-altering' in terms of public, scientific, and legislative willingness to accept the concept of human life being created (and eventually destroyed) in laboratories.
In ethical issues the journey from X to Y takes place primarily on the level of principle, and for most of us these principles are hidden away behind layers of passion, emotion, culture, and social mores.
Take, for example, the issue of slavery: very few people are in favour of slavery these days. Yet we know for a fact that this was not always the case. Transport the average Anglo-Saxon of anti-slavery orientation back in time by about 200 years and we might find to our shock and horror that his enlightened moral views are out of step with mainstream society.

Is It Unconstitutional for Laws to Be Based on Their Supporters’ Religiously...

Is It Unconstitutional for Laws to Be Based on Their Supporters’ Religiously Founded Moral Beliefs?

via The Volokh Conspiracy by Eugene Volokh on 3/17/12

(Eugene Volokh)
This perennial question came up again on an academic e-mail discussion list that I'm on, so I thought I'd blog about it (though I said much the same thing 10 years ago, in another blog post). I think the answer is not just "no," but "hell, no" — I think it would be an outrageous discrimination against religious believers to have such a constitutional rule, and fortunately nothing in the history or the precedents of the Establishment Clause supports this position.
My most recent brush with the argument happened with regard to rules against recognizing same-sex marriage, but others have raised the same argument as to cloning bans, abortion bans, and the like: Isn't it illegitimate for the government to ban cloning, or fail to recognize same-sex marriages, when most of the arguments for that position are essentially religious? Isn't that an unconstitutional violation of the separation of church and state, or at least a violation of some democratic norm that people ought not force their religious views on others?
But most of the coercive laws that we hotly debate involve the forcing of a majority's views on the minority. That's true of laws protecting endangered species, antislavery laws, antidiscrimination laws, animal cruelty laws, environmental laws, intellectual property laws — or for that matter bans on infanticide, child sexual abuse, or more generally murder, rape, or theft. Some of these laws may be sound on the merits, and others unsound. But the fact that they force one group's views on another doesn't make them wrong.
Religious people have moral views just like secular people do, and they're just as entitled as secular people to use the political process to enact their views into law. True, religious people's moral views may rest on unproven and probably unprovable metaphysical assumptions — but the same is generally true as to secular people's moral views.
To say that religious arguments must be excluded from public debate, while equally unprovable secular moral arguments may continue to be made, would be to turn into second-class citizens those people whose basic moral views come from their religion. Neither the Constitution nor sound political morality require this.
In fact, many important political movements — the antislavery movement, the civil rights movement, and various antiwar movements — were composed in large part of religious people who acted for explicitly religious reasons, and justified their positions using explicitly religious arguments. Would we say that opposition to slavery was illegitimate because it was mostly overtly religious? If not, then we also can't condemn opposition to cloning or abortion or same-sex marriage on these grounds.
But what about the Establishment Clause? Well, the Supreme Court has explicitly held that the Establishment Clause doesn't invalidate laws simply because their supporters backed them for religious reasons. See, e.g., McGowan v. Maryland, 366 U.S. 420, 442 (1961); Bob Jones Univ. v. United States, 461 U.S. 574 (1983); Harris v. McRae, 448 U.S 297, 319-20 (1980). And for the reasons I mention above, the Court's decisions here were correct. True, the First Amendment does bar the government from teaching religion, from requiring religious practices such as prayer, and (generally) from singling out conduct for better or worse treatment because it's religiously motivated (e.g., punishing religious animal sacrifices but not secularly motivated animal killing, or giving a sales tax exemption to religious publications but not secular ones). But it doesn't bar the government from implementing religiously-motivated prohibitions on people's conduct, whether as to murder, theft, slavery, civil rights, cloning, or abortion.
Nor do I know of any evidence that the Establishment Clause was generally understood in 1791, in 1868, or any time in between or since as discriminating against religious believers this way. It may be convenient for secularists — and I myself am not religious — to have their moral reasons for lawmaking be permitted, and have their religious rivals' moral reasons declared unconstitutional or otherwise illegitimate. But there's no basis for thinking that the Constitution embodies any such discriminatory rule.
There are lots of good arguments to oppose cloning bans, abortion bans, or bans on homosexual conduct. The supporters of such prohibitions may be wrong on moral or pragmatic grounds. But the bans aren't made invalid by the fact that many of their supporters act for religiously influenced moral reasons, as opposed to secularly influenced moral reasons.

Myths about Free Markets

Myths about Free Markets

via John Goodman's Health Policy Blog by John Goodman on 2/15/12

1. They encourage discrimination against minorities.
2. They make the rich richer and the poor, poorer.
3. They degenerate into monopoly.
4. They promote war.
5. They promote stinginess.

All demolished by David Henderson in his talk at Hoover. Interesting video throughout.

Israel vs Palestine

MercatorNet: Is “Yuck!” a good enough reason?

MercatorNet: Is “Yuck!” a good enough reason?

It is my grave duty to inform you that the same is true of the discipline of ethics, where the most reasoned and convincing arguments nevertheless rest upon a set of basic assumptions which we simply must accept or deny. Those who best represent traditional ethics exist in a kind of parallel universe to most modern academic ethicists, and, it seems, never the twain shall meet.
Hence, such philosophers as the renowned and infamous Peter Singer can freely condemn the irrationality of moral intuition or “the yuck factor”, thereby defending in principle such remaining taboos as bestiality and incest.

Morality in Six Dimensions

The Science of Libertarian Morality - Reason Magazine

Rather than a five-dimensional morality scale, maybe there's a sixth scale that's been overlooked.

In his earlier work, Haidt surveyed the attitudes of conservatives and liberals using what he calls the Moral Foundations Questionnaire, which measures how much a person relies on each of five different moral foundations: harm/care, fairness/reciprocity, ingroup/loyalty, authority/respect, and purity/sanctity. Typically, conservatives scored lower than liberals on the harm and fairness scales—that is, they gave those issues less weight when making moral judgments—and scored much higher on ingroup, authority, and purity.

....

Haidt and his colleagues eventually recognized that their Moral Foundations Questionnaire was blinkered by liberal academic bias, failing to include a sixth moral foundation, liberty. They developed a liberty scale to probe this moral dimension. Unsurprisingly, the researchers found that libertarians dramatically outscored liberals and conservatives when it came to putting a high value on both economic and lifestyle liberty. Haidt and his colleagues conclude, “Libertarians may fear that the moral concerns typically endorsed by liberals or conservatives are claims that can be used to trample upon individual rights—libertarians’ sacred value.”

Utilitarianism and Morality

This e-mail, appearing in The News Gazette, discusses utilitarianism.

I think it's fair to say that many, maybe most Americans employ some type of utilitarianism in their moral decision making. But there are at least two problems. One is that to judge the best outcome can be very subjective. What may be judged good for the pregnant woman may not be good for the baby. What may be judged good for the about-to-cheat-husband may not good for his wife or his children. This problem of subjectivity is inherent in utilitarianism for a second reason. Utilitarianism counsels that moral decisions should NOT be based on the inherent meaning of acts. Acts are only good or bad relative to outcomes. The natural law theory that I expounded in class assumes that human acts have an inherent meaning (remember my fist vs. extended hand of friendship example).

 

This, by the way, is the problem I have with "utilitarian" arguments against torture. 

These arguments take the form,

 

Torture doesn't work

Therefore

Torture should never be used.

 

Problem is, if torture is determined to work, even if only in some cases, it ceases to be an absolute forbiddance.

 

Now the professor who wrote this e-mail touched on a different area, just as contentious:

 

One of the most common applications of utilitarianism to sexual morality is the criterion of mutual consent. It is said that any sexual act is okay if the two or more people involved agree. Now no one can (or should) deny that for a sexual act to be moral there must be consent. Certainly, this is one reason why rape is morally wrong. But the question is whether this is enough.

If two men consent to engage in sexual acts, according to utilitarianism, such an act would be morally okay. But notice too that if a ten year old agrees to a sexual act with a 40 year old, such an act would also be moral if even it is illegal under the current law. Notice too that our concern is with morality, not law. So by the consent criterion, we would have to admit certain cases as moral which we presently would not approve of. The case of the 10 and 40 year olds might be excluded by adding a modification like "informed consent." Then as long as both parties agree with sufficient knowledge, the act would be morally okay. A little reflection would show, I think, that "informed consent" might be more difficult to apply in practice than in theory. But another problem would be where to draw the line between moral and immoral acts using only informed consent. For example, if a dog consents to engage in a sexual act with its human master, such an act would also be moral according to the consent criterion. If this impresses you as far-fetched, the point is not whether it might occur but by what criterion we could say that it is wrong. I don't think that it would be wrong according to the consent criterion.

 

Scalia's Advice to New Grads

From the New York Post:

[A] platitude I want discuss comes in many flavors. It can be variously delivered as, 'Follow your star,' or 'Never compromise your principles.' Or, quoting Polonius in 'Hamlet' — who people forget was supposed to be an idiot — 'To thine ownself be true.' Now this can be very good or very bad advice. Indeed, follow your star if you want to head north and it's the North Star. But if you want to head north and it's Mars, you had better follow somebody else's star.

....

"Movement is not necessarily progress. More important than your obligation to follow your conscience, or at least prior to it, is your obligation to form your conscience correctly. Nobody — remember this — neither Hitler, nor Lenin, nor any despot you could name, ever came forward with a proposal that read, 'Now, let's create a really oppressive and evil society.' Hitler said, 'Let's take the means necessary to restore our national pride and civic order.' And Lenin said, 'Let's take the means necessary to assure a fair distribution of the goods of the world.'

"In short, it is your responsibility, men and women of the class of 2010, not just to be zealous in the pursuit of your ideals, but to be sure that your ideals are the right ones. That is perhaps the hardest part of being a good human being: Good intentions are not enough. Being a good person begins with being a wise person. Then, when you follow your conscience, will you be headed in the right direction."

Moral color blindness

It seems I'm not the only one to use that description. The same term is used here: Pajamas Media » How Should Conservatives Deal with the Left’s Disrespect and Lack of Empathy?

Jonathan Haidt...states:

“I think of liberals as colorblind,” he says in a hushed tone that conveys the quiet intensity of a low-key crusader. “We have finely tuned sensors for harm and injustice but are blind to other moral dimensions. Look at the way the word ‘wall’ is used in liberal discourse. It’s almost always related to the idea that we have to knock them down.”

Great minds...

Pharaoh, the Ten Plagues, and Iran

The owner of Bookworm Room comments on the ten plagues of Egypt, and the relevance today: Pharaoh, the Ten Plagues, and Iran

An antisemitic Jew I know, rather than seeing the Passover ceremony as the celebration of freedom (the world’s first and for a long time only successful slave revolt), and of justice and morality (the Ten Commandments), derides the whole ceremony as the unconscionable and immoral celebration of the genocide of the Egyptian people. What troubles him so much is the fact that, after each plague, when Pharaoh seems about to soften and let the Jews go, God hardens Pharaoh’s heart, leading to the necessity of yet another plague, culminating in the death of the first born.

There’s a much more profound purpose behind the ten plagues, and that is to remind us of the tyrant’s capacity for tolerating others’ suffering, as long as his power remains in place.

What Pharaoh discovered with the first nine plagues is that life can go on, at least for the ruler, despite an increase in the burdens placed upon his people. A blood filled Nile River may, at first, have seemed appalling, but the red receded and life went on. Pharaoh still held together his government. The same held true for each subsequent plague, whether lice or boils or wild animals or frogs, or whatever: As long as Pharaoh could maintain his power base, he was okay with the incremental decimation visited upon those he ruled.

Sheltered in his lavish palace, Pharaoh might worry about a populace starving and frightened, but that was irrelevant as long as that same populace continued to fear and worship him. The people’s suffering, ultimately, was irrelevant to his goals. It was only when the price became too high — when Pharaoh’s power base was destroyed because his citizens were destroyed — that Pharaoh was convinced, even temporarily, to alter his evil ways.

Human nature hasn’t changed much in 3,000 years. Think, for example, of both the Nazis and the Japanese at the end of WWII. For the Nazis, it was apparent by December 1944 (the Battle of the Bulge) that the war was over. Hitler, however, was a megalomaniac in the pharaonic mold, and his high command, either from fear or insanity, would not gainsay him. Rather than surrendering, the Nazi high command was willing to see its country overrun and its citizens killed. Only when the death toll became too high, and it was apparent that nothing could be salvaged from the ashes, did the war on the continent finally end.
....
But what about the innocent lives lost as a result of Pharaoh’s, the Nazi’s, and the Japanese high command’s intransigence? As the Japanese tale shows only too well, the innocents were always going to die, with the only question being whether they would die quickly or slowly. The same holds true for the Germans, whom the Nazis had long ago designated as cannon fodder to support their intensely evil regime. That’s the problem with an evil regime. If you’re unlucky enough to live under that regime, whether or not you support it, you’re going to be cannon fodder. Pharaoh will let you die of plagues, and the Nazi and Japanese leadership will let you be bombed and burned — as long as they can retain their power.
....
Liberals believe that it is immoral to impose serious consequences against the Iranian regime because there are innocents who will suffer from those consequences. What these liberals fail to understand is that, when power doesn’t reside in the people, but resides, instead, in a single group that is insulated from all but the most terrible strikes, imposing small plagues against the country (freezing a few bank accounts, public reprimands, vague threats) is utterly useless. These small plagues, no matter how much they affect the ordinary citizen, do not affect the decision-making process in which a tyrant engages. The only thing that will move the tyrant is to destroy his power base. Everything else is theater.