Why Are Conservatives So Mean?

A man named Andrew Klavin who writes action stories for movies has put a great video together asking the question Why Are Conservatives So Mean?

This is worth a watch. I have the hunch that Klaven is going to become a bigger voice.

Thanks to PJTV as the site where I found this video.

Find Your Voice

Like it or not, we are engaged in a major political battle - the battle of Freedom versus Slavery. Although our country has been slowly drifting toward a fascist totalitarian state for many years, right now Obama and the Democrats are into a full-fledged revolution - a change-over of the political system of the United States of America - the eradication of freedom in every major realm of life - the economy, health-care, energy, education, speech - everything that counts in whether we as free men determine the course of our lives, or as unfree men are going to be a nation of "nothing more than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd." (Alexis de Tocqueville)

How to fight this revolution is an urgent concern.

Robert Villegas put together three YouTube videos on how to Find Your Voice in the current battle. I thank him for his work. It is worth your listening.

Why Conservatism is Floundering; Also Libertarianism

The bottom line regarding Conservatism's death throes is that it justifies liberty on the grounds that it produces the greatest overall good for society. In other words, conservatism is not grounded in the individual as the justification for life and its consequence, a valid social life, but rather a utilitarian ethic that regards the society or the group as the thing of ultimate value. Thus it advocates one program after another tromping on the rights of one man or group of men justifying it as in the interest of the greater good. This moral grounding means that conservatism is collectivism and political action is all either socialism or socialism-lite.

cartoon by John Cox

A stark example of the conservative position is their view on abortion which turns the woman into the property of the state by saying that a fetus has rights (things attended to by the state) and she cannot abort it even though she is an independent individual adult with a mind and a life of her own. The minute she is pregnant the net effect, according to their view, is that she is a slave to society and must nurture that fetus and deliver the baby to society. Given their views, there is no socialist program that conservatives would not eventually adopt; just make it slower, please.

Ayn Rand's philosophy of objectivism's grounding, on the other hand, is the individual life and its requirements for living. Essentially this amounts to the requirements for his mind to function and be able to be used as his means of survival. Man needs political freedom to live because his mind is his fundamental tool of survival and a mind cannot be forced. It only works when free to consider the alternatives that it sees, draw conclusions and act from there. From this basic premise, government's purpose is to protect individual rights, which means to protect the individual from other men's violations of those rights. Government's purpose is to render any and all situations back in alignment with individual rights. The is the role of justice.

Libertarianism also fails because it is the attempt to erect a political philosophy on its first premise: If a man's life is sacrosanct then another man cannot initiate force against him. The reason Libertarianism fails is not because it's basic principle is false but because it is not grounded on an ethics and the philosophical principles beneath ethics, namely metaphysical and epistemological principles. Without an ethics it is unable to morally justify its basic social principle. By default, it gets caught in the same moral morass that we are in today and has nothing to offer as a resolution.

Rand has resolved this conundrum and that is why her work is worth considering. Of course all of those unwilling to do the heavy lifting in thinking this through are not going to like her. They just react to her based on their beliefs. That will not get the job done now. With Rand's identifications in existence, the jig's up on all forms dependent upon the sacrifice of the individual to the group.

Watching the corpses of these old justifications twisting in the wind is a spectator sport in itself. Conservatives are desperately trying to find a platform that people will buy into even though their moral base is corrupt. Given that the Democrats are a more consistent example of the conservatives' underlying premises of socialism, the Democrats are in the dominant position so long as the bulk of our society buys those premises. They are dominant because they are more consistent.

Reality does not countenance socialist principles for society organization. It is a proven failure. Thus neither party has a real life unless it is willing to get increasingly bold in its use of physical force against innocent men. And then it only has a life until it is overthrown by the next group that the public thinks has a better idea of effecting the same principles.

For freedom to exist in the United States, it is the moral premises that support socialism/collectivism that must be overthrown - overthrown by reasoning individual minds. And the choice is stark: Black or white, A or non-A. Either you choose life and the form it comes in, the individual human being, as primary or you don't. Either you do not accept slavery or you do. Until then war and rumors of war is our fate, be it on the scale of the global, the continental, within our country or within our separate communities. That fight is always over the most popular idea for determining the greater good.

When people are willing to let go of the greater good as the moral justification for every social action because they see it doesn't work and is a false idea, then there will be a possibility for individuals and thus an authentic, life-serving human society.

Until then and forever:Viva Individualismo!

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Thanks to the recordings of Yaron Brook's visit to the Adam Smith Institute in Great Britain for clarifying this distinction for me. His speech is recorded in four parts: Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV. The Q&A which is also also illuminating is recorded in seven parts: Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV, Part V, Part VI, Part VII.

Obama Man

Understanding Obama and What to Do About Him

For your information, I took down this post advocating ridicule of Obama.

I don't like ridicule either and am not good at constructing it or delivering it. I see it as an act of dehumanization which means it is an act of war.

From what I see, Obama is at war - with us, the people of America. And he is slick in the way he talks such that he is getting away with it. If you want to hear someone analyze how he gets by with this, watch this.

I see America as a battered wife. Obama goes abroad and apologizes for our bad behavior. He cavorts with the "bad people" and says that morally this is the right thing to do. He comes home and throws his weight around, forcing people to his will regardless of rationality and the systems in place for achieving that. Then he turns nice and wants to take care of us when we are sufficiently weak and demoralized. We want to love him. We try. We keep hoping. And the cycle continues.

Imagine that you were with your father outside the home (I use this metaphor because Obama is dictating how things go at home like he is the all powerful father) and the first thing out of his mouth, after a couple pleasantries, bows and fist-bumps, is an apology for your behavior. OK. How would you feel? Ashamed? Angry? Disrespected? When we get back home he gets out the strap and forces or threatens to force you to his dictates. You haven't done anything wrong. You've just been a normal child. If you had done something wrong, you could understand it, but this plainly makes no sense.

Obama is using force all over the place. There is no rational excuse for his behavior. It is criminal and he dehumanizes businessmen and thinks he can do anything he wants, give some "cockamamie" reason for it and it is OK. It is not OK. For this reason, he deserves no quarter and however people want to fight him is not something I am going to blame them for.

On the other hand, since we are where we are, it is ideas that are going to have to be advocated, so long as it is possible to advocate them, for there to be a change in the minds and then the actions of the American people. For this reason, I do not want to see Obama martyred because it would likely mean that his ideas would become something that they aren't. Along with his current godlike status, the ideas he advocates which - to those who want to blithely believe him - are Christ-like in their supposed goodness. You and I know they produce the opposite effect.

I think we are at a juncture, a tipping point, in history. The issue is the advocacy of the group vs. the advocacy of the individual. Further I think Yaron Brook (at the video link above) is right in that it is the underlying moral issue of self-sacrifice vs. self-interest that has to be challenged. And the battle for the mind of man must be won in favor of his individual right to use it. I hope that Obama is the means for the resolution of this battle.

And the above is on a good day - even a moderate day. On a bad day, it is war.

President Dwarfs Liberty

This comment is not about Obama disregarding liberty which is everywhere in the news. I've been railing against that regularly. Rather it is about how he handled the incident.

Obama's handling of this incident was irritating. He didn't own his responsibility as a leader. The buck stops here, remember?

Air Force One is his plane while President and directly under his command. A mature option, which does not come natural to Obama, is that he would have owned that he had made a thoughtless choice - a mistake. If he had an insubordinate in his ranks, he is responsible for that person's choices too. Instead he said he learned of it when the media did - as if he had no knowledge of where his plane was. This had him appear as an idiot.

Although I read where he or someone on his staff had apologized, I didn't hear him apologize on the news clip I saw. This kind of dodging isn't something I admire, I can tell you that.

The Delusion

Obama plays Aion

Light and Air on Global Warming

The TIA Daily published this on April 30, 2009. When I read this, I got happy.

[T]here has been a MAJOR change in the way that the Australian media are reporting the AGW [anthropogenic (human-caused) global warming] issue, led nobly by newspaper The Australian. The change has been stimulated by a Canberra Senate select committee that is discussing the tabled ETS legislation, and also by the release of geologist Ian Plimer's new book, Heaven and Earth. Global Warming: The Missing Science….

The trend of balanced media comment has continued this week, culminating with a splendid article…by Jan Veizer in today's Australian.

That article sums up the state of genuine science on the real causes of global temperature fluctuations. The basic picture is that dihydrogen monoxide gas—water vapor—is a far more powerful greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, and that the natural interaction of solar radiation and water vapor (including the mechanism of cloud-formation discovered by Henrik Svensmark) is what really determines global temperatures.

Atmospheric CO2 is thus the product and not the cause of the climate, as demonstrated by past records where temperature changes precede changes in atmospheric CO2 concentrations and fluxes.

Another article in The Australian describes the general turning of the tide on global warming:
With public perceptions changing so dramatically and quickly it is little wonder Ian Plimer's latest book, Heaven and Earth, Global Warming: The Missing Science, has been received with such enthusiasm and is into its third print run in as many weeks.

The public is receptive to an expose of the many mythologies and false claims associated with anthropogenic global warming and are welcoming an authoritative description of planet Earth and its ever-changing climate in readable language.

I checked in on all of this with my antipodean correspondent Tom Minchin, who confirms that this is all true.

The journalist leading the charge is Andrew Bolt of the Melbourne Herald Sun. But The Australian is growing in confidence and the rejectionism is spreading. One of the most remarkable changes occurred two weeks ago [April 13] when leading AGW hysteric Paul Sheehan (who writes for the main Sydney newspaper the Sydney Morning Herald, which has done as much to project the myth of AGW as any newspaper here) reviewed Ian Plimer's new book and admitted he was taken aback.

Here is how Sheehan's review begins:

What I am about to write questions much of what I have written in this space, in numerous columns, over the past five years. Perhaps what I have written can withstand this questioning. Perhaps not. The greater question is, am I—and you—capable of questioning our own orthodoxies and intellectual habits? Let's see.

The subject of this column is not small. It is a book entitled Heaven and Earth, which will be published tomorrow. It has been written by one of Australia's foremost Earth scientists, Professor Ian Plimer. He is a confronting sort of individual, polite but gruff, courteous but combative. He can write extremely well, and Heaven and Earth is a brilliantly argued book by someone not intimidated by hostile majorities or intellectual fashions.

The book's 500 pages and 230,000 words and 2311 footnotes are the product of 40 years' research and a depth and breadth of scholarship.

With this awed endorsement of Plimer's scientific credibility, Sheehan then summarizes Plimer's argument:

Much of what we have read about climate change, he argues, is rubbish, especially the computer modeling on which much current scientific opinion is based, which he describes as "primitive."…

The Earth's climate is driven by the receipt and redistribution of solar energy. Despite this crucial relationship, the sun tends to be brushed aside as the most important driver of climate. Calculations on supercomputers are primitive compared with the complex dynamism of the Earth's climate and ignore the crucial relationship between climate and solar energy.

"To reduce modern climate change to one variable, CO2, or a small proportion of one variable—human-induced CO2—is not science. To try to predict the future based on just one variable (CO2) in extraordinarily complex natural systems is folly."

In response, this is Sheehan's conclusion:

Heaven and Earth is an evidence-based attack on conformity and orthodoxy, including my own, and a reminder to respect informed dissent and beware of ideology subverting evidence.
The title of Sheehan's article? "Beware the Climate of Conformity." He never actually comes out and says that Plimer's argument against man-made global warming is correct or that he agrees with it. But I don't think this review can be interpreted as anything other than a capitulation. It cedes to the skeptics the high ground of being "evidence-based" and accepts the characterization of the global warming promoters as dogmatic conformists.

Australia is not that different from America. If a shift in opinion against the global warming dogma can happen there, it can happen here, particularly when Plimer's book finds an American publisher.

...

The task of discrediting the global warming propaganda campaign—and fending off or rolling back global-warming regulations—will certainly be long and difficult. But Australia has just provided us with evidence that it is possible.