“Religious Freedom”

     I’m snowed in this morning, and the political news has been sort of flat lately, so I thought I might address the subject of religious freedom under the law: how far a religion may go in asserting the freedom of its adherents to live and act according to its doctrines, and how far the law, whether in an unbounded tyranny or in a republic such as ours that purports to recognize religious freedom, may go in qualifying the requirements and limiting the practices of a religion.

     Mind you, I don’t expect this to be a “comfortable” essay. Some of my Gentle Readers are likely to take umbrage at what I write. But that’s in the nature of both religion and law...isn’t it?

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1. What Is A Religion?

     Fundamentals are...fundamental. They come before all else. Therefore, in an inquiry such as this, they must be soundly addressed before all else. Only when we’ve established the two most fundamental considerations – the nature of a religion and the nature of law – can we make any headway on examining the interfaces between them.

     Men espouse many beliefs. Some of those beliefs are easily distinguished from the rest by their invocation of non-falsifiable premises. The premises of importance, for this essay, are the ones that address the possibility of entities and powers beyond those of our spatiotemporal domain.

     (An aside: I’ve resolved here to avoid the words real and reality. I intend to avoid the words exist and existence with equal determination. As Man is a material, time-bound creature, our vocabulary doesn’t cope well with propositions about the “reality” or the “existence” of non-material, supra-temporal beings. Our familiarity and regular interactions with material objects within our spatiotemporal domain can easily lead us astray.)

     Religious beliefs must be non-falsifiable, because by the very nature of human senses and abilities they are non-verifiable. Thus we establish our first firm condition for classifying some belief system as a religion.

     Some will counter that “in theory,” the truth or falsity of certain religious belief systems, including Christianity, could have been made testable and therefore falsifiable. They would propose a “chain of evidence” that unfortunately doesn’t exist, reaching from the life of Jesus of Nazareth to the present day, through which the veracity of the Gospels could be determined as if in a court of law. Leaving aside the “CSI objection” (“People lie; evidence doesn’t”), there are even more basic problems with such a notion. They arise from the Law of Alternatives:

For any irreproducible event, there will exist more than one explanation that does not require the denial (“It never happened”) of the event itself.

     In other words, a phenomenon that can’t be reproduced can’t be definitively – i.e., omitting all possibility of an alternative – attributed to a single causal model. Indeed, the history of the physical sciences suggests that that’s also true of certain reproducible events. But that’s to the side.

     To distinguish religious beliefs from other non-falsifiable beliefs, we must address their contrast from beliefs such as “The government is here to help me,” “My wife would never cheat on me,” or “My daughter is a virgin.” A religious belief must explicitly address entities that cannot be perceived – against their will, at least – by human senses. Moreover, such entities must be proposed to have a relationship with Man that begins with “Believe in Me” and continues on to “Live thus if you want Me to be happy with you.”

     This leads to a genus and differentia for religious beliefs:

• Genus: A non-falsifiable belief,
• Differentia:
  • About a non-material, supra-temporal entity or entities,
  • That have a determinative – i.e., proscriptive, prescriptive, or both – relationship with Man.

     Thus, while “global warming” is often derided of as a “religion,” the denotation is satirical only. In contrast, Christianity is a religion, as are Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, and so on.

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2. The Scope Of Law.

     A republic such as the United States, which nominally functions within a Constitutional framework, makes it relatively easy to determine the supposed scope of law. However, we’re not here for the easy cases. Let’s ponder the scope of law in the absence of such a framework: say, in a dictatorship where the decrees of a single individual constitute the “law.”

     If we start from the primitively brutal conception of law as a decree from an institution whose masters intend to back it with force, we can proceed without our usual concerns about Constitutionality and religious specifics. This is a fruitful origin for several reasons:

• There are far more governments that lack a Constitutional framework than possess one;
• Those that do possess one seldom regard themselves as bound by it;
• The squabbles about matters such as “interpretation” and “supreme authority” will go on forever;
• The dynamics of non-Constitutional orders are far more easily analyzed.

     Law stripped of all notions of “legitimacy” makes room for more practical considerations:

• What matters to the ruler(s);
• What matters to the subjects;
• The enforceability of the law;
• The probability of popular resistance or revolt.

     Many a historical ruler of theoretically unlimited power had a far lighter hand than our contemporary federal government. Such rulers exerted the forces at their disposal most predictably when defied. They were plainly less interested in exercising their notional powers than in retaining them. Yet among them were many who chose to decree a state religion. In some such cases, the observance and practice of that religion was made obligatory; in others, the subjects were merely expected to support it with a tithe.

     At the root of many such decrees was a need to put their regime on a religious foundation. The collaboration of Throne and Altar was critical to the perpetuation of many a monarchy. Here we see gropings for legitimacy that go beyond the might-makes-right rule of the preponderance of force. These became ever more important with the evolution of concepts of nobility and advances in technology that cast into doubt the proposition that any government, however constituted could really possess an unchallengeable preponderance of force.

     The ultimate priority of every government is to remain in power and to be acknowledged as such. The principal requirements for that priority are:

• A patina of legitimacy;
• Force enough to enforce its decrees;
• Laws whose enforcement the subjects will tolerate.

     Those three requirements interlock. They also interact with the dominant religious convictions of the subject populace.

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3. The Facts.

     Though it’s a near approach to tautology, we must allow that in any sociopolitical order:

• The effective degree of religious freedom will be what the politically significant (or protected) religious groups can get away with;
• The effective degree of religious constraint will be whatever the rulers can impose and enforce without adverse consequences.

     The incentives and penalties here are imperative in the extreme. No political system can long endure without the consent – grudging or otherwise – of the subject populace. Any widespread belief that clashes with the State’s decrees is a source of opposition to it. Therefore, the State will be minded to act against such beliefs...but if its decrees exceed beyond its power to enforce them to a sufficient degree, the consequences will be bad, for the discovery that the State can be defied without penalty will engender an ever increasing amount of defiance. Thus, the State must take care to “stay inside the religious lines,” whatever they might be, if it wishes to keep a grip on its pretense of legitimacy and its effective power to rule.

     Many tyrannies have discovered that the attempt to suppress certain religions and religious practices as hostile to the interests of the State is fraught with extreme peril. Only a group that’s both small and effectively demonizable can be treated in such a fashion with no risk of blowback. If you’ve ever wondered why the Jews have so frequently come under some tyranny’s hammer, now you know.

     The matter is murkiest in a multi-sectarian society with a political order that requires more than one kind of popular acquiescence. Different religious sects promulgate different standards of behavior. For example, there are sects derived from both Amerind and Caribbean belief systems that treat certain intoxicants as sacraments. Those intoxicants are banned by federal or state law throughout this country. Yet when it comes to those sects, the laws go unenforced under a rationale of respect for “religious freedom.” In point of fact, the State feels no such respect and would suppress Amerind and Caribbean uses of those intoxicants if its masters felt they could do so without unacceptable consequences. They cannot do so because even among Americans who support the drug laws, popular convictions about religious freedom would evoke unacceptable degrees of resistance.

     Inversely, American Catholic institutions are under tremendous political pressure to conform to certain laws that expressly demand the violation of Catholic convictions. The masters of the State have found in practice that they can enforce laws that override those convictions – that there’s sufficient popular support for those laws and for their enforcement, Catholics’ religious objections notwithstanding. The seeming paradox is that there are far more American Catholics than there are Amerinds or Rastafarians. What tips the scales is the magnitude of support for laws that require, say, Catholic pharmacists to sell abortifacients and Catholic employers to provide medical insurance that would cover abortions.

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4. The “Shoulds”

     “Should” – the modifier that denotes the imperative mood – is the toughest of all words to argue about. Many “shoulds” have been premised on beliefs that were later discarded, whether profitably or otherwise. Moreover, there’s no escape from that box:

     From propositions about fact alone no practical conclusion can ever be drawn. This will preserve society cannot lead to do this except by the mediation of society ought to be preserved. This will cost you your life cannot lead directly to do not do this: it can lead to it only through a felt desire or an acknowledged duty of self-preservation. The Innovator is trying to get a conclusion in the imperative mood out of premisses in the indicative mood: and though he continues trying to all eternity he cannot succeed, for the thing is impossible. We must therefore either extend the word Reason to include what our ancestors called Practical Reason and confess that judgements such as society ought to be preserved (though they can support themselves by no reason of the sort that Gaius and Titius demand) are not mere sentiments but are rationality itself; or else we must give up at once, and for ever, the attempt to find a core of 'rational' value behind all the sentiments we have debunked. [C. S. Lewis, The Abolition Of Man.]

     Whenever we use the word rights outside the legal context, we are saying “should” or “should not.” Such propositions, pace Lewis, cannot be proved or disproved. They can be denied; they can be violated, sometimes without penalty to the violator. But those are practical considerations only.

     When I wrote that:

     One of the least pleasant and most frequently averted objections to a demand for this or that is "Prove it:"
     Prove that what you demand is yours by right.
     Prove that the changes you advocate will do more good than harm.
     Prove that history offers us any evidence whatsoever in support of your theories.

     Virtually no one raises that objection in its simplest, purest form. The losses have been staggering.

     "You say your convictions are absolute? A clear matter of right and justice?" the counter-proselyte says to the proselyte. "But you can't prove them, can you? No, I can't disprove them, but neither am I inclined to allow you power over others on your representation. Go back where you came from and keep company with others of like mind. We'll have no truck with you here."

     This is practically the American credo...which we persist in setting aside with distressing frequency, usually in the hope of mollifying some noisy pressure group. Indeed, it's been off the socio-economic-legal-political playing field since about 1913. And in consequence, the promoters of nostrums crazier than any Napoleon-wannabe have had their way with us as we've stood by goggle-eyed.

     ...I was thinking of my fervent, long-held conviction that every individual has a right to be left alone: a “should” that many would accept but many others would reject. It’s as un-falsifiable, and therefore as un-verifiable, as the demands of those who’d elicited my denunciation. The irony, as I review those words of nearly four years ago, is simply overwhelming. The only support it has is essentially religious: my belief, shared by millions of others, that “it should be that way.”

     Marc Stiegler presented us with a sly “should” in his novel David’s Sling.

     "The Institute recognized three broad classes of decisions, and three broad methods of decision-making: engineering decisions, political decisions, and unresolvable decisions....

     "Engineering decisions were made by finding the correct, or best, answer. This was the best decision-making methodology whenever possible, but often human affairs proved too ambiguous for this wholly rational analysis.

     Political decisions were made by building an answer of consensus. In difficult cases, the consensus decision might be to let one particular man make a decision, but that was a form of consensus nonetheless. Because political decision systems could generate decisions in more situations than engineering decision systems, political systems typically gained pre-eminence over engineering. For the most part, this arrangement worked well—except that too often, the politicians made political decisions in situation where engineering applied, usually with tragic consequences. The key question was, how do you decide whether to use politics or engineering to decide? Politicians had all too often decided to use politics.

     Zeteticism had recognized an important truth: the choice between politics and engineering is always an engineering decision.

     Study that passage. (It’ll be on the final exam.) Find the hidden “should.” Decide whether you agree with the statement that contains it. Then consider whether you’d be willing to defend that statement in an open forum. Clashes between religious assertions and political assertions are of the very same sort.

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     As usual I could go on, but why bother? The problems involved are insoluble at the theoretical level. Only practical tests of State authority against popular sentiment can be studied – and worse yet, no one can accurately forecast the outcome of such a test a priori. Hari Seldon’s “psychohistory” remains a figment of the imagination.

     It is perhaps unfortunate, despite the reverence we associate with the Bill of Rights, that “freedom of religion” appears in the First Amendment. Endless arguments over what constitutes a religion that the State must abstain from infringing upon have come nowhere near settling the matter. Had our political order remained within strict Constitutional constraints – i.e., that the federal government may only do what’s expressly authorized in the Constitution; that the state governments may only do what’s expressly authorized in their constitutions and charters; and that all else is absolutely protected by individuals’ and voluntary associations’ uninfringeable rights – many clashes over religious freedom would never have arisen. Nevertheless, here we are.

     And we may expect the fusillades over what’s protected by religious freedom, and upon which of its fringes the State may tread, to continue for generations to come.

Legislative Encystments

     Unfortunately, I have a depressing subject for this morning’s screed. I know, I know: It’s Monday. Most Gentle Readers don’t need any more reasons to be glum. But then, you went to bed yesterday evening knowing Monday was coming, so why didn’t you brace for it?

     Anyway, quite a lot has been written in recent weeks about the war between the fledgling Trump Administration and the Deep State. Conceptions of the Deep State tend to converge on the great importance of the millions of persons in the Executive branch “alphabet agencies.” The tenacity of their hold on their positions is unequaled by any other category of worker, anywhere in the world, owing to Civil Service laws so indulgent that a bureaucrat who’d raped a minor in Times Square at high noon, with reporters from the Times as witnesses, could retain his job, salary, and all other perquisites during three years of hearings before being discharged. Needless to say, the Left has made the colonization and conquest of the bureaucracies a high priority.

     Outrageous. Intolerable. Terrifying and worse. But there’s more to the Deep State than that.

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     The array of unelected federal functionaries has more components than one, of course:

     [T]he legislator gives general orders to his chief of staff, who then sets the others to work composing a bill to that end. Parkinson’s Law kicks in at this point. A staff of twenty or thirty is inherently incapable of writing a short bill. Among other things, each staffer wants the final product to have his fingerprints on it, to prove his importance to his coworkers and to the legislator. The consequence is invariably a bill that runs to dozens if not hundreds of pages, reads as if it had been assembled from a congeries of legal treatises, obsolete encyclopedias, and phone books, and contains almost as many internal contradictions and ambiguities as there are words in it.

     Yet you might think that a federal legislator’s staff, which serves at the legislator’s pleasure and is not covered by the Civil Service laws, would be more likely to exhibit genuine loyalty toward the legislator, his convictions, and his agenda. That turns out not to be the case. Those staffers have far more in common, for both occupational and ideological reasons, with the time-servers in the bureaucracies than with their titular boss.

     Remember Robert Conquest’s Second Law of Politics: Any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing. This is well supported by recorded history. Moreover, it has some important corollaries:

• A left-wing organization will bend a substantial fraction of its efforts to corrupting other institutions;
• Absent countervailing survival imperatives, left-wing organizations will collaborate on their common agenda items;
• Once an organization becomes left-wing, it will remain unalterably left-wing unless destroyed root and branch.

     Now consider the circumstances of a federal legislator of conservative convictions, newly seated in Congress. Everyone else in the building has a staff of twenty or thirty; therefore he must have one too. Where is it to come from?

• Young lawyers in the private sector;
• Subject-matter experts from universities and think tanks;
• Veterans of government service, largely from the bureaucracies.

     A Congressional staff position is a prestigious job; the holder won’t want to lose it. Therefore, he must serve his boss in a fashion that persuades him, albeit subtly, that the staffer in question is an important pillar of support for his work. His competitors will be his fellow staffers, who share his desire to stand out from the crowd. He will seek allies wherever he might find them...and the bureaucrats in the alphabet agencies will prove only too happy to “help.”

     Remember the outlandish size of the typical Congressional bill. Remember the incentive that drives every staffer to ensure that his fingerprints are on it. Remember that the longer the bill, the less likely is a legislator to read more than a staff-composed precis. And remember how easily words such as “discretion” and phrases such as “reasonable and proper” find their way into such bills.

     The process is automatic; once in motion, it can’t be restrained. The legislator finds himself encysted and directed by the very persons upon whom he’s relied to keep pace with his fellows in Congress. There’s no more at work than the ordinary incentives that pertain to job holders everywhere. Yet it is curiously irresistible.

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     It takes a strength of will most federal legislators don’t possess to resist the above processes effectively. Even most of the strong-willed can be worn down, over time. That’s why there aren’t many long-serving legislators who both talk the conservative talk and walk the walk.

     Popular perception of these mechanisms might be dim and fuzzy, but the image has gained intensity as the United States has slid down the chute of bureaucratic totalitarianism. The “Flight 93” election of Donald Trump can be ascribed in large measure to that perception:

     Let’s be very blunt here: if you genuinely think things can go on with no fundamental change needed, then you have implicitly admitted that conservatism is wrong. Wrong philosophically, wrong on human nature, wrong on the nature of politics, and wrong in its policy prescriptions. Because, first, few of those prescriptions are in force today. Second, of the ones that are, the left is busy undoing them, often with conservative assistance. And, third, the whole trend of the West is ever-leftward, ever further away from what we all understand as conservatism.

     Within the Washington Beltway, those who do think that “things can go on with no fundamental change needed” are thick on the ground. Their dominance of the thinking and proposals that reach the floor of Congress are the broadsword in the hand of the Deep State. They cannot be thwarted by any measure short of the wholesale destruction of the bureaucracies and the Congressional staff system.

     Let the late, great Cyril Northcote Parkinson have the last word:

     [This stage] presents us with no opportunity to do anything. The institution is for all practical purposes dead. It can be founded afresh but only with a change of name, a change of site, and an entirely different staff. The temptation, for the economically minded, is to transfer some portion of the original staff to the new institution—in the name, for example, of continuity. Such a transfusion would certainly be fatal, and continuity is the very thing to avoid. No portion of the old and diseased foundation can be regarded as free from infection. No staff, no equipment, no tradition must be removed from the original site. Strict quarantine should be followed by complete disinfection. Infected personnel should be dispatched with a warm testimonial to such rival institutions as are regarded with particular hostility. All equipment and files should be destroyed without hesitation. As for the buildings, the best plan is to insure them heavily and then set them alight. Only when the site is a blackened ruin can we feel certain that the germs of the disease are dead.

     You might think he was kidding. I don’t.

Which Of Us Are “Secret Special Snowflakes?” A Sunday Rumination

     Apologies for the lack of an essay yesterday. I got caught up in a short story I conceived, early in the day, and I wanted to get it as close to completion as possible before my energies flagged. Anyway, here we are again.

     This emission on Gab got me thinking:

     Part of the problem with society today is that some women forget real men deserve to be spoiled too.
     Tell him he's handsome.
     Thank him for the things he does.
     Let him know he's appreciated.
     If he treats you like a queen, treat him like a king.

     Now, I have no problem with appreciating your spouse. (I certainly like it. Not that I get it from...oh, never mind.) But there’s more complexity to the malaise that men – especially married men – suffer than that.

     I replied to the above:

     I must quibble a little. Part of our current problem is that too many people (both sexes) feel "unappreciated" because no one is thanking them for doing what they're supposed to do: i.e., their duties and responsibilities. It's a big part of “special snowflake” syndrome.

     For saying that, a lot of people would flag me as “hard” or “harsh.” But seriously now: If you have a responsibility to discharge – one you freely accepted, perhaps by marrying in the first place – how can you deserve thanks for doing so?

     Give that a moment on your cranial carousel while I fetch more coffee.

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     I want to think of myself as a good person. Don’t you? But we’re all fallible. We all fall short sometimes. Unless you’re the Blessed Virgin Mary, you have something – perhaps a lot of somethings – to regret.

     But what is a good person, anyway? One approach would be to say that he’s one who:

• Does everything he must or should;
• Does nothing he mustn’t or shouldn’t.

     Those are individualized lists. Most of us couldn’t compose perfectly exhaustive, perfectly accurate ones of either sort; life in contemporary society is too complex. An honest person would have to doubt the completeness and accuracy of his recollection of all the various times he’s faced a duty or a temptation and done exactly what he should, when he should. We’ve been told far too often, by far too many “self help” gurus, to think well of ourselves. We’re much too prone to do so in excess.

     Now, as with all things, there’s a limit proper to self-criticism. One must not go beyond the recognition of one’s objective defaults. Perhaps we should call that the limit of self-condemnation. G. K. Chesterton criticized it harshly in The Defendant:

     There runs a strange law through the length of human history — that men are continually tending to undervalue their environment, to undervalue their happiness, to undervalue themselves. The great sin of mankind, the sin typified by the fall of Adam, is the tendency, not towards pride, but towards this weird and horrible humility.

     Grotesquely undervaluing oneself, failing to see one’s life not merely as a gift from God to oneself but to others as well, is something to avoid. You were important enough that your mother spent nine uncomfortable months producing you and eighteen years cooking for you, cleaning up after you, and wiping your nose; therefore you must count for something, at least to her. However, our primary failing – to slough consideration of the times we have not done what we should and have done what we shouldn’t – remains important enough to deserve frequent attention.

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     I can’t help but think of this subject through the lens of approved roles.

     (About 15% of the audience read the above and said to themselves “Oh boy, here he goes again.” Those persons should contemplate whether that might just be an indication that the subject makes them uncomfortable because it should. You know who you are.)

     Despite all the condemnations heaped upon the standard roles men and women have played in Western society – most commonly, husband, father, and provider; wife, mother, and homemaker – they remain important to many persons: persons who embrace them sincerely and strive to live them faithfully. Moreover, many of those who speak scornfully of those roles do so insincerely: i.e., because they secretly know that they lack the fiber required to fulfill the responsibilities attached to them.

     Specialty roles – e.g., priest or minister; employer; statesman – are more demanding. Most of us don’t have the fiber to fulfill their responsibilities. He who knows that about himself cannot accept such a role in full sincerity, though there will always be some who’ll do so anyway.

     (Are there “general” responsibilities that lie outside such roles? Yes, but they’re not imposed on each of us every day. We have a duty to be courteous in ordinary social and commercial intercourse; a duty to refrain from inflicting ourselves on others unwanted; a duty to contribute, albeit minimally, to the maintenance of public cleanliness and order. Occasions that invoke those duties are irregular, though when they arrive, they’re as imperative as the duties of one’s chosen role, if any.)

     In short, a role consciously embraced defines the responsibilities of him who accepts it, just as the script and stage directions define the responsibilities of an actor in a play. Here are your responsibilities, the role says: to do thus and thus, but to avoid doing thus and thus. They make plain the specific conditions under which one can consider oneself a good person.

     The reverse of the coin is just as important: he who sloughs his responsibilities is not a good person, for he has not kept his end of the bargain. He might not hear about it from those around him; these days it’s rather risky ever to criticize anyone for anything. But if he owns a conscience, he’ll hear it from a Critic Wo stands above all reprisals.

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     Recent trends in the promotion and pursuit of that most horrible (“O horrible, O horrible, most horrible!” Hamlet, Act I, scene 5) of all social shibboleths, “self-esteem,” have completely confused many younger Americans. They seem to have been convinced that they deserve not merely to feel good about themselves just for being alive, but to deserve approbation and praise from others. But if that were so, what reason would they have to do anything, or to deny themselves any indulgence? Why not lounge about lifelong, leaving others to see to the grubby work of existence while slave girls ply fans and feed us peeled grapes? (Seedless grapes, of course.)

     Put that way, it should be plain:

Existing entitles you to nothing.
Everyone has a row to hoe.

     Neither is it obligatory for others to thank us for doing what we should, any more than they owe us their thanks for not doing what we shouldn’t. They need not offer it and we should not expect it. Whether we receive such appreciation and approbation or go completely unremarked, even scorned, makes no difference to the imperativeness of our personal dos and don’ts.

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     Yes, there’s a religious aspect to this. I’ve just taken a while to come to it.

     “A man pays his bills, keeps himself clean, respects other people, and keeps his word. He gets no credit for this; he has to do this much just to stay even with himself.” – Robert A. Heinlein, Time For The Stars

     The Decalogue:

1. I am the Lord thy God; thou shalt have no other gods before me.
2. Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain.
3. Remember thou the Sabbath day and keep it holy.
4. Honor thy father and thy mother.
5. Thou shalt not murder.
6. Thou shalt not commit adultery.
7. Thou shalt not steal.
8. Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor.
9. Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife.
10. Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s goods.

     ...constitutes the set of “general responsibilities” to which we are all bound, regardless of anything else about us. The roles we choose for ourselves go atop those responsibilities. No one is exempt from them because of “other duties.”

     Why are there no escape hatches that would permit us to kill indiscriminately, or to cuckold one another, or pilfer from one another, or so on? Because the Decalogue is The Law of Stable Society. No society that flouts the Decalogue, in whole or in part, can flourish. Even chiseling along the edges – e.g., abandoning the support of our aged parents to the State rather than seeing to it ourselves – does great harm to the social order, as should be plain to anyone with eyes to see.

     God did not prescribe or proscribe for us on a whim. His laws are the laws of human nature, the rules for getting along and staying even with ourselves. Had He never delivered the Decalogue to Moses, those laws would be just as imperative as they were when Moses descended from Mount Sinai with the tablets.

     Good thing they’re simple and easy to remember, eh?

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     I could go on, of course. I could tie the above to the terrible deterioration of both the masculine and feminine virtues. I could delineate how the enervation of the concept of responsibility has parted generation from generation and sibling from sibling. I could demonstrate how the notion that “I should be thanked for what I do” leads directly to the sort of spousal friction that’s rendered contemporary marriages as fragile as spun glass. But my Gentle Readers don’t come here to read drivel that obvious.

     Do what you should and must.
     Refrain from doing what you shouldn’t or mustn’t.
     Having discharged your responsibilities, expect nothing and say nothing.

     May God bless and keep you all.

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A Bit More Blinding By “Science”

     The devotees of "global warming" are at it again. These idiots – and I use the term according to its dictionary meaning: persons of intellect so severely degraded that they shouldn’t be allowed out of the house alone – are crowing and having innumerable ecstasies over this supposed success by a climate model:

     Scott Adams, who’s a hell of a lot smarter than most folks would imagine a “professional cartoonist” to be, is probably holding his sides in by main force over this:

     I will bet anyone $1 million dollars that I can come up with a climate forecast model that ignores C02 and still predicts the temperature 30 years from now to within half a degree. Does anyone want to take that bet?
     Obviously there is a trick involved, so I won’t accept your bet for ethical reasons. But let’s see if you can figure out how I could win that bet every time.
     I am 100% confident I can build a climate prediction model, using my current skill set, that will predict the measured temperature in 30 years to within half a degree.
     Furthermore, you can pick whatever measurement type and place you want for the bet. My trick does not depend on doing anything clever with the measurement itself.

     The trick – which is actually a demonstration of a core principle of science – is called survivorship bias:

     Survivorship bias, or survival bias, is the logical error of concentrating on the people or things that "survived" some process and inadvertently overlooking those that did not because of their lack of visibility. This can lead to false conclusions in several different ways. The survivors may be actual people, as in a medical study, or could be companies or research subjects or applicants for a job, or anything that must make it past some selection process to be considered further.

     Survivorship bias can lead to overly optimistic beliefs because failures are ignored, such as when companies that no longer exist are excluded from analyses of financial performance. It can also lead to the false belief that the successes in a group have some special property, rather than just coincidence (Correlation proves Causation). For example, if three of the five students with the best college grades went to the same high school, that can lead one to believe that the high school must offer an excellent education. This could be true, but the question cannot be answered without looking at the grades of all the other students from that high school, not just the ones who "survived" the top-five selection process.

     Exactly. This sort of criterion for claiming knowledge is a classic logical fallacy. As Thomas Sowell wrote in The Vision of the Anointed, by using this sort of “logic,” one could “prove” that no one died in World War II, simply by interviewing only survivors.

     Trust only – and always with reservations – the predictions of a man who’s successfully predicted not one but many outcomes, always before the occurrence of the event and always by using the same causal model. As I wrote in one of my better short stories:

     "Are you a scientist in name only, Dr. Culloden, or in fact?"
     The researcher stiffened. "What do you think, my unwilling guest?"
     "I think you have evaded the question."
     "I am a scientist." He hurled the words at the Dark Angel, a return of service of the glove Uriel had hurled into his face.
     "What is the first rule of science?"
     "Prediction is knowledge."
     "How many counterexamples are required to disprove a theory?"
     Culloden could see the end of the syllogism. "One."
     "Then let us return whence you found me."

     Prediction is knowledge. By corollary, if one makes N “predictions” (where N is “enough to cover all the possible outcomes”), each of which differs from the others by no more than the previously agreed-upon acceptable margin of error, and afterward suppresses mention of the N-1 that fell outside that margin, one is not practicing science or demonstrating knowledge, but playing a confidence game, a sort of probabilistic Three-Card Monte.

     Even real, scrupulous scientists can fall afoul of survivorship bias. Sir Fred Hoyle knew that, too:

     "It looks to me as if those perturbations of the rockets must have been deliberately engineered," began Weichart.
     "Why do you say that, Dave?" asked Marlowe.
     "Well, the probability of three cities being hit by a hundred-odd rockets moving at random is obviously very small. Therefore I conclude that the rockets were not perturbed at random. I think they must have been deliberately guided to give direct hits."
     "There's something of an objection to that," argued McNeil. "If the rockets were deliberately guided, how is it that only three of 'em found their targets?"
     "Maybe only three were guided, or maybe the guiding wasn't all that good. I wouldn't know."
     There was a derisive laugh from Alexandrov.
     "Bloody argument," he asserted.
     "What d'you mean, 'bloody' argument?"
     "Invent bloody argument, like this. Golfer hits ball. Ball lands on tuft of grass -- so. Probability ball landed on tuft very small, very very small. Million other tufts for ball to land on. Probability very small, very, very very small. So golfer did not hit ball, ball deliberately guided onto tuft. Is bloody argument, yes? Like Weichart's argument....Must say what damn target is before shoot, not after shoot. Put shirt on before, not after event."

     Quite a few “investment gurus” have staked their reputations on having been right...once. Some of them are wearing orange jumpsuits and eating substandard meals today. Don’t stake your money on their supposed foresight.

     Or on mine.

Dismissals

     In a recent video, the invaluable Mark Steyn leans forcefully into a critical point about political discourse: it’s about persuasion. That, however, is something to which certain of the “discoursers” are unalterably opposed. Knowing how much it offends me to be on the receiving end, I try to police myself for such inclinations.

     Not everyone of a conservative or broadly pro-freedom mindset does so.

---

     What I have in mind at the moment is the following passage from a guest at Sarah Hoyt’s place:

     The Individualist is not trying to destroy all government. That’s the mark of the insane. What’s desired is lowering the dosage of government back down into the therapeutic range....Some regulation is desirable.

     I must differ, and very strongly at that.

     We could start with the last four words of that citation and work backwards. “Some regulation is desirable.” To whom? Who decides? According to what standard? A statement of evaluation is like that: it posits an evaluator and a standard, without specifying either. But the rest of us are entitled to question those unseen elements, and to differ with them – without suffering to be called “insane.”

     But there’s no need to work backwards. The faults start with the first sentence:

• Who is this “Individualist?” of whom you speak?
• What makes you so sure he would agree with your statement of his intentions?
• Are you prepared to have him call you "insane" should he differ with you?
• And this hypothesized "therapeutic range" for government...no, I can’t go on. The first 15 words were all I can stand.

     The author hasn’t argued against anarchism; he’s merely dismissed it and those who would argue for it. Insultingly, at that. Perhaps he felt he had to do so to continue on with his essay. Having read it, I’d say he should have spared himself the effort and written something worthwhile...perhaps a recipe for Franks & Beans.

     It’s a fine example of what Steyn decried in his video.

---

     Mind you, I’m not arguing with the author’s political position. Though I differ with him, I would agree that a very minimal government is desirable...if it can be stabilized and its minions compelled to obey the laws that bind the rest of us; that’s where the challenge lies. What I dislike is his arrogance: his readiness to insult those who see things differently.

     Martinets don’t make converts. They alienate those a good argument might reach. While I’ll readily grant that not everyone is reachable, those who display a willingness to listen and to take what they’ll hear seriously should be given the benefit of the doubt. That includes the treatment of their positions as ones that could be sincerely held by a man of good will – perhaps positions that you once held, or would hold were certain evidence and reasoning not available to you.

     I’ll allow that in our time, with so many people hurling insults in place of argument, the urge to “join in” can become very strong. I’ve felt that urge. I’ve occasionally succumbed to it. And to be perfectly fair, sometimes you’ll do no harm by it, because the persons at whom you’ve hurled your epithets have proved, with insults and condemnations of their own, that they’re not reachable — i.e., not men of good will.

     But to dismiss a position that varies from yours as “insane?” To insult others who agree with you on the importance of freedom but differ with you on how best to safeguard it? To insult others who might otherwise regard you as an ally in a noble cause? To insult a man who, for all you know, might be one of the foremost scholars of his place and time? To insult someone who might just know the subject under discussion better than you?

     Don’t. Just don’t.

     Jesus of Nazareth said it best: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” There are no exceptions for political discourse.

Unworthy: A Guest Rumination

     [The following came to mind because of several recent personal events, a long rumination over this column, and this Ace of Spades column about the mental soundness of the millennial generation. It was written by the petite powerhouse of Southern California, my beloved friend Duyen, shortly before she met and was courted by her husband-to-be Matt. It first appeared at Eternity Road on 9/21/2008. -- FWP]

---

Hello, everyone. It's Duyen again. Please bear with me. I haven't been writing much lately, for a simple reason: I've felt that I have nothing to say that anyone would want to hear.

Which is pretty much what this Rumination is about.

***

You've probably heard the phrase "impostor syndrome." It's applied to people who can't accept that they deserve the attention they're getting, or the esteem in which others hold them. (I just had a little shot of it this very instant, finishing that last sentence: "What sort of self-important moron worries about whether it's okay to end a sentence with a preposition?" I just told myself that Fran would frown at me if I didn't make the effort.)

I think the phrase was coined to avoid the use of an older term: unworthiness. A lot of people feel unworthy: of their jobs, their salaries, their homes, their safety and security, their pleasures, and the love of their spouses. The ironic part is that those folks go back and forth between chafing under the sense of unworthiness and arrogantly judging the worth of others, but we'll get to that later.

Unworthiness has religious connotations, too. Remember the centurion at Capernaum? "Lord, I am not worthy that thou shouldst come under my roof, but only say the word, and my servant shall be healed." Catholics make use of that phrase at Mass: "Lord, I am not worthy to receive you, but only say the word, and I shall be healed." It's a token of submission to the will of God, and a gesture of gratitude for the gift of the Miracle of Transubstantiation embodied in the Eucharist.

What a lot of Christians forget, at least from time to time, is that the separation between God and Man is completely unlike any other separation we know. It might be appropriate for us to feel unworthy of His gifts, but we can be certain that He doesn't think that meanly of us. He created us, one and all, with the potential to rise to His side on the Last Day.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

***

I went on a date the night before last, a fix-up arranged by a lady I work with. It wasn't successful. I dressed nicely, I tried to be agreeable and charming, he was on time, well groomed, and perfectly courteous. There was nothing really wrong with either of us, but our conversation just didn't work. Neither of us wanted to talk about our work, and we had a lot of trouble probing for one another's backgrounds and interests. Believe it or not, for most of dinner we would up talking about his medical history.

That's not a basis for romantic attachment.

It's a common enough complaint that people on blind dates don't know where to start with one another. It's partly from the "not the Girl Next Door" effect, but I think there's more involved. I think a decent person who finds himself dependent on blind encounters for a chance at love all too easily feels that he must be somehow deficient. Inadequate. Unworthy.

If you feel that way about yourself, you're going to have a lot of trouble making the personal disclosures that might persuade someone else to pledge himself to you. You'll hide yourself inside yourself. You might tell yourself that it's just self-protection -- "he could be a stalker or a rapist" -- but way more often than not, what you're doing is shielding your imagined shortcomings from someone else's inspection.

And that is so not a basis for romantic attachment.

***

There's a strong correlation between the modern plague of unworthiness and modern judgmentalism: the readiness to pronounce a verdict of unworthiness on someone else. We've been told to think that "I'm OK, you're OK," but a lot of us seem to prefer "I might not be OK, but you're at least as bad." I don't have figures; I just have the same personal, anecdotal experience of humanity that you have. Please, review your own memories and think about whether you get the same sense of the thing.

We all have flaws. No, I won't tell you about mine, at least not for anything less than a nice dinner out. But I have them, and you have yours. But really, what are they? Do you sometimes raise your voice when you get frustrated with your spouse, your kids, or other people? Do you sometimes kick an inanimate object because you injured yourself on it? Do you sometimes hang back from a chore you know you should do, by invoking the Southern California Excuse ("I'm just not into it right now")?

BIG BLEEPING DEAL!

Want to know something? You're worthy. Worthy of respect for being self-supporting. Worthy of respect for meeting your obligations, even if reluctantly. Worthy of respect for at least trying to do unto others as you would have them do unto you. And so is just about everyone you pass on the street.

If you don't think so, consider this: God created this entire universe specifically to give rise to you. More than that, He sent His Son to take human form and suffer death by torture for your sake. (For mine too, so no more wisecracks about Asian drivers!) How much more worthy could anyone be?

There are a lot of people who have a stake in making you feel unworthy. You can almost feel them groping for your pocketbook. Want to give them a little zing! at low cost? When one of them makes his pitch that you should submit to his notions and sacrifice your own freedom to them, smile and say, "God created this universe so I could romp around in it, so buzz off." You'll enjoy his reaction, I promise!

You can do that even if you're an atheist, by the way.

***

As much help as I've had overcoming the sense of unworthiness, I still get blindsided by it now and then. It will always be that way, maybe for all of us. It's just as important to be able to doubt yourself as it is to remember that God loves you and wants you to be eternally happy. The important thing is to stay strong. To keep faith. If you have faith that God considers us worthy of his love, you can convert it into another kind of faith: faith in yourself.

May God bless and keep you all.

Identities

     Let’s have a few, shall we?

• White
• Male
• Married
• Heterosexual
• Catholic
• Conservative
• Writer
• Retired
• Gun nut

     Strictly speaking, those aren’t identities, as they don’t specify any particular individual. Each is a characteristic a large number of persons exhibit. Even taken together, they don’t specify a single person. I can testify to that from personal knowledge: I am all of them and I know several other persons who would say the same. Yet the contemporary trend I shall christen identitarianism has used each, and many others, as a rallying-cry: a call for “unity” and in some cases for “action.”

     To be clear and candid about it, identitarianism is today’s version of collectivism: a particularly crude version thereof. The “workers” and “exploiters” garbage purveyed by the outright socialists didn’t float; the nation overwhelmingly rejected it. They to whom collectivism – a separation of the forces into Us and Them – is essential to their political initiatives had to try something else. A fair number of persons are buying into it.

     The worst excrescences are those used to demonize opponents of one’s political position.

---

     The bludgeon-words most frequently wielded today:

• Racist
• Sexist
• Homophobe
• Islamophobe

     ...are not “identities,” despite the Left’s relentless use of them to demonize us. Not one of them genuinely distinguishes its holder from everyone around him. However, they are the best known pseudo-identities being purveyed by the Left. He who is attacked with one of these rhetorical clubs is being labeled not as a racist, or sexist, or homophobe, but as a bad person: someone you need to know nothing else about. Someone you should not tolerate. Someone you certainly should not trust.

     As you, Gentle Reader, are a Gentle Reader of Liberty’s Torch, I’m sure I haven’t told you anything you didn’t already know. If you’ve been reading this pixel-blot on the World Wide Web for very long, you also know already that just as I possess all the characteristics I listed in the opening segment, I also possess the four immediately above. That is:

• I hold that there are objective statistical differences between the races that can be contextually important.
• I hold that there are objective statistical differences between the sexes that can be contextually important.
• I hold that homosexuality, particularly male homosexuality, is dangerous and life-limiting, especially to children.
• I hold that Islam is a cancerous totalitarian ideology that hardly bothers to disguise its ambitions toward the conquest of the entire world.

     Moreover, it’s a pretty good bet that you’d agree with all four of those convictions. Indeed, I’d wager heavily that objective tests would reveal that in practice, the overwhelming majority of Americans hold all four.

     An “in practice” test is a test of one’s behavior. In this case, it’s a test of one’s choice when confronted by distinguishable alternatives. I’ll formulate one example before passing on. Let’s imagine that you had to choose between two babysitters for your minor children, but you know only this about them: one is heterosexual and the other is homosexual. If you were prevented from learning anything more about them, which one would you select?

     A belief that common is, by definition, normal. That is, it pertains to the normal or average man. To dissent such a belief makes one exceptional, though not in any value-laden sense.

     So much for the use of such beliefs as identities.

---

     Identitarianism, like most left wing rhetorical tropes, is a substitute for argument. For Smith to demonize Jones is to insulate Smith from Jones’s logical or evidentiary thrusts against Smith’s positions. That Smith’s positions might have absolutely nothing to do with any of the characteristics he’s attributed to Jones is irrelevant; “good people” simply don’t pay attention to the arguments of “bad people.” That spares Smith the effort of learning how to argue.

     It’s a cheat. It’s obviously a cheat. Yet millions of persons have allowed themselves to be silenced by that cheat. Either they lacked the mental horsepower to penetrate to its irrelevance, or they were so embarrassed or offended by the implicit condemnation that they couldn’t bear to “stay in the ring.”

     Once again, Gentle Reader, hear my plaintive cry:

When attacked with any of the Left’s identitarian bludgeons, simply shrug and reply:
“So what?”

     It’s the perfect riposte to the identitarian tactic. It leaves the attacker speechless, unable to concoct a rejoinder, and stripped of his pretense of moral superiority. It inspires like-minded onlookers, who will be emboldened to use it themselves in subsequent exchanges. It’s the H-Bomb of contemporary political discourse.

     Normally it won’t provoke violence, though that might change as the Left becomes more frantic about its dwindling influence on Americans’ actual convictions. But that’s a subject for another tirade.

The biggest story of our time.

This Mark Steyn video is about 29 minutes long. It's absolutely brilliant. The part about what is the biggest story of our time is near the end.

He's absolutely correct about what that story is and how the media is consciously, with malice aforethought, doing all in their power to keep it from you.

Think about what that story is and this media suppression and you'll have the beginning of an understanding of the malign, satanic agenda that is being played out in all Western nations. I don't think even the term "Deep State" begins to describe the traitors who have worked so hard to bring this about.

The betrayal is staggering.

The video was part of the article "Something is Rotten in the State of Sweden." The Mark Steyn Show, 3/5/17.

A Maslovian Upheaval

     The patterns are beginning to coalesce in genuinely illuminating ways.

     I’ve written about America’s elite – actually, twice now – out of a sense that I ought to be able to light a few cranial bulbs merely by stressing the fact of its existence. After all, an elite is something “we’re not supposed to have,” at least in the political sense. No kings, princes, dukes, earls, counts, viscounts, barons, marquises, or whatnot allowed, right? Shall we all shout DEMOCRACY!! as one, preferably in the key of C?

     And yes, a few people did write to say that they’d been disturbed by the notion. Mildly, anyway. Yeah, yeah. Now tell us about corporate takeovers.

     It seems my fulminations were missing something.

---

     The indispensable Ace of Spades supplies the critical element: Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs:

1. Immediate survival.
2. Security against threats, immediate or potential.
3. Acceptance by a valued group.
4. Self-esteem.
5. Self-actualization.

     ...which Ace recasts from an explicitly political viewpoint:

1. Security from bandits, invaders, Vikings, street criminals.
2. Security from harassment or assault from government officials themselves. (Note that 1 and 2 can easily flip depending on which is more threatening, but generally, states are formed to defend a land against outside conquerers and then that state moves on to conquering its own people.)
3. Security from social or cultural degradation and being assigned to an officially or semi-officially inferior caste -- think "Civil Rights." Think casual slurs directed at any group.
4. Big picture, gut level, philosophy-defining questions, such as on abortion, the sanctity of marriage, whether the state will permit personal property or whether it will all be shared, whether criminals will be treated leniently or punitively, etc.
5. More wonkish refinements of the big-picture gut level items -- whether or not we'll have a border adjustment tax or an Ex-Im Bank or whether we will declare as a nation that we will go to war with Russia if it threatens Estonia, even though we all know it doesn't matter what we say, we won't go to war, but it's important for our self-esteem to claim we might.

     I might quibble over the placement of particular items in certain categories, especially at levels 4 (Self-esteem) and 5 (Self-actualization), but on the whole Ace has captured the political implications of Maslow’s hierarchy quite well.

     The insight here is so large that even a Certified Galactic Intellect can overlook it, purely out of the inability to “see the edges:”

The elite and the non-elite operate at different levels of the hierarchy. Moreover, at levels 4 and 5, the elite and non-elite apply different criteria.

     If you’re a member of the American political elite – and I severely doubt that one of them would bother reading Liberty’s Torch – until quite recently your level 4 criteria were all satisfied, and you spent your time and attention at level 5. For us of the hoi polloi, “the action” is elsewhere:

• Some of us are under immediate, survival-endangering attack (level 1);
• Many Americans are struggling for self-sufficiency (level 2);
• Acceptance can be elusive if your circle is politically divided (level 3);
• And many Americans’ self-regard is challenged by recent events (level 4).

     Very few non-elite Americans are fortunate enough to operate at the level of self-actualization.

     The property that determines whether one is a member of the political elite is access to power: more specifically, power over the non-elite. Such access virtually guarantees the elitist the satisfaction of his levels 1 through 4...or it did until recently.

---

     The election of Donald Trump, and the stunning discovery that he means to carry through on his promises, is of course at the base of the upheaval. The elite sees Trump and his agenda as an existential – i.e., level 1 – threat.

     Tom Clancy captured their upset beautifully in Executive Orders, the novel in which his perennial hero Jack Ryan assumes the presidency after the mass murder chronicled in Debt Of Honor:

     It was as though a foreigner had usurped the throne, not necessarily a bad man, but a different man who didn’t assemble people from the Establishment. They’d waited patiently for him to come to them, as all presidents did, to seek their wisdom and counsel, to give access and get it in return, as courtiers had for centuries. They handled things for a busy chief, doling out justice, seeing to it that things were done in the same old way, which had to be the right way, since all of their number agreed with it while serving and being served by it.
     But the old system hadn’t so much been destroyed as ignored, and that befuddled the thousands of members of the Great Network. They held their cocktail parties and discussed the new President over Perrier and pate, smiling tolerantly at his new ideas and waiting for him to see the light. But it had been quite a while now since that awful night, and it hadn’t happened yet. Networked people still working inside as appointees of the Fowler-Durling Administration came to the parties and reported that they didn’t understand what was going on. Senior lobbyists tried to make appointments through the office of the President, only to be told that the President was extremely tied up and didn’t have time.
     Didn’t have time?
     Didn’t have time for them?
     It was as though Pharaoh had told all the nobles and courtiers to go home and tend their estates up and down the river kingdom, and that was no fun—to live in the provinces...with the...common folk?

     Perfect. What we grubby groundlings see as a ray of hope, the possibility of salvation from Leviathan’s ever expanding maw, the elites see as a threat to what they value most – and critically, the power that’s brought them the goods we’ve struggled to amass and conserve.

     What’s followed...follows.

---

     Ace makes the stakes perfectly plain:

     Stated as offensively and provocatively as possible (and I'm cribbing this from a cynical friend): Morality is a luxury good. Rich, prosperous countries breed a value of life. Desperately impoverished people will murder people for a meal.

     Their protestations about “public service” notwithstanding, the elite are aware that their opulence and status are founded on exploiting their political power over the rest of us. Moreover, they know that were they in our place, they’d resent such treatment – i.e., what they’ve done to us – and want to take a bloody vengeance. That sense is what makes the ascendancy of Donald Trump a level 1 threat to them.

     Accordingly, just now, for the elite, there are no rules. They’ll do whatever they “must” to remove the usurper and reinstate themselves in Their Right and Proper Place.

     With that I yield the floor to my Gentle Readers.

A Great Light Dawns

     Time was, I was the only one talking about this:

     Lying is what they do because that’s all they have left on the left. They have no foundational principles except power. Their entire ideology is transactional – it’s not based on ideas but on payoffs to Democrat sub-sets. Here’s some dough for the baby crunching industry! We’ll hassle some Christian bakers for the SJWs! Let’s put a bunch of cis-het males of pallor who don’t even listen to NPR out of work in West Tennetucky, or wherever they grow coal, to delight our global warming cultist pals!

     Welcome to the party, pal.

     While the insight might be late in coming, it’s no less important for that. As I wrote five years ago:

     [T]here is a threshold at which any coalition will experience internal pressures that lead to its dissolution. The threshold might be numerical, or it might be economic, or it might arise from the addition to the coalition of an interest group inherently hostile to the interests of one or more other members.

     For a political party, the incontrovertibly important threshold is 50%. When that threshold is reached, the transactionalism becomes frenzied, for once a “winning majority” is in sight, the departure of any one of the member groups can undo it, and many – perhaps most — of the member groups will see that as an opportunity to “increase their take.”

     The presidential election of November 8, 2016 neatly illustrated this effect. The “traitor group” was blue-collar workers. Those workers had seen the Democrats pay off other groups to the workers’ detriment, thus robbing their political arm – the unions – of much of their power. The recognition lost the Democrats the blue-collar vote, which cost them a decisive number of Electoral College votes. Democrat strategists have wrung their hands over it ever since. Yet they remain unable to correct their course, for Democrat politics has been coalition politics since FDR. It’s all they know.

     The irony consists in the popular-vote balance, which favored Hillary Clinton overall – quite heavily in California, New York, and Illinois. Even after the loss of the blue-collar workers, the Democrat coalition commanded a majority of the Americans who showed up at the polls. They could have taken the presidential election of 2000 as a warning. They did not, though whether it would have made a difference is open to question.

     But I doubt that you, Gentle Reader, are here to read about the obvious, and I’m not here to write about it.

---

     The future of the American political system is murky. Two Democrat losses in the Electoral College despite significant national popular vote majorities have created pressure against the system. The thrust of that pressure, of course, is to undo the Electoral College system. As a Constitutional amendment to that effect would have zero prospects of ratification, the pressure is manifest entirely at the state level: agitation for state laws that would compel the state’s electors to cast their ballots for the national popular vote winner.

     This isn’t news, of course. The agitation became visible in 2001, after George W. Bush defeated Al Gore. However, its roots are even deeper than that. They reach at least as far back as Rutherford B. Hayes’s defeat of Samuel J. Tilden in 1876:

     In 1876, Hayes was elected president in one of the most contentious elections in national history. He lost the official popular vote to Democrat Samuel J. Tilden (due at least in part to Southern suppression of Republican votes, it is not known with certainty who won the actual popular vote) but he won an intensely disputed electoral college vote after a Congressional commission awarded him twenty contested electoral votes. The result was the Compromise of 1877, in which the Democrats acquiesced to Hayes's election and Hayes withdrew remaining U.S. troops protecting Republican office holders in the South.

     Post-Civil-War Reconstruction had created enough animosity toward the Republican Party in the South to give rise to what became known as the “Solid South:” a reliable source of Democrat votes, both popularly and in the Electoral College:

     The Solid South or Southern bloc was the electoral voting bloc of the states of the Southern United States for issues that were regarded as particularly important to the interests of white Democrats in the southern states. The Southern bloc existed especially between 1877 (the end of Reconstruction) and 1964 (the year of the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964). During this period, the Democratic Party controlled state legislatures; most local and state officeholders in the South were Democrats, as were federal politicians elected from these states. Southern Democrats disenfranchised blacks in every state of the former Confederacy at the turn of the century. This resulted essentially in a one-party system, in which a candidate's victory in Democratic primary elections was tantamount to election to the office itself. White primaries were another means that the Democrats used to consolidate their political power, excluding blacks from voting in primaries.

     It’s much to be regretted that this critical bit of American history is no longer a part of the typical high-school history curriculum.

---

     Only losers look to change the rules of the contest. He who loses repeatedly will be especially determined to do so. State-level initiatives such as the one mentioned above, and of course the Secretary of State project, have no other object. Whether they will make any inroads against the Constitutional position of the Electoral College is unclear.

     What I find myself wondering is what “lessons” the Republican Party has drawn from those two victories in defiance of the popular majority. Historically, Republican politics has not been coalition-minded. GOP strategists have seldom attempted group-oriented outreach, perhaps subliminally convinced that the Democrats’ hold on identifiable voting blocs is too firm to be profitably challenged. That conviction would be consistent with the GOP’s demographic and geographic strongholds. Even more salient, coalition politics having failed the Left, there’s no reason for Republicans and conservatives to think it would treat them any better.

     Yet the pressure on the GOP to think in terms of voting blocs is increasing. The slow but steady demographic changes in the American population have Republican strategists badly worried. The evident Republican domination of several pseudo-blocs:

• White men;
• Married women;
• Christian conservatives;

     ...has seduced several prominent conservative commentators. Should Republican kingmakers listen to their “advice,” it will reinforce the Democrats’ coalition strategy, by supporting their caricature of the GOP as a racialist / religious party.

     The strategies and dynamics of the 2020 presidential campaign will bear close scrutiny, for victory has its lessons, too. Which set will prove the more persuasive? We shall see.

Tapped Out

     I thought I had a subject for an essay. Really I did. But I’ve been sitting here staring at a blank screen for far too long now. It’s time to accept that I’ve run dry and allow myself a day off.

     I’ll see you all tomorrow.

Elites In Crisis

     Praxeology rests on the fundamental axiom that individual human beings act, that is, on the primordial fact that individuals engage in conscious actions toward chosen goals....Furthermore, that a man acts implies that he believes action will make a difference; in other words, that he will prefer the state of affairs resulting from action to that from no action. – Murray N. Rothbard

     The aim of the High is to remain where they are. – George Orwell, 1984

     The most obvious truths are among those men struggle most desperately to deny.

     Like a college fraternity, an elite of whatever variety is an in-group. Those “in” possess privileges, perquisites, and (in the specific case of governments) powers that those “out” do not. He who values those things will compare the requirements for admission and the barriers to entry to his own assets, motivation, and endurance, and decide on that basis whether to “pledge.” Similarly, each of those “in,” should they feel their status threatened by developments, will assess the magnitude of the threat and the difficulties of active resistance, and decide on that basis whether to fight – and how.

     Recent revelations, nicely aggregated and summarized here, make it seem incontrovertible that the political elite, a.k.a. “the Establishment,” has been waging a quiet campaign to defeat the Trump Administration before it can get fully into motion.

     Scoffers will scoff. They’ll slow-clap and bray “Yeah, yeah, another evil conspiracy.” And because conspiracy and allegations thereof have been systematically ridiculed for so long, they’ll succeed in deflecting some of the attention the timeline in that article would otherwise get. But in point of fact, a conscious, all-pervading conspiracy is not required for the events in the cited article to have their full sinister import.

     The individual members of the Beltway Elite, being uniformly motivated by the same considerations and to approximately the same degree, are all too likely to act uniformly in defense of their “in” status.” Given recent events, we may take it as written that that’s exactly what they’ve been doing.

---

     Members of the progressive Hive likewise act on their own instincts and have their own code of communication. They feel free, but they are also predictable. Liberals laugh at conspiracy theories that assume that because there is a pattern there must be some central control; but the fact that there is no central control doesn’t mean that there is no pattern. – Joseph Sobran, “The Hive”

     Several categories of actors have participated in the dogpile on the Trump Insurgency and its nominees. The federal officeholders are the most easily understood, as they have careers to preserve. Civil Service employees, though protected by law from dismissal for even the most grievous wrongdoing, will feel a similar impetus toward defense against the interloper and his lieutenants. Slightly less obvious is the central motivation of the media, which has become an open handmaiden of Big Government since the New Deal. Bluntly stated, the more government there is, the more things it involves itself in, and the more “access” reporters can acquire, the more there will be to report. Thus, they will feel much the same survival pressure to collaborate with those resisting the new regime as those more plainly affected – and they will do so whether or not their cooperation is requested.

     “Leaks” are the key. In the view of a reporter with “access,” a leak is merely possible material for his next story. While the reporter’s political preferences should not be entirely discounted, it is nevertheless to his practical advantage to use those leaks:

• That will entice the interest of many readers;
• That will enhance his reputation for investigating allegations of wrongdoing;
• That will further ingratiate him with those who’ve granted him “access.”

     It is plausible that the highest echelons of the Beltway Elite consciously set out on the path Joel Pollak has delineated. Such persons have great pride. They feel a terrible resentment of those who would undo their handiwork. They’re surely capable of using indirect implication to communicate their preferences to underlings. Some conscious collaboration among lower-level leakers is possible, but once the word has been whispered, it’s hardly required. The motivations that impel their disclosures are much the same as those of the strata above them. The matter passes thence to the media, of which the Left’s conquest is no longer in doubt.

---

"When we see a lot of framed timbers, different portions of which we know have been gotten out at different times and places, and by different workmen...and when we see those timbers joined together, and see that they exactly make the frame of a house or a mill, all the tenons and mortises exactly fitting, and all the lengths and proportions of the different pieces exactly adapted to their respective places, and not a piece too many or too few...in such a case we find it impossible not to believe that...all understood one another from the beginning, and all worked upon a common plan or draft, drawn up before the first blow was struck."— Abraham Lincoln, deducing from objective evidence the blueprint of a political plot to save the institution of slavery. [From Garet Garrett's essay "The Revolution Was"]

     Lincoln’s deductions notwithstanding, sometimes the cause-and-effect pattern we think we see is backwards from what has really occurred. While the bees in a hive don’t possess awareness of what drives their actions, human beings are more completely equipped. Sometimes our “bees” act originally on personal motivations, but later on become aware how their efforts interlock and synergize with the efforts of those around them. The questions that arise then are two:

1. “Do we want to keep doing this?”
2. “How will we get away with it, now that the pattern is so visible?”

     From the evidence, I’d say the media megaphones, the minions of the Deep State, and the more visible members of the political elite, to the extent that each participant has realized what the others are doing and how it interlocks with his own efforts, have answered those questions:

1. “Yes;”
2. “By doubling down and never letting up.”

     Will Trump and his lieutenants impose penalties upon any of those involved? Perhaps. Indeed, to judge from Rex Tillerson’s purge of the State Department’s 7th floor cabal, the process might already be in motion. However, the federal government is vast. Cleaning house will not be a quick purge. The media, of course, are beyond direct correction; all the new Administration can do is limit their access, thus compelling them to work for what they seek.

     We shall see.

Exploring the dark side.

Babylon 1900.

Once a thriving city of 40,000, East Cleveland now has a population of 17,000 and is in ruins, with street after street of abandoned and decaying homes and buildings. Former mayors and city officials are in prison for corruption. Schools that were once excellent now pass only two or three of 24 state tests, even though they receive more funding per pupil than most suburban schools. The police and fire departments are reduced to skeleton staffs, and many city services have disappeared. The mayor and city council president have recently been recalled, and the city’s only hope of survival is either declaring bankruptcy or merging with Cleveland. At one time, blacks moved to East Cleveland for a better life; now it is a destination of last resort.

Government is partly to blame. Section 8 subsidies and risk-free, government-sponsored mortgages give people no vested interest in their community. They are free to walk away from property in which they have invested nothing.

People who lived in East Cleveland as late as the 1970s have told me what a great town it was, and how they loved Shaw High School. Now there are no stores or businesses. Instead of living in an affordable community close to Cleveland’s cultural center, whites choose one-hour commutes and mortgages they can’t afford in order to escape from blacks. East Cleveland today is the result of a black population with black leadership, and until America begins to understand race, there are more East Clevelands in our future.^[1]

An example of what resulted when our finest social engineers thought of ways to deal with "poverty."

It turned out that the poverty in question was poverty of the spirit.

Charlie Brown, come kick this football!

Notes
^[1] "How I Learned About Blacks." By William Hendershot, American Renaissance, 2/10/17.

Tally ho.

Within hours of the election of Donald Trump the mainstream media, their politico counterparts and social media operatives began spreading the narrative that the President was only elected as a result of the dissemination of fake news.

The Mainstream Is Circling The Wagons: “They Are Coming For All Of Us… This Is An Orchestrated Attack Against Truth. By Mac Slavo, SHTFplan.com, 3/1/17.

H/t: Zero Hedge.

What Will it Take for Europeans to Push Back?

A smart woman.

The Creation And Perpetuation Of An Elite

     It would be like him to do that; that was the sort of thing he thought about. Martingales, Chiffney bits, boots; where you got the best soap, the best brandy, the name of the chap who rode a plater down the Khyber cliffs; the spreading power of number three shot before a charge of number four powder...by heavens, I hardly ever heard him talk of anything else. Not in all the years that I knew him did I hear him talk of anything but these subjects. Oh, yes, once he told me that I could buy my special shade of blue ties cheaper from a firm in Burlington Arcade than from my own people in New York. And I have bought my ties from that firm ever since. [Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier]

     The nature of an elite is plain from the attitude of those who claim to belong to one: We’re superior to you. It doesn’t matter how elaborately an elitist dresses his snobbery in noblesse oblige. The snobbery – the air of elevation over others – is the meat of the matter.

     The snobbery is a required element. It contributes to the perception of an elite by “outsiders.” Superiors must act superior, whether blatantly or subtly. It’s also indispensable to the perpetuation of the elite veneer. If elitists were to refrain from lording it over others, they would soon forfeit all claims to elite status.

     And it must extend to the smallest, least consequential of matters.

---

     Dystopic, who’s getting to be a power in the Blogosphere, has posted a humorous and penetrating article on a key aspect of elitism. An indicative snippet:

     Food virtue signalling, or more aptly, food snobbery has been a thing for a very long time. And like political virtue signalling, it is all about display one’s superiority over another based on some irrelevant metric. “Look at me,” says the narcissist, “I’m superior because I like my steak rare.”

     Of course, it is not merely steak that has suffered this effect. Wine has traditionally been a strong bastion of snobbery, but the practice has moved to craft beer. Now, again, don’t get me wrong, I like craft beer. For the longest time, I thought I didn’t like beer, because I found Bud, Coors, and Miller Lite to be foul-tasting beverage abominations. But therein lies the point: I found them foul. Another man might like them. Indeed, even today these beers sell like hotcakes. Obviously somebody likes them.

     If the President wants a Bud Lite, get him a damned Bud Lite. And just because you drink Dogfish Head 90 minute IPA (which I also find foul, by the way, as it’s a totally overrated beer in my opinion) doesn’t mean you are a better man, or have a more “elevated” palette, or anything of the sort.

     Please read it all.

     Snobbery of the palate is one of the most common components to elitism. It’s been around for a long time. Note the dishes supposedly elite chefs concoct on cooking-contest shows. Note the bizarre ingredients they frequently incorporate. Note the incomprehensible foreign-language names attached to the resulting dishes. Note the still more incomprehensible comments the “judges” make about those dishes. Note – and ponder.

     The “judges” supposedly have “cosmopolitan tastes” and “educated palates.” They muse and declaim over the dubious plates nervously set before them like Aristotle contemplating the bust of Homer. But how often do they take more than a tentative bite from what’s set before them? How often would you, Gentle Reader, willingly partake of those...creations?

     I submit to you that if it isn’t 100% pretense, it comes damned close...and that there’s a lot of upchucking being done and antacid being consumed behind the scenes.

---

     A personal note: I’m particularly exercised by wine snobs: the elitists who specialize in telling us from their oh-so-overflowing founts of knowledge and experience which wines we “should” prefer. I can’t stand the wines they advocate. I can’t stand them.

     Wine is a luxury beverage; the more expensive, the more extreme the luxury. A luxury is pointless if it isn’t enjoyable. Shriekingly expensive wine that tastes unpleasant and is difficult to swallow is the antithesis of enjoyable, and therefore the antithesis of luxury. “Pointless” is the mildest of the adjectives applicable to it.

     I submit that the evidence that wine elitism is pure pose is available at any of their much-promoted “tastings.” Here’s a humorous take on it:

     Beneath the obvious humor, there’s a lot of truth in that commercial. Wine snobs often fulsomely praise wines that fight being swallowed: they’re so astringent and acidic that the throat struggles to reject them. If you’ve ever seen a bunch of wine snobs at a wine tasting, of the sniffing, staring, swirling, delicate sip, and the spitting-out, the last part is the only bit that was sincere.

     I’ve been there, Gentle Reader. I’ve actually been there. The miasma of assumed superiority, the pretense of refinement and erudition that eclipses the tawdry tastes and preferences of us grubby groundlings, is thick enough to sculpt.

---

     “Of tastes there is nothing written,” says the Talmud. That grates on those desperate to consider themselves superior and to advertise their superiority. They do it to exalt themselves over us of the Fish Sticks and Tater Tots with a White Zinfandel set, of course, but just as imperatively to signal their membership in “the better sort” to others who share their aspirations and pretenses. The signaling is what matters.

     Dystopic has applied the phrase “virtue signaling” to elitism of the palate. This is indeed part of the syndrome, for an elitist wants to be taken as superior to others in all ways, but most emphatically in virtue. Yet just as there’s no virtue involved, there’s also no true superiority. Their pretenses are merely emblems to imply superiority via membership in a difficult-to-join group.

     In truth, the emblems – the difficult, expensive, unpleasant practices they embrace and promote as badges of membership in their set – are all elitists have. It’s almost a reason to pity them.

     Almost. Not quite.

That peculiar leftist disconnect from reality.

Left wingers are just stupid and hypocritical. They’re always waxing sentimental about mass murderers Lenin and Stalin put poor Vlad Putin, who is possibly associated with around four mysterious deaths, is a “thug, criminal and threat to world peace and human rights”.^[1]

I am not sure hypocrisy's involved. That presupposes conscious knowledge and an intent to purvey something that is contrary to what you know to be true. The basic knowledge simply is not there. It's willful blindness at best but blindness nonetheless. Dictatorial powers and unchecked centralization are seen as long-overdue, cost-free improvements. Said Woody Allen at this link:

I am pleased with Obama. I think he’s brilliant. The Republican Party should get out of his way and stop trying to hurt him. It would be good if he could be a dictator for a few years, because he could do a lot of good things quickly.

The quotation at the top of this post reminds me of the Treason Class hypocrisy in Europe. Strengst verboten to utter a discouraging word to or about invading savages. It's ostracism, prosecution, and penury -- and possibly even loss of your children -- for anyone so unwise as to do that.

But it you're an important official and bring in foreign, hate-filled savages to rape, kill, assault, sponge off, and dispossess your putative countrymen, well then, it's the Coudenhove-Kalergi prize and lucrative employment for you.

Criticize your obvious enemies? Point out that they obviously don't belong in a European nation?

Misery.

Import and protect the enemies of your countrymen?

Prosperity!

I think now that the acid test for spending any time discussing the present danger with someone is whether they can correctly identify the single most disastrous event of the 20th-century, viz., the Bolshevik revolution. If someone can't tell you that that was the watershed event and why, you're wasting your time to discuss anything with them except recipes, the weather, and Whoopi Goldberg.

Notes
^[1] Comment on "A Budget Without Russians. The Empire’s Nightmare." By Fred Reed, The Unz Review, 2/23/17.