Values and Duties

Frans de Waal has a follow up at The Opinionator to his post last month titled Morals Without God about which we commented here. Apparently de Waal has received a lot of angry emails from atheists taking him to task for being insufficiently hostile to religion.

His response affords an occasion to emphasize more explicitly than I perhaps did in the earlier post what I think is an important distinction in the discussion of whether God is necessary for morality.

Atheists will often insist that they can be, and often are, just as morally good as anyone else and that God is not necessary for them to be so. What they mean by this, I take it, is that they can hold the same values as does any believer without the concomitant belief in God. An atheist can be just as kind, generous, peaceful, gentle, loving, etc. as anyone else.

My argument is that this is certainly true, but it's entirely beside the point. The debate is not over whether an atheist can hold a particular set of moral values, the debate is over whether an atheist is constrained by any moral obligation to abide by one set of values rather than another. In other words, if atheism is true can there be moral duty?

The answer to that, it seems to me, is no. If there is no transcendent moral authority to impose an obligation on us to, say, care for the poor, then there is no such obligation. It might be objected that the individual himself can impose the obligation, but a self-imposed obligation is an illusion. If someone sets himself up as his own moral authority and imposes an obligation upon himself then he surely has the authority to rescind the obligation whenever it suits him. An obligation that can be repudiated whenever the person who is under the obligation chooses to cast it off is no obligation at all.

An atheist can choose to be kind and generous, but if he's right about God his choice simply reflects an arbitrary preference. Had he chosen to be cruel and selfish he would not be wrong. His values could not be said to be morally inferior, they're just different values.

An irony in all this is that the atheist lives by a superstition. She believes that something called moral right exists when in fact, on atheism, it not only doesn't exist, it cannot exist. But this means that an atheist should logically be a nihilist and most atheists cannot live with that conclusion even though its where their reason leads them. Instead they deny what reason dictates and live instead by their feelings. In order to believe that moral values matter, that some values are better than others, they must leave reason behind and make an irrational leap based upon their own personal moral tastes.

A further irony is that certain of their number (e.g. Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris et al.) then scoff at Christians and other theists for holding what they allege is an irrational belief in God. They claim that the Christian is irrational despite the fact that a Christian can live perfectly consistently within his basic assumptions about God, whereas most atheists cannot live at all consistently with theirs.

It'd be funny were it not so tragic.

Reducing the Deficit

It looks like we're at least getting some movement on reducing spending and trimming entitlements. The two co-chairs of a presidential commission established to come up with ideas for reducing our government's enormous appetite for spending have produced a series of proposals that has in it something to antagonize pretty much everyone, but at least it should give us something to build upon:

A presidential commission’s leaders proposed a $3.8 trillion deficit-cutting plan that would trim Social Security and Medicare, reduce income-tax rates and eliminate tax breaks including the mortgage-interest deduction.

The plan would throw out hundreds of tax breaks for items such as capital gains and child care. It would raise the gas tax, slash defense spending and bring down health-care costs by clamping down on medical malpractice suits. The Social Security retirement age would rise to 68 in about 2050 and 69 in about 2075.

None of the proposals would take effect next year to avoid disrupting the economic recovery. Under one option, income-tax rates would be reduced to three levels: 8 percent, 14 percent and 23 percent. Currently there are six tax levels ranging from 10 percent to 35 percent. The corporate income-tax rate would be cut to 26 percent from 35 percent.

Wiping out all tax breaks, including the home mortgage deduction, while lowering rates would cost taxpayers $100 billion a year under the plan.

Increasing taxes and cutting defense spending will not be popular with conservatives, although the simplified tax rates will be, and Nancy Pelosi has already voiced her objection to tinkering with Medicare and Social Security:

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California called the plan “simply unacceptable,” saying older Americans “are counting on the bedrock promises of Social Security and Medicare.”

This seems an odd objection since as far as I can tell from the article, few of today's "older Americans" will still be around when the new retirement age goes into effect.

Anyway, a detailed list of proposals can be found here. Something has to be done soon as one of the chairmen said when the proposals were released:

“This country’s out of money and we better start thinking,” said Erskine Bowles, co-chairman of the panel created by President Barack Obama. Without “tough choices,” Bowles said, “we’re on the most predictable path toward an economic crisis that I can imagine.”

Indeed. If we don't do something to reign in entitlements and reduce the deficit the country our children and grandchildren inhabit will look very much different, and very much poorer, than the country we live in today.

Microfinance in China

Yesterday we talked about microfinance as a great way to help the world's poor improve their condition. I received this email in response, and I thought some of our readers might be interested in it:

To Viewpoint,

My name is Brendan Rigby, and I am a volunteer representative of Wokai a microfinance organisation dedicated to poverty alleviation in China. We are currently raising awareness of poverty and microfinance in China and how everyone can now get involved.

Essentially, Wokai is a peer-to-peer approach to microfinance that was created by two young social entrepreneurs. It is an innovative, contributor-driven microfinance website that connects contributors in the international community with borrowers in China. Contributors can choose borrowers to support, watch repayments, and pick who to fund next. Unlike much of the global sector, the impact of a contributor's donation is visible and apparent through Wokai.

Wokai has also built a community of contributors through the website, in which users can access user-rated and user-generated content on microfinance in China. We also encourage other social entrepreneurs to establish Wokai Chapters in their city to mobilise support and encourage others to get involved. Through information and capital exchange, Wokai aims to grow the microfinance sector in China and correspondingly increase opportunities for the poor to generate a sustainable livelihood and access education and healthcare services.

We are currently reaching out to bloggers such as yourself to help us build this community of contributors. We would be very appreciative your support in our effort to raise awareness build community support.

Microfinance in China is an extremely underdeveloped and overlooked issue that deserves more attention. Poverty in China is often overlooked and overshadowed. According to World Bank and UN statistics, around 200 million Chinese live on less than US$1.25 a day. China's financial and banking system makes it difficult for entrepreneurs and small business owners to access loan credit, especially in rural areas.

Since the website launch in November 2008, Wokai has raised over US$374.000 in loan capital, attracted 6,700 contributors, and empowered 491 borrowers. Wokai works closely with two Chinese microfinance institutions (MFI) in Sichuan and Inner Mongolia, achieving a 99.5% on-time repayment rate. By the end of 2011, Wokai is aiming to raise US$1 million in loan captial to expand its partnerships with Chinese MFIs. This is an achieveable goal, but not without more support from individuals passionate about empowering families to lift themselves from poverty.

Thank you for your time, love reading the blog and I look forward to speaking further about microfinance in China and Wokai.

I encourage readers to check out Wokai's webpage here.

Calling for a Violent Revolution

What is going on here? A mainstream cable talk show on MSNBC is apparently providing a platform for a guy who's advocating violent revolution in the U.S. Dylan Ratigan is one of the fairer voices on the lefty cable network MSNBC, but why he would have a guest like this on, and why his producers allowed him to have this guest on, is beyond me. Indeed, in a more sensible era the man's ideas would be considered seditious. I believe in free speech, but it's patently irresponsible to give someone an opportunity on national television to call for killing the leaders of our country, which is certainly implicit in any call to violent revolution.

Imagine that instead of a politically progressive cartoonist of minimal talent this had been a member of the Tea Party voicing similar opinions on, say, Glenn Beck's show. There'd be a national clamor for the sponsors of the show to yank their sponsorship and for FOX to fire Beck. Yet Ted Rall, a man who once implied in a cartoon that Pat Tillman was an "idiot" and a "sap" for passing up a pro football career to join the military after 9/11, can call for the violent overthrow of the government - which would certainly entail a huge loss of life and be cataclysmic for this country and the world - and the outrage seems to be exclusively on the right:

Am I overreacting or is this as sick as it sounds?

Helping the Poor Through Microfinance

Yesterday we did a piece on how conservatives and liberals differ in their views of the best way to help the poor. Here's an example of the sort of assistance that conservatives applaud.

In the past it was felt that what we needed to do was just send money to those languishing in grinding poverty in places like Chad and Haiti. It was eventually realized, however, that sending aid to foreign governments was, for a host of reasons, counterproductive. Moreover, unless people are working, unless they're struggling to make it on their own without having to rely on an indefinite stream of handouts, we might as well just burn the cash we give them for all the good it does those who receive it.

The lessons learned from our bad experience with aid led to the emergence of a number of private organizations that employed the principles of microfinance to help the poor in the third world. Microfinance groups cut out the bureaucratic government middle-man and encourage and reward entrepreneuership and self-reliance. One such organization is named Kiva.

For those who may not be familiar with Kiva and other similar groups, they work like this:

Entrepreneurs in need of funds to expand or start a business in the third world apply for a loan with a field representative who works with Kiva. Usually the loans are for a couple of hundred or a few thousand dollars. The representative assesses the credibility of the applicant, and if they are approved, their name, photo, and a brief bio are posted on the Kiva website.

People all over the world then view the request and make an online contribution (minimum of $25). Once the loan amount has been raised the loan is granted and the entrepreneuer then has about a year or so to repay it. When the lenders have been repaid they are notified and can then apply the funds to other loans if they wish.

It's an excellent way to help people without having to work through an inefficient, wasteful government bureaucracy and without just throwing money at people without demanding anything of them in return, as many welfare programs do.

Kiva affords donors an opportunity to help people who are working hard to help themselves, and one of the best aspects of the microfinance plan is that the donations can accumulate and be recycled among a series of recipients. It's a great idea all around.

Check it out.

How Can We Best Help the Poor?

People have asked how one might square conservative political philosophy with a Christian duty to help the poor. The question puzzles me a little because I don't know why anyone should think the two are in tension in the first place.

Of course, there might be some still in thrall to archaic stereotypes who believe that liberals care about the poor whereas conservatives care only about making money and protecting their wealth. That's simply not true, however. Conservatives and liberals, at least many of them, both agree that we have a moral obligation to help the poor. The debate between them is not about whether we should help but how we should help. It's about finding the best way to accomplish the goal of lifting people out of poverty.

Conservatives reject policies which are wasteful, inefficient and ineffective, which is how they view most government programs. Waste and inefficiency are unjust and immoral, but they are inevitable in government. The government initiates some anti-poverty program, and a bureaucracy is then erected to manage it. Your tax dollar wends its way through the bureaucratic sausage machine and everyone who touches it along the way takes a cut. By the time the money gets to the recipient for whom it is intended she may see only a fraction of the original dollar. That's wasteful and inefficient.

For six decades we've tried to solve the problem of the poor by essentially taking money from those who have, and giving it, often with no strings attached, to those who don't. For example, perhaps you work hard, maybe two jobs, to save for your children's education and to pay your mortgage. Your neighbor buys a house next door which he can't afford and is subsequently foreclosed upon. The government solution is to take money from you and give it to him to stave off foreclosure. That's unjust.

After six decades of these sorts of policies we are burdened with as much, if not more, poverty as ever. We have spent trillions of dollars since the 1960s on combating poverty and have very little to show for it. That's ineffective.

The best way to lift people out of penury is not by giving them a handout. It's by making sure there are jobs available for those who are willing to work. If people don't have to work for what they receive they'll never develop the virtues and disciplines necessary to rise above their circumstances.

So the question becomes, what's the best way to create jobs? Here again the liberal solution is to raise taxes, run up debt, and provide money in the form of stimulus to get the economy going. That may help a little, like a band aid might help a little, but the long term cost is very high. Not only do the jobs disappear when the stimulus runs out but the debt that the government incurs when they borrow the money to pay for it is an albatross around the necks of future generations.

A better approach is to create a private-sector business environment in which employers have the fiscal resources to expand their business and market their product. When consumers have more money in their pocket they'll buy more. When employers are making a significant profit and consumers are buying their product people will be hired. What's the best way to get more money into the pockets of businesses and customers? Conservatives argue that it's by removing onerous and costly regulations on businesses, keeping their taxes low and also reducing the taxes that consumers pay.

Right now businesses aren't hiring because they don't know how much Obamacare is going to cost them, they don't know how much their fuel costs will go up with the onset of inflation and the possibility that cap and trade gets passed next year, and they don't know what their tax rates will be after January 1st. The administration wants to allow the current lower tax rates to lapse, at least on those making over $250,000, which includes a lot of businesses. This will automatically kick in massive tax increases on these businesses unless legislation is passed to keep the current rates in place. All this uncertainty is like a tourniquet squeezing an arm. It just shuts off the flow of commerce.

Conservatives also believe that spending must be reduced because the more government spends the more money they have to borrow. The more they borrow the more money they have to print to pay on the debt. The more money there is in circulation the less value it has, and the less it will buy. That's inflation, and it always hurts the poor more than anyone because they're living on the tightest economic margins. When $3 buys only one gallon of gas instead of two, most of us just pay the extra cost and cut back somewhere else, but the poor can't pay it. They walk instead.

Moreover, when gas costs more everything costs more, including food, because it takes gas to raise, harvest, process and transport the food. The poor often cannot afford to pay the higher cost so they just do without.

Conservatives believe that the best way to help the poor, which all Christians, liberal and conservative, believe we must do, is to lower taxes, reduce spending, ease regulations on business, and reduce health care and fuel costs on both businesses and consumers. This will enable consumers to buy more, businesses to hire more, and that means jobs for those who need them.

The liberal solution is to do the opposite: Raise taxes, borrow money to spend on infrastructure, etc., increase the regulatory burden to protect the environment and the consumer, increase health care costs to pay for care for those who can't afford it, and increase fuel costs so that we are forced to conserve more. These may all sound like good ideas, but each of them stifles job creation and are no help at all in the long run to the poor who need jobs more than they need a marginally better environment.

The question for the Christian, then, is do we want a solution that ultimately does not make the situation of the poor better and may make it worse, or do we want a solution that helps not only the wealth creators in society, but also more effectively ameliorates the plight of the poor?

The Olby Affair

Keith Olbermann is a difficult man to like. In my opinion he and Sean Hannity are the two most insufferable talk show hosts on the air today (well, not counting Michael Savage). Olbermann is often vulgar, vicious, vile and unfair. Even so, I don't understand why MSNBC suspended him indefinitely without pay, and I suspect there must be more to the story than meets the eye:

Keith Olbermann, the unabashedly liberal-leaning counterpart to cable television's conservative hosts, was suspended indefinitely without pay from MSNBC Friday afternoon for contributing a total of $7,200 to three Democratic candidates in late October, a violation of network ethics policies.

I understand that NBC has rules about their personnel not contributing to political campaigns, but I don't know why. They say it's because news people should not be invested in a political candidate because it reflects poorly on their ability to fairly comment on the issues of the day, but this explanation is difficult to credit. Anyone who has watched MSNBC's lineup knows that there's no impartiality there. The people at MSNBC are as deep into the tank for progressive Democrats as Sean Hannity over at FOX is in the tank for conservative Republicans (FOX, by the way, has a similar policy for its news staff but not for its commentators).

I think the NBC policy makes little sense and to punish Olbermann because he gave money to a couple of progressive candidates when for 24 hours a day MSNBC is pretty much campaigning for progressives and progressive policies anyway seems a little peculiar. Olbermann is, like everyone else at MSNBC and many of the people at FOX, an opinion-monger. He tries to promote his point of view and to persuade people to accept it. No one confuses these guys with objective news reporters. No one thinks they're ideologically unbiased or that they even should be.

To forbid them from financially supporting the candidates they promote on their shows seems very odd, but if the NBC execs feel they have to enforce their policy why not just dock him a day's pay or something? The reaction seems, on the face of it, disproportionate to the offense, and that's why I think there's more to the story than what we learn from the WaPo account. Maybe this is not the first problem the suits over at MSNBC have had with Keith, which is certainly not hard to imagine, and perhaps he has crossed the line one time too many.

At any rate, I wouldn't be sorry to see him be let go, which is what some are speculating is going to happen (if he does leave I wish he could take Hannity with him), but this is not how I'd like to see it happen. I'd prefer he be cashiered because his ratings are poor or because his level of civility falls short of MSNBC's standards, but these aren't the reasons that were given for his suspension. The guy's very hard to take, but he still should be treated fairly and reasonably, even if he doesn't treat others that way.

Widening the War

I haven't heard anything about this on the normal media channels, but if it's true it marks a widening of the war against terrorists. Never before, at least according to the article, have American forces targeted an al Qaeda operative in Gaza.

From the article:

A missile fired from an American warship in the Mediterranean hit the car in which Muhammad Jamal A-Namnam, 27, was driving in the heart of Gaza City Wednesday, Nov. 3 and killed him, debkafile's exclusive counter-terror sources report. Namnam was an operational commander of the Army of Islam, Al-Qaeda's Palestinian cell in the Gaza Strip. He was on a mission on behalf of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula – AQAP to plan, organize and execute the next wave of terrorist attacks on US targets after last week's air package bomb plot.

According to our sources, the Palestinian cell members were planning to infiltrate northern Sinai from the Gaza strip over the coming weekend and strike American personnel serving with the Multinational Force and Observers Organization – MFO, which is under American command and is stationed at North Camp, El Gorah, 37 kilometers southeast of El-Arish. In a coordinated operation, Al Qaeda fighters hiding up in the mountains of central Sinai were to have attacked US Marines and Air Force troops stationed at the South Camp in Naama Bay, Sharm el Sheikh.

Meanwhile, American and allied forces are quietly continuing to mass in the seas near Iran. Whether this is merely an attempt to intimidate Iran or a prelude to taking out their nuclear weapons facilities is hard to tell, but I imagine we'll find out soon enough.

The Package Bombers

The package bombs found on planes bound for the United States originated in Yemen and U.S. intelligence agencies know where the bad guys are. They want to launch a special forces operation against them, but the Yemeni president Abdullah Ali Saleh, despite U.S. and Saudi pressure, has been very uncooperative. Ultimately, the decision to go after these terrorists may be taken out of his hands.

Here's the story.

Tuesday's Significance

A friend writes to ask how significant I thought Tuesday's election was for Republicans, especially since Democrats still control the Presidency and the Senate. From what I've read the election results are very significant. Here are several reasons why:

1. Since they no longer enjoy the perquisites of power some House Democrats can be expected to retire (Nancy Pelosi's name has been prominently mentioned in this regard). This would give the GOP an even greater plurality than did Tuesday's election.
2. The Republicans are now poised to take the Senate in 2012. Twenty one Democrat senators are up for reelection in 2012 plus two independents. Only ten Republicans will stand for reelection. Unless the economy improves dramatically, and the President's approval ratings go up, more Democrat seats will be vulnerable than Republican. If the President's popularity and the economy are both in the doldrums the Republicans could wind up with over 60 senate seats which would make veto overrides a serious possibility.
3. The number of big states whose governments are now controlled by the GOP has shot up from 15 to 26. This is very significant for legislation like Obamacare and immigration policy which states can pressure the federal government to change or improve.
4. GOP control of the statehouses will also be very important this year because congressional districts will be redrawn as a result of the 2010 census. The party in power in the state gets to redraw these boundaries and they always do so to protect their own political interests.
5. The fact that the Republicans now have 46 senate seats (two races are still undecided) means it will be much more difficult for the Democrats to break a Republican filibuster. This means that Obama's legislative agenda is probably finished. All they can do is fight to keep what he already has from being repealed or try to circumvent the legislature by imposing policy through his executive agencies and czars.

Perhaps the most significant consequence of Tuesday's election was the number of governorships and state legislatures that swung toward the Republicans and the number of young, rising Democrat pols who got wiped out in the process. These two calamities for the Democrat party are going to be very difficult to overcome anytime soon.

Shrinking from the Challenge

Michael Egnor poses a series of penetrating questions to a militantly atheistic materialist named P.Z. Myers. Myers' replies to the questions suggest that he hasn't even thought about several of them. His answers and Egnor's response to those answers can be found here. Here are the questions Egnor asks Myers to answer:

• Why is there anything?
• What caused the Universe?

• Why is there regularity (Law) in nature?
• Of the Four Causes in nature proposed by Aristotle (material, formal, efficient, and final), which of them are real?
• Do final causes exist?

• Why do we have subjective experience, and not merely objective existence?
• Why is the human mind intentional, in the technical philosophical sense of aboutness, which is the referral to something besides itself?
• Does Moral Law exist in itself, or is it an artifact of nature (natural selection, etc.)
• Why is there evil?

When you read Myers' flippant and superficial answers and compare them to Egnor's replies it becomes very tempting to believe that atheism is little more than an expression of an anti-intellectual hope that there really is no God. Atheists seem unable, or at least Myers and others to whom Egnor has posed these same questions seem unable, to muster any persuasive counter to a serious intellectual challenge.

Read their exchange at the link and see what you think.

Letter to a Young Girl

I was reading an email from a young student recently, and what she said reminded me of a letter I had written about three years ago to my youngest daughter when she was a junior in high school. I had posted the letter on Viewpoint at the time, and after reading my student's email I thought I'd repost it in hope that someone finds it helpful.

Here it is:

Hi Honey,

I've been thinking a lot about the talk we had the other night on what happiness is and how we obtain it, and I hope you have been, too. I wanted to say a little more about it, and I thought that since I was going to be away, I'd put it into a letter for you to read while I'm gone.

One of the things we talked about was that we can't assess whether we're happy based on our feelings because happiness isn't just a feeling. It's more of a condition or quality of our lives - sort of like beauty is a quality of a symphony. It's a state of satisfaction we gain through devotion to God, living a life of virtue (honesty, integrity, loyalty, chastity, trustworthiness, self-discipline), cultivating wholesome and loving relationships with family and friends, experiencing the pleasures of accomplishment in career, sports, school, etc., and filling our lives with beauty (nature, music, literature, art, etc.).

One thing is sure - happiness isn't found by acquiring material things like clothes and toys. It's not attained by being popular, having good looks, or being high on the social pecking order. Those things seem like they should make us happy, especially when we're young, but they don't. Ultimately they just leave us empty.

To the extent that happiness is a feeling we have to understand that a person's feelings tend to follow her actions. A lot of people allow their feelings to determine their actions - if they like someone they're friendly toward them; if they feel happy they act happy - but this is backwards.

People who do brave things, for instance, don't do them because they feel brave. Most people usually feel terrified when in a dangerous situation, but brave people don't let their feelings rule their behavior, and what they do is all the more wonderful because it's done in spite of everything in them urging them to get out of danger. If they do something brave, despite their fear, we say they have courage and we admire them for it.

Well, happiness is like courage. You should act as if you're happy even if you don't feel it. When you do act that way your feelings change and tend to track your behavior. You find yourself feeling happier than you did before even though the only thing that has changed is your attitude.

How can a person act happy without seeming phony? Well, we can act happy by displaying a positive, upbeat attitude, by being pleasant to be around, by enjoying life, and by smiling a lot. Someone who has a genuine smile (not a Paris Hilton smirk) on her face all the time is much more attractive to other people than someone whose expression always tells other people that she's just worn out or miserable.

One other thing about happiness is that it tends to elude us most when we're most intent on pursuing it. It's when we're busy doing the things I mentioned above, it's when we're busy serving and being a friend to others, that happiness is produced as a by-product. We achieve it when we're not thinking about it. It just tags along, as if it were tied by a string, with love for God, family, friends, beauty, accomplishment, a rewarding career, and so on.

Sometimes young people are worried that they don't have friends and that makes them unhappy, but often the reason they don't, paradoxically, is that they're too busy trying to convince someone to be their friend. They try too hard and they come across to others as too insecure. This is off-putting to people, and they tend to avoid the person who seems to try over-hard to be their friend. The best way to make friends, I think, is to just be pleasant, friendly, and positive. Don't be critical of people, especially your friends, and especially your guy friends, either behind their backs or to their faces. A person who never has anything bad to say about others will always have friends.

Once in a while a critical word has to be said, of course, but it'll be meaningless at best and hurtful at worst, unless it's rare and done with complete kindness. A person who is always complaining or criticizing is not pleasant to be around and will not have good, devoted friends, and will not be happy. A person who gives others the impression that her life is miserable is going to find that after a while people just don't want to hear it, and they're not going to want to be around her.

I hope this makes sense to you, honey. Maybe as you read it you can think of people you know who are examples of the things I'm talking about....

All my love,

Dad

Can't We All Just Get Along?

A group of supporters of GOP candidate Robert Hurt, running for congress in Virginia's 5th district, are sitting outside minding their own business when a supporter of Hurt's Democrat opponent, Tom Perriello, happens by to engage the Republicans in some polite political dialogue over the issues. Much of the man's political wisdom was directed at a black woman who was among the Hurt supporters.

Warning - some of the technical jargon the Democrat employs may not be appropriate for mixed company:

Apparently, this gentleman did not receive the memo from Jim Wallis calling upon citizens to engage in civil dialogue this election season. Or maybe he thought this was pretty civil for a Democrat. Anyway, if a tea partier had launched this sort of racist, vile, and bigoted screed it would be all over the evening news, but since it was a Democrat, well, maybe the media just figures that that's really not news.

Video courtesy of TheBlaze.com

Yes, They're Angry

Throughout this campaign season the liberal media and the Democrats have been portraying Tea Partiers and other conservatives as "angry". Well, yes, they're angry writes Moe Lane at RedState.com. Who wouldn't be angry given what has been said about them and the people they respect and support during the last year.

Lane writes:

• These people (liberals) told their clients (i.e. their readers and listeners) to say that:
• you hate African-Americans.
• you hate Latinos.
• you hate gays.
• you hate women.
• you hate Jews.
• you hate Muslims.
• you hate the poor.
• you hate America.
• you were fascists.
• you were theocrats.
• you were stupid.
• you were uneducated.
• you were hatemongers.
• you were insane.
• you were violent extremists.
• These people told their clients to call you unpatriotic.
• to call you cowards.
• These people told their clients to mock you at every opportunity.
• to deliberately use a sexual slur when referring to you.
• to trivialize and dismiss your concerns at every opportunity.

It's true that every one of the epithets and slanders Lane lists has been employed by liberals, either in the Democratic party, the main-stream media, or cable talk - or all three - against the Tea Party as a whole or against individual Tea Party-supported candidates at one point or another over the last year. If Tea Partiers are angry maybe they have a right to be.

If the "Tea-nami" that has been forecast actually materializes at the polls today the Left will have nothing and no one to blame for stirring up these hornets but their own policies and their own execrable, disgusting, rhetoric.

Profiling

I know Juan Williams got fired from NPR for admitting this sort of thing, and I don't want anyone to think that I'm profiling or anything, but I have to say that from now on it's going to make me very nervous if I see Yemenis carrying toner cartridges onto an airplane.

Please don't think less of me.

Restoring Sanity, Or Not

Reason TV attended the John Stewart/Stephen Colbert Restore Sanity rally last Saturday and tried to get a sense of what was on the minds of the attendees. The results were pretty funny:

Even funnier are the interviews of attendees who were asked whether President Obama is a Keynesian. John Maynard Keynes, of course, was an economist who endorsed lots of government spending during times of recession in order to stimulate the economy. This is the President's view as well. Apparently, though, some of the attendees at the Restore Sanity rally couldn't tell the difference between being a Keynesian and being a Kenyan.

It's not often that something I see on the computer makes me laugh out loud, but this did. Watch:

And liberals are out there calling Tea Partiers simple-minded? These are the people that comprise the Democrats' electoral base? Lord help us.

Video courtesy of TheBlaze.com.

Truth Coming Back to Bite Him

Jerry Brown is running for the office of governor of California against Meg Whitman who has dug up an old interview Brown did on CNN fifteen years ago, some years after his first stint as governor. In a fit of candor uncharacteristic of politicians Mr. Brown admits that his whole campaign for the office was a tissue of lies. Whitman is now clobbering him with it:

If this video costs Brown the election it will certainly be a lesson for politicians: Under no circumstances should you ever tell the truth. On the other hand, that's a lesson they seem not to need to be taught.

Five Reasons to Vote Democratic Tomorrow

Tomorrow is the big day, the day that political junkies have been looking forward to for a long time - the midterm elections. In the spirit of bipartisanship I herewith offer five reasons to cast your vote for the Democrats when you go to the polls:

1. You think the government lets you keep too much of your paycheck.
2. You'd rather not have to work for a paycheck.
3. You think the best way to create jobs is to create more government bureaucracies.
4. You believe the best way to solve our immigration problem is to enact the same economic policies here that the immigrants are fleeing from.
5. You think the best way to gain independence from foreign oil suppliers is to build windmills.

Remember to vote.

Slime and Violence

ABC's Jonathan Karl laments the incivility and mendacity of the political ads with which we've been barraged this election cycle and puts the blame squarely where it belongs:

In one typical example, Democratic ads have transformed Kentucky Republican House candidate Andy Barr into "a convicted criminal" -- complete with images yellow police tape and fuzzy video of crime scenes. Not mentioned is his crime: As a college student 19 years ago, he was caught using a fake ID during spring break.

As you watch this year's ads -- and I've been watching all too many lately -- you'll notice a striking difference between Democratic and Republican attack ads: Democrats are attacking over personal issues, Republicans are attacking over policy.

A recent study by the Wesleyan Media Project actually quantifies this. They looked at 900,000 airing of political ads this year and concluded: "Democrats are using personal attacks at much higher rates than Republicans and a much higher rate than Democrats in 2008."

Karl's report gives lots of examples of how the Democrats have resorted repeatedly to personal insult and slander in a desperate attempt to discredit their opponents in the eyes of the voters.

With so many to choose from, of course, Karl couldn't list them all. Daily Beast columnist Howard Kurtz has videos of several more. Neither ABC nor The Daily Beast, it should be noted, can be said to be Republican media organs.

Sliming one's opponent is the sort of thing that sixth graders do in a student council election. It's done because they have no issues to discuss, or, as in the case of the Democrats, they have no desire to discuss the issues nor their record on them.

Somewhat related to the Democrats' use of personal attack is the absolutely appalling performance of MSNBC's Chris Matthews on his Hardball show the other night. Matthews is either one of the most uninformed cable talk show hosts or he's one of the most dishonest, and his guests seem no better informed, or truthful, than he is. Here's the segment from his program a couple of nights ago. The relevant discussion starts at about the 9:30 mark:

Since neither Matthews nor his interlocutors can recall anything on the liberal side remotely similar to a man pressing his boot onto a disruptive protestor's shoulder - since Matthews believes we'd have to go back 60 years to find a commensurate example of such violent behavior on the Left - let us at Viewpoint remind him of just a few episodes that have occurred in the last year or so, each of which is at least as bad, and some much worse, than the incident that has him worrying that the Tea Party is on the brink of Kristallknacht.

First there was the sad case of Kevin Gladney, a black man who was beaten and kicked by SEIU thugs outside a Town Hall meeting held by a Democrat congressman. Gladney was attacked because he was selling Tea Party paraphenalia.

Then there was the incident last summer of North Carolina congressman Bob Ethridge who physically assaulted a student who was questioning him on a Washington D.C. street. The video of this encounter is at the link.

And we can't forget the poor guy who had his finger bitten off at a health care rally about a year ago. The victim was a 65 year old man who was peacefully protesting health care reform when he was attacked by a MoveOn.org supporter.

And just the other day another MoveOn.org thug grabbed a man around the throat and choked him. The video can be seen here. Finally, if it's uniforms that has Matthews in a swivet as he frets for our future perhaps someone should remind him of these fine citizens who were charged and found guilty of intimidating white voters at a Philadelphia polling place, until the Obama Justice department decided that since they were black the charges would be dropped:

Maybe Matthews and his two guests, both of whom are putative journalists, don't keep up on the news and are merely professionally incompetent. That's always a possibility. On the other hand, maybe they're just dishonest.

Great Books

What makes a great book great? At Biola College they offer an honors program in which students read, by the time they graduate, about one hundred of the books considered to be among the very best ever written, but how do they determine which works should be included? Fred Sanders, at The Scriptorium, lists and discusses eight characteristics or criteria of a great book. I've listed the eight, but to read his discussion of them you'll have to visit his article:

1. A great book speaks from an important original setting.
2. A great book is written in a way that is relevant for readers today.
3. A great book is well-crafted.
4. A great book is one that provokes excellent discussion.
5. A great book is inexhaustible, so no reading of it is the final reading, and no discussion ever runs it dry.
6. A great book is time-tested. People from multiple generations have had their hands on it, and have judged it to be worth passing along.
7. A great book is weird. It’s got angles, edges, textures, and stuff sticking out that you wouldn’t have predicted.
8. A great book is smarter than the best teacher, but within reach of the average student.

How many books have you read that meet these criteria? Stephenie Meyer's Twilight series doesn't count.

Bad Faith

Shelby Steele is no bitter, white redneck resentful that we have an African American president. He is himself an African American, a former college English professor, an accomplished author (Affirmative Action Baby and White Guilt), and is currently a senior fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution.

In a recent Wall Street Journal column Mr Steele plumbs the mind of Mr. Obama, seeking to understand the assumptions that guide his presidency. It's a very good essay of which the following is a part:

How is it that Barack Obama could step into the presidency with an air of inevitability and then, in less than two years, find himself unwelcome at the campaign rallies of many of his fellow Democrats?

The first answer is well-known: His policymaking has been grandiose, thoughtless and bullying. His health-care bill was ambitious to the point of destructiveness and, finally, so chaotic that today no citizen knows where they stand in relation to it. His financial-reform bill seems little more than a short-sighted scapegoating of Wall Street. In foreign policy he has failed to articulate a role for America in the world. We don't know why we do what we do in foreign affairs. George W. Bush at least made a valiant stab at an American rationale—democratization—but with Mr. Obama there is nothing.

Barack Obama .... is a child of the 1960s. His coming of age paralleled exactly the unfolding of a new "counterculture" American identity. And this new American identity—and the post-1960s liberalism it spawned—is grounded in a remarkable irony: bad faith in America as virtue itself, bad faith in the classic American identity of constitutional freedom and capitalism as the way to a better America.

So Mr. Obama is very definitely an American, and he has a broad American constituency. He is simply the first president we have seen grounded in this counterculture American identity. When he bows to foreign leaders, he is not displaying "otherness" but the counterculture Americanism of honorable self-effacement in which America acknowledges its own capacity for evil as prelude to engagement.

Bad faith in America became virtuous in the '60s when America finally acknowledged so many of its flagrant hypocrisies: the segregation of blacks, the suppression of women, the exploitation of other minorities, the "imperialism" of the Vietnam War, the indifference to the environment, the hypocrisy of puritanical sexual mores and so on. The compounding of all these hypocrisies added up to the crowning idea of the '60s: that America was characterologically evil. Thus the only way back to decency and moral authority was through bad faith in America and its institutions, through the presumption that evil was America's natural default position.

Among today's liberal elite, bad faith in America is a sophistication, a kind of hipness. More importantly, it is the perfect formula for political and governmental power. It rationalizes power in the name of intervening against evil — I will use the government to intervene against the evil tendencies of American life (economic inequality, structural racism and sexism, corporate greed, neglect of the environment and so on), so I need your vote.

Read the rest of Steele's essay at the link. It contains several excellent insights into the mind of Mr. Obama and, by extension, that of many another modern liberal progressive.

Liberal Genes

A recent study reveals that some people have a gene that predisposes them to be liberals. I don't know what to make of this. Does that mean that if liberalism is genetically determined liberals can't be held responsible for the damage they do? Does it mean that liberals are a kind of mutant? I don't know. Here's an excerpt from the article:

Is political ideology derived from a person's social environment or is it a result of genetic predisposition? It's an interaction of both, according to a recent study on our political leanings that boosts both sides of the nature versus nurture debate.

Scientists at the University of California San Diego and Harvard University determined that people who carry a variant of the DRD4 gene are more likely to be liberals as adults, depending on the number of friendships they had during high school. They published their study in a recent issue of The Journal of Politics.

The 7R variant of DRD4, a dopamine receptor gene, had previously been associated with novelty seeking. The researchers theorized novelty seeking would be related to openness, a psychological trait that has been associated with political liberalism.

However, social environment was critical. The more friends gene carriers have in high school, the more likely they are to be liberals as adults. The authors write, "Ten friends can move a person with two copies of 7R allele almost halfway from being a conservative to moderate or from being moderate to liberal."

I wonder if Obamacare will cover gene therapy.

Good Without God

Frans de Waal has a piece at The New York Times' Opinionator blog in which he argues that God is not necessary for human morality. Professor de Waal holds that morality is hard-wired into us by evolution and therefore appeals to a Divine sanction for morality are superfluous. There's so much wrong with his reasoning that one scarcely knows where to start, but perhaps this paragraph would be a good place to focus our attention:

Perhaps it is just me, but I am wary of anyone whose belief system is the only thing standing between them and repulsive behavior. Why not assume that our humanity, including the self-control needed for livable societies, is built into us? Does anyone truly believe that our ancestors lacked social norms before they had religion? Did they never assist others in need, or complain about an unfair deal? Humans must have worried about the functioning of their communities well before the current religions arose, which is only a few thousand years ago. Not that religion is irrelevant — I will get to this — but it is an add-on rather than the wellspring of morality.

The question to ask Mr. de Waal is how it helps his case if morality is somehow built into us? If we've evolved to act in certain ways how does that make those ways "morally right"? If what we call morality is indeed part of our genetic inheritance then it has been encoded into our genes either by Divine agency or by impersonal natural forces. If it's the latter, which is Mr. de Waal's position, how could this innate moral sense possibly obligate us to conform to it? How can blind, purposeless, impersonal forces impose upon us a moral duty to do anything?

If, on the other hand, the moral sense is instilled in us by Divine agency then the rest of Mr. de Waal's paragraph is pointless. If God gives us the moral law, writes it on our hearts as Paul puts it in his letter to the Roman church, then of course people could have followed it before they had formal religion, but that doesn't mean that God is any the less necessary for its existence.

Furthermore, that humans worry about their communities and contrive laws to facilitate their survival has nothing to do with whether it would be right or wrong to break those laws or to do anything that would harm the community. In a godless universe there's no reason why I should care about the community, especially if it's in my own interest to act in ways that harm others but benefit me. Why would it be wrong to treat others unkindly if I prosper from it? What imposes the duty upon me not to behave this way?

Mr. de Waal says that whatever it is it's not God, but, in fact, it's either God or it's nothing at all.

Taliban Woes

The problems and difficulties faced by the Taliban in Afghanistan continue to mount. An article at Strategy Page explains why. Here's the lede:

The massive movement of intelligence gathering and analyzing forces from Iraq to Afghanistan in the last two years is paying off by cutting Taliban supplies of weapons, and money. More and more captured (often from dead Taliban) weapons and ammunition is of poor quality. Explosives, even the stuff made from ammonium nitrate fertilizer, is harder to get, and often used in smaller quantities in order to make more roadside bombs.

That, in turn, is just getting more Taliban killed, including many more leaders. That's because the largely illiterate Taliban have fewer skilled people for tasks like planting bombs (and rigging them to go off on cue). Guys who get promoted often find themselves one of the few people who knows how to rig a bomb, so they have to go out on the bomb planting missions.

These are increasingly more dangerous because the Americans have more UAVs, along with camera towers and aerostats (tethered blimps) that can see for long distances, day or night and in any weather. It's not just that the cameras can pick up some guys planting a bomb (and call in an air strike), but can detect suspicious movement of any kind.

There's much more at the link about how difficult things are getting for the Talibs in Afghanistan and why. Check it out.

Inexcusable

I don't know what's more outrageous, what this boneheaded Rand Paul supporter did to this woman, or the attempt by MSNBC talking heads to blame Glenn Beck and other talk radio hosts for his actions. In any case, the man has been condignly fired. The woman was a provocateur, to be sure, but that's not an excuse for this sort of treatment. She apparently needed to be restrained, but once she was on the ground, stepping on her was gratuitous and excessive.

The edited video makes it look like the man repeatedly stomped on the woman (he didn't), but just placing his foot on her shoulder was bad enough. Indeed, it's about as bad as Joy Behar on The View calling Sharron Angle a moron, evil, and a bitch (three times) and insisting that she's going to hell:

Anyway, the stomper has since apologized, but his behavior has no place in a civil polity and should not be tolerated in our political debates. The Paul campaign was right to sever their ties to the guy. Now, if only the Democrats would sever their ties to Joy Behar, or, for that matter, the SEIU thugs who beat and kicked Kenneth Gladney at a town hall meeting in August of 2009.

I know, I know, but one can still dream.

Irreducible Complexity

In the debate between intelligent design advocates and their Darwinian opponents, the claim is made by the IDers that there are systems in living things that are irreducible complex, i.e. they could not have evolved step by gradual step because they cannot function until all the parts are in place and operating. The bacterial flagellum is considered the paradigmatic example of IC but there are numerous others.

This site, for example lists a couple dozen systems or structures that are alleged to be irreducibly complex. Whether they are or not may be debated, but I'll leave that debate to others more qualified than I. Here are some examples for which the article offers brief explanations:

1. Bacterial Flagellum
2. Eukaryotic Cilium
3. Aminoacyl-tRNA Synthetases (aaRS)
4. Blood clotting cascade
5. Ribosome
6. Antibodies and the Adaptive Immune System

Students of biology will find the complete list interesting reading.

Psychological Egoism

Here's a question: Does genuine altruism exist in human beings? By this I mean, do human beings, or better, can human beings, act for the benefit of others if there's no benefit in the act for the doer? Do we do what we do for others only because we believe, if even subconsciously, that there's some benefit in the act for us?

Before you answer you should read a brief essay by Georgetown philosophy professor Judith Lichtenberg on just this question.

Lichtenberg notes that psychological egoism (PE), the view that all our actions, including those ostensibly done for others, are really done for self-benefit, is impossible to falsify. This means that one cannot imagine a circumstance which, if it obtained, would prove PE wrong. The inability to think of such a circumstance means that the theory can't be tested and this is, in fact, a detriment. Immunity to testing is a weakness in a theory, not a strength.

Lichtenberg might have also mentioned that PE is ultimately based upon circular reasoning. To see this consider the case of Wesley Autrey which she discusses in the beginning of her piece. Autrey risked his life in 2007 to rescue a man who had fallen onto the subway tracks in New York City as a train bore down upon him.

To the question, what was in it for Autrey the PE might reply that Autrey hoped for a reward, either monetary, psychological or perhaps even eternal, for doing what he did. Suppose, though, that upon being interviewed Autrey denies that any of those considerations ever entered his mind. He didn't have time to think, he attests. He saw the man fall, he saw the train approach, and he reacted.

The PE might then resort to this fallback position: "There must have been some self-benefit in saving the man that Autrey felt." If asked why there must be such a motive, the PE can only answer, "because saving the man is what he did and everything people do they do in their own self-interest."

In other words,

1. We always act for our own benefit
2. Cases where people seem to act genuinely for others only seem to be altruistic. There's always a self-beneficial purpose buried somewhere in the person's motivations.
3. We know there must be a self-beneficial motive driving the person's act because we always act for our own self-benefit.

This is a circular argument and circular arguments are logically invalid. Thus, although PE seems formidable, it's ultimately based on fallacious reasoning.

Anyway, read Lichtenberg's column and see what you think.

Unequal Justice at the DOJ

The Washington Post has conducted an investigation into the Justice Department's handling of the New Black Panther Party case and has concluded what was pretty obvious to anyone who had followed it from the beginning: The DOJ is not interested in pursuing voting rights abuses when the victims are white and the perpetrators are black.

The article presents a good summary of what the case is about, and those not familiar with the details are urged to read it. For those who are acquainted with the case here are some excerpts that give a sense of the culture the Post found at the DOJ:

Civil rights officials from the Bush administration have said that enforcement should be race-neutral. But some officials from the Obama administration, which took office vowing to reinvigorate civil rights enforcement, thought the agency should focus primarily on cases filed on behalf of minorities.

"The Voting Rights Act was passed because people like Bull Connor were hitting people like John Lewis, not the other way around," said one Justice Department official not authorized to speak publicly, referring to the white Alabama police commissioner who cracked down on civil rights protesters such as Lewis, now a Democratic congressman from Georgia.

Before the New Black Panther controversy, another case had inflamed...passions. Ike Brown, an African American political boss in rural Mississippi, was accused by the Justice Department in 2005 of discriminating against the county's white minority. It was the first time the 1965 Voting Rights Act was used against minorities and to protect whites.

Coates and Adams later told the civil rights commission that the decision to bring the Brown case caused bitter divisions in the voting section and opposition from civil rights groups.

Three Justice Department lawyers, speaking on the condition of anonymity because they feared retaliation from their supervisors, described the same tensions, among career lawyers as well as political appointees. Employees who worked on the Brown case were harassed by colleagues, they said, and some department lawyers anonymously went on legal blogs "absolutely tearing apart anybody who was involved in that case," said one lawyer.

"There are career people who feel strongly that it is not the voting section's job to protect white voters," the lawyer said. "The environment is that you better toe the line of traditional civil rights ideas or you better keep quiet about it, because you will not advance, you will not receive awards and you will be ostracized."

In the months after the case ended, tensions persisted. A new supervisor, Julie Fernandes, arrived to oversee the voting section, and Coates testified that she told attorneys at a September 2009 lunch that the Obama administration was interested in filing cases - under a key voting rights section - only on behalf of minorities. "Everyone in the room understood exactly what she meant," Coates said. "No more cases like the Ike Brown or New Black Panther Party cases."

If this is not racism then the word racism has no meaning. It's ironic that President Obama, who campaigned as a man who would heal our racial divisions, has done more, either directly or indirectly, to exacerbate those divisions than has any president in the last fifty years.

The principle here is clear, or should be: If it would be unjust for the federal government to wink at white crimes against blacks then it's equally unjust for federal officials to excuse black crimes against whites. As soon as that principle of equal treatment under the law is no longer honored then this country is going to go up in flames, just as it did in the 1960s. Unfortunately, too many on the Left see the ascendancy of a black man to the presidency as an opportunity for blacks to do to whites what had long been done to them. If the Department of Justice and other federal agencies are actually going to abet this attitude then we stand on the brink of social upheaval.

It's getting monotonous, I know, but it must be said yet again: None of this is surprising. It's precisely the sort of racial bias we can expect as long as we keep putting leftists and liberals into positions of power.

Mythbuster

Tobin Hartshaw at the New York Times Opinionator blog offers a good overview of the controversy swirling around NPR's decision to fire Juan Williams for giving voice to feelings probably shared by the vast majority of air travelers around the world, including many Muslims.

If you haven't been following this story you can catch up there, if you have been following it you've perhaps noticed that it serves to expose a couple of myths about liberals to which some Americans still cling. The first myth is that liberals are tolerant of diversity. NPR fired Williams because, though he is himself unquestionably liberal and NPR is a decidedly liberal broadcast network, Williams has on occasion ventured to express ideologically heterodox ideas which have raised eyebrows among the left-wing thought police. Diversity is only tolerated and celebrated on the Left when it's diversity of appearance. Diversity of thought is definitely prohibited.

The second myth is that liberals are invariably compassionate. There was nothing compassionate about the way NPR CEO Vivian Schiller handled this fiasco, but the worst part of it was her insinuation that Williams said what he did because he was either mentally deranged or simply seeking publicity. She fired him over the phone, without the courtesy of a personal meeting, and then publicly insulted him, all because he said on the Bill O'Reilly show that when he boards a plane and sees Muslims on the plane it makes him nervous. Well, if that's a sign of insanity then an awful lot of Americans need to see a psychiatrist.

Schiller has sought to justify her deplorable treatment of Williams by piously insisting on the need for NPR's journalists to refrain from damaging their credibility by expressing their personal feelings. However, Stephen Hayes is quoted by Hartshaw as observing that other reporters and journalists at NPR are not shy about giving their personal assessments, and they haven't fallen afoul of Ms. Schiller's axe. Here's Hayes:

If that’s true, NPR legal affairs correspondent Nina Totenberg might want to start looking for a new job. Over the past month, in her regular appearances on “Inside Washington,” she has: criticized a ruling of the Roberts Court as scandalous; claimed that Michelle Obama gives people “warm and fuzzy” feelings; called Bill Clinton “the most gifted politician I’ve ever seen;” and lamented that the Democratic Party is diverse enough to include moderates that want to extend all Bush tax cuts.

Totenberg won't be fired, though, because these personal opinions are all well within the acceptable range of liberal good-think. Expressing anxiety about potential terrorists is not.

The fact of the matter is that the Left simply won't tolerate independent thinking, what the communists used to call "deviationism," and anyone who transgresses the approved dogma in any one point, no matter how minor, is anathema. Lanny Davis, perhaps the most liberal member of the Clinton White House, was condemned by his fellow liberals for supporting the campaign of Senator Joe Lieberman, another liberal who happened to support the Iraq war and who was thus almost literally excommunicated from the Democratic party by the keepers of the true faith. Lieberman is the godfather of Davis' child, but such bonds of affection matter not at all to the Left when ideological purity is at stake.

If you'd like a glimpse of where many on the Left would like to take the country read George Orwell's 1984. Few writers have plumbed the psychology of the Left so incisively as did Orwell. If you don't have time for a book then rent the film The Lives of Others. It's a powerful story of what it's like to live in a country run by people who think like Vivian Schiller.

PA Senate Race

Recent polls report that the race for Arlen Specter's U.S. Senate seat in Pennsylvania is tightening to a dead heat. Not so, says an expert analyst cited by Jim Geraghty at National Review. His conclusion, after a lot of number crunching, is that Republican Pat Toomey is still ahead of Democrat Joe Sestak by between 9 and 12 points.

If you enjoy the statistical arcana of political polls you can read the analysis here.

The interesting thing about this race is that it presents us with perhaps the clearest referendum on the Obama, Reid, Pelosi agenda of all the races in the country. As a congressman, Sestak voted for everything his party proposed over the last two years. Toomey has opposed all of it. Neither man brings any ethical or personal liabilities to the campaign so the vote should reflect Pennsylvania's endorsement or repudiation of the ideology of high debt, high taxes, and economic stagnation (Sestak), or low taxes, low spending, and economic growth (Toomey).

No doubt this race, like so many others this election, will be settled by who turns out to vote two Tuesdays from now. If the Democrat base consisting of minorities and 18-21 year-olds stays home, as they are wont to do in mid-term elections, then the Republican Toomey will win. If they turn out in good numbers, it'll be close. We'll see.

Why Big Government Is a Job Killer

Arthur Brooks at the Washington Examiner has a column on the ten ways big government stifles job creation.

"In general," Brooks says, "the worst thing for job creation is a poor entrepreneurial climate. Such a climate is brought on by the large fiscal debt, unpredictable health care costs, and a generally anti-business and pro-regulation approach by government."

He goes on to list and discuss ten ways government policies create this poor climate. Policies such as are favored by contemporary Democrats in general, and President Obama in particular, almost always do the following:

• Increase business uncertainty
• Increase consumer uncertainty
• Impose high corporate taxes
• Raise health insurance costs
• Strengthen unions
• Make it harder to hire and fire
• Impose trade restrictions
• Tighten credit
• Increase unemployment insurance
• Encourage frivolous lawsuits

Brooks goes on to give a brief explanation how each of these stifles job creation. It's a good lesson in economics and also affords a good insight into why, under the current administration, it has been very hard to climb out of the current recession. Those readers who expect to be testing the job market soon might pay special heed to Brooks' essay.

Gay Marriage and Polyamory

One of the very first posts we did at Viewpoint, way back in May of 2004, addressed the consequences for traditional marriage of legalizing gay unions. We argued then, and have argued since, that legalizing gay marriage would all but extinguish traditional marriage.

The reason is that traditional marriage has been for millenia, at least in the Judeo-Christian world, considered to be a union of one man and one woman. Once we accept gay marriage we're acknowledging that the gender of the people in a marriage is no longer legally relevant, but as soon as we make the gender of the participants irrelevant we no longer have any logical grounds for insisting that the number of participants in the union should be legally relevant.

Thus, gay marriage will almost certainly lead to the legalization of polyamory (i.e. group marriage) and that would bring about, in my opinion, the end of both the traditional family and traditional marriage (except, perhaps, in some religious enclaves). Marriage would be pretty much whatever anyone wanted it to be, and when marriage is no longer anything special it will not survive the demands it places upon its participants for very long.

The argument has been rebuffed by some readers who dismiss it on the grounds that they can't imagine people wanting to form group marriages. This is a bit naive, in my opinion, since there will always be those who will do whatever they can do, as this report attests:

A group calling itself the Canadian Polyamory Advocacy Association (CPAA) has asked Chief Justice Robert Bauman of the British Columbia Supreme Court to declare whether polyamorists might be prosecuted as a result of the hearing, scheduled to begin Nov. 22, on the constitutionality of the ban on polygamy.

The lawyer for the CPAA, John Ince, told Chief Justice Bauman that polygamy is a patriarchal system of male dominance where one man has many wives, whereas polyamorous (group love) relationships are "postmodern" consensual relationships that can involve groups of males and females that can be heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual or transgendered who may or may not live together, and thus should not be considered subject to the same laws as polygamy.

"We're not patriarchal. We're not intergenerationally normalized. We're postmodern,” Ince told the media after meeting with Chief Justice Bauman. "We clearly fall outside the definition of the offense (of polygamy). We oppose laws that oppose loving, consensual relationships,” he said.

Pro-family advocates have long warned that the institution of homosexual “marriage” and civil unions in Canada, as well as in other western countries, would lead to the legalization of polygamy and any other form of relationship which participants want to legitimize.

Winston Blackmore's lawyer Blair Suffredine, a former member of Premier Gordon Campbell's Liberal government, remarked at last year's hearing that "If (homosexuals) can marry, what is the reason that public policy says one person can't marry more than one person?"

Opponents of same-sex “marriage” have warned that once homosexuals are permitted to “marry,” there is nothing stopping polygamous marriages, or any type of relationship, from being legally recognized as marriage as well.

“It’s like this,” explained Stanley Kurtz in a 2006 National Review article. “The way to abolish marriage, without seeming to abolish it, is to redefine the institution out of existence. If everything can be marriage, pretty soon nothing will be marriage. Legalize gay marriage, followed by multi-partner marriage, and pretty soon the whole idea of marriage will be meaningless.”

Just so. Resistance to gay marriage is often portrayed by its advocates as a symptom of homophobia, but this is simplistic. For many, their opposition to the legalization of gay unions is borne of a desire not to oppress gays but to preserve traditional marriage. Traditional marriage is essential to the health of a society - many of the dysfunctions we see among the poor in our inner cities are the consequence of the breakdown of traditional families - and gay marriage will almost certainly undermine it.

The next time someone challenges you to explain how it harms you if two gays or lesbians who love each other are allowed to marry you might explain to them that it's not that it harms you, it's that it harms everyone.

Out of Gas

As this very important election approaches, and as I listen to the political rhetoric on the liberal cable talk shows and watch the Democrats' ads on television a number of questions run through my mind:

I wonder, for example, if there are there any Democrats out there who are actually campaigning on ideas. Are there any Democrat candidates who have not referred to their opponents as "extremists"? Are there any Democrats who are running on the accomplishments of the last two years, or who are willing to have themselves associated with Nancy Pelosi or Barack Obama? Are there any Democrats who are proud to proclaim that they're liberals and are not trying to convince the voters that they're in fact conservatives who really oppose Pelosi and/or Obama? Is there any Democrat willing to campaign on Obamacare, cap and trade, card check, open borders, higher taxes, etc?

I ask the questions sincerely. There may be some, but if so I haven't encountered them, and I'm wondering why not. If it's because there really aren't very many candidates who are willing to campaign on ideas, the record of the Democrat party, or the ideology of liberalism then I have to wonder whether they really believe in what they're doing, what they're saying, and who they are. Are they running because they want to represent the people or because they want to milk the people, or because they want to control the people?

They seem like people who are completely out of intellectual gas and feel the only chance they have is to keep portraying Republicans as kooks and radicals. It's dishonest, but when you have no positive reason to give to voters for supporting you then smears and slander are your only hope.

Letter to Young Students

Stanley Hauerwas, professor of theological ethics at Duke Divinity School, has penned a marvelous letter, packed with good advice, to young students headed off to college. The letter is directed specifically at Christian high schoolers and college undergrads but could be read with profit by any bright young man or woman beginning his or her undergraduate experience. Here's a portion of it:

To be a student is a calling. Your parents are setting up accounts to pay the bills, or you are scraping together your own resources and taking out loans, or a scholarship is making college possible. Whatever the practical source, the end result is the same. You are privileged to enter a time—four years!—during which your main job is to listen to lectures, attend seminars, go to labs, and read books.

It is an extraordinary gift. In a world of deep injustice and violence, a people exists that thinks some can be given time to study. We need you to take seriously the calling that is yours by virtue of going to college. You may well be thinking, “What is he thinking? I’m just beginning my freshman year. I’m not being called to be a student. None of my peers thinks he or she is called to be a student. They’re going to college because it prepares you for life. I’m going to college so I can get a better job and have a better life than I’d have if I didn’t go to college. It’s not a calling.”

But you are a Christian. This means you cannot go to college just to get a better job. These days, people talk about college as an investment because they think of education as a bank account: You deposit the knowledge and expertise you’ve earned, and when it comes time to get a job, you make a withdrawal, putting all that stuff on a résumé and making money off the investment of your four years. Christians need jobs just like anybody else, but the years you spend as an undergraduate are like everything else in your life. They’re not yours to do with as you please. They’re Christ’s.

Christ’s call on you as a student is a calling to meet the needs of the Church, both for its own life and the life of the world. The Resurrection of Jesus, Wilken suggests, is not only the central fact of Christian worship but also the ground of all Christian thinking “about God, about human beings, about the world and history.” Somebody needs to do that thinking—and that means you.

Don’t underestimate how much the Church needs your mind.

Indeed. And if you're not a Christian that last sentence still applies if you substitute the word world, or nation, for Church. If you're in high school or college, or know someone who is, you really should read the whole thing.

The Failure of "Multikulti"

We've often argued on Viewpoint that the postmodern infatuation with multiculturalism is a colossal mistake. A nation, to be a nation, needs cohesion, and it cannot achieve cohesion when its citizens are constantly reminding everyone how very different they are from each other.

People are united by the things they share in common - a common language, a common history, a common set of political values, a common set of moral principles - to name the most important. Race and religion are also factors, but the divisions engendered by racial and religious diversity are suppressed when those other commonalities are present, as they have been throughout much of our nation's history.

When people share common values and a common language they can, and do, overlook racial and religious differences, but when none of those commonalities exist society becomes Balkanized into ethnic, racial and religious interests groups all seeking to achieve power over the others. Each group becomes a tinder box of resentments, grievances, and hatreds.

This, apparently, is what we see happening in Europe, and the Europeans are starting to admit publicly what they used to try to sweep under the rug - multiculturalism is a failure. The most recent European leader to make this unpleasant admission is Germany's Angela Merkel:

Germany's attempt to create a multi-cultural society has failed completely, Chancellor Angela Merkel said at the weekend, calling on the country's immigrants to learn German and adopt Christian values. Merkel weighed in for the first time in a blistering debate sparked by a central bank board member saying the country was being made "more stupid" by poorly educated and unproductive Muslim migrants.

"Multikulti", the concept that "we are now living side by side and are happy about it," does not work, Merkel told a meeting of younger members of her conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU) party at Potsdam near Berlin.

"This approach has failed, totally," she said, adding that immigrants should integrate and adopt Germany's culture and values.

"We feel tied to Christian values. Those who don't accept them don't have a place here," said the chancellor.

"Subsidising immigrants" isn't sufficient, Germany has the right to "make demands" on them, she added, such as mastering the language of Goethe and abandoning practices such as forced marriages.

There's more at the link. The United States is a nation of immigrants, of course, but until relatively recently those immigrants insisted that their children speak the language, embrace the traditions, and value the freedoms enshrined in the Bill of Rights. That has changed, however. The concept of assimilation has fallen out of favor. The Left considers it an expression of cultural chauvinism and takes every opportunity to denigrate those very values and traditions. If this trend continues, and it will as long as the Left maintains its cultural hegemony, it will not be long before the U.S. starts looking like Bosnia.

Open Letter to Hispanics

In a recent column Dennis Prager, perhaps the most consistently insightful columnist in the country today, writes an open letter to Hispanics about immigration. It hits all the right notes and says what I wish I had had the wit to say myself. He begins with this:

I am writing to you as a concerned and sympathetic American who is a Republican. My sentiments do not represent every American -- that would be impossible. But I believe the following represent most Americans.

First, a message to those of you here illegally:

You may be very surprised to hear this, but in your position, millions of Americans, including me, would have done what you did.

If I lived in a poor country with a largely corrupt government, a country in which I had little or no prospect of hope for an improved life for me or my children, and I could not legally get into the world's freest, most affluent country, the country with the most opportunities for people of any and every background, I would do whatever I could do to get into that country illegally.

Mexico and many other Central and South American countries are largely hopeless places for most of their people. America offers hope to everyone willing to work hard. Who could not understand why any individual, let alone a father or mother of a family, would try to get into the United States -- legally preferably, illegally if necessary?

Now that I have made it clear that millions of us understand what motivates you and do not morally condemn you for entering America illegally, I have to ask you to try to understand what motivates us.

Please take the time to read the rest of the piece. It's excellent.

His conclusion is particularly insightful. He turns his attention to Hispanics who are American citizens and says this:

Finally, and most important, by voting for Democratic Party candidates, you are voting for a type of government more like the ones most Latinos fled. Take the Mexican example. The Democratic Party is, in most important ways, an American version of the PRI [Mexico's ruling party]. For 70 years, the PRI governed Mexico and brought its economy to its knees because of vast government spending, the squashing of individual initiative, a bloated bureaucracy, unsustainable debt and the subsequent devaluing of the Mexican peso.

Why, for God's sake, would you want to see that replicated in America? The very reason America has been so prosperous and so free -- the very reasons you or your ancestors, like almost every other American's ancestors, came here -- is that America has had more limited government and therefore more liberty than any other country in the world. The Republican Party represents all that you or your parents came to America for -- and why you left Mexico and other countries: individual opportunity and individual responsibility. It is also the party that represents your social values.

Admittedly, the Democratic Party appeals to your emotions. But a vote for the Democratic Party is a vote to make America like the Mexico of the PRI. And a vote for the Democratic Party is a vote to undo the great American achievement of uniting the children of immigrants from all over the world as Americans.

Although I don't place as much confidence in the GOP as Prager seems to, and often think that those who accuse Republican politicians of being just a paler shade of Democrat are right, Prager's column is nevertheless powerful, must-read stuff.

Gay Parents

A new study is sure to stoke the controversy over the issue of gay marriage:

Walter Schumm knows what he's about to do is unpopular: publish a study arguing that gay parents are more likely to raise gay children than straight parents. But the Kansas State University family studies professor has a detailed analysis that past almost aggressively ideological researchers never had.

When one such researcher, Paul Cameron, published a paper in 2006 arguing that children of gay parents were more likely to be gay themselves, the response from the academic press was virulent, to say nothing of the popular press; the Southern Poverty Law Center, for instance, equated Cameron to a Nazi.

The gay press, as far back as the 1980s, labeled Cameron "the most dangerous anti-gay voice in America." Though Cameron was the first to publish papers on the dangers of secondhand smoke, the scientific community has abandoned him. The American Psychological Association long since dropped him from its membership for an "ethical" violation.

Schumm seems to have done a pretty thorough analysis of the available data and what he's found has implications not only for the question of gay adoption but also for the debate over what role genetics plays in one's sexual orientation.

One thing that isn't clear from this article is whether the children studied were biological children of gays or adoptive children. I assumed the latter but they certainly could be the former, and it makes a difference.

Anyway, Schumm, anticipating a firestorm of outrage over his having conducted a study that does not arrive at the socially approved conclusions, and which indeed treads on the far side of the line separating orthodoxy from heresy, takes comfort in a quote from philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer. "All truth passes through three stages: First it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident."

Exit question: If it turns out that gay parents are more likely to raise gay kids why should a society that holds as dogma the belief that homosexuality is a legitimate alternative lifestyle find that upsetting?

Marriage and Poverty

Statistics cited in a column by Mona Charen suggest that a big part of the solution to the problem of poverty in America is marriage. Not "living together" but marriage. I copy her column at length because the information it contains is so important:

But cohabitation doesn't begin to confer the benefits that marriage does. In "The State of Our Unions," scholars associated with the Institute for American Values outline some of the advantages married couples enjoy over their single counterparts.

"Men who marry," writes Alex Roberts, "typically earn more because marriage itself leads to increases in income; that is, men who marry work harder, work smarter, and earn more than their unmarried peers ... Cohabiting couples ... are less likely to pool resources, feel obligated to spend wisely and save, or invest in the future of the household." Married men earn between 10 and 40 percent more than their single counterparts with similar educational and job histories.

Married couples also create more wealth than single people or cohabiting couples. "A 1992 study of retirement data concluded that 'individuals who are not continuously married have significantly lower wealth than those who remain married throughout their lives.'"

A study of 7,608 household heads between 1984 and 1989 found that those who married saw income increases of 50 to 100 percent, and net wealth increases of 400 to 600 percent. "Continuously married households had about double the income and four times the net worth of the continuously divorced and never-married, on average."

Marriage also bestows more emotional well-being. A study by W. Bradford Wilcox and others, "Marriage and Mental Health in Adults and Children," reports that "Married Americans were more than twice as likely as divorced or separated Americans to say they were very happy with life in general. Cohabiting, never-married, and widowed individuals' happiness resembled that of divorced and separated people more than married people."

Married people were also less likely to suffer from depression and other forms of mental anguish: "Married men and women report fewer symptoms of mental illness and psychological distress than do otherwise similar individuals who are not married. Longitudinal research shows that it is not merely that mentally healthy people are more likely to get or stay married. Instead, marriage itself appears to boost mental health. Remaining unmarried or getting divorced seems to result, on average, in a deterioration in mental well-being."

Children of married couples are far healthier mentally and physically than the children of cohabiting, divorced, or never-married couples. Wilcox et al cite one study suggesting that the tripling of the teen suicide rate over the past half-century is closely associated with divorce, while married men are half as likely as single men to kill themselves.

Marriage knits the couple into a kinship network in which interest-free loans, baby-sitting, elder care, and other forms of assistance in hard times are more readily available. Sadly, among those most in need of these added supports — those with lower levels of education — marriage is in steep decline. More than 50 percent of new mothers without college degrees are unmarried, compared with only 7 percent of mothers with college diplomas. In fact, among the college-educated, marriage has strengthened over the past several decades, leading to a "marriage gap" that goes a long way toward explaining the slowing of growth in family income over the past generation. Married-couple families have become a rapidly diminishing segment of total families over the past 20 years.

The young adults who move in together imagining that a wedding is too expensive are paying a far higher price than they recognize.

Another advantage of marriage Charen doesn't mention but could have is that a married couple and their children are much likely to be better off because of the grandparent effect. Grandparents who stay married tend to accumulate much more wealth than they would have if they had separated. This wealth is often made available to their children and grandchildren for college educations, cars, home mortgages, inheritances, etc. A married couple with four parents to fall back upon is in far better shape than a single mom whose own mother was a single mom.

One reason the poor often can't rise out of poverty is because when single motherhood becomes the norm, as it has among African Americans, for example, every generation has to start over in their struggle to rise into the middle class. Among families who get married and stay married, on the other hand, most of the struggle to get into the middle class is undertaken by the first generation. Subsequent generations are then well-positioned to reap the benefits.