Monumental Insanity

A few days ago I did a post titled "Slippery Slope" in which I joined the swell of voices who believe the destruction of Confederate statues is the first step onto a slippery slope that leads to utter insanity. A friend wrote to explain why he thought taking down statues of Robert E. Lee and like-minded Confederates is wholly justified and does not have to result in wholesale obliteration of our history. His argument is a good one. Here's part of what he wrote:

I don’t believe that removing Confederate monuments from public spaces through legal means puts us on a slippery slope at all. Let’s remember that many of these monuments were erected during the Jim Crow era as an homage to the cause of slavery and segregation – and as part of an ongoing, vicious campaign to intimidate those who thought differently.

The people memorialized by these monuments are not American heroes. Robert E. Lee was a brilliant general. He was also a traitor to this country who waged a war not only to preserve slavery but to expand it. Had he prevailed, the United States likely would not have become the greatest country in the world and the indignities of slavery would have been perpetuated.

Lee was an unapologetic advocate of slavery who thought the Emancipation Proclamation was an abomination. During his lifetime, plenty of people recognized that slavery was a terrible sin against God and humanity, so it’s not as if he was a victim of his times who didn’t know better. He chose to enable the oppression of an entire race and consequently sent tens of thousands of his fellow Southern soldiers, not to mention Union ones, to their deaths. That was his choice; we don’t need to give him monuments to affirm it.

I recently toured the Gettysburg battlefield with my family, a few weeks before the Charlottesville incident. It struck me, as we walked across the fields and through the museum, how many lives were needlessly lost because Lee chose to fight for the South and slavery. Had he applied his military genius in service of the Union and on behalf of human rights, the war probably would have been over before it even started. He has an extraordinary amount of blood on his hands, and it was all through his own choosing.

And this gets to the central difference between Lee/other Confederate leaders and our Founding Fathers. When Trump wonders where it all ends with the tearing down of monuments, this isn’t all that complicated either. Yes, Washington and Jefferson had slaves, and that is a serious stain on their legacies. Nevertheless, it wasn’t the defining aspect of their contributions to our country. They also brought the world’s greatest form of government into being. They are the Founding Fathers of our country, and their positive contributions to the world are enormous.

For Lee and his fellow Confederate leaders, it’s hard to say what they contributed beyond a lot of unnecessary suffering and death in their defense of an entirely indefensible institution. None of that deserves monuments. Their cause was not noble and neither was Lee.

I agree with much of what my friend has written here. I've never been a fan of Lee, and I, too, have reflected on how many lives were shattered and lost because he used his talents on behalf of the Confederacy. If, after calm rational debate, the citizens of a town voted to remove statues of Lee and others on the basis of arguments like my friend articulates there'd be little reason to object.

But, in my opinion, the left is not demanding that the statues come down because Lee et al. were traitors to their country. Indeed, for some on the left that'd be to their credit. Rather, they want the statues gone because Lee is a symbol of the institution of slavery and that sin trumps whatever virtues he might have possessed.

Yet, once we countenance pulling down monuments of slave-owners who made no good contribution to the country, the next step will be to pull down monuments of slave-owners regardless of their other contributions. In fact, their other contributions will be eclipsed by the fact that they will be seen as racists, which fact will obviate, in the minds of many, everything else they've done. At that point there'll be no stopping the madness.

This isn't hypothetical. We're seeing it today. People on tv are calling for monuments to Washington and Jefferson to be purged. Even Lincoln's monuments are being vandalized, presumably because he pardoned the Confederates in order to promote national healing and also proposed that ex-slaves might wish to be sent to Liberia.

An article in the Washington Times summarizes some of the nuttiness:

Baltimore in the middle of the night removed its Confederate-tied monuments. North Carolina thugs in Durham tore down a Confederate soldier statue and kicked and spat on it. A pastor — a man of Christ — called for the renaming of Washington Park in Chicago, as well as the removal of its George Washington statue and the renaming of Jackson Park. Why? The names conjure images of slavery, he said.

Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan removed the Taney statue from the State House — a step aimed at appeasing those offended by the fact it showed the likeness of the very U.S. Supreme Court justice, Roger B. Taney, who wrote the famous 1857 Dred Scott decision upholding slavery and denying citizenship to blacks.

Democrats in Congress called for an all-out cleansing of Confederate-tied statues, monuments and structures from Statuary Hall, a Capitol Hill fixture and popular tourist draw that contains dozens of contributions from individual states.

“The Capitol is a place for all Americans to come and feel welcomed, encouraged and inspired,” said Sen. Cory Booker, New Jersey Democrat. “Confederate statues do the opposite.”

This, from House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi: “The Confederate statues in the halls of Congress have always been reprehensible. If Republicans are serious about rejecting white supremacy, I call upon Speaker [Paul] Ryan to join Democrats to remove the Confederate statues from the Capitol immediately.”

... The left’s only warming up. This insanity is not going to end any time soon. The train still has to ride over the Washington, D.C., monuments of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. Al Sharpton’s already called on Congress to defund the Jefferson Memorial in the District, saying Jefferson “had slaves and children with the slaves” and that tax dollars that are used to fund this monument are an affront.

“When you look at the fact that public monuments are supported by public funds,” Sharpton told Charlie Rose in a recent televised interview, “you are asking me to subsidize the insult of my family.”

Keep going. The journey’s not over. Next stop: The documents of these so-dubbed racist Founding Fathers. The Declaration of Independence. The U.S. Constitution. And the question that looms — the question that’s to be posed by the left: How can these documents represent the freedoms of all, when they were penned by those with racist mindsets?

Once it’s admitted into U.S. society that Jefferson and Washington have no business being represented in the public memorials of America, it’s only a small, very small step to say the same of their writings? But what are we going to do, rip up the original Declaration of Independence — tear the Constitution to shreds? What would that accomplish?

The bit about Al Sharpton objecting to spending federal tax dollars to support maintaining the Jefferson Memorial is especially funny. Sharpton's taxes are, or were, $4.5 million in arrears. Evidently not many of Reverend Al's tax dollars are going to the Jefferson Memorial in any case.

Perhaps, though, the award for the most risible piece of insanity connected to this whole business has to go to ESPN which has decided that they can't have an Asian-American named Robert Lee announce a football game played by the University of Virginia because his name is the same as that of the odious general.

I once had a student named Jeff Davis. I wonder if he's decided to change his name yet.

If men who transgressed liberal ideas of righteousness in some areas of their lives, even though they may have done much good otherwise, deserve to be expunged from our national memory, who will be left? As another friend told me recently, if we're going to remove the statues of everyone who was in some way morally flawed there'll only be one statue left, the one that overlooks Sao Paulo, Brazil. That won't make a lot of folks on the left happy either.

Tale of Two Cities Redux

Several years ago Myron Magnet wrote a powerful essay at City Journal in which he reacted to the claim by New York's liberal mayoral candidate at the time Bill de Blasio that there are two New Yorks, one rich and one poor. Magnet argued that the actual divide is between New Yorkers who pay taxes and New Yorkers who live off of them. Because the whole article is such good reading (and fairly brief) I thought I'd rerun the post I did on it when it first came out. Here it is slightly edited.

One of the best parts of Magnets column is this:

As its very name suggests, mayoral candidate Bill de Blasio’s tale of two cities is pure fiction, a myth that formed the intellectual basis of leftist politics long before Marx turned it into “science.” Its key idea is that the rich are rich because they have somehow extracted their wealth from the poor, causing their poverty....

In the early days of industrialization, when nearly naked children pulled carts of coal through mine shafts and factory workers got ground up by unfenced machinery, this tale had a core of truth. But....[a]s for New York’s poor of today, there is not a scintilla of truth in the notion that the co-op dwellers of Fifth and Park Avenues have caused their poverty—not even if you believe that Wall Street hanky-panky is the cause of the deep unemployment America suffers five years after the outset of the financial crisis.

The trouble with the two-cities narrative is less that it is false and more that it has become a cause of the very poverty it pretends to explain—especially in the case of the minority poverty so prevalent in New York. The belief that people are poor because they are victims of economic injustice, and that the nation owes the African-American poor, in particular, some kind of reparation for the slavery and racism that supposedly has kept them perpetually poor, led to a War on Poverty that began half a century ago and that resulted in a welfare system that today, together with food stamps, public housing, and other benefits, provides its recipients with more income than a minimum-wage job, vaporizing the economic incentive for going to work.

Worse, the elite mindset that conceived the War on Poverty permanently transformed the nation’s culture in ways that entrenched the poor in their poverty. Thanks to the elites in the press, the government, and the universities—thanks to the writers, preachers, and teachers who have made “social justice” the reigning orthodoxy—the once standard belief that it’s dishonorable and unmanly not to work, at however menial a job, to support your family has given way to the view that there’s no shame in accepting reparations for victimization.

Combine these economic views with the change in elite views about sexuality that, also about 50 years ago, destigmatized casual sex and out-of-wedlock childbearing, and you have a sure-fire recipe for a caste of perpetually poor people, disproportionately minority, who rarely work or marry, and who form families headed by young, inexperienced, and ill-educated single mothers, poorly equipped to give children the moral and cognitive nurture, the thirst and drive for education they need to succeed in an increasingly skills-based global economy.

If you were going to divide New York into two cities—one rich, one poor—this would be the poor one: female-headed families living in housing projects or Section 8 apartments with flat-screen TVs and refrigerators stocked with food-stamp plenty, for generation after generation, whose unmotivated kids learn little from bad schools that cost more than almost any other public schools in the country—schools that only the most determined manage to learn enough from to escape the government-financed ghetto, leaving behind the average, ambitionless mass to become the parents of the next generation.

The rich New York would be exactly the opposite: people who get married and mostly stay married, who work hard to give their kids the best educational credentials and enrichment programs they can afford (alas, with a full measure of social-justice ideology and resume-burnishing social-service summer internships), who worship the work ethic, and who pay the taxes that support the other New York.

An observer from another planet would ask, Why does such a bizarre system go on, seemingly without end? Why does the rich New York keep supporting the poor New York, and why does the poor New York not improve its lot?

Magnet offers more insight at the link. His article highlights the fact that there's something odd about discussions of the poor and material poverty in the U.S. Most of the people who are classified as materially poor (there are types of impoverishment other than material deprivation, of course) possess luxuries that even the wealthiest aristocrats as recently as a hundred years ago would have envied. Here's economist Thomas Sowell on the subject:

Most Americans living below the government-set poverty line have a washer and/or a dryer, as well as a computer. More than 80 percent have air conditioning. More than 80 percent also have both a landline and a cell phone. Nearly all have television and a refrigerator. Most Americans living below the official poverty line also own a motor vehicle and have more living space than the average European -- not Europeans in poverty, the average European.

He could have added that they also have access to public transportation, medical care, food, and education. Their residences are dry and have indoor plumbing and heat. Their clothing is superior to even the finest raiment of a century ago, the air they breathe is cleaner, and the water they drink is purer. They are materially far richer than the wealthy of all but the most recent generations. So why do we call them "poor"? Sowell answers:

Because government bureaucrats create the official definition of poverty, and they do so in ways that provide a political rationale for the welfare state -- and, not incidentally, for the bureaucrats' own jobs.

The poverty that afflicts America is not material, it's spiritual, and for that sort of poverty there's no government program.

Brooks' Inadvertent Description of Conservatives

New York Times columnist David Brooks assays to describe the distinctive characteristics of political moderates, but I think he manages instead to give a pretty good description, inadvertently, of political conservatives.

He lists eight ideas that, he says, moderates tend to embrace. In fact, for the most part he's describing political conservatives. Of the eight traits Brooks discusses three are ideologically neutral but five are actually characteristics which define conservatives. Wherever he uses the term "moderate" the reader can more accurately, I think, substitute "conservative". Here are the five in boldface with my comments:

1. Politics is a limited activity. Zealots look to the political realm for salvation and self-fulfillment. They turn politics into a secular religion and ultimately an apocalyptic war of religion because they try to impose one correct answer on all of life. Moderates believe that, at most, government can create a platform upon which the beautiful things in life can flourish. But it cannot itself provide those beautiful things. Government can create economic and physical security and a just order, but meaning, joy and the good life flow from loving relationships, thick communities and wise friends. The moderate is prudent and temperate about political life because he is so passionate about emotional, spiritual and intellectual life.

This is why conservatives argue incessantly for limited, decentralized government and for more autonomy for communities and families, Edmund Burke's "little platoons" of society.

2. In politics, the lows are lower than the highs are high. The harm government does when it screws up — wars, depressions — is larger than the benefits government produces when it does well. Therefore the moderate operates from a politics of skepticism, not a politics of faith. He understands that most of the choices are among bad options (North Korea), so he prefers steady incremental reform to sudden revolutionary change.

Conservatives are not opposed to change, but they are opposed to change for the sake of change. All change should be tempered by experience and traditions which have proven themselves reliable guides over long periods of time. Conservatives are very suspicious of revolutions, whether political, cultural or social. Sudden, rapid change rarely makes things better and usually makes them worse.

3. Truth before justice. All political movements must face inconvenient facts — thoughts and data that seem to aid their foes. If you try to suppress those facts, by banning a speaker or firing an employee, then you are putting the goals of your cause, no matter how noble, above the search for truth. This is the path to fanaticism,....

For precisely these reasons conservatives are the strongest advocates of free speech and the free flow of ideas in our culture. Those who prohibit or restrict this freedom are taking us down the road to Big Brother totalitarianism.

4. Partisanship is necessary but blinding.....Moderates are problematic members of their party. They tend to be hard on their peers and sympathetic to their foes.

This helps explain why conservatives are such a thorn in the side of Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan and why conservatives are among President Trump's strongest critics. The Democratic party is disciplined and unified largely because it has no conservatives in it.

5. Humility is the fundamental virtue.....The more the moderate grapples with reality the more she understands how much is beyond our understanding.

Precisely because of the humility Brooks describes, conservatives tend to be skeptical when authorities in various fields speak apodictically about phenomena like climate change, biogenesis, morality, religion, and what's best for our children. Conservatives often suspect that neither we nor they know enough to warrant their certainty.

Brooks finishes with this:

Moderation requires courage. Moderates don’t operate from the safety of their ideologically pure galleons. They are unafraid to face the cross currents, detached from clan, acknowledging how little they know.

In fact, the people who must have courage today are those who stand against the Zeitgeist, who are legally hounded for their religious beliefs, who are shouted down in the university, who are threatened with violence and who lose their jobs, businesses and friends because of their beliefs. Most of these folks today aren't moderates, they're conservatives.

Devil's Bargain

Progressive leftists are fond of dreaming of ways to create utopian societies, but often the brave new worlds they conjure up turn out to be dystopic prisons.

The communist prison states of the twentieth and twenty first centuries were the product of leftists' desire to produce perfect societies. Even if the dreamers seem like a sweet, kind souls the future they envision is often a dehumanizing, totalitarian nightmare. B.F. Skinner's Walden II comes to mind as does Peter Singer's vision of a future in which mothers are free to kill their young children.

A few years ago The Atlantic published an essay on the thoughts of an academic by the name of S. Matthew Liao, a professor of philosophy and bioethics at New York University. Mr. Liao believes that at least part of the solution to our pending environmental troubles is to re-engineer human beings so that they leave a diminished carbon footprint. Here's The Atlantic's lede:

The threat of global climate change has prompted us to redesign many of our technologies to be more energy-efficient. From lightweight hybrid cars to long-lasting LED's, engineers have made well-known products smaller and less wasteful. But tinkering with our tools will only get us so far, because however smart our technologies become, the human body has its own ecological footprint, and there are more of them than ever before.

So, some scholars are asking, what if we could engineer human beings to be more energy efficient? A new paper to be published in Ethics, Policy & Environment proposes a series of biomedical modifications that could help humans, themselves, consume less.

Some of the proposed modifications are simple and noninvasive. For instance, many people wish to give up meat for ecological reasons, but lack the willpower to do so on their own. The paper suggests that such individuals could take a pill that would trigger mild nausea upon the ingestion of meat, which would then lead to a lasting aversion to meat-eating.

Other techniques are bound to be more controversial. For instance, the paper suggests that parents could make use of genetic engineering or hormone therapy in order to birth smaller, less resource-intensive children.

Liao is keen to point out that the paper is not meant to advocate for any particular human modifications, or even human engineering generally; rather, it is only meant to introduce human engineering as one possible, partial solution to climate change.

He also emphasized the voluntary nature of the proposed modifications. Neither Liao or his co-authors, Anders Sandberg and Rebecca Roache of Oxford, approve of any coercive human engineering; they favor modifications borne of individual choices, not technocratic mandates.

Of course the authors disapprove of coercion. Brave new worlds always start out sounding reasonable and non-coercive, but it's not long until, as in Orwell's Animal Farm, it all turns ugly. When people choose not to genetically rejigger their children or to swallow the meat pill the state will decide to do something "reasonable" like set limits to how much carbon you can consume, or they'll tell you they'll not provide insurance coverage for more than two childbirths, or they'll not provide health care for people over a certain bodyweight, etc.

In the end they won't tell you that you'll have to do the things Liao suggests, you'll be free to ignore the wise advice of the government planners and statists if you wish, but you won't be able to afford to. You'll have been "gently" coerced by Big Brother into participating in their dehumanized society without even realizing it was happening.

Here are some of the "options" Liao proposes:

• A "meat patch" that makes you vomit when you eat meat.
• Hormones that retard your children's growth.
• Drugs that make you want to write checks (to charities, of course).
• Genetically engineering humans to grow "cat eyes" so we don't need light bulbs.

Because it's voluntary it all sounds so reasonable, so harmless. Just like Mephistopheles' bargain sounded so reasonable to Dr. Faustus.

Worldviews

In a piece for the New York Times Molly Worthen tries to get her arms around the idea of a "Christian worldview" and makes a few distressing missteps along the way.

She quotes, for instance, the Christian writer Rachel Held Evans who, criticizing the religious training of her youth, asserts that the Christian worldview includes the beliefs that “... climate change isn’t real, that evolution is a myth made up by scientists who hate God, and capitalism is God’s ideal for society.”

Evans' dismissive summation would be news to a lot of Christians who would certainly profess a Christian worldview but who hold to none of these beliefs.

Worthen adds that:

The innocuous phrase — “biblical worldview” or “Christian worldview” — is everywhere in the evangelical world.... [but it's] not as straightforward as it seems. Ever since the scientific revolution, two compulsions have guided conservative Protestant intellectual life: the impulse to defend the Bible as a reliable scientific authority and the impulse to place the Bible beyond the claims of science entirely.

This is a bit misleading, however. One can have a Christian worldview and have no particular opinion at all on the Bible's standing vis a vis modern science. In fact, I suspect that most evangelicals simply acknowledge that they don't know enough about the Bible or science to navigate this alleged dispute. They're too busy, in any case, ministering to the sick and the poor to worry much about it.

Part of the difficulty with Worthen's essay is that she conflates the term "Christian worldview" with "conservative Christian worldview" and by "conservative" she means "politically conservative." Thus she writes:

The conservative Christian worldview is not just a posture of mistrust toward the secular world’s “fake news.” It is a network of institutions and experts versed in shadow versions of climate change science, biology and other fields.

But there are many people who are skeptical toward the media, toward the pronouncements of some scientists about climate change and evolution, etc. who are not Christian. Conversely, there are many Christians who have a Christian view of life who embrace climate change, evolution, and largely trust the media. These are primarily political or ideological positions, independent of one's overall faith commitment.

So what is a Christian worldview? Its essence might be distilled to three fundamental propositions or beliefs:

1. That God exists and has created the world (How and when the world was created are ancillary matters)
2. That God reveals Himself specially in the person of Jesus Christ whose teaching on how we should live is divinely sanctioned and authoritative.
3. That God restored Jesus from death to life and will raise us as well to eternal life.

Of course, this is just the core of a Christian worldview. Many Christians believe more than this. Many hold that the Bible, properly interpreted, is completely trustworthy in what it affirms, that Jesus was Himself divine, that God grants eternal life only to those who accept Jesus' lordship, etc., but the point is there's nothing in any of this about "Fake News," capitalism, climate change, or even about evolution. These things are what Reformation era theologians called adiaphora. They're matters upon which Christians who share a core worldview can disagree.

Worthen adds this:

[T]he worldview that has propelled mainstream Western intellectual life and made modern civilization possible is a kind of pragmatism. It is an empirical outlook that continually — if imperfectly — revises its conclusions based on evidence available to everyone, regardless of their beliefs about the supernatural. This worldview clashes with the conservative evangelical war on facts, but it is not necessarily incompatible with Christian faith.

This is also a bit misleading. There is, as far as I am aware, no "conservative evangelical war on facts." There is, however, among evangelical thinkers a great deal of concern about what constitutes a fact as well as the interpretative framework in which facts are situated.

In other words, an evangelical can look at the same evidence as did Charles Darwin without coming to Darwin's conclusion that those evidential facts obviate the need for an intelligent agency to explain them. How facts are interpreted is often a function of a person's metaphysical or philosophical predilections rather than his or her commitment to objective science.

She concludes with this:

Mr. Nelson [a professor of journalism at an evangelical college] encourages his students to be skeptics rather than cynics. “The skeptic looks at something and says, ‘I wonder,’ ” he said. “The cynic says, ‘I know,’ and then stops thinking.”

He pointed out that “cynicism and tribalism are very closely related. You protect your tribe, your way of life and thinking, and you try to annihilate anything that might call that into question.” Cynicism and tribalism are among the gravest human temptations. They are all the more dangerous when they pose as wisdom and righteousness.

This is an ironic conclusion given that it is the skepticism expressed by some Christians - skepticism about the pronouncements of journalists as to what is true in the news, skepticism about the pronouncements of some climatologists concerning anthropogenic global warming, and skepticism about the metaphysical claims of some scientists about the nature of ultimate reality and causation - that Worthen considers to be so problematic.

The people who need to read Mr. Nelson's admonitions are not the Christians who are already plenty skeptical of secular authorities, but those who eagerly and uncritically gulp down their pronouncements. They're the ones who need to spend more time chewing on those claims before they swallow them.

Trump Derangement Syndrome

"Our media have a problem: they are essentially incapable of covering Donald Trump with anything less than full-on deranged hysteria." Daniel Payne at The Federalist.

It's hard to argue with Payne about this. It seems that the liberal media, as well as others, have taken on the role of Chief Inspector Dreyfus to Donald Trump's Inspector Clouseau. The mere thought of Donald Trump seems to induce in them a completely mindless, irrational malice and rancor.

Those in the media suffering from this affliction can't seem to help themselves, nor can they seem to focus on things that matter. They panicked like Chicken Little when he talked tough to Kim Jung Un, fretting that Trump would unleash nuclear war. North Korea backed down from their threats against Guam, and the media, rather than acknowledging the fact, quietly shoved the whole business down the memory hole.

Nothing much appears to be coming of Robert Mueller's Russia investigation either, although there's plenty going on with Hillary's emails and Debbie Wasserman Schultz's inept dealings with nefarious IT people, but despite having promoted the "collusion with Russia" meme 24/7 for almost the entire year, the media is now ignoring it. Any failure gets prominent attention and becomes the subject of much ridicule, any success, and there've been quite a few, gets shunted to the media equivalent of Siberia.

So what's now occupying their attention instead? Like a kitten mesmerized by a laser dot on the carpet the media is fixated on Trump's claim that there was blame to be found on both sides of the awful events in Charlottesville and that "fine people" and bad people were on both sides of the protest. The former assertion is undeniable. The latter, not so much. As of this writing there's no good evidence of any "fine people" on the side of the white supremacists, but even if the president is completely wrong about this, it's hardly the sort of error that merits the hysterics we've been witness to from MSNBC, CNN and sundry other commentators over the past week.

If you think "hysterics" is too strong a word, consider that a state senator from Missouri was driven so far out of her mind by Trump's press conference that she declared she hoped someone would assassinate the president. But perhaps I'm giving her the benefit of the doubt here. For all I know, she was actually in her normal state of mind.

Others, less vicious but equally ridiculous, are calling for his impeachment. This would be a novel development: impeaching the president of the United States because he claimed that both left and right in Charlottesville were responsible for violence. Someone should enlighten these knuckleheads to the fact that they can't impeach a president just because he says things they don't like.

In the body of his article Payne elaborates on the semi-insanity rife in the media this week:

The furor surrounding the press conference stemmed largely from one particular line Trump delivered. When one reporter asked about his claim that there had been “hatred [and] violence on both sides,” Trump replied: “Well I do think there’s blame. Yes, I think there is blame on both sides. You look at both sides. I think there is blame on both sides.”

With that unremarkable assertion, the media were off. “HE STILL BLAMES BOTH SIDES,” CNN blared in enormous font on its front page. In a headline, The New York Times blared that Trump “again blames ‘both sides.” So did the Chicago Tribune. So did NBC News. So did U.S. News and World Report (calling it “an insane press conference” to boot). So did NPR. So did CBS News. So did the Washington Post. So did the Wall Street Journal. So did Time. So did MSNBC. So did USA Today. NBC News later wondered: “Has Trump Lost His Moral Authority for Good?” CNN continued with the massive headlines, calling Trump’s press conference “a meltdown for the ages,” and declaring: “Trump is who we feared he was.” Vox claimed Trump “is offering comfort to racists and extremists.”

The unambiguous implication of this media firestorm is obvious: we are supposed to see it as outrageous at best and morally abhorrent at worst that Trump would claim that “there is blame on both sides.” The thing is, Trump was telling the truth. There is blame on both sides. And we have eyewitness descriptions and photographic evidence to back it up.

This evidence hasn't been very widely publicized by our fourth estate because it contradicts the narrative they wish to purvey which is that the protestors were ugly Nazi brown-shirts and the counter-protestors were gentle clergy, nuns, and grandparents. In fact, the eyewitness testimony gives a fuller picture of the composition of the counter-protestors and the violence they inflicted that the progressive media has largely, but not entirely, ignored:

New York Times reporter Sheryl Gay Stolberg, for one, attested: “The hard left seemed as hate-filled as alt-right,” she tweeted. “I saw club-wielding ‘antifa’ beating white nationalists being led out of the park.” If there were any doubt as to whether the Left were committing violence that day, Stolberg later clarified: “[I] should have said violent, not hate-filled.”

Another eyewitness report comes from Isabella Ciambotti, a creative writing major from the University of Virginia [who was herself a counter-protestor]. Speaking to The New York Times, Ciambotti testified that at one point “a counterprotestor ripped a newspaper stand off the sidewalk and threw it at alt-right protesters.” Photographic evidence confirms Ciambotti’s account.

Raw footage of the moment the counterprotestor threw the box is inconclusive but strongly suggests the counterprotester was unprovoked at the time. Further raw footage shows counterprotesters hurling objects at white supremacists and neo-Nazis while the latter simply stand there a good distance apart from the crowd.

Ciambotti also claims to have witnessed “another man from the white supremacist crowd being chased and beaten.” Additionally she saw “a much older man, also with the alt-right group, [who] got pushed to the ground in the commotion. Someone raised a stick over his head and beat the man with it.” Ciambotti claims to have intervened before the beating could continue further.

According to Jake Tapper of CNN the leftists also physically assaulted journalists who tried to record the violence.

Payne continues:

The fact that our media dedicated an entire news cycle to Trump’s truthful statement on the matter is staggering. This was not necessary. There were plenty of things the media could have criticized in Trump’s press conference. He asserts, for instance, that “very fine people” marched with the white supremacists and Nazis, people “that were there to protest the taking down, of to them, a very, very important statue.”

Maybe this is true, but there is no evidence that the statue protest was made up of anything other than paranoid racists. Trump should not have made this statement unless he was willing to provide proof to back it up.

Yet he also told the press: “I’m not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists, because they should be condemned totally.” This, according to Vox, constitutes Trump “offering comfort to racists and extremists.”

Trump makes a lot of mistakes. Some are minor, some major. In that, he is like every president who has ever held the position. Sometimes he gets things right, too—-as he did blaming the Charlottesville street violence on “both sides.”

Truth and objectivity are very difficult to espy in our current political reportage. Too many editors, journalists, talking heads and television news producers have adopted a pragmatic understanding of truth that justifies them to themselves when they tell only one side of a story. They've embraced the post-modern notion, widely held on the left, that truth is whatever works to achieve one's purposes. If the purpose is to discredit and ultimately remove Trump from office, then any account of events which accomplishes that goal is justified and "true" regardless of how well it corresponds to the actual facts.

Payne concludes with this:

The media’s responsibility, if it even cares anymore, is to learn how to tell the difference between the things he does right, the small mistakes he makes, and the big blunders he commits. Currently the media are apparently incapable of telling the difference between all three: it’s one and the same to them, no matter what he does, no matter what he says.

This is a dismal situation for Americans to be in. We have newsmakers whose only professional function these days seems to be whipping tens of millions of people into angry, irrational frenzies. They do not seem to care about the truth. They do not seem to care about honesty, integrity, or accuracy. We are lurching from one shrieking, insane media episode to the next. And it is wearing on all of us, and weakening the bonds of fellowship and friendship between common Americans.

Those last few sentences are certainly true, and maybe that's the whole point - weakening the bonds of fellowship and friendship between common Americans.

Racial Bigotry at Sojourners

Sojourners touts itself as a magazine of Christian love, reconciliation and Christ-like compassion. So why do they publish the sort of ugly, hate-filled rhetoric David Potter delivers to his readers in a recent edition of the magazine?

In the course of a piece on Charlottesville and white supremacy Potter decides that limiting himself to condemning white supremacists imposes too narrow a scope for his purposes. He pulls out all the stops and seizes his opportunity to indict the entire white race:

[I]t is imperative that white people understand that the construct of whiteness is a disease. In baring [sic] the brutalizing effects of whiteness, people of color are all too familiar with the reality that the overwhelming majority of domestic terrorism is committed by white men: the Oklahoma City bombing, the massacre at Emmanuel AME, the stabbing attack on a Portland train earlier this spring, and the Charlottesville car ramming that injured 19 counter-protestors and murdered Heather Heyer. That white men have the highest suicide rate, accounting for 7 of 10 suicides in 2015, provides further symptoms of this sickness.

Set aside the dubious claims about domestic terrorism and the peculiar interjection of the suicide rate and focus instead on what this writer claims about being white: Whiteness, he avers, is a disease. White people are sick.

Imagine saying anything remotely like that about blacks or Arabs, Jews or Asians. It would surely get the writer fired from many publications or opinion outlets. Yet it's apparently acceptable to voice this sort of bigotry at Sojourners. It's very sad that a putatively Christian magazine allows its pages to be disgraced by this sort of vitriolic small-mindedness.

If Potter thinks that telling people that they're diseased by virtue of their race will cause them to suddenly become more receptive to pleas for racial comity and reconciliation then he couldn't be more mistaken.

If he doesn't really care whether white readers become more interested in racial harmony and just wants to vent his own hatreds, prejudices and frustrations then he couldn't be acting less Christianly.

I don't know whether Potter is black or white, but it doesn't matter. It's columns like his which drive people into the arms of the white supremacists, and, ironically enough, language and insults such as he employs are the very sort of repulsive rhetoric employed by the neo-Nazis and other bigots who demonstrated in Charlottesville.

Perhaps Mr. Potter will have the grace to print a clarification or retraction, but if not, he has shown himself to have more in common with those whom he claims to be repelled by than he is evidently aware.

Pull Down Darwin, Too?

In an article for the Evening Standard journalist A.N. Wilson, who has a biography of Charles Darwin due for release next month, notes that Darwin's statue is prominently situated in the Natural History Museum in London.

In the article he goes on to discuss two of Darwin's big ideas and writes this:

Darwin’s second big idea was that Nature is always ruthless: that the strong push out the weak, that compassion and compromise are for [s]issies whom Nature throws to the wall. Darwin borrowed the phrase “survival of the fittest” from the now forgotten and much discredited philosopher Herbert Spencer.

He invented a consolation myth for the selfish class to which he belonged, to persuade them that their neglect of the poor, and the colossal gulf between them and the poor, was the way Nature intended things. He thought his class would outbreed the “savages” (ie the brown peoples of the globe) and the feckless, drunken Irish.

Stubbornly, the unfittest survived. Brown, Jewish and Irish people had more babies than the Darwin class. The Darwinians then had to devise the hateful pseudo-science of eugenics, which was a scheme to prevent the poor from breeding.

We all know where that led, and the uses to which the National Socialists put Darwin’s dangerous ideas.

To be sure, Darwin was opposed to slavery but not because he recognized the equality of the races. He clearly believed that whites were more highly evolved than, and in many ways superior to, blacks and famously elaborates on that belief in his Descent of Man:

At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilised races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace, the savage races throughout the world. At the same time the anthropomorphous apes, as Professor Schaaffhausen has remarked will no doubt be exterminated. The break between man and his nearest allies will then be wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilised state, as we may hope, even than the Caucasian, and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as now between the negro or Australian and the gorilla. [Emphasis mine]

Such passages from Darwin arguably provided more ammunition for the pernicious propaganda of white supremacists in the 19th and 20th centuries than did any Confederate soldier or officer. When the mobs get done purging our public spaces of all the monuments to these relatively inconsequential figures perhaps they'll turn their attention toward those whose ideas really count.

On the other hand, Darwin, despite his racist views, is a revered saint on the left so his memorials are probably safe.

Equally secure are any memorials to Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, whose ambition it was to limit the production of black babies. Sanger is also a progressive saint so the mob won't be looking for her portraits to deface and burn.

It's too bad for those saddened to see the assaults on Robert E. Lee's monuments that Lee was never able to declare himself to be a Darwinian or pro-choice. If he had, ironically, his statues would be safe today.

Slippery Slopes

So leftist protestors have started pulling down statues of confederate soldiers who fought to defend the right of a state to practice slavery. Whatever one thinks of the propriety of this destruction, whatever one thinks of those who engaged in the buying and selling of human beings, one has to wonder where it will all end.

If monuments of those who fought on behalf of the south in the 1860s are to be destroyed, will all the monuments in cities like Richmond and at civil war battlefields like Gettysburg be pulled down as well? If not, why not?

If monuments of confederate soldiers, most of whom themselves never owned slaves, are no longer tolerable on the American landscape what about monuments to men who actually bought, sold, and owned slaves? Shall we destroy the Jefferson Memorial in Washington, D.C.? Shall we change the name of the Washington Monument? Indeed, should we change the name of the city itself?

What about the state of Washington? How can the citizens of that reliably liberal enclave suffer to have the place in which they live be named for a slave-holder? What about all the universities and colleges and towns across the land named for Washington and Jefferson and other slave-owners? Should not their names be changed as well and the portraits and statues of these men removed?

How about the University of Virginia which was founded by Thomas Jefferson? Is it not sufficiently tainted by its association with its slave-owner founder that it should be closed down? And what should we do with the Constitution and Declaration of Independence which were written by slave-owners? Should they not be torn up and re-written?

While we're at it how can we abide having portraits of Washington and Jefferson on our currency and on Mount Rushmore? And speaking of our currency what's Andrew Jackson's portrait doing on the $20 bill? Jackson perpetrated one of the worst atrocities in our history when he evicted the Cherokees from Georgia. Shouldn't he be expunged from our historical consciousness as well?

Furthermore, consistency demands that the Democratic Party should, at the very least, be compelled to change its name since under that name it has historically been home to all of the major racists in our nation's past. Why don't those who insist on tearing down statues of Civil War soldiers, and those who support them, take their reasoning to its logical conclusion and insist that we do away with the very name of the party of George Wallace, Woodrow Wilson, Bull Connor and FDR who interned thousands of Japanese Americans during WWII?

The first step on a slippery slope - in this case the destruction of Confederate monuments - is always the easiest, but after the first step the logic upon which it was based makes it increasingly more difficult to find a place to stop the slide into sheer madness and mindlessness.

The Value of Lecture

Students and teachers among Viewpoint readers might be interested in a column at the New York Times by Molly Worthen, an associate professor of history at the University of North Carolina. The column is about the value of lectures in college classes, a topic about which there's quite a diversity of opinion.

After introducing her essay by quoting some instructors who eschew lecture in favor of "active learning" and think others should, too, Worthen writes:

In many quarters, the active learning craze is only the latest development in a long tradition of complaining about boring professors, flavored with a dash of that other great American pastime, populist resentment of experts. But there is an ominous note in the most recent chorus of calls to replace the “sage on the stage” with student-led discussion. These criticisms intersect with a broader crisis of confidence in the humanities. They are an attempt to further assimilate history, philosophy, literature and their sister disciplines to the goals and methods of the hard sciences — fields whose stars are rising in the eyes of administrators, politicians and higher-education entrepreneurs.

In the humanities, there are sound reasons for sticking with the traditional model of the large lecture course combined with small weekly discussion sections. Lectures are essential for teaching the humanities’ most basic skills: comprehension and reasoning, skills whose value extends beyond the classroom to the essential demands of working life and citizenship.

I wonder how many critics of lecture have in their minds a picture of something like a prof I had as an undergrad who, at the beginning of class, would sit on his desk, pull a lectern in front of him, and proceed to read his lecture from a series of blue books in which the lectures were recorded word for word.

This, I know, is how many scholars at professional conferences present their papers, and it's pretty much a waste of time for the listeners who could simply read the paper for themselves.

Worthen continues:

Those who want to abolish the lecture course do not understand what a lecture is. A lecture is not the declamation of an encyclopedia article. In the humanities, a lecture “places a premium on the connections between individual facts,” Monessa Cummins, the chairwoman of the classics department and a popular lecturer at Grinnell College, told me. “It is not a recitation of facts, but the building of an argument.”

Absorbing a long, complex argument is hard work, requiring students to synthesize, organize and react as they listen. In our time, when any reading assignment longer than a Facebook post seems ponderous, students have little experience doing this. Some research suggests that minority and low-income students struggle even more. But if we abandon the lecture format because students may find it difficult, we do them a disservice.

Moreover, we capitulate to the worst features of the customer-service mentality that has seeped into the university from the business world. The solution, instead, is to teach those students how to gain all a great lecture course has to give them.

It is indeed hard work to listen to an hour-long lecture, but the discipline it instills and the skills it develops are immensely valuable.

Listening continuously and taking notes for an hour is an unusual cognitive experience for most young people. Professors should embrace — and even advertise — lecture courses as an exercise in mindfulness and attention building, a mental workout that counteracts the junk food of non-stop social media. More and more of my colleagues are banning the use of laptops in their classrooms.

They say that despite initial grumbling, students usually praise the policy by the end of the semester. “I think the students value a break from their multitasking lives,” Andrew Delbanco, a professor of American Studies at Columbia University and an award-winning teacher, told me. “The classroom is an unusual space for them to be in: Here’s a person talking about complicated ideas and challenging books and trying not to dumb them down, not playing for laughs, requiring 60 minutes of focused attention.”

For my part, I don't think 60 minutes of non-stop lecture is particularly efficacious. The instructor needs to pause from time to time and let students digest what they've heard, to be questioned and to ask questions. Their opinions on the issues under discussion should be solicited and challenged and students should be encouraged to defend their views.

Many students, unfortunately, either have no questions or opinions or are reluctant to voice them, but those who do, learn.

One of the dismaying aspects of this approach, though, is that students frequently expect their opinions to be accepted tout court and to be immune to challenge. If the prof does press them on their view, or evinces some disagreement, students sometimes interpret this as a sign that they're not free in class to voice their thoughts. In other words, they see having their views challenged as a form of "put-down" when, of course, it's not that at all. It's simply an attempt to prod the student to sharpen his or her arguments, to express them in a rational fashion rather than simply emoting, and to think more deeply about what they believe.

Worthen goes on to talk about another valuable discipline: Note-taking. This is a skill that, for whatever reason, fewer and fewer students seem to have developed in high school, but in my opinion it's one of the major keys to student success in many college courses.

There's much else of interest to both teachers and students in her column, and I encourage you to read the whole thing.

Shapiro on the Alt-Right

In the wake of Charlottesville Ben Shapiro fired off a series of tweets about the alt-right which I wish to almost completely affirm. Shapiro's tweets are in italics accompanied by my comments:

1. The so-called alt-right is an evil movement having nothing to do with - and actively opposing - Constitutional conservatism.

Any movement based on hatred is evil. The alt-right is not evil because they're nationalistic although that could be troubling. They're evil because they wear the mantle of the nazis and the nazi ideology of racial purity which leads almost inevitably to racial-cleansing.

2. They've done an excellent job, with the media's ignorant help, of portraying themselves as large and powerful.

I don't know how many of them there are, but I suspect there are many more who sympathize with them than actually belong to any organization.

3. And broadening their definition to include anyone who is anti-establishment .... That's not what they are.

This is one of the frustrating things about the progressive media. They constantly commit the fallacy of undistributed middle, i.e. they assume that because group A shares certain beliefs in common with group B that therefore the two groups are identical. It's like arguing that because dogs and cats both have four legs that therefore dogs are cats. The fact that conservatives favor some of the things the alt-right favors does not entail that conservatives are alt-right.

4. The alt-right has a very definite philosophy, articulated by people like Spencer, Taylor, and Vox Day. 5. And excused and popularized by people like Milo Yiannopoulos. They were successful online in convincing key figures that they were 6. An important constituency. Immoral politicians and advisors then made the conscious decision not to carve them off. 7. Yes, that includes Trump and Bannon.

This was indeed a mistake on Trump's part which it's not too late to rectify. Barack Obama stood by Rev. Wright for years until Wright's rhetoric made the association untenable. Trump should completely dissociate himself from any support alt-right individuals like David Duke may be giving him. If that costs him support in the polls, so be it. It's the right thing to do. It's perhaps worth noting that despite the awful rhetoric from some elements in the Black Lives Matter movement and the subsequent murders of police officers, the left never really pushed Obama to disavow BLM, but they're certainly critical of Trump for not more explicitly separating himself from the alt-right.

8. Three elements assure their continued growth: pandering politicians and media figures catering to or ignoring them [i.e. the alt-right], and 9. Left-wingers labeling all right-wingers alt-right and therefore leading innocent people to believe that alt-right Judy means right.

See #3.

10. And left-wing violent groups like Antifa that drive fools into the belief that anyone who fights Antifa is necessarily an ally [of the alt-right].

11. We're watching a tiny microcosm replay of brownshirts vs. reds in Weimar Germany. They're even carrying the same flags.

This is precisely right. There's no substantive difference between the alt-right and the far left. They're both steeped in hatred and both would impose a socialist totalitarian tyranny if they could. The only differences between fascists and communists is that fascists are more militaristic, racist and nationalist (blood and soil) while communists are less fond of overt military trappings, base their hatreds more on class and religion rather than race, and are more globalist. Otherwise, the neo-nazis in Charlottesville and the left-wing protestors in Hamburg and elsewhere are simply two sides of the same coin. They're equally noxious. Given power they would both oppress the groups they hate or, if history is a guide, seek to slaughter them.

12. And leadership in media and especially the White House must actively and thunderously condemn the evil we're watching metastasize.

Trump's response yesterday has been criticized because he didn't explicitly condemn white supremacists and other fascists. I think this is unfair, but even so, the Charlottesville marchers and their ilk, like their counterparts on the left, do need to be explicitly and specifically deplored.

It would be nice, though, if the people so outraged at Trump's measured response yesterday had been as critical of Obama for his disappointing unwillingness to call Islamic-inspired domestic terrorism by its name as well as his failure to dissociate himself from the hateful rhetoric of certain elements of BLM instead of inviting them to the White House.

A Few Rarities

Nature enthusiasts have been treated to several avian rarities in Pennsylvania this summer, and since it's been awhile since I've posted anything on birds I thought I'd share the news about these feathered visitors. None of the photos below are of the actual birds found in Pennsylvania this summer, but they are pics of birds of the same species.

The first is a Roseate spoonbill which inhabits wetlands along the coast in the southern states but rarely ventures as far north as the mid-atlantic region and even more rarely as far inland as Pennsylvania.

Even so, there were two of them present in the state last month within forty miles of each other. One of them is still here. Notice the oddly shaped bill which the spoonbill uses to push mud around as it probes for insects, worms, and other delicacies:

Roseate spoonbill

The second is a small heron that also is found along the southern coasts and very rarely inland this far north. Yet there was one, and maybe two of these birds in PA at the end of July as well.

It's called a Tricolored heron and the reason I said that there may have been two of them is that when one bird was no longer being seen a second one was discovered at a lake only about twenty miles away from where the first was originally found.

Tricolored heron

The third visitor is the most remarkable. It's called a White-winged tern and it's indigenous to eastern Europe and central Asia:

Yellow is its breeding range. Blue is where it winters

How this lovely bird found its way to a small lake in the mountains of north central Pennsylvania this week is a mystery, but its striking black and white plumage and extreme rarity (it may be the only Pennsylvania White-winged tern on record) have been delighting birders and photographers who've been making the trek to Tioga Co. to see it for several days now:

White-winged tern

The natural world is full of beautiful jewels, and birds are among its most gorgeous treasures. To see these creatures in real life can sometimes take one's breath away.

More on Purpose

A couple of days ago I did a post on materialism in which I argued that a materialist worldview empties the world and life of any genuine meaning despite the efforts of some materialists to salvage some measure of purpose in the fleeting ephemerata of human existence.

A friend wrote to respond to the post and add some thoughts of his own which I'd like to share. Here's the core of his response:

As is evident in the article you cite, the problem of materialists is that, no matter how hard they try, they can never fully jettison their human essence. Like C.S. Lewis says in Miracles, "While denying humanity, they all the while remain human."

Materialism is the immediate (and pitifully jejune) result of positivism. The materialist basically says, "I refuse to speculate about realities that can't be empirically verified. Prudence demands that I only give credence to what is posited to my senses--to what I know with certainty is actually there. Therefore, I reject any notion of inherent purpose and meaning.

But there are few things which are more empirically obvious than the existential reality of human beings for whom purpose and meaning are more necessary than food. As you likely know, this is the premise of Viktor Frankl's book, Man's Search for Meaning. Man's incessant search for meaning is an empirically verifiable, existential reality.

To fail to see this one would have to be as obtuse as the willfully blind fundamentalist Christian who refuses to consider any evidence that the earth more than 6,000 years old.

The materialist explanation that purpose is only for evolutionary "benefit" also exposes the reality they are trying to deny. Benefit necessarily implies purpose or telos--benefit means an advantage that contributes toward an end cause. But then having an end cause, like increasing evolutionary sophistication and functionality, requires an intent (aka "purpose") and the concept of intent is nonsensical apart from a will and a mind which does the intending.

It's hard for a materialist to write two sentences without asserting some kind of value attribution. But, as you have so keenly pointed out, like purpose and meaning, according to them, there can be no inherent value in anything.

All is an illusion, but then that can't even be said without a value assertion; either an illusion is "bad" because it keeps us from what is real and true, both of which have inherent value, or illusion is "good" because it enables us to gratify ourselves in some way, but then apart from sheer, visceral itch-scratching, "gratifying" one's self smuggles in notions of individual happiness and fulfillment, which are inherently valuable and thus constitute an important purpose.

To paraphrase Chesterton in The Everlasting Man, "Nothing makes a man look less like an animal than assuming he is one."

Quite so. The materialist, in my opinion, is living in a state of metaphysical tension. He realizes that human life requires meaning, significance and purpose and realizes at the same time that any genuine meaning, significance and purpose are extremely difficult to reconcile with the tenets of his materialism which reduces everything to the chaotic swirl of leptons and baryons.

Yet he soldiers on, clinging to his materialism, his desire to embrace a metaphysics which allows him to avoid a confrontation with God evidently outweighing his desire for a meaningful life. One might well wonder why.

Eight Myths about War with North Korea

Fears of war with North Korea have been exacerbated recently by the rhetoric coming from North Korea's psychotic leader Kim Jung Un who keeps threatening the United States with destruction as he pursues his quest for nuclear missiles.

Given his homicidal temperament and history and his repeated vows to launch nuclear war against American citizens, the White House can't afford to allow him to obtain the weapons that will give him the means to carry out his threats. Diplomacy has so far failed to deter him, however, and it looks as if war is a real possibility.

The consequences of actual war with North Korea would indeed be grim but, according to an article at RedState, have been largely exaggerated by our media. We've been told that the South Korean capital of Seoul with it's population of 25 million people would be levelled by North Korean artillery and that thousands of American troops based in South Korea would be targeted before they could be safely moved.

Neither of these claims is true, according to the author of the piece, a writer who goes by the name Strieff. His column debunks the claim that North Korea has the ability to inflict the damage and carnage the media tells us will ensue if war breaks out and discusses eight myths that have been circulated about such a conflict. The alleged myths are these:

1. Seoul is within easy artillery range of North Korea.
2. All of these long range pieces are within range of Seoul.
3. North Korea will use all of its artillery to target Seoul.
4. North Korean artillery will be able to hit Seoul even if it is in range.
5. North Korean artillery will shoot thousands of rounds at Seoul.
6. Neither the US nor ROK (South Korea) Air Force or artillery will engage North Korean artillery.
7. The ROK army won’t cross the border to clear out North Korean artillery.
8. Seoul will suffer massive civilian casualties.

Streiff refers to the following map which accompanied a piece in yesterday's WaPo (of which he's critical) in his response to the first two "myths":

Of the first myth he says this:

This is simply not true. Thirty miles is extreme range for tube or rocket artillery. The entire North Korean Army has, at a high end estimate, a max of 500 artillery systems and 200 rocket systems that can range Seoul’s northern suburbs and Seoul from what is now North Korea. Only one-third of Seoul can be hit by any type of tube artillery.

The drawing of a 44-mile circle and implying that there are hundreds of artillery pieces which can range as far as the heaviest North Korean rocket systems is just dishonest in the extreme.

Of the second myth he writes:

Dispersion between artillery systems is going to be at least 50 meters. Math alone tells you once you start dispersing that you quickly run out of usable real estate. Why disperse? The blast radius for a 500-lb bomb (the B-2 carries 80 of these) is 50 meters. That means it will kill 50% of everyone within that zone. Even troops in bunkers will be killed or injured by the combination of overpressure and vacuum rupturing hollow organs.

If you drop 1000-lb bombs, increasingly the weapon of choice, the 50% lethality radius exceeds 200 meters. If you want your artillery to survive more than the first air strike you will want them dispersed and in hardened positions. While the 44 mile radius on the map is cute, many of these weapons will be out of range of Seoul because clustering dozens of pieces up on the DMZ within easy range of ROK infantry and armor doesn’t make sense.

You'll have to read the rest at RedState. It's an interesting counterpoint to the catastrophic consequences we've been told would follow an attempt to take out the barbaric regime in Pyongyang.

Streiff closes with this:

...the fact is that the assertion that Seoul is going to be flattened by North Korean artillery is simply false and can easily be proven false.

None of this is to say a war with North Korea would be easy and that it wouldn’t result in widespread destruction in the northern 10% of South Korea, but don’t be fooled. The stories of an Armageddon in South Korea are simply not true. The ROK Air Force and ROK Army are not going to sit on their thumbs and allow Seoul to be pulverized. Neither will American forces.

Just like we spent a lot of effort hunting SCUDs in both Gulf wars, the artillery that can shoot at Seoul will be quickly and ruthlessly hunted down and silenced.

Of one thing there can be no doubt. North Korea simply cannot be permitted to go on building nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them. They must be stopped, and if diplomacy continues to be unproductive then, it seems, Streiff's analysis will be put to the test.

A Purposeless Universe

Joseph P. Carter is a doctoral student in ancient Greek philosophy at the University of Georgia and a materialist who believes that matter and energy is all there is. On the materialist view there's nothing that cannot be reduced to material stuff - no immaterial mind, no soul and, usually, no God.

Carter writes about human purpose from a materialist perspective at the NYT's The Stone, and his conclusions, though somewhat subtly stated, are pretty bleak. Here are some excerpts which will help illustrate the gravamen of his argument:

Purpose is a universal human need. Without it, we feel bereft of meaning and happiness....

But, where does purpose come from? What is it? For over two millenniums, discerning our purpose in the universe has been a primary task of philosophers....

In his Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle tells us that our purpose is happiness or eudaemonia, “well-spiritedness.” Happiness is an ordered and prudent life.

I’m certainly no Aristotelian. Not because I reject happiness. Rather, as a materialist, I think there’s nothing intrinsic about the goals and purposes we seek to achieve it. Modern science explicitly jettisons this sort of teleological thinking from our knowledge of the universe. From particle physics to cosmology, we see that the universe operates well without purpose....

What follows from this, whether Carter intends it or not, is that whatever means we employ to achieve happiness are justified if they enable us to successfully attain it.

In other words, on materialism there are no intrinsically right or wrong means, only those that work and those that don't. If it brings happiness someone to rape, pillage and murder such behaviors aren't wrong because the universe knows nothing about value judgments.

Just as the temperature of the coffee and air equalizes, the Earth, our solar system, galaxies and even supermassive black holes will break down to the quantum level, where everything cools to a uniform state.... Eventually everything ends in heat death....

What’s the purpose in that, though?

There isn’t one. At least not fundamentally.... [T]he universe as we understand it tells us nothing about the goal or meaning of existence, let alone our own. In the grand scheme of things, you and I are enormously insignificant.

But, Carter stresses, we're not completely insignificant. We can invent pretend purposes and meaning that occupy and divert our attention enough to enable us to stave off nihilism and existential despair.

We can be important to each other, he insists, we can do things that give us the incentive to get out of bed in the morning, we can even believe there's real purpose to our lives even though we know there isn't because evolutionary benefits accrue to those who make themselves believe it.

This is a depressing recitation, but it's really all that materialism can offer. A materialist can either accept that his life is nothing more than a "tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing", or he can reject materialism. What he can't do is remain a materialist and pretend that somehow life matters.

Jean Paul Sartre observed that "Life ceases to have any meaning the moment you lose the illusion of being eternal." Or, to put the same thought differently, unless what we do matters forever it doesn't really matter at all.

Carter, as one would expect, disagrees with this assessment:

An indifferent universe also offers us a powerful and compelling case for living justly and contentedly because it allows us to anchor our attention here. It teaches us that this life matters and that we alone are responsible for it. Love, friendship and forgiveness are for our benefit. Oppression, war and conflict are self-inflicted.

This seems to me to be a case of whistling past the graveyard. What an indifferent universe does is impress upon us the fact, contrary to Carter's assertion, that there is no compelling case for living justly if living unjustly confers upon us the pleasures and other desiderata of life that we seek. It tells us that we are just dust in the wind and nothing we do will last or matter ultimately. It tells us that love and the rest are merely chemical reactions in our brains and that though they may benefit some people, others may benefit just as much from oppression, war and conflict.

Atheist materialist Richard Dawkins famously wrote that the universe exhibits no design, no purpose, no evil and no good. Just blind pitiless indifference. In such a universe right and wrong, good and bad, are entirely subjective. What's right and good for one person may be wrong and bad for another.

When we ask what’s the purpose of the recent gassing of Syrian children in the Idlib Province or the torture and killings of Chechnyan homosexual men, we ought not simply look to God or the universe for explanations but to ourselves, to the entrenched mythologies that drive such actions — then reject them when the institutions they inform amount to acts of horror.

Notice Carter doesn't say we should judge these acts to be evil. On the materialist's view there is no genuine moral evil. Carter avers instead that we can "reject" them, but why, on materialism, should we reject these acts if they bring us happiness? Why is it wrong for men to treat other men cruelly if they believe it advances their well-being and flourishing? It's hard to see how a materialist would answer that question.

He concludes his article with these words:

One day I will die. So will you. [Everything in the universe] will decay ... as the fundamental particles we’re made of return to the inert state in which everything began.

Perhaps so, but if that's true then nothing we do on this tiny speck of a planet in the extraordinarily brief moment of time we spend here really matters.

Materialism offers no hope, no meaning, no basis for moral action, no reason for enduring the pain and suffering of life. To insist otherwise, as Carter does, is to indulge in make-believe.

No Surprise

The French News Agency AFP recently ran a story about a study that showed that people are more likely to assume that a hypothetical "vile deed" was more likely inflicted by an atheist than by a theist.

This isn't an especially newsworthy finding, I wouldn't think, given all the anecdotal evidence out there, but AFP thought it was because the study revealed that even atheists held this view about their fellow atheists:

An unusual social study has revealed that atheists are more easily suspected of vile deeds than Christians, Muslims, Hindus or Buddhists -- strikingly, even by fellow atheists, researchers said Monday.

This suggests that in an increasingly secular world, many -- including some atheists -- still hold the view that people will do bad things unless they fear punishment from all-seeing gods.

The results of the study "show that across the world, religious belief is intuitively viewed as a necessary safeguard against the temptations of grossly immoral conduct," an international team wrote in the journal Nature Human Behaviour. And it revealed that "atheists are broadly perceived as potentially morally depraved and dangerous."

Participants were given a description of a fictional evildoer who tortured animals as a child, then grows up to become a teacher who murders and mutilates five homeless people.

Half of the group were asked how likely it was that the perpetrator was a religious believer, and the other half how likely that he was an atheist.

The team found that people were about twice as likely to assume that the serial killer was an atheist.

"It is striking that even atheists appear to hold the same intuitive anti-atheist bias," study co-author Will Gervais, a psychology professor at the University of Kentucky in Lexington, told AFP.

There are more details at the link. I'm not sure, though, why Gervais is surprised by this result. How many of the mass murderers in the U.S. were either atheists or Islamic terrorists? I would venture to guess that the number is close to 100%. Moreover, those who were not atheists or Muslims I would venture to guess are only nominal theists who at best hold very tenuous, inchoate views about God.

There are two different reasons, in my opinion, why perpetrators of mass evil, at least in this country, are likely to be either atheists or Muslims. In the latter case it's because the perpetrator is convinced, not unreasonably, that the religion to which he is devoted actually encourages the murders of infidels, apostates, Jews, and those who dishonor the family name.

In the former case the reason is not so much that the perpetrator lacks a belief in Divine punishment, although that may be part of it, but rather that an atheist perpetrator has no good reason for thinking that any deed he might perform is morally evil in the first place.

If atheism is true then we're all just highly evolved animals, and there's no moral evil among animals. When a cat kills a mouse, even if the killing is simply gratuitous and unrelated to acquiring food, it's not doing evil. It's just doing what cats do. So it is with human beings. When one man slays another he's just doing what humans have been doing to each other ever since Cain and Abel.

Morality, on atheism, is simply something humans have devised to help them live together in society and avoid constant conflict, but if someone violates society's moral conventions they're not doing something wrong in any ultimately meaningful sense. They're just doing something that other people don't like.

When we condemn a mass killer all we're doing is expressing our disapproval of what the killer did, sort of like when fans at a baseball game boo the umpire, but the umpire who makes a bad call hasn't done anything immoral and neither has the killer. For the killer's act to be immoral he must be accountable to a higher law and a higher judge than merely the laws and judges of human society.

Thus, the presumption that someone who does evil is likely to be an atheist is a perfectly rational surmise, and the study simply shows that reflective atheists, just like most others, recognize the fact.

A theist, if he's genuinely committed to his belief, knows that if he does a horrible deed he's doing something deeply and genuinely wrong and is betraying both the faith he professes to hold and the God he professes to love. When an atheist does something horrible he has no reason to think he's doing anything wrong or betraying anything at all.

Between the two, then, who is more likely to wreak evil upon others?

GOP Tartuffery

Politicians who say one thing and do another are not difficult to find, but even so the recent senate vote on repealing Obamacare was a bonanza for connoisseurs of political tergiversation.

Seven GOP senators who had on previous occasions - when it was certain that any repeal bill would be vetoed by Mr. Obama and no danger of the law actually being undone could be espied - stoutly insisted that for the sake of the country, for the well-being of the people, the ACA had to be demolished, root and branch. But when repeal loomed as a real possibility last month these august senators' memories of their previous asseverations were evidently beclouded, and they voted against a bill that would have eliminated the law for which they had previously expressed such strenuous opposition.

Here's what each of the seven Republican senators who voted late last month against repealing Obamacare has said about it in the past:

LISA MURKOWSKI (R-AK): “This law is not affordable for anyone in Alaska. That is why I will support the bill that repeals the ACA and wipes out its harmful impacts."

SUSAN COLLINS (R-ME): "I believe that we made - that Congress made - a real error in passing Obamacare, we should repeal the law so that we can start over."

JOHN McCAIN (R-AZ): “It is clear that any serious attempt to improve our health care system must begin with a full repeal and replacement of Obamacare.”

DEAN HELLER (R-NV): "The repeal of this law will not only reduce federal spending, but it will also allow Congress to address problems within the current health-care system.”

SHELLEY MOORE CAPITO (R-WV): "I have consistently voted to repeal and replace this disastrous health-care law, and I am glad that a repeal bill will finally reach the president’s desk."

LAMAR ALEXANDER (R-TN): "Obamacare was an historic mistake, and should be repealed and replaced with step-by-step reforms that transform the health-care delivery system."

ROB PORTMAN (R-OH): “[Obamacare] is fundamentally flawed. I do think we ought to delay ... and then we’ve got to repeal this thing and start over."

Actually Murkowski, Collins and McCain achieved summa cum laude honors among Washington hypocrites by actually voting against both full repeal and the so-called "skinny repeal" which would have repealed the law but kept it in place until a satisfactory substitute was found.

If there's a Hall of Fame for political tartuffery surely these three deserve immediate induction.

Viva la Revolución!

During the recent G20 summit in Hamburg, Germany leftists from across Europe protested violently against the evils of global capitalism. The "protestors" were presumably young socialist/communists who ought to be taken aside and asked what, exactly, is their vision of a socialist future?

Is it, say, Venezuela which was at one time in the not too distant past the fourth richest nation in the world on a per capita basis, but which, since adopting socialism in the "Bolivarian Revolution" of Hugo Chavez and his successor Nicolas Maduro, finds that it can no longer feed or provide basic services for its people? Socialism has brought this once-prosperous nation to the cusp of civil war as Rich Lowry explains in a column at the New York Post.

Lowry writes:

Venezuela is a woeful reminder that no country is so rich that it can’t be driven into the ground by revolutionary socialism....

A country that has more oil reserves than Saudi Arabia is suffering shortages of basic supplies. Venezuela now totters on the brink of bankruptcy and civil war, in the national catastrophe known as the Bolivarian Revolution.

The phrase is the coinage of the late Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez, succeeded by the current Venezuelan strongman Nicolas Maduro.

The Chavistas have worked from the typical Communist playbook of romanticizing the masses while immiserating them. Runaway spending, price controls, nationalization of companies, corruption and the end of the rule of law — it’s been a master class in how to destroy an economy.

The result is a sharp, years-long recession, runaway inflation and unsustainable debt. The suffering of ordinary people is staggering, while the thieves and killers who are Chavista officials have made off with hundreds of billions of dollars. At this rate — The Economist calls the country’s economic decline “the steepest in modern Latin American history” — there will be nothing left to steal.

Any government in a democratic country that failed this spectacularly would have been relegated to the dustbin of history long ago. Maduro is getting around this problem by ending Venezuela’s democracy.

This has been the standard modus operandi of the far left for the last one hundred years. Leftists exploit democracy to gain power and then eliminate democracy in order to consolidate that power. Finally, they employ their power to impose a violent tyranny while at the same time turning their country into an economic basket-case.

The history of Africa in the 20th century is full of case studies, and closer to home Cuba is a notable illustration of this same pattern, a pattern that George Orwell limned so charmingly for readers of his novel Animal Farm.

Lowry concludes his piece with these thoughts:

Denied the ordinary means of dissent via the press and elections, the opposition has taken to the streets. Already more than 100 people have been killed in clashes over the past several months.

Worse is yet to come. Lacking legitimacy and representing only a fraction of the populace, the Maduro regime will rely on the final backstop of violent suppression. It is now the worst crisis in a major country in the Western Hemisphere since the heights of the Colombian civil war in the 1990s and 2000s.

In the meantime, the Bolivarian Revolution is proceeding according to its sick logic — and there will be blood.

Alas, there often is. Once a government extinguishes freedom and seeks to impose a socialist economy by force, bloodshed, often massive as in Cambodia, China and the U.S.S.R., is the not uncommon result.

So, too, is economic wretchedness.

RAISE

By now you've no doubt heard of the RAISE Act (Reforming American Immigration for a Strong Economy Act) that has been introduced into the Senate by Senators Tom Cotton and David Perdue and endorsed by President Trump. Predictably media liberals are attacking it and Trump's supporters are delighted with it, but what would the act actually do? What are it's strong and weak points and how can the weaknesses be strengthened?

Immigration expert Lyman Stone has a fine piece at The Federalist that summarizes the act and answers those questions. Here's the summary:

First, the RAISE ACT would eliminate “Diversity Lottery Visas,” a program that gives 50,000 visas to countries that send few immigrants to the United States in the name of, well, diversity.

Second, it would limit the number of refugees given permanent residency to 50,000 per year.

Third, it would eliminate the ability of immigrants to sponsor visas for extended family members and adult children.

Fourth, it would restructure the employment-visa system into a points system akin to those used by Canada or Australia, prioritizing young-ish immigrants with good English, high-paying job offers, and other markers of achievement.

Stone goes on to explain a bit about each of these. The points system in particular would look like this:

[E]ach person applying for immigration authorization is awarded points based on various characteristics on a 0 to 100 basis. If you get fewer than 30 points, you are ineligible for immigration.

Practically speaking, nobody except Olympic athletes, wealthy investors, or Nobel Prize winners gets a score over 45 points. For most immigrants, points come from age (26-31 is the sweet spot, earning 10 points, while over-50s get zero points, with various gradations in between), education (a bachelor’s degree earns you 5 or 6, a STEM masters 7 or 8, a STEM PhD 10 or 13), English-language skills (the top 10 percent of test-takers using a standardized test get 12 points), and salary offered (5-13 points depending on how far the wage is above median wages).

Many countries use points systems because these are easy to understand for voters, bureaucrats, and immigrants. Voters feel like they understand how they’re being governed, bureaucrats don’t have to make as many subjective choices, and immigrants have clear goals and benchmarks. The United Kingdom adopted such a system in 2008. Australia’s system is widely seen as a model for such systems. You can easily look up Canada’s scoring system online.

Like any legislation RAISE probably needs to be tweaked. Stone discusses some pros and cons:

A focus on skills is long overdue. Even as low-skilled workers in the United States may face competition from cheaper immigrant labor, high-skilled employers continue to complain that they can’t find enough workers. Shifting away from kinship-based visas that encourage immigrants to bring over lower-skilled relatives towards a system that zeroes in on skilled workers would simultaneously reduce the pressure on working-class wages while making it easier for advanced companies to hire the best and brightest from around the world.

Indeed, it actually makes it harder for companies to poach talent from abroad by creating additional barriers, such as English fluency or certain age brackets, that were not previously necessary. Say you’re an advanced polymer manufacturing company in Ohio and you want to hire an engineer. Your new hire has a PhD in polymers from a U.S. university (13 points) and you’re offering him 40 percent of median wages (13 points). But he’s 53 (zero points) and his English is only about average for foreigners (zero points). At 26 points, this candidate is totally ineligible for a visa despite obviously being good for the country.At least, that’s what should happen.

But the RAISE Act designers made a crucial drafting error. They slashed family visas, implemented a points-based system… then left the number of employment visas unchanged at 140,000. This is nonsensical. Sure, the RAISE Act relieves some pressure on low-skilled workers, which is good, but it does absolutely nothing to make the United States more globally competitive.

The problems, Stone maintains, are easy to remedy, and he suggests some fixes in his article to which I refer you for many more details than I've mentioned here.

It's hard to see why this bill, with appropriate modifications, should not be passed into law, although some will oppose it simply because it's a Republican proposal endorsed by Trump. The "Resist" folks notwithstanding, though, it's a system that makes a lot of sense, has been adopted by other first world nations, and one that we should adopt as well.