Hate Trumps Love

At least that's the way it appears in much of our country.

The CEO of a cyber security firm has resigned after posting his intention on social media to assassinate President-elect Trump:

The CEO of a San Diego cyber-security company has resigned after he said he planned to assassinate President-elect Trump on social media. Images of Matt Harrigan’s comments began circulating on social media Sunday. They included the statement “I’m going to kill the president. Elect.” He also wrote, “Bring it secret service,” and “In no uncertain terms, f*** you America. Seriously. F*** off.”

This man shows signs of being seriously deranged, and we should probably pray for him rather than laugh at him. More serious than his moronic posting was the beating of a fifteen year old student by four thugs at an anti-Trump demonstration at a Rockville, MD high school:

Hundreds of students from Richard Montgomery High School were carrying signs reading, “Love Trumps Hate,” and chanting near the Rockville courthouse on Maryland Avenue in a protest that began at about 10 a.m. when a 15-year-old boy wearing one of the Trump campaign’s “Make American Great Again” hats was attacked by about four students.

The group surrounded the teen, punching him repeatedly, then threw him to the ground and kicked him repeatedly in the ribs. It is not yet clear what led up to the incident, but Maj. Michael English with Rockville police said the victim was not the aggressor.

There's been a great deal of hand-wringing in the media about Trump supporters allegedly saying mean things to minorities and playing nasty tricks on them, like subscribing them to racist websites, but has there been a single report of brutal beatings perpetrated by Trump supporters against anyone? I'm sure there has been, but they're few and far between.

The lunacy and the violence seems to be predominately a feature of the left and other anti-Trumpers, and it simply confirms in the minds of the people who voted for him, many of whom certainly had their doubts about the man, that they did the right thing. It also goes a long way to ensuring that the party these people implicitly support will not be returned to power anytime soon.

Let's Condemn All of It

There's considerable concern being voiced this week over acts of intimidation perpetrated by putative Trump supporters, and, to the extent that these occur, they must be categorically condemned by everyone dedicated to justice and democracy. Democracies are fragile and cannot long endure if the people are not free of intimidation. It's unfortunate, though, that there seems to be much less concern being expressed over the far more violent threats and physical attacks being perpetrated by leftist opponents of Donald Trump.

Consider just a few examples of the threats and intimidation first. The CEO of Grubhub has told his employees that if they supported Trump they should tender their resignations forthwith.

Film director Joss Whedon tweeted ominously that Donald Trump must not be permitted to serve a term in office. Exactly what does this mean? Is Whedon calling for Trump's assassination? An awful lot of his political allies are.

Assassination threats against Trump are flooding Twitter. Leftist protesters are calling for violence. One site has even been set up to encourage the rape of Trump's wife. The disgusting website is called "Rape Melania."

Add to the threats against Trump and his supporters the riots and numerous instances of actual physical violence that is being visited upon Trump supporters, and one wonders why, if the intimidation of minorities by threatening signs and slurs is worthy of our condemnation, and they emphatically are, why don't these other examples of even more horrible behavior also merit our condemnation? Why is the liberal media seemingly indifferent to them?

Donald Trump was called upon by some in the media to publicly condemn acts of intimidation carried out in his name, and on national television he forcefully responded by telling people to just stop it. Why aren't similar and worse behaviors on the left being condemned by President Obama, Mrs. Clinton and other prominent Democrats? Why aren't the print and broadcast media demanding that the leaders of the Democrat party forcefully repudiate these despicable attacks and threats?

Do they have a partisan or ideological blind spot so large that they can't see evil when it's manifested on the left? Is not the perception that they do indeed have such a blind spot one of the very reasons Trump won the support of so many voters who were fed up with one-sided media outrage? When will the media learn to practice simple fairness?

The Electoral College

For the fourth time in history the candidate who lost the presidential election actually received more votes than did the winner (The previous elections in which this occurred were in 1876, 1888, and 2000).

This has caused some to question why we use the Electoral College rather than simply electing the winner by popular vote. The reason is that the founding fathers created the current system because they wanted the president to be elected by the states, not directly by the people. The founders had a healthy fear of the mob and how easily it could be swayed, so just as they set up a system of checks and balances in the government they also set up something of the same thing in the electoral process.

Josh Gerlernter writing at National Review Online points out one effect of the Electoral College:

[O]ne thing about the Electoral College that is inarguable is that it delegitimizes the popular vote as a measurement of the candidates’ popularity. There is no basis for saying that Clinton was ultimately the more popular candidate because more people voted for her. Because the Electoral College means non-swing states are taken for granted, their constituents are more likely to take the outcome for granted, and not bother to vote.

Obviously, this doesn’t mean that more Trump supporters than Clinton supporters didn’t bother voting. It means that there’s no way of knowing one way or the other. Though you could argue that, since Republicans were defending 24 senate seats to the Democrats’ nine, there was more reason for Democrats to vote in likely Republican states than the other way around.

With votes still being counted, Clinton leads Trump by just under 300,000 votes. In California, where — unlike in 2012 — there was no Republican senate candidate on the ballot, Trump won 1.8 million fewer votes than Romney. Is that because Trump is 1.8 million votes less popular in California than Romney was? Maybe. But it could also be that Republicans had less reason to vote in a state whose electoral votes were never in doubt.

In other words, in a state like California where there was no chance of Trump winning and no real major office candidates on the ballot, it could well be that a lot of Republican voters simply stayed home, telling themselves that their vote wouldn't make any difference anyway. If so, the fact that Hillary had more total votes doesn't really mean that she's more popular.

Should we abandon the Electoral College? Arguments can be made pro and contra, but it would in any case be very difficult to accomplish since it would require a Constitutional amendment, and that, as proponents of the Equal Rights Amendment will tell you, is next to impossible to achieve. It would be especially difficult in this case since the current system has almost two hundred and forty years of political inertia behind it and no human rights issues are at stake. It's just easier to live with the current system than to try to change it.

Hot Button Issue

Several days ago (11/8/16) I posted a piece on VP titled I Bet You Didn't Know This which explained that, contrary to the impression we get from our media, a majority of Hispanics actually want stricter immigration laws and enforcement of those laws.

In response to that post a reader shared an anecdote which I thought would be of interest to other readers. I've edited her submission only slightly. She wrote:

I worked in retail up until this past August and one of my favorite co-workers is a Haitian. He has been in America for the last 6 years. He is married and has two children. His wife and children were already citizens and had been so for a very long time. My Haitian friend worked as a professor in Mexico for many years and he taught law. He speaks four different languages and has traveled extensively through the world. He has friends from all over and good friends that are Hispanic.

He was the first one to start talking about his frustration with the laws in the United States when it came to immigration issues. He was studying and working hard to become a citizen here 2 years ago and he and I were talking about the laws and the immigration policies. He was quite angry at the fact that he knew there were illegal immigrants who worked “under the table” did not pay taxes and yet had their driver’s license and were “taken care of” by our government.

He said he loved these people but still believed exactly what this Viewpoint post states, “there has been “too little” done to enforce immigration laws.”

He would appreciate this post, and I can hear him now in his accented French saying, "Yes, yes now this makes sense. I agree with him and this post." I wonder how my friend would feel about the findings of this research saying, "more Hispanics support a deportation policy for illegals." I have a huge heart for helping people, but I also get frustrated when I feel taken advantage of, and I do believe there are a lot of immigrants that are here illegally and taking advantage of the system.

The media leads us to believe all Hispanics want open boarders and want all of us to welcome them with open arms. I think putting "a cap of 500,000 immigrants a year, about half the current level" is good idea.

Once again it appears the media has fed the wrong information to the readers, “if you only get your news and insight from the major media what you think you know is probably wrong” is a true statement. If I didn’t believe that before ..., which I did, the posts on Viewpoint have certainly opened my eyes to more of it.

Immigration is a hot button for a lot of people, myself included. This point was a part of what influenced my voting choices. I’m not sure a wall is the way to go as Trump has said he will do, but I know that having the “open borders policy” is not a good idea and the fact that the media has led people to believe that is what “all Hispanics are in favor of” is stunning, although it should not be. No doubt they get their information from the very people they want to get it from to support what they want the readers to read and, once again, mislead the people with inaccurate information.

Trump may in the end choose not to build the wall that he promised he would build during the campaign. Who knows? But he will be forgiven for not keeping that promise only if he makes the wall unnecessary by restoring the integrity of our borders by other means. If he fails in this task he'll almost certainly be a one-term president.

Thank Obama for Trump

The same left which howled in outrage when Trump suggested in a debate that he might not accept the results of the election if there was reason to think that there was fraud, seems now to be refusing to accept the results of the election. Thousands are protesting in the streets and declaring that they will never accept Trump as their president. Some of the demonstrations are violent. People are being beaten and property is being damaged.

Imagine the hysterics if Tea Partiers had conducted themselves similarly in the wake of Obama's reelection in 2012, yet all we're getting today from much of our news reports are the cold, hard facts. No hand-wringing about what these riots portend for our democracy. No blistering indictments of the thugs roaming the streets looking for Trump supporters to pummel. You'd think that the media and the left would know better. After all, it was revulsion at media hypocrisy and gratuitous violence organized and subsidized by the left that drove many Trump voters to the polls in the first place.

But there were lots of other factors that motivated people to vote for Trump. In fact, Robert Tracinski at The Federalist argues that Donald Trump is actually Barack Obama's legacy. He suggests five facts about, or aspects of, Obama's presidency which inspired people to reject the woman who would have given us an Obama third term. He writes:

[W]hat most people haven’t realized yet is the extent to which this election loss is also the legacy of President Obama, on five different levels.

The five levels he alludes to, with my summaries of them, are these:

1. Obama discouraged more electable alternatives to Hillary Clinton. Under Obama the Democratic party has moved substantially leftward which makes it very difficult to appeal to a center-right nation. Obama is without doubt the left-most person ever to occupy the White House and his influence has spread throughout the party.

2. Obama’s mania for unpopular policies ran his party into the ground. The mid-term elections of 2010 and 2014 when Obama wasn't on the ballot saw his party lose hundreds of elected officials - governors and state legislators - largely as a result of the ham-fisted fashion in which Obamacare was rammed through the legislature, so that the party today has a very thin bench. As weak and unappealing as she was, Hillary was about the best candidate the Democrats had to put up against the Republicans in 2016.

3. Instead of transcending racial politics, Obama revived them. The Democrats have made a bet that minorities will soon be the majority so they've put their hopes on dominating that minority vote. This strategy backfired in 2016, however, since large numbers of whites resent the tactic of racial divisiveness that they see the Democratic party fostering.

4. Obama’s stagnant economy bred hopelessness. Tracinski writes: President Obama came into office at a moment of financial crisis, and he promised that government “stimulus” would get the economy moving again. But the stimulus never really stimulated, and the economy has just dragged along in the slowest and most lackluster recovery in memory.

Instead of “Morning Again in America” where we experience a burst of 7 percent annual growth, we have yet to regain even the old long-term average of 3 percent growth. The result is stagnant wages, high unemployment, reduced labor force participation, and more people on welfare and food stamps. These problems have been particularly devastating for non-college-educated, blue-collar whites, feeding an atmosphere of rage and hopelessness.

5. Obama cultivated the sense of a diminished America. His foreign policy often seemed confused, weak and inconsistent. He threatened Assad with retribution if Assad used chemical weapons on his people, but when Assad crossed Obama's red line the United States essentially did nothing. His Iran nuclear deal seems to be little more than a $100 billion bribe to Iran to put off for a time the day when they annihilate Israel with nuclear weapons. Benghazi was a disaster. His precipitous withdrawal from Iraq left a vacuum that ISIS rushed in to fill at the cost of thousands of lives. And so on.

Tracinski does a good job of developing these five failures and his article is well-worth reading. Check it out.

Racism or Ignorance?

One of the weirdest dogmas in the liberal catechism is that voter ID laws are racist because expecting black people to have ID or to know how to obtain ID in order to vote is simply to expect too much of blacks.

This is what Michael Gerson, a George W. Bush speechwriter, once referred to as the "soft bigotry of low expectations," and it's certainly the conventional view on the left as illustrated anecdotally by Ami Horowitz.

Horowitz went to Berkeley recently to interview liberal white students about their views on requiring voters to present identification at the polling place in order to minimize the opportunities for fraud, and many of them, at least the ones he included in the video, gave pretty much the stock response that such requirements are racist. Why? Because, the reasoning goes, obtaining IDs is beyond the capacities of too many black people.

Horowitz then traveled to Harlem to interview African Americans to see what they thought about what the Berkeley students had said. The results, the ones that survived the editing at any rate, were interesting:

Who are the racists, those who expect blacks and others to be able to perform the same task that whites perform all the time, i.e. secure an ID, or those who believe that blacks just can't be expected to manage what almost everyone else in the country can manage with little difficulty? It seems to me that if there is real racism lurking about in the issue of voter ID it's being exhibited by the young progressives at Berkeley, but, in truth, I doubt that these people are genuinely racist. I agree with the interviewees in Harlem. They're probably just ignorant.

Repudiation

There's been, and will be, a lot of analysis of yesterday's election, most of it I'm sure is much closer to the mark than my inexpert view. Nevertheless, for what it's worth I think that yesterday was not so much an affirmation by the nation's electorate of Donald Trump but rather an explosive repudiation of a political and media coalition that has frustrated and angered voters across this country for decades.

The elites in Washington and at the major media outlets have lorded it over the rest of what they disdainfully call "flyover country" for a generation and have grown increasingly arrogant, self-righteous and corrupt, and a lot of people have quite simply had enough of it.

More than Hillary Clinton, perhaps, this election was a repudiation of eight years of the Obama administration, its scandals, corruption, circumventions of the people via executive orders, and policies which many see as destructive of the economic and social health of the country.

Under the Obama presidency, to take a few examples, the IRS and DOJ have been perverted by a leadership seeking to use the power of these institutions to advance President Obama's political agenda and to protect Mrs. Clinton from legal scrutiny.

Over the past eight years the president's judicial appointments have been disappointingly mediocre and alarmingly unmoored from the Constitution and the law. The judiciary has taken upon itself the prerogatives of the legislature. Judges now make law instead of interpreting it.

During Mr. Obama's tenure the national debt has climbed to historically unprecedented levels, soaring to about 20 trillion dollars, an incomprehensible sum that'll take generations of Americans to pay off. Meanwhile, the labor force participation rate is at record lows.

The president's nuclear deal with Iran awarded the mullahs 100 billion dollars, half of which they're using to subsidize terrorism and build up their military. In return we got promises that Iran will slow down their production of nuclear weapons, delaying for only a few years the day when they'll be able to annihilate the nation of Israel and terrorize the rest of the Middle East with the threat of nuclear holocaust.

Throw into this mix the failures of Obamacare with its attendant deceptions, our de facto open borders policy, the assaults on traditional marriage and gender distinctions, the marketing of baby body parts by Planned Parenthood, the repeated attacks on religious liberty, and the steady decay of popular culture, a vivid illustration of which being Hillary Clinton's recent rally featuring rapper Jay-Z promiscuously dropping F-bombs and N-bombs (Many people watching that spectacle doubtless said to themselves that they don't want anything to do with a candidate who'd have anything to do with such a performance).

Hillary Clinton was seen as perpetuating and exacerbating all of these grievances, and indeed she campaigned as one who would in fact carry the policies and practices of the last eight years forward for the next eight. Enough people cringed at that prospect to ensure her defeat. Enough people, too, were weary of being called bigots, racists, xenophobes, homophobes, and, in general, deplorables, simply because they question the wisdom of allowing men into women's restrooms or allowing unvetted refugees to pour willy-nilly into the country.

The election of Trump was also a rejection of a news media which has abandoned its role of informing us of the news and has assumed the role of partisan, biased advocates of the Democrat party and its agenda. When media employees like CNN's Donna Brazile are found to have passed questions on to Hillary Clinton that CNN's debate moderators were planning to ask Mrs. Clinton one can't help but feel that the media is simply the propaganda arm of the Democratic party.

Trump's voters were also eager to stick a thumb in the eye of Hollywood celebrities who presume to lecture us on our duties as citizens and threaten like spoiled children to move out of the country if we don't heed their admonitions. Many voters were eager to help them pack their bags.

And finally there was the strong desire to see the back of Bill and Hillary Clinton and the malodorous culture of mendacity, corruption, and floating above the law that has attached to them for as long as they've been in public life.

The desire to be done with all of this lit the fuse on the dynamite that exploded last night.

Donald Trump, despite his manifold faults, was seen at least to be a fighter, someone who would hit back when the Democrats attacked him. Most voters can't even remember a Republican presidential candidate who fought back against the attacks and slanders of the Democrats' media minions.

So Trump was chosen to be the champion to carry all the simmering frustrations and irritations of the last eight years or more into the election, but he was just the vehicle. The goal, in the mind of many voters, was to strip the Democrat/media complex of its power and influence, to clean out the sewer that is Washington, and to reaffirm the principle that government exists to serve the people, the people don't exist to serve the government.

Judging by the dismay on the faces of many media commenters last night they were shocked that the people would have the temerity to ignore them and actually refuse to swallow the castor oil the media wanted us to believe was really good for us.

Bet You Didn't Know This

From Paul Bedard at the Washington Examiner: A majority of Hispanics actually favor tougher immigration enforcement:

The Pulse Opinion Research survey found that 51 percent of Hispanics believe that there has been "too little" done to enforce immigration laws. What's more, by a margin of 49 percent to 36 percent, Hispanics "support a policy causing illegal immigrants to return home by enforcing the law."

Overall, the survey done for the Center for Immigration Studies, found that most Americans, 54 percent, believe that the administration has done too little to enforce immigration laws and 56 percent support returning illegals.

Immigration has been a huge issue in the election and most pundits have reasoned that Trump's call for enforcement and construction of a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border has pushed Hispanics into Hillary Rodham Clinton's camp.

But the findings cloud that reasoning since more Hispanics support a deportation policy for illegals.

Another key finding: Most Americans want a cap of 500,000 immigrants a year, about half the current level.

There's much more on this perhaps surprising finding at the link. We've been inculcated by the media with the assumption that all Hispanics are in favor of the Obama/Clinton open borders policy, but that's evidently false. The media, of course, get their data by interviewing activist Hispanics who tend to be left/liberals who represent the suppositions of large swatches of the media but who do not represent the majority of Hispanics in this country.

This illustrates once again, if further illustration were necessary, that if you only get your news and insight from the major media what you think you know is probably wrong.

Donald or Hillary?

A friend wrote to give his opinion on the election and said this:

[Trump's] a buffoon and dangerous. Hillary is no paragon of virtue, but it is at least more of the same, which is a lot better in my view than Trump at the helm. I hope you agree.

Well, it's hard to argue with most of what my friend said in those three sentences, but even so, I do disagree with his assertion that Hillary is less odious than Trump. In fact, I think in the "contemptible candidate" sweepstakes she beats Trump by a couple of lengths. Here's part of what I wrote back to him:

I cannot defend much of Trump's rhetoric and wouldn't even try. The man is a textbook case of arrested development, but, even so, whatever criticisms can be fairly leveled against Trump as a potential president can also be leveled with at least equal, if not greater, force against Hillary and her party.

If Trump is a danger to the Constitution so, too, is she. She has openly declared that freedom of religion needs to be curtailed, as does the 2nd amendment. If Trump has talked about abusing women, she and her party have vigorously defended abusers like her own husband, Ted Kennedy, and others (It amazes me that although, unlike Bill Clinton, Trump has never been accused of rape or indecent exposure, and unlike Ted Kennedy Trump has never been accused of assaulting a waitress under the table at a restaurant or of being responsible for a young woman's tragic death, yet some of the same people who condemn Trump for his faults often admired, even adored, these men).

If Trump has lied about some of his past, Hillary has lied repeatedly to the American people and to Congress about how she has failed to protect our national security. If Trump has an unsavory past, Hillary's past has been one scandal after another (Rose Law Firm, Whitewater, Stock Futures trades, White House Travel Agency, FBI files, to name a few). If Trump has refused to release his tax returns, she has not only refused to release her emails but illegally destroyed them. She's also refused to release her medical records. If Trump is foul-mouthed, she is equally so.

She's in fact so vile in her speech and rude in her conduct to her subordinates that secret service and other security agents despise her and try to avoid being assigned to her. If Trump is a terrible role-model for kids, she's just as bad. Indeed, her concern for women and children is belied by her conduct in discussing her role in defending a 41 year-old man - whom she knew to be guilty of raping a 12 year old girl - back in the 1970s. She not only maligned the girl's reputation in the trial but chuckled at the tactics she used to essentially get the rapist off.

She's a radical on abortion, favoring the unrestricted right to abort a baby until the moment it's born - a fact that I'm frankly surprised many Catholics seem unconcerned about. She wishes to increase refugees to this country by 550%, despite the calamity that has befallen Europe as a result of massive refugee immigration. She's a crony capitalist who has put our foreign policy up for sale to the corporatists and foreign interests who contribute to her "charitable" foundation, a "charity" which gives only 5.7% of its income to charitable causes and which exists primarily to enrich the Clintons.

Finally, the stench of corruption clings to her like the spray of a skunk clings to a dog. The Wikileaks releases have shown her and her circle to be steeped in illegality, and now the FBI has announced as I'm typing this that they're re-opening their investigation of her. Trump has exploited the system, to be sure, but no one has accused him of breaking the law.

It's startling to me to realize I'm defending Trump, a task in several ways akin to Hercules' undertaking in the Aegean stables, but if tomorrow we see our mission as casting our vote against the worst of two bad choices, Donald Trump looks shockingly good, at least to me, when contrasted with Hillary Clinton.

Amusing Ourselves to Death

In the mid-1980s a sociologist by the name of Neil Postman wrote a book that was destined to become a classic in cultural criticism. The book was titled Amusing Ourselves to Death and it was Postman's thesis that television dumbed down everything and that our politics would eventually be transmogrified by the medium from a serious exercise in selecting the people who would guide our national destiny into little more than a frivolous spectacle.

Journalist Paul Brian has a column at The Federalist which amplifies Postman's prescient prognostication and in which he argues that television is corrupting not just our politics but our very ability to think:

Postman saw today’s click-craving, faux-outrage 24/7 news cycle slouching over the field of satellite dishes to be born from decades away. Even though the Internet Age was not yet upon him, he saw where the path of everything-as-entertainment was leading: to people having shorter average attention spans than goldfish, to a continuous present where contradictions and context are just minor details of no great interest.

“With television we vault ourselves into a continuous, incoherent present,” Postman writes. “In a world of discontinuities, contradiction is useless as a test of truth or merit.”

In foreseeing the climate that would pave the way for pure-celebrity candidates like Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jesse Ventura, and Donald Trump, not to mention the elevation of politicians like President Barack Obama to celebrity status, Postman surely deserves his reputation as the Nostradamus of the digital age.

The game show sets upon which our candidates stage their debates, the sporting event atmosphere that the media creates, the melodramatic "countdowns" to the debates and elections, the fascination with sexual scandal, the focus on whether some trivial development will help or hurt a candidate rather than on whether it's really even relevant to the issues that should concern us, all conspire to stifle thought. Campaigns are no longer vehicles for helping voters understand issues and discern truth so much as extravaganzas exploited by the media to attract viewers who wish merely to be entertained.

Serious discussion of issues requires thinking and the strenuous exercise of reason, but that's not a promising way to garner ratings among the unthinking masses of television viewers. Better to package campaigns and candidates in a political version of Survivor:

We now live in a political climate where politicians embrace fame. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau makes national news for being photographed shirtless. Trump hires a media provocateur as his campaign CEO, prompting speculation his plan is to form a media empire if his presidential run doesn’t pan out. Hillary Clinton’s supporters fret that her appearance on Kimmel received lower ratings than reuns of Teen Moms and Friends (but she’s trying to increase star power by hanging out with Justin Timberlake).

Amusing Ourselves to Death essentially champions Aldous Huxley’s vision of the future in Brave New World over George Orwell’s vision in 1984.

“Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley’s vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacity to think,” Postman writes.

To extend the Big Brother metaphor: Is he so funny / annoying / brilliant / stupid / crazy / ridiculous that you can’t look away? Good news: because of the high ratings he’ll be back with all-new episodes next season.

“In the Huxleyan prophecy, Big Brother does not watch us, by his choice. We watch him, by ours,” Postman prophesies with dark humor. Orwell saw a future where books were banned, Huxley one in which there was no need to ban books because nobody wanted to read them in the first place.

The media beguiles us into focusing on which candidate has made the most serious gaffe or committed the greatest outrage against social orthodoxy or articulated the cleverest put-down. We receive constant reminders as to who looks old, who looks tired, who looks frumpy. What the candidate would actually do if elected is barely given a thought by a media determined to seduce us with breathless reports of a candidate's eloquence, style, charm, and afflatus, but rarely analyzing in any serious way the quality of a candidate's ideas. They seem determined to amuse us to death.

Postman endeavors to prove that in the Age of Typography (elsewhere he calls it the Age of Exposition), when books and print newspapers were the sole source of information, discourse was “generally coherent, serious and rational.” But in the Age of Television (elsewhere he calls it the Age of Show Business), political discourse in particular has become “shriveled and absurd,” reliant on context-free snippets of information and entertaining spectacles and gaffes.

And it's not just our politics which suffers from this infatuation with the trivial and mindless. Sporting events are turned into multimedia assaults on the senses and intellect with halftime rock bands and fireworks and meaningless side-line interviews involving vacuous questions posed by witless "reporters." Too many church services feature epilepsy-inducing strobe lights, artificial stage fog, deafness-inducing high decibel "worship" music, and flamboyant preachers whose message, even if it's occasionally worth hearing, is often obscured by the medium in which it's presented.

One example of mind-dulling news reportage, albeit one of minor importance, is the radio news report that features a snippet of often unintelligible background noise from some foreign trouble site. Sometimes it's screaming sirens, or machinery noise, or people yelling in a foreign tongue. Listeners aren't supposed to ask what the actual purpose of playing that particular sound bite could possibly be, they're just supposed to allow it to anesthetize them into an acquiescence to the pointlessness of it.

Postman and Brian, I think, are right. We are not a people who want to think. We're a people who want to be able to avoid thinking, especially about politics. We really want only to be distracted and entertained. Brian quotes Postman:

“Our politics, religion, news, athletics, education and commerce have been transformed into congenial adjuncts of show business, largely without protest or even much popular notice,” he writes. “The result is that we are a people on the verge of amusing ourselves to death.”

There's more good stuff from Brian's article at the link.

Where Does Altruism Come From?

An article in Science Daily on altruistic behavior in plants, of all things, quotes a Harvard evolutionary biology professor named William Friedman:

"One of the most fundamental laws of nature is that if you are going to be an altruist, give it up to your closest relatives," said Friedman. "Altruism only evolves if the benefactor is a close relative of the beneficiary."

Either Friedman doesn't consider humans the product of evolution, which would be an odd stance for an evolutionary biologist to take, or he's never heard of Mother Teresa.

Why He Did It

One of the most stunning developments in a presidential campaign replete with such developments is the announcement by FBI director James Comey that new emails have surfaced that have prompted the FBI to continue their probe into the seemingly bottomless pit of Mrs. Clinton's email server scandal.

This decision has raised eyebrows, tempers, and lots of questions. The UK Daily Mail has an article that gives us a glimpse into the state of Mr. Comey's mind, and, although the Mail is a tabloid and perhaps not as reliable as we might like, the story is written by Ed Klein, an investigative journalist who has written four books on the Clintons and who has a reputation as a responsible journalist from his work for a number of high-profile news organizations.

Here are some important excerpts from Klein's piece:

James Comey's decision to revive the investigation of Hillary Clinton's email server and her handling of classified material came after he could no longer resist mounting pressure by mutinous agents in the FBI, including some of his top deputies, according to a source close to the embattled FBI director.

'The atmosphere at the FBI has been toxic ever since Jim announced last July that he wouldn't recommend an indictment against Hillary,' said the source, a close friend who has known Comey for nearly two decades, shares family outings with him, and accompanies him to Catholic mass.

'Some people, including department heads, stopped talking to Jim, and even ignored his greetings when they passed him in the hall,' said the source. 'They felt that he betrayed them and brought disgrace on the bureau by letting Hillary off with a slap on the wrist.'

According to the source, Comey fretted over the problem for months and discussed it at great length with his wife, Patrice.

He told his wife that he was depressed by the stack of resignation letters piling up on his desk from disaffected agents. The letters reminded him every day that morale in the FBI had hit rock bottom.

'He's been ignoring the resignation letters in the hope that he could find a way of remedying the situation,' said the source.

'When new emails that appeared to be related to Hillary's personal email server turned up in a computer used by [her close aide] Huma Abedin and [Abedin's disgraced husband,] Anthony Weiner, Comey jumped at the excuse to reopen the investigation.

'The people he trusts the most have been the angriest at him,' the source continued.

'And that includes his wife, Pat. She kept urging him to admit that he had been wrong when he refused to press charges against the former secretary of state.

'He talks about the damage that he's done to himself and the institution [of the FBI], and how he's been shunned by the men and women who he admires and work for him. It's taken a tremendous toll on him.

'It shattered his ego. He looks like he's aged 10 years in the past four months.'

Klein goes on to describe that Comey's decision to reopen the investigation has infuriated both Attorney General Loretta Lynch and President Barack Obama who once said that appointing Comey, who has had a reputation for exceptional integrity, was "the worst mistake he's made as president." One wonders if Mr. Obama thinks the Comey appointment was a mistake because Mr. Comey had a reputation for integrity.

In any case, the Director has certainly made this last week of the election campaign interesting, although I'm sure Mrs. Clinton would much rather he had just kept quiet.

The Fundamental Stuff

Materialists believe everything reduces to material stuff - atoms and the particles of which they are made. On this view, even phenomena like ideas and sensations are merely epiphenomena of the material brain. The brain, in other words, is all that's necessary to explain mental events. There is no mind.

This view is becoming increasingly untenable, however, as we learn more about the deep structure of living things. It certainly is beginning to look like matter is itself reducible to information and, since information lies downstream from mind, it would follow that mind is even more basic than matter.

The following video is a bit long, but it illustrates how the theory that matter is reducible to information plays out in biology. It's pretty good.

Perhaps the 20th century physicist Sir James Jeans was correct when he said that the universe is beginning to look more like a great thought than like a great machine.

Learning from the Experience of Others

How bad is the migrant situation in Germany? Last week I posted an article which described growing discontent on the part of both migrants and natural-born citizens of Germany that's resulting, according to the article, in a steep increase in German emigration. The discontent expressed was largely anecdotal, however, and it wasn't clear how widespread it really was. This article in the UK Express, to the extent that it's accurate, gives us a bit more insight into the deteriorating situation. According to the Express,

During the first six months of 2016, migrants committed 142,500 crimes, according to the Federal Criminal Police Office. This is equivalent to 780 crimes committed by migrants every day, an increase of nearly 40 per cent over 2015. The data includes only those crimes in which a suspect has been caught.

Thousands of migrants who entered the country as 'asylum seekers' or 'refugees' have gone missing. They are, presumably, economic migrants who entered Germany on false pretences.

Many are thought to be engaging in robbery and criminal violence.

The violence includes assault and rape, including the rape of a ten year-old girl in Leipzig.

According to Freddi Lohse of the German Police Union in Hamburg, many migrant offenders view the leniency of the German justice system as a green light to continue delinquent behaviour, says the report.

The crime statistics are up considerably since last year, and last year's crime rate was much higher than 2014:

Migrants committed 208,344 crimes in 2015, according to a confidential police report leaked to Bild. This figure represents an 80 per cent increase since 2014 and is equivalent to 570 crimes committed by migrants every day, or 23 crimes each hour, in 2015 alone.

The report added: "The growing sense of lawlessness is substantiated by an October 24 YouGov poll which found that 68 per cent of Germans believe that security in the country has deteriorated during the past several years.

"Nearly 70 per cent of respondents said they fear for their lives and property in German train stations and subways, while 63 per cent feel unsafe at large public events."

There's doubt in Germany that Angela Merkel can survive next year's election given the dissatisfaction with her policies that brought 1.1 million migrants to Germany last year alone.

In any case, a question that might be posed to the architects of this state of affairs is, given all that has happened as a consequence of bringing over a million unassimilating migrants into your country, would you do it all again? Presumably the honest answer would be "no," and, if so, one hopes our own political leaders would draw the obvious cautionary lessons from the German experience.

Materialism and Consciousness

This is the fourth and last of the posts on the philosophy of mind that have been featured on Viewpoint since last week:

Raymond Tallis at The New Atlantis discusses the devastating assault on philosophical materialism that began in the 1970s when American philosopher Thomas Nagel explored the question, "What is it like to be a bat?"

Nagel argued that there is something it is like to be a bat whereas it does not make sense to say that it is like something to be a stone. Bats, and people, have conscious experience that purely material objects do not have, and it is this conscious experience that is the defining feature of minds.

This experience, Tallis observes, is not a fact about the physical realm:

This difference between a person’s experience and a pebble’s non-experience cannot be captured by the sum total of the objective knowledge we can have about the physical makeup of human beings and pebbles. Conscious experience, subjective as it is to the individual organism, lies beyond the reach of such knowledge. I could know everything there is to know about a bat and still not know what it is like to be a bat — to have a bat’s experiences and live a bat’s life in a bat’s world.

This claim has been argued over at great length by myriad philosophers, who have mobilized a series of thought experiments to investigate Nagel’s claim. Among the most famous involves a fictional super-scientist named Mary, who studies the world from a room containing only the colors black and white, but has complete knowledge of the mechanics of optics, electromagnetic radiation, and the functioning of the human visual system.

When Mary is finally released from the room she begins to see colors for the first time. She now knows not only how different wavelengths of light affect the visual system, but also the direct experience of what it is like to see colors. Therefore, felt experiences and sensations are more than the physical processes that underlie them.

Nagel goes on to make the claim, a claim that has put him in the bad graces of his fellow naturalists, that naturalism simply lacks the resources to account for conscious experience. Tallis writes:

But none of the main features of minds — which Nagel identifies as consciousness, cognition, and [moral] value — can be accommodated by this worldview’s [naturalism's] identification of the mind with physical events in the brain, or by its assumption that human beings are no more than animal organisms whose behavior is fully explicable by evolutionary processes.

One might wonder why naturalistic materialists are so reluctant to acknowledge that there's more to us than just physical matter. What difference does it make if an essential aspect of our being is mental? What does it matter if we're not just matter but also a mind? Indeed, what does it matter if we are fundamentally mind?

Perhaps the answer is that given by philosopher J.P.Moreland. Moreland makes an argument in his book Consciousness and the Existence of God that naturalism entails the view that everything that exists is reducible to matter and energy, that is, there are no immaterial substances. Thus, the existence of human consciousness must be explicable in terms of material substance or naturalism is likely to be false. Moreland also argues that there is no good naturalistic explanation for consciousness and that, indeed, the existence of consciousness is strong evidence for the existence of God.

Nagel, an atheist, doesn't go as far as Moreland in believing that the phenomena of conscious experience point to the existence of God, but he comes close, arguing that there must be some mental, telic principle in the universe that somehow imbues the world with consciousness. There is nothing about matter, even the matter which constitutes the brain, that can account for conscious experiences like the sensations of color or a toothache. There's nothing about a chemical reaction or the firing of nerve fibers that can conceivably account for what we experience when we see red, hear middle C, taste sweetness, or feel pain. Nor is there anything about matter that can account for the existence of moral value.

If it turns out that naturalism remains unable to rise to the challenge presented by consciousness then naturalism, and materialism, will forfeit their dominant position among philosophers, a position that has already been seriously eroded.

Read the rest of Tallis' article at the link. It's very good.

The Interaction Problem

I've run a few posts on the topic of mind and matter the past few days, largely because we've been discussing it in my classes and because I find the topic fascinating.

In today's post I'd like to highlight one of the common objections materialists make to the belief that we are at least partly comprised of an immaterial mental substance.

This is the objection based on what's called the interaction problem. The problem is that it's inconceivable or unthinkable that two completely different substances, mind and matter (or brains), could in any way interact with each other. Given that we can't describe how brains interact with immaterial minds and vice versa, belief that somehow they do is unwarranted, or so it is claimed.

The problem with the interaction objection is that it seems to be based on the assumption that something can only be affected by other things which are like them. That is, material entities - the brain or bodies - can only be affected by other things which are material, but this principle - that like can only affect like - is surely not true. We see counter examples all around us:

• The idea of food, an immaterial phenomenon, causes the physical reaction of salivary glands secreting saliva.
• The excitation of cone cells in the retina, a physical reaction, produces the sensation of red which is non-physical.
• Swirling fluid in your inner ear, a physical condition, causes the sensation of dizziness which is non-physical.
• Getting your fingers caught in a closing car door, a material situation, causes pain which is an immaterial phenomenon.

And so on. The only way that the principle that "like causes like" can be known to be true is if we assume a priori that materialism is true, but the truth of materialism is the very point that's in question in this discussion. To assume that materialism is true at the outset and then conclude that indeed it must be true is to commit the logical fallacy known as begging the question.

The Evolution of Consciousness (Pt. II)

Sal Cordova at Uncommon Descent talks about how reflecting on the phenomenon of human consciousness as a high school student led him to doubt the Darwinian story:

I remember sitting in class and the biology teacher gave the standard talking points. But for some reason, the fact I was conscious did not seem reducible to evolutionary explanations. Strange that I would even be perplexed about it as a high school student, but I was. That was the beginning of my doubts about Darwin…

Years later, when I related the story to Walter ReMine, he explained to me consciousness poses a serious problem for evolution.

He said something to the effect, “Say an animal has to flee a predator — all it has to do is run away. Why does it have to evolve consciousness in order to flee predators?” Mechanically speaking the animal can be programmed to flee or even hunt without having to be self-aware. Why does it have to evolve consciousness to do anything for survival?

Why would selection favor the evolution of consciousness? How does selection select for the pre-cursors of consciousness? I don’t think it can. Ergo, consciousness didn’t evolve, or it’s just a maladaptation, or an illusion — or maybe it is created by God. Materialists can say consciousness is an illusion all they want, but once upon a time, when my arm was broken in a hang gliding crash, I felt real pain. It would have been nice if consciousness were an illusion back then, but it wasn’t.

Somehow, at some point in our embryonic development consciousness arises, but how does a particular configuration of material stuff generate it? Dead people have the same configuration of matter in their brains (unless they suffered a head injury) that they had before dying and yet before death they were conscious and after death they are not. Why? What's missing after death?

How do physical processes like electrochemical reactions in the brain produce a belief, or a doubt, or understanding? How do atoms whirling about in our neuronal matrix give rise to our sense that the distant past is different from the recent past? How do chemical reactions translate a pattern of ink on paper into a meaning or a firing of synapses translate electrical pulses into the sensation of red?

Consciousness is an incredibly intriguing phenomenon and not only is there no explanation of it in a materialist ontology, there's also no explanation for how it could ever have evolved through purely random material processes.

Cordova has more at the link.

The Evolution of Consciousness (Pt. I)

My classes are currently discussing what's often referred to as the mind/body problem. This is the question whether there is about us any non-physical, immaterial substance like mind, or whether we humans are ultimately completely reducible to material stuff. I thought it'd be relevant, therefore, to run a couple of posts on the topic, slightly modified, which first appeared on Viewpoint a couple of years ago. Here's the first:

One of the many problems consciousness poses for naturalism (the view that only the natural world exists. There is no supernature) is the difficulty of explaining how consciousness could have evolved. Natural selection acts on physical bodies, but consciousness seems to be something altogether different from physical, material body.

Barry Arrington at Uncommon Descent highlights the problem when he writes:

Consciousness could not have evolved from “simpler” states of matter, because it is not a state of matter. To say that consciousness evolved from matter is like saying Newton’s theory of gravity evolved from apples.

Even if for the sake of argument one concedes that natural selection might account for the development of a material body, consciousness remains a mystery. There is still a vast uncrossable gulf between the physical body and mind. In other words, the difference between body and mind is qualitative, not quantitative. You can’t get an immaterial mind no matter how many slight successive modifications of the body there may have been.

This is a serious problem for naturalism because most naturalists hold that naturalism entails physicalism - i.e. the view that physics fixes all the facts about the world - and materialism - the view that all of reality is reducible to matter. Consciousness, however, does not seem to be something explicable in terms either of physics or matter which means that it is a prima facie defeater for naturalism.

Naturalists can avoid utter defeat by conceding that both physicalism and materialism are false and trying somehow to enfold consciousness into a naturalistic ontology, but this would be an accommodation most naturalists would find devastating. Indeed, this is what philosopher Thomas Nagel tries to do in his much discussed book Mind and Cosmos, and he's been roundly thrashed by his fellow naturalists for his heresy.

Naturalism dominated philosophy for the two centuries from about 1750 to 1950, but it appears that work being done in the last couple of decades in the philosophy of mind is bringing an end to the hegemony it once enjoyed and making it increasingly difficult to be an "intellectually fulfilled atheist," as Richard Dawkins once put it.

More tomorrow.

The Middle Way

In class discussions of free will and determinism, a number of students have asked if there isn't a middle way. One student even dug a post out of the archives that I did on such a via media back in 2008 (12/24/08). The post starts out by addressing the notion of a kind of compromise position between libertarian free will and determinism, usually referred to as "compatibilism," and ends up summarizing some of the discussions we've had in class on these different philosophical positions. Here it is:

Barry Arrington at Uncommon Descent offers a succinct rebuttal of compatibilism, i.e. the view that our choices are fully determined and yet at the same time free. As Arrington points out, this certainly sounds like a contradiction.

The compatibilist defines freedom, however, as the lack of coercion, so as long as nothing or no one is compelling your behavior it's completely free even though at the moment you make your decision there's in fact only one possible choice you could make. Your choice is determined by the influence of your past experiences, your environment and your genetic make-up. The feeling you have that you could have chosen something other than what you did choose is simply an illusion, a trick played on us by our brains.

Compatibilism, however, doesn't solve the controversy between determinism and libertarianism (the belief we have free-will). It simply uses a philosophical sleight-of-hand to define it away. As long as it is the case that at any given moment there's just one possible future then our choices are determined by factors beyond our control, and if they're determined it's very difficult to see how we could be responsible for them. Whether we are being compelled by external forces to make a particular choice or not, we are still being compelled by internal factors that make our choice inevitable.

The temptation for the materialist (i.e. one who allows no non-material entities in his ontology) is to simply accept determinism, but not only does this view strip us of any moral responsibility, it seems to be based on a circularity: The determinist says that our choices are the inevitable products of our strongest motives, but if questioned about how we can know what our strongest motives are he would invite us to examine the choices we make. Our actions reveal our strongest motives and our strongest motives are whichever ones we act upon. But, if so, the claim that we always act upon our strongest motives reduces to the tautology that we always act upon the motives we act upon. This is certainly true, but it's not very edifying.

On the other hand, it's also difficult to pin down exactly what a free choice is. It can't be a choice that's completely uncaused because then it wouldn't be a consequence of our character and in what sense would we be responsible for it? But if the choice is a product of our character, and our character is the result of our past experiences, environment, and our genetic make-up, then ultimately our choice is determined by factors over which we have no control and we're back to determinism.

It seems to me that if materialism is true and all we are is a material, physical being, and all of our choices are simply the product of chemical reactions occurring in the brain, then determinism must be true as well, and moral responsibility and human dignity are illusions, and no punishment or reward could ever be justified on grounds of desert.

This all seems completely counter-intuitive so most people cling to libertarianism even if they can't explain what a genuine free choice would actually be. However, they can only maintain a belief in free will if they give up their belief in materialism. Only if we have a non-physical, immaterial mind that somehow functions in human volition can there be free will and thus moral responsibility and human dignity.

Double Digits

The so-called Affordable Care Act was sold to the American people by the president and congressional Democrats (not a single Republican voted for it) on the pretense that it would make insurance cheaper and medical care better. Critics at the time cautioned us that what we were being told wasn't true, that Obamacare, as it came to be called, would end up in a death spiral because young, healthy people would opt out thus depriving insurance companies of the revenue to pay for the medical costs of the sick people who would flock to the system.

Despite the warnings that this would happen, a lot of people thought a nice man like Mr. Obama and a nice lady like Nancy Pelosi would never lie to us. Well, they did, and now the bills are coming due, and millions of Americans are experiencing the insurance equivalent of sticker shock.

The Obama administration has admitted that insurance premiums will rise by double-digit percentages in 2017, an admission that will likely bring the debate surrounding Obamacare to the forefront in the final days of the 2016 election:

Premiums will increase at an average of 25 percent across the 39 states serviced by the online marketplace healthcare.gov, according to the Obama administration. Even worse, around 20 percent of consumers, or one in five, will only have one insurer to choose from in the marketplace.

This is because insurance companies will go bankrupt if they stay in the system so they're getting out as fast as they can:

This is not great news for the already struggling healthcare legislation. Obamacare is in the midst of a death spiral: 17 co-ops have failed, the Tennessee Health Commissioner says the healthcare exchanges in the state are “very near collapse,” insurance companies in North Carolina have become a “financial sinkhole,” and few health experts have positive things to say about the future of the legislation.

The total number of insurers participating on the Obamacare exchanges is likely to drop from 232 this year to 167 in 2017. That is a loss of 28 percent in just 12 months.

This year’s expected increase is triple the size of 2016, and will have a direct effect on 16 percent of consumers who are not protected by subsidies, the Hill reports. Some 5 to 7 million consumers are either not eligible for subsidy assistance, or they purchase healthcare packages outside of the exchanges, where subsidies are not available.

The lesson here is that one should never trust politicians, no matter how charming they may be, to tell the truth nor the government to do anything well (other than run the military) or efficiently or better than free people shopping in a free market can do.

This is a lesson that a lot of millenials who supported Barack Obama, Bernie Sanders, and Hillary Clinton refused to accept, but now, unfortunately, millions of them are going to learn it the hard way.