David Fincher: The soul of the American liberal

I just finished watching Fincher’s remake of the Swedish book/movie, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. The movie works well for the first two hours and then devolves into a tedious Occupy Wall Street revenge fantasy. The subtext of the movie is that powerful capitalists are all corrupt; all men are monsters or feckless; women are more or less heroic victims of male monstrousness and/or fecklessness.

Lately, I’ve been thinking that the defining characteristic of the American liberal worldview is that the powerful and successful in free capitalist societies are actually secret monsters who maintain their privilege by dirty dealings and entertain themselves with perversion and horrific secret crimes. It’s pretty close to a blood libel against businessmen.

Dean Koontz, the horror thriller writer, wrote a terrific book called Twilight Eyes. A race of alien werewolves lives among human beings, looking just like the rest of us, except to a few humans who can see the beast underneath. The werewolves delight in causing human misery and tragedy: they make boilers explode in grade schools, cause train wrecks and so on. The typical liberal thinks he sees through the thin veneer of humanity painted on the capitalist monster. He can tell that capitalism is really about exploitation, not free trade between free adults. He knows that all the wealth created is really just a ruse to replace real human values. It’s Soylent Green all the way down.

What I haven’t been able to figure out is why liberals come to see the world this way.

I was raised by crackpots. My father was a political crackpot–a John Bircher conspiracy theory Christian fundamentalist. My mother was a medical crackpot–not just homeopathy and laetrile and anti-flouride and the medical establishment is out to drug us to death, but really crazy stuff like color therapy (wrap mylar film of various colors around bottles of water, leave them out in the sun for a day and the water would be transformed into medicine).

It’s too easy to say that liberals just have the crackpot gene. But the liberal conviction of the fundamental evil of every free market outcome is pretty crack-potty.

My daughter (yes, I am skipping around a lot in this post–I’m thinking by typing) was raised without religion. I was indoctrinated in Christian Reconstructionism, but had made a break for it by the time she was verbal. When she was 7 or 8, a couple of her little Christian friends, egged on without doubt by their parents, made my little heathen a pet project and started taking her to church. This lasted a few months before they gave up. Near the end, she came home and said something like, “Dad, they pretend they’re drinking the blood of Jesus. WTF?” She was shocked and revolted. Like only an 8 year old girl can be revolted by something unexpected and gross.

I started out immersed in Christian metaphorical ritual cannibalism. Seemed perfectly normal, perfectly healthy, to me. Even after I decided it was BS, I didn’t fully grok how fucked up and weird it was till I saw it through an innocent 8 year old’s eyes.

So here’s my theory the first, and it is the first theory that is mine, and it is the theory I am saying right now–

Liberalism is as crack-potty as the Eucharist. Liberal tropes have become so embedded in our culture that we don’t notice now weird they are. Lots of people who aren’t crackpots at heart just breathe this stupidity in.

Liberalism spreads too because it’s useful. It’s an excuse. Not just as an excuse for failure, but an excuse for hating. “The Man” is keeping you down. Really? In America? You can’t overcome Richard Nixon or George Bush or Monsanto? If “The Man” were Robert Mugabe or Vladimir Putin, I could sympathize with your plight. Liberals hate like teens hate their parents. Liberalism is Will Smith singing “Parents Just Don’t Understand” writ large. Liberal hate is even more petty and laughable than liberal life excuses.

Case in point: the Trayvon Martin/George Zimmerman case. Barack Obama behaved like a douchebag. Obama is to politics what Michael Jackson was to plastic surgery. He can’t be taught. You’d think after the Beer Summit debacle Barack would shut his stupid mouth about law enforcement issues before the facts are known. You’d be wrong. I have yet to hear liberals walking back the Trayvon Jesus Christ Who Died For Our Sins narrative. Like the sulky teens they are, liberals don’t apologize.

And they live in a dark world where their privilege and pampering is really just manipulation by people who do stuff they can’t understand. Like a Fincher movie.

I do feel sorry for liberals. Like other crackpots, they live 24 x 7 with a sense of impending doom.

 

 

Collapsing Personality Disorders

DSM5 will collapse Narcissistic, Paranoid, Schizoid, Dependent, and Histrionic personality disorders into a single category, with N/P/S/D/H characteristics.

Schizotypal, Antisocial, Borderline, Avoidant and Obsessive-Compulsive categories remain intact.

Clinicians are up in arms. They say each of these collapsed disorders have unique syndromes and shouldn’t be conflated. Maybe they’re right, but at first glance, from my experience, and I am not a professional, just someone who’s dealt with a lot of assholes, it seems that all the collapsed disorders can be put under the heading of “known asshole, various flavors.”

The diagnostic criteria overlap for a lot for the collapsed types. There is no agreed-on etiology, course or therapy for these types. 

I’m for listing the new category as “I’m an Asshole Disorder”.

The categories that the DSM5 keeps intact do have clear syndrome features, ones that the rest of us realize are abnormal. Think Sheldon from Big Bang Theory.

The collapsed categories are people like your boss, your contractor, that crazy bitch in the cube next to you….Being an asshole is not a psychiatric disorder, it’s a life strategy. Narcissism, neediness,  weirdness and attention-whoring need to be declassified. And that is what DSM5 is doing.

Clinicians are bitching because up till now they can milk treating assholes and now the DSM5 is rounding up all the assholes under one category and it’s going to be a lot harder to justify $200 an hour for asshole therapy under a single code.

BTW, therapy doesn’t fix assholes. Shocker.

HATRED

There’s a big difference between hatred and “hate speech.”

The left in America is marinated in hatred. Go back to how they treated Reagan. The protests, the violence, the rage.

Bush took less shit than Reagan did from these foul little Ivy League totalitarians and their thuggee proletariat orcs. And what they did to him was howling limbic rage.

These people now wave the grey poupon and whine about implicit racism in a few Tea Party protest signs while ignoring–no, cheering–anti-Semitism and Marxism and terrorism from leftist protesters.

“Hate speech” is now anything these reptile haters hiss at.

Yeah, I know my glass is full but I still feel half empty

Anthony Lane, film reviewer for The New Yorker, writes this about the new wave of 3-D movies:

3-D will ravish our senses and take us on rides that no drug can match, but my guess is that, like so many blessings, it won’t make us happy. It will make us want more.

Ok, so what? Another self-important self-conscious mopey New York asshole who thinks he shits gold nuggets raining down rhetorical pyrite,  working it wringing deep sigh-laden meaning out of the mundane and trivial.

The formula is simple:  Bitch about a cool new bit of technology or other progress by waxing eloquent about any one or more of:

• Pining nostalgically for the previous status quo, having instantly transmuted a previous annoyance into a lost spiritual ritual.
• C0mplaining about side effects, lost jobs, obsolete business models and all the dmage done
• Moping that the improvement will only temporarily break the surface tension of everyone’s ordinary, inevitable ennui. What is that only me?
• Bemoaning the impact on global warming, social cohesion, childhood obesity, traffic congestion, traffic accidents, distracted driving, ADHD, toxins, landfills, autism, and, the last refuge of an effete, pampered, attention-whoring big city liberal scoundrel–becoming an option glut slut.

This kind of whining is really easy to imitate, once you see the trick. Watch:

• Microwave ovens have ruined the American dinner table, robbed kitchens of their rightful aromas…
• Double-paned windows lock Americans away from neighborhood sounds, make them more alienated from seasonal changes by saving them enough money that they can afford to turn the thermostat up to 70 in the winter…
• eBooks take away the wonderful smell of mildew, the pleasure of having your whole house overrun with bookshelves, the joy of marking up books with post-it notes, underlines, dog-ears, and then still having to look for 20 minutes to find the thing you needed….I fear nobody will be able to add numbers in a world where paper books disappear like slide rules…

This attitude is more than annoying, it’s dangerous. From the Franken-phobia of the “precautionary principle” to the world’s-smallest-violin framing of the health care debate  to the asinine control-freak measures proposed to deal with global warming, the dreary liberal way of seeing the world completely rejects “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” because if you’re a liberal everything’s fucking broken.

That’s really the essence of the Democrat party and mainstream liberalism today: no matter how cool it looks, whether it’s America or a new IMAX 3-D movie, it actually sucks and it’s suckiness is in direct proportion to how much it doesn’t seem to suck. Everything chafes them. All underwear binds. Each new thing threatens some old thing that now that we think about it doesn’t suck anymore because the new thing is what really sucks. Liberals aren’t conservative: they’re Luddites.

The left/liberal establishment has adopted a reflexive piss-in-your-own-punchbowl attitude toward everything except The Other. Everything new in their culture is fraught with Frankenstinianism (I just made up that word–pretty good word, huh?) Everything in other cultures is Whole-Foods-cool.

The only thing old that they don’t like is Western values.

They’re allergic not only to their own blood, sweat and tears, but to the Western idea of blood, sweat and tears. The result is a perpetual sneer and rejection of actual progress in favor of defining progress as government programs that promote MY ideals with YOUR money.

This goes beyond grievance politics or identity politics to having a Grievance Identity. America is a miserable, racist place with a (half) black President where children grow hungrier and fatter, and the greedy super-rich cause accidents by trying to drive their hummers while texting and beating their servants in the back seat. Thank god for Me days or I don’t know how I’d survive in Thunderdome Amerika.

Listen to liberals snarl the word corporation. Or business interests. Or America. No need to modify these terms with adjectives like  greedy, heartless orcorrupt anymore–the meme has firmly taken hold, and liberals spit the word corporation like Nazis used to say Juden.

Look at the Obamas, poster children for resenting where they eat.

Both Michelle and her consort have played their race cards skillfully, graduating from top schools, taking faux jobs like “community organizer” or finding soft featherbeds like “community affairs officer” for $300K a year. They are among the most privileged in the country they scold for rewarding the over-privileged. They show no indication of noticing or appreciating or wondering why they have been given so much for giving so little.

Affluent liberals drive SUVs and have big screen TVs, plant their big fat carbon feet-prints in far-flung places on regular vacations, move into bigger and bigger houses, all the time griping about how it doesn’t really fulfill them. The only actual lifestyle choices I see liberals making that are different from their conservative SES peers are buying expensive organic edible status symbols at Whole Foods instead of normal food at Costco and religiously sorting their trash like they’re worshipping at a curbside shrine.

Jackwagons.

Terrorizing the TSA

I’ve been thinking about what punishment, if any, TSA front line workers deserve from us. Eric Schneie’s Classical Values blog has helped me come to a firm conclusion.

Front-line TSA workers deserve all the contempt, ridicule, harassment and non-cooperation that we can heap upon them. Let’s make their jobs miserable. Well, even more miserable.

Amazing as it may sound, the government is trying to get people to feel sorry for the TSA screeners.

“Our concern is that the public not confuse the people implementing the policies with the people who developed the policies,” said Sharon Pinnock, the union’s director of membership and organization.I love it.

“Don’t blame me! I was just following orders!”

 It would be nice if Ms. Pinnock could have at least provided a few names of those who deserve blame. As she says, “the people who developed the policies.”

But of course, the “the people who developed the policies” are anonymous apparatchiks too.

Because they have created an insular and near-anonymous system, no one is really accountable and there is no one to blame — as even members of Congress discovered when they tried ever so gently to ask TSA administrator John Pistole if he might consider backing off just a little.

The answer was NO!

 I’m not saying everyone should get kicked off flights or get themselves arrested. But the right thing to do is to make sure every TSA goon knows exactly how you feel. If they decide to give you extra crap for having a bad attitude, what of it? Be sure you have your cell phone recording every time you go through gate-rape. Give the system a little heartburn every time you encounter it.

It doesn’t matter that TSA agents didn’t make the policy. It doesn’t matter that many of them are perfectly nice people. It doesn’t matter that were you in their place, you probably wouldn’t quit your job either over the new policy.

People keep saying that they don’t want to be treated like cogs in a machine. Let’s treat TSA workers like adult moral agents. They have also earned the contempt that everyone up their chain of command deserves too.

But wait a minute. Isn’t this a little like Tim McVeigh holding accountable the day care workers and little kids in the Oklahoma City federal building? Uh, no, not really. There were probably very few people who died in that bombing who supported or contributed to Ruby Ridge or Waco. Had McVeigh gone after Lon Horiuchi (the federal sniper who murdered Vicki Weaver and whose trigger-happy behavior probably sparked the Waco disaster), I would certainly have not considered McVeigh a moral monster, even if I might have disagreed with him about vigilante justice.

And I’m not talking about killing TSA agents. I’m not even advocating here for civil disobedience. I’m only talking about shaming them.

All TSA agents are fully aware of the new policies and are participating directly in their enforcement. In deference to Godwin’s law, I will omit analogies to concentration camp guards and will skip pasting in Hannah Arendt quotes. Instead, I’ll just ask, What kind of a dumbass do you have to be to think that TSA front-line agents aren’t actively morally involved and accountable for this?

I’ll let Eric Schneie deliver the coup de grace:

In the old days, people didn’t go for that “just going my job” crap.” They held the guys who did things to people responsible for their actions and they resorted to things like tar and feathers.

What else could they do? Petition King George? A lot of good that would have done.

Might as well petition Congress, which lacks the authority to petition John Pistole, because after all, he is only doing his job, and he really isn’t ultimately in charge. (As to who really is in charge, they’re anonymous as well as interchangeable, and for their own safety you little people have no right to know who or where they are.)

 

POSTSCRIPT. Just to be very clear, I’m not advocating the assassination of Lon Horiuchi. But if I ever met him, I wouldn’t shake his hand and I’d tell him to his face he’s a miserable little murderer. Remember all the shit people gave OJ Simpson after he was acquitted? Horiuchi should be similarly ostracized. He probably would be were he as instantly recognizable as the Juice Monster.

Horiuchi’s behavior at Waco very probably was the proximate cause of all those deaths. He was accused of firing several shots without orders, but denied it and got away with it. Tim McVeigh was seriously pissed and blamed Horiuchi for Waco. Then Horiuchi gets assigned to Ruby Ridge, and he murders Vicki Weaver, shooting her dead while she’s holding a baby. Horiuchi claimed “oops, I missed–I meant to kill one of the men. Lucky shot, wasn’t that?” Sorry, that second bite gives me all I need to refuse Horiuchi the benefit of the doubt about the malice of the first one. The government finally settled a wrongful death suit for millions with the Weaver family, refusing any admission of wrongdoing. And, once again, Horiuchi kept his job.

Now, imagine you’re Tim McVeigh, convinced, and probably correctly so, that Ron Horiuchi’s bloody recklessness caused the deaths of 74 people. The government protected its own and let him get away with it scot free. Then, a little while later, Horiuchi kills a woman who is literally holding a baby. And, once again, the federal government turns a blind eye. Had McVeigh taken out Horiuchi, we’d have understood. We cheer this kind of revenge in the movies.

Take this thought experiment a step further: Assume that McVeigh understood the points quoted above–that the problem wasn’t just Horiuchi, but the faceless, unaccountable Borg bureaucracy that used him as a weapon and protected him when he misfired. The bureacracy doesn’t care about collateral damage, and are attacking his friends purely because of their “radical” beliefs. Why not tit for tat, an eye for an eye? I’ll see your 20 children and raise you 19…

Here’s where McVeigh turned into a terrorist. When you start seeing it as ok to target and kill people only because they are associated with an organization or group you don’t like, you’ve crossed a bright line. You are a terrorist at heart if you believe some people deserve to die just because they’re “part of the machine,” not because of having personally committed actual crimes worthy of capital punishment. (Yes, this applies to Muslims who support suicide bombings, even if they’d never strap one on themselves.)

McVeigh wanted to kill random federal law enforcement officers, preferably from multiple agencies, and either he didn’t care or he thought it was poetic justice, to blow up a daycare center to get the job done. At the end of the day, the genocidal mindset is just a subset of the general terrorist mindset, and there’s no logically limiting factor in who you can justify killing once you push off and start tobogganing down this very slippery slope. McVeigh went very quickly from wanting Ron Horiuchi brought to justice to condemning all federal law enforcement officers to it being ok to murder their children too. Why not keep going and indict all taxpayers who voluntarily pay salaries to the feds?

This is what demonization means, and how it works psychodynamically.

Now, ask yourself , was the government behavior at Waco and Ruby Ridge consistent with the terrorist mindset as I’ve described it above? Reckless disregard for collateral damage; a belief that any level of violence is justified to deal with the problem; Demonization of a hated group of people that you treat as an existential threat to your own culture and goals; reckless disregard for collateral damage, or perhaps even an ugly satisfaction in inflicting it.

Under Janet Reno, the US Justice Department really was a terrorist organization.



Adulthood’s End, part 2

Jonathan Rauch, in The Atlantic April 2010, writes about “Letting Go of My Father”. He tells about the hardships and challenges of dealing with his octogenerian dad’s decline and falls.

The article resonates with me, perhaps more so than it might have before  because I may be facing the same things soon. Rauch eloquently talks about how isolated he felt until he started blurting out “inappropriately” what was going on. Then he found many people who were or had been in the same place.

This is an experience common to people going through everyday issues that are touchy or embarrassing. Failing parents, failing children, suddenly gay spouses, divorces, depressions, mental illnesses, horrific abuse… If you don’t break silence, you’ll never know how many other people near you have been there done that.

Rauch writes poignantly about his dad’s fierce independence and how he tried to preserve his dad’s illusion of independence way after it was obviously illusory.

I’m walking a difficult line here. If you like the usual tone of this blog, you may not be impressed with this post. I’m going to suspend the “take no prisoners” rule for a minute. Well, somewhat. In the next paragraphs, I’m going to savage the grief-stricken. But even I have some sense of decorum. So I’ll try to make it a clean kill.

Several years ago, a teenage girl got herself killed skiing because she didn’t wear a helmet her parents didn’t make her wear a helmet. Her grieving parents started a crusade to make it illegal for anyone to ski without a helmet. I don’t ski, so I don’t know how successful they were. Does everyone who skis now have to wear a helmet?

The parents of this girl got a respectful, credulous listening because (1) the media are vultures who lick up spilled blood like mother’s milk and (2) who dares to disagree with the grief-stricken when they may go hysterical at any moment?

If you suffer tragedy, you get a penalty shot on the rest of us to work out your grief and need for control. Any stupid thing you think the rest of us should be forced to do, we have to listen to you demand we do it, and show decent respect. Up to a point. When it turns into a public bully-pulpit thing, I don’t like it.

Jonathan Rauch ends his article in full-on bully-pulpit-mode.

In terms of his actual decency and compassion and caring for his dad, I’m a Rauch fan. But….

Rauch says:

How can it be that so many people like me are so completely unprepared for what is, after all, one of life’s near certainties?

…

There are resources out there to tap, to be sure. Once you begin looking, you can find them….What I needed was for the experts to find me and tell me what I needed.

Rauch found abundant resources once he overcame his reticence to talk about the fact that he might be having a hard time. What the hell does Rauch really mean? Do we need yet another stupid over-produced PSA? A hotline? “Does your life suck? Call 1-800-CRY-BABY and we’ll tell you why and what you need.”

At one point….I joked to friends that we should all be given time off work at age 40 to take a course on elder care. I no longer see this as such a joke.  Surely [paragraph ends with advocating that multiple programs, courses and hotlines should be set up to force-feed everyone about this].

I’m not even going to comment about this. Except to say hell, yeah, I’ll take a free day off work.

Here’s Rauch’s last paragraph, unedited:

What we need even more than that, though, is for our nameless problem to be plucked out of the realm of the personal and brought into full public view, where help can find us. In the years after Betty Friedan named their problem, women who work in the home (formerly “housewives”) demanded and got a new infrastructure for support:  opportunities to study and work at home, part-time job opportunities, public and private help with child care, social networks, and so on. Perhaps more important, they demanded and got society’s recognition that they were providing an indispensable public good. As a result, they are not isolated or silent anymore, and they do not need to put up with being lonely or bored. Keeping today’s invisible infrastructure of caregivers out of sight is as stressful and wasteful and pointless as leaving millions of women feeling stranded at home once was. My mother’s friend and the feminists of her generation fundamentally had it right. There should be no need for anyone to go through this alone, and no glory in trying.

Rauch embodies everything wrong and right with America. No matter how much Americans talk like helpless oppressed victims, and whine like little girls about needing support groups and hotlines, Americans don’t just sit there like a Frog would and wait for the Marines to land.  Rauch manned up and took care of his dad. I just wish he’d have been proud of it. Ain’t that America: we git ‘er done, and then we whine like little girls about it.

I Hate Haiti

I didn’t used to care about Haiti, till my wife started making noises about going down there for humanitarian reasons. That’s when I started to hate Haiti.

Haiti is one of the most….what? How do you describe Haiti? Shithole doesn’t even come close. None of the scatological pejoratives that we usually rely on when talking about the third world capture the redolent stench of how horrible a place Haiti is. Not even Muslims can wreck a country this bad for this long. To make something stink this bad, you need the French.

Everyone’s falling all over themselves to send money. If you’re reading this, please don’t. There will be plenty of money without you piling on. Take this as an opportunity to send money to a serious cause dealing with an ongoing problem, not just an ephemeral Sally Struthers moment. 

Anyhow, my wife wanted to go to Haiti to do her medical thing, and I stamped my little foot. Had she gone, I’d have divorced her. All you other people with spouses spending time down there in that voodoo-infested petrie dish, you should stamp your little feet too, especially now. Though you might not think it’s possible, hygiene’s about to get a lot worse in Haiti.

She didn’t go and I think she was secretly grateful that I nipped that little bit of altruistic insanity in the bud.

So what should the US do when bad things happen to shithole countries?

I’m thinking we should stop giving foreign aid to anyone on any basis, including military, except to countries that agree to be a protectorate of the United States, subject to adult supervision of their governments and legal structure.

Forget no taxation without representation, no help without strings.

There are a ridiculous gaggle of spoiled teenager countries out there who will never get it right until they have to live by adult USA rules.

If we want to help Haiti, we should take it over, right now. Otherwise, this is exactly like putting more money into your heroin-addicted adult child’s payment card because you can’t bear what’s happening.

Haiti needs to change, and they won’t do it unless we make them do it or die.

The Heart of the Matter

The time has come for me to stop ranting about liberals. This has been an interesting, meditational exercise for me (if by meditating you mean indulging in vitriolic rants).

I’ve suspended commenting on Tiger Woods, Al Gore and the new Dollhouse season just to keep picking at this subject. Clearly, I need to get over it.

So what have I learned?

• Liberals believe they are on average smarter than conservatives, and thus morally better. How this differs from garden variety snobbery I have not yet figured out.
• Liberals are bigoted against conservatives in the same way that white supremacists are bigoted against blacks. Liberal contempt for NASCAR and grits is psychodynamically identical to racist contempt for jungle music and fried chicken. The fact that jungle music and fried chicken are really good and NASCAR and grits really suck is beside the point.
• Demographically, conservatives are dumber than liberals. Let’s face it: If you choose to watch PBS instead of going to NASCAR this weekend, your IQ is probably higher. Even if you’re doing less with those extra points.  You could look at this as showing that conservative ideas are so obviously better that even shallow stupid small town people understand them because they’re not deeply stupid.
• Deep stupidity is an intelligence-resistant neurosis, similar to an antibiotic-resistant virus. A guy with a 98 IQ going to NASCAR every time he can and raising a family and holding down a job is not stupid. He’s punching well above his IQ weight class. An effete beta liberal working in the public or non-profit sector with a 120 IQ indulging in infantile progressive fantasies is deeply stupid. He wants Big Brother to play My Bodygaurd because he’s afraid to duke it out with life in ANY weight class. He senses, deep down, that his livelihood depends on that NASCAR guy.
• Liberal ideology, at its most fundamental level, is predicated on turning the human race into poster children for liberal intervention. The fact that the liberal plan to help is stupid and obviously won’t work doesn’t matter because liberals are being promiscuously compassionate and you’re not.
• Promiscuous compassion is the first refuge of the liberal scoundrel. Compassion excuses every stupid liberal proposal to control other people from intelligent criticism. Promiscuous compassion is the liberal’s outward-facing raison d’etre. Inwardly, it’s I should run everyone and everything. Lugubriously pretending that I care about everyone and everything is the way that I, Liberal, distinguish myself from Pol Pot.
• Even liberal compassion has its limits. Anyone who succeeds in normal human terms is exempted. If you’re no good at coming up with grievances and boo-boo’s, you’re no good to liberals. You’re invisible if you suck it up and don’t whine.
• Succeeding as a normal human is proof that you’ve victimized someone somewhere and you must be punished and hampered. But not outright stopped. Even the most deeply stupid liberal, like the worst spoiled 7 year old, doesn’t want Dad to lose his job. But has no idea on on what Dad’s job is really like or on what it depends.

The term deep stupidity deserves more definition. Here’s what liberals don’t get that makes them deeply stupid:

• The rule of law. Without this, nothing else matters. Being able to reasonably predict the long-term outcome of your actions is essential to human thriving. If the rules change minute to minute, you’re always a whim away from being wished into the cornfield. Stable relationships are the lifeblood of civilization. Even bad rules are better than whimsical rules. When you think it’s ok to change the rules without overwhelming consensus and careful experimentation, you’re a huge danger and a force for chaos.
• Self-ownership. Your life, talents and resources belong to you and should not be subject to even partial appropriation by others, no matter how unfortunate their circumstances or how powerful their advocates. In terms of what you should be forced to do, you owe other human beings nothing more than justice. The rest is up to you.
• Along with being deeply stupid, Liberals are deeply ignorant about the objects of their promiscuous compassion. They break the rule that to be wisely compassionate you should be deeply involved with the person you intend to help.
• The fundamental property of government that distinguishes it from all other social institutions is violence. Any time you think that you need government to solve a problem, you’re really saying that the right thing to do is to hold a gun to other people’s heads to get this problem solved. This includes banning smoking in restaurants and enforcing garbage sorting on your neighbors. What kind of a moron do you have to be to think that resorting to threats of violence is the way to deal with those things?
• Consistency and seriousness. Celebrity Liberals fly private jets to Copenhagen to talk about how to reduce their gigantic carbon footprints. Because they’re so important it’s OK that they not do this over Cisco virtual meetings so they can sweat on each other and nosh with each other and pontificate as a herd and have a chance to get the hot Swedish liberal to come up to  your room. They go to $500 a plate fundraisers for poverty and suck down pate and Chardonnay while Sally Struthers’ 5 year old kids still look pregnant. Why do they act like this?
• Because liberal principles are impossible to live up to, you don’t really have to try that hard. When you believe in things you can’t live up to, it’s so easy to just say, I’ll do what I can and I’ll say when it’s enough. Intent trumps output. Here’s how problems actually get solved, you poseurs: Some guy with deep knowledge spends his weekends and nights thinking hard and makes a little tweak or invention that moves things slightly in a better direction. He’s not a banquet-whore and he doesn’t fly to Copenhagen on someone else’s dime–he doesn’t have time. His carbon footprint is tiny because he’s up in his head and working instead of flitting and emoting. Liberals, like all children, think that if problems aren’t being solved, it’s because others aren’t trying hard enough. Lacking the skills to create new vaccines or more efficient car engines, they prefer to mandate that others figure it out or else. (Sadly, this attitude works  pretty well. I’d like to tell Ralph Nader that he has 2 years to design a perfectly safe car or I’m going to put a rabid wolverine down his pants–I bet I’d get to unleash the rabid wolverine. Liberals don’t know how to solve problems–they think they can coerce those who do know.)
• Other people aren’t dolls. All liberal plans and pretensions depend on other people being pliable victims who wait for and accept rescue. Liberals are always shocked that other people make chess moves against them and subvert their noble intentions for selfish ends. Here’s what liberals think:  Teenage single mothers will take those food stamps to shop carefully and cook nutritious meals for their under-birthweight children, and will use the rest of their AFDC to go to DeVry and learn to program computers. People who get SBA loans after the banks laughed out loud will succeed anyway if we just give them a chance. Giving poor people with 300 credit scores and 30 minute time horizons 30 year mortgages will make them responsible. When liberals say that the personal is political, they have no idea how truly they speak. Liberalism is codependency writ large. They have no idea that the poor are far more malicious, lazy and cunning than they are unfortunate. Liberals are always surprised when they are punked by the people they propose to help.
• The law of unintended consequences. The point above is an important example of liberals not understanding unintended consequences, but it’s not the whole of it. Liberals don’t understand that wage and price controls substitute scarcity and queues for wages and prices. They don’t count the number of dead children they accept as the price for banning DDT. They don’t notice who they demoralize and disincent and divert and kill. They’re focused only on the benefits of what they do. Like a chemical company that thinks only about what they ship and get paid for, not what they pump into the water supply.  Liberals have no notion of economic ecology.
•  What things cost. Because productive people are a taken for granted resource, like parental bank accounts are taken for granted by spoiled children. Liberals don’t budget when they’re prescribing. After all, it’s not their own money and daddy will figure it out somehow.

Which brings me to my final Duh! epiphany.

The entire Liberal plan is to use government as a magic wand.

That’s it. They have no other strategy or hope. Liberals view every social institution except government as ineffective.  On the playground of life, liberals always run to teacher.

Liberals, Finis, part v (The rule of law)

A good government must be a predictable government. As with parenting, it’s more important to be predictable than to be fair. It doesn’t matter so much what the rules are as that the rules are enforced predictably. Human beings are good at games. They’ll adapt and thrive under most any set of predictable rules.

Going beyond predictability, impartiality is a fundamental attribute of justice. It’s also a fundamental goal of PC (Promiscuous Compassion). According to PC, we should care equally about Starvin’ Marvin and our own childen. It’s an outright injustice for us to feed our own brats while Marvin gets no mac ‘n’ cheese.

Does Marvin feel hunger any less than our own adorable little carpet-monsters? On what decent moral basis can we justify nurturing our own little Birth Control Failures while Marvin’s starvin’?

Yes, because I do no injustice to Marvin by not feeding him. I am literally not responsible for Marvin’s problems. I didn’t create them and I am not obligated to fix them.

Let’s reduce the notion that I am responsible to help Marvin out by phrasing it differently: Seriously, you’re going to tell me that I should let my own kid go hungry unless I feed everyone else’s at the same time?

Any liberal still reading this: if you own a TV or a Cuisinart or a nice dining room set or an Internet-connected computer, shut up now. By your PC principles, you should sell all you have and give to the poor.  The fact that you won’t means you are a walking performative contradiction.

(Ah, but we are responsible for Marvin’s plight because Western colonialism/imperialism/slavery/exploitation, rejoins the liberal. Shut up. I’m not going to deal with that Marxist nonsense here.)

Justice doesn’t work by the same rules as compassion, and it shouldn’t. The rules for justice are often the opposite of those for compassion (or why do you think people talk so much about mercy vs justice?)

Justice is all about impartiality and treating people as interchangeable units (all are equal before the law). Justice needs to ignore individual character, circumstances and history, and decide things based on adherence to a set of rules that all are expected to live up to.

Compassion needs facts on the ground, personal judgment, intuition and deep interpersonal wisdom.  Compassion needs to be smart and discriminating and know a basket case when it sees one. Compassion should not be promiscuous or indiscriminate, or it will become evil’s co-dependent little helper. At best, promiscuous compassion corrupts the human spirit by starving it for justice, exactly like a spoiling parent.

Compassion, rightly understood, respects justice and then goes beyond to find the spiritual fire still burning at the center of the worst pile of human garbage. This is dangerous business, in proportion to the crimes that compassion wants to forgive.

So I’m all in favor of compassion, but not when it trumps justice. This is how those 4 cops in Tacoma, Washington just got killed. Lazy bureaucrats, given cover by appealing to compassion, let out a guy out who obviously didn’t deserve to ever walk the streets. Everyone felt compassion because he started committing violent crimes so young. People in the justice system were stupidly compassionate instead of appropriately ruthless. Thank God one of those dying cops spent his last seconds ruthlessly putting a bullet in that guy instead of focusing on what might have driven him to act like that.

Most people who need our compassion don’t deserve it. They’ve dumped on everyone who’s tried to help them. They have ruthlessly gone their own way and then extorted or manipulated help. They need a rodeo cowboy instead of a social worker. Someone who can last for more than 7 seconds  of their bullshit.

Competing for our compassionate resources are fertile girls with axes to grind and itches to scratch. People who give in to the urge to stay stoned rather than to pursue goals. Jerks with chips on their shoulders who’ve never learned to swallow and say, “Yes, boss!” Amoral punks who see the rest of us as marks or prey. So we should leave people to starve in the streets if they have an attitude problem? Yeah, that’s what I’m saying.

Sure, there are innocent victims who deserve our unguarded compassion–the children of those fertile girls, for the first few years, until they grow up to be psychopaths like their moms. People with serious birth defects and brain injuries, victims of horrible car crashes, some widows (not previously married to gangsta’s) and all orphans.

Kick everyone off welfare who doesn’t meet real “I didn’t have much of anything to do with my plight” victim tests, and there’s hardly anyone left on welfare.

95% of the declared candidates for compassion in America are people who could have done better but didn’t. Actually, that’s a mistake: I should have said, people who should have done better but wouldn’t.

Doing compassionate good in mass, large-scale cases without doing more harm than good is even harder than in individual cases. Go ahead, send money to Starvin’ Marvin. Warlords will intercept it and use it to slaughter his village. Or, if it reaches him, you strangle his country’s own nascent agricultural industry.  Live Aid made a lot of lasting difference, didn’t it?

I went to a party last night. I talked to a good guy who helps with subsidized housing for all these CCFC’s. (CCFC’s = Class Candidates For Compassion). They have to put in extra strong drywall in CCFC housing because the CCFC’s tend to kick holes in their walls whenever they get mad. Stoves and ovens have timers that shut off after 30 minutes because the CCFC’s would otherwise burn the building down every week. Getting CCFC’s to pay their part of the rent, well… This good guy had lots of patience about this stuff. I have a different philosophy.

The first rule of help is: Change the batteries in your bullshit detector.

Most people whose lives are a hot mess are skilled liars. Not so much to themselves, but to everyone who has tried to help them.  They are lazy, malicious and manipulative. They brandish contempt and resentment as fashion statements. Karen Horney coined the term “hostile dependency.” Great term.

The second rule of help is: Absent an unusual disaster or obvious malicious act of God in their lives, everyone able-bodied who asks for your help is a screwup and a huge pain in the ass. If someone doesn’t have obvious brain injury or no legs, and they are seeking your help, they are trouble. Are you up for trouble?

My third rule would be anyone who kicks a hole in the wall of their subsidized apartment wall is out of there, forever, die in the street. We catch you with an unpatched hole in your wall, you’re done. Better learn some drywalling skills, son, if you aren’t going to learn anger management.

It’s like being a parent. If you’re not up for a high level of long-term uncomfortable and confrontational involvement, then get your tubes tied.  Better to be barren and selfish than to help screw up other people’s lives to indulge your romantic delusions about them. Compassion isn’t just about doing touch and go’s, but requires you to put and keep some skin in the game.

Justice really isn’t all that harsh in the vast majority of cases and it is a much better teacher for most people than compassion. Justice enforces rules and what most people demanding help really need is to learn to accept the rules.

Long ago, I read Scott Peck’s People of the Lie, his attempt to grapple with human evil. Peck proposed several DSM-ish criteria for identifying evil (ultimately a wrong-headed approach, I think).

He talked about militant ignorance. Most people in need of unusual help from other people are militantly ignorant. Compassion is mostly wasted on these people. They are fecal alchemists, turning help and everything else in their lives into shit. Are they evil? I don’t think answering that question matters, at least in this context.

Let’s just say they aren’t ready yet for help. Most people who demand our help are in need of moral toilet training before we start buying them big boy pants.

Liberals, Finis, part iv (Checks and Balances)

In part iii, I made a case that your obligation to help the less fortunate is owed to yourself, if to anybody, not to them. Neither the less fortunate nor the liberal carpetbaggers who exploit them have any inherent right to your labor or property.

It’s a big mistake to conflate a sense of moral obligation based on your own values with a legal duty that supersedes your values. Liberals win by rushing you from the first to the second without you realizing it. The moment you lose is when you grant that it’s OK to use government to help anyone with your money. That’s not what governments are for.

Government is for suppressing violence and resolving disputes that would otherwise escalate to violence. Governments arrogate to themselves the exclusive right to do violence. (There are limited exceptions where government will allow its subjects to do violence, each exception subject to government review and ex post facto approval.)

Government is magic. As close to magic as you’ll see in this world. Kim Jong Il, the tiny fucker who terrorizes North Korea for a living, lives a magical life. He lives the liberal dream: to seize the reins of power and remake the world like he wants it to be. In KJI’s world, people wish they could get wished into the cornfield because at least there’d be something to eat. The typical American liberal wants the same power to use more wisely.

But all lust for absolute power is evil. You need an opposition to reality check you. If you get absolute power, even if you start out harmless, you become at least Michael Jackson. Most people have no idea how important the people who oppose them are to keeping them sane. This is the whole point of checks and balances.

Every American knows that checks and balances are important because they were told so in 5th grade. Judicial, Legislative, Executive, yeah can I go out and play now? Few Americans understand that Paris Hilton and Michael Jackson are what every boy and girl would grow up to be if they didn’t have checks and balances in their own lives.

Regardless of whether you think human nature is inherently good or evil, you must admit that humans need a daily dose of checks and balances to keep from turning into complete Michael Jacksons.

Think about  institutional checks and balances in a wider context than branches of government: Church, State, Family, Business, Community, Individual.

The power of the Church is moral. The power of the family is to determine the character and values of the next generation. Business takes care of the material side of life. Like-minded people find each other and form communities. The individual exercises sovereignty to create things that feed back into all other institutions. Government keeps the violence down to a dull roar so all the other institutions can function safely.

Government should no more take over all power in society than should Judicial, Legislative or Executive freeze out the other 2 branches of government. Liberals and progressives, God bless ’em, whether they know it or not, are choking out church, family, business, community and individuals, transferring power to government like they claim George Bush transferred power to the Executive branch. They think of government not as a background service that allows the other institutions to flourish, but as a hammer to make all the other institutions accept the bit. One ring to rule them all…

If you are a person who believes that government should rightly be used to do most or all of these jobs,

• Stock libraries
• Feed the hungry
• Job training
• Mass transit
• Encourage green living
• Educate children
• Subsidize failing businesses
• Subsidize prospering businesses so they’ll move to your town
• Provide medical care
• Run the electric company. And the gas company. And pick up trash.
• Subsidize sports teams
• Subsidize artists
• Subsidize abortions, adoptions or orphanages
• build roads
• etc

… then you are part of the problem.

You are ceding to the societal institution that embodies violence what should be left to institutions that can flourish only in the absence of violence. You are napalming the social ecosystem, destroying the village to save it.