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Am I Crazy -- Like a Fox?

My line, ever since the Obama administration decided to go ahead with their entire lefty agenda in 2009, is that the Democrats were making a strategic error for the ages.

I thought then that the right thing to do, for the Democratic Party's power down the years, would have been to push a moderate agenda, focused on fixing the economy and cementing the youth, women, and minorities into the Emerging Democratic Majority.

Instead, the Obamis figured that this was their once in a generation chance to ram through their lefty wish list, featuring a "stimulus" that paid off Democratic constituencies, Obamacare that hammered the middle class, green energy that ran up electricity bills, and Dodd-Frank that enmeshed the financial industry in stupid regulation and hampered its role of getting money from people who have it to people that want it.

But it got worse. Instead of reaching out to the middle and picking off moderate Republicans into the emerging Democratic consensus, Obama has been openly combative towards Republicans, thus heightening divisions. And he has clearly encouraged all the left-wing activist groups to go for the gold.

My understanding of conflict, politics, and strategy, such as it is, tells me that almost all the actions of the Obama administration have been strategically foolish: they hurt the long-term interest of the United States, the Democratic party, and the liberal movement.

Now we learn from Jonah Goldberg that the strategic vision of President Obama towards Iran is to help them:

He says he wants to bring Iran out of the cold, to "break through (their) isolation" and help them become a "very successful regional power."

But Iran is a revolutionary power. I doubt that treating it as a status-quo power and a partner in the concert of nations is really in anyone's interest.

And anyway, let's adjust the president's rhetoric and imagine him applying it to the Republicans.

He says he wants to bring Tea Party activists out of the cold, to "break through (their) isolation" and help them contribute to the emerging consensus. 

In fact the president is talking nonsense. In no sensible world would a status-quo power like the US want to encourage a revolutionary expansionist power like Iran. What we want, and what the rest of the world probably wants, is for no single power in the Middle East to dominate the rest of the region. That was the point of interfering in Iraq: to put a block in the path of Iranian expansion. The strategic interest of the US in the Middle East is to make sure that no single power gets its hands on all the oil.

On the other hand it would be immensely cunning for the president to cut out the moderate wing of the Republican Party, wine and dine the "beltway" Republicans and get them on board, say, with his immigration reform. Imagine the rage, the bloodletting in the Republican Party! Why, that way he might even succeed in dividing the Republican Party and set up Hillary Clinton for a win in 2016.

You see, I think that the business with Lois Lerner running interference on the Tea Party was a strategic mistake. I think that the race activism on Trayvon Martin and Ferguson are strategic mistakes. I think that the whole "rape crisis" effort is a strategic mistake. I think that the ruckus on the Indiana RFRA act is a strategic mistake. That's because if I were a moderate non-political woman I would wonder what on earth was going on. (And if I were a working-class white man I'd vow never to vote for a Democrat again.)

Today the intrepid Vox Day is invoking the wisdom of Sun Tzu, the First Strategist.

If you know others and know yourself, you will not be imperiled in a hundred battles; if you do not know others but know yourself, you win one and lose one; if you do not know others and do not know yourself, you will be imperiled in every single battle.

If I were to describe President Obama and the liberals I would say that they know themselves, particularly their vision of themselves. But they don't know too much about others, except that they are racists, sexists, homophobes, and they don't seem to know much about what other people think about them.

The strength of President Clinton was that, as a governor of a state that was trending conservative, and as a brilliant politician, he knew how to present himself to the great middle of America. And he learned it the hard way by losing reelection as governor of Arkansas in 1980.

Maybe the Obamis are geniuses, and everything I know about politics and conflict is wrong.

We'll See. 

When Politics Comes to SFF

The science-fiction/fantasy genre is reckoned a small pond. It's not, after all, an important "literary" genre where the good people go. Important or not, the SFF publishers and editors have tended to be conventional liberals. They have had a tendency to whisper that so-and-so was a conservative, darling.

That meant that the libertarian Sarah Hoyt used to live in fear that she'd say something wrong somehow and it would wreck her career. Hey, join the club! Who doesn't worry that stepping out of the liberal line at work could cost them?

Because SFF was a cozy little liberal club, the editors and publishers tended to favor their favorites at award time. And then, being liberals, they decided that SFF ought to show a bit of leg in the diversity department. Perfectly harmless, if you're a liberal.

Now my #2 dictum -- right after #1 "government is force" -- is "politics is division." Humans are naturally social animals, but if you start getting political, then you are setting yourself up to divide your community in two.

In other words, if you and your liberal pals in SFF decide that such-and-such a writer is, eeuw, conservative, and that it is time to give women and people of color a chance, it may all sound perfectly harmless to you, but it might strike terror into the heart of a Sarah Hoyt and rage into the heart of a Vox Day.

In recent years a couple of conservative SF writers, Brad Torgerson and Larry Correia, decided to develop a slate of non-liberal nominees for the SFF Hugo awards. Last week their slate, "Sad Puppies," swept the Hugo nominations. Not surprisingly the liberal SFF rump isn't too pleased. At io9, Charlie Jane Anders wrote:

Last August, the Hugo Awards for science fiction and fantasy were swept by a younger group of women and people of color. At the time, we said "This was really a year that underscored that a younger generation of diverse writers are becoming central to the genre." So maybe it's not surprising that there was an organized backlash.

Note the innocent use of the passive voice. If you read the other side, they say that it has been people like Anders that have been pushing women and people of color on SFF, whether the SFF fans liked it or not, and that conservative voices were being shut out.

Anders' piece is titled: "The Hugo Awards Were Always Political. But Now They're Only Political." Well, yes, honey. But see my dictum #2 above: politics is division. Once you start down the slippery slope of politics, even for the obviously sensible reason, with which all evolved people agree, that women and people of color have been marginalized in government/office/boardroom/university/SFF or whatever, then sooner or later you are going to inspire a movement of rejection against your noble and ethical attempt to level the playing field.

Convinced of their own benignity, liberals have come to think of government and politics steered by liberals as a similarly benign influence on the modern world. All they are doing is trying to reduce violence and inequality and neo-colonialism and marginalization: what could be wrong with that?

But everyone thinks that their own ideas and proposals are benign and beneficial. It's the other guys that are cruel and unjust. The question that the really evolved person asks is: what does this benign proposal we are advancing look like to the "other" guys? Does it gore their oxen?

Usually, when any government program or political proposal is advanced, the answer to the question "does it gore the other guys' oxen?" is "Yes."

Why? Because government is force. Any government program is going to forcibly take money from someone through taxes and give it to someone else. The guy whose money is being forcibly taken isn't going to like it. And politics is division; it's about saying that our guys are deserving and their guys are undeserving. Having divided up the world, you are now morally and ethically justified in handing out loot to your deserving supporters and taking it away from the undeserving non-supporters.

Why are you then shocked, shocked when the un-deserving object?

Does Ted Cruz Have Bad Breath?

You'd expect that liberals would be foaming at the mouth at Ted Cruz's announcement last week that we was going to run for President of the United States, and you wouldn't be disappointed.

But why are so many conservatives badmouthing him? They seem to be suggesting that Ted Cruz doesn't have a hope of winning the nomination. And even if he did, he wouldn't have a hope of winning the election. Here's George Will disputing Cruz's electoral math:

By disdaining “the mushy middle,” Cruz evidently assumes that the electorate’s middle — lightly partisan and only mildly ideological — is too minuscule to matter.

The point is Pennsylvania.

Cruz, and all other Republican aspirants, must be measured against Pennsylvania. It is one of the 18 states that have voted Democratic in six consecutive elections and that, with the District of Columbia, total 242 electoral votes, and Pennsylvania was redder in 2012 than in 2008. Which Republican is most apt to flip Pennsylvania by accumulating large majorities in Philadelphia’s suburbs?

Then there's the hit on Cruz in the Senate. He's a mad bomber. Nobody likes him. Cruz can't work with other people.

Why is everyone ganging up on Cruz?

Look, everyone understands that the 2016 election will be won in the "five states that have been competitive since 1992 — Ohio, Colorado, Florida, Nevada and Virginia." You think Ted Cruz hasn't thought of that? You think he doesn't have a plan for winning those states? You think that Ted Cruz doesn't have a plan for winning the "mushy middle?"

Here's a thought about the "mushy middle." I'll bet that millions of them are really ticked off right about the impact of Obamacare. If you are a "mushy middle" you probably already had health insurance, and now you find out that premiums are going up, deductibles are going up, and you want someone to fight for you to bring sanity to health care.

Who's the one guy that stood up and fought back against Obamacare? Oh yeah, I know. Ted Cruz's filibuster against Obamacare in 2013 was a purely symbolic act; his quixotic speech wasn't going to go anywhere.

But if you are a mushy middle American, you might get the impression that Ted Cruz cares about people like you and is prepared to take a risk and stand up and fight for you.

Here's another thing. In his announcement speech, Ted Cruz did the usual born-in-a-log-cabin thing. In his case, he told the story of his father battling Batista in Cuba and then struggling his way up in America. Oh, and his mother was the first in her family to go to college and became a programmer in the 1950s.

You know what I call that? I call that appealing to the mushy middle.

So is Ted Cruz too extreme? Is he too abrasive? Is he too young and inexperienced? Who knows? All I know about Ted Cruz is what I read in the newspaper. Which means that I know nothing about Ted Cruz except what someone wants me to know.

But here is what I suspect. I suspect that Ted Cruz has a strategic mind.

Let's Bring It On. I'd say that any of the leading Republican candidates -- I am thinking Cruz, Walker, Rubio (sorry, no more Bushes for me) -- would be better than the corrupt and undistinguished Hillary Clinton. I say, let the best man win, the one that can appeal to the ordinary responsible individual American in the mushy middle.

When Does the Fight for Justice Become In-Justice?

If you are a liberal you have the comfortable knowledge that you are the good guy and you know that you are opposed in your fight for justice by the racists, sexists, and homophobes of the world. To say nothing of the classists.

Conservatives not so much, because we know that we can get into trouble for being conservative. Just read what it was like for SF writer Sarah Hoyt tiptoeing through the liberal tulips and editors at SF conventions.

Let's say that the liberals, the angels of light, get the political power they need to implement their program to fight injustice and punish the oppressors on all fronts. Then what? At what point does the fight against injustice become frank oppression as the new rulers hunt out and punish anyone that disagrees with their rage for justice?

We can agree, I suppose, that the last, final form of justice is still waiting to be found.

The problem is that in any society there are likely to be dueling agendas, competing conceptions of justice. There certainly are competing ideas of justice in the United States. So which conception do we choose? Does it come down to who has a majority in the Congress on in the Supreme Court?

But then it's not a matter of justice, it's a matter of political or judicial power.

There is, of course, an answer to this problem. It is the idea of limited government, and the separation of church and state.

The point of limited government is that not all questions of justice should be dealt with by legislation and judges. Some things, we may be pardoned for suggesting, are merely indignities, and should not be dealt with by legislatures. In other words, some things, objectionable as they may be, do not need to be settled by force. And let us be clear: when you resort to the legal system, you are invoking force and compulsion; you are saying that if the judge agrees with you and renders a verdict at trial, you want the judge to force the government's will on your legal opponent.

The separation of church and state is a bit different. Here we are saying that the formulation of rights and norms, of transcendental truths and meanings of life, should be separate from the government, which is the agent of force. Bluntly put, when we get the government into rights and norms and meanings of life, we are legislating somebody's morality. In most cases, that would be the ruling class's morality.

That's easy to say. In practice, of course, everything the government does that deviates from its core function of rewarding its supporters amounts to the legislation of morality.

And whenever the government legislates a morality that you disagree with, you experience that legislation as injustice directed against you.

In our present society we have the additional problem that our liberal friends don't think they are legislating morality when they legislate their social agenda. They can't be legislating morality because morality comes with religion and liberals are secularists and don't have a religion and don't have a morality. What they have, according to atheist Sam Harris, is "rational ethics." And of course when you implement rational ethics in legislation you aren't legislating morality but reason. Fred Bauer calls this attitude "sectarian secularism."

So now we come to the question of what to do about Christian bakers that don't want to bake for a gay wedding, at least not when they are required to put gay catchphrases on the cake. And what about Muslim bakers?

In the end, the law usually figures out what to do in cases like this. It would probably say that to deny service to a gay couple that just wanted to buy a cake off the shelf is illegal, just as it would be illegal to refuse service to a gay couple at a restaurant. But a Christian baker would have the right to refuse to decorate a cake with slogans that went against her religion.

The real answer to this is live and let live. Some things -- most things -- should not be brought to law. Only egregious, monstrous things should be resolved by government force.

And this is something that we should all practice. Not just because it's the right thing to do, but because it is the practical thing to do. When you use government power to enforce your will on other people, the other people get really pissed off. If they get pissed off enough they may form a head of rebellion to remove your cruel and unjust rule.

Oh, I know. "Cruel and unjust" doesn't apply to you and me; it just applies to that fellow behind the tree.

It is the beginning of wisdom to know that in every breast beats the heart of a would-be tyrant.

Gays Can Never be "Normal"

One of the lies that liberals tell themselves is that the fundamentalist Christian churches are the very locus of the powerful patriarchy, and therefore must be crushed.

In fact, as liberal James Ault tells in in Spirit and Flesh, a book about a fundamentalist church in New England, the opposite is true. In the church that he studied the men held all the offices but the women had all the power. They operated behind the scenes, and their men did what they were told.

Another thing to keep in mind is that fundamentalists are little people. No elite American would attend a real fundamentalist church; it would be too embarrassing. And as liberals say of African Americans: they can't be racists because they don't have the power.

So when gays decide to humiliate small Christian shopkeepers by siccing the local Human Rights Commission on them, there is only one thing to say: how about a little compassion, a little tolerance? How about putting yourself in the place of the "other?"

How about practicing what you preach?

Also, it might be a good time to revisit Winston Churchill's dictum: in victory, magnanimity. Gays have won the gay marriage battle. How about declaring victory and going home?

Look, I get the impossible position of the gays. Back in the days of Stonewall they were defiantly radical and counter-cultural. But now they want to be "normal" and accepted as normal. Only problem is, as Erick Erickson writes, that gays can never be normal. Gays can't be normal because they can't get married and have normal children that grow up with a mother and a father. And so on and so on.

A generation ago and more liberals indoctrinated young college women to liberate their sexual selves: women could get laid just like men! Unfortunately the young women believed them, and tried to do it. But most women aren't cut out for the multiple partners game. They fall in love and love forever. The sexual revolution created nothing but heartache.

Now liberals are indoctrinating our youth into believing that gay is just a lifestyle choice -- or that you are born gay, or whatever lends itself to the activist battle of the moment. Unfortunately our young people believe believe them. They will live to regret it, but by then it will be too late.

Of course, that's nothing on the liberal war on Christianity. I regard the Axial Age religions as vital agencies that help people graduate from the life of tribal helplessness as People of the Subordinate Self, and become People of the Responsible Self and responsible individuals. The left and the welfare state are foolish attempts that discourage people from making the momentous leap from victimhood and bondage to responsibility and freedom.

Yes, but the Christians are such bigots!

My take on the almost universal religious condemnation of homosexuality down the ages is that it is probably a social evolutionary thing: social Darwinism, if you like. Society needs to channel young energy towards marriage, work, and making babies, because otherwise the race dies out. Kinda like the late Roman empire where it got to be really difficult to get well-born young men to abandon their lives of dissipation and get married. Kinda like Europe today.

So religion isn't just about getting people to behave right through the cunning trick of divine justice. It also must push the idea of "go forth and multiply." Otherwise oblivion.

Our liberal friends like to suggest that getting married and raising children is a second-class sort of life, one that you resort to if don't have it in you to become a creative artist. And, of course, women are wasted as stay-at-home moms.

But the truth is that multiplication is hard. Ask any school-aged kid. Ask any married couple with two or three kids and one of them a surly teenager. And the most important thing that 90 percent of us will ever do is to put children on the ground and get them properly fledged and out of the nest.

Individual Responsibility: What about the Ancient Nomads?

One of my thoughtful emailers sent me a question about my post on SJW Anita Sarkeesian. He notes my three-stage system of People of the Subordinate Self, People of the Responsible Self, and People of the Creative Self, and writes:

You mention that responsible individualism is "the responsibility to find work, the responsibility to make your own choices, the responsibility to find your own mate, all within the demanding environment of the market economy".  Aren't these the responsibilities of all humans, always?  Surely man has dreamed of universal leisure for his fellow man since time immemorial, and only recently has such fantasy become the basis of entire ideologies.  How then do our modern age responsibilities differ than that of an ancient nomad when boiled down to the basics of the quote above?  

The straight answer to that is: yes, of course, and not just of humans but of every living thing. Of course every human has the responsibility to get on their bike and earn a living. But there's a problem with all social animals, the problem of freeloading. The basic deal in social cooperation is that we all get to eat at the communal table; we all make our contribution, and we all get to enjoy the fruits of our cooperation. The reason that social cooperation works is that the division of labor works: when animals specialize, the individuals benefit and the community benefits.

But what about the slacker? There are several ways to deal with this menace. The first is shaming and possible expulsion. Other people in the community judge your behavior and take action. Then there is hierarchy. The boss tells you what to do, and punishes you if you don't do it. Then there is divine justice. God punishes you for your sins. Finally, there is exchange, which the anthropologists tell us is unique to modern humans, although it didn't really go viral until the rise of the bourgeoisie. People find a way to contribute to society and then get rewarded by the exchange system for their contribution.

On my system, the hunter-gatherers are pre-subordinate selves. They cooperate in a face-to-face society and the slacker gets named and shamed into compliance. We see this today in the ubiquitous community of women at work or in a neighborhood that have no power over each other except the judgements of other women's gossip.

When we get to the agricultural age we get a visibly hierarchical society where people must do their part and where agricultural workers are typically subordinated to a landed warrior class. Once you get this subordination you get the freeloader that does the absolute minimum of work that will avoid sanction. We see this survive today in any corporate or government bureaucracy where you can probably enjoy lifetime tenure and a pension if you keep your nose clean and don't antagonize the bosses. The problem is that it is staggeringly inefficient to have everyone sitting around waiting for the boss to tell them what to do.

The boss system works, after a fashion, in the agricultural age because life on the farm is pretty simple. But in the industrial age, where almost nobody grows their own food or builds their own cottage, the boss system has broken down. Today we all live in the exchange system where each one of us must find out how to contribute to society, and we learn what others value through the exchange system and its prices for ideas, for goods and for labor.

In this modern age, where the yoke of work and of finding work falls directly upon the shoulders of the individual worker, it is not surprising, as my emailer suggests, that people dream of "universal leisure for his fellow man" and conjure up whole ideologies to that dream. It is telling, of course, that all attempts to realize dreams of universal leisure have turned into nightmares. They have all regressed to the old boss system and have simply been unable to deliver even a smidgen of leisure. Instead they have required the most cruel compulsion to deliver even the simplest necessities of modern life.

And so today we get Anita Sarkeesian, once a nice middle-class college girl, who gets seduced by the victim ideology of feminism and the all-explaining power of the “white supremacist capitalist patriarchy.” Sarkeesian and her fellow religionists demand "safe spaces," freedom from "microagressions" and the power to defenestrate anyone that challenges their dogmas.

For decades liberals have been lecturing us about the horror of that delicate flower, the Victorian wife, that had to be protected from the big bad world of sex and sleaze, and was told to "lie back and think of England." The solution to this patriarchal nightmare, wrote Simone de Beauvoir in The Second Sex, was the "independent woman," unafraid of sex, unafraid of the public square and men and career.

What is going on here? It's politics. The whole point of politics is power, and the needs of power change from decade to decade. In the mid 20th century the cry was for the independent woman. Now the cry is for "safe spaces." But it's all politics and political power.

Yes, it's true that every individual has the responsibility to provide for himself and his family. But nomads are socialized into cooperation in a different way than modern city folk. The question is: how do you deal with the freeloader? In nomad society the freeloader got a frown from the other women; the agricultural bondman got a frown from his lord (and from the village women). Today it is a frown from the exchange system (and from the boss at work and the neighborhood women).

The way to stay clear of the modern freeloader police is to be a responsible individual. Then you'll have nothing to fear from the gossiping women, nothing to fear from the boss at work, and nothing to fear from the market system.

But you still have to watch out for the diversity police. There is no escape from them!