Voting Yourself Off the Planet

My mother always used to worry about "overpopulation." Still, she had two children that each had two children. And I'm afraid that towards the end of her life I used to tease her a little about the birth dearth in Europe.

But why torment her? She picked up the zeitgeist of her youth, which was heavily into eugenics and the problem of the "unfit." Darwin, Spencer, Margaret Sanger and all. My mother was human; she believed what others believed.

But I have come to wonder about the population-control folks. What are they thinking? Don't they realize that, when they decide not to breed, they are voting themselves off the planet? Poster boy #1 is China, with their mad Mao-inspired One Child policy that only now is getting quietly shelved too late to prevent a massive collapse in China's population.

Now, according to James Lileks, there's a fashionable Manhattan trend celebrating childlessness. OK, there's a fashionable New York Times boomlet with a ton of articles and books celebrating childlessness. Here's a quote from Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed: Sixteen Writers on the Decision Not to Have Kids.

According to the NYT review, it “concludes with Tim Kreider’s rousing defense of the child-free as ‘an experiment unprecedented in human history . . . A kind of existential vanguard, forced by our own choices to face the naked question of existence with fewer illusions, or at least fewer consolations, than the rest of humanity, forced to prove ourselves anew every day that extinction does not negate meaning.’”

Here's an idea, Tim old boy. Extinction does negate meaning.

The guy I like on this is "Spengler," David Goldman. Here he is defending his book How Civilizations Die from the liberals at Ha'aretz.

Iran has an apocalyptic regime with a great deal to be apocalyptic about. As I have argued in these pages since 2005, no poor country in the entire troubled history of the world has seen its fertility rate plunge from 7 children per female just one generation ago to only 1.6 children per female today. There is no explanation for mass rejection of a nation’s demographic future except for deep cultural pessimism... Its unsuccessful engagement with modernity has left a childless country plagued by social pathologies, including some of the world’s highest rates of opium addiction, venereal disease, and prostitution.

 OK. Let's do a jump from here to gay marriage. As everyone knows, the traditional Axial Age religions all take a rather firm line on homosexuality. You could say that they are homophobic in the strict sense of being afraid of homosexuality. It's interesting to wonder why.

My take is that religion is the social lubricant that keeps the human project from seizing up. It is not just about scaring people straight with the threat of divine punishment. I think that the Axial Age religions are anti-gay because any religion that supports (or even celebrates gayness, as modern secular religious liberals do) is not long for this world. Because pretty soon there won't be any people in this world.

Every society must celebrate work, marriage, children, raising the next generation, and it needs to channel not just the economic incentives but the zeitgeist towards the pro-work, pro-natal culture. Otherwise people are going to decide that work is just too hard; they would rather follow their bliss. They will decide that marriage is too much of a risk and just tag along with the odd "relationship." They will agree with some of James Lileks' commenters:

Given the direction the world, especially America, is clearly takng, why would you have any children? Who is more selfish, vain or entirely oblivious: those who consign their offspring to less prosperous, less free futures, or those who eschew the blessings of replicating themselves?

 Of course that is why religions are also into hope, big time. They need to stop that sort of attitude right now.

Childlessness is a bit like fat. A century ago the rich were fat and the poor were thin. Now the opposite is true.

Two centuries ago, childlessness was the fate of the poor. If you were a poor woman without a dowry nobody would marry you and if you were a man without land, ditto. The rich had all the children, because they could afford it, and their abundant children crowded out the middling and the poor. But ever since the Industrial Revolution the poor have mostly been able to afford children, and those children have mostly survived. And so the rich, darling, have decided to be different.

Think about it: if you've inherited enough to support yourself as a writer or an artist, why wouldn't you stay single and develop your creativity rather than get down and dirty by creating children and putting your inheritance at risk?

Rodney Stark calls this "upper class asceticism," and he says it started with Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha, who dumped his wife and kids for the spiritual life.

None of this is rocket science. If you like your civilization, you can keep your civilization. But first you must have children.

Why Nobody is Getting Fired over UVA Rape Hoax

Now that the official word from the Columbia Journalism School has been handed down on the UVA Rape Hoax, the Rolling Stone article on the rape of "Jackie" by seven frat boys at the University of Virginia, the world wonders: why is nobody getting fired?

Why is the writer, Sabrina Rubin Erdely, still writing for Rolling Stone? Why does UVA President Teresa Sullivan still have a job? Why is "Jackie" not in the coils of the law?

The New York Times takes a philosophical view of the whole matter. It quotes Rolling Stone  managing editor Will Dana:

Mr. Dana said that the report was punishment enough for those involved, and that they did not deserve to lose their jobs because the article “was not the result of patterns in the work of these people.”

So that's all right. Nothing to see here.

Jonah Goldberg ain't too happy either. This is not just about a rogue journalist and fabulist, he writes, like the good old days of Stephen Glass at The New Republic and Janet Cooke at the Washington Post. Everyone at Rolling Stone was in on it. But he knows why the liberals can't quite get it together and punish the wrongdoers. It's because they don't think anyone really did anything wrong.

Why? Because in their hearts they’re sure they were right, and that’s all that matters.

The narrative is right, and that's all that matters. There is a problem with sexual harassment on campus, and liberals need to teach America about it and cure the sick racist sexist homophobic culture that condones it.

But Ben Shapiro takes the notion of the all-important "narrative" to a new insight. He reckons that it's actually beneficial for the "narrative" when activists use a lie to advance it. The point is that a "narrative can only be forwarded if there is controversy over the facts." If "everyone agreed that Jackie had been gang raped" then no controversy. We send the guilty off to jail. End of Story.

But the leftist narrative requires an opposition, a group of evil haters who take rape less than seriously...

So the left specifically chooses to feature situations in which facts are under dispute. Then leftists claim that no one could reasonably dispute the facts; the only people who would dispute facts about the occurrence of an evil are those who sympathize with the evil.

On this view the tendentious claim, from a survey of two colleges that one in five women experience harassment during their time is college, is much better than the official Department of Justice numbers that the rate is more like 0.03 in five. Then you can claim that anyone opposing your narrative is a potential rapist, and not taking the issue seriously.

Hello climate change, where the skeptics of catastrophic global warming are associated with Holocaust "deniers."

You can see that this strategy goes all the way back to Marx and his argument about the bourgeoisie and the working class. Having waved his hands and declared that the working class was being grievously exploited by the capitalists, then any objector to his program could be dismissed as merely the bribed apologist of the bourgeoisie.

The truth is that after 170 years of this, we responsible individuals of the middle class still haven't come up with a way to neutralize it.

And that is the real scandal.

Switch to An American Manifesto

We won't be posting to this blog any more.



Go to an American Manifesto instead.

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.