Open Letter and Questionnaire to Sens. Murray and Cantwell

Dear Senators Murray and Cantwell:

As a concerned citizen of the State of Washington I am confused. On the one hand my Democratic friends and neighbors seem to be copacetic with riots organized and performed by left-wing groups like BLM and AntiFa. On the other hand they seem be deeply threatened by riots organized by right-wing groups like Proud Boys.

Of course in these difficult times, it is not surprising that educated and evolved people feel threatened. Who knows what collusions with the Russians to disrupt the congressional elections in 2022 -- in which I dare say that you, Sen. Murray, will once again offer yourself to the voters of Washington -- are even now in the planning stage?

Now, in the last week we have experienced a United States Senator being the target of left-wing activists over the issue of normalization of status for so-called Dreamers. But we also have the phenomenon of angry parents attending school-board meetings to protest the teaching of "critical race theory" to their children in our public schools.

Now, I read, the Attorney General of the United States has directed the FBI to investigate the parents that have threatened school board members. I am bound to say that I have not heard of any federal investigation of the LUCHA activists that protested Sen. Sinema.

I have not heard any reaction from you two faithful Senators to this developing situation. I wonder what your take is? Do you find it concerning that female United States Senator Sinema was followed by protesters into a bathroom and photographed? And what about the parents that protested outside the home of a female school-board member Shirley Brown in Sarasota County, Florida?

Of course, I am sure that your take on these matters is extremely wise and nuanced. But maybe your staffers take a different line.

Would you please submit the following questionnaire to each of your staffers, which asks them to indicate their take on the two recent protests, and return the results to me. I would appreciate getting your responses by October 15, 2021.

Questionnaire

Q: What is your closest reaction to the recent protests involving Senator Sinema (R-AZ) and immigration activists from LUCHA? Please mark an X against the response that most nearly approximates your own view.

In my opinion protesters are:	Mark X in box
Dedicated Activists
Peaceful Protesters
Angry and justified
Mostly Peaceful Protesters
Dupes of George Soros
Far-left extremists
Racist bigots
Violent rioters
Domestic terrorists
Armed insurrectionists
Attempted assassins

Q: What is your closest reaction to the recent protests involving Shirley Brown of the Sarasota Country School Board and anti-CRT parents? Please mark an X against the response that most nearly approximates your own view.

In my opinion protesters are:	Mark X in box
Dedicated Activists
Peaceful Protesters
Angry and justified
Mostly Peaceful Protesters
Dupes of Donald Trump
Far-right extremists
Racist bigots
Violent rioters
Domestic terrorists
Armed insurrectionists
Attempted assassins

Please call an all-hands meeting of your staffers and aides and direct them to fill in the questionnaire not later than Friday October 8, 2021 and email the results to me at chrischantrill at gmail dot com by October 15, 2021.

In these trying times, please make sure to keep safe so you both can continue to serve the people of the State of Washington.

Sincerely,

Christopher Chantrill

The Intersection of Politics and Religion

I wanted to start this piece with a reference to an article I read a day or two ago about the intersection of politics and religion, and how problematic that is. But I can't find it.

Obviously politics and religion are inevitably intertwined. And that is as clear to me as ever since I read Carl Schmitt's The Concept of the Political where he defines the political as friend vs. enemy and the moral as good vs. evil.

Let us define an enemy as someone who is a physical threat, who might visit violence upon us.

Let us define an evil person as someone who is something less than a physical threat to us: someone who is a moral threat to the community.

The point is that an evil person is not necessarily an enemy, although an enemy is probably evil.

The problem is that the more anyone mixes up politics and religion the more likely they are to consider an evil person to be an enemy.

And the point about an enemy, as Carl Schmitt makes clear, is that "conflict," ultimately leading to killing, is inherent in the notion of "enemy."

We humans can argue all day about whether the chap down the street is evil or not. And that is pretty harmless, until we bring politics and government into the equation. Because government is force, and politics is Us vs. Them, Friend vs. Enemy, and ultimately the only safe thing to do with an enemy is to kill him. 

And that's the problem with our progressive friends. Once you have decided that the job of government has to do with justice, righting wrongs, then pretty soon you are labeling the unjust as people that need to have their heads chopped off. Hello Stalin, Hitler, and Mao.

Obviously, there is no complete separation of the political and the moral, or church from state. But I'd say that the whole point of the moral is to influence humans into doing pro-social acts short of actually threatening them physically to get their act together.

Put it another way. The reason he humans experience a thing called "guilt" is probably God's way of helping us avoid a lot of violent conflict. When we feel guilty we probably decide not to do something evil, or regret actually doing something that we come to understand as evil.

Inevitably the two -- the political and the moral -- will intermix, and there will always be a tendency for humans to regard someone they experience as evil as nothing less than an enemy.

And let us connect this with my notion of male honor and female honor that I got years ago from James Bowman's Honor: A History. Honor in men is courage, standing in line with the brothers against the enemy. Honor in women is chastity, or being a good little girl, as I like to sneer. "Don't be evil," as Google says. But you can see that honor in women also means holding together with the other women in the community and "not talking to" someone who is acting against the mores of the community.

So the question always comes down to this: is the obnoxious guy down the street causing enough of a problem to classify him as an enemy, and invoke the power of the state to compel him to observe social norms?

Does he have a couple of wrecked cars and a bunch of trash on his property? Is he building a mega-mansion that is three times the size of every other house on the block? Does he have loud parties that go on into the middle of the night? Does he steal the odd dahlia in high summer?

Then obviously there are things that have to be agreed if things are to work: driving on the right. Then there are nice-to-haves: keeping businesses out of a residential district. Then there smelly factories on the downwind end of town. Then there is the issue of pollution, factories that are not just smelly but emit substances that actually harm other living things. In other words what the economists call "externalities," activities that harm other people. And if you want to carry it to the limit, then there is the question of climate change, where fossil fuels are going to cause irreversible changes to the climate.

Hey! It's complicated!

But I would say that the "tell" is when the normal argument about good and evil escalates into the designation of the evil person as an "enemy."

And I would say that our liberal friends are a little too quick to designate political opponents as enemies. 

But I understand why. When you have merged politics and religion, as many of our modern belief systems do, then the difference between and evil person and an enemy becomes at best confused and at worse erased. The evil one is an enemy and the enemy is evil.

And what can you do with an evil enemy, except destroy him? Or her.

Tiger Moms and Equity

I was to a party recently and found myself in a group with three moms of children on the cusp of college. They were full of AP and Running Start and Berkeley and other swank colleges.

Did you know? Back in the day there weren't any counselors to advise high-schoolers on Running Start ("Running Start is a program that allows 11th and 12th grade students to take college courses at Washington[ State]'s 34 community and technical colleges.") But now there are.

I asked the mom next to me what was driving all this super-achievement, and she said that it is a combination of kids and parents and school. Then she said something about "Equity."

Because she is a Nice Person. As usual, I didn't have a retort ready: not even "Puleeeze!" And anyway I wouldn't have wanted to prick her progressive bubble. That's not what parties are for.

But I immediately had a divine vision, directly from God. There is no way that the current fashion for "equity" among our educati is going to make a blind bit of difference.

Why? Because to play the game of Get Into a Good College you need one thing. You need a Tiger Mom. Everything else is liberal b*llsh*t.

OK, I know. You anti-racists are out there condemning me to Twitter Death for racism, because we know that Tiger Moms are all East Asian moms. OK, let's use a cat that's native to the good old US and A. Bobcat? Not fierce enough. Mountain Lion? Too long -- as in "mountain lion mom." Maybe "Panther Mom" will do the job.

But back to our story. There is no way that any gubmint program of "Equity" to assist BIPOC or other "oppressed peoples" children to get into college is ever going to beat the white liberal Panther Moms or the East Asian Tiger Moms.

Why? Well you tell me. Because the Tiger Moms are educated and they talk to each other and they care, they really care about getting their kids into selective colleges. Because the BIPOC moms are not that much into education and selective colleges. Because the BIPOC culture is not into higher education so much as aspiring rapperology. Because any program of Equity will devolve into a pure loot-and-plunder operation, because that it what all government programs are about.

And I'll betcha that any Equity program would end up screwing over ordinary white middle-class kids. You know, the kind of people that got screwed by Affirmative Action and then Diversity and then DEI, and now CRT.

And maybe there's another factor. I remember when I was a teenager in my pre-college years. I remember distinctly thinking that not going to college was unthinkable. What would I do if I didn't get into college? I couldn't imagine an adult life except as a college graduate.

Yes, think about this. If you are the child of educated parents, then working hard in high school and going to a good college is the road to a nice safe orderly life. You always get to be in a world where talent and intelligence and credentials are sensibly rewarded, and you gently advance through some corporate or government bureaucracy that seems to be eternal.

But the world outside that nice safe check-the-boxes life? As in start a business? As in join a tech start-up? That, clearly, is a horse of a different color.

Here's my Fearless Prediction. Whatever "Equity" becomes as the rubber hits the road and it gets instantiated into a thousand gubmint programs, I have one fearless prediction.

It will Make Things Worse.

Books and Justice and Making Things Worse

It has been my fate recently to have read -- or read about -- numerous books proposing to curb the monstrous injustice of the world with new government initiatives. The assumption of all the geniuses writing these books is that government programs can help mitigate injustice in the world.

Of course, this is just the moderates in the genre. There are those, who shall remain nameless, who propose that with enough bold action we can remake the world into a heaven-on-earth of justice.

I admit, right up front, that I have taught myself not to believe that government can do anything about justice, beginning with the fact that, if you are a victim of a violent act, from robbery to murder, there is no justice for you. Like the victim of rape, you are still violated however the criminal justice system disposes of your violator.

What we call "justice" is in fact legislating morality. Yes, it would be nice if everyone were equal, but that's not how the world works. And in order to make things equal you will need to use quite a lot of force. A lot of people will experience your force as injustice. Go figure.

Just yesterday I read a review of a book on justice and genetics: The Genetic Lottery: Why DNA Matters for Social Equality by academic Kathryn Paige Harden reviewed on Quillette. The good thing is that, after consigning Charles Murray to the second circle of Hell for daring to mention in The Bell Curve that groups with low IQ -- i.e. blacks -- would really struggle in a future where cognitive skills will be more and more important, nice girls like Harden are waking up to the problem.

And their solution to the problem is the moral narrative of "equity" that our lefty friends have been selling for while now.

Equity, Harden explains, is about giving disadvantaged people tailored support that puts them on a similar footing to their more advantaged peers. It is explicitly a philosophy of positive discrimination that can be extended to every conceivable dimension of disadvantage—including genetic disadvantage.

You know what. I have a bit of a problem with this. Even assuming that a ruling class and a government should ever get into a program of "positive discrimination," even assuming that a government program can execute successfully on the moral program of positive discrimination to make things fair, there is the little question of "will it work" or will it, on the contrary, Make Things Worse?

And then there is the teeny weeny problem that, supposing that the program Makes Things Worse, will the program ever get reformed? Answer: No, because the whole point of any government program is not justice but loot and plunder. But you knew that.

See, I think that the gubmint program of free education that started with our pal Horace Mann nearly 200 years ago has Made Things Worse, starting with the rather obvious fact that education has just become a loot and plunder program for women union teachers, and continuing with the rather obvious fact that education doesn't seem to be doing much for blacks, but is really cool for well-born white and Asian women.

See, I think that the gubmint program of Social Security that started with the noble FDR nearly a century ago has Made Things Worse, by taxing the incomes of ordinary workers, spending the money on gubmint programs and then handing out benefits instead of enrolling workers into a genuine savings program that might end up as capital to be willed to children.

See, I think that the gtubmint program of Medicare started by the noble LBJ over half a century ago takes a ton of money away from rich Americans -- who might be using the money to create jobs -- and spending it on insane end-of-life expenditures. Put it this way: suppose that the average middle-class American had to pay for their own end-of-life medical care, what would they be prepared to spend on it, with insurance or savings? How many of them would say: hey, let's flip the switch and let our kids have the money?

See, I think that the gubmint program of "worker rights" and wage and hour laws and the indulgence of labor unions Makes Things Worse. I think that pushing worker wages above the market actually makes workers vulnerable, as the collapse of big private sector unionism showed after the 1960s. And unfortunately for the workers, the ruling class lost interest in advocating for white union members after the 1960s civil rights era.

See I think that the gubmint program of welfare has Made Things Worse. This is most obvious for black Americans for whom 70 percent of children are born out of wedlock, and where far too many young men end up as "aspiring rappers." Do you know how welfare used to work? In 1000, you axed your lord to become his slave. In Victorian England you were a servant. Funny thing about servants. They were all single, and single young servant girls were forbidden to have "followers." Servants ended in England after World War II when poor women didn't need to "go into service" any more, because welfare.

See, I think that the gubmint program of Climate Change is Making Things Worse. We see this happening right now in Europe where an unexpected calm in the North Sea meant that there was no power from offshore wind turbines so they had to fire up natural gas electric generation. But that put natural gas prices into the stratosphere. And energy prices hit middle and lower-class people the hardest. All of a sudden the British government has decided to start a program of small nuclear plants. I've been reading Doughnut Economics by woman Brit economist Kate Raworth that proposes, among other follies, pedal to the metal "renewable energy." Yes, but suppose "renewable energy" Make Things Worse? How would we know, and how would we reverse gubmint green energy programs, knowing that all gubmint programs are loot and plunder dressed up with lipstick on a pig and the shortest time interval known to the economists' union is the time between an economist getting a research grant and deciding she deserves it -- for evermore?

See, I think that all these activists, that "want to make a difference" because that is what they have been carefully taught, have No Idea that almost all Good Ideas don't turn out quite so well in practice. That goes for business startups, marriage startups, gubmint programs, religious groups and cults, political parties, everything. They almost all fail. But gubmint programs are forever. Until the next revolution.

Meanwhile Our Nance is busy trying to negotiate a mere $2.2 trillion program -- still stuffed to the gills with loot-and-plunder handouts and activist "make a difference" conceits -- to pass in a reconciliation package in Congress.

I tell you, Nancy Pelosi, when you have gone to your reward some poor schmuck of a President and a fool of a House Speaker are going to have to figure out how to undo trillions of dollars of handouts without sparking a mostly peaceful protest from the beneficiaries of said handouts. I don't envy them their job, not one whit.

Karl Popper Defines "Rationality"

Everyone is all in favor of "reason" and contemptuous of the other guys that substitute "feelings" or "faith" or "bigotry" for reason.

What we really mean is that "our" account of the meaning of "life, the universe, and everything" is the correct one, the rational one, but the other guy... Well, he's probably living in Cloud Cuckoo Land.

Karl Popper is famous for the idea of "falsification." He argues that unless it is possible to test your theory against real-life data then it's not a theory but just a narrative.

By the way, he has nothing against narrative. Man "can invent stories, fairy tales, myths." But when a myth can't be tested...

Not that there's anything wrong with narratives. It's just that a narrative isn't science.

In Knowledge and the Body-Mind Problem: In defence of interaction, adapted from a series of lectures given by Popper at Emory University in 1969 and published by M.A. Notturno, Popper develops his ideas. 

He has two Big Ideas to present. The first is the process of scientific discovery. It goes like this:

1. A theory has a problem.
2. Propose a tentative revised theory.
3. Test the theory.
4. Wait for the next problem.

The second Big Idea is his "Three Worlds" notion. It goes like this

World 3: the products of our human minds.
World 2: our mental states or processes.
World 1: physical states or processes.

When he says World 3 he means both scientific theories and actual physical products of the human mind such as windmills and temples and jet airplanes.

But at the end of the book, in the last lecture, titled "The Self, Rationality, and Freedom," he defines "rationality."

I mean by "rationality" simply a critical attitude towards problems -- the readiness to learn from our mistakes, and the attitude of consciously searching for our mistakes and for our prejudices. Thus, I mean by "rationality" the attitude of conscious, critical, error elimination.

Simplified, I would say that Popper sees reason and rationality as a process rather than a framework.

And, he says, we humans can only deal with one or two mistakes at a time. We cannot sweep the whole of knowledge-so-far in the trash and start with a blank sheet. So, "our criticism cannot tackle more than one or two problems or theories at a time". But, "there is no problem or theory... that is immune to being made  the object of our critical consideration."

Then, he attacks what he calls "the myth of the framework," the idea that two people cannot have a fruitful discussion unless their world-views are pretty much in alignment. On the contrary, he writes, dealing with someone with a significantly different "framework" can be really productive and interesting. But it does require both sides to admit to themselves that they might be wrong.

Finally he critiques the notion of "self-expression," that

the quality of the work we do depends on how good we are. It depends only on our talents, on our psychological, and, perhaps, on our physiological states.

Popper regards this as sick and wrong. That's because he regards all successful theory and knowledge as "objective knowledge" in his World 3. The point is that all scientific knowledge is a public thing. It is a monument that is pushed out into the public world. Then either you, or someone else, critiques it and tries to improve it. I suppose that the point is that if you make a scientific discovery it might be because of your astonishing talent. Or it might be because you got lucky and "noticed" something that nobody else did.

Either way, once you have created a new theory, it is back to the drawing board and on to the next thing. 

Common Sense and Politics

Everybody knows that the world runs on Common Sense: even Thomas Paine knew that.

For instance, I think that President Joe Biden and my high-caste South Asian congresscritter Pramila Jayapal want us to believe that a $3.5 trillion "infrastructure" bill is just common sense with a "zero cost."

I agree. And the Democrats' current agenda of fighting climate change and systemic racism is just common sense.

Why? Because if it is just common sense that government is war plus loot and plunder -- where war can be international war, civil war, or just a routine election -- then the following is just common sense.

Common Sense: Climate Change is loot and plunder for the educated class, and Systemic Racism is loot and plunder for the rulers' underclass clients.

So shut up and eat your spinach.

Really, the marriage between climate change and systemic racism is a marriage made in heaven.

Except, that I would say, the following is common sense.

Common Sense: Build Back Better ends up Making Things Worse.

But back to Thomas Paine and his Common Sense. Of course, it wasn't common sense at all. Published in January 1776, it was, as La Wik quotes Gordon S. Wood, "the most incendiary and popular pamphlet of the entire revolutionary era." La Wik:

It was sold and distributed widely and read aloud at taverns and meeting places. In proportion to the population of the colonies at that time (2.5 million), it had the largest sale and circulation of any book published in American history.

Let's quickly rehearse Common Sense from La Wik.

The first section is on the origin and design of government.

Paine related common Enlightenment theories of the state of nature to establish a foundation for republican government. Paine began the section by making a distinction between society and government and argues that government is a "necessary evil."

Well, that wouldn't be "common sense" today. Today, everyone agrees, government by an educated and evolved elite is merely common sense, rather than a "necessary evil." If you think government is a "necessary evil" you are a deplorable, a bitter clinger, and a white oppressor to boot.

I mean, if you scan the "Economics" or the "Political Science" section at your local used book store, I'd say that 75 percent of the books are all about how "we" can use government to bend the arc of history towards justice. Common sense, darling.

I know. Who is "we," Kemosabe?

The second section is on monarchy and hereditary succession.

[Paine] considers monarchy first from a biblical perspective and then from a historical perspective. He begins by arguing that since all men are equal at creation, the distinction between kings and subjects is a false one.

To hell with the Divine Right of kings, for instance. Common sense.

In the third section Paine looks at the current conflict between Britain and the colonies.

Paine examines the hostilities between England and the American colonies and argues that the best course of action is independence. Paine proposes a Continental Charter (or Charter of the United Colonies) that would be an American Magna Carta.

Nothing here but Common Sense. Right fellas, everyone down the ages was putting together Continental Charters before breakfast. Particularly in "taverns and meeting places."

Mind you, I'd say it is amazing that this 47-page book was "read aloud in taverns and meeting places." Imagine that happening today!

So, rather than merely advocating "common sense" Thomas Paine was really proposing the most radical political change in history. But hey, when you are proposing the most radical political change in history the last thing you want to do is scare people. So you tell them that your radicalism is just "common sense." Just like Joe Biden and Pramila Jayapal.

Anyway, pace Thomas Paine, I'd say that when anyone is invoking "common sense" they are trying to put one over on us, by getting us to just accept whatever it is as natural and physical, nothing to see here, move right along.

Of course, on the other hand, you should always accept what I write here on this blog as completely unexceptional and normal, something that doesn't even need discussion, but that anyone with half a brain would accept without a second thought. Common sense, really.

But the question today is whether the "F*ck Joe Biden" movement is common sense or straight-up "hate speech."

You decide.

The Rubber Hits the Road on Capitol Hill

OK. So today Byron York reports that the Democratic cave begins on all the spending:

1. That they won't pass the $3.5 trillion "infrastructure" bill.
2. That they will pass the $1.1 trillion "infrastructure" bill.

Still to come:

1. Funding the government October 1
2. Increasing the debt limit.

Thus, York writes, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi "has now surrendered to the so-called centrists in her party".

And this moments after President Biden and my own personal high-caste South Asian Congresscritter Pramila Jayapal claimed that the $3.5 trillion was free.

In a White House speech promoting his spending plans, Biden said that “the price tag is zero… on the national debt. We’re going to pay for everything we spend. [People say] ‘It started off at six trillion, now it’s 3.5 trillion’... it’s going to be zero.”

Well, I sent an email to Rep. Jayapal telling her that "my pal Goebbels" called the "zero" price tag the Big Lie.

Oh, I get it. Government is loot and plunder and when you win an election the rubes down on the farm expect to get paid.

And every progressive activist that wants to "make a difference" has come up with some glorious way to "bend the arc of history towards justice" with other peoples' money.

And every new handout is another block of the economy that is set in concrete and can never be reformed until the government runs out of other peoples' money.

So I get that every item in every spending bill is loot and plunder, including $3 billion for "tree equity."

But I still ponder the bigger question. 

Is Nancy Pelosi just playing the lefty rubes in her party? Letting them fly up a box canyon until they crash into the rock wall at the end? Or is she running from them, afraid that they will take away her power if she doesn't dance with them?

On the other hand she seems perfectly happy to sacrifice moderate members to the Greater Cause of passing new progressive legislation, as she did in 2010 with Obamacare and then lost 64 -- that's sixty-four -- members in the 2010 midterms.

Thing is: the ruling class can get together if it wants to. Example No. 1 is the federal debt after World War II. Here:

See how our ruling class all agreed to make the debt decrease as a percent of GDP. Right up until 1980. Know what happened then? Reagan said we are cutting taxes and cutting spending. But the Dems said: forget about cutting spending. So that ramped the debt from 35 percent GDP to 60 percent GDP. Then we had the Iraq War. And then we had the Crash of 2008. And now we've had the COVID Crisis. And we are back up to 135 percent GDP, higher than at the end of World War II.

Hello Nancy? Hello Chuck? Hello Joe Biden? Anybody there?

Because you know who will be hurt most if there is a wipe-out. The underclass; minorities; BIPOCs -- "women and minorities hardest hit." Your voters. Do you care?

I guess the truth is that no elected politician cares about anything except getting re-elected. And getting elected means dangling free stuff in front of the noses of the rubes. And that means running up huge Christmas Tree bills loaded with goodies.

But I wish it weren't so.