Another Vegetarian Leaves the Dark Side, Almost

George Dvorsky has started to eat meat. He pretty much had to, it seems, because his vegetarian diet was failing him. Dvorsky was an ethical vegetarian, the judgmental kind, who declared that carnivores were bad people. Now along with eating meat, Dvorsky has to eat his words.

I was a vegetarian for 20 years, myself. But I did it for reasons that I connected with health – the fear of hormones and insecticides and whatever mystery additives that were put into cattle and meat. For awhile I read a magazine called Vegetarian Times, which turned out to be an animal rights advocacy rag rather than much of a help with putting together a healthy diet. I slowly realized that the knowledge of human nutrition is far from complete, and that humans are far from regular, production-line units with the same nutritional requirements.

The psychology of vegetarianism is similar, it appeared to me finally, to that of Atheo-Leftist elitism. It sets a person (human person) apart from those indiscriminant eaters who ingest who-knows-what. And the apartness easily becomes an aboveness, a moral position of presumed superior ethical intuitions. So it is difficult to be a vegetarian merely for health reasons; self-righteousness is a common side effect.

The diet itself is not without hazards. In order to ingest a complete protein, for example, both a grain and a legume must be combined: neither has the sufficient complement of amino acids to form a complete protein. Also there is a tendency to become enamored of “organic” foods, which are biohazards themselves. And if one travels, it is frequently not possible to get a vegetarian meal that is not just lettuce and a tomato. And if one has a tendency to buy into the unsubstantiated claims surrounding the mysterious additives in meat, then one is also vulnerable to the unsubstantiated claims of homeopaths and outright frauds.

The concern about additives in meat is without empirical evidence in its support. All additivies, including insectides, come with a withdrawal period, which is a period during which the animal is not to be harvested. After the period is over, the substance is known to be dissipated from the animal’s tissue.

Not to use the insecticides or, when necessary, the antibiotics to treat illness is, in my estimation, animal cruelty. Pastured animals cannot help but attract blood sucking insects, usually by the thousands unless controlled. And they ingest larval-stage internal parasites which are resident on the plants they eat.

When I had time to look into it, I found no reasonable empirical findings to support the concerns about the safety of meat. So I finally became a rarity: an ex-long time vegetarian who now raises beef cattle.

Dvorsky still has elitist ethical standards. After all, he is a professional bioethicist (well, everyone is a bioethicist). His sniffing about the superiority of “animal persons” which are grass fed until harvest is a moral fallacy predicated on the misconception that animals are mistreated in feedlots. A feedlot is no more immoral than people living in close proximity in concrete jungles called cities. Feedlots are scraped clean, the dust hosed down, protection from the elements is provided where necessary, the diets are optimal, health is monitored several times a day and ill animals receive immediate healthcare. Healthy, calm animals are profitable; mistreated animals are not.

I think that the fallacy of professional bioethics is demonstrated in this one single column. Here a human who calls animals “persons” has previously called meat eaters “bad people”. But having discovered, finally and on a personal health basis, that not eating meat is dilatory to human health, he inverts his prior condemnations into necessary truths. And even while doing so, he continues to promote his new gustatory victims as persons. It is almost as if he endorses cannibalism as a human necessity.

What this episode decorates is that ethicists of the bio-type do not have any special insight into morality which is in any way superior to the common sense of the general population. So for them to preach to the general population comes not from special insight, it comes from something else – the eliteness they feel, and the presumed entitlement to preach which comes from that eliteness.

ADDENDUM:
The obesity epidemic today is likely caused by overconsumption of sugar, corn syrup, and corn and vegetable oils used in frying... all of which are vegetables and legitimate on a vegetarian diet. It is unlikely that one gets to 300 or 400 lbs by overeating meat.

Pearson’s R Value and the Intelligence of the Left

Evidence. That is the standard cry of the Atheo-Left. We must have evidence. And now there is evidence for one of the more onerous of the Left’s claims, which is that certain professions, such as those that are almost exclusively Leftist, become that way because of natural selection: the smarter people are Leftist, and smarter people get selected for these jobs, so the political slant is naturally to the Left.

But there is a way to measure the intellect and ideological slant of people who publish writings, it turns out. This method is called the Retiel Technique for generating ”Siegel-Spaeth ideology scores (normally used to estimate the ideological position of judges)”:

”For this study, 200 law review articles were randomly selected from a pool of 30 student-edited law reviews in the WESTLAW JLR database. Content-analysis software was used to generate Siegel-Spaeth ideology scores (normally used to estimate the ideological position of judges), and the Retiel technique was used to provide an estimate Stanford-Benet score for the author of each article. Standard techniques were applied to determine the statistical significance of the resulting correlations.”

The findings were conclusive: there is a negative correlation between intelligence and being “Progressive”. In fact, the findings were a linear progression, with more Progressive being linearly correlated with less intelligence, according to the test results.

”The results do not confirm the standard hypothesis. Siegel-Spaeth ideology scores that indicate "progressive" ideology were negatively correlated with the Stanford-Benet estimates. The Pearson product-moment correlation coefficient (-0.61) provides strong evidence of a negative relationship between progressive ideology and intelligence. This Pearson's R value included a small group of anomolous data points. 7 of the 200 articles had outlying Siegel-Spaeth scores; in layman's terms, these articles had scores that indicated extreme left-wing political ideology; these same articles had very high mean Stanford-Benet scores. If these outliers are excluded from the sample, the Pearson's R value decreases from -0.61 to -0.89 (a result that approaches linearity).”

The reason that the populations of certain institutions are heavily-to-completely Leftist is not natural selection, unless natural selection for these jobs is selecting the lesser intelligences. And perhaps that is the case, because the degree of non-dogmatic, non-PC thinking is minimal in these institutions. They deny absolutes and stick absolutely to the same agenda without deviation. Deviation in thought results in banishment – and that is the selection procedure.

Here we have evidence; if the Left is evidence-based, then they will admit to their error and endeavor to fix the imbalance of intellect in their institutions. Will they?

Elitism Self-Indulged

If there is any doubt about the self-endowed elitism of the Left, then Michael De Dora, over at Rationally Speaking, can help eliminate it. De Dora has written a lengthy article there about... himself. And in it he points out the statistics on reaching his own increasing elevation of elitism, the percentage of Americans who get advanced degrees. Check it out and feel free to congratulate him on his acquisition of near elite-hood. He now needs only three more PhD's to catch up to Massimo.

Essence of Life

I have written before about the essential denials that are required in order to support the Philosophical Materialist pose. One of the most interesting has been the denial of the existence of any differentiation between living things and non-living things, such as Massimo Pigliucci’s statement that he could see no life essence, unless it was DNA. Pigliucci is trained in biology and now is officially a philosopher since being transferred into a teaching position in the philosophy department.

Biologists have long been able to tell living things apart from mere minerals. It is their specialty, in fact, the study of living things. So certainly there must be a metric for determining if something is alive, dead, or is not capable of life. And of course there is. It is likely that every biology book informs students of something like this:

Life, n.: that property of plants and animals which makes it possible for them to take in food, get energy from it, grow, adapt themselves to their surroundings, and reproduce their kind: it is the quality that distinguishes a living animal or plant from inorganic matter or a dead organism.
Webster’s Unabridged.

Probably every 5th grader knows that. So why does the biologist – philosopher feel constrained to deny it?

There is a very good reason for a Philosophical Materialist to deny that life has an essence, a differentiating quality that sets it apart from mere matter. The problem is that life, its very essence, is not quantifiable materially. Life has qualities, such as those in the definitions above, but life, as an entity contained within a material entity, cannot be weighed, or measured in any way; it has no quantities. In fact, like truth, it is binary: it exists or it does not exist. A living thing possesses something at its core that is not material. And that non-material something differentiates living things from non-living things.

Obviously this is a fatal admission for Philosophical Materialism. Therefore life cannot exist as a differentiable quality from mere matter, if the doctrine of materialism is to be preserved.

This shows as clearly as possible the nature of the intellectual industry of today. Many pretenders to the title of Intellectual are sullied by their strict adherence to Atheo-materialist cant, a doctrine that comes first and foremost, an axiom and presupposition, with observable facts being either fit to the doctrine or denied outright.

The problem of life has further repercussions. Life, as a non-material entity, produces other qualities, especially in humans. These include sentience, conscious thought, agency, abstract design, intellect and the ability to communicate real and abstract concepts - all things that differentiate life from non-life, all things that are not predictable from the existence of mere matter, all things that refute the pure materialism doctrine.

So these things, life, sentience, conscious thought, agency, intellect, abstraction, these all must be “explained” within materialist parameters, or else denied as delusions or illusions. Denial is the easy way out, obviously.

Here is the harder problem for Philosophical Materialism: What is the source of this non-material entity, life? Some evolutionary biologists, in unguarded moments, claim that all life comes from prior life – an undeniable statement – that is intended to prove materialist evolution if one presupposes a magical First Life jumping into being. But that transfers the issue to a single instance, where a material, non-living entity somehow acquires this non-material quality, a quality not previously existing or predictable from material things. And this violates the universal laws of the material universe, cause and effect, and entropy.

Materialist/Evolutionists escape this issue by running away: they do not accept First Life as an issue for evolution; evolution starts after first life. The bloody gash in logic is inescapable.

The Philosophical Materialist / Public Intellectuals are not deterred by logical defects. They proclaim possession of Critical Thinking, a method they never define, one that somehow bends itself around the defects and incorporates itself into the thought pattern required to salvage materialism. And most importantly it salvages Atheism. It is Atheism that gives the Public Intellectual his eliteness, his elevated ability to create a universe to his own liking, his ability to create his own truths that are not beholden to any actual Truth.

As Julien Benda pointed out in his book, The Treason of the Intellectuals, the Public Intellectual quit any stance of disinterested search for Truth over a century ago. They incorporated political stances of racism and nationalism in the early 20th century. Now they incorporate Consequentialism, secular socialism, Humanism and anti-Semitism in their philosophies, rather than rational objectivism.

What they don’t address is this: What is the source of the non-material entity, life, which differentiates living things from non-living? That thing, life, is merely denied as even existing, despite all evidence to the contrary.

Why I Am Not A Philosopher

”Philosophy is concerned with two matters: soluble questions that are trivial, and crucial questions that are insoluble”

Stefan Kanfer; quoted in Martin Gardner, “The Whys Of A Philosophical Scrivener”

The right hand banner at Massimo Piggliucci’s blog quotes the Marquis de Condorcet and Noam Chomsky, both of whom claim that the responsibility of public intellectuals is to reveal the institutional lies and prejudices:

” It is the responsibility of intellectuals to speak the truth and to expose lies.”

Thus does Piggliucci assume the mantle of Public Intellectual, and the presupposed responsibility attached to it.

How does one achieve the vaunted title of intellectual, anyway? There is no college regimen that produces intellectuals after studying intellectualism. There is no award that I know of which promotes a person from herdmate to intellectual elite. There is no guild or union for journeyman intellectuals, no licensing requirement, no on-the-job training for apprentice intellectuals preparing to certify as Master Intellectual.

Thomas Sowell declares that “Intellectual”, especially “Public Intellectual”, is a job name. These are to be strictly differentiated from people who use their intellect. Public Intellectuals typically are people who stay in school much longer than almost everybody else. Many never ever leave school their entire professional life. This, they presume, gives them wisdom. And the wisdom attained through constant schooling by other permanent school dwellers is thought to be superior to any wisdom attained in the outside world. Such superior wisdom, of course, is a characteristic of eliteness. Hence the urgent responsibility to dispense wisdom to the less wise.

The same goes for Philosopher. “Philosopher” is a job name, like doctor, engineer, produce manager at the grocery store, Mary Kay salesman. It is a profession. And these people also are to be strictly differentiated from people who have philosophies, which is everyone else in the world.

As a profession, Philosopher has several requirements and limitations.

It cannot accept the norms and mores of the current society, otherwise there is no path to eliteness.

It cannot accept any objective basis for irrefutable truth, or else its job is done and unemployment looms.

It must, however, supply derived subjective truths as rational, despite the lack of any firm basis for rationality due to the lack of objective truth.

Its product is words, and its success depends on selling those words. The sale of its words is enhanced by its controversy, both in erratic thought and erratic personal habits. Some claim that the more obscure the words, the higher the quality of the philosophical product.

Controversy in thought comes directly from condemnation of popular culture and the populace in general, including arrogations of the need for populace control that is necessitated due to the errors and stupidity of the populace.

Controversy in thought comes directly from denying absolutes, then declaring new absolutes which are morally imperative and binding. After which detractors are attacked with Ad Hominems and public cursings in gutter-speak. If you think this is an exaggeration, you need to get to know Dennett and Chomsky better.

This is the Dennett-Chomsky-esqe philosopher job description. One which attacks unreasoningly, places blame before data is in, verbally crucifies those who disagree, declares a demographic to be evil against all evidence to the contrary. One which uses the job description as the basis for truth, as if a title imbues every thought with the power of Truth. One which first chooses a “truth”, then vigorously searches out rationalizations to support it, even if those rationalizations must be meticulously fabricated out of thin air.

The professional Philosopher bears no resemblance to those of a philosophical persuasion, those who wish for accuracy, validity and truth, as well as an intellectual basis for thinking that those things might exist.

Professional Philosophers are no longer formed by introspection: in fact the value of introspection is denied outright as error-prone subjective delusion. Nor are they formed by any searching for first principles, which also are denied outright. Professional Philosophers are hired for their belief in, and ability to sell, preconceived and approved agendas. In fact, Professional Philosophers and Modern Skeptics travel in herds, or at least gaggles, all producing and selling the exact same product.

In short, Professional Philosophers are salesmen. They sell books. They sell universities. They sell worldviews. Primarily they sell Philosophical Materialism, Atheism and relativism.

What they sell doesn’t matter for my purposes here. It suffices to observe that selling a product requires taking a firm and unshakably positive position on the value and validity of that product. It becomes irrelevant whether the product actually has those qualities: the sales pitch is leveraged toward sales, not truth.

The victim in this is intellectual integrity and the search for truth - intellectual integrity because the buyer no longer has any need to think beyond the massive oversimplification which he buys, and the search for truth because the search is over: “truth”, however paradoxical, is prepackaged to sell easily. But wait, you also get eliteness, too!

In a sense, I am selling something too, although not for personal gain, and certainly not the canned product which the Professional Philosophers are now selling. What I pitch here is a need for individual intellectual accuracy in the search for validity in a worldview. This is an intellectual habit, one of personal inspection and introspection; one of finding those principles that are basic to rationality; those that underlie logic; those that, if false, would change the entire nature of the universe, and can be known to valid because of that non-falsification. It is a habit of personal intellectual integrity regardless of whether it is congruent with anyone’s packaged philosophical product.

And high on the list, it is an intellectual habit that does not deny any validity a priori and without scrutiny, because to do so is to live under a dogma.

Upon those incorrigibly valid intellectual principles, both a process for determining validity, and a worldview based on valid principles can be derived.

This is not Professional Philosophy, however. In fact, it seems to go against the professional job holders in Philosophical positions. Nonetheless, those of the original philosophical bent usually go against the intellectual journeymen of their time anyway; they are radically individualist in their search mechanisms, in their demand for validity, in their rigid intellectual integrity.

I aspire to the latter over the former, which is why I am not a Philosopher.

Anti-Semitism and the Left

Anti-Semitism is coming more and more to the fore in Leftist activism, having been increasingly enabled by Obama’s own coldness to Israel and pusillanimous approaches to a violent Gaza and a nuclear Iran, while bowing to every Muslim potentate that he sees. The Left has a designated week called “Israeli Apartheid Week”, to punish Israel for a crime it does not commit: Apartheid. Israel is home to Arabs as well as Jews.

It is the Iranian-supported Muslim Palestinians, of course, who will not tolerate non-Muslims, who have vowed to eradicate Israel and all Jews, who use Hudna to restock their rocket and arms supplies, not to establish any sort of peaceful coexistence. Have they shown any indication of being a peaceable neighbor, one with which any sane non-Muslim nation would want to have open borders?

Every non-Muslim nation with a sizable Muslim sub-population can now attest to the quality of freedom in dealing with this demographic. Islam, per the Qur’an, is not tolerant…. period. This places them in the position of being able to corrupt the laws of tolerance, and to abuse their critics and expand their power, as is the focus of Canadian tribunals. If that fails, riots erupt, as Europe can attest.

Why is the Left so enamored of such behavior? As Goldberg, Sowell and many others have shown, the Left is the repository of modern fascism. And the religious form of fascism is Islam, a fact noted even by Leftist Atheist Onfrey. The Palestians have undeniable historic ties to Hitler and National Socialist fascism.

As direct and undeniable as these links to fascism seem to be, the Left brazenly charges Israel with the very crimes it wants to commit:

”As Jonathan Tobin points out, the official goal of the Middle East "peace process" is a "two-state solution", in one of which Muslims live alongside Jews and have voting rights and representation in the legislature, while in the other there are no Jews at all and, as in "moderate" Jordan, to sell your house to a Jew is a crime punishable by death. There goes the neighborhood, right? When the western campus left holds its annual "Israeli Apartheid Week", presumably it's in philosophical support of the notion that you don't need to run an "apartheid" system if you just get rid of everyone who's not like you.

If Muslims are so revolted by Jews that they cannot tolerate any living among them, well, they're free to believe what they want. What is less understandable is the present position of the United States government. The President and his Secretary of State have made it very clear that they regard a few dozen housing units in Jerusalem as a far greater threat to Middle East peace than the Iranian nuclear program. Why is it in the interest of the United States to validate, enthusiastically, the most explicit and crudest bigotry of the Palestinian "cause"?”

It is not the in the interest of the United States of course, it is in the interest of the Leftist socialist manipulators working feverishly to demolish Western institutions that promote bottom-up control of government. Israel qualifies for demolition. Along with all Western democracies, also under attack.
The Left will come to regret its intransigence (Dawkins already is on that path it appears). The reason is that the socialist Left will be surprised that it is not in charge after the dust of the demolition of Western culture clears. Ayatollahs will be. And a Leftist socialista is just another infidel.

Alinsky-Cloward-Piven-Obama: Finally it has a Name

I admit to not being familiar with Cloward-Piven until recently. These contemporaries of Saul Alinsky were socialist activists with a plan. The actual objectives of the Cloward-Piven Strategy, as it is now called, were not as wide sweeping as the nation’s Leftist political strategists of today are enjoying. But the strategy has worked and it is still viable for the bigger picture under Obama. Cloward-Piven wanted a single objective: a guaranteed universal living wage. This would end poverty, and the morality of that end justified any means to get it.

In order to get such a thing, they proposed to overload the welfare system with double the number of poor people demanding their entitlement “rights”. This would overload the system, eventually crashing it. The result would bring the poverty stricken minorities together in angry, chaotic strikes at the remaining bureaucracies. The Leftist journalism outlets would generate sympathy for the poor, both in the general populace and in the government. In the chaos of the crisis caused by the deliberate system crash, politicians would suddenly see that a guaranteed universal living wage was the only solution.

The Cloward-Piven "manifesto" is reprinted at discoverthenetworks.com:

”A series of welfare drives in large cities would, we believe, impel action on a new federal program to distribute income, eliminating the present public welfare system and alleviating the abject poverty which it perpetrates. Widespread campaigns to register the eligible poor for welfare aid, and to help existing recipients obtain their full benefits, would produce bureaucratic disruption in welfare agencies and fiscal disruption in local and state governments. These disruptions would generate severe political strains, and deepen existing divisions among elements in the big-city Democratic coalition: the remaining white middle class, the white working-class ethnic groups and the growing minority poor. To avoid a further weakening of that historic coalition, a national Democratic administration would be con-strained to advance a federal solution to poverty that would override local welfare failures, local class and racial conflicts and local revenue dilemmas. By the internal disruption of local bureaucratic practices, by the furor over public welfare poverty, and by the collapse of current financing arrangements, powerful forces can be generated for major economic reforms at the national level.”


The ultimate aim of this strategy is a new program for direct income distribution. What reason is there to expect that the federal government will enact such legislation in response to a crisis in the welfare system?

We ordinarily think of major legislation as taking form only through established electoral processes We tend to overlook the force of crisis in precipitating legislative reform, partly because we lack a theoretical framework by which to understand the impact of major disruptions.

By crisis, we mean a publicly visible disruption in some institutional sphere. Crisis can occur spontaneously (e.g., riots) or as the intended result of tactics of demonstration and protest which either generate institutional disruption or bring unrecognized disruption to public attention. Public trouble is a political liability, it calls for action by political leaders to stabilize the situation. Because crisis usually creates or exposes conflict, it threatens to produce cleavages in a political consensus which politicians will ordinarily act to avert."

How could they have anticipated their good fortune to have an Alinsky organizer elected president – by huge minority support – as well as a Democratic congress so controlled that even filibuster was ruled out, at least for Obama’s first year. Plus the existing crisis of collapsing financing and economic systems brought on by purposeful “American Dream” legislation which seemed to be actually designed to create collapse, what more could a crisis strategist want?

With every federal move destined to exacerbate the crisis, and grabbing more means through health care “reform” to create a new crisis, Alinsky-Cloward-Pimm-Obama (ACPO) seemed destined for success.

When viewed in light of this type of strategy, a great preponderance of Democratic moves make sense. And even if the great collapse doesn’t come immediately, the momentum toward the wall has been increased considerably.

The ultimate failure of the entire nation now seems to be within the grasp of the ACPO's. Merely by drunkenly spending the nation into a completely unrecompensible debt, the nation's systems of all types will be stressed to the failing point.





According to an analysis at discoverthenetworks.com,

"Cloward and Piven recruited a militant black organizer named George Wiley to lead their new movement. In the summer of 1967, Wiley founded the National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO). His tactics closely followed the recommendations set out in Cloward and Piven's article. His followers invaded welfare offices across the United States -- often violently -- bullying social workers and loudly demanding every penny to which the law "entitled" them. By 1969, NWRO claimed a dues-paying membership of 22,500 families, with 523 chapters across the nation.

Regarding Wiley's tactics, The New York Times commented on September 27, 1970, "There have been sit-ins in legislative chambers, including a United States Senate committee hearing, mass demonstrations of several thousand welfare recipients, school boycotts, picket lines, mounted police, tear gas, arrests - and, on occasion, rock-throwing, smashed glass doors, overturned desks, scattered papers and ripped-out phones."These methods proved effective. "The flooding succeeded beyond Wiley's wildest dreams," writes Sol Stern in the City Journal. "From 1965 to 1974, the number of households on welfare soared from 4.3 million to 10.8 million, despite mostly flush economic times. By the early 1970s, one person was on the welfare rolls in New York City for every two working in the city's private economy."As a direct result of its massive welfare spending, New York City was forced to declare bankruptcy in 1975. The entire state of New York nearly went down with it. The Cloward-Piven strategy had proved its effectiveness."

Within the ACPO strategy, even such things as the constant decline in public education, the erosion of national sovereignty, the ignoring of constitutional limits, the pursuit of victimology as policy, as well as purposeful fiscal irresponsibility all come into focus. The Consequentialist Left is in their heyday; perhaps they have squandered it in Massachussetts, perhaps not. They are on the move in a big way.

Al Gore the Living Lesson

The reason that carbon credits and credit trading will not work is perfectly exemplified in the example of Al Gore. Al personally uses many times the amount of energy of an average American, causing extra CO2 emission. But Al is morally exonerated, because he bought some carbon credits from people who aren’t using them, i.e. the were not emitting their allotment of CO2.

The net result is that Al hasn’t reduced his emissions at all, and still causes more CO2 to enter the atmosphere than average Americans by a very large factor, and the sellers of the carbon credits still emit the same amount of CO2 also.

All that happened is that some money went from Al to the other guys. No change in the CO2 emission occurred.

The same thing will happen with Cap and Trade. Except it will go from frugal Red states, like mine, to profligate Blue states like California. It will cause job loss, higher energy prices (which affects primarily the poor and the elderly), and higher taxes. It will not affect CO2 emissions.

What a Lefist boon it will be to punish Red states and reward Blue states, merely by passing a faux Anthropological Global Warming Law.

Put more water in the soup, there's better times a'comin...

I admit it, I’ve been in a mood for the past week. For one thing, getting the farm ready for winter is a chore, one that gets more annoying every year that I get older, which seems to be escalating. But those tasks are well underway now, and that’s not really the underlying issue. That comes from the sameness of the daily news, the constant downhill “progress” that the country is undergoing, the incessant beratings and cursings from the Left. And there’s David Brooks assuring the world that he is the centroid of the political universe, Republican flavored, and that Rush and Beck and the tea partiers are merely niche, unimportant little people.

Disgusting, predictable, and boring. The one bright spot is a book I am reading by Thomas Sowell. This book proves that there is a time machine somewhere, because Sowell obviously used it to crib my posts of the past two years and then publish all that stuff clear back in 1993. Only he did a bang-up job on the data and evidence.

The book is “The Vision of the Anointed”. Sowell does the legwork that is necessary to completely illuminate the conditions surrounding the crises that have been defined by the Left, and wars declared on them. He says,

“Despite the great variety of issues in a series of crusading movements among the intelligentsia in the 20th century, several key elements have been common to most of them:

1. Assertions of a great danger to the whole society, a danger to which the masses of people are oblivious.

2. An urgent need for action to avert impending catastrophe.

3. A need for government to drastically curtail the dangerous behavior of the many, in response to the prescient conclusions of the few.

4. A disdainful dismissal of arguments to the contrary as either uninformed, irresponsible, or motivated by unworthy purposes."

And there are stages to each of the Leftist “wars”:

1. The Crisis: manufactured and promoted with emotional and moral stridency; as Sowell demonstrates with real data, there is no actual crisis.[1]

2. The Solution: always interventionism and restrictions on the masses.[1]

3. The Results: always takes the situation to its negative perigee.[1]

4. The Response: measurement is based on false initial conditions, so that a positive – though false – result is reported. (Example: instead of discussing the absolute value of unemployed, the administration promotes the “decrease in the rate of unemployment” and declares success: "stepping back from the brink".)[1]

Sowell analyzes the initial conditions, the purported threat, and the actual results of several Leftist “crusades”, including the infamous “war on poverty”, “demanding sex education to solve teen pregnancy”, “criminal rights”, “health care: infant mortality”, “discrimination in education”, “mortgage discrimination”, and so on. And finally, the response of the Left to the luminous failure of each crusade is shown.

I particularly remember both the “war on poverty” and the “homeless crisis”. The war on poverty spent cash like Obama would - volcanically, building nice new high-rises for the poor… who immediately destroyed them. As Sowell points out, both poverty and crime are epiphenomena of an underlying attitude that didn’t change. In fact, the attitude was reinforced into concrete entitlement, an attitude that was not attacked until Reagan.

The homeless panic was fueled by guilt-ridden claims of millions of homeless people freezing or boiling, depending on the season. This caused local news reporters to go out and count the street people and the “jungle dwellers”, and report that the problem must surely be somewhere else. After a year or so, the crisis disappeared on its own due to lack of homeless people, and the discovery that the small number that did exist didn’t want housing. Mostly they wanted to be left alone.

And of course education is always a panic due to the continual sorry test scores, and drop-out rates of ~50% in big cities. This always requires more taxpayer large$$, despite the negative correlation between government interference and education quality. Homeschooling is proven to far out-produce the government schools at a fraction of the cost per student.

I haven’t finished Sowell’s book yet, and still I recommend it based on the first 80 pages. The analysis that he did over a decade and a half ago fits the ObamaCare crisis like a hand-stitched glove.

There. I feel better now.


[1] Italicized comments here are mine, not Sowell's.

The Left is always available for a Potemkin Village tour.

The Congressional Black Caucus took a guided tour of Cuba, hosted by the Castro bros. The CBC members are highly impressed with Castro, no praise too lavish or gushy or ignorant. For some reason they don't report on the political prisoners, religious prisoners - surely the Castros showed them the prisons and graveyards, don't you think?

The Left falls for this stuff every time.

Liberty vs. George Soros

George Soros is a statist case in point. Referred to variously as both Hungarian and American, Soros was born in Hungary, and is ethnically Jewish but religiously an Atheist. Soros has taken every opportunity to fund and support the Left-most candidates and propositions, including in states where he does not live. One specific memory I have is of his massive support for abortion in the elections in Arizona. Has Soros even been to Arizona? No matter, his vast wealth has been.

Soros has not just fought for the destruction of American institutions, he has bet his wealth against them, in his Quantum Investment Fund, a hedge fund. Now Soros grins massively as he exults, “I’m having a very good crisis!”.It is widely suspected that Soros has contributed controlling amounts of funding to American candidates, including massive funding to the record breaking campaign fund of Barack Obama. Obama has always been a fellow traveler of the socialist ideas that Soros revels in.

Soros will have to be dealt with if liberty is to be salvaged. But he is not the only wealthy patron of statism. One would think that more and more of them are being created by the Obama bailouts, as taxpayers take the losses and bankers reap the gains. When there is no financial downside for supporting statism, when there is only financial gain - in fact financial gifts of billions, no questions asked and no transparency - well, why would they continue to support free markets?

If Soros is as smart as he projects himself to be, he probably also owns his share of banks and financial institutions, and has raked off the cash from both ends. And if that is the case, we are funding our own tyranny-to-come.

Going Galt?

I am not a huge fan of Ayn Rand, and I find it impossible to read much fiction, especially huge mounds of it. So I find it very useful for the philosophy contained in Rand's novels to be summarized. There is now considerable talk about "going Galt", due to the disenfranchisement and economic punishment of the productive half of the nation. What this means is summarized on The Hill in a blog posting by U.S. Representative John Campbell, taken from the Washington Independent:

"Creative people (the “Atlases” of the title) are hounded and punished for their labor by an oppressive, socialistic state. In response, they retreat from society to a hidden enclave where they watch civilization’s slow collapse".

A reader of the blog, Jim Woods, clarified it further:

"Regarding the references to Ayn Rand’s novel Atlas Shrugged, Galt’s strike was not political but moral. Consider his oath, “I swear by my life and my love of it that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.” The productive joined Galt’s strike after they understood and rejected the morality of altruism; in striking, the producer denied that other men held a claim upon their life based upon the needs of others.

"Our past election continued the rhetorical Orgy of Sacrifice, which characterized the Bush Administration. Fundamentally, that election was a choice between a candidate that said that individuals should be immediately forced to sacrifice to others (Obama), and another that said that such force should only be used after individuals failed to volunteer themselves for sacrifice (McCain). As elections have consequences, it should be no surprise that our new President and Congress have accelerated the rate of compelled sacrifice as chosen by the electorate.

"During the election, then-Senator Obama made the moral choice clear when he ridiculed the virtue of selfishness, the title of Ayn Rand’s text on ethics. Now, individuals are choosing to act morally, to act in their own rational self-interest, and rejecting the moral code that claims that they should be sacrificed to the needs of others."

Obama and the Left have fully demonstrated their faux "morality" time and again. The most extreme statement possible came yesterday when Obama decried "ideology" and sanctified "science", ordered the NIH to draw up a "new ethic", making clear that his own ideology is relativist scientific socialism (same as Lenin's Scientific Socialism in the 1910's and 1920's; same as the National Socialists in Germany during the 1930', 1940's). The idea of outcome levelling, the denial of human value, and personal self-sacrifice to the needs of the majority are straight out of Comte's humanism, Nietzsche's Will to Power, and the First Humanist Manifesto.

The totalitarian results have already been recorded for the massive first round, with some 250,000,000 people murdered in its pursuit. The Obama round is up next, and if de Tocqueville is right, the complete subjection of mind and body will be accomplished with much less blood, possibly without so much as a squeal. The death of the mind and spirit will be just as complete. The death of morality has already been accomplished with the installation of Relativism in the government school systems.

To go Galt is hardly possible, one might suspect, if there is no enclave to accommodate an escape. Maybe the "Atlases" will just shut down in-place, as are many small businesses right now. The collapse under non-producers, well, chaos might well be expected, as the new Obama tent cities rise up when their expectations are not met, and money is no longer worth anything.

Or maybe the productives will rise up and throw the ideological Scientific Socialists out of power. I'll vote for that. This could happen if Obama's single issue race-voters stay home at the midterm election. It could happen.

De Tocqueville and the Principle of Equality

Alexis de Tocqueville Predicts Obamism

In 1835 and 1840 Alexis de Tocqueville wrote the two books contained in the now single volume called “Democracy in America”. Born in 1805, Tocqueville was only 35 when he wrote the chillingly prescient words that follow, taken from the Signet Classic edition, Heffner ed., 2001.

“It would seem that if despotism were to be established amongst the democratic nations of our days, it might assume different character (*); it would be more extensive and more mild; it would degrade men without tormenting them. I do not question, that, in an age of instruction and equality , sovereigns might more easily succeed in collecting all political power into their own hands, and might interfere more habitually and decidedly with the circle of private interests, than any sovereign of antiquity could ever do. But this same principle of equality which facilitates despotism, tempers its rigor. We have seen how the manners of society become more humane and gentle, in proportion as men become more equal and alike. When no member of the community has much power or much wealth, tyranny is, as it were, without opportunities and a field of action. As all fortunes are scanty, the passions of men are naturally circumscribed, their imagination moderates the sovereign himself, and checks within certain limits the inordinate stretch of his desires.

“Independently of these reasons, drawn from the nature of the state of society itself, I might add many others arising from causes beyond my subject; but I shall keep within the limits I have laid down.

“Democratic governments may become violent, and even cruel, at certain periods of extreme effervescence or of great danger; but these dangers are rare and brief. When I consider the petty passions of our contemporaries [Americans], the mildness of their manners, the extent of their education, the purity of their religion, the gentleness of their morality, their regular and industrious habits, and the restraint which they almost all observe in their vices no less than in their virtues, I have no fear they will meet with tyrants in their rulers, but rather with guardians.

“I think, then, that the species of oppression by which democratic nations are menaced is unlike anything which ever before existed in the world: our contemporaries will find no prototype of it in their memories. I seek in vain for an expression which will accurately convey the whole of the idea I have formed of it; the old words despotism and tyranny are inappropriate: the thing itself is new, and since I cannot name, I must attempt to define it.

“I seek to trace the novel features under which despotism may appear in the world. The first thing that strikes the observation is an innumerable multitude of men, all equal and alike, incessantly endeavoring to procure the petty and paltry pleasures with which they glut their lives. Each of them, living apart, is as a stranger to the fate of all the rest, -his children and his private friends constitute to him the whole of mankind; as for the rest of his fellow-citizens he is close to them, but he sees them not; he touches them, but he feels them not; he exists but in himself and for himself alone; and if his kindred still remain to him, he may be said at any rate to have lost his country.

“Above this race of men stands an immense and tutelary power, which takes upon itself alone to secure their gratifications, and to watch over their fate. That power is absolute, minute, regular, provident, and mild. It would be like the authority of a parent, if, like that authority, its object was to prepare men for manhood; but it seeks, on the contrary to keep them in perpetual childhood: it is well content that the people should rejoice, provided they think of nothing but rejoicing. For their happiness such a government willingly labors, but it chooses to be the sole agent and arbiter of that happiness; it provides for their security, foresees and supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principle concerns, directs their industry, regulates the descent of their property, and subdivides their inheritances: what remains, but to spare them all the care of thinking and all the trouble of living?

“Thus it every day renders the exercise of the free agency of man less useful and less frequent; it circumscribes the will within a narrower range, and gradually robs a man of all the uses of himself. The principle of equality has prepared men for these things; it has predisposed men to endure them, and often times to look on them as benefits.

“After having thus successively taken each member of the community into its powerful grasp, and fashioned him at will, the supreme power then extends its arm over the whole community. It covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent and guided; men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting: such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to be nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.

“I have always thought that servitude of the regular, quiet, and gentle kind which I have just described might be combined more easily than is commonly believed with some of the outward forms of freedom, and that it might even establish itself under the wing of the sovereignty of the people. “

Having firm hindsight of the French Revolution and the horrific outcome of egalite’ over liberte’, Tocqueville accurately described the humanist, socialist totalitarianism that we now must combat here on our home turf. It will take years to overcome the damage done by such governing; it is not even clear that the Americans of today want anything more than to be the “flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd”. The moral relativism that is educated into several generations translates well into the cults of victimhood, dependency and self-centered irresponsibility that is endemic in not just consumer behavior, but now in governmental response to it.

If he were here today, Tocqueville could document the collapse of freedom into the sucking muck of equality, just as he outlined in his principle of equality.

(*)Tocqueville had previously been describing the Roman verison of totalitarian control.

Saul Alinsky, Hillary, and Obama: Undermining the Foundations of Culture

Saul Alinsky was a radical - some say communist - who wrote the book for both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. Clinton wrote a thesis on Alinsky; Obama worked in an Alinsky offshoot organization and taught Alinsky techniques. Alinsky wrote an admiring note about Lucifer in his book, Rules for Radicals, and went on to cover the principles for siezing power from the "haves" by the "have nots". Many of his techniques, such as ridicule, personification of targets, and making a "stink", are used frequently and forcefully by the Left. The following list is a condensation of techniques for siezing power that Alinsky published.

See if you see Hillary and Obama in the following exerpts from Alinsky's book:

Rules of power tactics

From Rules for Radicals by Saul Alinsky

Tactics mean doing what you can with what you have.

Tactics are those conscious deliberate acts by which human beings live with each other and deal with the world around them. In the world of give and take, tactics is the art of how to take and how to give. Here our concern is with the tactic of taking; how the Have-Nots can take power away from the Haves.

For an elementary illustration of tactics, take parts of your face as the point of reference; your eyes, your ears, and your nose. First the eyes; if you have organized a vast, mass-based people's organization, you can parade it visibly before the enemy and openly show your power. Second the ears; if your organization is small in numbers, then...conceal the members in the dark but raise a din and clamor that will make the listener believe that your organization numbers many more than it does. Third, the nose; if your organization is too tiny even for noise, stink up the place.

Always remember the first rule of power tactics: Power is not only what you have but what the enemy thinks you have.

Second: Never go outside the experience of your people. When an action is outside the experience of the people, the result is confusion, fear, and retreat.

Wherever possible go outside of the experience of the enemy. Here you want to cause confusion, fear, and retreat.

The fourth rule is: Make the enemy live up to their own book of rules. You can kill them with this, for they can no more obey their own rules than the Christian church can live up to Christianity.

The fourth rule carries within it the fifth rule: Ridicule is man's most potent weapon. It is almost impossible to counterattack ridicule. Also it infuriates the opposition, who then react to your advantage.

Sixth rule: A good tactic is one that your people enjoy. If your people are not having a ball doing it, there is something very wrong with the tactic.

A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag. Man can sustain militant interest in any issue for only a limited time, after which it becomes a ritualistic commitment.

Keep the pressure on, with different tactics and actions, and utilize all events of the period for your purpose.

The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself.

The major premise for tactics is the development of operations that will maintain a constant pressure upon the opposition.

If you push a negative hard and deep enough it will break through into its counterside; this is based on the principle that every positive has its negative.

The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative. You cannot risk being trapped by the enemy in his suddenly agreeing with your demand and saying "You're right - we don't know what to do about this issue. Now you tell us."

Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.

In conflict tactics there are certain rules that the organizer should always regard as universalities. One is that the opposition must be singled out as the target and "frozen." By this I mean that in a complex, interrelated, urban society, it becomes increasingly difficult to single out who is to blame for any particular evil. There is a constant, and somewhat legitimate, passing of the buck. The target is always trying to shift responsibility to get out of being the target.

One of the criteria in picking your target is the target's vulnerability - where do you have the power to start? Furthermore, the target can always say, "Why do you center on me when there are others to blame as well?" When you "freeze the target," you disregard these arguments and, for the moment, all others to blame.

Then, as you zero in and freeze your target and carry out your attack, all of the "others" come out of the woodwork very soon. They become visible by their support of the target.

The other important point in the choosing of a target is that it must be a personification, not something general and abstract such as a community's segregated practices or a major corporation or City Hall. It is not possible to develop the necessary hostility against, say, City Hall, which after all is a concrete, physical, inanimate structure, or against a corporation, which has no soul or identity, or a public school administration, which again is an inanimate system.

Do Atheists have a public image problem? If so they don't seem to care a whole lot judging from the perpetual stream of invectives exploding from Atheist websites.

Matthew Nisbet of framing science is a professor of communication. He weighs in on the subject of Atheists who do Atheism harm in the public eye:

But we also have a lot of lousy self-proclaimed spokespeople who do damage to our public image. They're usually angry, grumpy, uncharismatic male loners with a passion for attacking and ridiculing religious believers. Any fellow atheist who disagrees with their Don Imus rhetoric, they label as appeasers.

These "new atheists" are the dark under belly of atheism. In books, blogs, and public statements, they sell us ideological porn, sophomoric rants that feed our dark sides and reinforce our own unfair stereotypes about the "other," i.e. the religious.

Yet all of this does far more harm than good. The addictive nature of their rhetoric radicalizes us and leads us to an ever more closed off conversation about how we are superior and everyone else is delusional.

As he clearly predicts, he is attacked on Pharyngula where they declared themselves victims and Nisbet as abetting the vicious Christians. Nisbet's own blog is loaded with commenters declaring "aggression" if not war on religion in general and Catholics specifically. If there is any doubt as to the degree of hatred felt by these Atheists, reading these comments should cure it.

There is no movement away from the naked hatred and in fact many are glad to have someone who is pushing it. The victim mentality is deep set, and that is the focus of much of the rhetoric pumped out of these sites - how Christians abuse Atheists.

During my 40 years of Atheism, I never once observed an attack on an Atheist by a Christian or anyone else. Nor did I hear of one. I suspect that if I had gotten into the face of some Christians with my beliefs - as Atheists these days do - that I might have met some resistance. I could probably have provoked some harsh words. Especially if I went out of my way to denigrate them, steal their stuff and mess with it. But it never occurred to me to do so. Now it is de rigeur, think nothing of it, it's our right, get over it.

Now it is the Atheist's "right" to provoke without consequence, or so he thinks. And that philosophy melds perfectly with the elitist arrogation of the "one true path" that Atheists preach, and preach loudly and from the public domain that they have usurped for their own religious purposes. It's no wonder that they feel under attack. It's a substantial backlash that they are feeling.

PZ Watch 8.04.08

Over on Atheism is Dead (AiD), mariano has posted excerpts from an interview with PZ Meyers, celebrity Atheist blogger. There are many telling points to observe, but the following exchange pretty well sums up the Atheist inverted thought process:

DJ: “But don’t parents have a right to teach their children what they believe to be true without a professor undermining certain deeply held beliefs?”

PZ: “Why should they have that right? I mean, we’ve got a social contract right? And what we are trying to do is raise lots and lots of people who are going to be functioning members of our society. And it’s in, in my personal self-interest that the children of evangelical Christians grow up to be productive members of society. Now, it’s not my interest to say they have to abandon their faith or anything like that. But if their faith is such that it’s obstructing their ability to contribute to science and technology, engineering and all these good things in our society then yeah, we have an interest in saying, ‘No, you shouldn’t be doing that.’”

Note what is not said here. There is no reference to the need for the literacy of students in history, civics, philosophy, critical thinking, literature, logic, or any of the facets of education that would bring about a fully functional citizen.

Here is what is said, and it is honestly blatant. Science, technology, engineering each trump a parent's RIGHT to teach their own children. The Atheist's right to control the education of the nation is the only right. The elitism is dripping from the jowls of the annointed. They, the elite, know better than anyone else in all things, and all things are science.

Earlier in the interview, PZ conflates science and Atheism. For him there is no difference. He has not given the slightest thought to the logical ramifications of Materialism, nor will he. He is riding high on the crest of waves that he himself creates. The bigger the wave, the higher is PZ's celebrity. PZ is not likely, therefore, to suddenly adopt tolerance. Tolerance would go directly against his wave making and personal gratification. So PZ and intolerance go hand in hand.

For those arguing that Atheism is not totalitarian, they must now either refute or ignore what PZ - and Dawkins in the same vein - have declared concerning their own rights to control the lives of others. It will be hard to refute; these two have made clear their self-elitism and presumed extraordinary rights conveyed thereby. They are consummate totalitarians.

Worshipping the Laws

The elements of religion are co-opted and forged into a new religion of material worship by the mullahs of science: this is the message of Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg, a physicist at the University of Texas (PhD Physics), in an article by Karl Gibberson (PhD, physics) for salon.com. Having not just a mystical creation story and a new moral ethic of ecology, the new mullahs of Materialism decree that all truth is material, that it can be known, and that science is the one true path to enlightenment. The mullahs of science are the descendants and heirs of the Enlightenment, the prophets of Modernism, the evangelists of Atheism.

In fact it is the orderly laws of the universe that these religious evangelists worship. Never mind that those laws must have a source, a cause. To the new religion it is the laws of the universe alone that are truth and ethics and enlightenment combined into a stew worthy of religious awe and the zeal of worship. The reverence-filled stories of creation "out of nothing" are as fanciful and fantastic as those of any traditional religion, and just as incapable of proof. In fact, says Gibberson, these reflect the "mythopoeic requirements" of religious belief as delineated by E.O.Wilson: they are stories, created for worshipping.

But the zeal extends beyond just worship. It encompasses a desire, deeply felt, desperate even, for a world made over in their own image. And this makes the mullahs aggressive beyond just evangelism. It launches them into the raging river of intolerance, leading to tyranny. Weinberg rightly refers to PZ Meyers as a sort of inquisitor who seeks out and martyrs infidels (to the religion of science) on his website. In fact, in terms of rhetoric of intolerance it would be difficult to discern Meyers from any other religious-hatred monger. If the religion of science is based on the ethical standards of a Meyers, few will sign up voluntarily.

Gibberson concludes:

"I am incredibly impressed with the achievements of science. But I don't think science is omniscient and I am not convinced that science will ever know everything. I am not convinced that science is even capable of knowing everything. That we can know as much as we do seems rather miraculous, in fact. Is it so dangerous to believe that there is a bit more to the world than meets the scientific eye, that behind the blackboard filled with equations there is a rational, creative and even caring mind breathing fire into those equations? "

Worshipping the laws and ignoring the source for those laws is irrational. It is based on an agenda, that of self-anointment to an elite priesthood. But it is only a partial reality that is being worshipped. Their glass is more than half empty.

George Carlin Rots

The blogosphere is agush with lamentation over the death of George Carlin this past Sunday. Carlin is glowingly called a comedian, although I never managed a chuckle at his evangelical left o' left wryness. He wasn't even a commentator, he was merely an arrested 9 year old still fascinated with tweaking mom and pop with bad words concerning body parts and defecation. This sort of juvenile rebelliousness is wearisome to those who have grown up and have had juveniles of their own to guide to maturity. But apparently Carlin developed quite a following, and they are in full wail.

Carlin is now in the vast nothingness that awaits Atheists. His fans and followers know that there is nothing left of him but images, while the real Carlin rots back into the forms of primary matter from whence he came. Nothing left. Nothing at all. They had better hope.

Why would a disbeliever strive to spread disbelief? If there is no diety, then why not just go your way without it, yes? Undoubtedly many Atheists do. But those who don't, give the definite impression that they are focused on spreading a hatred of that in which they don't believe. They are evangelical in their attempt to make the entire world just like them, to justify their rejectionism by recruiting more rejectionists.

Carlin was one of those. But now he rots into nothingness. May he rot in peace.

Addendum:
Bulletin: Even the pharyngulator thinks that Carlin wasn't all that funny.

Book Review: The Age of American Unreason; Jacoby

The Age of American Unreason; Susan Jacoby, 2008, Pantheon Books; 318 pages.

Jacoby is disgusted. On every page, really disgusted. She laments the ignorance and low brow attitudes of America. But more than that she laments the entire spectrum of American culture. And more than that she laments the causes for the degradation of, well, just everything.

If you don’t realize by the second page that she is an atheist, well, then she is talking about you. Actually she is talking about all of us Americans, with only a few exceptions. We all are the victims of “dumbing down”. Jacoby sets out to show how it happened.

In the first chapter, Jacoby condemns first the effects of the media – especially TV, and second, the rise of “fundamentalist religion”. These are the two sources of anti-intellectualism. It is often not clear whether she is fighting against the anti-intellectualists, or trying to support a return to Reason (capital R) of her own unstated definition. She never gets around to defining Reason, or logic, or rational thinking. It slowly becomes clear that Jacoby thinks that philosophical materialism is Reason. Anyone who is not for embryonic stem cell research is anti-intellectual in her view. Few outside herself know what the scientific method is; if they did they would be materialists like she is. She is for Darwinist evolution and against social Darwinism. For Jacoby, these are the things of intellectualism and Reason. But again, she never defines intellectualism or Reason, so we must take examples to show us.

Jacoby writes in angry sound (or word) bites, which leave the reader suspicious of the absent, full background, not covered, and the conclusions that are derived. In fairness, she attempts (in broad strokes) too much ground to actually fit into the space of one book. In so doing, she ignores certain influences that are actually pertinent, such as the influence of John Dewey (and through Dewey: Darwin) on the dumbing-down process.

In other cases she makes deductions that are patently false, such as assuming that all “fundamentalists” are in pursuit of no education outside the Bible, and are massively ignorant and happy that way. The facts are that home-schooled children do far better than government schooled children, including in math and science. Moreover they watch less TV. And this occurs frequently in “fundamentalist” homes that refuse to allow their children to be inadequately educated by the state. The fundamentalist attack is unnecessary and incorrect. One suspects that fundamentalists just hack Jacoby off.

Oddly it is the state-provided education that Jacoby abhors, and rightly so. In recent news releases it is shown that states have massively under-reported the failure to graduate 9th grade students. Real drop out rates are obscene, with only 60% to 70% of 9th graders making it to graduation. Those who do graduate typically don’t know much beyond taking the test.

Jacoby attacks the far left and the far right alike, leaving one to wonder who is left, since the middle ground is ignorant beyond repair. In fact her final conclusion is a statement of her disgust, now degraded into despair. After suggesting that intellectuals, parents, teachers and politicians step up to the plate, she concedes the following:

“None of these suggestions addresses the core problem created by the media – the pacifiers of the mind that permeate our homes, schools and politics. There is little evidence to indicate that Americans have either the desire or the will to lessen their dependency on the easy satisfactions held out by the video and digital world…”

“If there is to be an alternative to the culture of distraction, it can only be created one family at a time, by parents and citizens determined to preserve a saving remnant of those who prize memory and true learning above all else. Adult self-control, not digital parental controls, is the chief requirement for the transmission of individual and historical memory.”

Incredibly Jacoby takes the same attitude as home-schoolers, without acknowledging them in any way whatsoever.

From my perspective, Jacoby’s book amounts to a prolonged and detailed rant followed by little substance. The are few positive portraits; among them are those of Bill Moyers, from whom an attack on religion is quoted, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. from whom an anti-war lament is quoted, and Diane Ravitch who along with Schlesinger wrote a piece promoting history teaching. Jacoby, herself reflected in the words of her book, comes across as widely read, thoroughly disgusted, and somewhat depressed. Probably because she has no real answers.

Moreover she has totally ignored other dumbing-down assessments from books such as the massively documented “the deliberate dumbing down of America” by Iserbyt; “the Freefall of the American University”, by Black; and “Brainwashed”, by Shapiro. According to these, especially Iserbyt, there is far more to the issue than Jacoby has discovered.

All in all, not a pleasant read, not a satisfactory assessment, and without a satisfactory remedy.

Chronic Inversion in Atheists

Some review:

Question:
What does it take to become a philosopher?

Answer:
a)Either deny God, or become a theologist instead.
b)Deny all prior philosophies.
c)Write a book, preferable extolling paganism in some new dynamic, because that sells books and establishes careers.

Philosophers are compelled - absolutely - by the very nature of their calling to be Atheists, and preferably materialists. So the question of free agency is settled before it is even asked: free agency is an illusion. Not only that but free will is an illusion and consciousness is an illusion.

Now if you are conscious you might inquire why this must be so. It is simple. Atheism and materialism both demand it. If you are still conscious, you might inquire why the conclusion demands the forced congruence of the premises? After all, Atheists claim that their chosen worldview is based on rational thought.

So where is the empirical, repeatable, falsifiable material evidence of the lack of consciousness? Can such a thing be proved if there are no conscious beings about to prove it?

This is the universe of the Atheist, one where logic is inverted; one where rationalization is interpreted as rational. To be specific, if free will, or free agency, or consciousness are admitted to exist, then the desired conclusion, which is Atheism, falters and fails. So premises are denied, despite their obvious validity seen by any rational investigator, in order to preserve the presupposed conclusion. This is classical rationalization, an irrational process.

Inversion comes so naturally to Atheists that they come to believe that the inverted state of logic is actually the true state. Inversion happens at all levels of their thought. It has to, in order for the conclusion to maintained. Inversion is why human life has no value to an Atheist (Singer, Sanger, O'Hair, the encyclopaedists, every totalitarian murderer of the 20th century, the abortionists, the embryonic stem cell traffickers, ad nauseum). Inversion, in fact, is at the bottom of humanism, where the ultimate "good" is the happiness of the human masses, at the expense of the individual.

Inversion caused Nietzsche to declare that without evil, good would be meaningless, therefore, evil is more important (since good depends on it), even better than good because it is stronger and more robust. He maintained his inversion through his anti-rationalism, and became chronically irrational for the last eleven years of his life.

So if you wish to decline to deny your gift of consciousness, or free will, or if you wish to act as an agent in your own behalf and that of others, then you are behaving, well, out of sync with the elitists, who do deny those things.

But what is the truth value of any position taken by an entity that has no agency, no freedom to choose a direction, or words describing that direction and the reason for its selection; why should any truth value be assigned to an entity that is not conscious? Much less by an entity that is not conscious?

Only in the land of inversion could that happen. Consequently, only the previously inverted are likely to agree that they are not conscious, not a free agent, and have no freedom to will a meaningful sentence into being. But they will all agree that evolution is settled science, confirmed by vast amounts of incontrovertable data, and the guiding philosophy for all science and truth, thus making one a fulfilled scientist.

Are they skeptics? They have no faculties for skepticism; they have denied their very humanity. Do they warrant attention? Only because they are dangerous to those who have not yet lost their ablity for rational thought, freedom of intellectual decisions, desire for intellectual integrity, and who still cherish their gift of consciousness.

Perhaps the chronically inverted cannot be reached through simple logic. But maybe those who have not yet committed to inversion can be.