Rebane's Ruminations

The Liberal Mind – Yes Virginia, we really are different (updated 10apr12)

George Rebane

The curious and inexplicable course of our polarized public discourse has been examined for some time in these pages, even to the extent that ‘The Liberal Mind’ is an RR category of collected posts on this issue.  To a reasonable person on the so-called Right, the reasoning processes of the so-called Left are an enduring puzzle, even though the outcomes of such processes are relatively easy to predict.  I don’t know whether people of the Left have similar problems understanding our reasoning processes, but I presume that they do.

These questions are neither idle nor unimportant as indicated by the increasing level of academic research devoted to the area.  A landmark study done at University College London, reported here, discovered measurable differences in the active brain areas of conservatives and liberals when they considered socio-political issues informed by their separate ideologies.  This research indicated that with appropriate brain imaging equipment in place, it is possible to tell from the resulting images whether the subject studied is a self-professed liberal or conservative.

Now Dr Jonathan Haidt, professor of psychology at the University of Virginia, has documented his examination of how liberals and conservatives differ in The Righteous Mind (two reports on it here and here).  The results from Haidt and his research team are both revealing and illuminating.  Even the noted progressive NYT columnist Nicholas Kristof reports that these results “help demystify the right”.

Dr Haidt’s research indicates that Americans speak of social values in “six languages” (aka six dimensions).  Kristof states that “Conservatives speak all six, but liberals are fluent in only three. And some (me included) mostly use just one, care for victims.”  The liberals’ three languages of social discourse are in a manifold whose three dimensions are – caring for the weak, fairness, and liberty.  The conservatives share these three, with a somewhat different view of fairness and liberty, and add to their manifold of thinking/expression three more – loyalty, respect for authority, and sanctity.  These three are also tagged as “binding values” that bind people together into larger groups.

Why we rage and what we can never condone

George Rebane

Here's a detail that has escaped me about the whole can of worms about the millions of illegal aliens in our country and the thousands more arriving every month.  The US Code dating back to 1940 required all aliens in the US to present proper identification giving evidence of their status when required by government authorities including law enforcement officials.  Arizona has passed a state law requiring exactly that to help them combat their illegal alien problem (e.g. one out of three prisoners incarcerated by Arizona are foreign - Mexican - nationals).  Unprecedented in American history, today we have our first post-American president and his Attorney General suing Arizona for enforcing US law that the federal government explicitly refuses to enforce across the land.  This is the reprehensible betrayal by government is in sum and substance of the Great Divide debate.

The Great Divide – 29feb12 update on work in process (updated 4mar12)

George Rebane

This is a weblog entry to update our ‘progress’ toward a fundamental transformation of America.  As has been discussed, we are past the tipping point with two alternative destinations that will redefine the social, economic, and political landscape of the North American landmass.  The first is the United Socialist States of America (USSA) that seeks a more draconian version of what has not worked in Europe.  The second is the Great Divide, which will fragment the continent into regions containing people sharing a more common culture and socio-political worldview.

I suspect that the GD will require mass migrations (think of the formation of Pakistan in 1947) and may end up with the territory divided into a confederation of mostly autonomous mega-states sharing perhaps a ‘free trade’ zone.  But most certainly these mega-states will not share economic systems, language, or political philosophies in the sense of the Bastiat Triangle (q.v.).

2012 is an election of great foreboding and diminishing hope for conservative Americans.  That the tipping point has been passed – the lazy, the lame, and the lightly learned populate way more than 50% of the electorate in a widening 'democracy' – will make it very likely that President Obama will serve a second term with, perhaps, an even more compliant Congress like the one he had during his first two years in office.

As our first post-American President, Barack Obama sees his current job as a stepping stone to higher office.  Ascribing him as a secular socialist is the ‘model’ that continues to support the most reliable predictions about the social and economic policies that he seeks to impose on us.  By any measure, he is the most divisive president that the country has had since Abe Lincoln, and from the conservetarian vantage, the worst one since Lyndon Johnson.

Occupy vs TeaParty - A comparative summary

George Rebane

The following table arrived from a correspondent and RR reader.  We note the similarities in the two movements.  Edifying.

Obama now ‘The Divider’

George Rebane

The Great Divide (and search RR) has been a subject of interest and debate among readers.  Our friends from the Left honor me with accusations of being a lone rogue in shining a light on the path that appears to be tearing the country apart.  Unfortunately as thinkers and commentators across the country have pointed out, the notion of such a division, the Great Divide, is an enterprise shared by people of many political and ideological colorations.

A recent piece on this is from Peggy Noonan – ‘The Divider vs the Thinker’ – that appeared in the 29oct11 WSJ.  In it she compares and contrasts President Barack Obama’s current efforts with those of Representative Paul Ryan.  What caught my eye in her analysis was the similarity of concepts that she highlights with those in RR.  Her overarching introduction immediately gets to the heart of the matter –

People are increasingly fearing the divisions within, even the potential coming apart of, our country. Rich/poor, black/white, young/old, red/blue: The things that divide us are not new, yet there's a sense now that the glue that held us together for more than two centuries has thinned and cracked with age. That it was allowed to thin and crack, that the modern era wore it out.

The glue of which she speaks was the “shared knowledge” of our past, especially that there was something “providential” about our beginnings.   Overwhelmingly, we had “a general understanding that we were something new in history, a nation founded on ideals and aspirations — liberty, equality — and not mere grunting tribal wants. We were from Europe but would not be European: No formal class structure here, no limits, from the time you touched ground all roads would lead forward. You would be treated not as your father was but as you deserved.”

From whatever future awaits us, she opines that we will look back at this as the “Great Coming Apart” during which we suffered stresses and strains where “half the country isn’t speaking to the other half”, quoting a moderate Democrat.

We Are the Real Terrorists

George Rebane

Truthout.org has published a major article ‘Breivik's Fundamentalist War on Politics, and Ours’ which is a progressive manifesto, and itself a declaration of war on conservatives and their politics.  Author Henry Giroux (one of truthout’s “news analysts”) forges every connection imaginable between Breivik, the Norwegian mass murderer, and anybody to the right of Hugo Chavez.

There is no doubt in the minds of truthout.org subscribers (this 501c3 solicits funds every month) that the greatest danger to America comes from “fundamentalists”, which is the labeled can into which all people like me (you?) are thrown.  Coming from leftwing sources like the White House, and now these people, the "terrorist" label is starting to sound like a drumbeat.

Missing from the fundamentalist toolbox is the necessity for self-reflection, thinking critically about the inevitable limitations of one's arguments, or being morally accountable to the social costs of harboring racist ideologies and pushing policies that serve to deepen racist exclusions, mobilize fear, and legitimate a growing government apparatus of punishment and imprisonment.  What connects the moral bankruptcy of right-wing Republicans who embrace violent imagery in order to mobilize their followers with the mindset of extremists like Breivik is that they share a deep romanticization of violence that is valorized by old and new fundamentalisms, whose endpoint is a death-dealing blow to the welfare state, young people, immigrants, Muslims, and others deemed dangerous and, so, "disposable."

After reading Giroux’s piece, a simple perusal of RR comment streams quickly reveals that our leftwing compatriots here are exactly of a piece with the worldview and philosophy of this leftist ideologue.  The opinions expressed on truthout.org are not to be dismissed, since their stable of contributing authors includes many (most?) of America's progressive luminaries.  This is their home stomping ground, and their readers are collectivist intellects who can master the sometimes thick porridge that the site pours out.

A remarkable telltale of their firm position on the political spectrum is the fairly frequent pace of publications that take even the Chief Community Organizer to task – maybe he’s not that bad after all.  So if you do happen to be a little to the right of Hugo, pour yourself a stiff one, send the young’uns out of the room, and wade in.

Ruminations - 15jun2012

The experiment that said “the bigger the state, the more just the society” clearly failed. There is no point pretending that it didn’t. - Tony Blair

George Rebane

- It's the Sun, stupid!
- Dems put bad stuff on hold til 2012
- Mexican right of return

Russ Steele at NC Media Watch reports here the latest real news on climate change – ‘it’s the sun, stupid.’  The AGW true believers are having to run around in ever tightening circles as they try to paper over every piece of new data that belies their political theory of manmade global disaster.  Every day it is more apparent that the only misery man is yet able to afflict on fellow man is through bad politics.  It was ever thus.

The perversion of the progressives is nowhere more visible than in the hiatus that the Obama administration is taking from its own agenda.  All those social and stimulus programs that were designed and passed by the Democrats to get the country back on its economic track have proven to do exactly the opposite.  And the social(ist) engineers in Washington know it in spades.  With the election coming up and the economy on its butt (second cheek is hitting the ground now), these hypocritical leftwingers are pulling back the enforcement of literally every piece of damaging legislation they have passed.  The dirtbags aren’t repealing any of it, only putting it on hold until after 2012 (details here).

That there is no public outcry about any of this will hopefully again explain my ongoing use of Bryan Kaplan’s ‘sheeple’ for a large fraction of America’s electorate.  In his Myth of the Rational Voter – Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies Kaplan presented ample evidence of how the democratic process goes awry the more direct democracy we instill at the cost of removing the republican safeguards bequeathed by our Founders.  (See ‘How Elections Really Work’)

As these pages have noted for the last several years, the Great Divide (here and here) is not just an apprehension of conservatives who view as hopeless the reunion with progressives.  A major force promoting the GD is the latino Reconquista movement (here and search RR with ‘Reconquista’).  The lamestream media has successfully subverted any coverage of the progress of Reconquista.  Now it has advanced to where it is openly taught in American public schools.  As reported in the 20jun11 National Review -

“Mexican-American Studies” in Tucson schools now include “Rodolfo Acuna’s Occupied America, which proposes that the US southwest become a “Chicano nation” and quotes without disapproval Hispanic activist Jose Angel Guiterrez saying that “we have to eliminate the gringo, and what I mean by that is if the worst comes to the worst, we have got to kill him.”

Shhhh, the sheeple are sleeping.

May Day in LA

George Rebane

The 2011 May Day celebrations in Los Angeles were not covered as thoroughly by the lamestream as one might wish.  Our progressive cadres continue to lay a thick smokescreen on the notion that today's labor movement, led by public service unions, have again picked up the theme of a new communist revolution.  Moreover, they want you to know it and join them.  Please file this in your Great Divide folder.  (Click to enlarge image.)

 

An Eerie Feeling re the Great Divide

George Rebane

Is the Great Divide already under way?  RR readers are familiar with the Great Divide discussion in these pages (RR search ‘great divide’).  The basis for the idea of a structural change in these United States is an old one, one that is provided for by our Constitution, and one that was in lively national discussion even before The War for Southern Independence (aka The Civil War).  Today the debate has again become compelling due to the seemingly irreconcilable polarization between the factions of the Left and those of the Right.

One ‘solution’, to the indisputable fact that both sides live in their own universe, is a peaceful separation of the two cohorts into a confederated assembly of the current states.  One that would enable open practice of limited government, Founders’ constitutionality, fiscal prudence, and free markets.  The other would continue the current collectivist path to socialism and whatever may follow that folly.  The actual division of territories is among the several problems that need a good-faith dialogue to solve peaceably.

Another and perhaps more serious problem is the asymmetry with which both sides view the Great Divide.  The people on the Right see themselves in a growing bondage of restraints, constraints, unlimited taxation, and loss of liberties.  Their general response is ‘let us go our own way.’  The Left’s general response is ‘oh no you don’t!’, the direct implication being that they would then very quickly run out of OPM, the fuel that always powers progressivism.

But for completeness, I have to add that there are a few progressives who firmly believe that their social order does not need money from other people; they can generate the necessary wealth themselves.  In fact, some of them even claim that it is the Left that is generating the country’s wealth and dragging along the worthless Right.  (Such progressives should be complemented for their keen insight, and the conversation taken to the next stage of how the Great Divide can remove from them the burden of having to carry the Right.)

A useful path toward the Great Divide is the re-establishment of states’ rights.  Removing such constitutional rights from the states has been a proto-progressive passion at least from the time of Lincoln.  Many recognize that the expansion of the Interstate Commerce Act (1887) and central banking (Federal Reserve 1913) have been the prime tools for reducing states to administrative districts of a strong federal government.

Today a last bastion of states’ rights is how they divide themselves into ‘right to work’ and ‘forced union’ states.  For all intents and purposes this already is a step toward the Great Divide, with the proviso that, if properly handled, such a divide may not even be necessary.  But here’s the rub.  The Left is lying to all ignorant enough to believe them that not forcing workers to join unions is actually denying workers their rights.  This twisted logic is one of the insane pillars upon which collectivism proudly stands.

Hardwiring the Right and Left

George Rebane

In my technology newsletters I recently encountered some buzz about clinical evidence differentiating the brainbones of liberals and conservatives – in short, you may be one or the other because that’s the way you’re wired up.  There has been a flurry of articles posted on the original research done on this thesis at the University College London – here is an example report, ‘Liberal vs. Conservative: Does the Difference Lie in the Brain?'

Please note that the research is early stage, the sample size is small, and what characteristic attributes it identifies in the opposing ideologues is a reach.  For example, “liberals tend to be better at managing conflicting information, while conservatives are thought to be better at recognizing threats, …”.  This has been enthusiastically translated by some light thinking progressives to mean that ‘liberals can better handle uncertainty, and conservatives are driven by fear’.  Sweet.