They sure ain’t like us (updated 5may16)

George Rebane

A continuing narrative on these pages has been the grossly asymmetric way that the Right (conservatives, libertarians) and Left (socialists, liberals) treat each other’s expression of ideas and beliefs in the public fora.  A corollary to this narrative is how narrow and broad are the spectra of news sources and commentaries that each side consumes.  This morning’s papers and news sites are chuck full of examples.

Comparing those of collectivist vs conservetarian bent, I ask -

• What’s the relative frequency of the Left vs Right assembling, organizing, and transporting a legion of hoodlums and rioters to block Right vs Left gatherings – political gatherings (e.g. here and here), conventions, economic conferences, religious meetings, … ?  (Here the progressive reader should do his best in the attempt to distinguish between a peaceful demonstration and a disruption requiring the presence of armed police to keep the peace).
• Which political cohort has subverted our educational system to become the outlet for disseminating their ideology and enforcing ‘correct thinking’ about every social issue of significance?
• Which political cohort has commandeered the humanities in the nation’s institutions of higher learning, and in the process created a generation of intellectually vapid students who must be actively and selectively shielded from politically incorrect, insensitive, and sometimes outrageous ideas and modes of thought?
• The congressional members of which party have politicized science and are now actively attacking corporations, think tanks, and scientific agencies to criminalize public skepticism of the causes and portents of global warming?
• People of which political philosophy are actively promoting policies and laws that continually diminish the public’s use of public lands and public waters.
• Which political extreme takes as ground truth that if an individual is only against government funding of some activity, then that is indisputable evidence that they are actively trying to proscribe or censor that activity per se.
• People of which political philosophy are actively promoting objectives and "sustainable development" policies which are stated (here) in the UN’s Agenda 21 (while vehemently denying that they are doing any such thing).

This list could go on and on.  But let me end with a little liberal bagatelle from the 30apr16 Union that published a letter from Ms Heidi Hall (here), liberal candidate for Nevada County’s District 1 Supervisor.  In there she castigated Mr Stan Meckler for pointing out that the “connections” she originally claimed “between Americans for Good Government and the Tea Party” were fallacious and even pernicious.  By her one-sided liberal logic – a version that supports its own brand of ‘reasoning’ in our society – if a certain party or parties who belong to organization A and then go on to found organization B, then it is OrgA that founded OrgB and are necessarily related in some material (i.e. “cynical and secretive”) way.  I won’t go into the sources from which she drew her information; expanding that thread here would add some out-of-scope humor.

But here’s the asymmetry, this kind of connections only work for people on the Right.  One must never claim that, say, just because George Soros is a Democrat, therefore his founding or funding of a number of leftwing organizations – e.g. Open Society Institute - means that the Democrat Party founded those organizations or has a material relationship with them.  And the same can never be said of the Democrat Party’s relationship with the Clinton Foundation just because the Billarys and other executives of the foundation are high-level Democrats.

So coming full circle – they ain’t like us.

[1may16 update]  This kind of post has usually elicited a more in-depth discussion of the nuances of ideological orientation – where we fit in the multifarious universe of socio-political beliefs and under what labels do we wish to be known.  And I’m happy to say that in that the above scribblings continue to serve.

In such discussions I cannot claim to stand on an alabaster pedestal of unvarnished truth, but only attempt to explain in a coherent and cogent way how the ideological landscape has appeared and made sense to me over a span of some six decades.  Some readers may be aware that I have a penchant for the operational/pragmatic scheme of things that successfully answers questions like ‘how can I tell if (insert proposition) is true or works or exists or …?’  For that reason I have made available my credo (q.v.), my teachers, my stance on issues, and what I have chosen to call myself.

Even though any real palette of political colors is much more complex than the widely and long accepted Left/Right spectrum, in most of the daily round we have to live with the established lexicon.  Unfortunately, in our effort to distinguish ourselves elevator speeches don’t permit many details, especially of the nuanced kind.  Fortunately in these pages we can go a bit, but still not much, beyond elevator communications.

An issue of interest here is how to understand and where to put people self-described as libertarians.  In the common lexicon of the day, libertarians are located to the right of center in the one-dimensional R/L spectrum (see graphic here).  But some time ago David Nolan and others sought make things more explicit and came up with various graphical representations of more complex political spectra.  The most popular and enduring is the Nolan Chart which has been much discussed in these pages over the years (e.g. here and here).  For images of such representations google ‘Nolan Chart’ and look at the images.

But the main conclusion here is that modern liberals and conservatives are quite a bit different than the people who claimed those labels in the 19th century – especially in its early part.  Conservatives hewed to various forms of autocracy represented by monarchical and empire forms of governance which included more or less strict behavioral guidelines usually enforced with the co-operation of the state’s religion.  Economies were strictly corporatist in which the state took its cut and in turn limited competition from entrepreneurial newcomers.

The (classical) liberals of that century were those who sought to follow the teachings of Enlightenment thinkers such as Bacon, Descartes, and Newton, and to compromise the contentions of such social philosophers as Locke and Hume (compare here) into a practical picture of man under beneficial governance – none more successfully than our Founders.  The American experience was studied, reported, and summarized by men like de Tocqueville and Bastiat, the latter’s distillation in The Law (q.v.) ranks high in the scriptural basis for today’s libertarians and conservatives.

In the latter 19th century the wing of post-monarchial liberals tended to a progressive amalgam of Hobbesian and Marxist worldviews and ultimately adopted the progressive label but also co-opted ‘liberal’ in the public mind.  Those who sought to retain (conserve) the teachings of the earlier classical liberals and differentiate themselves from the new breed of collectivists satisfied themselves with the ‘conservative’ label especially as they incorporated Anglo-Saxon cultural memes and the Christian religions into their expanded beliefs.

But highlighting a weakness of the Nolan chart, modern conservatives are not ‘low’ on personal freedoms, and hew more to what Bastiat taught and described in his nature of the individual living under beneficent governance.  So where old-time conservatives (e.g. Tories) wanted to, say, conserve the trappings of monarchy, the modern American conservative wants to conserve the originalism of the Constitution and the economic dynamism, entrepreneurialism, and individualism that was practiced in the 19th century.

Into all this in America arose a potpourri of political philosophies that grudgingly adopted the label of libertarian.  Those so moved and motivated were a disorganized lot.  Scholars studying the matter have concluded –

What it means to be a "libertarian" in a political sense is a contentious issue, especially among libertarians themselves. There is no single theory that can be safely identified as the libertarian theory, and probably no single principle or set of principles on which all libertarians can agree. Nevertheless, there is a certain family resemblance among libertarian theories that can serve as a framework for analysis.  (more here)

Today a leading source of libertarian light and cohesion is the Cato Institute which seeks to unify the various libertarian threads.  One of its scholars David Boaz has recently revised/written what may be considered a libertarian manifesto in his The Libertarian Mind (2015).  A very readable history of libertarianism can be accessed here.  (Full disclosure – I am a longtime supporter and member of the Cato Institute.)

Today most, but not all, the ideologically formed would assign libertarians to the Right in the simple everyday political spectrum.  Only in more detailed analyses do we separate libertarians from conservatives, and then not always successfully.  As mentioned above, the Nolan chart’s simplistic format low scores on personal freedoms are attributed to conservatives, a tenet which no modern conservative would accept.

Modern conservatives also eschew the religious restrictions of their forebears, and today promote free public expression of all religions – at least of all religions that do not promote the destruction of America as an obstacle to God’s plan for mankind.

Attempting to reconcile what conservatives and libertarians claimed as their own, I found a middle ground that I labeled conservetarian – being basically a libertarian with a conservative foreign policy outlook.  I could not go with my libertarian brethren who seem to promote the idea of a defenseless yet commercially successful and wealthy state surviving within a community of nations whose major hegemons have demonstrated their intent to violate the Westphalian convention (q.v.) at every opportunity.  Hence I am a conservetarian who promotes a kick-ass foreign policy rather than one of a kicked-ass kind.

Since my own declaration, conservetarianism has risen of its own accord within a community of other like-minded ideologues.  We now even claim a manifesto in Charles Cooke’s The Conservatarian Manifesto: Libertarians, Conservatives, and the Fight for the Right’s Future (2015), note the spelling variance.  Such an essay was required given that both the modern conservatives and liberals had equivalent documents they could cite.  For the liberals of an historically progressive bent I point you to the extensive oeuvre of Anthony Giddens’ socio-political writings that include what may be considered his summa in The Progressive Manifesto (2013).  I’m somewhat blown away that for a number of years the man was Director of the London School of Economics.

So in sum, I cannot claim to be anything more than a student of the exciting and important subject of socio-political philosophies and related disciplines that inform us how we build and maintain societies.  All such labeled philosophies are really fuzzy sets whose tenets are gathered, sometimes willy-nilly, by various pundits and proponents.  But almost all of them have leaked out of their carefully fashioned nests and are found to also populate other belief systems, many of which claim them as uniquely their own.  I tend to ideologically label people by what I see as the preponderance of their displayed attributes, and those primarily selected by how they walk instead of only talk.  And even in that I often err.

Finally, for anyone who thinks they have a well-formed ideology, especially one deserving of a name, I invite them to put down a dated comprehensive list of its tenets.  Absent that, all arguments of what this or that labeled ideologue may believe come with flaws, often tolerable but always congenital.

Some more of my previous scribblings on the topic that may be relevant can be found here, here, and here.

[5may16 update]  Heard Bernie Sanders on NPR this morning reveal his latest socialist shibboleth about what is corporate welfare.  The man told us that Walmart is a recipient of corporate welfare because some of its employees get checks from the government for various kinds of benefits for which they qualify.  With that broad brush he painted literally every employer in the country as a recipient of corporate welfare without even pausing to let his intellectually bereft constituents contemplate the larger and more comprehensive social perversion that he glibly purveys across the country.  And that is his ‘self-evident’ truth that an employer is responsible for supplying all the needs of his employees that money can buy.

To the extent that the employee gets remunerated or his needs satisfied from some other source(s), to that extent the employer is then subsidized by that/those source(s).  For those listening to Sanders, as for those who listened to Lenin, there is no need to stop and think before confirming again that capitalism and private enterprise are intrinsically evil – just move along there.

Comments

[Gregory]

First, let's clear up your error in the very first sentence... almost by definition, libertarians are not Right Wing. It's easy for Left Wingnuts to label them so because they (we) are obviously anti-Left Wing, and to the Left, if you aren't Left you're on the other side. The Right claims libertarians as their own because Libertarianism is the source of all their good ideas without actually signing on to the freedoms that give social conservatives the willies and libertarians are, unlike the left, pleasant to talk to.

You are, of course, spot on when describing the ultimately coercive nature of modern leftists who are closer to Stalinists than classic liberals, and have all but eliminated liberty from the equation, unless one is in one of the protected classes that aggravate social conservatives. I was absolutely shocked when visiting a retired K-12 music teacher's home and finding he was a subscriber to National Review... he spent his entire career keeping his politics to himself, lest he end up on the sidelines or out on the street.

It wasn't all that long ago that the FUE was lecturing all how inappropriate it is for a candidate for a non-partisan office to have a shred of partisan political ambition, and now he's pushing Hall, an activist Democrat who managed to pull in the father of Mann made global warming to endorse her.

Anyone taking Professor Mann seriously should read Professor Curry's posting here:
https://judithcurry.com/2015/08/13/mark-steyns-new-book-on-michael-mann/

One of the most to the point quotes is from physicist Jonathan Jones:

My whole involvement has always been driven by concerns about the corruption of science. Like many people I was dragged into this by [Michael Mann's] Hockey Stick. The Hockey Stick is an extraordinary claim which requires extraordinary evidence, so I started reading round the subject. And it soon became clear that the first extraordinary thing about the evidence for the Hockey Stick was how extraordinarily weak it was, and the second extraordinary thing was how desperate its defenders were to hide this fact. The Hockey Stick is obviously wrong. Climategate 2011 shows that even many of its most outspoken public defenders know it is obviously wrong. And yet it goes on being published and defended year after year. Do I expect you to publicly denounce the Hockey Stick as obvious drivel? Well yes, that’s what you should do. It is the job of scientists of integrity to expose pathological science. It is a litmus test of whether climate scientists are prepared to stand up against the bullying defenders of pathology in their midst.

Hall has dragged this guy into our non-partisan County supervisor race, and I'm pretty sure it isn't because he knows anything about Nevada County.

[George Rebane]

Gregory 345pm - Well, I'll take your critique of my "error" in the first sentence in the spirit it was offered. Yes, ideology is a multi-dimensional affair (I've covered the 2D variety in these pages many times), however, to communicate to the general, and most certainly leftwing, reader, I am placing libertarians in the same pot as conservatives as far as discussing the subsequent points of policy and behavior that distinguish the collectivists from the rest of us.

[Russ Steele]

Progressives want to remove all guns from the general population. Removing guns from the general population will not change these findings, some people are born killers. Denying guns to people with mental disorders makes more sense, given the findings discussed below:

Neuro-imaging of the brain patterns of habitual offenders shows different patterns of activity from "normal" people, scientists have found.

A new study by Adrian Raine, a professor of criminology, psychiatry and psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, found diminished activity in areas of the brain linked with self-awareness, the processing of emotions and sensitivity to violence.

In his new book, The Anatomy of Violence, Raine shows similar abnormalities occurring in lesser offenders, including aggressive adolescents, perpetrators of domestic violence and low-level, repeat offenders.

"The findings suggest that many people currently being punished for their crimes cannot actually control their behaviour, and should be seen as suffering from a disorder that needs treatment," said Raine.

His research found criminals with psychopathic tendencies often had a shrunken ventromedial cortex - the area of the brain that controls decision-making.

Habitual criminals who acted more on impulse commonly had an under-developed dorsolateral cortex - the area involved in learning from mistakes.

"People with abnormalities here keep doing the same wrong things," Raine told the Sunday Times.

Research in the UK by Graeme Fairchild, a lecturer in clinical psychology at Southampton University, has shown that adolescents with aggressive conduct disorders often had a shrunken amygdala - the area governing emotions and morality.

"People with severe forms of conduct disorder could be seen as having a brain development disorder, rather than just being evil," said Fairchild. "If the parts of your brain involved in feeling guilt or empathy are damaged, then there is an issue of diminished responsibility. It is too early to use this in the courts, but we have to ask if they are truly to blame for their behaviour."

Progressive have similar brain disorders, they are incapable of understanding how the real world works, preferring to live a dream world. A perfect example of this is the belief that humans can control the climate, by controlling human CO2 emissions. Emissions that are but a sliver of natural CO2 emissions, which are so small they are almost impossible to measure. Yet progressive persist, passing legislation which forces human reductions in CO2 emissions, yet there is no viable scientific connection that human emissions of CO2 are significantly influencing the climate beyond natural variability. The only explanation for how progressives function is they have a brain disorder, a disorder that prevents them from observing the world as it exists and how it functions.

[Russ Steele]

Bumped from the Sandbox with some edits:

This is how the progressive play the intellectual game of data hide and seek.

Research university hides results of fracking study which fails to prove it’s dangerous
POSTED AT 5:01 PM ON APRIL 26, 2016 BY JAZZ SHAW

What happens when a university research department is tasked with conducting a study of the harmful effects of fracking on ground water and other environmental concerns? Well, that depends on who provides their research money and what the results turn out to be. In the case of the University of Cincinnati, a lot of their funding comes from groups which have a vested interest in proving how harmful fracking is so it’s hardly a surprise that they lost interest in the study when it failed to produce any evidence of ground water contamination near commercial fracking sites.

Jeff Stier, senior fellow and head of the Risk Analysis Division at the National Center for Public Policy Research in Washington provides a detailed report at Newsweek.

Geologists at the University of Cincinnati just wrapped up a three-year investigation of hydraulic fracturing and its impact on local water supplies.

The result? There’s no evidence - zero, zilch, nada - that fracking contaminates drinking water. Researchers hoped to keep these findings secret.

Why would a public research university boasting a top-100 geology program deliberately hide its work? Because, as lead researcher Amy Townsend-Small explained, “our funders, the groups that had given us funding in the past, were a little disappointed in our results. They feel that fracking is scary and so they were hoping our data could point to a reason to ban it.”

So, if the results do not support the progressive hypothesis, it is OK to hide the results. Especially if the researchers want some funding in the future. One has to ask, how many AGW studies showing it is null and void have been hidden, to keep the research money flowing?

[Gregory]

The problem is, George, is that libertarians really aren't conservatives and too many Republicans also keep forgetting that conservative and Republican aren't synonyms, either.

Yes, libertarians and Republicans are natural allies against leftists, but that does not make libertarians right wingers. And please, not to call leftists liberals, because they aren't in much the same way Progressives aren't progressive.

Libertarians are best thought of as radical moderates, at least as far as the modern right-left one dimensional model goes.

[Bill Tozer]

They sure ain't like us and its pushback time. The time is rapidly approaching to put the gloves on. Talking almost over. The Titans will meet this November. We will see if they bleed red white and blue like us, or red white and green as rumored.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=I6eQ78HCGEA

[Russ Steele]

Here is Professor Richard Lindzen explaining how the global warmers are sure not like us:

Climate change is an urgent topic of discussion among politicians, journalists and celebrities...but what do scientists say about climate change? Does the data validate those who say humans are causing the earth to catastrophically warm? Richard Lindzen, an MIT atmospheric physicist and one of the world's leading climatologists, summarizes the science behind climate change.

Video is here: https://youtu.be/OwqIy8Ikv-c

[George Rebane]

Gregory 513pm - These pages attest that most of us are more than up on the nuances you expand. In today's de facto ideological duopoly libertarians are seen as rightwingers, and most RR readers also understand that progressives are ideologically sclerotic reprobates who have co-opted the diametrically opposite label as prescribed first by Lenin and then by succeeding acolytes like Alinsky. Nevertheless, it's in the current lexicon, and your frustration with usage is the same as mine when I explain the particulars of 'preventable global warming' and the terribly inappropriate use of 'illegal immigrant' or even 'undocumented Americans'. With equal determination we both seem to be pissing in the wind.

[Gregory]

George, it's a whole lot simpler than your analysis: I know I'm not "right wing" and I am offended when so mislabled.

[George Rebane]

Gregory 918pm - Great. Let's see your simple analysis. I live to learn.

And as far as being offended, I think in today's world you'll have to live with it. May such an offense be one of your biggest problems.

[Gregory]

It doesn't take an analysis, George. Refer to any Nolan Chart... half of the scope of libertarian range is on the left, and half is on the right. As a group, we aren't "right wing".

I can take the co-opting of the term "liberal" by leftist "progressives" thanks to the journalistic left's control of he language, but the appropriation of "libertarian" by the conservative right isn't appropriate.

[Bill Tozer]

• Which political cohort has commandeered the humanities in the nation’s institutions of higher learning, and in the process created a generation of intellectually vapid students who must be actively and selectively shielded from politically incorrect, insensitive, and sometimes outrageous ideas and modes of thought?

Geeze Dr. Rebane, that is a tough one. Need more research and not just andedotal stories to figure this one out. Is it saying "American is the land of opportunity" a big no-no on campuses because some might see that was exclusive? No, that is not evidence. Hmmm. I will get back to you on this puzzle.

[George Rebane]

I copied this comment from the 29apr16 sandbox. It seemed to also have relevance here.

re BillT's 558am - Does anyone else wonder why our leftwing cannot connect the dots from the global experience with socialism to what WILL certainly happen here when such policies are finally put in place in America? The harbingers are already visible wherever one looks. All my life I've wondered what special kind of intellectual blindness afflicts these people. From the carefully camouflaged studies that are being done (e.g. the functional MRI imaging of Left v Right brains asked to solve/answer the same problems) the conclusion emerges that the differences in our brains has a clinical basis. That explains why they are immune to remediation through normal educational pathways.

[Anthony Kropotkin]

From my armchair on the patio I can't help but laugh.

I could document dozens of examples of right wing groups interfering with events, funerals by the westboro baptists, pro-abortion events by planned parenthood interrupted by anti-abortion demonstrators or even just entering an abortion providers medical offices, or even prayer services interrupted by racially motivated shooters.

The education system is dominated professors who advance theories of governance and economics that never question free market thinking. I have seen them first hand in my work around energy economics. They are the majority in any business school even at 'liberal' universities. Our history curriculum continue to be enamored with the strange belief in American Exceptionalism that creeps onto these pages disguised as a desire to make America great again. How illogical is that? Either we are great and that is what makes us exceptional or we are not great and thus not exceptional,

Shielded by political correctness or not the shielding takes place on both the left and the right, and through it all this generation of Americans is the most highly educated, has the highest percentage of advanced degrees, and tests hirer than almost any generation in American history.

At no time in recent history have we had a Congress more focused on resisting a more scientifically supported theory of change than in this Republican Congress where despite evidence presented by almost every government agency and non governmental scientific association and clear dominant support in the international scientific community they continue to question and fail to act on anthropogenic causes of climate change.

Public lands under every modern interpretation of traditional American legal doctrine belong to all of the people and the right to manage those lands is created in the Constitution, numerous treaties ceding land to the United States and in every state Constitution as it joined the nation. No one group has an inherent right to use public lands in a way that diminishes its value for another group without due process and ultimately federal authority to make the final decision.

Every citizen has the right to equal consideration under the law, and that includes equal consideration of benefits such as health care regardless of another citizens supposed moral objection.

Somewhere in the process of becoming Dr. Rebane the good doctor appears to have lost his way on both logic and scientific process. His groping in the dark for the path back to truth seems once again to have hit the wall of ideology.

[Bill Tozer]

They sure aren't like us. That is exactly what Bill and Hillary are saying about the good people of West Virginnie.

Former President Bill Clinton drew boos and shouts from the crowd as he made a campaign stop in Logan, West Virginia, on his wife's behalf, ahead of the state's May 10 presidential primary.
Supporters of Democrat Bernie Sanders and Republican candidate Donald Trump gathered outside the school as Clinton spoke Sunday. According to WVNS-TV, a letter written on behalf of Logan officials told U.S. Sen. Joe Manchin's staff in an email that Bill and Hillary Clinton "are simply not welcome in our city." SF Gate

[Paul Emery]

George

In light of all the enlightened characteristics you attribute to Conservatives how do you explain the ascension of Donald Trump as the best possible option for President as selected by the Republican Party, the party of Conservative Americans.

I completely disagree that Libertarians are conservatives. Quite the opposite. The Republicans are flag wavers for government intrusion in our private lives, locally being their support for Measure W and Sheriff Royal which advocates flyovers and photographs of private property to check if you may be growing illegal plants. the Democrats do not support that intrusion in our private affairs.

[Todd Juvinall]

PE. "The Republicans are flag wavers for government intrusion in our private lives". Please give us all some examples of your statement above.

[George Rebane]

PaulE 142pm - I invite you to reformulate your question after reading this posts 1may16 update.

[jon smith]

Example: Flag waving Republicans as a group are opposed the an individual's right to grow a marijuana plant on their private property and smoke that plant within the sanctity of their own home. As a group I know few liberals and even fewer Libertarians who espouse that level of overt intrusion on one's personal life.

[jon smith]

I could just as easily name liberal intrusions on private lives, but that wasn't the question.

[George Rebane]

This discussion would go much better if the parties would learn to differentiate the meanings of 'Republican', 'conservative', and 'libertarian', and also know the difference between 'libertarian' and 'Libertarian'. The same remarks apply to the terms in the menagerie of the Left.

[Jon Dozer]

Hey Todd, Paul Emery just gave you two local examples of Republican support for government intrusion right before you posted. Was there a problem in your reading today?

The leaders of the Patriot Act and all the various NSA programs- initiated by Republican legislation in Congress and by the Bush Administration.
The War on Drugs- Republican led for decades.
Abortion restrictions of every conceivable kind? REPUBLICAN to the core.

[jon smith]

Please allow me to amend my statement to allay the apparent confusion of a certain member or certain members of this audience: I am not aware of any political party other than the (flag waiving) Republicans who so overwhemlingly believe it is their duty to prevent anyone from growing an herb in their garden and using it in the sanctity of their own home.

[Don Bessee]

PE- Weed is still illegal in CA and on the Federal level. Its only for the truly sick who now have to get an OK from their real doctor who sends them for blood tests and such. There is no civil right to grow weed. The CA supreme court has made it clear there is no CA constitutional right to weed.

So save us the we just wanna grow a plant man crap.
The medical end of the spectrum will never get taken seriously until they shun the gangster growers, plain and simple. It may take years.
Don't bet on the parker weed legalization initiative winning, the local asa types and the wanna be small for profit growers hate it.
Its the same on a state level. ;-)

[Todd Juvinall]

Jon Dozer | 01 May 2016 at 03:02 PM

Well Mr. troll, I certainly disagree with your view (you appear to have little to no reading comprehension). The country had a democrat President and a democrat House and Senate and could simply have booted the "Patriot Act" and changed the law on any "NSA" snooping. But hey, the liberal pals of yours did not. Please explain the liberal democrats failure to do your bidding troll and PE.

Also, for JSmith, has it not been the democarts that have made tobacco use a monster piranha and passed thousands of bills to "protect" second hand smoke breathers? How about now on the radio you are pushing a law to ban apartment dweller the right to smoke a cig in their apartments? I think you libs are the true fascists since it is your ilk that have passed all these laws to curtail individual rights. Not the right. And what about letting men and boys into the girls restrooms and locker rooms. No vote in the affirmative from a "righty" All yours Jon Smith. So it appears your ilk are the traitors to individual rights. We on the right fight hard against you but you seem to be winning the votes to enslave. California is run by you twits and look at the mess. All yours bub.

[George Rebane]

Couldn't have said it better than ToddJ's 417pm, but would add that it is overwhelmingly the Democrats who have instituted laws and regs that determine and prescribe almost every aspect of our public and private lives. To do so is immortalized in their seminal scriptures and has been since Marx and Engels first put pen to paper. No conservative, libertarian, and most certainly no conservetarian gives a big rat's ass what consenting adults do in private.

[Don Bessee]

The 'jon' by any other name still smells the same. ;-)

[Jon Dozer]

"And what about letting men and boys into the girls restrooms and locker rooms". Todd

Glad you brought that up. Another GOP overreach. You really want Caitlyn Jenner going into a boys bathroom? I DON'T! A full-blown female in a dress should not be in the mens or boys room.

btw, not jon smith. That is a different person. Thanks.

[jon smith]

Todd- Let me repeat myself: "I could just as easily named liberal intrusions on private lives, but that wasn't the question."

[Todd Juvinall]

Dozer, Kaitlyn still has a penis. You want your daughter in the same bathroom? If so, go for it.

Jon Smith, then why not not expose both? You are simply a lib and will protect your ilk.

[jon smith]

Todd- You explicitly asked for examples of flag waving Republican. I answered your question. Sorry you couldn't handle my answer.

[Paul Emery]

So Don I take it you have no problem with the Sheriffs Dept flying over private property and taking detailed photo's of back yards in their enforcement of civil ordinances?

[Don Bessee]

Can we say google earth PE?

[George Rebane]

From the air the surface of your property is not private, nor has it been since man learned to fly. No one has even contended that. Now if the sheriff hovers the drone outside your window and looks in, that has yet to be adjudicated. I vote that some volume of space that covers your real estate be declared private property that one can look through but cannot look from within it. Thoughts on this?

PS. All other questions seem to be attempts at 'gotcha questions' instead of addressing the new problems that advancing technologies make possible.

[Todd Juvinall]

jon smith | 01 May 2016 at 06:29 PM

{lease [point to where I asked you for examples (explicitly) for flag waving Republicans. We are the flag wavers. The libs burn the flags. I think you have mistaken your words from some other person. Jeeze, ganja?

[Todd Juvinall]

Paul Emery is only concerned about MJ since he could care less his ilk has done all the same things to tobacco. He doesn't care about the tobacco folks and their rights apparently.

Regarding invasive laws on private property. Hey Paul E, what is your opinion on the state coming into the house and taking someone's kids away to CPS?

[George Rebane]

I apologize to Mr Anthony Kropotkin for not catching his 1257pm comment that TypePad had squirreled away in the spam folder. Mr Kropotkin's liberal views are now available in this comment stream for due consideration.

From a perusal of his comments, it appears that he is comfortably ensconced in his progressive universe the reality of which is markedly removed from the universe in which I am lost and groping for truth from which my ideology blinds me. It is a joy to witness such self-assured certitude denied the rest of us.

[jon smith]

[email protected] 6:29.
At 6:30 are you already too drunk to remember your question of 2:34?

"The Republicans are flag wavers for government intrusion in our private lives". Please give us all some examples of your statement above.

I gave you an example. Sorry you couldn't remember your own question.

[Paul Emery]

Not gotcha questions George, just an attempt to access to what extent Don B. is willing to allow local constabulary freedom to access private property information randomly by air in pursuit of civil land use violations.

[George Rebane]

PaulE 854pm - As was recently shown on 60 Minutes, the government and bad guys already monitor everything electronic that goes in/out of your house and your pocket. LE taking overhead pictures of your property is not new but will become more frequent and cheaper with drones. I'm not sure that anything at all can be done about that at this stage. We are a comprehensively monitored and tracked population.

I will though take a drone in place of the Huey helicopter that hovered 20 feet above my lawn when we lived on Saddlepeak Rd in the Santa Monica Mtns. I had a vegetable greenhouse on a third floor deck that they thought was a MJ grow. So they hovered there and took pictures while blowing the living crap out of Jo Ann's flower gardens and scattering lawn furniture. No one came back to ask whether they should pay us for the damage they caused. That is the hubris of Leviathan.

[Anthony Kropotkin]

"From the air the surface of your property is not private, nor has it been since man learned to fly. No one has even contended that. Now if the sheriff hovers the drone outside your window and looks in, that has yet to be adjudicated. I vote that some volume of space that covers your real estate be declared private property that one can look through but cannot look from within it. Thoughts on this?"

My thought on this are the Dr. Rebane is correct that aerial space and photography as a result is not private. I seem to remember that that is not the position some here did not share when NH 2020 used analysis of vegetation cover to analyze species habitat and other natural resources.

Is it rational to contend aerial photography is legal for one purpose but not for another?

[Russ Steele]

Why is the Left hostile to Western civilization?

After decades of considering this question, the answer Dennis Prager concluded is: standards.

The Left hates standards – moral standards, artistic standards, cultural standards.

The West is built on all three, and has excelled in all three.

Why does the Left hate standards? It hates standards because when there are standards, there is judgment. And Leftists don’t want to be judged.

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/434549/left-western-civilization-case-hatred

[Paul Emery]

George

Certainly those that condone Measure W (including the Nevada County Republican party) do so condoning the tactics used to enforce this land use ordinance. Crickets from Don B on this one.

[Name not listed....]

I guess when your Sheriff lies he's supported by mentally ill people as well as the rest of the Republican party who accept his lies as God's truth!

[George Rebane]

Name not 1135am - Since you're not a resident of Nevada County, what lies has our Sheriff Royal told?

[Walt]

Paul's " willing to allow local constabulary freedom to access private property information randomly by air in pursuit of civil land use violations."
OH,, You mean like NH2020? Remember the county "fence jumpers" looking for "endangered" whatevers? The LIB ECO brigade was all for those instructions.

[Russ Steele]

[email protected]:43PM

The libs were some of the very first users of drones to spy on bird hunters in Texas. These hunters were the first to shoot down a spying econuts drone, and then the court battle started. Drone spying is OK if it for an econuts cause, but not for monitoring illegal grows by the government or neighbors.

[Paul Emery]

Walt

I never was a supporter of NH2020. I'm surprised you support Measure W that uses the same tactics to intrude on peoples privacy in their backyards.

George

What is your view of the takeover of the Republican party and it's Conservative traditions that go back to Barry Goldwater and William Buckley by the Trumpster who is in no way a Conservative by any measurement of his history or dogma.

[Jon Dozer]

Saw that Drumpf supporter today on video stand there and confront Ted Cruz like yesterday's trash. No thinking, no reasoning, just a terrifying willingness to FOLLOW, and to believe the BS and the TV Celebrity Messiah who is Drumpf. Made me almost feel sorry for Ted Cruz, who in his own far right, evangelical-based world, is an intelligent, well spoken, well educated person. A college econ professor of mine back in the day, a fine man and scholar, was a holocaust survivor, and always warned us about charletans like Drumpf. They come along every so often to lead on a non-thinking mass of followers like that moron in Indiana today. Worse than suckers. Its playing to the worst human fears and vulnerabilities.

[Russ Steele]

March 13, 2016

Hillary Clinton: "We Are Going To Put A Lot Of Coal Miners & Coal Companies Out Of Business"

https://youtu.be/ksIXqxpQNt0

Now, less than two months later, she claims she wants to see coal “continued to be sold and continued to be mined.”

https://youtu.be/QcPkEWqGG2A

So, which Hillary do you believe? I am voting for the first one, the one that supports Obama's desire to shut down the coal industry.

[Russ Steele]

New York Times is having a small cow over Trump win.

The Republican Party’s trek into the darkness took a fateful step in Indiana on Tuesday.

And, no surprise our local lefty blogger provided the text and a link. The elites, Democrat and Republican, just don't get it the people are pissed and they no longer trust the existing power structure and are willing to destroy it in the hope something better will result. I fear their hopes will be dashed, but right now they so not give a damn, they are going to change the power structure and Trump is the instrument of destruction!

[Jon Dozer]

Unfortunately Russ, there is that small detail about the electoral college and general election demographics.
But anyone is free to dream of destructive ideas, and of demagogue leaders who share their racist and sexist core beliefs.
Enjoy your day in the sun during this high water mark for the Drumpf Brigade.

Can't fight the demographics and the electoral college.

[Don Bessee]

I love the PE assumption of projecting onto others what conservative values are and how we should only look back to the 60's. I understand that's you limited perspective. Shall we look all the way back to Lincoln and the beginnings?

[Jon Dozer]

I wish you well looking to your present! LOL. As I said in my post above. Drumpf is poison for the GOP. Senate- gone, President-gone.
If that's what you wanted....:)

[Todd Juvinall]

Hillary will take down the democrats for a generation. It will be a cakewalk and all conservative. Wow!

[Russ Steele]

IF YOU’VE NEVER HEARD OF “TIBET 5100 WATER RESOURCES, LTD,” YOU’RE NOT ALONE: It’s a Chinese firm doing business in Tibet as “Tibet Water.” Secretary of State John Kerry knows about it because a family trust of his wife, Teresa Heinz, is invested in the company that bottles Tibetan glacial water and sells it in Europe as an alternative to Evian and Perrier.

Tibet is the world’s highest land and home to Mt. Everest and Tibetan Bhuddism. It’s also long been the object of Chinese imperialism and is under Beijing’s heavy-handed rule today. Thanks to the thousands of glaciers in Tibet, the land has lots of water, which is why Tibet Water is there. Tibet Water is closely linked to the Chinese government and to the Communist Party that controls it.

So why is the U.S. Secretary of State’s family invested in a company that is exploiting the natural resources of a poor neighbor, an exploitation, by the way, that could not occur without the approval of the government of China? Good question. The Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group’s Richard Pollock, who exclusively reported the investment today, has asked Kerry’s spokesman for an explanation.

Certainly, not like us.

[Gregory]

Set the wayback machine to Apr 30 at 6:57PM
"In today's de facto ideological duopoly libertarians are seen as rightwingers"
-George Rebane

...and in the May Day update, George provides an old link to yet another one dimensional model that puts Conservatives to the left of libertarians. That progressives might believe it to be true does not lend much credibility; to me, it smacks of the Right grabbing a piece of libertarianism just as the left has wrapped itself in their faux liberalism that substitutes distributing Other People's Money (like bread at the circuses) for freedoms from government.

An Austrian School/Popperian point of view is well supported in "THE POLITICAL COMPASS & WHY LIBERTARIANISM IS NOT RIGHT-WING" by J.C. Lester
http://www.la-articles.org.uk/pc.htm

A nice unification of the left and right wing usurping of libertarianism is found by his quoting of Brittan (1968)

The dilemma of the [classical] liberal is that while Conservatives now use the language of individual freedom, they apply this only — if at all — to domestic economic questions. They are the less libertarian of the two parties — despite individual exceptions — on all matters of personal and social conduct, and are much the more hawk-like in their attitude to ‘foreign affairs’. Labour, on the other hand, has liberal instincts on foreign affairs and personal conduct, but is perversely blind to the claims of economic liberty, which is distrusted as a capitalist rationalisation.

Your favored one dimensional model is just a projection of the old circle model onto a line... with a snip separating extreme left and right.

One passage hits the nail on the head:"In reality, then, it is non-libertarians who are being tendentious if they insist that libertarianism is on the ‘extreme right-wing’. This usage is merely a pejorative and an excuse to avoid debate".

[George Rebane]

Gregory 407pm - Have very little problem with your comment (analysis?) save the "snip separating extreme left and right." There I'll stand with the structure I presented in 'Ideologies and Governance – a structured look' here -
http://rebaneruminations.typepad.com/rebanes_ruminations/2013/02/ideologies-and-governance-a-structured-look.html

We have no modern experience with the anarchistic extreme on the Right (see figure). But we do have plenty of experience with the collectivist extremes of the Left. But it boggles my mind in trying to connect the ultra-individualism of the Right with the ultra-collectivism (surrendering self to serve class) of the Left, no matter what reasonable ideological topologies, including the "old circle model", you might invoke.

[Gregory]

You're needlessly repeating yourself, George, and that one dimensional model for all political thought is ridiculous. Segment by segment, it is the same as the circular model, akin to the Byzantine ad hoc attempts in the past to make the geocentric model fit the heliocentric reality.

The Nolan chart is certainly an oversimplification of reality, but you can at least see reality using it as a guide. Left and Right may well have had real meaning two centuries ago in the French National Ass'y but now, it's mostly a formula for being blind as to what the real differences are, a tool for identification friend or foe, not a basis of understanding and rational discourse.

That day in '88 above Beverly Hills when Dr. Timothy Leary hosted a reception for Ron Paul during his presidential run, there may well have been only one right winger in attendance... Debra Saunders, now of the Chronicle. Everyone else were very probably the low tax liberals that the modern Libertarian Party is known for.

Besides, Bastiat sat on the Left.

[George Rebane]

Gregory 843pm - Well thanks for that frank vote of confidence. It looks like a nice place to end this thread.

[Gregory]

George, I accept your forfeit. A libertarian government is essentially no different than that specified by the Constitution as constrained by the Bill of Rights. Low tax liberalism. Whigs, with the slavery issue resolved in the favor of liberty. Jefferson, not Joe McCarthy.

In related news, Republican strategist and James Carville's strange bedfellow, Mary Matalin, apparently registered Libertarian yesterday and is adamant it wasn't because of Trump, for whom she may vote. It's that she was a Republican in a Jeffersonian and Madisonian sense... not exactly extreme right wing sentiments, are they? To understand this you'll have to give up the ludicrous idea that libertarians are to the right of Conservatives and one step away from right wing anarchy... that is somehow different than the left wing anarchy near the other end of your line segment that presents all political thought on the same one dimensional representation. Just pick the point on that line.

[George Rebane]

Gregory 901am - "forfeit"? in your dreams Gregory. You just don't understand the cited figure as drawn. 1) there is no "ludicrous idea that libertarians are to the right of Conservatives ..." in that figure. The dimension of governance indicated is NOT right/left, but the clearly marked spectrum of collectivism-to-individualism in society. 2) the dimension 'Type of Government Control' actually portrays the TBD multiple dimensions of attribute space that comprise any given type of governance of which the Nolan Chart attempts to capture two. That is why the '-isms' can wander/wiggle in this manifold as the level of collectivism increases. (This manner of indicating high dimensioned spaces is standard in the literature.)

Nevertheless, I am sorry that I didn't make that figure easier for you to understand. But I have yet to find a graphic that captures and displays the multiple notions of governance indicated in my figure. Perhaps you can point me to a better one.

[Gregory]

Let me pick up one of Russ' points, 02May 8:06AM

Why is the Left hostile to Western civilization?

After decades of considering this question, the answer Dennis Prager concluded is: standards.

The Left hates standards – moral standards, artistic standards, cultural standards.

The West is built on all three, and has excelled in all three.

Why does the Left hate standards? It hates standards because when there are standards, there is judgment. And Leftists don’t want to be judged.

To the contrary, the hard Left are among the most judgmental SOB's on the planet. On the national scale, I've had friends who grew up and became engineers under both the PRC and USSR systems... it was work, it was harsh judgements, and they eventually escaped. One guy, a Romanian political refugee, was shocked at how much smarter Americans were than he was used to but I think he finally accepted what I told him... he was in a small R&D skunkworks that was filled with people smarter than in most engineering departments... we'd all been judged harshly and invited in.

On smaller scales, I've been told our local hard left elementary school, the Yuba River Charter, harshly judges parents who let their kids watch TV.

What the Left doesn't want is to be judged by the standards of the Right, and vice versa. They both think they *are* Western Civilization.

[Gregory]

Curious... when you wrote that old post with that even older figure, you introduced it as "But when all is said and done, the modern progressives do accept a right/left view that is approximated in the figure below", clearly labeling it a right/left view... but in your revision today, you claim "The dimension of governance indicated is NOT right/left, but the clearly marked spectrum of collectivism-to-individualism in society", but that is not at all in the text.

Unfortunately the website you borrowed the figure has had a change of heart and essentially took the site down, so trying to find out what the creator of that piece of graphical misinformation intended isn't as easy as it should be.

It seems to me your interpretations change with the winds. "Classical liberalism" is NOT the same as conservatism except in the minds of some delusional conservatives while libertarianism really *is* classical liberalism, but unfortunately, socialists/progressives have appropriated the term liberal. For now.

In my opinion, there isn't a chance in hell that conservatives will call themselves liberals when the left gets tired of the label.

[George Rebane]

Gregory 549pm - The 'older' figure on top shows how common wisdom stacks the labeled ideologies in the simple one-dim world. My 947am only addressed the lower figure that I drew. And for good or ill, today's self-declared conservatives like to think of themselves as 'classical liberals' even though the equivalence doesn't stand close scrutiny - the ideological jumble is what it is. And given The Donald's advent, I believe that today's conservatives will twist themselves into a pretzel as they attempt to redefine themselves. I'll stick with conservetarian as specified in my credo, and well approximated in Cooke's 'The Conservatarian Manifesto'.

But in broader discussions I'll continue to use collectivism-to-individualism as the key (i.e. dominant Eigen) dimension as shown in my figure to distinguish between modes of governance. Hope that helps.

[Later]. Apparently I missed a salient point of yours (am on travel, airports are a bummer). My reference to progressives' interpretation of the figure was just that. They too simplify to a right/left spectrum. There was no "revision today". But then again, you may choose to believe what comforts most.

[Bill Tozer]

Re: Ms. Hodge's spendid editorial in today's Union. I could be wrong, but I think she feels we should be more like the group think of wherever she is from. We be behind that times. Hey, we finally got them ATM card readers on our gas pumps along with that black foreskin. What more do you want?? If you think we here in the boondocks are too laid back, last time I was in Montana (maybe 3-4 years ago, I but petro in the horseless carriage and there was no black foreskins on the nozzle. I topped 'er off and savored each end every second of viewing the shiny metallic tip of nozzle emitted vapors into the bluest of blue skies. Big Sky Country. They be farer behind the times.