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Deconstructing "Progressive " thought

Sythen said:
How long until every native starts appealing every sentence because they claim their past wasn't adequately taken into account? And when that starts happening, how long until judges just give them a constant slap on the wrist simply to save time and money? Its very easy to see this going very badly. Nothing good comes from decisions like this.

Yes you COULD write one based on nearly any religious text. Heck an atheist wrote a guide on how to molest kids. ( http://christiangovernance.ca/news/amazon-pulls-%E2%80%98pedophile-guide%E2%80%99-amid-outrage ) Its not the fact that it was written that is so bad, because there is always a few crazies in any group of people. Its the fact this store has sold out of them. And has been sold out for months.

You always claim to be in the center, but I have yet to see you offer even one centrist viewpoint. Your an apologist and a hard Left loonie. I will not claim to be center because I am not trying to fool anyone. That actually brings up another point.. Who says centrist views are a good thing? Any extreme is a bad thing, and there would be extreme centrists.. How does the quote go? If you don't stand for anything, you will fall for anythig? Something like that..

I share few if any points of view with the Left. As for being a centrist, that doesn't mean standing for nothing. I'm at neither extreme, that's all it means. I'm a fervent social liberal (because most social issues aren't the government's business), I want a sound, sustainable economy, and a country that's decent to live in, for which I don't mind paying the bills as long as they're reasonable. Social liberal, fiscal moderate. Pretty simple. Anyhow, like I said, we're done here.
 
Redeye said:
I share few if any points of view with the Left. As for being a centrist, that doesn't mean standing for nothing. I'm at neither extreme, that's all it means. I'm a fervent social liberal (because most social issues aren't the government's business), I want a sound, sustainable economy, and a country that's decent to live in, for which I don't mind paying the bills as long as they're reasonable. Social liberal, fiscal moderate. Pretty simple. Anyhow, like I said, we're done here.

Stephen Harper has moved his party towards the centre as he realizes that is where most Canadian voters are. The NDP and it's new leader have said that if they want to be elected as the government that they must move toward the centre. I believe most Canadian voters are "Social liberal, fiscal moderate."
You know good grey Canadians.  :)
 
Redeye said:
I share few if any points of view with the Left....

This is me, reading the above

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Baden  Guy said:
Stephen Harper has moved his party towards the centre as he realizes that is where most Canadian voters are. The NDP and it's new leader have said that if they want to be elected as the government that they must move toward the centre. I believe most Canadian voters are "Social liberal, fiscal moderate."
You know good grey Canadians.  :)

Probably a good description. For the most part, I don't want government to have anything to do with people's personal private lives. I want tax dollars spent efficiently to deliver those services that cannot be delivered efficiently by "free markets" (which are at best notional, to begin with). I don't think a tax system should punish success, but I also don't have any interest in society that abandons its most vulnerable, because the ultimate cost is higher than having decent, reasonable "social safety net" structures in place. Generally, I think capitalism, despite its flaws is probably about the best economic system we've ever come up with, and that reasonable, prudent regulation can address most of those flaws. Pretty simple. I'm pretty much one of those good grey Canadians.
 
A quick look at how others look at Sharia law (and why):

http://pjmedia.com/instapundit-archive/oldarchives/2002_03_24_instapundit_archive.html#75034457

THE NIGERIAN MINISTRY OF JUSTICE has essentially declared Sharia law unconstitutional by stating that it violates the principle against discriminatory punishments in the Nigerian constitution. This will be very unpopular among the Saudi-backed Muslims in the north who have been pushing the strict Saudi Hanbali version of Sharia (source of the recent stoning-for-adultery sentences) at the Saudis' behest. Stay tuned.
 
Thucydides said:
A quick look at how others look at Sharia law (and why):

http://pjmedia.com/instapundit-archive/oldarchives/2002_03_24_instapundit_archive.html#75034457

Okay. So another country has ruled it doesn't fit with its constitution. Kind of like we would were there any significant push for it.

In the 2001 Census, a whopping 2% of Canadians identified themselves as Muslim. 2011 Census data hasn't been released, and I don't care to speculate on it, but I suspect that growth will be minor. Even if every single one of them fervently advocated for Sharia in any form, what exactly would be the impact - never mind that it would be unconstitutional, anyhow?
 
Blogger Sarah Hoyt provides one of the best deconstructins of "Progressive" though ever, clearly identifying the Marxist roots and pulling them out:

http://accordingtohoyt.com/2012/03/29/circles-in-thinking/

Circles In Thinking
Posted on March 29, 2012 | 28 Comments

Something has been working at me since my post against using stupid slogans instead of thinking (when reality is almost if not actually the opposite – and no, I’m not going to reprise that.  I made all the arguments I wanted to make in that post.  And everyone got a chance to yell at me.  Enough.)  Weirdly, what bothered me most was not the name calling, but a seemingly innocuous comment, which was echoed and repeated by any number of commenters.

To begin with, it was the way it was repeated – not, like a lot of it, as though the person were working from a cheat-sheet, but more – as though a lot of people at the same time had come up with the same clinching argument…  Or what they thought was a clinching argument.

Except it wasn’t, not when you step back and analyze it.  Worse, when you step back and analyze it, you grow quite alarmed at its underpinnings and the fact that ANYONE would think this served as an argument to defend anything.

If, like me, you are – for your sins – a graduate of an excellent college, and hold a degree in the humanities, you don’t wonder why so many people echoed it probably without coordination.  The reason is that they all heard this in school and that in school, if this had been a college paper, it would have won a good grade.  And like most such arguments, it echoes the bias of thought of college professors and current academia.

I don’t remember off the top of my head whether we let any of those comments through.  I wasn’t the only one weeding through them – I have helpers who do that also, so I have time to write.  So, I’ll have to reprise it.

The comment omitted what they were against so I’ll put it in square brackets [It doesn’t surprise me that you think that men get a worse deal in current society than women because] This reminds me of all the Victorian women who were against female suffrage. [presumably meaning: and you don’t realize that just like them you are brainwashed.]

If you are nodding along, you probably ALSO had an excellent college education in the humanities and learned what would get you an A in sociology or feminist literature or whatever the heck it was you took.  (In my case it was theory of Literature, American Literature and Comparative Literature.  Also American Culture, British Culture and German Culture.  Possibly also linguistics, though those tended to be more factual.)

If you are nodding along you ALSO never took the time to unpack this argument.  Don’t feel bad about it, though.  It bothered me – and not in the sense that it felt right – because though it felt like while it was a “valid” – i.e. “logical” – argument, I had a feeling it was wrong.  Not just in my case, but in general.

Still even now, several decades after leaving college, it took me hours and the fact I had a lot of time in a waiting room yesterday to unpack it and figure out the LEVELS of wrong in it: in general, in particular, and when applied to my blog.  We are ALL the product of our education, and if you think that unlike your grandmother you had an education that prepared you to think without bias, it just means you haven’t seen through the bias.

This is a staggeringly bad argument in general because it can be used to dismiss anyone’s ideas based on what a group in the past did.  Say you don’t believe – I plead the fifth.  Most of the time I have a better image of humans in general and yes, women in particular.  Periodically I get annoyed and have to point out certain issues – that women tend to repeat slogans without examining them and fall for quasi-messianic movements without examining their underpinnings.  I could sneeringly dismiss your argument with “Well, you know, the first thing women did, given the vote, was pass prohibition.”

And then you’ll say – rightly – “but Sarah, that was a different set of women, educated under different circumstances, informed by a different set of beliefs, which make your argument irrelevant.”

Which brings us to the second part of why this argument is wrong in the specific and why it’s appalling that people with a college education can’t unpack it.  Repeat after me: The past is another country.  Not only do you not know how you’d have reacted to the suffragette movement if you lived in that time (rather irrelevant, really, since if you lived in that time, you wouldn’t be you) BUT you have no idea if they were right for their time and by their lights.

Now before you go screaming around the echo chamber that Sarah Hoyt believes women shouldn’t have right to vote, let’s register it for posterity that Sarah Hoyt has her doubts on universal suffrage regardless of gender.  It’s a horrible system.  It’s just the best one we’ve come up with so far.  The average woman is no dumber or less equipped to make a voting decision than the average man, and at the high end, women are as equipped to do it as high-end men.

What I’d like say, though – and what I’d like you to listen to, if you can remove the wads of indoctrination blocking your ears – is that just because women’s suffrage won and the results (except prohibition) have been pretty good, they had no intellectual way of knowing that at the time.

First of all you’re assuming that suffrage is always an universal good.  I will grant you our history – which they didn’t have – seems to show it.  Societies where more people vote tend to, if nothing else, decay into tyranny slower.  And it’s possible we might avert it altogether (maybe.  History hasn’t weighed in.)  However, at the time this was not clear.  I like to joke that in the Portuguese civil war my ancestors fought and died never to have a say in their governance again.  That is to say, they fought and died for the guy who wanted to be an absolute monarch.  (Yes, there are other things there, including local and hereditary loyalty, but–) It’s a funny line, and it works for us, but it is just a joke.  I don’t presume to judge their choice, and neither should you.  Why?  They remembered the French revolution and, btw, the British one.  They had grandfather-handed-down memories of mob rule.  Their choice of the king and stability might have seemed the best at the time.  NOT mine.  I disapprove of any dictatorship.  But theirs.  Their best choice, at the time, not knowing the future, and armed with what they did know of their people and place which are stranger to me than any culture on Earth today.

Quite possibly it was the same with female suffrage.  The women you were talking about are not the women of today, with contraceptives and education that make them close enough to men.

Look, you go to war with the weapons you have, not the ones you hope for.  The suffragettes fought for the rights of women as they were, not as they are.  The women they had at the time were not us.  Education in the upper classes schooled women towards subservience (at least if what we know is true, and I’m not saying it is, we weren’t there.)  The lower classes are a lot more opaque.  We study them through excavations of middens and sometimes surviving oral history.  However, we can assume in the first throes of the industrial revolution men and women in the lower classes, both, were NOT equipped to be informed voters.  Add to that the fact most women spent most of their lives pregnant.  I’ve been pregnant.  I’ve researched pregnancy (to figure out what the heck happened to my mind then.)  There is an hormone whose sole purpose is to make you fat, contented and stupid.  And yes, it says that in the literature.  More importantly, when you’re pregnant and you feel your body is coping with all it can handle, you’ll take the path of least resistence in everything else.

This means that women who thought – at the time – about other women getting the vote and shuddered might have had a point.  They foresaw disaster if women got the vote, and – THIS IS VERY IMPORTANT – though we know they weren’t right (the minor thing with prohibition excepted) THEY HAD NO WAY OF KNOWING THAT.  Anyone who’s been through college should be self-aware enough to realize that.  The past is determined, the future isn’t.  We are their future.  They had no way of being sure how things would go.  They were entitled to their doubts and their second thoughts and by having them they showed NOT that they were puppets of the establishment, but that they were thinking human beings.  Even if they were wrong.  Hindsight is twenty twenty.

Now of course you’re saying “But Sarah, they were voting against their interests.”  Stop it.  Stop making me roll my eyes so hard they’ll fall on the floor.

What you’ve just slipped into, whether you realize it or not is “Argument by Marx.”  You probably don’t realize it, because even though lately the establishment has got a lot more bold and started making self-satisfied noises about neo-Marxism (it’s like stupidity.  Calling it neo-stupidity makes it sound so much better) it’s permeated all thought and all teaching for decades – unexamined, unthought-about.  It’s in the bin marked “unexamined foundational beliefs” which in your ancestors’ time held the idea of G-d creating the universe, something that permeated all thought, even that of self-conscious atheists.

And it is the other thing that is wrong, wrong, wrong about that comment.

The comment presupposes what some of their comrades (da, tovarish) said more boldly.  That by saying it is men who are getting the short end of the stick in our society and by standing in front of the feminist mob yelling “stop” I’m a “gender traitor.”  It does this by equaling me with Victorian women who were against their “gender”’s rights.

This is pure Marxism.  It strips me of me and my circumstances in life and what I want, and reduces me to one salient characteristic: the fact I was born with a vagina.  It is one of the most dehumanizing and demeaning theories of history ANYONE could come up with.  And Marx did.

Take your Victorian anti-suffrage woman.  She lived a pretty contented life, and in her experience she didn’t need the vote.  And if you’re going to say “but what about her sisters?”  Her sisters probably had similar lives.  If you mean other women in general, a woman of that time and class remembered the French revolution and was likely to have a sneering disdain for all lower classes.  These were not her sisters.  And the lower class men were not her brothers either. The whole idea would seem absurd to her.  Before you condemn her ask yourself “Why shouldn’t it?  What reason did she have to think of herself as belonging to any group? Why should she fight for more than what guaranteed the best life for her and her immediate loved ones?” (Bringing up nonsense about “false consciousness” and “group betrayal” is not thinking, it’s tourettes.  You’re assuming again that Marx was right. This is some leap of faith since his ideas have yet to work on real people.)

Now, take me.  Yes, I have a vagina.  I checked this morning.  It was still there.  BUT I have a lot of other circumstances in my life.  I have two sons, for instance – sons I’ve seen systematically discriminated against in school starting with the type of work required (group work is deadly for boys.  It’s also dominant now) to the style of teaching (most male brains learn more visually and kinetically.  Most teaching is verbal)  WHY would you presume I’m more interested in bullying males and getting more and more benes for my as yet non-existent female descendants, rather than in fighting for my sons to have at least the same basic treatment as their female peers?  Or, presuming I’ll have female descendants some day (I could have all granddaughters) and I can’t know, WHY would you presume, since I have kids and I don’t know what the future will be, I would want anything beyond “equality under the law?”

Leaving all that aside why would you presume I have more in common with a single woman working in a factory somewhere in the Midwest than with a married man with sons who writes articles for a living a hundred miles away?  What earthly sense does that make?

And before you lecture me about how Marxism envisions people as belonging to several interest groups – thank you muchly.  I was raised in a country that was going head over heels for Marxism.  I studied Marx in several classes.  I also had the dubious pleasure, a few months ago, of reading what earnest Utopian American Marxists in the seventies viewed as the ideal system of government.  It was bewildering and vomit-inducing.  They wanted the country organized into “soviets” (in real soviet, country organizes you) each of them representing an interest group to which you “belonged” in some way.  For instance, take me (please) I’d be in the women’s soviet, the Colorado soviet, the mother’s soviet, the Latino soviet and – presumably – the intellectuals soviet (Okay, for minus three seconds, after which I’d be in the Gulag soviet.)  Each of these would elect representatives.

And none of these would represent anyone.  For these to work, it presupposes that you have more than a marginal interest in common with other people in the same group.  Heck, even if you put me in the “Portuguese immigrants soviet” I’d have barely nothing in common with most of them because for one most don’t come from my part of the country and very few write or read SF (Okay Larry Correia, but he’s third generation.  Also, I’d be more likely to be with him in the Gulag soviet.)

The essential failure of making individuals go through groups with which they share a characteristic, is that ultimately groups are too amorphous for the representative to represent anything but himself. The last irreducible group is one.  Which is why our system establishes rights of the individual and equality under the law.  ANYTHING else, no matter how “progressive” it sounds is a shambling step back into the mists of tribalism and irrational group think.

(And yes, I realize group people by region as we do has its issues too.  OTOH if your city is razed, it kind of matters to you.  But I’m not saying that representation in other ways can’t or shouldn’t be considered.  I’m just saying multiplying the number of “representatives” and subtracting from the individual is not a step in the right direction.  And that groups aren’t as obvious as you think.)

The only place where it is appropriate for me to “think as a woman” or fight for an issue “as a woman” is the type of situation as in Arab countries where women AS A WHOLE are subjected to prohibitions in driving, working, learning or dressing the way they please (and no, it couldn’t happen here.  NEVER to that extent.  It’s the result of complex forces of culture and history.  Correction: It couldn’t happen here that fast and without some serious foundational changes.)  That fight has been fought for me already, and I’m guaranteed life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.  Oh, yeah, and equality under the law.  And I will fight for those for EVERYONE, man, woman or yet undiscovered sentient being.  Yes, even against a group to which I nominally belong because you think I do.

And now that we’ve gone through why that comment was stupid and irrelevant in general and in particular, let’s talk about why it was wrong as a comment to put in my blog…

Having unpacked the levels of unthinking and unreasoning repetition of college-learning in that comment, we can now stand back and be amazed at the staggering arrogance of it.  To wit, the person making it assumes that a) I’d never heard it.  b) I’d never studied history.  c) I didn’t have the ability to reflect upon my situation in the light of history.

Given that this is the blog of – forget formal education – someone who is addicted to books, interested in history, and who has written historical fiction, the hubris in that comment is staggering.  And it shows something else.  It shows the desperate need to count intellectual superiority over anyone who disagrees with you, without even giving it a moment’s thought.  (None of these people said something like “I’m surprised someone like you didn’t realize” – no, the presumption is always that I never thought in historical or self-reflective terms.)

Make a note of it: if this is the only type of argument you can marshal – one size fits all and regurgitated from college classes – and if you think it will win the discussion, you’ve already lost.

UPDATE:  Welcome instapundit readers!  I normally
 
Progressivism will stop at literally nothing to acheive a "New Man". A rundown of the latest musings, and some of the previous ideas on creating a "New Man". Radical eugenics also was a prominent feature of American Progressive thought (and echoed in Canada, including forced sterilization of people with mental disabilities) in the 1930's; Tommy Douglas was a big supporter of eugenics.

http://pjmedia.com/eddriscoll/2012/03/29/re-engineering-humans/?print=1

Re-Engineering Humans: An Old Solution to Climate Change

Posted By Ed Driscoll On March 29, 2012 @ 2:43 pm In Bobos In Paradise,God And Man At Dupont University,Liberal Fascism,The Assault On Reason,The Future and its Enemies,The New Puritans,The Return of the Primitive | 53 Comments

It’s no coincidence that global warming took off as an issue just as the Soviet Union fell; it’s top-down centralized government’s last best hope of controlling the masses. And like other forms of totalitarian worldviews, it doubles as a religion as well, as Czech President Vaclav Klaus noted late last year:

“I’m convinced that after years of studying the phenomenon, global warming is not the real issue of temperature,” said Klaus, an economist by training. “That is the issue of a new ideology or a new religion. A religion of climate change or a religion of global warming. This is a religion which tells us that the people are responsible for the current, very small increase in temperatures. And they should be punished.”

Of course, it’s no fun for totalitarians unless they can punish people en masse. An article at Live Science titled, “Engineering Humans: A New Solution to Climate Change?” should leave all but the truest believers of “global warming/climate change/climate chaos/whatever it’s called this week” more than a little terrified:

So far, conventional solutions to global warming — new government policies and changes in individual behavior — haven’t delivered. And more radical options, such as pumping sulfur into the atmosphere to counteract warming, pose a great deal of risk.

There may be another route to avoid the potentially disastrous effects of climate change: We can deliberately alter ourselves, three researchers suggest.

Human engineering, as they call it, poses less danger than altering our planet through geoengineering, and it could augment changes to personal behavior or policies to mitigate climate change, they write in an article to be published in the journal Ethics, Policy and the Environment.

“We are serious philosophers, but we might not be entirely serious that people should be doing this,” said Anders Sandberg, one of the authors and an ethicist at Oxford University in the United Kingdom. “What we are arguing is we should be taking a look at this, at the very least.”

Their suggestions

In their article, they put forward a series of suggestions, intended as examples of the sorts of human engineering measures that people could voluntarily adopt. These include:

-Induce intolerance to red meat (think lactose intolerance), since livestock farming accounts for a significant portion of greenhouse gas emissions.

-Make humans smaller to reduce the amount of energy we each need to consume. This could be done by selecting smaller embryos through preimplantation genetic diagnosis, a technique already in use to screen for genetic diseases. “Human engineering could therefore give people the choice between having a greater number of smaller children or a smaller number of larger children,” they write.

-Reduce birthrates by making people smarter, since higher cognitive ability appears linked to lower birthrates. This could be achieved through a variety of means, including better schooling, electrical stimulation of the brain and drugs designed to improve cognitive ability, they propose.

-Treat people with hormones, such as oxytocin, to make us more altruistic and empathetic. As a result, people would be more willing to act as a group and more sensitive to the suffering of animals and other people caused by climate change.

Given the nostalgie de la boue propensities of some of the zaniest of environmentalism’s true believers (read: biggest hypocrites), let’s hope they can build in the Old Spice gene as well.

At the Online Library of Law and Liberty, Jeffrey Bossert Clark pushes back against the concept, in an essay titled “Re-making Man by Choice and Decree:”

A few days ago, the Drudge Report brought me to a link that I thought for a time simply had to be an early April Fool’s Day joke, but is instead dead serious: How Engineering the Human Body Could Combat Climate Change.  In this article, Atlantic correspondent Ross Andersen ably interviews S. Matthew Liao, a professor of philosophy and bioethics at New York University.  Liao and his philosopher co-authors have a forthcoming paper in the journal Ethics, Policy & Environment that proposes genetic engineering and other “biomedical modifications” of body function for the purpose of reducing greenhouse gas emissions. That’s obviously crazy, but it illustrates the absurd lengths to which eco-fanatics will go in the quixotic quest to fix the weather.

Let’s begin with Liao’s defense of his “modest proposal.”  In response to this question, “ome critics are likely to see these techniques as inappropriately interfering with human nature.  What do you say to them?” Liao responded that it’s no different than “giving women epidurals when they’re giving birth,” since that also interferes with human nature.  I think my wife, who requested an epidural when giving birth to our oldest son, would beg to differ.  Liao is clearly proposing prescriptions that are more radical than epidurals — a lot more radical.  By the end of this blog post, you’ll see what I mean.

Don’t worry, says Liao, the reason you get twitchy when you hear that the human race should be re-engineered in some respect is that you “generally worry about interfering for the wrong reasons.  But because we believe that mitigating climate change can help a great many people, we see human engineering in this context as an ethical endeavor, and so that objection may not apply.”  Ah. Until Liao ‘splained things, I failed to see that global warming provides a good reason for changing the human body—even while letting parents genetically select for blue eyes, athleticism, high IQ, or good looks in their future children are all bad reasons for genetic engineering in humans (though Liao never actually explains what an ill-motivated “bad” biomedical modification would be).

If “trust us, we come in peace” doesn’t work for you, consider Liao’s second line of defense:  Your body must be re-made so as to pay for your past sins.  “Andersen:  Taking a look at this from the perspective of deep ecology — is there something to be said for the idea that because climate change is human caused, that humans ought to be the ones that change to mitigate it — that somehow we ought to be bear the cost to fix this?  Liao:  That was actually one of the ideas that motivated us to write this paper, the idea that we cause anthropogenic climate change, and so perhaps we ought to be bear some of the costs required to address it.”  In short, just when you thought hair shirts and self-flagellation were so 1270 A.D., Liao and company are proposing genetic modification as sin expiation — a kind of self-mortification of the bodies of current and future generations.

It’s more than a little ironic that the article at the top of this is titled “Engineering Humans: A New Solution to Climate Change,” since the concept, like many of the elements that make up …oh, call it Liberal Fascism, for want of a better phrase, is itself is nearly a century old.

Genetically engineering the New Man is invariably the goal of each new totalitarian society; in 1980′s The Third Wave, Alvin Toffler pondered if one was needed in today’s era, before running down the earlier Nazi and Soviet attempts to build one. (Since Toffler’s book is inexcusably not yet on Kindle, this passage was OCRed from my dead tree version, apologies if a word is missing or misspelled):

As a novel civilization erupts into our everyday lives we are left wondering whether we, too, are obsolete. With so many of habits, values, routines, and responses called into question, it is hardly surprising if we sometimes feel like people of the past, relics of Second Wave civilization. But if some of us are indeed anachronisms, are there also people of the future among us — anticipatory citizens, as it were, of the Third Wave civilization to come? Once we look past the decay and disintegration around us, can we see emerging outlines of the personality of the future — the coming, so speak, of a “new man”?

If so, it would not be the first time un homme nouveu was supposedly detected on the horizon. In a brilliant essay, André Reszler, director of the Center for European Culture, has described earlier attempts to forecast the coming of a new type of human being. At the end of the eighteenth century there was, for example, the “American Adam” — man born anew in North America, supposedly without the vices and weaknesses of the European. In the middle of the twentieth century, the new man was supposed to appear in Hitler’s Germany. Nazism, wrote Hermann Rauschning, “is more than a religion; it is the will to create the superman.” This sturdy “Aryan” would be part peasant, part warrior, part God. “I have seen the new man,” Hitler once confided to Rauschning. “He is intrepid and cruel. I stood in fear before him.”

The image of a new man (few ever speak of a “new woman,” except as an afterthought) also haunted the Communists. The Soviets speak of the coming of “Socialist Man.” But it was Trotsky who rhapsodized most vividly about the future human. “Man will become incomparably stronger, wiser and more perceptive. His body will become more harmonious, his movements more rhythmical, his voice more melodious. His ways of life will acquire a powerfully dramatic quality. The average man will attain the level of an Aristotle, of a Goethe, of a Marx.”

As recently as a decade or two ago, Frantz Fanon heralded the coming of yet another new man who would have a “new mind.” Che Guevara saw his ideal man of the future as having a richer interior life. Each image is different.

Yet Reszler persuasively points out that behind most of these of the “new man” there lurks that familiar old fellow, the Noble Savage, a mythic creature endowed with all sorts of qualities civilization has supposedly corrupted or worn away. Reszler properly questions this romanticization of the primitive, reminding that regimes which set out consciously to foster a “new man” usually brought totalitarian havoc in their wake.

It would be foolish, therefore, to herald yet once more the birth of a “new man” (unless, now that the genetic engineers are at work, we mean that in a frightening, strictly biological sense). The idea suggests a prototype, a single ideal model that the entire civilization strains to emulate. And in a society moving rapidly toward de-massification, nothing is more unlikely.

In his post yesterday in the context of ObamaCare, Andrew Klavan explored “How Nice People Crush Freedom:”

In other words, there’s always a good reason to take your freedom away — your health, the poor, your evil opinions, the lousy way you raise your kids — and never a reason to preserve freedom except the love of freedom itself. Thus, so often, the people destroying the American way of life are actually nice people who just want to help.

As C.S. Lewis observed:

Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.

Conscience? I’m sure we can genetically extricate that…

Related: At the Weekly Standard, Andrew Ferguson on “Declaring War on Newborns — The disgrace of medical ethics.”

Article printed from Ed Driscoll: http://pjmedia.com/eddriscoll

URL to article: http://pjmedia.com/eddriscoll/2012/03/29/re-engineering-humans/
 
Looking at the Ontario and just concluded Alberta election, we can see these same ideas in action. For people on the Classical Liberal/Libertarian/Conservative/conservative side, it is vitally important to know and understand what we are dealing with, and how to carry the fight:

http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/296899/primo-obama-michael-walsh

Primo Obama
By Michael Walsh
April 24, 2012 8:34 P.M. Comments38
Over at PJ Media, the Vodkapundit, Stephen Green, picks up on on something I’ve been saying for a while now:

Obama, unlike Bush ’04, has enjoyed a mostly friendly press. He — and his Chicago/Axelrod Machine — still hasn’t really been tested. The United States is not Chicago. A national race is not a Democratic primary. The fresh-faced challenger is now the dour incumbent with a crappy record. And a friendly media doesn’t mean what it once did, now in the age of Twitter.

That’s why we saw David Axelrod flop-sweating on Fox News Sunday. That’s why almost every Democrat in America has put distance between themselves and OWS. (Did I say “distance”? Roseanne’s dipping pool covers less acreage.) And now we see War after senseless War — and none of them causing much damage to Mitt Romney. Romney has taken some hits, sure, but Obama has gained zero traction (Obama eats dogs, cough, cough). In fact, there’s some evidence that these left-wing attacks are doing the impossible — getting the GOP base excited about Romney.

“Excited about Romney.” That has got to be some kind of oxymoron. And yet, Team Obama is making it real. See, you can always rile up the Democratic base with a fictional “War on Women.” But the nation as a whole won’t buy it. But Team Obama just doesn’t have enough real-world, battle-tested experience to understand this simple fact of politics.

So I think I’d better shut up now, before I give the game away.

I’ve been pretty outspoken in my belief that Mitt Romney will lose to Obama this fall — unless he learns to turn the Left’s dreary litany of tawdry smears back against them. And, on current evidence, he has. Jim Treacher may have been the originator of the #ObamaEatsDogs meme — accomplished by the simple expedient of actually reading “the best-written memoir ever produced by a politician” (and almost certainly ghost-written by somebody else — why doesn’t some enterprising MSM reporter track down Obama’s former literary agent, Jane Dystel, and ask her who really wrote Dreams From My Father? It’s not like she’s in hiding) — but the campaign has been smart to let it take its viral course, instead of tut-tutting about it, the way McCain would have.

The entire “progressive” edifice is a Potemkin village, a Hollywood set, that looks formidable from the exterior. But in reality, there’s no there there, except the liberal fascists’ standard naked will to power by any means necessary. Because their tactics are always the same (smear, bully, intimidate, whine, and complain), they’re something of a humorless bore, really, although a dangerous humorless bore — a fanatic constantly in search of force majeure. Team Romney [insert party of choice here] must simply and forcefully reject the premises of their argument — Democrats good, Republicans bad — and refuse to play by their MSM-enforced rules.

Like Primo Carnera, whose every fight was fixed until he found himself in the ring with someone who didn’t get the memo, the lefties overestimate their own potency, and are undiscouraged even when their temporary successes (Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union) come crashing down with body counts in the high millions. It’s never the ideology, but always the execution. Practical atheists nearly to a man, they have a zealot’s faith in their own diabolical ideology, and a troglodyte conservative’s unwillingness to let go of the tried and untrue. Talk about “internal contradictions“!

Which is why the dog meme has legs. Derision is wolf bane to the Left; “The best way to drive out the devil, if he will not yield to texts of Scripture, is to jeer and flout him, for he cannot bear scorn,” said Martin Luther. Or, as St. Thomas More noted, “The devil . . . the prowde spirite . . . cannot endure to be mocked.” It’s a punch, thrown right at Barry’s midsection, and the whoosh of the air going out of both man and myth is rushing across the land.
 
Thucydides said:
Looking at the Ontario and just concluded Alberta election, we can see these same ideas in action. For people on the Classical Liberal/Libertarian/Conservative/conservative side, it is vitally important to know and understand what we are dealing with, and how to carry the fight:

http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/296899/primo-obama-michael-walsh

I get a laugh out of these pieces, especially when they throw in terms as laughable as "liberal fascists", referring to Jonah Goldberg's extremely awkward attempt to reinvent the political spectrum and to do his best to quotemine in order to cast fascism as a "left" ideology, when while it doesn't fit on a single axis "left-right" spectrum, it has little in common with the ideas of the left when compared to the ideas of the right. I can only assume that William F. Buckley spins in his grave constantly seeing what a mockery Goldberg has made of the institution he built. The online edition fired columnist John Derbyshire for a racist rant that was originally defended as satire (except without any humour value), but couldn't provide much of an explanation of how it got past editors in the first place.

But what I found most hysterical, the real knee-slapper in this, was the claim that the "Obama Eats Dogs" meme "has legs". It does? Really? Amongst who? A bunch of right wingers who don't actually realize how ridiculous it is to compare the idea that a very young Barack Obama, living in Indonesia, ate what he was served for dinner? Well, if that gets them riled up, what exactly does that accomplish, given that there was no danger of them voting Democratic to begin with? When that meme emerged, it seemed to be a response to the revelation that 2012 Presidential Election Second Place finisher (presumptive) Romney locked his dog in a carrier on the roof of his car while making a day long car trip, something that people thought was pretty outrageous. To suggest that one cancels out the other is a little rich for me. What would actually matter is how voters who aren't decided will take it, and I don't think they'll get much mileage out of that.

To me, here's the difference. The "left" in the States has generally built cases around issues - the "war on women" being one of the most successful issues. Their goal is to make use of whatever means of communicating with potential voters they can to work on issues. The "right" does so as well - but in a lot of cases, they're either defending things that the Democrats can counter somewhat effectively, or they're reacting and generally flailing. If you watch social media, a lot of the "big names" who are GOP supporters tend to have build a lot of ad hominem into their efforts, more than the Democrat supporters do. They'll use a variety of what are aptly referred to as "dog whistles", things that rile up their compatriots, and the content, sadly, tends to have not even subtle racist overtones. The obsession with President Obama's middle name, for example. As though it's somehow a determinant of his character.

In order to accomplish anything, messaging has to cater to the middle - the independents, the undecideds, the wavering. Which ever side can do that more effectively will attract and retain voters. In assessing the messages you have to dismiss the fringes of both sides, and there's loads on both sides, but the cogent messages are what matters. What's interesting is that much of the Democratic rhetoric is based on turning the GOP's rhetoric back on them. For example, recently someone in the Romney camp suggested that the GOP economic plan will be Bush's program, updated. A program which, rather clearly, failed. So rather than having to argue their own platform, the Dems need only say "this guy's plan is to go back to something that already failed, why would we want that?!"

It gives them the ability to be aloof about their own platform, and while we've discussed ad nauseum the relatively low value of polls, it seems to be working.
 
Redeye said:
To me, here's the difference. The "left" in the States has generally built cases around issues - the "war on women" being one of the most successful issues.


Ummm.. wasn't the most recent salvo in the "war on women" fired by a Democratic staffer against Mrs Romney? A hit that was in my opinion quite significantly below the belt.
 
ModlrMike said:
Ummm.. wasn't the most recent salvo in the "war on women" fired by a Democratic staffer against Mrs Romney? A hit that was in my opinion quite significantly below the belt.

Yes. It was. And I agree. But that's one tiny sliver of something much bigger.
 
This article is very interesting in showing how people on the Liberal/Progressive side of the divide see the world. I can anecdotaly attest to the accuracy of the model from discussions with Canadians on various sides of the political divide as well; NDP and many LPC supporters simply don't "get" what is being said or done by Classical Liberals, Libertarians, Conservatives or conservatives. Political operatives for the CPC and small c parties like the Saskatchewan Party and Wildrose Alliance should be able to take advantage of these observations:

http://pjmedia.com/blog/the-asymmetry-of-ideology/?print=1

The Asymmetry of Ideology
Posted By Rand Simberg On April 26, 2012 @ 12:00 am In Culture,Politics,US News | 60 Comments

Last month, former Vice President Cheney got a heart transplant [1], something that he had needed for years. Happily, he’s doing well, which apparently upsets the Left to no end [2]:

In Herald online comments, reader Dustycc53 remarked: “Wasted on a war criminal. Hey Dick how many kids did your lies kill? Thats ok, hell can wait a little longer.” A website joked Cheney’s operation failed because “surgeons mistakenly transplanted the bleeding heart of a liberal” into the unflinchingly hawkish veep.

“Damn. No more jokes about Cheney not having a pulse,” tweeted liberal blogger Dan Kennedy, a Northeastern University assistant professor. “Cheney’s only remaining medical problem is no reflection when he looks in the mirror.” He added defensively later, “Hey, it’s a great day for the Cheneys. Why shouldn’t we have some fun?”

While Bush derangement syndrome raged throughout his presidency, it never held a candle to the hatred for the vice president. Whence all of the vicious vitriol?

University of Virginia psychology professor Jonathan Haidt has been doing some interesting research on what makes “liberals” (that is to say, Leftists, since they’re not really liberal at all) and conservatives tick and recently wrote a book on the topic. It explains a remarkable amount about current (and not-so-current) events. It is all the more interesting because he seems to be a recovering “liberal” himself. Here’s the deal, from the New York Times book review [3]:

Anecdotally, he reports that when he talks about authority, loyalty and sanctity, many people in the [liberal] audience spurn these ideas as the seeds of racism, sexism and homophobia. And in a survey of 2,000 Americans, Haidt found that self-described liberals, especially those who called themselves “very liberal,” were worse at predicting the moral judgments of moderates and conservatives than moderates and conservatives were at predicting the moral judgments of liberals. Liberals don’t understand conservative values. And they can’t recognize this failing, because they’re so convinced of their rationality, open-mindedness and enlightenment.

A recent issue of Reason magazine for which he was the cover child (literally, in a sense) elaborates. The work is based on research in which he asked value-loaded questions of two thousand self-described liberals and conservatives. A third were asked to answer in their own opinions, a third were asked to answer with what they imagined would be “typical liberal” opinions, and the remaining were asked to answer with what they thought a “typical conservative” would think:

This design allowed us to examine the stereotypes that each side held about the other. More important, it allowed us to assess how accurate they were by comparing peoples’ expectations about “typical” partisans to the actual responses from partisans on the left and right. Who was best able to pretend to be the other?

The results were clear and consistent. Moderates and conservatives were most accurate in their predictions, whether they were pretending to be liberals or conservatives. Liberals were least accurate, especially those who described themselves as “very liberal.” The biggest errors in the study came when liberals answer care and fairness questions while pretending to be conservatives. When faced with statements such as “one of the worst things one can do is to hurt a defenseless animal” or “justice is the most important requirement for a society,” liberals assumed that conservatives would disagree. If you have a moral matrix built primarily on intuitions about care and fairness (as equality) and you listen to the Reagan narrative, what else could you think? Reagan seems completely unconcerned about the welfare of drug addicts, poor people and gay people. He is more interested in fighting wars and telling people how to run their sex lives.

Clearly, the Left views Cheney through the same Alice-in-Evil-Land mirror, to the point that they don’t believe that he deserves to live. Haidt elaborates:

If you don’t see that Reagan is pursuing positive values of loyalty, authority and sanctity, you almost have to conclude that Republicans see no positive value in care and fairness. You might even go so far as Michael Feingold, theater critic for The Village Voice, when he wrote in 2004, “Republicans don’t believe in the imagination, partly because so few of them have one, but mostly because it gets in the way of their chosen work, which is to destroy the human race and the plan…Which is why I personally think they should be exterminated before they cause any more harm.” One of the [many] ironies in this quotation is that is shows the inability of a theater critic -– who skillfully enters fantastical imaginary worlds for a living — to imagine that Republicans operate within a moral matrix that differs from his own.

Again, emphasis mine.  Note the Leftist eliminationist rhetoric from the people who deign to lecture us, the great unwashed, about civility. Another irony is that he is no doubt hyperconfident of his ability to see into the hearts of conservative darkness, which is really just an example of the Dunning-Kruger Effect [4], described as “…a cognitive bias in which the unskilled suffer from illusory superiority, mistakenly rating their ability much higher than average. This bias is attributed to a metacognitive inability of the unskilled to recognize their mistakes”:

The hypothesized phenomenon was tested in a series of experiments performed by Justin Kruger and David Dunning, both then of Cornell University.[2][5] Kruger and Dunning noted earlier studies suggesting that ignorance of standards of performance is behind a great deal of incompetence. This pattern was seen in studies of skills as diverse as reading comprehension, operating a motor vehicle, and playing chess or tennis.

Kruger and Dunning proposed that, for a given skill, incompetent people will:

tend to overestimate their own level of skill;
fail to recognize genuine skill in others;
fail to recognize the extremity of their inadequacy;
recognize and acknowledge their own previous lack of skill, if they can be trained to substantially improve.
This would also go a long way to explain how conservatives can survive in Hollywood [5]:

One of the more amusing and obvious effects of this is seen in writing, especially in Hollywood, where conservative writers can write fully developed liberal characters (and most have to if they want to keep working), whereas liberal writers’ attempts at writing a conservative character invariably produce a laughably bad, two-dimensional caricature. Conservatives and liberals then watch two different movies. The liberals think the conservative characters are spot on, while conservatives instantly recognize that they’re watching yet another amateur attempt by an idiot liberal writer who doesn’t have the vaguest idea how a conservative thinks.

As one more data point, the phenomenon was on full display in the recent controversy over the Heartland document on teaching science, in which many of the Leftist warm mongers continue to fantasize [6] that the faked Heartland document is real. On the other hand, it was almost immediately obvious to those on the other side, even those sympathetic to the AGW thesis, such as (libertarian) Megan McArdle, that it was faked, because no conservative would have written such a thing in such a way. As she noted [7], it read like “it was written from the secret villain lair in a Batman comic. By an intern.”

Peter Gleick wrote [8]it that way, and his partners in fraud thought it perfectly plausible, exactly because they fundamentally lack this ability to understand the motivations of their political opponents. And by Haidt’s thesis, they are, by the nature of their belief system, unable to rectify this problem. So perhaps the rest of us should take note, take heart, and most importantly in the coming months, take advantage.

Article printed from PJ Media: http://pjmedia.com

URL to article: http://pjmedia.com/blog/the-asymmetry-of-ideology/

URLs in this post:

[1] got a heart transplant: http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/story/2012-03-24/cheney-heart-surgery/53754802/1
[2] upsets the Left to no end: http://www.bostonherald.com/news/politics/view.bg?articleid=1061120044
[3] New York Times book review: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/25/books/review/the-righteous-mind-by-jonathan-haidt.html
[4] Dunning-Kruger Effect: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
[5] how conservatives can survive in Hollywood: http://www.transterrestrial.com/?p=41454#comment-271824
[6] continue to fantasize: http://desmogblog.com/evaluation-shows-faked-heartland-climate-strategy-memo-authentic
[7] she noted: http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/02/leaked-docs-from-heartland-institute-cause-a-stir-but-is-one-a-fake/253165/
[8] Peter Gleick wrote : http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,2107364,00.html
 
>awkward attempt to reinvent the political spectrum

Fascism has never properly been on the right.  Fascism is Mussolini's child, and is well summed-up by his dictum: "Everything in the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State".  That is not a right-wing doctrine; it has absolutely nothing in it which remotely resembles individualist/minarchist doctrines.  The notion of fascism being "on the right" was championed by Stalin and his dutiful fart-catchers: it was an attempt to set themselves apart in what was really a turf war (pseudo-religious schism) over ownership of the far left of the political spectrum.  That is all well-established, uncontroversial historical fact.  The misuse of "fascism" suits a lot of people today as a paintbrush to associate right-wingers with, pointedly, Nazism - and is why the bullsh!t continues - but the proper nature of the political system remains the same and remains a doctrine of the political left: if there is a "fascism" on the right, it isn't "fascism" as fascism was originally created, just as "gay" today has been co-opted to mean something than it originally did.

People who believe fascism is right-wing - and there are large numbers of them, including some who are very educated and capable of knowing better if they just read the history - are mistaken, if not deliberately dishonest.

The best current example is Hugo Chavez.  Is he a fascist or a socialist?  Basically, he exhibits all the signatures of a fascist right up until the point at which someone (eg. a corporation) fails to follow his dictates, at which point he nationalizes or confiscates whatever is at stake, thus flipping the switch to socialist.  He elegantly illustrates how intimately joined fascism and socialism (or communism, if you prefer) are, differing only on a mere question of ownership.
 
>The "left" in the States has generally built cases around issues - the "war on women" being one of the most successful issues.

If you mean as an appeal to ignorance, you may be correct.  If you mean as a genuine issue worthy of serious debate, I find you in error.  The refusal of Catholic institutions to directly fund contraception had to be twisted pretty hard to be seen as a "war on women", given that a mere refusal to pay does not amount to a forceful denial.  And after that - what exactly is left, except several years of well-documented vitriol perpetrated by (presumably) Democratic party supporters against women whose crime was failing to toe the Democratic party line/narrative/expectation.  This is the party that presented John Edwards as its vice presidential candidate in 2004.
 
Brad Sallows said:
>awkward attempt to reinvent the political spectrum

Fascism has never properly been on the right.  Fascism is Mussolini's child, and is well summed-up by his dictum: "Everything in the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State".  That is not a right-wing doctrine; it has absolutely nothing in it which remotely resembles individualist/minarchist doctrines.  The notion of fascism being "on the right" was championed by Stalin and his dutiful fart-catchers: it was an attempt to set themselves apart in what was really a turf war (pseudo-religious schism) over ownership of the far left of the political spectrum.  That is all well-established, uncontroversial historical fact.  The misuse of "fascism" suits a lot of people today as a paintbrush to associate right-wingers with, pointedly, Nazism - and is why the bullsh!t continues - but the proper nature of the political system remains the same and remains a doctrine of the political left: if there is a "fascism" on the right, it isn't "fascism" as fascism was originally created, just as "gay" today has been co-opted to mean something than it originally did.

People who believe fascism is right-wing - and there are large numbers of them, including some who are very educated and capable of knowing better if they just read the history - are mistaken, if not deliberately dishonest.

Actually - simplistic conventional political science has basically always but it on the extreme right, just like Nazism which is something of a derivative. It's become a colloquial term for any sort of oppressive governance. It has never been properly mapped on any sort of single access linear spectrum and cannot be, so no, it's not properly on the right. Likewise, it doesn't fit on the left either, despite recent efforts to try to lump it in. It's syncretic, it doesn't fit any easy labeling system we use. However, many of the traits of fascism - fusion of state and business interests, extreme nationalism, etc do not fit the left - and that's what alarms a lot of the "left" - that businesses are at the point of being able to heavily lobby - or by extension even buy governments, courts, etc that suit their fancy. Witness the backlash against ALEC in the States, the continuing debate over Citizens United, etc.

Brad Sallows said:
The best current example is Hugo Chavez.  Is he a fascist or a socialist?  Basically, he exhibits all the signatures of a fascist right up until the point at which someone (eg. a corporation) fails to follow his dictates, at which point he nationalizes or confiscates whatever is at stake, thus flipping the switch to socialist.  He elegantly illustrates how intimately joined fascism and socialism (or communism, if you prefer) are, differing only on a mere question of ownership.

They have similiarities - but there's more differences than ownership - the concept of national identity, the view of egalitarianism, etc.

The interesting thing missing with Chavez is a narrow nationalist bent. Chavez often talks in terms of a supranational identity though, of his "Bolivarian socialism", a political approach he feels is uniquely applicable to his region. I can agree with the suggestion that some of his policies look clearly from the fascist playbook, at least at first. His initial efforts were to push private enterprise to better serve the interests of the state - specifically to deal with massive disparity of wealth and widespread poverty. He took some influences from fascism I suspect, and also from Cuba's Revolution (from which the concept of his "Bolivarian Missions" arose - especially things like literacy programs).

One of the defining features of socialism that is opposed by fascism is egalitarianism - Chavez definitely looks like an egalitarian. I don't know how best to label him. His initial platform of wanting to make sure that Venezuelans benefit from their natural resource wealth has gone a little off the rails, but it still gets a fair bit of support - and that shift has happened elsewhere in Latin America over the years - Brazil and Bolivia come to mind.

When it comes to the "war on women" the nonsense over the Catholic church and birth control (which has seemed to die down almost completely) was one thing. Interestingly, it showed the ugly underbelly of a lot of American conservatives, and fanned a lot of flames. It did as I understand it shift poll numbers, and probably got a lot of women more interested in what was going on. There's also been discussion/debate over things like domestic violence, pay equity, and the attack on Obamacare (which removes sex discrimination from insurance policy pricing), and that's got people talking. I don't see how the GOP sees much good coming from alienating a large group of female voters.
 
Rather than just trying to rehash it, Wikipedia's "Economics of Fascism" does a pretty good job of explaining fascist perspectives on economics, which helps lay out the difference between fascism and socialism. The reason that the left draws comparisons between fascism and what they'll generally label as "neoliberal" or "neoconservative" governments is the privatization of profits and socialization of losses of private businesses. They can then extend that argument to things like environmental policy, for example, by arguing that private profit is protected, but the costs in terms of externalities like pollution are borne by all rather than those who cause them.

No model described therein describes my understanding of Venezuela's politics, but neither does socialism - it's some sort of fusion.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics_of_fascism
 
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