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Chicagoboyz community member John Wolfsberger, Jr. emails:

I actually feel some sympathy for Elizabeth Warren. She was a law professor, unfairly besieged by the republican War on Women (TM), apparently sitting alone in the faculty lounge. In an effort to meet new people and make some friends, she decided to make herself more interesting by revealing her Native American Ancestry. She really did nothing wrong.
 
However, the incident has led me to an interesting insight. Ms. Warren tells us she is 1/32 Native American based on her great, great, great grandmother being Cherokee. For simplicity sake, let’s refer to her as the g3 grandmother. It occurred to me that if two of her g4 grandparents had been Cherokee, but parents of different g3 grandparents, Ms. Warren could still be considered 1/32 Native American. Furthermore, if 4 of Ms. Warrens g5 grandparents had been Native American, and parents of different g4 grandparents, Ms. Warren would still be 1/32 Native American. And so on.
 
That insight led me to a bit of research. Homo ergaster, the forerunner of Homo Sapiens (which is all of us) left Africa between 1.8 and 1.3 million years ago. Taking the nominal value as 1.5 million years, and assuming 20 years per generation, that means my (roughly) g75,000 grandparents were ALL African. True, more recent ancestors lived in Bavaria, the Vorarlberg and Ireland, but they were ALL African as well, by THEIR (roughly) g74,997 grandparents.
 
Since every single one of my ancestors was African, shouldn’t I be able, a la Ms. Warren, to claim minority status as an African American? And if I can, shouldn’t everyone else in the United States be able to as well, regardless of where their more recent ancestors resided for a time?
 
This seems eminently reasonable. There is only one issue to resolve: if we all belong to the exact same Victim Group (TM), who’s the oppressor group?

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Via Martin Kramer, who asks: “What happens to aging ’60s American Jewish radicals after the kids move out, the dog dies, and their parents (may they rest in peace), who so valued and cherished Israel, have passed on to their heavenly reward?”

If the trailer is representative, this is a slick piece of agitprop packaged as folksy interviews with thoughtful Jewish intellectuals who just happen to have doubts about Israel, no doubt because their integrity and independent-mindedness let them see clearly the evils of Israel that other Jews (and most non-Jewish Americans) are brainwashed into overlooking. In fact this is a bunch of leftist hacks repeating buzzwords (apartheid etc.) and citing events pruned of context to single out Israel for demonization. The woman in the last interview gives the game away by blaming Israel for the “stateless” condition of Palestinian refugees, even though Palestinian Arab statelessness, to the extent it still exists, is a racket maintained by Arab governments and the Palestinians themselves, and even though the post-WW2 world has had many refugee populations that dwarfed the Palestinian Arab refugee population and that, unlike the Palestinians, were mostly resettled within a few years. The difference is that people like those in this movie couldn’t use those other refugee populations as a weapon against the Jews. You would have to be profoundly ignorant to find this movie convincing, but ignorant people seem to be the target audience. Watch it for yourself.

I was fortunate to have had in high school a leftist, anti-Semitic history teacher, a man who was an enthusiast of Third World “liberation” movements run by kleptocrats and gangsters but who put Israel under a moral microscope. The Israeli Jews, as he saw it, had treated the Palestinian Arabs unjustly by (he would quote a particular historian whose book he always had at the ready) expelling them and this unjust treatment colored everything that Israel did subsequently. Two wrongs — an allusion to the Holocaust — don’t make a right. We should all be citizens of the world and should drop our parochialisms and be happy. Of course he mainly applied this argument to the Jews, and I was not clever enough to point out that the Jews’ enemies had often persecuted them for supposedly being too worldly. I argued, and learned a great deal in that class, and watching this movie trailer transports me right back to it. Shabbat shalom.

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How Obama makes decisions.

Excerpt:

Ron Suskind’s book Confidence Men portrays Barack Obama as being confounded by his duties as president. Some of the scenes depicted by Suskind would be comical if they were not so tragic for America.

Presidential exhortations more befitting a summer camp counselor will evoke such reactions.

Several months ago, I cited a study of Woodrow Wilson written by Sigmund Freud and William Bullitt:

Throughout his life he took intense interest only in subjects which could somehow be connected with speech…He took no interest in mathematics, science, art or music–except in singing himself, a form of speaking. His method of thinking about a subject seems to have been to imagine himself making a speech about it…He seems to have thought about political or economic problems only when he was preparing to make a speech about them either on paper or from the rostrum. His memory was undoubtedly of the vaso-motor type. The use of his vocal chords was to him inseparable from thinking.

To Obama, it’s all about the speeches, all about the hype. Despite his faux reputation as an intellectual, the man has remarkably little interest in contemplation, analysis, or problem-solving.

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Beware the irrational, however seductive. Shun the ‘transcendent’ and all who invited you to subordinate or annihilate yourself. Distrust compassion; prefer dignity for yourself and others. Don’t be afraid to be thought arrogant or selfish. Picture all experts as if they were mammals. Never be a spectator of unfairness or stupidity. Seek out argument and disputation for their own sake; the grave will supply plenty of time for silence. Suspect your own motives, and all excuses. Do not live for others any more than you would expect others to live for you.

-Christopher Hitchems, Letters to a Young Contrarian

(Via Alan Johnson)

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A Flesch-Kinkaid analysis of State of the Union addresses says that Obama’s speech last night was at a grade level of 8.4. By comparison, JFK’s inaugural was at a level of 12.0, Richard Nixon was 11.5, George H W Bush was 8.6, and George W Bush was 10.4.

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Richard Fernandez:

There will always be those who’d like to abstract the candy from the candy store. But it is the shopkeeper’s responsibility to keep that from happening. Conservatives cannot simply hope that progressives will behave themselves. Boys will be boys and progressives will be progressives.
 
The supine acquiescence and collaboration in centralizing government over the last 3 decades has led to the point where a candidacy like Obama’s was not only possible but inevitable. His election is a symptom, not the primary cause of it of what ails the body politic.
 
The man himself can’t be blamed for taking his ambitions and ideology as far as they will go. It is those who let him pass that shows how low the rot within what passes for conservatism has fallen. Conservatism has basically been reduced to behaving well. To politely choose between the milquetoast offerings the press serves up and do nothing to make waves.
 
Anyone who so much as threatens to cause the slightest amount of controversy is branded a wacko — ironically not just by the Democrats but all too often by conservatives who are obsessed with the cult of respectability. Thus Palin, Bachman, Cain, Gingrich and Paul are faulted not so much for their personal failings — which any politician has — but for being disreputable. And being disrepute in today’s conservative world often consists in daring to think a single original thought.
 
By contrast, ‘progressives’ are psychologically conditioned to challenge and even subvert the system. They see that as their job. Others may criticize them, but their Base at least, will cheer them on. Implicit in the ‘progressive’ brand name is the idea of loyalty to the future, not so some transient present or disposable past. So when City Journal’s Siegel and Kotkin write that Obama is perfectly capable of trying to remake the US into a version of China they mean it. After all, politicians of 1940s dreamed of making America like the Soviet Union.
 

A victorious Obama administration could embrace a soft version of the Chinese model. The mechanisms of control already exist. The bureaucratic apparatus, the array of policy czars and regulatory enforcers commissioned by the executive branch, has grown dramatically under Obama. Their ability to control and prosecute people for violations relating to issues like labor and the environment—once largely the province of states and localities—can be further enhanced.

 
But it’s dollars to donuts that any ‘reputable’ conservative asked to comment on Siegel and Klotkin’s article would vehemently deny that such a thing is possible, not because it isn’t — which would be a good reason if it were true — but because it’s impossible for a conservative to admit a progressive can be a progressive.
 
CS Lewis wrote that the biggest trick the devil ever pulled was to make people believe he didn’t exist. Similarly the greatest conjury progressivism has ever peformed was to make their political opponents believe it was shameful to accept that progressives could ever be anything but slightly racier versions of themselves.

Eric Trager (via Martin Kramer):

The Muslim Brotherhood’s Radical Plan for Egypt
January 10, 2012
 
Given the Muslim Brotherhood’s anti-Western outlook, Washington must prepare for the strong possibility that it will hold only limited influence with Egypt’s next government.
 
When the third and final round of Egypt’s parliamentary elections concludes tomorrow, the Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party (FJP) is widely expected to cement its dominance of the next legislature. Although the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces still holds executive power, the FJP’s political victory promises radical changes for Egypt, including a theocratic domestic program and a confrontational foreign policy. The United States should have no illusions about the party’s aims or ability to moderate. As long as the FJP is in power, Washington should condition future bilateral relations on its behavior regarding key U.S. interests, including the treatment of religious minorities, Egypt’s peace treaty with Israel, and counterterrorism.
 
A Theocratic Domestic Policy
 
The FJP’s overriding aim is to establish an Islamic state in which sharia would be the primary source of legislation. Although FJP leaders correctly note that “sharia principles were a main source of legislation” under Article II of the 1971 constitution, which was suspended following Mubarak’s ouster, the party intends to implement sharia-based laws far more comprehensively than was previously done. The FJP platform states that “sharia, in its essence…organizes the various aspects of life for Muslims and those non-Muslims who participate in the state with them.” The party’s theocratic aims are therefore likely to change many aspects of Egypt’s domestic policy.
[...]
 
A Confrontational Foreign Policy
 
The Brotherhood is similarly signaling its preference for radicalism over realism in foreign affairs. For example, Supreme Guide Muhammad Badie recently declared that, after forming the new government, the organization would pursue its final goal of establishing a “rightly guided caliphate for the education of the world.” This goal may be unrealistic in the short term, but the Brotherhood is already working through the FJP to tilt Egypt away from its Western allies and toward an Islamist foreign policy.
 
The peace treaty with Israel will likely be the first casualty of an FJP-led government. Although the party has said that it will honor Egypt’s international agreements, it has carved out an exception for the Camp David Accords, which it intends to put to a national referendum, thereby shielding itself from direct responsibility for the treaty’s demise. Meanwhile, the Brotherhood has amplified its confrontational posture toward Israel in recent weeks by vowing never to recognize the state and warmly greeting Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Cairo.
 
Not Likely to Moderate
 
It is tempting to believe that the FJP will moderate once in power, but four factors make this highly unlikely. First, although the Brotherhood has frequently portrayed the FJP as a separate entity, the distinction between the “organization” and its “political wing” is superficial. The Brotherhood’s fifteen-member Guidance Office elected the FJP’s leaders, all of whom are former members of that office. Moreover, the choice of hardliner Muhammad Morsi as the FJP’s first chairman suggested that the Brotherhood was committed to ensuring the party would not veer from its parent organization’s principles.
 
Second, the Brotherhood ensures the FJP’s ideological rigidity by retaining direct control over its parliamentary nomination process. The new FJP parliamentarians are all longtime Muslim Brothers whose candidacies were thoroughly vetted by multiple layers of the organization’s leadership.
 
Third, the emergence of the Salafist Nour Party as Egypt’s second-strongest faction makes moderation a strategically dangerous choice for the FJP. Much of the Nour Party’s appeal is based on its claim to represent the “true” Islam, making it a respected arbiter of Islamic principles within Egyptian politics. The FJP thus risks losing support among an overwhelmingly religious electorate if it is perceived to be veering from its Islamist doctrine. It is particularly unlikely to disagree with the Nour Party on basic Quranic principles such as the bans on usury and alcohol.
 
Finally, the FJP has invited al-Gamaa al-Islamiyah, a U.S.-designated terrorist organization, to join its future governing coalition. The inclusion of this radical, historically violent faction further reduces the likelihood of the Brotherhood pursuing a moderate agenda, and will severely complicate U.S. efforts to cooperate with the next Egyptian cabinet.
[...]

The quoted passages share a common quality of cutting through what their authors see as other people’s illusions. Are they right to do so? I think so.

People tend to believe what they want to believe and to extrapolate their judgments of others from their own experiences. Extrapolating from your experience is a good heuristic when you are dealing with people whose backgrounds and values are similar to yours, but it can be dangerous in dealing with people who are very different from you. The only reliable way to avoid traps is by education, not necessarily formal education but reading and experience with different kinds of people and systems. It’s also helpful to have a gut-level understanding, which tends to come from hard experience, that there are often many ways for things to go wrong, that extreme events happen sometimes and that there are people who are best avoided. Not everyone understands these things. As Fernandez suggests, many American voters incorrectly believed that Obama would not function as a leftist radical once he was in office even though he had functioned as one before. (One wearies of media conservatives who criticize Obama’s “mistakes” when it should be obvious that Obama is doing what he always intended to do.)

Similarly, as Eric Trager implies, US officials who have been trying to frame the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt as a conventional interest group that is amenable to western-style win/win power-sharing deals in the low-risk shared-values manner of liberal democracy are, to put it mildly, ignoring the obvious. The odd thing is that so many of our media and government people go along with such charades and delusions. They seem to confuse words with reality and articulated plans with experience. When they see something disturbing happen their instinct is often to explain it away rather than accept what is happening and decide how to proceed. At such times, maybe always, people who are capable of seeing what is going on in front of them are rarer than we like to think.

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-Uploading files over cable Internet is now often extremely slow even in the middle of the day. Until recently it was quick. Is the slowdown a function of the fact that many people are now watching TV and movies online?

-Supermarkets’ attempt to make life easier for parents of small children by providing giant kiddie-car-shaped shopping carts makes life harder for everyone else.

-Where did the habit of beginning sentences with the word “so” originate? This is new and annoying. I want to respond with, “So what?” but I hold my tongue.

-While we’re on the topic of annoying rhetorical phenomena, how about the use of the word “understand” as an imperative at the beginning of a sentence? People have been saying this for a few years now. It seems to be an assertion of authority as in, “That is how it is, understand?” (but inverted). It serves the same purpose as the use of “OK?” at the end of a declarative sentence, as in: “That is how the boss wants it done, OK?” Maybe it’s another way of saying, “so”. These figures of speech appear to be designed to compel rather than persuade, and make it easier to avoid arguing issues on the merits.

-I believe, and I think that many other people believe, that the economy will begin to pick up as soon as Obama leaves office (or as soon as it’s clear that Obama will leave office). To what extent is this belief that is probably held by many Americans likely to be a self-fulfilling prophecy?

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Warren Meyer:

If the very rich got that way through special access to government power, then why is the solution to tax them more, and not just to reduce government power?
 
And if the very rich got that way through hard work and innovation, then why the hell are we proposing to take resources out of these people’s hands?

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Like other commenters, I was struck by this observation of Lex’s while he related his tale of his initial Occupy Chicago encounter:

My hatred of the Boomers, who have brainwashed and wasted these kids
is boundless. There is nothing wrong with them. They have just never
been taught anything but bullshit. They have been betrayed by their
parents and their teachers. It is very depressing. The country has
been shamefully dumbed down.

Three weeks ago, Thomas S. Monson, the president of my church, observed:

I recently read an article in the New York Times concerning a study which took place during the summer of 2008. A distinguished Notre Dame sociologist led a research team in conducting in-depth interviews with 230 young adults across America. I believe we can safely assume that the results would be similar in most parts of the world.
 
I share with you just a portion of this very telling article:
 
“The interviewers asked open-ended questions about right and wrong,
moral dilemmas and the meaning of life. In the rambling answers, … you
see the young people groping to say anything sensible on these matters. But they just don’t have the categories or vocabulary to do
so.
 
“When asked to describe a moral dilemma they had faced, two-thirds of the young people either couldn’t answer the question or described problems that are not moral at all, like whether they could afford to rent a certain apartment or whether they had enough quarters to feed the meter at a parking spot.”
 
The article continues:
 
“The default position, which most of them came back to again and again, is that moral choices are just a matter of individual taste. ‘It’s personal,’ the respondents typically said. ‘It’s up to the individual. Who am I to say?’
 
“Rejecting blind deference to authority, many of the young people have gone off to the other extreme [saying]: ‘I would do what I thought made me happy or how I felt. I have no other way of knowing what to do but how I internally feel.’
 
Those who conducted the interviews emphasized that the majority of the young people with whom they spoke had “not been given the resources—by schools, institutions [or] families—to cultivate their moral intuitions.”

Pre-modern Chinese scholars thought that calling a thing by its correct name was very important. It was even more important during and after the chaos and violence that rages as one dynasty of rulers fell and another arose. Many of our fellow countrymen sense something is wrong with how things are. They sense that the things that are wrong have names. But they don’t know what to call them. They sense that the names peddled to them by the usual suspects are not the true names of the things that worry them with their wrongness.

So they’re mired in frustration. Some of this frustration is unavoidable. Some things our fellow Americans want are impossible. Others are mutually exclusive. They go together like matches and small children and they can’t be reconciled into a coherent whole.

This detachment from how things really are is inevitable and all too human. But much of the incoherence of their worries is a side-effect of their lack of mental vocabulary to form their sense of wrongness into a concrete program of action. Some of this lack of mental vocabulary is accidental. Some of it has been deliberately cultivated.

I don’t endorse resilient communitarian John Robb and some other observers’ description of the incoherence produced by this lack of mental vocabulary as a feature. John Robb in particular is often spot on in his analysis of emerging developments but his synthesis is frequently iffy, though that just may be my head buzzing with unpurged legacy thought.

If Occupy* adhered to the model preached by fourth generation warfare advocates and further elaborated by Robb as “open source insurgency”, their goals would be concentrated in ideaspace to a coherent program but their actions in meatspace in pursuit of that program would be dispersed. For a hypothetical open source insurgency, a coherent program acts like mission-type orders. These types of orders, called Normaltaktiker by the German officers who developed and sometimes used them, would tell a subordinate officer which hill to seize and why they need to take the hill but not how to take the hill. Details of taking the hill are left to the discretion and initiative of the subordinate. His superiors don’t interfere as long as his discretion and initiative don’t violate the intent of his orders and the overall battle, war, or policy.

In an open source insurgency, supporters know why they need to take the hill but there should be no one who forces them to take the hill by providing a checklist that must be ticked off in order or else. The open source insurgent is supposed to understand the intent of their goals and what actions will advance those goals without violating that intent without supervision from a core cadre. More experienced insurgents may provide how-to manuals for performing certain actions but the role of such guides is purely advisory. This hands-off approach should supposedly allow open source insurgents to launch a series of disconnected, dispersed, and distributed actions intended to build towards realizing their shared goals through the accumulated reactions they trigger. It should require no direct contact with one another or a centralized command and control authority, allowing open source insurgents to remain disconnected, dispersed, and distributed
so they they aren’t a big, fat juicy target for the Powers that Be.

Occupy* seems to be following the opposite pattern. They’re concentrating for action but have widely (and wildly) dispersed goals. They don’t know what all their actions are for because they lack the correct mental names to call out what’s going on.

There are undoubtedly elements within Occupy* that have a concrete agenda whose goal is to co-opt it in pursuit of their own agenda. They know very well what they name the situation as. As Lex observed in his reconnaissance, the usual suspects are already trying. They’re trying to create ”democratic” institutions that will allow them to co-opt the unfocused to support their program through procedural niceties. It seems they have yet to fully succeed.

So far Occupy* is following the classic American political progression of:

1. First you’re accused of being astroturf.
2. Then you’re feared.
3. Then you’re co-opted.
4. Then you’re astroturf.

They say they want a revolution. To have a revolution, you must have a secular social catechism that accumulates the sort of strategic effects that will trigger a fatal split in our current set of societal elites. In the crisis so far, we’ve only seen dusty formulas trotted out by ancient and creaky Boomers yearning to re-fight the glorious battles of youth.

Again.

And again.

Here’s an unintended side-effect of extended human ;ifespans: ideological stasis. To butcher Max Planck: a political notion does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it. Boomers, given unnaturally long biological life by historical developments they barely comprehend, give unnaturally long life to their foolishly destructive notions. Society may stagnate in some areas while progressing in others with unforeseen effects. This may make the process of sorting out of what’s needed to grapple with our current predicament prolonged, painful, and prone to triggering frustration and outbreaks of corrective violence.

Go tell the Boomers that, in the words of Oliver Cromwell and Leo Amery:

You have sat too long here for any good you have been doing. Depart, I say, and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go!

We should endorse Lex’s efforts to creatively engage with this upsurge. Coalescing movements for change need fresh and vigorous mental ammunition for the struggle. Creative engagement is necessary for building an arsenal for renewed civic vigor as we stumble towards new political formulas for these United States.

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Watchful Waiting = Do nothing, even though it may be a good idea to do something, because it’s difficult to justify doing something when institutional third-party payers who evaluate everything in terms of population average costs and benefits rather than your cost and your benefit are making the decisions.

Precautionary Principle = Take extreme measures, even though it may be a good idea to do nothing, because it’s difficult to justify doing nothing when activists who evaluate everything in terms of hypothetical worst cases rather than probability weighted costs and benefits are making the decisions.

The question that always matters most is “Who decides?”. Answer it and you can usually predict what the answers to the other questions will be.

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WRT this post by Glenn Reynolds, it’s always been a mistake to assume that a black Republican candidate would be immune to racial demagoguery. If Cain does well as a candidate Democrats will attack him. They will make race-based and other attacks and they will continue to use the attacks that work. It doesn’t matter that Cain as a black person is most unlikely to be an anti-black racist. What matters is whether any particular kind of demagogic attack on him is politically effective. Conservatives and libertarians have no excuse for uncertainty on this point since Democrats relentlessly attacked their last presidential candidate, a RINO squish and former media favorite, as a right-wing extremist once he became a contender. If Cain becomes the Republican nominee Democrats will attack him as a racist even as they attack Obama’s opponents as racists. There will be no irony in these attacks because they will not be about accuracy or logical consistency but about political effectiveness.

Republican voters should not assume that a candidate’s background will insulate him from personal attacks by political opponents. Democratic pols and their media allies will subject any Republican contender to vile personal attacks and campaigns of character assassination. The best course of action for Republicans and the country is to run highly-qualified candidates who can perform well on their own merits without any consideration to identity politics.

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From the Princess Bride:
Vizzini has just cut the rope The Dread Pirate Roberts is climbing up
Vizzini: He didn’t fall? Inconceivable!
Inigo Montoya: You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

Of course, Montoya is correct. Vizzini isn’t actually using the word inconceivable correctly. Inconceivable means “not capable of being imagined” but Vizzini uses the word to mean, “I didn’t plan on that happening when I set up this little political kidnapping.”

Right now, the word “extremist” is much bandied about in Washington these days but clearly it doesn’t mean what people seem to think it means. People claim that this or that group of “extremists”  in Congress have hijacked the federal government, and hyperventilate about it endlessly.

By defining as “extremist” people who are in fact not at all “extreme” people end up in a delusional world of political plans that fail as “inconceivably” as Vizzini’s did, and if they don’t start thinking clearly, their political fortunes could end up sharing Vizzini’s fate.

The word “extreme” means, “furthest from the center or a given point” and that concept is extended metaphorically to people to give us “extremist”, meaning someone who holds political views far from the center of the political spectrum. So what constitutes “far from center” in the context of America’s political system?

By convention, political scientists have divided the political spectrum into five 20% chunks of the population called quintiles. The 3rd quintile in the middle represents the 20% of the population who are centrist/moderates. The 2nd quintile on the left is the 20% of the population who comprise the “Left” and the 4th quintile on the right is the 20% who comprise the “Right”. The 1st quintile on the left is defined as the 20% of the population who are “far-Left” and the 5th quintile on the right is is defined as the 20% of the population who are “far-Right”.

At first it might seem that both the “far-Left” and the “far-Right” could be accurately labeled as “extremist” because 80% of the population is to the right of the “far-Left” while 80% of the population of is to the left of the “far-Right”. However, such a definition would mean that at any given time 40% of the population would be classified as “extremist” one way or the other. Looked at another way, if you had three randomly selected Americans in a room, one of them would be an “extremist”.

Even classifying the 10% most left and right as extremist would still classify 20% or 1 in every 5 Americans as an extremist. Using the 5% most left and tight would mean that 1 in every 10 people would be an “extremist”.

In most usages, leftists define the rightmost 20% of the population as extremist while those on the Right define the leftmost 20% as extremist. Both conveniently ignore their own “extremist” quintile on their side of the Left/Right divide.

When people define some political stance which has nearly 50% support as “extremist” they aren’t using “extremist” to mean what it should mean. What they really mean is something along the lines of, “I extremely dislike that idea”.

When the Democrats began enacting their agenda in 2008 many on the Right cried that they were “extremist” even though the Democrats had won majorities in both the legislative and executive branches. One might argue that the scale of their programs was “extreme” in historical context, but the basic ideas that drove those policies were not “extremist” because at least 1 in every 3 Americans strongly supported them at the time.

Now it is common for Democrats to label the Tea Party as “extremist” even though the Tea Party goals are supported by 4 out of every 10 Americans. There is simply no objective way that the Tea Party can be labeled “extremist”.

What politicos are really trying to say when they label someone as “extremist” is that they represent the points of view of a tiny minority and therefore don’t have any moral authority to strongly influence policy that affects everyone. However, that rhetorical trick undermines itself, because in the American system of government a small minority cannot impose policy on everyone else. If a group or view truly is “extremist” then they are automatically a small minority of no political import. Conversely, if they are politically powerful, they are not on the extremes.

Words mean things. When people use the wrong word to describe some phenomenon, that means that they are thinking about the phenomenon wrong. Using “extremist” incorrectly leads to political defeat because it induces people to ignore facts. If you incorrectly think some political stance is “extremist”, you will translate that in your mind to “has little widespread political support”, which in turn will lead you to massively underestimate the political power behind the idea. You will consistently be defeated by the “extremists” simply because you refuse to label the idea correctly.

In the end, the real problem we face in American politics is not one of various extremists but what we might call “dual centers”. We have large minorities clustering up around right and left centers. Roughly, 40% of Americans will line up on either the left or right of every issue, while the remaining 20% vacillate in between depending on circumstances. If we did have “extremists” we could ignore them but we have competing blocks of “centristd” instead.

We are at loggerheads right now because on very nearly every major issue nearly half the population wants to go left and nearly half of the population wants to go right. We don’t actually have any significant “extremists” of any kind. Obama isn’t an “extremist”, and if he were he wouldn’t be a threat to the Right’s agenda. Likewise, the Tea Party isn’t “extremist”, and if they were the Left wouldn’t be so afraid of them.

We should tell the politicos to lay off the “extremist” accusations. The word doesn’t mean what they think it does.

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[ cross-posted from Zenpundit -- war, reading lists ]

.

Not exactly delighted by the reading list recently provided by the inbound Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Carl Prine at Line of Departure will be offering a “weekly discussion about how one might know one’s self” – Sun Tzu suggests that such knowledge is of value to the professional soldier — via texts other than the “middlebrow books of a recent vintage, pulp paperbacks” of the Army’s recommended readings.

Today he opened with an essay on the First World War poet Siegfried Sassoon, and quoted the final paragraph from Sassoon’s Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man:

And here I was, with my knobkerrie in my hand, staring across at the enemy I’d never seen. Somewhere out of sight beyond the splintered tree-tops of Hidden Wood a bird had begun to sing. Without knowing why, I remembered that it was Easter Sunday. Standing in that dismal ditch, I could find no consolation in the thought that Christ was risen. I sploshed back to the dug-out to call the others up for “stand-to.”

I could only respond with a passage that I first encountered, likewise, on a blog – Pat Lang‘s Sic Semper Tyrannis – from Sassoon’s friend and fellow poet of the Great War, Wilfred Owen:

For 14 hours yesterday, I was at work-teaching Christ to lift his cross by the numbers, and how to adjust his crown; and not to imagine he thirst until after the last halt. I attended his Supper to see that there were no complaints; and inspected his feet that they should be worthy of the nails. I see to it that he is dumb, and stands mute before his accusers. With a piece of silver I buy him every day, and with maps I make him familiar with the topography of Golgotha.

And I think to myself how much more power there is in either one of those paragraphs, than in that quip about “no atheists in foxholes”.

* * *

It’s not a matter of one of those “God or no God” debates in which some clergyman might triumph over some atheist, or vice versa, on TV or at the town or village hall. It’s a matter of cultural riches, of having a reference base of image and story that’s strong enough to express the horrors of Passchendaele or the Marne in a way that speaks to the hearts of those who were not there — and of those who will find themselves there, all too really, in other times and other lands.

It’s about narrative deep enough to go with you to Golgotha and back. It’s about the words, and about the furnace.

Prine himself puts it like this:

I care only of your soul and how it might be fired in the smithy of this blog and then hammered by your experiences in the coming years.

Our culture is the smithy.

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A comment by ArtChance in response to this NRO piece by Stanley Kurtz:

We few out in the Country who actually practice adversarial public sector labor relations knew what Comrade Obama was the second we laid eyes on him. By “adversarial” I mean work for a Republican government in a union state where you actually have to bargain with unions. In Democrat controlled states, the government conspires with unions against the people and the legislature.
 
When I saw him make his famous speech at the ’02 (IIRC) convention I said to myself, “I know you, you’re the one they think they can dress up and pass off as reasonable.” He’s pretty much a by the book communist/union organizer and anyone who deals with him should know Alinsky like a Baptist minister knows the New Testament.
 
Somebody like Obama is almost impossible for “nice guy” Republicans to deal with. The Republicans get their ideas about negotiating from “Getting to Yes” while Obama and his ilk get theirs from “Rules for Radicals.” In the recent debt debate, Obama didn’t want a deal, he wanted a political process that could be played to his advantage, and he was very successful against the “nice guys” in getting that. Typical of an Alinskyite, he never made a concrete proposal, just some pie in the sky positions, and made the Republicans negotiate with themselves to try to come up with something he would buy. Anyone who’s ever dealt with a public employee union knows that game. If you start from the position that a agreement with them is your objective, you wind up compromising yourself into their position, which is exactly what Boehner/McConnell did. Both of them are too much from the “nice guy” tradition to understand that the only way to bargain with a communist-trained negotiator is to start out with a position that if he is forced to accept it, will kill him politically or economically and make it so that the default from his not reaching agreement is having to live under your untenable for him conditions. In other words, you really do have to do what the Ds were accusing the Tea Partiers of, you hold a gun to their heads, a political or economic gun of course, and quietly say, “be reasonable so I don’t have to use it.”

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It’s been reported that Joe Biden referred to Republican opponents on the debt issue in the following terms:

They have acted like terrorists.

Biden now denies that he used that phrasing. But there’s no question that Democratic representative Mike Doyle, who was in the same meeting, said:

We have negotiated with terrorists. This small group of terrorists have made it impossible to spend any money.

Numerous other Democrats and Democrat-leaning media types have used the T-word or close synonyms of same in referring to their American political opponents, for example NYT columnist Joe Nocera, who refers to the Tea Party Republicans as having “waged jihad on the American people” and Maureen Dowd, who approvingly quoted “some Democrats” as having described the Tea Party as “the Republican Taliban wing.”

Note that this vitriol is coming from a party which rejects the idea of calling actual terrorists “terrorists.” They prefer to call terrorist attacks man-caused disasters, and to refer to wars as overseas contingency operations.

I’m reminded, as I often am, of something Neptunux Lex wrote in 2008:

The innate character flaw of the political right, with its thrumming appeals to the logic of blood and soil, is its lamentable tendency to go in search of enemies abroad. The left, on the other hand, with its own appeals to the politics of envy and class warfare, is content to find mortal enemies closer to hand.

Today’s American leftists view American citizens who strongly differ with them politically as enemies to a much greater extent than Islamic terrorists or any hostile nation-state.

Regarding Mike Doyle’s complaint about it having been made “impossible to spend any money”…the Democratic politicians are like teenagers who have been unwisely been given a credit card and who, now that consideration is being given to not raising the credit limit yet again, whine that “you won’t let me spend any money at all“…indeed, they also follow the typical teenage pattern of whining “but all my friends get to spend more”…in this case their friends from Europe…while ignoring the little problem that their friends’ parents are being driven into bankruptcy even more rapidly than their own are.

Links: James Taranto

Sister Toldjah

Neptunus Lex

The era of the condescending President

Some of the above links via Instapundit and Maggie’s Farm

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Many of the comments in response to a John Tierney piece about why conservatives avoid grad school are remarkable for their smug, unreflective hostility toward and ignorance about the people they criticize.

A typical comment:

Republican scholar is an oxymoron, by definition the right/conservatives of today are anti-intellectual and have more in common with Maoists than they do with the traditional American conservative movement. And this article in it’s false effort to be fair and balanced refuses to report on what’s real and true. How can those who deny science and academics somehow become 50% of our college faculity?

But a few of the commenters get it:

Many of these comments stink of the closemindedness and lack of tolerance that they claim to despise. Perhaps the pot is calling the kettle black. What sane person would self-select to learn in an environment so intellectually narrow and toxic to dissent?

Needless to say, there are many more comments like the first one above than like the second one.

Comments on the piece have been closed. I wonder why.

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Abraham Lincoln like to start his Cabinet meetings with a little humor to relax everyone. On September 22, 1862 he began the Cabinet meeting by reading the following little nugget by the then popular humorist Artemus Ward (spelling in the original.)

High-Handed Outrage at Utica

In the Faul of 1856, I showed my show in Uticky, a trooly grate sitty in the State of New York.
 
The people gave me a cordyal recepshun. The press was loud in her prases.
 
1 day as I was givin a descripshun of my Beests and Snaiks in my usual flowry stile what was my skorn disgust to see a big burly feller walk up to the cage containin my wax figgers of the Lord’s Last Supper, and cease Judas Iscarrot by the feet and drag him out on the ground. He then commenced fur to pound him as hard as he cood.
 
“What under the son are you abowt?” cried I.
 
Sez he, “What did you bring this pussylanermus cuss here fur?” and he hit the wax figger another tremenjis blow on the hed.
 
Sez I, “You egrejus ass, that air’s a wax figger–a representashun of the false ‘Postle.”
 
Sez he, “That’s all very well fur you to say, but I tell you, old man, that Judas Iscarrot can’t show hisself in Utiky with impunerty by a darn site!” with which observashun he kaved in Judassis hed. The young man belonged to 1 of the first famerlies in Utiky. I sood him, and the Joory brawt in a verdick of Arson in the 3d degree.

I have no idea why this story is supposed to be so funny. That in turn tells me that I am missing an important understanding of the culture of the era and the mind of Abraham Lincoln and others of that generation.

Supposedly, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton didn’t get the joke either and grumbled about the waste of time. To placate Stanton, Lincoln hurried along to the real work of the meeting: announcing his intention to finally release the Emancipation Proclamation. Stanton didn’t think that was funny either.

I think that the trivial and/or popular works of an era tell us more about the tenor of the times than do the tiny minority of works in any era that time eventually elevates to canon.

Moby Dick flopped when published in 1851. It only became regarded as a great American novel in the 1920s. That suggests the novel didn’t really resonate with the era in which it was written. If we want to understand the mindset of 1851 America, we should probably look at the House of Seven Gables or Uncle Tom’s Cabin, both of which sold well in their day but which are largely unread today.

Popular humor in particular reveals a great deal about a milieu because understanding a joke is a cognitively intensive process that requires a lot of contextual knowledge.

All humor is based on a surprise deviation from the normally expected flow of events. It is the surprise that provokes our mirth. That is why a joke is never as funny the second time you here it, there isn’t much surprise left.

In order for an individual to experience a humorous surprise, he must first understand the expected normal flow of events in the scenario the humorist presents. Without an intuitive understanding of what should happen, what actually happens doesn’t seem funny but merely puzzling. That is why jokes from one culture often fall flat in another.

I don’t find the Outrage at Utica humorous because I have no clue about the expected normal progression of events in the scenario presented. I can only guess that: (1) The use of phonetic spelling seems to indicate that the reader is supposed to view the narrator as a merely semi-literate bumpkin and laughing at the uneducated is always funny. (2) The idea that someone would treat a wax figure like the real person is mildly amusing. (3) The charge of arson for destroying a wax figure is silly. That’s all I can glean from the scenario but by all accounts Lincoln thought this story one of funniest things he’d ever heard and he read it aloud often.

Artemus Ward isn’t alone in being opaque to modern readers. A great deal of 19th Century American humor is not only unfunny to modern ears but often simply unintelligible. It’s not that we can see what attempted humor fell flat, it’s that we don’t even understand what the humorist was shooting for in the first place. I have a book of “cowboy humor” full of supposedly uproarious stories collected or written in the period of 1830-1890 and I understand what the author intended as humor in only about one-tenth of the stories. The rest of the stories are as explicable as a Gene Autry movie written by Bertolt Brecht.

Lincoln regarded the Emancipation Proclamation as a pivotal document in American and world history. He had high hopes for its practical effects upon the war and he believed the war itself absolutely necessary to the success of the American experiment. He viewed the American experiment in turn as vital to the future of humanity. He really wanted to sell releasing the proclamation at that time to the Cabinet and Outrage at Utica was the bit of humor he chose to put his Cabinet members in a receptive state of mind.

He clearly thought that was some story and the fact that we don’t get it means we don’t really understand our forebearers’ intuitive view of the world. We came from them, their beliefs and actions shaped us at our core but we are not them. I don’t think we will really ever understand the world view of the Civil War generation or any generation a century removed from us. We won’t really understand why southerners thought slavery justifiable or why ordinary men marched in straight ranks directly into withering rifle and cannon fire that they knew would kill most of them. If we really did understand, we would laugh at the same things they laughed at.

But we don’t laugh, so we don’t understand.

It’s true: The past is another country. They think different things are funny there.

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Commenter hdgreene at Belmont Club:

The uniting concept in the Leftist economic program is the politically controlled Cartel — whether in health care or energy or finance. Cartels force the consumer to pay higher prices for a lower quality product. They force workers and suppliers to do more for less. They exist, in short, for the benefit of those who control the Cartel. In this case that is bureaucrats, technocrats, politicians and their cronies.
 
Of course they do not promote these Cartels by announcing the real purpose. Instead they tell you it will save lives or money or the entire planet. Salesmanship is important — especially when selling lemons.

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Lying about Apple, especially the iPhone, seems to be a fad these days.

The usually mostly reliable Register seems to be caught up in some kind of anti-Apple hysteria lately. Today, they breathlessly report:

The leading computer company plans to build a system that will sense when people are trying to video live events — and turn off their cameras.[emp added]

Small problem, nothing in the articles supports that breathless assertion. It is, quite simply, a lie and journalistic fraud.

They offered no evidence at all that Apple “plans to build a system.” The story simply reports that Apple has filed a patent for such a technology. It is common practice for companies to patent everything that they think up. If something is technologically possible, the company patents it just in case. Filing a patent in no way indicates that the company means to deploy the technology.

I did a patent crawl of Apple a few years back and found that Apple has about fifty unused patents for everyone I could identify that made it into a shipping product. Filing a patent tells us nothing about what the company intends.

It is equally likely that Apple could use the patent to prevent other companies from deploying the technology. I guess that wouldn’t be that interesting would it?

I have substantial interest in Apple, but I don’t think I am being biased when I get tired of these hysterical stories that always turn out to be nothing. Remember a couple of months ago when Apple was “tracking their user’s every move!” It turned out to be a bug that prevented a cache file of local wi-fi spots from being deleted. There was never any evidence that Apple even knew the file existed much less that they were using it in any way without the user’s knowledge.

Apple has been enormously successful in the last few years at balancing the rights of content producers, especially small, independent producers like myself, with the rights of content consumers. The didn’t do that by reducing the functionality at the end user’s side. End users get high quality music, media and software much cheaper than they did in the past and small producers can actually reach the market and get paid without having to sell themselves out to a big media or software company. It’s a massive win-win for everybody.

Yet somehow, this is regarded as absolutely Orwellian to the point that everyone believes uncritically every bad thing anyone says about Apple no matter how unsupported or far fetched.

I really wish there was a way to hold people responsible for this level of malice and/or incompetence. But hey, journalists are too important to be held responsible. It might have a “chilling” effect on their bank accounts.

Yeah, I am pissed off.

Update:

Patently Apple is a site devoted to tracking and examining Apple patents (of which there are hundreds or more every year). They have a detailed examination of the patent.

The upshot is that the patent is actually for a means of communicating with mobile devices via the infrared picked up by the device’s cameras. Most high quality cameras today can detect infrared but people can’t see it so it is usually ignored unless it is used for night vision. The Apple patent provides for a means of putting infrared “tags” on objects and locations that would broadcast information that the mobile device could pick up and display.

For example, a museum could put tags besides displays that would provide information about the display. The technology also could be used to provide virtual direction signs. It’s basically a way to wire in augmented reality to specific locations.

The patent also speculates that the technology could be used to provide tags that would order the device to disable its camera. This is odd because you can’t possibly make a valid business model that would make the disabling technology pay. End users won’t pay for any kind of functional limitation unless they get something in return. Patently Apple explains this by observing:

In Apple’s patent point # 48, the patent specifically adds “classified facilities” as being another application for this technology: “In some embodiments, a transmitter can be located in areas where capturing pictures and videos is prohibited (e.g., a concert or a classified facility) and the transmitters can generate infrared signals with encoded data that includes commands temporarily disabling recording functions.” Hmm, I guess that means that area 51 will be better protected in the future. And no, you didn’t see any little green men, right? Kidding aside, you could be rest assured that the request for such a feature must have come directly from the US government at some point in time.

Given my experiences at Apple and other computing companies, I think he is correct that a government request/mandate is probably the primary driver behind this functionality. It’s really clear that such a disabling technology would be useless unless backed by a government mandate requiring all recording devices to use the tag system. There is no point in only disabling 20% of the recording devices present.

While the disabling technology could be abused, it could also be a benefit because, lets face it, there are a lot of areas of personal life in which we wouldn’t like people to be able to record us. How about a medical files storage room? Do you want anybody to be able to take a snap of your medical files and post it online? How about public rest rooms, gyms or dressing rooms? What if you want to host a wild party and don’t want video of you dancing in nothing but a lampshade showing up in your boss’ email Monday morning?

So, in the end, we have a much more complex story than, “Apple is going to cripple your phone’s camera just to protect greedy big media companies!” Instead we have a potentially very useful technology that like all technology has a lot implications both good and bad.

Honestly, why couldn’t Register (and a lot of other tech media sites) have the integrity to add a single extra paragraph to flesh things out a bit? Oh, right, they sell news stories, not news facts. Stories are by definition fiction and an evil Apple makes a better story,. End of story.

Update II: I suppose it would be paranoiac and churlish of me to speculate on how much Google or Microsoft might have paid to have the false story spread? Just saying Google with its Android and Microsofts virtually unknown Windows Mobile must be really liking the way the media has spun this story.

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[ corss-posted from Zenpundit -- the talk & the walk, vehicles as weapons, Islamist and "narco" terror ]
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Compare and contrast:

Hell, a Colombian cartel was fielding narco-subs a while back, as I recall..