Month: October 2008

You Should Be Ashamed!

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Mickey Kaus is a Liberal who will actually try to find out the facts. Kudos to him for that.

But he does occasionally descend into Left wing incoherence. A prime example is a short post entitled Ride My See-Saw. (Click on this link, and scroll down to the post at the 1:21 PM mark.)

Mr. Kaus is taken with the concept of “vertical ticket splitters”, people who don’t automatically cast all of their votes for one party. He attributes their motivation for doing this to guilt. People might vote for Obama in this election, but then carefully cast their remaining votes for Republicans because they feel guilty about…

Well, I’m not really sure why anyone feels guilt. Mr. Kaus seems to think that the bad feelings all flow from racism.

“M suggested that voters (especially white, swing voters) who don’t vote for Obama may feel guilty about it and compensate by voting for Democrats in downballot races (Senate and Congress). But the converse of this theory is equally interesting–voters who do pick Obama, may compensate or hedge for what they feel is a bold, guilt-expiating risk by picking Republicans downballot.”

(snip)

“…more people will be vertical ticket splitters because of the presence of Obama, who is not only an African American candidate–whom you might feel guilty about not picking–but a relatively unknown candidate whom you might want to hedge against, especially if you voted for him to avoid feeling guilty about not picking him (and then felt guilty about that).”

(An attempt was made to keep the original emphasis intact. The above is how Mr. Kaus wants you to see his work.)

This seems extremely odd to me. If someone is a racist, then by definition they genuinely believe that a person’s race disqualifies them in some way. Makes the minority candidate unable to do a decent job simply because of their heritage, so to speak.

Seen in this light, it becomes obvious that racists are not going to be effected in any way by guilty feelings. Why would anyone, racist or otherwise, feel guilty about voting for what they see as the more capable choice? If anything, racists would feel pride in voting for their prejudices because they would think that they are acting for the greater good. So why go on and on about how racists would feel guilt?

The constant harping on racism from the Left during this election appears to me to have two root causes.

It seems to me that one cause is pure projection from Liberals. They are going to vote for Obama not because they genuinely believe him to be the best qualified for the job, but due to some bizarre self loathing. White guilt, if you will. Since guilt is the most powerful motivator when they make their political choices, it seems obvious to them that everyone else must also have simmering pools of white hot shame bubbling just beneath the surface. If people just listened to the voice in their heads that said they must make up for being a piece of crap, then everyone would make the same choice. The correct choice!

The other is a cynical attempt to manipulate swing voters, a propaganda effort to make the Bradley Effect work for the Democrats. If swing voters can be convinced that they will be perceived as racists by voting for anyone other than Obama, maybe a significant percentage will vote for the candidate that they would otherwise feel is too inexperienced to handle the job. Pretty much force people to vote for the least qualified candidate.

I must confess, dear reader, that it makes me feel distinctly uncomfortable to climb up on my analyst’s couch and try to plumb the mental depths of complete strangers. Not only am I obviously unqualified, it also strikes me as the height of arrogance to even try. But I feel justified since the Left in general, and Mr. Kaus specifically, are not constrained to keep to their area of expertise.

To close, I would have to say that the only people who should be feeling guilty are the Liberals who scream “Racism!” at the drop of a hat. Have they no shame?

(Hat tip to Glenn.)

What More Could Ayers Have Done?

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Sometime back, I ask a question: What would Ayers (or anyone else) have to have done and what unrepented beliefs would he have to still hold, such that Obama’s supporters would consider it a fatal lapse of judgment for Obama to have associated with Ayers? 

To this day Ayers has never refuted his Maoist beliefs and he has only weakly repented of his violent acts.  Just to tally up the list of Ayers’s extremism:

1) During the early ’70s, Ayers’s Weathermen cell attempted to burn a judge, his wife and three children alive with three gasoline bombs. A neighbor risked his life to prevent the largest bomb from detonating. 

2) Ayers personally designed a large anti-personal fragmentation bomb (a mass of explosives surrounded by nails) that he intended to detonate at a dance attended by U.S. Army personnel and their dates. Instead, the bomb exploded during its construction killing two Weathermen.

3) Ayers was/is a radical Maoist communist who sought/seeks the complete destruction of America. He sought to destroy liberal democracy, basic human rights and institute Stalinist/Maoist totalitarian rule.

4) In service to his goal (3) he sought the invasion of America by communist powers in the Soviet Union, Mao-ruled China, Castro-ruled Cuba and other communist states. (see 5 below)

5) He calmly contemplated the mass murder of 25 million Americans [h/t Instapundit] who would refuse to convert to communism following the revolution. 

Honestly, what more could he possibly do to place himself beyond the pale? What more would he have to have done such that Obama supporters would consider it unacceptable that leftist Chicago embraced him? What more could he have done such that they would say, “Okay, Obama’s association with Ayers casts doubts on his fitness to be president?” 

What? What? What? What?

Why Socialism Will Not Die: Meat!

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Despite all the death, misery and poverty that socialism has wreaked over the past century on all scales from Stalin to Detroit, one would think that a species capable of learning would figure out that socialism’s negatives eventually outweigh its positives. Worse, looking back across the history of humanity, we see  the core socialist idea of forced redistribution occurring again and again across culture after culture. 

Why do humans seem to have an in-built urge for socialism? Why won’t it die? I think socialism will not die because primitive humans lacked refrigerators. 

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Outblogging the MSM

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I belong to an internet group called the UCF, who started out as members of John Scalzi’s Wateveresque forum until an army of trolls came in and set up residence in that once-fine space. We gradually retreated to our own blogs and set up an online community for ourselves. Most of us are aspiring writers, all of us are science fiction fans, and we’re all a little goofy, but that’s about where the similarity ends. We run the political spectrum from socialist to me. There is a lawyer, a film and TV location manager, an administrative assistant at JPL, and editor for Linux Journal, several other IT professionals of various stripes, an architect, a marine biologist, and a former Navy Chief Warrant turned writer and woodworker, among others (oh yeah, and me, a chemist). Over time, I’ve come to regard all of them as friends, although I’ve only met two of them in meatspace.

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A Letter to David Kolata at CUB

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The Citizen’s Utility Board or “CUB” is a non-profit group that represents the consumers of the state of Illinois against the interests of the electric, gas and telecom utilities. Their web site is www.citizensutilityboard.org and I recently joined their membership ranks so now I see their periodic newsletter. David Kolata is the Executive Director of CUB (his photo is on the article, above).

HISTORY OF CUB

CUB was started in the mid-80’s. While there are many elements to CUB, the most relevant was their opposition to the big electric rate hikes that ComEd (now Exelon) was pushing through in the 1980’s, as their giant nuclear plants, plagued by cost overruns, came on line.

How the “rate setting process” works is that the utility will come forward and request a hike in rates, as well as the changes in rates by customer classes (business, residential, etc…). The Illinois Commerce Commission (ICC) typically decides whether or not the rate hike will be allowed and how much of the utility’s request to grant. CUB was established to represent the citizens of the state and generally this means fighting to keep the rate increase as small as possible. Typically the utility asks for $100M, CUB says give them nothing (or they owe us a refund), and then the ICC makes a decision somewhere along the continuum.

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