Mar
4
Are Atheists Really Smarter?
Filed Under General Politics | 8 Comments
Simon found a report that said that atheists have higher IQ’s than those of faith. If that’s the case, then that doesn’t translate to smarter. Pew do a regular survey of religion in America. Here are some things about atheists:
21% of atheists believe in God.
12% of atheists believe in heaven (10% in hell).
18% of atheists meditate at least weekly.
10% of atheists pray on a weekly basis
And liberals? Here’s a gem from a Baylor University study:
researchers found that conservative religious Americans are far less likely to believe in the occult and paranormal than are other Americans, with self-identified theological liberals and the irreligious far more likely than other Americans to believe
What constitutes the paranormal and occult that liberals believe in more than conservatives:
theological liberals are more apt to believe in the paranormal and the occult – haunted houses, UFOs, communicating with the dead and astrology – than do conservatives.
So at least 10-20% of atheists believe in God, heaven or prayer, and liberals are more likely to believe in UFO’s and haunted houses. I’ll take my 6 point IQ deficit and be content in the knowledge that I’m not as dumb as them.
Nov
30
Whilst reading some comments at Realclimate.org, I saw a comment which for me sums up the quality of the debate on climate change and how advocates of AGW view sceptics. The comment was by a commentator CCPO and is comment no 179. Read it and weep at how real debate is no longer necessary when pushing a progressive agenda, it is now a case of having to accept liberal truth without the facility for criticism:
…it is neither in the interests of the cause of reducing CO2 emmissions, nor the greater cause of upholding science itself, to assume all skeptics are Denialists.
Why? They are. If they are so ill informed as to not know the very obvious, even as laypersons, perhaps they should not be posting, eh? Since the evidence is incredibly one-sided, and even the scientists here and elsewhere don’t dispute my contention posted here and elsewhere that there is not even one paper that in any way refutes any of the underpinnings of AGW, how can they be but a denialist?
Asking me to be “nice” will get you nowhere. We’ve been too nice, and the nuts are winning.
The only thing that will stop these pugilists is for them to have consequences. They need to find themselves in criminal or civil court.
Just as in the healthcare debate, it is unacceptable to the liberal nuttery for anyone to question their assertions. Because they are backed by ’science’, we peasants should just blindly accept their judgements. They are the modern catholic church, only allowing the chosen few to interpret their ‘religious’ texts. But 15th century Catholicism was challenged by a sceptical protestant revolution and todays sceptics are becoming more and more motivated by the dogmatic left to play that protestant role.
Nov
12
Line Of The Day
Filed Under American Politics | Leave a Comment
The Daily Kos seem out of touch with the American people:
Congress will confront no shortage of must-pass legislation once health care reform is enacted, including immigration reform and climate change legislation. These numbers clearly indicate that a major new jobs bill must be added to the mix.
You think?!?
The trouble is, a major jobs bill hasn’t been at the top of a Democratic wishlist like healthcare reform has. But let’s not let 10% and rising unemployment get in the way of the progressive agenda. The priorities must be got right. Netroots first, public second.
It should be a clean bill, one that focuses on creating jobs and nothing but jobs, to rebuild our infrastructure.
Unlike the very very dirty stimulus which was a mere waste of $787 billion. And why has rebuilding infrastructure become a priority for the left? Why not let the private sector create the jobs by releasing it from onerous regulatory and taxation burdens? Ah! Silly question. We are talking about the left here who see a government dollar as being inherently more valuable than a private economy dollar. This is the problem with Keynsian stimulus. A dollar is a dollar regardless of who spends it. A government dollar spent on the economy, is a private dollar taken out of the economy. A strange budgetry principal if you ask me.
Oct
14
Might We Be Witnessing The End Of Progressivism?
Filed Under American Politics, Foreign Policy | 20 Comments
I have an admittedly unscientifically tested theory that overreach by political parties often lead to the death, at least temporarily, of the values those parties represent. So for example, Thatcher’s neo-liberal conservatism hasn’t graced our shores since the Poll Tax, the demise of Gordon Brown will most probably lead to the demise of statism and nation building foreign wars will be much harder to sell to the American public following the unpopularity of Bush’s policies. I’ve always felt that the radical progressivism demonstrated by the Pelosi-Obama pact would take progressivism in that same direction, but two stories really spelled that out for me.
The first was in Russia. Following Obama’s decision to axe the missile shield in Eastern Europe and some subsequent positive noises from Medveyedev about sanctions on Iran, some liberal commentators argued that the two were related, that Obama’s soft policy approach won over Russia to his cause. Following Hillary’s visit to Moscow, that seems to be premature.
As is being reported, Russia has shown itself to be much more reluctant to contemplate sanctions than initially advertised:
U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton stressed Tuesday that Washington and Moscow are working together to ensure Iran’s nuclear program is strictly for peaceful purposes, but Russia has stopped short of committing to Iranian sanctions.
Speaking to reporters after a closed-door meeting, Clinton and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov indicated there has been no agreement between the countries on any sort of sanctions plan, even though Russia is not opposed to sanctions in principle.
…
Lavrov said that sometimes sanctions theoretically need to be imposed when all diplomatic efforts are exhausted — but not in the case of Iran.
“Threats, sanctions and threats of pressure in the current situation, we are convinced, would be counterproductive,” he said.
I still maintain that giving up the missile shield without getting anything in return from Russia shows weak foreign policy, a case of lying back and thinking of transnationalism whilst being shafted by Russia. But it is the progressive way, the belief that a countries own interests should be subordinated for what they believe is the greater good; a transnational governance and a naive belief in an ephemeral world peace. Think of it as the Miss World approach to foreign policy. And I don’t believe that the American public at large are ready to have their interests subordinated to world courts and the United Nations, America is a country with a well defined self-confidence and Presidents who ignore that do so at their peril, think Jimmy Carter, and that is what Obama’s grovelling approach to foreign affairs will undermine.
The second article is related to healthcare. Yesterday the Max Baucus plan passed out of the finance committee, another step on the road to a transformative health care reform. There are still many hoops to jump through to get it passed and there was much discussion about whether it will. Megan McCardle thinks it will, but that it will be a disaster:
I think it is more likely is that this thing passes, and fails spectacularly. There are too many moving parts, and if any of them breaks, the whole thing rapidly starts to spin out of control and eat a gigantic hole in the deficit. If it does break, I think that Democrats keep control of Congress just long enough to explain why they keep having to enact whopping new tax increases every few years. Republicans don’t need to improve their message. They just have to wait for Democrats to recover their reputation as tax and spend politicians who woefully under-predict the cost of everything they propose.
To radically transform health care in the United States, the democrats are having to thread too many needles. They have to keep the liberals happy, they need to accommodate moderate Democrats, they need to try to ensure the bill gets some bi-partisan cover from Republicans and they need to keep their special interest groups on side. An example of this is the trade union opposition to the Max Baucus plan. So what was a well intentioned but badly thought out plan in the first place will be fiddled about with and compromised on to try to placate all the relevant parties. And on top of that, there are seven different proposals that all need to be reconciled. I’d suggest that there’s a very good chance that the eventual bill will become a Frankenstein’s monster; a mish-mash of different parts bolted together on the fly that the creators will quickly lose control of. As an example of this, one only needs to look at the Max Baucus plan. To square the circle of keeping the bill from further increasing the deficit, Max Baucus had to write in a couple of provisions that have no chance of being enacted in reality. Firstly, the bill requires a 15% cut in Medicare compensation for Doctors, and secondly, it requires cuts to both Medicare and Medicaid. Does anyone really believe that politicians will be brave enough to make those cuts? I don’t, and this means that the Baucus plan goes from being one that marginally improves the deficit situation to one one that makes it much worse.
So domestically, on top of expanding deficits, a GM buyout that has become a hole into which more money needs to be poured and a stimulus that has failed to stimulate is a health care bill confused by it’s need to cater to all the competing interests. As Megan McCardle notes, this may well end up as a disastrous bill. And if that is the case, as a premier liberal and progressive shibboleth, it will tarnish progressivism in the mind of an increasingly sceptical public, one that has been naturally suspicious of tax and spend liberalism since the end of the sixties.
The incumbent radical progressives have staked their reputation on a massive increase on the size of the state and a foreign policy that raises the interests of internationalism above those of America. Those two policy directions have proved to be unpopular in the past and I don’t see any evidence for that changing. Just as the Brits tired of Thatcherite Conservatism and Brownite statism, I can see the American public tiring of radical progressivism. It might not be for eight years, but the liberal can expect a lengthy period in the wilderness following Obama.
The question is, will it be too late or America by then?
Sep
28
Defining Liberalism And Conservatism
Filed Under American Politics, Conservatism, Liberalism | 57 Comments
Whilst holding my nose and trying not too breath, I was reading the Balloon Juice site (far too many noxious gasses there) when I came upon a post trying to define conservatism and liberalism. Now intelligence and Balloon Juice are strange bedfellows so very little was achieved, so I figured we might do better.
Some noteworthy quotations from people that matter:
Conservatism
Abraham Lincoln:
“What is conservatism? Is it not adherence to the old and tried, against the new and untried”
Dennis Prager:
“Liberals tend to put the onus of your success on society and conservatives on you and your family.”
And one of my favourite definitions of conservative from Michael Oakshott:
“To be conservative…..is to prefer the familiar to the unknown, to prefer the tried to the untried, fact to mystery, the actual to the possible, the limited to the unbounded, the near to the distant, the sufficient to the superabundant, the convenient to the perfect, present laughter to utopian bliss.”
Liberalism*
Hubert H Humphrey:
“Liberalism, above all, means emancipation — emancipation from one’s fears, his inadequacies, from prejudice, from discrimination… from poverty.”
Friedrich Von Hayek:
What the liberal must ask, first of all, is not how fast or how far we should move, but where we should move.
My own limited definition, is that liberalism is the kick up the backside that conservatism needs, whilst conservatism is the brake on liberal excess.
Now it’s your turn.
* I had trouble finding some good liberal quotes that weren’t critical or back-slappingly self-congratulatory. That’s probably because “liberalism” is too broad a subject to be defined easily. Both Republicans and democrats can lay claim to being liberal, either in it’s modern or classical sense. It might be easier to define progressivism or left-liberalism.
Sep
16
Who Are They Trying To Convince?
Filed Under American Politics | 64 Comments
Jimmy Carter has now jumped on the racism bandwagon. Democrat Hank Johnson has evoked images of the KKK riding out into the night (did someone say fear-mongering?). The Democrat and liberal response to any criticism of Obama has become one of knee-jerk cries of racism. It seems that whenever a liberal blogger or commentator refers to the President in the context of criticism, suddenly he has become the “black President”, something I’ve never seen used in the right wing blogosphere.
Some of the criticism has been racist, either subtly or overtly. Water melons in the White House garden, a blacked out picture to represent Obama amongst the other Presidents and the witch doctor image. But these are exceptions. One of the allegations of racism levelled against the 9/12 protesters was the number of “take back our country” posters. But the left spent the last eight years using that very phrase. Howard Dean, the recent DNC chairman wrote a book entitled “Win Back America”. That particular allegation doesn’t wash.
But leaving the facts of whether or not there is racism explicit or implicit in the criticism of Obama (some but not all by a long shot), I think the more important question, is what are the Democrats trying to achieve by stoking up the race wars as they are? And more importantly, who are they trying to convince? Because at the moment, the answer is not very many people.
In a Rasmussen poll, they asked whether people thought that criticism of Obama was racist.
Only 12% of likely voters thought that the criticism was racist. 67% disagreed. If the Democrats are trying to paint Obama opponents as racist, they are failing miserably. Breaking it down further reveals the impotence of this line of attack:
Eighty-eight percent (88%) of Republicans reject the notion that most of the opponents are racist. So do 78% of voters not affiliated with either major party. However, just 39% of Democrats share that view.
Even amongst Obama’s strongest supporters, at best there is parity who do think attacks are racist and those who don’t:
Among Obama’s strongest supporters, those who Strongly Approve of his job performance, 35% say most opponents are racists, 32% disagree and 33% are not sure.
Among African-American voters, 27% say most opponents are racist, 25% disagree, and 48% are not sure.
Fifty percent (50%) of white Democrats reject the charge of racism, but 15% say it’s true.
The truth is, this is a feeble effort to discredit the right. They are convincing no-one, and are more likely to turn off the more independent voters and white Democrats that always disliked the racial divisiveness of people like Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson.
Barack Obama had the right idea, to portray himself as post-racial. That is why he sought to put the Rev. Wright controversy behind him so quickly. And to his credit, Obama has not got involved in this very petty politicking. On this, he is a decent man. It is a shame he is being let down so badly by his party and his supporters.
Sep
14
An Instructive Commentary
Filed Under American Politics, Liberalism | 18 Comments
Robert Kuttner of the American Prospect has an article at The Huffington Post which I find to be an interesting insight into the Progressive mindset. He writes on the subject of a tax on financial speculation to lessen the potential for negative impacts such as we witnessed last year. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to suggest such a thing. The financial markets did get carried away on a glut of unregulated and incautious speculation. The results, banks going to the wall, were self-inflicted and ordinary people suffered hugely as a result.
But it’s also important to understand that we rely on such speculation, and as we suffer now, we have benefited hugely in the past from the same levels of speculation. And no doubt, our future prosperity will also be dependent on the financial industry. We no longer store our loot under the mattress. We are invested in pensions, mortgages and shareholdings. Our borrowing and our savings depend on rates set within the corridors of financial power.
And to that end, any attempts at regulation, or demands for greater accountability need to be tempered with this in mind. We need to be looking for functional measures that balance protecting ourselves from the excesses whilst using a light a touch as possible when it comes to restraint.
I was expecting this sort of commentary from Kuttner, having read the first couple of paragraphs. I was wrong:
First, a very small tax in all kinds of financial transactions, say one tenth of one percent, would not be felt by legitimate long-term investors. But in the case of traders who get in and out of exotic derivatives minute by minute, making huge numbers of quickie trades, it would add up to a lot of money and would cut into both their profits and their entire socially destructive business strategy.
Second, such a tax could pull in hundreds of billions of dollars a year, at a time when large deficits are giving the political right (and center) an excuse to cut social spending, and no form of taxation is popular. But this tax would be the least unpopular. It would not just fall primarily on the very, very wealthy. It would fall on the least socially defensible part of Wall Street, the people who make their billions from speculative short term trades.
What is overdue is a little bit of populist retribution against the people who brought down the system — and will bring it down again if the hegemony of the traders is not constrained.
So the progressive is not interested in a financial system that works. It is social justice, political retribution, sustaining large increases in public spending, and finally punishing the rich, that motivates them. I don’t think that much more proof is needed that the socialists of the seventies and eighties have morphed into the progressives of today.
Society is an organic whole. It is dependent on it’s constituent parts functioning well and in harmony. But for people like Kuttner, a functioning society is not what is desired. They want a society that they can control and manipulate to provide for “social justice”.
But that’s the thing about progressivism. It can never be truly about social justice. By definition, progressivism is about manipulating society, it is mechanistic rather than organic, and where is the justice in having self-appointed social engineers pulling the strings on the society they deem suitable?
Aug
7
There was the beginnings of an interesting discussion in the comments last night which made me think about whether my personal circumstances have influenced my politics at all. Before I go on, here’s Israel and Liberty on the issue:
Israel:
My sister runs hers and good luck to her she seems to enjoy her job just as much as l enjoy mine, but l think the difference between me and you is that i’m not just going to dismiss people at the lower end of the spectrum as “bums, end-users, siphons and illegal immigrants”. You obviously have NO CLUE to what circumstances they have which has them there.
And Liberty:
Israel
May I suggest that the reason you might be seeing comments that seem “angry” is that we are all vulnerable.
I would venture to guess (and please everyone no personal details are required) that some of the people on this blog, conservatives included, have faced unbelievable difficulties in their lives.
I venture to even say that some of the conservatives have had much more difficult lives than you can even imagine. What you may perceive as smugness might even be remnants of their survival mode.
The left is not alone in the battle to make life livable and sane. The left is not the only side with compassion, care and work and struggle.
I’ve been thinking a lot about my views on the world in the last eight years, an exploration that has led me to the conservatism I now value.
I was born outside the U.K., moving to different countries every two or three years. I didn’t move to Britain until I was eighteen. My parents were, I suppose, lower-middle class, but the environment in which they were living, and I was raised, was one of respect, politeness and the understanding that one can only get rewards through hard work. Both my parents had a respect for religion but weren’t religious and both were interested in current affairs and politics, but weren’t particularly political. They can be best described as soft right of centre. By the by, given the chance to vote, both would have voted for Obama at the last election, but both think Gordon Brown is a complete duffer. They were very keen on ensuring I got a good education. I was strongly encouraged to read and learning became a fun exercise. Nothing substantial, I wasn’t reading Aristotle or anything like that, but I was very strong on Geography and developed a real passion for history. This education was enhanced by private school. I wasn’t sent there because of my parent’s wealth, they sacrificed a lot so that I could go there, but they wanted me to have a stable education, rather than changing schools every two or three years as we moved from one country to another.
After leaving school, my life became rather unstable. To my everlasting regret, I never went to University. I moved from job to job through my adult years, never being able to commit to anything, never finding anything that really excited me. I think it is fair to say, that my life has been a wasted one; I am not one of life’s successes. More on that later.
I divorced in 2000. I never really thought about who I was up to that time or what I valued. The divorce caused me to be rather more self-analytical and I engaged in a sort of Cartesian doubt experiment, throwing out all my pre-conceived ideas and thinking rationally about what I believed and valued.
I said earlier, that I wasn’t one of life’s successes, and this was one of the things I needed to confront. It is this that guided me to the conservatism I hold today. Left wing philosophy would have me believe, that my failure was not necessarily my own fault. There are other factors that dictate my path through life, factors beyond my own control. It would be easy to accept this Marxist or liberal premise, that it was outside factors that have the most influence on my life. But the key realisation for me was that my life was not influenced by outside forces, my failures were mine alone. At any stage of my adult life, I could have acted to improve it. I could have gone on to further education, I could have stayed with one of the many jobs I had and committed to a career path, I could have retrained or sought out new experiences. It was this realisation that led me to my conservatism. We are self-sufficient and self-determining animals. It is our own decisions that affect our lives. Some of us make good choices, some of us bad ones. Therefore, it is only right that those that make good choices are rewarded and they certainly shouldn’t be sacrificed to bail out the ones who make bad choices. The left would have us believe that our passage through life is a deterministic one, we are slaves to the society and culture that we are raised in. But this is a fallacy, the people who defy the pre-determined (either positively or negatively) prove that. In fact, the left’s egalitarian policies artificially create the circumstances which discourage a self-deterministic approach to life, through re-distributive taxation, welfare and equalising outcomes.
That was how I became a conservative. Would anyone else like to share. Be as personal (or not) as you like, but can I suggest you avoid specifics, you never know who’s reading the blog.
Aug
2
The Stratification Of Society
Filed Under American Politics, Conservatism, Liberalism | 15 Comments
In a comment by Hayward, a reply to my recommendation of the book “The Conservative Intellectual Movement Since 1945″, he posted a review of the book which included this little gem:
Conservativism is about the entrenchment of power and the stratification of society. At all levels from race, to wealth to gender, each will know his place.
It put me in mid of a post I’d recently read at HotAir which spoke to the very issue of stratification within society, but at the hands of Obama and his liberals. Any stratitification resulting from conservatism is a functional outcome derived from the nature of society, not something that happens by design. Conservatives do not legislate the promotion of stratification, in fact, often the opposite is true. Consider Margaret Thatcher’s decision to allow residents to buy their own social housing, in both the U.K. and the U.S., it is the right that propose allowing parents to choose the school of their choice through voucher programs, a measure the left strongly oppose. The HotAir article I referred to earlier makes it very clear just how Obama and his Congressional buddies are dividing up the country into the “haves” and the “should be kept in their places”:
On Healthcare:
* The Peasant Plan: The Obama Administration is trying, inexorably, to force “the American street” into a “public” (read: socialized) healthcare system.
* The “Haves” Plan: Congress and their union benefactors are making sure it (and its benefactors) are exempt from Obamacare. Expect the rest of the elites to follow suit.
Education:
* The Peasant Plan: The Obama Administration wasted no time in cutting DC’s wildly-successful school voucher plan. And Obama’s Democrat allies around the nation are busy trying to roll back charter schools, open enrollment laws, voucher plans and school choice in general, in particular in the communities that need them most, the inner cities and the various Indian reservations; while these plans are often wildly successful, they sap jobs from the teachers’ union – and that’s much more important than educating the children. To be fair, it is a jobs stimulus plan – for public school teachers. Not to mention all the people who’ll have to deal with the failure of our public school system. And India and China.
* The “Haves” Plan: Being “Haves”, they send their kids to private schools (or, for the lesser “haves”, to public schools in areas with fewer of the social problems caused by three generations of using the inner city as a warehouse for other “have nots”.
Food and drink:
# The Peasant Plan: McDonald’s – the fine dining of choice for middle-class Americans who judge restaurants by whether there’s a playland for the kids to run around in – stands to get taxed back to the stone age.
# The “Haves” Plan: No special taxes for the high-end restaurants, like the ones in DC where those who pull the levers of government dine.* The Peasant Plan: Soda pop – the cheap opiate caffeinate of the masses – is in line for punitive taxes to “pay for obesity”.
* The “Haves” Plan: Starbucks – home of the fat-bomb froux-froux coffee beverages that fuel the Administration’s kids’ all-night policy-mongering sessions – goes forth blissfully untaxed. Live and latte live, I guess.
Transport and energy:
* The Peasant Plan: “Clunkers” – affordable used cars – are actively harassed off the road via “Cap and Trade” energy taxes, implemented to attempt to force people off the roads and into cramped, perpetually-late or broken-down public transit systems.
* The “Haves” Plan: Hybrid vehicles – which are presently hideously expensive to buy, and moreso to maintain, and are thus the province of the well-off – are subsidized.
The left have given us social housing, public healthcare, equalised education (which reduces standards) and a welfare state that denies ambition and motivation. All this is done under the self-serving pretext of “caring”. In truth it is about absolving oneself of one’s own guilt at being rich and ensuring that poor place are kept in their place (ie not near the rich people).
I would just like to finish by quoting shockwaver in full who makes this point so much more eloquently:
your implication in the use of “entrenchment” is exactly backward from modern day conservatism. stratification is the result, not the goal. And it’s not a static stratification either, at least up to the 95-percentile, but more akin to a geologic one except the scale of time is years, not eons, with the whole system constantly churning.
the U.S. is known for its remarkable vertical social and economic mobility. my sphere is filled with success stories of those with humble origins in numbers not found in any of the socialist countries that i have visited. these stories are not restricted to the field of science but permeate all of the productive part of our society. where i see the most generational stratification is in the effete intellectual community where theoreticians pontificate about thing about which they have no practical knowledge.
and the belief that conservatism is about entrenchment of wealth is laughable on its face. anyone who lives in this country knows to a certainty that the wealth is not controlled by conservatives. just look at the party affiliation in the richest congressional districts or look at the backgrounds of the financial gurus on wall street who all come from the ivy league schools and have a stranglehold they are unwilling to release.
the biggest popular lie about conservatism is that it is the party of the rich when in fact it occupies the great middle of America. i admit that there is correlation of income with conservatism in middle America but it is liberals who populate the extremes: the very wealthy (just visit the tony part of any major American city) and the poor whom they demagogue by constantly telling them that they are stuck in their circumstances until the government can get them out.
to me, socialism is about equalizing results independent of effort. conservatism is about being allowed to succeed. simply put, it’s the conservative part of our social structure that has allowed me to make a better life for myself and my children while the socialistic part would deny me that. i will not bore you with my story; it is enough to say that it started low socio-economically and it’s our system that allowed me to get ahead without any government help.
one fundamental flaw in socialism is that it does not acknowledge that unearned “success” is no success at all. i strongly believe, in principle, that socialism destroys initiative and that society suffers because of it. you know, it’s that rising tide thing — except in this case, it’s a lowering tide.
socialism is compassion blind to its ultimate consequences and it fails. conservatism is harsher but it works.