Does it Feel Good? Continued...

Continuing on the "Does It Feel Good?" vs. "Does It Do Good?" theme from the other day....

Gun Control: Calls for gun control after a public shooting even though none of the proposals would have prevented the shooting.  More gun control feels good.

The minimum wage: The overall net value is nothing.  It makes those getting the raise temporarily more happy (until prices adjust) and some people a lot less happy when they lose their job.  At best liberal economists will argue that it does no harm overall, admitting that it probably does no good.  But it feels good.

The Keystone Pipeline: Everyone acknowledges that it would've actually reduced carbon emissions and would have also reduced the risk of oil spills.  But environmentalists hated it and Obama killed it.   Why?  Oil pipelines don't feel good.  Killing the pipeline was environmentally "symbolic."

Paris Climate Talks: The talks were full of talk and not much else.  There are no legally binding agreements, and no means of enforcement.  But getting that many countries together to talk about "Climate Change" feels good. (Ask NPR).

Affirmative Action: It stigmatizes minorities and mismatches their current abilities with requirements.  But even if it did neither ill nor good, it definitely feels good.

That's all for now.  I bet if we thought about it we could come up with a pretty long list.

Understanding the Myopic Psychology of Liberals

Progressives hate traditional institutions for they are an impediment to swift and unrelenting "progress," and for many, power. But there is more, if Jonathan Haidt is correct.  The left cannot even understand the right, though the right can partially understand the left.  (More below). Given such a state of affairs, where at least one side cannot even understand the other, what civil, political alternative is there to keep us from tearing each other apart other than a return to federalism?

How to Understand Both Liberals and Conservatives (excerpt):

But Haidt’s second major discovery is far more consequential:  the concept of “the conservative advantage.” Based on painstaking cross-cultural social-psychological experimentation, Haidt establishes that the moral foundations of liberals and conservatives are not just different, they are dramatically unequal. The liberal moral matrix rests essentially entirely on the left-most foundations [i.e. Care/Harm, to a lesser extent Fairness/Cheating]; the conservative moral foundation—though slanted to the right—rests upon all six [value categories, i.e. Care/Harm; Fairness/Cheating; Liberty/Oppression; Loyalty/Betrayal; Authority/Subversion; Sanctity/Degradation].

This is a stunning finding with enormous implications. The first is that conservatives can relate to the moral thinking of liberals, but the converse is not true at all. Haidt, who is liberal himself, elegantly explains how and why conservatives will view liberals as merely misguided while liberals tend to view conservatives as incomprehensible, insane, immoral, etc.

Another implication is that liberal prescriptions tend to be incredibly single-minded as compared to those of conservatives. Haidt uses the metaphor of a bee hive to illustrate. A liberal, finding a bee in the hive suffering from injustice, is motivated more or less exclusively by the desire to get justice for the bee. A conservative, being partially driven by the Care/Harm foundation, also desires to alleviate the injustice, but tries to find a solution that also contemplates the survival of the hive itself.

Liberals seek to create justice and equity; whether doing so harms core institutions simply doesn’t enter into their moral reasoning. Conservatives, in contrast to their typical caricature, do care about justice and fairness, they merely cherish vital institutions relatively more. If there’s a conflict, conservatives will err toward protecting institutions. [This is somewhat simplistic insofar as many conservatives will also think that destroying such institutions is unfair and unjust.]

Sadly, “The Righteous Mind” proves irrefutably that trying to explain to liberals that their solutions might undermine vital institutions is fruitless. They cannot and will not relate, or even concede that such concerns fall into the realm of moral reasoning. The good news is that a coalition can be built among the rest of us who understand that destroying the hive to benefit the lone bee results inescapably in suffering for all.

Read all of it.

The Extreme Democrats Move Further to the Left

Totalitarian Democrats Out for a Stroll

I have written about this before.  More support from the New York Times.

The Root Difference Between Conservatives and Liberals

From Keith-Burgess Jackson: 

Barry M. Goldwater (1909-1998) on Conservatism

I have been much concerned that so many people today with Conservative instincts feel compelled to apologize for them. Or if not to apologize directly, to qualify their commitment in a way that amounts to breast-beating. “Republican candidates,” Vice President Nixon has said, “should be economic conservatives, but conservatives with a heart.” President Eisenhower announced during his first term, “I am conservative when it comes to economic problems but liberal when it comes to human problems.” Still other Republican leaders have insisted on calling themselves “progressive” Conservatives. These formulations are tantamount to an admission that Conservatism is a narrow, mechanistic economic theory that may work very well as a bookkeeper’s guide, but cannot be relied upon as a comprehensive political philosophy.

The same judgment, though in the form of an attack rather than an admission, is advanced by the radical camp. “We liberals,” they say, “are interested in people. Our concern is with human beings, while you Conservatives are preoccupied with the preservation of economic privilege and status.” Take them a step further, and the Liberals will turn the accusations into a class argument: it is the little people that concern us, not the “malefactors of great wealth.”

Such statements, from friend and foe alike, do great injustice to the Conservative point of view. Conservatism is not an economic theory, though it has economic implications. The shoe is precisely on the other foot: it is Socialism that subordinates all other considerations to man’s material wellbeing. It is Conservatism that puts material things in their proper place—that has a structured view of the human being and of human society, in which economics plays only a subsidiary role.

The root difference between the Conservatives and the Liberals of today is that Conservatives take account of the whole man, while the Liberals tend to look only at the material side of man’s nature. The Conservative believes that man is, in part, an economic, an animal creature; but that he is also a spiritual creature with spiritual needs and spiritual desires. What is more, these needs and desires reflect the superior side of man’s nature, and thus take precedence over his economic wants. Conservatism therefore looks upon the enhancement of man’s spiritual nature as the primary concern of political philosophy. Liberals, on the other hand,—in the name of a concern for “human beings”—regard the satisfaction of economic wants as the dominant mission of society. They are, moreover, in a hurry. So that their characteristic approach is to harness the society’s political and economic forces into a collective effort to compel “progress.” In this approach, I believe they fight against Nature.

Surely the first obligation of a political thinker is to understand the nature of man. The Conservative does not claim special powers of perception on this point, but he does claim a familiarity with the accumulated wisdom and experience of history, and he is not too proud to learn from the great minds of the past.

(Barry M. Goldwater, The Conscience of a Conservative, ed. CC Goldwater, The James Madison Library in American Politics, ed. Sean Wilentz [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007 (first published in 1960)], 1-3 [footnote omitted; italics in original])

Note from KBJ: This is a great book by a great (though, like all of us, imperfect) man. I'm ashamed to say that it took me 58 years to read it. Better late than never.

Mother's Day Meme Fun

Racism and Sexism are Insidious

Syme from the film, "1984"

Liberals are racism and sexism bloodhounds.  They are constantly on the move, nose to the ground, catching whiffs and barking up a tree.  Racism and sexism are everywhere.  A few examples and then two 1984 quotations below:

"Hooligan" "Bugger" "Eskimo" "Peanut Gallery" all racist.

Saying "you guys" to a group that includes both men and women is sexist.  One poor student confesses,

“I don’t consciously do it, but I’ll say ‘You guys!’ or ‘We should do something together, guys!’ and I don’t even consciously...like, usually I'm addressing a group of all girls,” a Macalester College student said in a video in August.

As a professor explains:

Banning Tobacco & Cursing on Campus, and the Gateway Drug

Two anecdotal stories from readers of the blog:

Banning Tobacco and Cursing

Are You Liberal? Take the Test and See!

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/1390257/posts
Anyone want to debate?  I'd say "no" to all of them with the exception of 14.  I plead ignorance about that one. Not sure about 6 either, since a case can be made for isolationism.

You say you are a liberal.

Do you believe the following?
1.Standards for admissions to universities, fire departments, etc. should be lowered for people of color.
2.Bilingual education for children of immigrants, rather than immersion in English, is good for them and for America.
3.Murderers should never be put to death.
4.During the Cold War, America should have adopted a nuclear arms freeze.
5.Colleges should not allow ROTC programs.
6.It was wrong to wage war against Saddam Hussein in the Gulf War.
7.Poor parents should not be allowed to have vouchers to send their children to private schools.
8.It is good that trial lawyers and teachers unions are the two biggest contributors to the Democratic Party.
9.Marriage should be redefined from male-female to any two people.
10.A married couple should not have more of a right to adopt a child than two men or two women.
11.The Boy Scouts should not be allowed to use parks or any other public places and should be prohibited from using churches and synagogues for their meetings.
12.The present high tax rates are good.
13.Speech codes on college campuses are good and American values are bad.
14.The Israelis and Palestinians are morally equivalent.
15.The United Nations is a moral force for good in the world, and therefore America should be subservient to it and such international institutions as a world court.
16.It is good that colleges have dropped hundreds of men's sports teams in order to meet gender-based quotas.
17.No abortions can be labeled immoral.
18.Restaurants should be prohibited by law from allowing customers to choose between a smoking and a non-smoking section.
19.High schools should make condoms available to students and teach them how to use them.
20.Racial profiling for terrorists is wrong -- a white American grandmother should as likely be searched as a Saudi young male.
21.Racism and poverty -- not a lack of fathers and a crisis of values -- are the primary causes of violent crime in the inner city.
22.It is wrong and unconstitutional for students to be told, "God bless you" at their graduation.
23.No culture is morally superior to any other.
Those are all liberal positions. How many of them do you hold?