Category: Politics

Who Built the Internet? Obama’s Straw Man Fallacy

This just over the transom:

With respect to your post about how "you didn't build this blog" — really bad example. You built the blog, but Big Government built the internet that allows you to transmit it it to potentially billions of people. So, it's exactly an illustration of what Obama was talking about — you and businesses and everyone are dependent on public infrastructure for rich and fruitful lives.

It's an excellent example.  You must be a liberal.  Here is what Obama said:

If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you've got a business, you didn't build that. Somebody else made that happen. The Internet didn't get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet. The point is, is that when we succeed, we succeed because of our individual initiative, but also because we do things together.

Let's go through this sentence by sentence.

1. It is true that we have all been helped by others and that no one's success is wholly a matter of his own effort.  "No man is an island."  No one pulls himself  up by his own bootstraps.    But of course no conservative denies this.  Not even libertarians deny it.  What Obama is doing is setting up a straw man that he can easily knock down.  He imputes a ridiculous view to the conservative/libertarian and then makes the obvious point that the ridiculous view is ridiculous.

2. Not everyone is lucky enough to have great teachers, but most of us have had some good teachers along the way. Sure.  But there is no necessary connection to Big Government.  I went to private schools: elementary, high school, college, and graduate school.  And my teaching jobs were all at private schools.  Obama falsely assumes that only government can provide education.  That is not only a false assumption but a mendacious one as well.  Obama is certainly aware that there are alternatives to public education such as home-schooling and private schools.  There is also autodidacticism: Eric Hoffer, the 'longshoreman philosopher,' didn't even go to elementary school.  A relative taught him to read when he was very young but beyond that he is totally self-taught. Of course, he is a rare exception.

There is also the question whether the federal government has any legitimate role to play in education even if one  grants (as I do) that state and local governments have a role to play.  It is simply nonsense, though in keeping with his Big Government agenda, for Obama to suggest that we need the federal government to provide education.  It is also important to  point out that the federal Department of Education, first set up in the '60s, has presided over a dramatic decline in the quality of education in the U. S.  But that is a huge separate topic.

3. With respect to roads and bridges and infrastructure generally, it is ridiculous to suggest that these products of collective effort are all due to the federal government or even to state and local government.  Obama is confusing the products of collective effort wth the products of government effort.  It is a silly non sequitur to think that because I cannot do something by myself that I need government to help me do it.    One can work with others without the intrusion of government.  He is also confusing infrastructure with public infrastructure.  The first is a genus, the second a species thereof. 

4. How did the Internet begin?  This from a libertarian site:  "The internet indeed began as a typical government program, the ARPANET, designed to share mainframe computing power and to establish a secure military communications network."  So the role of the federal government in the genesis of the Internet cannot be denied.

But what do we mean by 'Internet'?  Those huge interconnected mainframes?  That is the main chunk of Internet infrastructure.  But don't forget the peripherals.  For the blogger to use that infrastructure he first of all needs a personal computer (PC).  Did Big Government provides us with PCs?  No.  It was guys like Jobs and Wozniak tinkering in the garage.  It was private companies like IBM.  And let's not forget that it was in the USA and not in Red China or the Soviet Union or North Korea that PCs were developed.  Would Jobs and Wozniak and Gates have been motivated to do their hard creative work in a state without a free economy?  Did any commie state provide its citizens with PCs?  No, but it did provide them with crappy cars like the Trabant and the Yugo.  Germans are great engineers.  But Communism so hobbled East Germany that the Trabant was the result.

How do you hook up the PC to the Internet?  Via the phone line.  (Telephony, by the way, was not developed by the government.  Remember Alexander Graham Bell and his associates?)  To convert digital information into analog information  transmissible via phone lines and back again you need a modulator-demodulator, a modem.  Who gave us the modem?  Government functionaries?  Al Gore?  Was Obama the mama of the modem?  Nope.  Dennis C. Hayes invented the PC modem in 1977.  In the private sector.

Back in the day we operated from the  C prompt using DOS commands.  That was before the GUI: graphical user interface.  Who invented that?  Credit goes to a number of people working for Xerox, Apple, and Microsoft.  All in the private sector.

And then there is Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML).  Who invented that and with it the World Wide Web (WWW)?  Tim Berners-Lee in the private sector.    The WWW is not the same as the Internet.  The WWW is a huge collection of interconnected hypertext documents accessible via the Internet.   The government did not give us the WWW.

Returning now to the blog that I built.  I built the blog, but I didn't build the Typepad platform that hosts the blog. Did Al Bore or any other government functionary give us Typepad or Blogger? No.  That too is in the private sector.

And then there are the search engines.  Did the government give us Google?

Obama is a mendacious no-nothing, a disaster for the country, and the emptiest of empty suits.  Just read his awful speech.  You liberals need to wise up. If you vote for him, you will seal your own doom and get what you deserve for being stupid. 

Barack the Magic Suit: A Political Fairy Tale

A short video by Andrew Klavan.  Here is an essay by him which ends like this:

He has no clue how things actually work. Even if socialism did work, it would be wrong because it would strip people of the fruits of their labor and the property rights on which liberty depends. Thankfully, it doesn’t work, which makes the moral issue moot. But Obama has no clue of what’s been tried and found wanting. He surrounds himself with ideologues and tunes out anyone who’s ever made an honest dime in the real world. Thus every single idea the “progressive” president puts forward is a regressive throwback to notions that have been failing miserably for more than seventy years. The stuff he believes is just plain dopey. He thinks technology is the cause of unemployment. He does not understand that only private jobs create the wealth that makes public jobs possible. He thinks that wind and solar energy should be subsidized and fossil fuel production suppressed. He insists on bringing the European social model to the U.S. even as the model implodes in front of our eyes.

So go ahead, tell me that Mitt Romney is rich and I should hate him for it. Tell me that he’s white and I should hate him for that. Tell me that his wife rides horses or that he said something nasty when he was fifteen or that — omigod! — he’s a Mormon. Whatever his foibles and flaws, it seems pretty clear that Romney has the character to be president. Barack Obama has proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that he does not. 

Profiling, Prejudice, and Discrimination

Everybody profiles.  Liberals are no exception.  Liberals reveal their prejudices by where they live, shop, send their kids to school and with whom they associate.  

The word 'prejudice' needs analysis.  It could refer to blind prejudice: unreasoning, reflexive (as opposed to reflective) aversion to what is other just because it is other, or an unreasoning pro-attitude toward the familiar just because it is familiar.  We should all condemn blind prejudice.  It is execrable to hate a person just because he is of a different color, for example. No doubt, but how many people do that?  How many people who are averse to blacks are averse because of their skin color as opposed to their behavior patterns? Racial prejudice is not, in the main, prejudice based on skin color, but on behavior. 

'Prejudice' could also mean 'prejudgment.'   Although blind prejudice is bad, prejudgment is generally good.  We cannot begin our cognitive lives anew at every instant.  We rely upon the 'sedimentation' of past exerience.  Changing the metaphor, we can think of prejudgments as distillations from experience.  The first time I 'serve' my cats whisky they are curious.  After that, they cannot be tempted to come near a shot glass of Jim Beam.  My prejudgments about rattle snakes are in place and have been for a long time.  I don't need to learn about them afresh at each new encounter with one. Prejudgments are not blind, but experience-based, and they are mostly true. The adult mind is not a tabula rasa.  What experience has written, she retains, and that's all to the good.

So there is good prejudice and there is bad prejudice.  The teenager thinks his father prejudiced in the bad sense when he warns the son not to go into certain parts of town after dark.  Later the son learns that the old man was not such a bigot after all: the father's prejudice was not blind but had a fundamentum in re.

But if you stay away from certain parts of town are you not 'discriminating' against them?  Well of course, but not all discrimination is bad. Everybody discriminates.  Liberals are especially discriminating.  The typical Scottsdale liberal would not be caught dead supping in some of the Apache Junction dives I have been found in.  Liberals discriminate in all sorts of ways.  That's why Scottsdale is Scottsdale and not Apache Junction. 

'Profiling,' like 'prejudice' and 'discrimination,' has come to acquire a wholly negative connotation.  Unjustly.  What's wrong with profiling?  We all do it, and we are justified in doing it.  Consider criminal profiling.

It is obvious that only certain kinds of people commit certain kinds of crimes. Suppose a rape has occurred at the corner of Fifth and Vermouth. Two males are moving away from the crime scene. One, the slower moving of the two, is a Jewish gentleman, 80 years of age, with a chess set under one arm and a copy of Maimonides' Guide for the Perplexed under the other. The other fellow, a vigorous twenty-year-old, is running from the scene.

Who is more likely to have committed the rape? If you can't answer this question, then you lack common sense.  But just to spell it out for you liberals: octogenarians are not known for their sexual prowess: the geezer is lucky if he can get it up for a five-minute romp.  Add chess playing and an interest in Maimonides and you have one harmless dude.

Or let's say you are walking down a street in Mesa, Arizona.  On one side of the street you spy some fresh-faced Mormon youths, dressed in their 1950s attire, looking like little Romneys, exiting a Bible studies class.  On the other side of the street, Hells Angels are coming out of their club house.  Which side of the street would you feel safer on?   On which side will your  concealed semi-auto .45 be more likely to see some use?

The problem is not so much that liberals are stupid, as that they have allowed themselves to be stupefied by that cognitive aberration known as political correctness.

Their brains are addled by the equality fetish:  everybody is equal, they think, in every way.  So the vigorous 20 year old is not more likely than the old man to have committed the rape.  The Mormon and the Hells Angel are equally law-abiding.  And the twenty-something Egyptian Muslim is no more likely to be a terrorist than the Mormon matron from Salt Lake City. 

Photo ID: Voter Suppression or Liberal Projection?

If it is racist to demand photo ID at polling places, what does that say about how liberals view black people? They must view you black folk as utterly incompetent nonentities incapable of taking part in modern life, as pimps, whores, drug addicts, carjackers, hoodie-wearing thugs, smash & grab artists, troglodytes, total losers  . . . .  Time to rise up and move off the liberal plantation.

The Left-leaning Los Angeles Times ran a  piece the other day with the risible subheading: "The evidence is overwhelming that recent photo ID laws are politically motivated."  This is a perfect example of the pot calling the kettle black.  It is also a good example of psychological projection.  After all, it is liberals and leftists whose motivations are purely political.  Their sole motivation for opposing photo ID laws is to win at all costs and by any means including voter fraud.  I say this because they do not have one single cogent argument against such laws. Liberals project  unsavory motivations into their opponents.  This defense mechanism keeps them from having to acknowledge that is they who have unsavory motivations.

Anyone with common sense ought to be able to appreciate that voting must be conducted in an orderly manner, a manner to inspire confidence in the citizenry, and that only citizens who have registered to vote and have satisfied the minimal requirements of age, etc., are to be allowed into the voting booth. Given the possibility of fraud, it is therefore necessary to verify the identities of those who present themselves at the polling place. To do this, voters must be required to present a government-issued photo ID card, a driver's license being only one example of such. It is a reasonable requirement and any reasonable person should be able to see it as one.  Is this why our liberal pals oppose it?  Liberals are not famous for their common sense.

Too many liberals, however, see these common-sense requirements as acts of voter suppression, as witness this astonishing outburst from Jennifer Granholm, former governor of Michigan:

In November, five million eligible voters will find it harder to exercise their
rights in America — 150 voter suppression laws have been introduced in 30 state
legislatures across the country.

The most common tactics: requiring photo ID, restricting registration drives,
limiting early voting and imposing onerous residency requirements. Who do these
laws most directly affect? The poor, the elderly, minorities and the young. And
how do those groups typically vote? Democratic.

Let's consider photo ID.  For Granholm, requiring such ID is a form of voter suppression.  How's that for hyperbole?  Does she call it bank withdrawal suppression when check cashers are required to produce ID?  The other day I withdrew a sum of money from a checking account in excess of what is obtainable from an ATM machine.  I was asked to show my driver's license.  Was that an infringement of my right to access my own funds?  Of course not.  The demand was eminently reasonable even though I am known at the bank in question.  Similarly with the photo ID requirement at the polling place.  Examples like this can be multiplied indefinitely. 

Some liberals say that voter fraud is rare.  Maybe, maybe not.  In any case, irrelevant.  There is a principle at stake.  Besides, how many people lack ID?  Without ID one simply cannot function in society.  To exploit and adapt a slogan of the Harvard logician, Willard Quine, "No [social] entity without [social] identity."  You're a nonentity without  ID.  So when a liberal says that voter fraud is rare, reply, "So is lack of ID.  Since almost everyone has it, almost no one is excluded from voting by the ID requirement."

Since liberals don't have even one cogent argument against photo ID, we are justified in psychologizing their opposition to common-sense requirements.  Their opposition is rooted in a desire to win by any means, including fraud.  As lefties, they believe the end justifies the means.  They see themselves as the noble standard-bearers of equality against their disgusting, evil, SIXHRB opponents.  (SIXHRB: sexist, intolerant, xenophobic, homophobic, racist, bigoted. HT: Dennis Prager.)

By the way, Governor Granholm is now on the faculty at University of California, Berkeley.  Surprise!

Political Action and the Principle of Le mieux est l’ennemi du bien

Attributed to Voltaire. "The best is the enemy of the good."

Meditation on this truth may help conservatives contain their revulsion at their lousy choices. Obama, who has proven that he is a disaster for the country, got in in part because of conservatives who could not abide McCain.  And he may stay in office in part because of disgusted conservatives who fail to heed Voltaire's principle.

Politics is a practical business. It is always about the lesser of evils, except when it is about the least of evils. It is not about being ideologically pure. It is about accomplishing something in a concrete situation in which holding out for the best is tantamount to acquiescing in the bad. Political choices are forced options in roughly William James' sense: he who abstains chooses willy-nilly. Not choosing the better amounts to a choice of the worse.

Don't let the best or the better become the enemy of the good.  Try to achieve something achievable.  Don't pine after the unattainable.  Impossible dreams are for liberals, not reality-anchored conservatives.  It did not surprise me when I learned that Ted Kennedy's favorite song was The Impossible Dream.  Figures!

Related post: Can What is Impossible to Achieve be an Ideal for us? 

On Calling Obama a Socialist

It is a tactical mistake for libertarians and conservatives to label Obama a socialist. For what will happen, has happened: liberals will revert to a strict definition and point out that Obama is not a socialist by this strict definition. Robert Heilbroner defines socialism in terms of "a centrally planned economy in which the government controls all means of production." To my knowledge, Obama has never advocated such a thing. So when the libertarian or conservative accuses Obama of socialism he lets himself in for a fruitless and wholly unnecessary verbal dispute from which he will emerge the loser.

It is enough to point out that the policies of Obama and the Democrat Party lead us toward bigger government and away from self-reliance, individual responsibility, individual liberty, and sound fiscal policy.  If you want to use the 'S' word, you can say that Obama & Co. are pushing us in the direction of socialism.  But calling him a socialist is tactically inadvisable.  Never forget that the whole point is to remove him and his gang from positions of power.  To achieve that goal we need to persuade large numbers of fence-sitters that  that he is leading us down the wrong path.  That persuasion is less likely to happen if we come across as extremists who misuse language.

It is even worse to label Obama a 'communist.' Every communist is a socialist, but not every socialist is a communist. If our president is not a socialist, then a fortiori he is not a communist. It is intellectually irresponsible to take a word that has a definite meaning and turn it into a semantic bludgeon. That's the sort of thing we expect from leftists, as witness their favorite 'F' word, 'fascist,' a word they apply as indiscriminately and irresponsibly as 'racist.'

Liberals and leftists love to sling the SIXHRB (sexist, intolerant, xenophobic, homophobic, racist, bigoted) epithets to pre-empt thought and prevent debate.  We should avoid similar behavior.

Milos Forman has an op-ed piece in the NYT entitled Obama the Socialist? Not Even Close.  Forman takes umbrage at the loose way 'socialism' is used by some conservatives:

Now, years later, I hear the word “socialist” being tossed around by the likes of Rick Perry, Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum, Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh and others. President Obama, they warn, is a socialist. The critics cry, “Obamacare is socialism!” They falsely equate Western European-style socialism, and its government provision of social insurance and health care, with Marxist-Leninist totalitarianism. It offends me, and cheapens the experience of millions who lived, and continue to live, under brutal forms of socialism.

Forman goes on to recount a couple of truly horrifying tales about what it was like living under the jackboot of communism in Czechoslovakia.

Although Forman is right to distinguish the brutal forms of socialism from the supposedly benign forms, he seems willy-nilly to concede that Obamacare is a socialist policy.  He is also quite naive if he thinks that the seeds of jackboot socilaism are not already present, in undeveloped form, in 'benign' socialism.  He seems not to understand that power corrupts people and that one can get to a truly awful destination by tiny steps each of which seems reasonable and benign.

The pious platitudes with which Forman ends his piece are risible.

Barack Obama, the PoMo Prez

No one is more skillful than Victor Davis Hanson when it comes to exposing His Mendacity, the empty suit currently occupying the White House.  Here is an excerpt from a recent column:

Illegal, Legal, Neither, or Both?

I think the current status of immigration law goes something like this. It is fine for a municipality or state to contravene immigration law by declaring a region a “sanctuary,” where federal law cannot be enforced. But it is illegal for a state to enforce immigration statutes when the federal government will not. Arizona was sued for trying to deport illegal aliens; so California is considering ways to grant them amnesty. If an illegal alien graduates from high school, serves in the military, or breaks no law, he can be exempt from deportation; but if he does not graduate, does not serve, or breaks a law, there is no expectation that he will now suddenly be deported at the time those eligible for amnesty will not be. The president told Latino activists he wanted to, but could not, issue exemptions by fiat, but then did exactly that a bit later as the campaign heated up.  Eric Holder both claimed the Arizona law encouraged profiling and admitted he had never read it. Obama called for an end to vilification, and then begged Latinos to “punish our enemies,” in the manner he once asked supporters to “get in their face.”

Mandate/Tax/Penalty?

The new federal takeover of health care requires a mandate, a tax, or a penalty, but the architects of the plan cannot agree on which — not a surprising postmodern turn when Justice Roberts reportedly wrote much of both the majority-confirming and the minority-dissenting opinions. It is unpopular now, but supposedly won’t be when it is enacted (or read for the first time) — and that is why over 2,000 insiders obtained exemption from such popular legislation. The 2,400 pages of ObamaCare were to lower our premiums by $2,500 a family, but they have already risen by almost 10% on average. Barack Obama ran against Hillary Clinton for her advocacy of a mandate, a position he ridiculed as both unfair and unworkable — before asserting just the opposite when he adopted her position as his own. One cannot be rejected for insurance for a preexisting illness, and therefore need not purchase insurance (preferring instead to pay the mandate / tax /penalty) until he is actually in extremis and in need of costly care — sort of like buying car insurance the day after you were blindsided, or life insurance on the day you were diagnosed with leukemia.

Obama’s Victory Speech Decoded

I am a conservative, not a libertarian.  This puts me at odds with John Stossel on a couple of important issues. But here he is spot on.

With libertarians there is common ground; with liberals increasingly little as they become ever more extreme, meandering ever deeper into the wasteland of hard leftism.

Garry Wills on What it Means to Vote for a Republican

Excerpt:

To vote for a Republican means, now, to vote for a plutocracy that depends for its support on anti-government forces like the tea party, Southern racists, religious fanatics, and war investors in the military-industrial complex. It does no good to say that “Romney is a good man, not a racist.” That may be true, but he needs a racist South as part of his essential support. And the price they will demand of him comes down to things like Supreme Court appointments. (The Republicans have been more realistic than the Democrats in seeing that presidential elections are really for control of the courts.)

When dealing with a delusional leftist such as Wills should one attempt to reason with him or resort to mockery and derision?  Probably both.  But at the moment I am not in a derisive mood.  I'll content myself with a couple of obvious points, the obviousness of which does not preclude the necessity to repeat them often.

1. Leftists typically refer to their opponents as 'anti-government.'  But surely Mr. Wills can understand that if one is for limited government, then one is for government.  Since Wills undoubtedly understands this, he lies when he characterizes the tea party as anti-government.  By lying he announces in effect that his intentions are purely polemical and that he is out to win at all costs, like a good leftist, who will doing anything to win: the end justifies the means.

Wills cannot possibly not understand that the debate is not about government vs. no government, but about the size, scope, and reach of government.  He knows this; he distorts the issue nonetheless because his is the mendacity endemic on the Left.

2.  And of course, good leftist that he is, Wills plays the race card.  He speaks of the "racist South."  Now there are plenty of rednecks down there and some of them are racists. But what you have to understand about leftists is that they are virtuosos of semantic inflation: 'racist' in their mouths means the same as 'conservative.'  Actually, it is even worse than this: 'racist' for a leftist doesn't have even this fixed meaning: it is an all-purpose semantic bludgeon the meaning of which expands or contracts like an accordion depending on the ideological needs of the moment.  Label your opponents racists to avoid confronting their ideas.  That's their shabby tactic.

The Obama Administration’s Contempt for the Rule of Law

We are living in very dangerous times.  You need to inform yourself.

Krauthammer: Obama Intent on Not Enforcing Immigration Law

Charles Krauthammer, Obama's Naked Lawlessness

Thomas Lifson, Rule of Law Now an Election Issue

Diana West, Why Arizona Matters.  Excerpt:

I find it difficult to regard the Supreme Court decision on Arizona immigration law as just another controversial or disappointing highest court decision. There is something almost post-apocalyptic  and certainly pre-totalitarian when, to invoke Justice Scalia's dissent, the Court has ruled that Arizona contradicts federal law by enforcing it. Yes, as Scalia put it, it "boggles the mind." It also conjures up truly alarming comparisons with "justice" as meted out by kangaroo courts, show trials and other horrors of totalitarian dictatorships.

Did we defeat the Soviet empire so that we could become a totalitarian state like it?

SCOTUS Rules Against SEIU

Not all news is bad.

I have nothing against unions as such.  My father was a rank-and-file member, all his working life, of the Boilermakers' Union.  SEIU, however, is a public-sector union, a horse of a different color.  So what's the problem with public-sector unions?  Briefly, this.

You pay taxes.  Some of your tax dollars go to pay the salaries of so-called 'civil servants.'  Some of these 'civil servants' belong to unions that automatically deduct union dues from their salaries and funnel this cash to the union bosses and lobbyists who pressure Democrat Party legislators to do their bidding.  Legislators, being human, love their power and perquisities, and do whatever they can to hold onto them.  To stay in power they need votes which they get from the union members who vote as a block for the Dems to get as many goodies as they can.

So we the people are forced via taxation to support the fiscally irresponsible and unsustainable Democrat Big Government agenda. Would you say that that smacks of corruption?

Suppose you object that that the Dems are not fiscally irresponsible.  Well, then you are wrong, but you have a right to your opinion.  That's not the issue, however.  The issue is whether it is legitimate to force people to support political parties whose ideas they oppose.

Regulating Political Speech

A good article by John Stossel.  Punch line: 

It is shameful that leftists let their hatred of corporations lead them to throw free speech under the bus. There is a smarter way to get corporate money out of politics: Shrink the state. If government has fewer favors to sell, citizens will spend less money trying to win them.

Or as one of my aphorisms has it: The bigger the government, the more to fight over!