Category: Politics

‘Politicization,’ National Debt, and Global Warming

The Republicans were accused of 'politicizing' the debt crisis.  But how can you politicize what is  inherently political?  The debt in question is the debt of the federal government.  Since a government is a political entity, questions concerning federal debts are political questions.  As inherently political, such questions cannot be politicized.

If to hypostatize is to illicitly treat as a substance that which is not a substance, to politicize is to illictly treat as political what is not political.  Since governmental debt questions are 'already' political, they cannot be politicized.

This is not to say that 'politicize' does not have a legitimate use.

Questions about global warming are not inherently political.  They are questions about the earth and its climate.  Since the earth is not a political entity, these questions are not political, nor can they be made political.  It is therefore illict to politicize these questions as both conservatives and leftists do. Here are three global warming questions that are at the top of the list with respect to logical priority:

1. Is global warming (GW) occurring?

2. If yes to (1), is it naturally irreversible, or is it likely to reverse itself on its own?

3. If GW is occurring, and will not reverse itself on its own, to what extent is it anthropogenic, i.e., caused by human activity? This is the crucial empirical question. It is obviously distinct from (1) and (2). If there is naturally irreversible global warming, this is not to say that it is caused by human activity. It may or may not be.

None of these is a political question.  Therefore, it is illicit to 'politicize' them. 

Unfortunately, too much of present day 'science' is ideologically-infected.  Global warming alarmism is yet another ersatz religion for liberals.  See here.  Of course, I also condemn  those conservatives and libertarians whose knee-jerk rejection of GW is premised on hostitlity to any empirical finding that might lead to policies that limit the freedom of the market.

Why Pay Taxes . . .

. . . when the government fails to do what it is constitutionally mandated to do such as secure the borders (Article I, Section 8), yet does all sorts of things for which there is no constitutional justification? Or has my reading of the U. S. Constitution been too spotty for me to find the mandate for Social Security?

Whether the Federal government should administer such programs as SS, or a substitute system suitably streamlined and reformed, is negotiable. But that border control is an indisputably legitimate and undeniably necessary function of government is not open to reasonable debate.

Theocracy and the Left

I wrote, "To reverse the scriptural phrase, they will swallow the imaginary gnat of 'theocracy' while straining at the all-too-real camel of Islamo-terrorism."
 
A reader comments, "I'm not so sure it's gullibility as much as flat-out dishonesty half the time. Honestly, when I first heard the 'Dominionist' rumblings again, I thought it was comedy. As in, someone was making a joke, not that this was a serious charge. Imagine my surprise."

It is indeed dishonesty and we can expect more of it as Perry and Bachmann gain traction.  The Left will trot out the same old tired exaggerations and lies that they deployed during the Bush administration.  So it is appropriate that I repost  the following 2005 entry from the old blog.

………………

Serious thinkers, those who aim at the truth, do not engage in linguistic sleight-of-hand. This is a tactic of ideologues and polemicists, whose goal is not truth but power. So my advice to all contenders in the political arena who want to be taken seriously as serious thinkers is that they avoid trying to advance their positions by way of the misuse of language. One sort of misuse is verbal inflation: one takes a word with a fixed specific meaning and inflates it to cover phenomena to which it cannot legitimately be applied. A good recent example is the loose and irresponsible use of the word 'theocracy.' I should think that this term counts as a pejorative for most all of us, whether on the Left or the Right. Very few of us want a theocracy. But to proceed further, we need a definition. 

Theocracy is a form of government in which the rulers are identical to the leaders of the dominant religion, and  governmental policies are either identical to or strongly influenced by the principles of the majority religion.  The idea is much better conveyed by 'ecclesiocracy' since 'theocracy' is something of a misnomer inasmuch as God himself does not rule in any so-called theocracy.  But the word is in use and we are stuck with it.  In a theocracy, the government claims to rule on behalf of God or a  higher power, as specified by the religion in question.

This definition of 'theocracy' is clear enough and comports well with standard usage. In light of it, those who refer to the Bush administration as 'theocratic' are clearly inflating and misusing the term. They are trying to win the debate by changing the rules of the debate in midstream. Among these rules is one that forbids tampering with the neutral terminology in which alone a reasonable debate can be conducted.

Let us see if we can be clear about some elementary points. A  conservative is not the same as a theist. A theist is not the same as a Christian. A Christian is not the same as a fundamentalist. A theist is not the same as theocrat.

Lefties need to be careful about their identity theories. Theist =  theocrat is perhaps not as outrageous as Bush = Hitler, but just as false.

Are there advocates of theocracy here in the USA? Yes. Do they pose any sort of threat? Not that I can see.  But lefties don't care about truth; they care about winning.  And they will do anything to win.  The end justifies the means.

Michele Bachmann and Dominionism Paranoia

Doug Groothuis, The Constructive Curmudgeon, points us to his article, Michele Bachmann and Dominionism Paranoia.  Excerpt:

There is a buzz in the political beehive about the dark dangers of Bachmann's association with "dominionism"—a fundamentalist movement heaven-bent on imposing a hellish theocracy on America. In the August 15 issue of The New Yorker, Ryan Lizza asserts that Bachmann has been ideologically shaped by "exotic" thinkers of the dominionist stripe who pose a threat to our secular political institutions. The piece—and much of the subsequent media reaction—is a calamity of confusion, conflation, and obfuscation.

Leftists are astonishingly bad at threat assessment.  To reverse the scriptural phrase, they will swallow  the imaginary gnat of 'theocracy' while straining at  the all-too-real camel of  Islamo-terrorism.

A Summary of Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals

If you want to understand the Left, their tactics, their ruthlessness, and their imperviousness to ethical considerations, then you need to read Alinksy.  Summary here.  You will then understand what is behind the outrageous attacks of leftist scum bags, such as this guy, on conservatives.  They see politics as warfare, and they believe the end justifies the means.

A Note on Political Rhetoric

Is the Social Security system a Ponzi scheme?  Many conservatives so label it.  But obviously it is not a Ponzi scheme.  The intent behind such schemes is fraud.  Not so with the SS system.  If your point is that the SS system as currently configured is unsustainable in the long run, and is to that extent like a Ponzi scheme, then say that.  You will then be saying something that, in my opinion, is true.  But don't say something that is literally and obviously false if you expect to convince fair-minded people.

You may accuse me of not understanding the purpose of political rhetoric.  "The purpose is not to convince thoughtful and fair-minded people; the purpose is to fire up the lazy and largely thoughtless masses.  The purpose is to 'energize the base.'  You naively think that others share your abhorrence of loose and irresponsible talk.  They don't."

Is Obama Smart?

George W. Bush couldn't rub a subject and a verb together and come up with a clean sentence in his mother tongue.  The man lacked verbal facility.  Among many, myself included, verbal facility is a touchstone of intelligence, or rather of one sort of intelligence, verbal intelligence.  Barack Obama has it.  But there is more to intelligence than the ability to sling words while avoiding syntactic howlers.  And when it comes to this 'more,' Obama is sadly lacking.  Obama is an uncommonly good bullshitter and blather-mouth, but the content is sorely lacking.  Does he have even one concrete idea that he is willing to express publicly?  Like Bret Stephens, I don't understand why so many consider him highly intelligent:

I don't buy it. I just think the president isn't very bright.

Socrates taught that wisdom begins in the recognition of how little we know. Mr. Obama is perpetually intent on telling us how much he knows. Aristotle wrote that the type of intelligence most needed in politics is prudence, which in turn requires experience. Mr. Obama came to office with no experience. Plutarch warned that flattery "makes itself an obstacle and pestilence to great houses and great affairs." Today's White House, more so than any in memory, is stuffed with flatterers.

Much is made of the president's rhetorical gifts. This is the sort of thing that can be credited only by people who think that a command of English syntax is a mark of great intellectual distinction. Can anyone recall a memorable phrase from one of Mr. Obama's big speeches that didn't amount to cliché? As for the small speeches, such as the one we were kept waiting 50 minutes for yesterday, we get Triple-A bromides about America remaining a "Triple-A country." Which, when it comes to long-term sovereign debt, is precisely what we no longer are under Mr. Obama.

Why We Can’t Ignore Politics

Thomas Mann, Diaries 1918-1939, entry of August 5, 1934:

     A cynical egotism, a selfish limitation of concern to one's
     personal welfare and one's reasonable survival in the face of the
     headstrong and voluptuous madness of 'history' is amply justified.
     One is a fool to take politics seriously, to care about it, to
     sacrifice one's moral and intellectual strength to it. All one can
     do is survive, and preserve one's personal freedom and dignity.
  
I don't endorse Mann's sentiment but I sympathize with it. Hitler came to power in 1933. Imagine the effect that must have had on a man of Mann's sensitivity and spiritual depth. You witness your country, the land of Kant and Schiller, of Dichter und Denker, poets and thinkers, in Heinrich Heine's fine phrase, transformed into a land of Richter und Henker, judges and hangmen.

My response to Mann would be along these lines: It precisely because men of the spirit must survive and survive to create that they must be concerned with politics and with those who can kill and suppress them. You escaped to the USA, but what if there were no such country to which to escape because all of the people of high quality practised your cynical egotism, your selfish limitation to the personal?

One can take politics seriously and do one's bit without sacrificing one's moral and intellectual strength to it.  The latter, I agree, would be folly.

Conservatives in the Lead

According to a Gallup Poll dated 1 August, 41% of Americans self-identify as conservatives, 36% as moderate, and 21% as liberal.

Liberals have only themselves to blame for their poor showing.  Their extremism and reckless deviation from common sense condemn them in the eyes of most of us.  The op-ed columnists of the once-great New York Times, for example, are an extremist lot.  Have you ever read a Krugman column?  Or this morning's bit of hyperventilation from Joe Nocera in which he likens Tea Partiers to terrorists?