One might think that, given the superior intelligence of Jews and Asians as groups, members of these groups would not support destructive leftists when it is fairly obvious that doing so is not in their long-term best self-interest. We read below that a third of Asian Americans live in California. So they have first-hand experience of the negative consequences of leftist government. So why do they vote Democrat overwhelmingly?
It turns out that Confucius plays a role! Ideas have consequences.
An Asian American documents the fact and then offers an explanation (emphases added):
From Roosevelt’s executive order which sent Japanese Americans to internment camps during the World War II to today’s affirmative action in college admissions, Asian Americans have been hurt again and again by Democrat politicians and liberal policies. Yet Asian Americans consistently vote overwhelmingly for Democrat candidates. In 2016, 79 percent of Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) voters supported Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. In the 2012, presidential election, Barack Obama won 73 percent of the Asian American vote, exceeding his support among Hispanics (71 percent) and women (55 percent).
Why do the majority of Asian Americans choose to support Democrats? I identified three factors. First is location. Asians tend to concentrate in urban environments where liberals are dominant. For example, a third of Asians in America live in California. Other top states with significant Asian populations are New York, New Jersey, and Hawaii. Therefore, Asians are bombarded by Democrat propaganda.
Second, the cultural influence of the countries of origin still has an impact on many first generation Asian immigrants: the top six countries that send 80 percent of all Asian immigrants to the U.S. are China, the Philippines, India, Vietnam, Korea and Japan. With the exception of India, the other five countries all have long traditions of being patriarchal societies following Confucian teachings.Confucius, a Chinese philosopher from 551 B.C to 479 B.C., defined the relationship between government and its people, between the ruler and his subject, as a family affair. Confucius believed people should obey and respect their rulers just as they obey and respect their fathers, while a ruler should love and care for his subjects as if they were his children. Under the influence of this philosophy, although many Asians believe self-reliance and hard work are the only paths to prosperity, many of them also believe government has a responsibility to take care of other people, and they are more open to big government as long as there is a virtuous leader to lead it. Like many other ethnic groups, the second generation of East Asians are much less likely to be subject to the influence of Confucius.
Third, the Democrat’s message of embracing diversity, as superficial as it is, still sounds attractive to many Asians, because it gives them a sense of belonging. In the meantime, Republicans have all but given up on winning Asian votes and thus make very little effort. Republicans have been doing a very poor job of “showing up” in Asian communities. To many Republicans candidates, minority outreach means outreach to African Americans and Hispanic Americans only. Outreach to Asians has a lower priority, often merely showing up at a Chinese New Year celebration in an election year is considered to be sufficient. In addition, Republicans do a poor job of recruiting Asian Americans at the grassroots level. Being an Asian and a conservative is a lonely journey. When I show up at a Republican Party event, 9 out of 10 times I am the only Asian in the room.
Should we assume that every people in every land is equally capable of shaping its own destiny? The notion that largely tribal Muslim societies can march to democracy on the same path as Americans who elected their own pastors and collected their own taxes has caused endless mischief. Time and again, Rice’s prescription comes down to “assume a civil society,” where none ever has existed.
[. . .]
Culture doesn’t matter for Condoleezza Rice, who reduces the world to simple ideological categories. Her contribution to misguided American policies has been substantial. America hasn’t begun to pay for the consequences of her mistakes. The Bush Administration and its successor spent over $4 trillion to build nations in Iraq and Afghanistan, with nearly 7,000 American dead and more than 50,000 wounded. What do we have to show for it?
Culture matters. This is why a nation has a right to defend and preserve its culture by enforcing its borders and by refusing to allow subversive elements to immigrate.
We are not all the same whether as individuals or as groups. We don't share the same values or want the same things. Not all cultures are equally conducive to human flourishing.
You have a natural right to life. This right to life entails in others a moral obligation not to harm you. Should anyone attempt to do so, you yourself have a right, directly and not via the invocation of the help of a police agency, to defend your life. But if so, then you have a right to the adequate means of self-defense. Having the right entails the right, though not the obligation, to exercise the right. This implies that the law-abiding citizen has a right to keep and bear appropriate arms for personal and home defense.
It follows that no one and no government has the right to infringe your gun rights.
Much more could be said, but as some wit once observed, and then kept repeating, "Brevity is the soul of blog."
Now what about this right to self-defense? If you were to deny that we possess it, I would pronounce you benighted and not worth ten seconds of a rational man's time. But it is always nice to be able to back up one's assertions by invocation of the views of great philosophers. So we turn to John Locke (1632-1704), a great influence on our Founding Fathers, and The Second Treatise of Government (1690). Chapter III is entitled "Of the State of War." The first paragraph, #16, is as follows:
Sec. 16. THE state of war is a state of enmity and destruction: and therefore declaring by word or action, not a passionate and hasty, but a sedate settled design upon another man’s life, puts him in a state of war with him against whom he has declared such an intention, and so has exposed his life to the other’s power to be taken away by him, or any one that joins with him in his defence, and espouses his quarrel; it being reasonable and just, I should have a right to destroy that which threatens me with destruction: for, by the fundamental law of nature, man being to be preserved as much as possible, when all cannot be preserved, the safety of the innocent is to be preferred: and one may destroy a man who makes war upon him, or has discovered an enmity to his being, for the same reason that he may kill a wolf or a lion; because such men are not under the ties of the common law of reason, have no other rule, but that of force and violence, and so may be treated as beasts of prey, those dangerous and noxious creatures, that will be sure to destroy him whenever he falls into their power [emphasis added].
I took a welcome break from the cable shout shows and the gun 'conversation' the other night to watch the 1944 film noir Double Indemnity, starring Barbara Stanwyck, Fred MacMurray, and Edward G. Robinson. The Stanwyck character talks an insurance agent played by MacMurray into murdering her husband in order to collect on a double indemnity policy.
The husband is strangled mafia-style, murderer in back seat, victim in front. But the act is not shown. The viewer is shown enough to 'get the picture.' These old films had sex and violence but one's nose wasn't rubbed in them. Sex and violence were part of the story line. If Bogie was shown taking the leading lady into a bedroom, one knew what was about to transpire, but one was spared the raw hydraulics of it.
But thanks to 'progressives' we've made 'progress.' Much of what passes as 'entertainment' today is meant to demean, dehumanize, degrade, and undermine whatever moral sense is left in people. I leave it to you to decide whether Tucson, Aurora, Sandy Hook . . . Parkland and like atrocities are more appropriately charged to the account of liberal culture rather than to that of gun culture.
You know my answer.
We ought to demand of Hollywood dreckmeisters that they clean up their act and curtail their cultural pollution. Not that these scumbags would ever show any social responsibility.
He is best known for his 1960 crossover hit that made it to the #7 spot on the Billboard Hot 100, Let's Think About Living. How quaint the reference to the fellow with the switchblade knife. It was a tamer time.
The denizens of HollyWeird love the freakish, the 'transgressive,' the grotesque, and the unnatural. And being leftists, they celebrate losers and screw-ups, from the legendary La La Land 'motorist' Rodney King to the shotgun murderer Tookie Williams. A characteristic of libs and lefties is that in their typical knee-jerk (reflexive as opposed to reflective) style, they take the side of losers, criminals, screw-ups and underdogs regardless of what they did to bring on their underdog status. If you don't understand this, you will never understand the Left and how pernicious leftists are.
Don't get me wrong. I believe in equal justice under the law. And I believe in helping those who, through no fault of their own, have fallen on hard times. I practice what I preach. But the attitude of leftists whereby they celebrate transgressives and miscreants is perverse, which is why these destructivos deserve our steadfast opposition and unremitting contempt.
Maybe tomorrow I'll tell you what I really think. For now, I pass the baton to Gilbert T. Sewall:
Hollywood’s A-list is almost all in for transformative social justice, which mixes calculated groupthink and “can I grab the spotlight?” As a result, America’s favorite Hollywood evening has mutated into hours of glossy political hectoring, this year in behalf of female empowerment, support for immigrants, and opposition to the National Rifle Association.
“Hollywood has the best moral compass, because it has compassion,” Harvey Weinstein declared in 2009. “We were the people who did the fundraising telethon for the victims of 9/11. We were there for the victims of Katrina and any world catastrophe.” With telethons and global hugs, who needs nature or God?
[. . .]
Hollywood likes freakish [freakishness], and so do its devotees. Criticizing tattoos, hookups, rap music, or trannies — saying the wrong thing on Facebook — might get you into trouble at work or school. Heaven forbid you should offend those who would consider your disapproval “hatred,” which entitles them to destroy your career or good name. Or maybe blow you away.
We’re getting used to that as well. First-person shooter video and computer games allow people to enact murder, not only watch it. That’s part of Hollywood’s multimedia platform too, a franchise worth billions.
Media accountants and publicists raise the specter of censorship and the thought police on their way to the bank. In fact, entertainment capitalists have no illusions what they are stirring up and the thrills they provide. New York- and Los Angeles-based wizards know how to stimulate appetites and points of view, and for a price they can do their magic in Washington, D.C. Privately, they exalt [exult] in their power.
Meanwhile, Hollywood doubles down on identity politics. It insists that depravity and imaginary violence do not lead to sociopathic behavior. It professes the product is mere fiction, that it has no real world effect. If you don’t like it, look the other way. You don’t have to buy it.
Well, it depends on the terminus a quo and the terminus ad quem. If you're going from San Francisco to Las Vegas, the rental fee is $2,000. But if you're going to San Francisco from Lost Wages, it will set you back a paltry 100 semolians.
Californication proceeds apace. The once-golden Golden State is bleeding liberals.
As for shitholes, San Francisco has become one, so much so that one now needs a crap map to safely negotiate its streets.
The problem, of course, is the Democrat Party and its leading 'lights,' the benighted Nancy Pelosi and Jerry 'Governor Moonbeam' Brown, that stellar lunar product of Jesuit 'education.'
Cutting against the Enlightenment grain, Kant delivers a resoundingly negative verdict. Suicide is always and everywhere morally wrong. This entry is part of an effort to understand his position. Unfortunately, Kant's treatment is exceedingly murky and one of his arguments is hard to square with what he says elsewhere. In his Lectures on Ethics (tr. Infield, Hackett Publishing, no date), the great champion of autonomy seems to recommend abject heteronomy:
God is our owner; we are His property; His providence works for our good. A bondsman in the case of a beneficent master deserves punishment if he opposes his master's wishes. (154)
It is hard to see how this coheres with Kant's talk of persons as ends in themselves in Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals (AA 428). For Kant, rational beings, whether biologically human or not, are persons. Persons, unlike things, are ends in themselves. As such, they may not be used as mere means. I may not treat another person as a mere means nor may I so treat myself. For Kant there are duties to oneself and they take precedence over duties to others since "nothing can be expected from a man who dishonours his own person." (118) The highest duty to oneself is that of self-preservation. Suicide is contrary to this highest duty and is therefore morally impermissible in all circumstances. The prohibition against suicide is exceptionless.
But how can a person be an end in itself if finite persons are created by God for his purposes? How can persons be ends in themselves if God owns us and we are his property? Is suicide wrong because it violates God's property rights? If anyone has property rights in my body, it would have to be me wouldn't it? Is man God's slave? So man is both free and enslaved?
Furthermore, if it is morally permissible for God to use finite persons as mere means to his end, self-glorification, say, then how could it be wrong for a person to treat himself as a mere means when he commits suicide?
We can put the underlying puzzle as a aporetic dyad:
1) My dignity, worth, autonomy, freedom, and irreplaceable uniqueness as a person derive from my having been created in the image and likeness of an absolutely unique free being who is the eminently personal source of all Being, truth, and value. My higher origin and destiny elevate me infinitely far above the rest of creation. I am animal, but also a spirit, and thus not merely an animal. I cannot be understood naturalistically as merely a more highly evolved animal.
2) If I am created by God both as a material being and as a person, then I cannot be an end in myself possessing autonomy and the other attributes mentioned. For if God creates and sustains me moment by moment in every aspect of my being, then also in my being a subject, a self-determining person.
Note that the freedom mentioned in (1) is not the compatibilist "freedom of the turnspit" as Kant derisively calls it, but the freedom of a (noumenal) agent who has the power to initiate a causal chain ex nihilo by performing an act that he could have refrained from performing, and is therefore morally responsible for performing. This rich non-compatibilist notion of freedom implies a god-like power in man that no merely natural (phenomenal) being possesses or could possess. This freedom points to a divine origin and is the respect in which we bear the image of God within us. The freedom of the human creature mirrors the freedom of the creator.
But how is this freedom and dignity and personal uniqueness, which we cannot possess except as God's creatures, logically compatible with our creature status? Presupposed is a robust conception of creation as creatio continuans according to which the entire being of the creature is sustained ongoingly by divine power (Any less robust a conception would injure the divine sovereignty.) How can the inviolable interiority of a person maintain itself in the face of God's creative omniscience?
Some will say that the paradox is a contradiction and both limbs cannot be true. Other will say that the paradox is a mystery: both limbs are true, but we cannot in this life understand how they could both be true.
The paradox is at the root of Kant's uncompromising attitude toward the morality of suicide. He prohibits it without exception despite man's freedom and autonomy because of their derivation from God. We are ends in ourselves, which implies that it is wrong for anyone, including God, to treat us as mere means; yet we are God's property and for this reason not morally justified in disposing of ourselves.
Kant's Exceptionless Prohibition of Suicide as Essentially Christian and Unjustifiable Otherwise
Christianity too issues a total and exceptionless prohibition against suicide. The classical (philosophical as opposed to theological) arguments of Augustine and Aquinas against suicide are, however, uncompelling, as the Christian Paul Ludwig Landsberg shows. Thus he maintains that
. . . the total prohibition of suicide can only be justified or even understood in relation to the scandal and the paradox of the cross. It is true that we belong to God, as Christ belonged to God. It is true that we should subordinate our will to His, as Christ did. It is true that we should leave the decision as to our life or death to Him. If we wish to die, we have indeed the right to pray to God to let us die. Yet we must always add: Thy will, not mine, be done. But this God is not our master as if we were slaves. He is our Father. He is the Christian God who loves us with infinite love and infinite wisdom. If He makes us suffer, it is for our salvation and purification. We must recall the spirit in which Christ suffered the most horrible death.
Here, perhaps, is the key to our puzzle. The puzzle, again, is how the Sage of Koenigsberg, the Enlightenment champion of human freedom and autonomy, can maintain that, no matter how horrific the circumstances, one may never justifiably take one's own life. The key is the need to suffer for purification. The fallen world is as it were a penal colony and we must serve our time. Suicide is jailbreak and for that reason never justified.
What I am suggesting is that if we read Kant's suicide doctrine in the light of Christianity it makes a certain amount of (paradoxical) sense, and that if one refuses to do this and reads it in a wholly secular light, then there is no justification for its exceptionless prohibition of suicide. I hope to test this thesis in further posts.
Landsberg again:
All that we can say to the suffering man who is tempted to commit suicide, is this “Remember the suffering of Christ and the martyrs. You must carry your cross, as they did. You will not cease to suffer, but the cross of suffering itself will grow sweet by virtue of an unknown strength proceeding from the heart of divine love. You must not kill yourself, because you must not throw away your cross. You need it. And enquire of your conscience if you are really innocent. You will find that if you are perhaps innocent of one thing for which the world reproaches you, you are guilty in a thousand other ways. You are a sinner. If Christ, who was innocent, suffered for others and, as Pascal said, has also shed a drop of blood for you, how shall you, a sinner, be entitled to refuse suffering? Perhaps it is a form of punishment. But divine punishment has this specific and incomparable quality, that it is not revenge and that its very nature is purification. Whoever revolts against it, revolts in fact against the inner meaning of his own life.”
Paul Ludwig Landsberg, geboren 1901 in Bonn, wurde 1927 Ordinarius für Philosophie und emigrierte 1933 zunächst nach Spanien, dann nach Frankreich. Der Schüler von Max Scheler und Edmund Husserl war während der französischen Emigration eng mit dem Collège de Sociologie verbunden und starb 1944 im Konzentrationslager Oranienburg.
Our contemporary media dreckmeisters apparently think that the purpose of art is to degrade sensibility, impede critical thinking, glorify scumbags, and rub our noses ever deeper into sex and violence. The liberal fetishization of freedom of expression without constraint or sense of responsibility is part of the problem. But I can't let a certain sort of libertarian or economic conservative off the hook. Their lust for profit is also involved.
What is is that characterizes contemporary media dreck? Among other things, the incessant presentation of defective human beings as if there are more of them than there are, and as if there is nothing at all wrong with their ways of life. Deviant behavior is presented as if it is mainstream and acceptable, if not desirable. And then lame justifications are provided for the presentation: 'this is what life is like now; we are simply telling it like it is.' It doesn't occur to the dreckmeisters that art might have an ennobling function.
The tendency of liberals and leftists is to think that any presentation of choice-worthy goals or admirable styles of life could only be hypocritical preaching. And to libs and lefties, nothing is worse than hypocrisy. Indeed, a good indicator of whether someone belongs to this class of the terminally benighted is whether the person obsesses over hypocrisy and thinks it the very worst thing in the world. See my category Hypocrisy for elaboration of this theme.
Leftist scum need to look in the mirror before blaming inanimate objects for violent behavior.
I am a foe of misquotation, misattribution, the retailing of unsourced quotations, the passing off of unchecked second-hand quotations, and sense-altering context suppression. Have I ever done any of these things? Probably. 'Suffering' as I do from cacoethes scribendi, it is a good bet that I have committed one or more of the above. But I try to avoid these 'sins.'
This morning I was reading from Karl Menninger, M.D., Whatever Became of Sin? (Hawthorn Books, 1973). On p. 156, I found this quotation:
Our youth today love luxury. They have bad manners, contempt for authority, disrespect for older people. Children nowadays are tyrants. They contradict their parents, gobble their food, and tyrannize their teachers.
At the bottom of the page there is a footnote that reads: "Socrates, circa 425 B. C. Quoted in Joel Fort, The Pleasure Seekers (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1969)."
I was immediately skeptical of this 'quotation.' In part because I had never encountered the passage in the Platonic dialogues I have read, but also because the quotation is second-hand. So I took to the 'Net and found what appears to be a reputable site, Quote Investigator.
. . . was crafted by a student, Kenneth John Freeman, for his Cambridge dissertation published in 1907. Freeman did not claim that the passage under analysis was a direct quotation of anyone; instead, he was presenting his own summary of the complaints directed against young people in ancient times.
Sloan Wilson's The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit appeared in 1955 two years before Jack Kerouac's On the Road. I never finished Gray Flannel, getting only 80 or so pages into it. It's a book as staid as the '50s, a tad boring, conventional, and forgettable in comparison to the hyper-romantic and heart-felt rush of the unforgettable On the Road. Since how 'beat' one is in part has to do with one's attitude towards money, which is not the same as one's possession or non-possession of it, I'll for now just pull some quotations from Horace and Sloan Wilson. The Horace quotations seem not to comport well with each other, but we can worry that bone on another occasion.
Quaerenda pecunia primum est; virtus post nummos. (Horace, Epistles I, 1, 53) Money is to be sought first of all; virtue after wealth. Or, loosely translated, cash before conscience.
Vilius argentum est auro virtutibus aurum. (Horace, Epistles I, 1, 52). Silver is less valuable than gold, gold less valuable than virtue.
The next morning, Tom put on his best suit, a freshly cleaned and pressed gray flannel. On his way to work he stopped in Grand Central Station to buy a clean white handkerchief and to have his shoes shined. During his luncheon hour he set out to visit the United Broadcasting Corporation. As he walked across Rockefeller Plaza, he thought wryly of the days when he and Betsy had assured each other that money didn't matter. They had told each other that when they were married, before the war, and during the war they had repeated it in long letters. "The important thing is to find a kind of work you really like, and something that is useful," Betsy had written him. "The money doesn't matter."
The hell with that, he thought. The real trouble is that up to now we've been kidding ourselves. We might as well admit that what we want is a big house and a new car and trips to Florida in the winter, and plenty of life insurance. When you come right down to it, a man with three children has no damn right to say that money doesn't matter. (The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, Simon and Shuster, 1955, pp. 9-10)
I have a little disagreement going with the Dark Ostrich. He asserts, "Relative poverty is all about status." In an earlier entry, I quoted him as maintaining that
We are born with a natural inequality which soon turns into economic inequality. The reason it turns into economic inequality, I believe, is that humans have a natural desire for status.
I replied,
Yes, we are naturally unequal, both as individuals and as groups, and this inequality results in economic inequality. But I wouldn't explain this in terms of the desire for status. Status is relative social standing, and depends on how one appears in the eyes of others. But this is relatively unimportant and has little to do with money and property which are far more important. I can live very well indeed without name and fame, accolades and awards, high social position and the perquisites that come in its train. But I cannot live well without a modicum of material wealth.
It is not desire for status that [primarily] explains economic inequality but the desire for money and property and the sort of material security they provide.
I would guess that no one who reads this weblog is absolutely poor, i.e., bereft of life's necessities, and that every one who reads it is relatively poor, and significantly so. What do I mean by 'significantly so'? Suppose A has a net worth of four billion USD and B a net worth of 3.9 billion. Then B is poor relative to A. I will call this insignificant relative poverty. But the Ostrich and I, though we have far more than we need, are significantly relatively poor as compared to, say, the late Fidel Castro, that man of the people and hero of the Left.
The Ostrich tells us that relative property is all about status. I take that to mean that it is the drive for social status alone that brings about economic inequality and with it relative poverty. That is empirically false. I am the counterexample: I live wisely and frugally and my net worth keeps going up. But I don't care about status, which is relatively unreal, being mainly a matter of what's going on in the heads of others. I carefully husband my resources because I want to be in a position to take care of myself and others when the inevitable disasters occur and not be a burden on others. What others think of me, though of some importance, is of less importance to me than my material well-being.
But let's be charitable. Perhaps what the Ostrich means to say is that it is the lust for status that mainly brings about economic inequality and relative poverty. I concede that that might be so. It is an empirical question and cannot be answered from the arm chair.
But there are a couple of normative questions in the vicinity and these are what really interest me. One is whether it is morally permissible to pursue loot and lucre, property and pelf, for social standing. The other is whether it is rational to pursue these things for social standing. I will leave the moral question for some other time.
As for rationality, it can be understood in two different ways.
An agent is instrumentally rational if he chooses means conducive to the achievement of his ends. A rational agent in Phoenix who intends to travel to Los Angeles by car in eight hours or less will head West on Interstate 10. If he were to head East he would show himself to be irrational, at least in respect of this particular goal or type of goal. This says nothing about the rationality or irrationality of driving to Los Angeles. Indeed, there are those who will say that it makes no sense to speak of ends as either rational or irrational, that such talk is meaningful only in respect of means.
On a second way of thinking about rationality, one can coherently speak of ends themselves as rational or the opposite. Consider social status and material security. Which is a higher value? Which is more choice-worthy? Which would it be more rational for a being of our constitution to pursue? To me the answer is obvious. Material security, which includes wealth well beyond what one needs physically to survive, is a higher value that social status. Modifying slightly what I said above,
I can live very well indeed without name and fame, accolades and awards, high social position and the perquisites that come in its train. But I cannot live well without material wealth in excess of what is needed for necessities.
Given how benighted human beings are, it may well be instrumentally rational to pursue wealth for the sake of status. That's an empirical question. But no reasonable person prefers status to wealth, just as no reasonable person prefers transient sense pleasures to long-term physical health.
So the Ostrich and I may be at cross-purposes. I am making normative claims while he remains at the level of the merely factual.
Now suppose someone asserts that the good is whatever satisfies desire, and that there is no way of ranking desires as objectively higher or lower, and their objects as more or less choice-worthy. Could I refute such a person? I don't think so. Contradict yes, refute no. For it all comes down to whether one has correct value intuitions. Some of us do and some of us don't. Just as some of us are color-blind, some of us are value-blind, wertblind in the terminology of Dietrich von Hildebrand. While color blindness is a defect in the eye of the head, value blindness is a defect in the 'eye' of the soul.
