“JPMorgan is one of the best-managed banks there is. Jamie Dimon, the head of it, is one of the smartest bankers we got and they still lost $2 billion and counting,” the president said. “We don’t know all the details. It’s going to be investigated, but this is why we passed Wall Street reform.”

A few things to note big guy. Wasn’t the Dodd-Frank financial reform suppose to put an end to all this cowboy trading by banks receiving federal bailout and guarantees, which essentially backstop all the bank losses? Wasn’t the Volcker rule explicitly added to address this very contingency? If your buddy Jamie, a significant donor to the Democrat Party, is so smart then what happened here? We need some answers from the “First Gay-Female-Hispanic-Asian-Jewish President“.

Perhaps it is time to recall a Richard Feynman quote: The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.

In essence, Haidt has examined the range of moral concerns felt by human beings and organized them into the following classifications:

• care-harm
• liberty-oppression
• fairness-cheatning
• loyalty-betrayal
• authority-subversion
• sanctity-degradation

Various cultures will value some more and others less. One of his revelations of earlier life occurred on a visit to India, where he discovered that the Hindu world was strongly concerned with the axis of sanctity-degradation , a set of concerns that were entrely alien to his secular, Jewish, American upbringing.

His major insight is that American “liberals”, that is to say, leftists, dwell and think within a two-flavour morality, by and large: care-harm, and liberty-oppression, with significantly less concern for the enforcement of social rules on the disadvantaged (fairness-cheating) and almost no concerns for the three remaining axes: loyalty-betrayal, authority-subversion, and sanctity degradation.  To be precise, this is an empirical finding based on thousands of controlled research responses.

Conservatives, by contrast, were sensitive to all six flavours of moral concern. He  observes that the Republican party is electorally more successful because Republicans are able to talk to the moral concerns of poor whites more effectively that the Democrats can, with their reduced set of moral concerns. That is interesting and important enough, but that is not his main point.

Haidt recounts two turning points in his intellectual growth, the first being his encounter as a young man in India  with broader moralities than care-harm, and liberty-oppression.

The second came in his encounter with a book called simply “Conservatism” by Jerry Muller, and a particular paragraph therein which caused him to slump to the floor when he read it. Pay attention – this is very important.

Muller asserts that modern conservatism “finds its origins within the main currents of Enlightenment thinking, when men such as David Hume and Edmund Burke tried to develop a reasoned pragmatic and essentially utilitarian critique of the Enlihtenment project.”

Muller writes:

“What makes social and political arguments conservative as opposed to orthodox is that the critique of liberal or progressive arguments takes place on the enlightened grounds of the search for human happiness based on the use of reason”.

Haidt responds:

“As a lifelong liberal, I had assumed that conservatism = orthodox = religion = faith = rejection of science. It followed therefore, that as an atheist and a scientist, I was obligated to be a liberal. But Muller asserted that modern conservatism is really about creating the best possible society, the one that brings about the greatest happiness given local circumstances. Could it be? Was there a kind of conservatism that could compete againt liberalism in the court of social science? Might conservatives have a better formula for how to create a healthy, happy society?”

A few pages later, Haidt, having considered the arguments for the importance of moral capital, concludes as follows:

“Nevertheless, if you are trying to change an organization or a society and you do not coniisder the effects of your changes on moral capital, you’re asking for trouble. This, I believe, is the fundamental blind spot of the left. It explains why liberal reforms so often backfire, and why communist revolutions usually end up with despotism. It is the reason I believe that liberalism – which has done so much to bring about freedom and equal opportunity – is not sufficient as a governing philosophy. It tends to overreach, change too many things to quickly, and reduce the stock of moral capital inadvertently. Conversely, while conservatives do a better job of preserving moral capital, they often fail to notice certain classes of voctims, fail to limit the predations of certain powerful interests, and fail to see the need to change or update institutions as times change.”

Those of us who have been conservative for a long time can appreciate that Haidt is opening his eyes, as every true social scientists must, to the facts of the matter, and too much praise cannot be given to the genuine seeker-after-truth.

The facts of the matter are well described in Charles Murray’s “Coming Apart“, which I recommend whole-heartedly, despite the well-reasoned criticism of David Frum. The reason I do so is that Murray  desribes statistically the decline of moral capital withn the bottom twenty percent of the white population of the United States, and the increased pulling away of the top 5% of the American population from the American working and not-working-enough class. Murray points out the decline of marriage, the increase of out-of-wedlock births, the much higher rates of shirking work by otherwise able-bodied males, the increase of crime and decrease of trust, in the white lower class. Frum argues that Murray has ignored the gutting of the American working class by free trade, and that Murray’s essentially moral argument misses the point. Fair enough. You can argue the cause, but you cannot argue that the moral capital of American society is not eroding, and in that finding alone, Charles Murray is talking about the same issue as Haidt.

None of this is news to conservatives. What matters about Haidt’s analysis is that it comes from inside the whale so to speak. When self-described atheistical secular Jews start talking about the importance of moral capital, and that conservatives are onto something important that progressives fail to appreicate, I begin to sense an intellectual revolution in the air. Not a minute too soon, either.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rTiuONsST9s&feature=player_embedded

There is no moderate Islam, there are only moderate Muslims, and they are all heretics, according to their own laws and traditions.

Obama gets the same treatment with this visual effect.

For the Obama faithful, a more appropriate picture is this.

Ashu Solo, a member of the city’s cultural diversity and race relations committee, was among the guests at the dinner Wednesday, where Coun. Randy Donauer said a blessing over the food in which he mentioned Jesus and ended with “amen.”

“It made me feel like a second-class citizen. It makes you feel excluded,” said Solo, who is an atheist.

“It’s ironic that I’ve now become a victim of religious bigotry and discrimination at this banquet that was supposed to be an appreciation banquet for the service of volunteers like me.”

Just observe how in the small space of three paragraphs, we see how Canadians are losing their country to the legal force of multi-culturalism, which says that all religions are odious, but christianity especially so.

• the complainant is a professional ideologist of multi-culturalism, whose salary or expenses is paid by taxpayers.
• He felt excluded when a prayer of thanks was said in terms of Canada’s majority religion.
• He is a recent immigrant.
• He is a “victim” of “religious bigotry and discrimination” by the mere fact of being in the presence of christian prayer.
• But most of all, he has an agency of the state to whom he can turn to bully the majority into compliance with his atheism and sense of victimhood.

Fair enough. As to how such macroevolution occurred, the biologists of this school hold their peace. As profoundly interesting as their arguments are, we are not concerned with them today.

The second school of disagreement with Darwin is the secular Left, which holds that macroevolution is an undeniable truth, but that the same forces of microevolution that have shaped every creature on the planet have somehow not acted on makind since we left Africa 50 or 30 thousand years ago.

Bruce Charlton wrote a profound article on this, which shows in brilliant relief their near hysterical denial of microevolution.

Or rather, secular Leftists do not straightforwardly and honestly deny that adaptation can occur in humans – rather, they make an assumption that all humans are essentially the same everywhere and throughout historical time – and any differences are superficial and non-heritable (’environmental’); and then demand a literally-impossible standard of evidential certainty before they will overturn this assumption of universal sameness….

Denial of micro-evolution has reached almost psychotic extremes in relation to men and women, where there are many Leftist social science academics, journalists, politicians etc who refuse to acknowledge even quantitative differences in functionality between men and women.

For such people, to assert the reality of qualitative differences (e.g. between men and women) is regarded as simply abhorrent – malicious, vile, hurtful, aggressive, stupid, dangerous to the Leftist project and ‘therefore’ (according to such people) necessarily untrue.

Since it is secular Leftists who control public discourse we find public discourse in the extraordinary, and scientifically indefensible, position of asserting that on the one hand macro-evolution is necessarily real and the essential form of the human species certainly arose by natural selection – which is an incremental accumulation of adaptive changes; yet on the other hand denying that micro-evolution, adaptation, has occurred within the human species.

In other words, the speculative and uncertain aspect of Darwinian natural selection is accepted as necessary, as dogma (to reject which is to move outwith the bounds of legitimate public discourse); while the empirically and experientially verifiable aspect of Darwinism is at the same time rejected.

(This is the way that Leftism works: skepticism or outright denial of the obvious and primary, dogmatic belief in the interpretative and secondary.)

Secular Leftists thus believe in speciation but not adaptation; they believe that humans arose by natural selection, but also that – once humans had arisen – natural selection does not apply to humans!”

Pease do yorself a favour and read the whole article.

“As an individual story, Martin-Zimmerman is more or less the same depressing Stuff Happens as occurs hundreds of times per year across this huge country. The main difference, in this case, was that the press initially got wrong the race of the shooter and thought it had, for once, its Great White Defendant…..”

“The central mechanism that leads the press astray is its War to Wipe Out Stereotypes, to wipe clean the collective mind, to render the blank slate as blank as possible. The fundamental problem of journalism, in the minds of the more elevated sort of journalist, is that its readers can notice patterns for themselves.”

I have been drawn increasingly of late to examining the framework which is automatically applied by the media to stories. Let us refer to them as templates: those pattern boards which allow one to cut out a piece of wood or metal uniformly.

Now the great American lie at the moment is that the African-American ethnic group is held back by white racism, which expresses itself as “stereotyping” or “profiling”, which is to say, dealing with a person from an identifiable group as if you had learned something about this group from your own or other people’s life experiences.

If you cruise the net as I do, you will come across plenty of occasions where US government official, from Obama and Holder on down, will decline to answer a question plainly because of the fear that to do so would engage them in stereotyping, or profiling, which is one stop short of racism, which is unthinkable.

The alternative to this lie is the truth. It is unacceptable for several reasons. It rests on two observations. The first is that the standard intelligence difference between American blacks and whites exists and is not narrowing, and the second is partly a consequence, that black paternal investment in thier chilkdren is unfortunately low, so that unwed mothers are raising feral male children. The African-American family has been in crisis for at least as long as Daniel Patrick Moynihan published his monumental study of the Negro family in 1965.

So the lie continues because any frank discussion is made impossible, to wit, John Derbyshire, for whose honesty National Review fired him.

The most significant political event of post-Second World War Canada may be the enactment of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. It has transformed a country obsessed with the federal-provincial division of powers and enabled it to address its diversity in a substantive, principled way. This was not inevitable. Credit is due in large part to the quality of the judicial branch of governance and, obviously, to the legal profession.

It often takes less foresight than good luck to succeed. The Charter of Rights could have gone the path of its disappointing predecessor, the Canadian Bill of Rights – a modest instrument of guidance to courts reluctant to challenge elected officials.

Many things contributed to the Charter’s central role in our constitutional democracy. At least three were counterintuitive.

The notwithstanding clause: This allowed legislators to override protected rights. Offensive to legal purists, it proved to be the perfect political compromise – designed to preserve the supremacy of elected officials, it, in fact, allowed the courts to avoid undue deference to them.

The three-year moratorium on equality rights: Conceived to give Parliament and the provincial legislatures an opportunity to make laws compliant with the Charter, it had the effect of ensuring that the first cases to come to the courts were familiar ones. It was a small step for the courts to strike down writs of assistance and enforce the right to counsel, a modest increase in the exercise of their common law powers. Had they been confronted at the outset with issues such as mandatory retirement or even women’s rights, they may have been much more hesitant to strike down offensive legislation, thereby creating a different, narrower scope for judicial review.

The Court Challenges Program: This was an admirable companion to the Charter. It expressed the government’s faith and commitment to rights enforcement, by equipping litigants and civil-society organizations with the ability to access the courts. This, in turn, provided the courts with high-quality Charter litigation without which the remarkable early Charter jurisprudence might have taken much longer to develop.

Many will deplore so-called judicial activism and the legalization of politics. They are wrong. Fundamental rights enforced by independent courts enrich a democracy that has set constitutional limits on itself. Charter litigation has provided a high-quality intellectual forum in which to debate issues that are not best left to majority diktat. Led by the Supreme Court, the Canadian judiciary has defined its proper place in constitutional governance. First assertive and willing to undertake substantive review of legislation, it has set a predictable framework for acceptable limitations on rights and avoided an adversarial relationship with Parliament, preferring dialogue to confrontation.

Unlike the U.S. judiciary, Canadian courts have, for the most part, avoided the taint of partisan political allegiances that erodes confidence in the judicial process. My own career would be unimaginable in the United States. I had three federal judicial appointments: to the Ontario High Court, to the Court of Appeal and then to the Supreme Court of Canada – the first two by a Conservative government, the last one under a Liberal one. Canadian judicial writing is accessible, often consensual, and dissent always respectful. It has set the tone for the peaceful resolution of some of the most divisive issues in any society.

Unfortunately, political parties have been impoverished by the rise of judicial prominence, or perhaps simply in parallel to it. The disenchantment with political life is currently widespread in mature democracies. But in terms of substance, the calendar of the Supreme Court of Canada compares very favourably with the platform of political parties.

From a global perspective, Canada now stands in an envious position in terms of quality of institutional governance. As democracy spreads over the world, it doesn’t always reach far beyond the setting of relatively free and fair elections. This often leads to stronger executive power and, at times, to a reasonably efficient legislative branch. Rarely is any attention given to the role of a professional, independent judiciary. It takes decades to construct, but in the resolution of conflicts, inevitable in any country, the rule of law is the best investment.

In contrast, I say:

1. A monologue is not a dialogue. One side of the power equation is nearly gagged. The means for parliaments to talk back to the judiciary are inadequate. The notwithstanding clause allows legislation to be passed “notwithstanding” a court determination, but only for a period of five years. Worse, the Constitution delegitimizes a parliament’s position from the start.  ”Notwithstanding that you are morally superior and legally correct, I am going to persist in my erroneous course of action”: this is not the equal footing of people in a dialogue.

2. Majority opinion is a better guide, 9 times out of 10, to the right balance between majority rights and interests and minority rights and interests.

3. There is no special wisdom in the legal profession, nor is the trial process particularly well suited, to give confidence that major questions of social and economic policy can be dealt with by lawyers in the kind of evidentiary proceedings in which they are skilled. The filter through which one passes -law school – makes one adept at certain kinds of argument, but inculcates nothing in the way of compassion, subject-expertise beyond the law, or democractic behaviour. Turning over major issues of social and economic policy to this narrow class of  narrowly selected skilled reasoners, at the expense of the elected politicians, and the people whom they represent, is without merit.

4. As matters turn out, the law schools are largely captive to Charter leftists, who produce an entire species of entitled leftist agitator who seek to avoid the majority diktat by imposing the minorty diktat.

As to the benefits of the Charter, to paraphrase Chou En-lai, after 200 years, it may be too soon to tell.

]]> http://www.barrelstrength.com/2012/04/19/a-message-from-the-ruling-class-to-the-peasantry/feed/ 4 http://www.barrelstrength.com/2012/04/08/some-elegant-words-on-the-state-of-free-speech-in-america/ http://www.barrelstrength.com/2012/04/08/some-elegant-words-on-the-state-of-free-speech-in-america/#comments Sun, 08 Apr 2012 11:47:24 +0000 Dalwhinnie http://www.barrelstrength.com/?p=4590 From Jeff Goldstein at Protein Wisdom:

This started as a comment, but I’m going to post it here so that you all can discuss while I recover from my rancid stomach ailment.

So. First, let me say this: Derb’s article is “controversial” in the same way Juan Williams’ noting that he gets a bit frightened on a plane when he sees Arabs in the row in front of him tugging at their vests was controversial. Meaning, it was honest — and as such, it was not sufficiently filtered for a media climate where political correctness still provides the parameters for what is and isn’t acceptable.

Eric Holder famously noted that we’re afraid to talk about race in this country. Derbyshire proved he, at least, isn’t. And his comrades are crawling over themselves to gain distance…..

It was in many respects a brave article — and that can be true whether you believe Derbyshire a racist or not. But given that it was written in the context of bounties on George Zimmerman, or Spike Lee Tweeting out home addresses, or Al Sharpton — who is invited to Easter breakfast at the WH — actively working to incite violence and subvert the justice system, well, it expresses a kind of anxiety that exists in the culture right now.

Derbyshire set his article up by noting that in any large population, there will be trends; he sought to take a look at the trends and reach conclusions based on them. Whether or not you believe the conclusions he reached are valid or not is almost immaterial. Because what was truly important about his article was the citation of the trends —- which, sad to say, we’ve been taught studiously to ignore. Funny how people who yell “SCIENCE!” and want to put conservatives in re-education camps fear actual data, isn’t it?

We can expect the left to express howling outrage over such a piece. The subject matter itself is not to be broached — but if it is, it had better reach a pre-determined conclusion emphasizing the goodness and righteousness and social effectiveness of the left’s pet identity politics / multicultarlist schemes. That this doesn’t means it needs to be shouted down, and its arguments not even considered.

From the Globe and Mail:

Rev. Sharpton, who hosts MSNBC’s Politics Daily and offers regular commentary on the case, has also served as an advocate for the Martin family by leading rallies demanding Mr. Zimmerman’s arrest, appearing beside Mr. Martin’s anguished parents, and conducting closed door meetings with prosecutors and local officials on the Martin family’s behalf. A call to Rev. Sharpton for comment Saturday was not returned.

Externally, media critics including Howard Kurtz, host of CNN’s Reliable Sources and a columnist for The Daily Beast, have criticized the network for allowing Rev. Sharpton to play a dual role as both activist and commentator.

“Even commentators have to abide by certain rules,” Mr. Kurtz wrote last month. “And in this case, by playing both sides of the camera, Rev. Al has obliterated them.”

The shit has hit the fan.

His usual publication site, National Review Online, is thinking of dropping him, and all the usual suspects think he is a dreadful human being.(as in here, here and here)

And who comes to his defence?

Laurence Auster, of View from the Right. Speaking of National Review’s apparent plans to can Derbyshire, and pointing out Derbyshire’s aggressive atheism disqualifies him to be a conservative, Auster wrotes:

This is a supremely ironic development. Going back many years … I have argued that given Derbyshire’s aggressive atheism, materialism, and nihilism, and his liberal views on many specific subjects (though not, of course, on immigration), his presence at the supposed flagship magazine of American conservatism was inappropropriate to say the least. In this I was following William F. Buckley’s dictum that a committed atheist who seeks to destroy religion and regards religious people as mentally defective is, by definition, not a conservative. But Derbyshire was kept on at NR, allowed by NR’s eternal-boy editors to keep on undermining conservatism and its Christian basis from within. But now that Derbyshire has said something true about race,—and said it, not in his usual jocular anecdotal personalistic unserious way which has always protected him in the past, but said it seriously, as a set of general propositions that parents should teach their children—it appears that the chestless wonders at NR want to fire him.

If they do fire him, it will mean that NR had no problem with a contributor who violated fundamental tenets of conservatism, but that they do have a problem with a contributor who violates fundamental tenets of liberalism. Which would confirm what I’ve been saying about that ruined hulk of a once-important magazine for the last ten or 15 years.

It has been my intuition, since the Trayvon Martin case exploded into our consciousness, that it would cause a vast amount of suppressed anger, true facts, and things that need saying, to appear in American discourse. It has also been observable that the accusations of racism, and calls for censorship firings, apologies, grovelling by whites, will only mount, until such time as this particular political pustule is lanced by the cleansing effect of free discussion.

Tell me, anyone, if you do find Derbyshire’s advice wrong, is it wrong because it is contains advice predicated on statistical inaccuracies, falsehoods or errors, or because – even if true – one should never say those things aloud, let alone publish them? Is it false? In what sense is it false? Is it morally vicious? Why? Is it racist? Define race and racism please. I want to know. What public good is served by censuring Derbyshire, and is the public good to be served greater than the evil of censorship? Discuss.

• first, he is a right-wing racist nut-case
• then, he is a Muslim, but no one can understand why such a happy well-balanced boy kills for sport
• then, he is a Muslim jihadi, but a lone wolf
• then, he is a part of global Islamic jihad, but we never quite get to that stage of frank admission, do we?

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2126176/French-police-hunt-serial-killer-flees-motorbike-Paris–just-like-Toulouse-Al-Qaeda-terrorist.html

IQALUIT, Nunavut – Nunavut says a new survey shows Canada’s polar bear population hasn’t significantly declined in the last seven years as predicted and that the iconic mammal has not been hurt by climate change.

An aerial survey done in August by the Nunavut government, in response to pressure from Inuit, estimated the western Hudson Bay bear population at around 1,000.

That’s about the same number of bears found in a more detailed study done in 2004. That study, which physically tagged the bears, predicted the number would decline to about 650 by 2011.

Repeat after me:

1. The world is either cooling or heating at any given time;
2. Parts of the world can be heating while other parts are cooling;
3. Arguing whether we are causing either is like a couple of fleas discussing who owns the dog whose fur they are living in. We ae not that important, people.

The killing of Trayvon Williams is generating a useful discussion. The smart, urban on-line City Journal has published this discussion of race, crime, and the boundaries of free discussion.

Well worth reading the whole, but here are a few excerpts:

“If the outcry over the killing of Trayvon Martin has served any useful purpose, it is to have brought some attention to what young black predators are doing to their own communities. As the story evolved, it became possible to ask: Where’s the public outcry about that? National Review editor Rich Lowry, in an especially poignant piece, listed a number of recent murders of young blacks in their gruesome particulars, calling them “the murders that don’t count.” “If Martin had been shot by a black classmate,” he rightly observed, “if he had been caught in a random crossfire, if he had looked at a gang member the wrong way, his death would have been relegated to the back pages of the local newspaper. Not a cause, not even a curiosity: Just another dead young black man. Nothing to see here. Please, move on.”

and

“[Attorney-General]Holder and others who cling to today’s rotting hulk of a civil rights establishment are increasingly an anachronism, for all their moral posturing standing as an impediment to genuine racial progress in this country. For them, the possibility of losing white racism as an issue—as a weapon—is intolerable. It would be bad enough if this were purely a cynical tactic to arouse other true believers in the base. But it’s not: they truly believe it, facts—and the possibility of a better life for those suffering in the inner cities—be damned. They have become what they despise, their mantra a tragic twist on George Wallace’s as he stood in the schoolhouse door: “Racism now, racism tomorrow, racism forever!”

Since the 1960s, Quebec has been destroying itself by

• driving out its creative minorities;
• imposing state national-socialism (”national socialism” means socialism for the Tribe, a highly-taxed and barely tolerated capitalism for everyone else);
• and when in doubt, intensify anti-English and anti-capitalist measures.

However, contrary to what the Vicar writes, the opposition is not between Calgary and Montreal,  but between Quebec City, that bastion of  reactionary French nationalism, and the rest of the liberal capitalist North American order, whose Quebec expression was Montreal. Once Montreal was destroyed as the principal city of Canada, Quebec sought to use its political power to maintain the subsidies that prevent its adaptation to the way the world works. So far, those internal transfers from everyone else to Quebec prevent Quebecois from realizing the consequences of thier own policies.

The Huffington Post carries a good article on Quebec’s demographic decline today.