At the Twilight's Last Gleaming

New York legalizes full-term abortions for any reason

2019-01-28T06:59:00.000-06:00

Our culture is teetering on the edge of the abyss.

Christian Post, January 22, 2019:

After an intense debate for and against the proposal, the New York state Legislature passed a bill Tuesday that makes it legal for doctors and other health care professionals, such as midwives and physician assistants, to perform abortions up until birth for any reason in the state.

Via Legal Insurrection

George Will on representative government v. plebiscitary democracy

2019-01-13T10:12:00.000-06:00

George Will, in a January 11, 2019 WaPo column on the messy aftermath of the UK's 2016 Brexit vote:

The bedrock principle of representative government is that “the people” do not decide issues, they decide who shall decide. And once a legislature sloughs off responsibility and resorts to a referendum on the dubious premise that the simple way to find out what people want is to ask them, it is difficult to avoid recurring episodes of plebiscitary democracy.

Social justice mobs never apologize when they're wrong, and will destroy one of their own without a second thought

2018-07-16T08:56:00.000-05:00

"Barrett Wilson" (a pseudonym, since the writer now fears his former online compatriots), writes at Quillette, July 14, 2018 (emphasis added):

In my previous life, I was a self-righteous social justice crusader. I would use my mid-sized Twitter and Facebook platforms to signal my wokeness on topics such as LGBT rights, rape culture, and racial injustice. Many of the opinions I held then are still opinions that I hold today. But I now realize that my social-media hyperactivity was, in reality, doing more harm than good.

Within the world created by the various apps I used, I got plenty of shares and retweets. But this masked how ineffective I had become outside, in the real world. The only causes I was actually contributing to were the causes of mobbing and public shaming. Real change does not stem from these tactics. They only cause division, alienation, and bitterness.

How did I become that person? It happened because it was exhilarating. Every time I would call someone racist or sexist, I would get a rush. That rush would then be reaffirmed and sustained by the stars, hearts, and thumbs-up that constitute the nickels and dimes of social media validation. The people giving me these stars, hearts, and thumbs-up were engaging in their own cynical game: A fear of being targeted by the mob induces us to signal publicly that we are part of it.

Grief counselors are in high demand nowadays

2018-03-16T14:29:00.000-05:00

Shoe, March 14, 2018:

Net Neutrality: The Apocalypse

2017-12-16T21:10:00.000-06:00

Via Being Libertarian (Facebook)

George Washington: If there's something you don't like in the Constitution, amend it, don't usurp it

2017-12-06T08:04:00.000-06:00

Image source: Mount Vernon

"McCarthyism masquerading as liberal open-mindedness" in Silicon Valley / San Francisco

2017-11-25T08:38:00.000-06:00

During a Reddit AMA, author/investor Tim Ferriss gives one of several reasons why he's leaving the Bay Area.

Silicon Valley also has an insidious infection that is spreading -- a peculiar form of McCarthyism (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McCarthyism) masquerading as liberal open-mindedness. I'm as socially liberal as you get, and I find it nauseating how many topics or dissenting opinions are simply out-of-bounds in Silicon Valley. These days, people with real jobs (unlike me) are risking their careers to even challenge collective delusions in SF. Isn't this supposed to be where people change the world by challenging the consensus reality? By seeing the hidden realities behind the facades? That's the whole reason I traveled west and started over in the Bay Area. Now, more and more, I feel like it's a Russian nesting doll of facades -- Washington DC with fewer neck ties, where people openly lie to one another out of fear of losing their jobs or being publicly crucified. It's weird, unsettling, and, frankly, really dangerous. There's way too much power here for politeness to be sustainable. If no one feels they can say "Hey, I know it makes everyone uncomfortable, but I think there's a leak in the fuel rods in this nuclear submarine..." we're headed for big trouble.

His destination, Austin, leans hard to the left itself, but apparently it's much less McCarthyite than SV/SF is.

Open-mindedness is seen as a virtue only when one's passionate views are held by a minority of those in positions of power and influence. Once those views become dominant in some place (e.g. the Bay Area), open-mindedness goes out the window and dissenting opinions are suppressed.

The purpose of the 'Commerce Clause' in the US Constitution

2017-11-21T07:59:00.001-06:00

In modern times, the US government has arrogated to itself the right to regulate all aspects of commerce that occur within our borders, from the largest mega-corporations all the way down to the most humble sole-proprietor businesses. When the government bothers to justify its assumed powers at all, there is usually some reference to the "commerce clause" in the US Constitution.

The underlined text in the following image shows, in its entirety, the power the Constitution grants the US government regarding commerce:

"The Congress shall have Power...To regulate Commerce

with foreign Nations,
and among the several States,
and with the Indian Tribes"

The prepositions are important to the proper understanding of the central government's enumerated power.

Congress regulates commerce with other nations and with the Indian tribes, because the US government is granted the right to regulate commercial interactions that cross the national borders of our country. Since the US government is the sole agent in our country's official interactions with other countries, it makes sense that the government should have a say in any commerce that might affect our country's relations with other countries.

When it comes to commerce that remains within the borders of our country, however, the language of the text is different: Congress has power to regulate commerce among (or between) the states. Businesses within those states are engaging in commerce with one another. The states are legally considered to be peers with one another, so what happens when there are disputes between states relating to these commercial interactions?

Congress is assigned the role of binding arbitrator, ensuring that no state will take unfair advantage of another as goods and services cross its borders. Congress does not have the power to dictate the size and shape of the grommets that are manufactured in Colorado, or to force Grommets, Inc. to grant its employees paid leave for yoga retreats. Rather, Congress has the power to prevent Texas (where rival company Also Grommets, Inc. is located) from erecting protectionist regulatory barriers that make it difficult for Grommets, Inc. to get its goods to market.

That is the original purpose of the US government's interstate commerce regulatory power. Anything else the government does in the arena of internal commerce is almost certainly a usurpation.

"[W]e have abundant reason to be convinced, that the spirit for Trade which pervades these States is not to be restrained; it behooves us then to establish just principles; and this, any more than other matters of national concern, cannot be done by thirteen heads differently constructed and organized. The necessity, therefore, of a controuling power is obvious; and why it should be withheld is beyond my comprehension."

– George Washington, letter to James Warren, Mount Vernon, October 7, 1785; Fitzpatrick 28:290

(Image and quote via the George Washington Facebook page)

That's not funny!

2017-10-18T07:57:00.000-05:00

Via You Had One Job (on Twitter)

Think carefully before demanding that the government take up your cause

2017-05-13T11:14:00.002-05:00

Image Source

"The average American of today is intellectually so far removed from his forebears
that instead of regarding government with apprehension,
he is more likely to regard it as a virtual parent,

concerned only with protecting him and helping him."

- George Reisman

Human nature being what it is, no government in history has ever been able to live up to the expectations that the current generation of Americans has for our government, and no government is ever likely to.

The government cannot take up your cause without oppressing those who do not embrace that cause. If you're okay with that, then you are the reason our forebears regarded government with apprehension. Modern government is full of people like you -- fine with the idea of oppression, as long as the oppressors are your fellow ideological tribespeople.

Teach a man to fish...

2017-03-29T07:38:00.000-05:00

Teach a man to fish, and he'll eat for life.
Give a man someone else's fish, and he'll vote for you.
(Source)

#RESIST the left's unhinged rhetoric

2017-02-13T08:11:00.000-06:00

"Donald Trump is such a terrifying fascist

dictator that literally no one fears speaking out

against him on literally any platform."

— Sonny Bunch

President Donald J. Trump, champion of the Constitution

2017-01-25T08:24:00.000-06:00

Not.

Please cite the section of the Constitution which grants the federal government the power to "send in the Feds" to combat crime that is manifestly a local law enforcement issue. If the local police can't get a handle on it, any escalation of the issue is the responsibility of the state of Illinois.

The federal government can't step in unless it turns into insurrection.

The time has come for a self-loathing white male superhero who laments the fact that he isn't a female minority

2016-12-30T13:32:00.001-06:00

Clickhole brings us the following "news" from Marvel:

Image credit: Clickhole

It’s time to get excited, because Marvel Comics just announced a new superhero that advances diversity in comics in a major way. The series is called Luminary, and it tells the story of a mild-mannered Caucasian man named Percy Pendleton who gains incredible superhuman powers and constantly expresses his regret that he was blessed with those abilities instead of a Latina woman, who could be a role model for young Hispanic girls in addition to merely fighting crime.

[...] While working as a nuclear physicist at Stark Industries, Percy is caught in a particle-accelerator explosion. A surge of neutrinos floods his nervous system and transforms him into the incredible Luminary, a hero whose amazing powers of flight, super strength, and energy manipulation make him concerned that as a white man he does nothing to reflect the face of a changing America, which is increasingly Hispanic and female.

I was heretofore unfamiliar with Clickhole, so it took a few minutes of research to reassure myself that this was satire. In these troubled times, I wouldn't put it past Marvel to infuse an established superhero with some white-privilege angst, but I doubt that they're ready to make such an idea the basis of a superhero.

You privileged white men are so judgmental!

2016-12-30T13:08:00.000-06:00

Image via Meoso

Stacking the deck: "White Privilege" theory in a nutshell

2016-12-29T11:20:00.000-06:00

In a world where everybody plays by the same rules and is judged by the same standards, racism would describe any action or attitude that shows favor for one race over another or displays overt contempt for members of a particular race. Similarly, sexism would describe any action or attitude that shows favor for one sex over another or displays overt contempt for members of a particular sex¹.

The "Progressive" Left, however, is not interested in everybody playing by the same rules and being judged by the same standards. Adherents have produced out of whole cloth the notion of "White Privilege". As you can see in the image below, here is how White Privilege theory answers the assertions that anybody can be racist or sexist:

Minorities² cannot be racist and women³ cannot be sexist, because they "do not hold political, economic, and institutional power".

In essence, whites (especially white males) have a stranglehold on political, economic, and institutional power, and whites employ that power to oppress women and ethnic minorities -- even without consciously meaning to. The oppressors enjoy all of the privileges of being in the oppressor class, and they jealously guard all of the privileges they enjoy.

So you see, if you're white -- especially a white male -- the deck has been stacked against you. These terms have been subverted to exclude the possibility of any opposing viewpoint. Suggestion: if you find yourself in a debate with a Progressive over one of these issues, let them know you refuse to engage them until they prove to your satisfaction that White Privilege is an actual thing.

Images via "The Safest Space" on Twitter

Footnotes:
¹ Progressives are pushing hard on the notion of gender fluidity⁴ nowadays, and that would seem to render the whole notion of sexism moot...wouldn't it? Sexism seems to imply binary gender.

² Many Progressives exclude Asians from the ethnic minority status (witness the active attempts to discriminate against them in California public universities), because for the most part they refuse to act like they're oppressed.

³ White women have the dubious honor of being both oppressor and oppressed, depending on the topic of the moment.

⁴ (Wow, a footnote on a footnote!) Many Progressives define the "oppressor" class as white heterosexual males to allow white sexual minorities to be counted as oppressed in some circumstances.

Farewell, Dr. Thomas Sowell

2016-12-28T12:28:00.001-06:00

"If you have always believed that everyone should play by the same rules and be judged by the same standards, that would have gotten you labeled a radical 60 years ago, a liberal 30 years ago and a racist today. -- Thomas Sowell"

Dr. Thomas Sowell, who announced this week that he is retiring, has been a tremendous asset to the national conversation on race and equality. He will be dearly missed, but I wish him a happy, healthy retirement.

Why it's important to see the Constitution as the supreme law of the land

2016-12-04T10:09:00.001-06:00

Walter E. Williams said it well:

Source: Tenth Amendment Center on Twitter

Election 2016: Dealing with reality as it is, not as we wish it had been

2016-11-12T13:07:00.000-06:00

(Source: Pearls Before Swine, April 13, 2016)

As the popular internet meme went, the thing that frightened us most about Election 2016 was that one of the two major candidates would win. And sure enough, one of them did.

I must admit that my least unfavorite of the two candidates won, but I continue to harbor the ill feeling that I've had for months: that any positive accomplishments a Trump administration might see (and I expect I occasionally will have reason to cheer) will be overshadowed by a variety of policy train wrecks. It remains to be seen whether or not the GOP can survive its stunning victory up and down the ballot.

I have often counseled my son that we need to deal with reality as it is, not as we wish it had been. It's tempting to bang my head against a wall until I fall unconscious, but this is no better than any other reality-avoidance technique that has been invented -- reality would wait patiently for me to come to again.

I don't know whether or not constitutional conservatism has a future in this country, but I can do no less than to stay true to my principles. I commit to doing this, even if it means standing against the standard-bearer of the party with which I've identified for over 35 years. But let me be clear: for me, standing against Trumpism will never mean allying myself with any of the -isms that plague the other party.

Most people don't really believe in free speech

2016-11-11T07:04:00.000-06:00

Here is the Churchill quote in context:

Everyone is in favor of free speech. Hardly a day passes without its being extolled, but some people's idea of it is that they are free to say what they like, but if anyone else says anything back, that is an outrage.

"A well-regulated militia": the Left's delusion about the Second Amendment

2016-06-18T13:30:00.000-05:00

This image, which is making its way around Facebook in the wake of the Orlando nightclub massacre, zeros in on the part of the Constitution's Second Amendment that is the most confusing to modern eyes.

Before we, too, zero in on this phrase, consider for a moment what the Bill of Rights (the first ten amendments) actually was. Why were these amendments added all at once, and so soon after the adoption of the Constitution? Because they were adopted as a condition of the approval of the Constitution by several of the states.

There was widespread suspicion that the proposed Constitution didn't go far enough to explicitly curtail the powers of the central government. The dissenters felt that individual rights would quickly fall prey to expanding government power in the absence of explicit declarations of the inviolable rights of individuals.

The Bill of Rights is the answer to these concerns, and the promise of these was sufficient to get all of the states to sign on to the Constitution.

Here, then, is the complete text of the Second Amendment:

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

Noting the neighboring words "security" and "State", many on the Left would have us believe that the phrase "well regulated Militia" is referring to the military and to state and local law-enforcement agencies -- that this amendment guarantees the government the ability to undertake any and all efforts necessary to protect the country (military) and maintain public order (local law enforcement).

But why, in the midst of a collection of amendments designed to guarantee individual rights, would the Founders drop in a grant of government power that, in essence, had the potential to render the rest of the Bill of Rights moot?

Does anyone honestly think that the dissenters would have gone along with this new government if this were the case? All of human history testifies that when the people of a country have no means to resist the tyranny of their government, their government will sooner or later drift into tyranny.

So what, then, did the phrase "well regulated Militia" mean to 18th-century American eyes?

The militia were the ones who were expected to grab their guns and take action whenever the need arose. Most importantly to the contemporary debate, though, all able-bodied males, regardless of occupation, were considered part of the militia, whether or not they had ever served in the armed forces. This in itself argues for the notion that this amendment was not a restrictive one.

What about "well regulated"? Surely this phrase shows that arms-bearing must be done under the supervision of the government, doesn't it? Actually, no. At the time, the phrase "well regulated" was used interchangeably with "well trained" or "orderly".

Well, then, what about "security of a free State"? In context, "state" is obviously referring to the nation itself, not to the government. There are two ways of seeing the phrase "free state": (1) a nation as a whole free from the control of other nations (this is the modern understanding of the term), and (2) a nation comprised of individuals who are free from the oppression of their government.

If we accept the notion of the entire Bill of Rights being a Bill of Individual Rights, that second interpretation of "free state" gains a considerable amount of weight.

So. Taking the Second Amendment as a whole, I see this paraphrased declaration: A nation of citizens in the possession of and well-trained in the use of firearms is an effective bulwark both against conquest by other nations and against oppression by that nation's government. Therefore, the central government shall take no steps to interfere with the right of the citizens to keep and bear such firearms.

A well-armed, well-trained citizenry is necessary to secure the freedom of said citizenry.

The Left, the Founders, and the Constitution

2016-04-08T15:46:00.002-05:00

Well, of course the left understands the U.S. Constitution better than its authors did.

On the all-too-common phenomenon of assuming one's ideological foes to be ignorant, immoral, or insane

2016-02-24T15:55:00.001-06:00

Aaron Ross Powell has written a mostly-excellent essay on the extreme tribalism (although he doesn't call it that) which underlies the emotions aroused by virtually every contentious issue of the day. As I opined in a previous post, the positions we take so earnestly are the rational end of a long chain of propositions that go all the way back to the one or more foundational propositions that form the foundation of our worldview (and are usually accepted without question).

Because our conclusions about the issue of the moment are so mindbogglingly obvious to us, we don't see how anybody could come to any other conclusion. If they do, it's a sure sign that they're ignorant, that they know better but are just too morally corrupt to embrace the right view, or that they are genuinely mentally ill. I don't think I am amiss in assuming that most of us have felt this way about our ideological foes at one time or another, or have been the target of such speculation.

Here's how Powell illustrates the conflict:

Say we believe that Policy A, which we support, will lead to good Result X. We encounter someone who instead advocates for Policy B. Because of our certainty about the evidence and how to interpret it, too many of us too often see that person’s support for Policy B coming not from a good faith and reasoned belief that Policy B is a better way to get to Result X. Because if what we believe is both correct and obvious, then the advocate of Policy B must know that it will undermine the achievement of X. And if X is a good result, then this person doesn’t just disagree with us, but actively wants something bad to happen.

Unfortunately, this all-too-common way of thinking about political debate leads to serious problems, because it means that our empirical beliefs are essentially closed to critique unless that critique comes from someone who already shares our policy preferences. If our interlocutor doesn’t share our policy preferences, then before the conversation can get off the ground, we’ve already decided he is either stupid (he’s too dumb to see his error) or immoral (he maliciously prefers evil outcomes). But, of course, if our empirical priors or interpretive framework are wrong, then someone with better priors will likely come to a different policy conclusion.

Thus individual policy preferences exist as a signal of their holder’s intelligence or moral worth—and a challenge to one’s policy preferences gets interpreted as an attack on the holder’s smarts or basic goodness. Because we believe that certain policy preferences signal moral worth, we adopt our policy preferences based on how we would like to be perceived. And we hold to those policies regardless of their actual, real-world outcomes, or pay so little attention to their outcomes that we never feel the need to revise our political preferences.

If you see nothing wrong with this phenomenon, and your chief goal in any ideological conflict is to vanquish your foes, there's not much left to talk about. Just carry on doing what you've always done. The current chaos that is the 2016 presidential campaign is the world you live in and apparently enjoy.

If, on the other hand, you wonder if it's even possible to coexist with people who hold points of view that bug you so much, hoping that it is possible, stick around. Understanding this ingrained human tendency to organize into tribes is, I believe, the only alternative to putting the maximum distance possible between all human beings. I also believe that understanding our tribal thinking is the first step to finding a way to knowing how to bring others around to our point of view.

This is going to be a running theme on this blog as I continue to ponder the riddles of human interaction. I hope you'll find it worth the read.

The FBI v Apple

2016-02-22T14:36:00.000-06:00

I'm not a big fan of Apple in general, but props to them for their principled refusal to open Pandora's Box by creating a custom version of the OS that bypasses the security features on the San Bernardino terrorist's iPhone.

There's no such thing as a one-time crack. Even if the government itself doesn't exploit the cracked version of the OS (and they'd hardly miss an opportunity to exploit it), it's not unlikely that it will escape into the wild somehow.

Image Source

Why most online arguments about politics and religion end in a stalemate

2016-02-10T10:27:00.000-06:00

Image source

Scenario: Two people are engaged in mortal ideological combat on Facebook. Each person argues their point passionately, genuinely baffled that what is manifestly obvious to them does not register at all with the other. Since The Truth™ is so obvious, each combatant starts wondering why their opponent refuses to concede the point, eventually attributing such incorrigibility to bad character or, even worse, to mental illness.

What is actually going on here? Why do most skirmishes like these end with nobody persuaded and with bad feelings all around?

I believe this happens because the actual conflict usually does not lie in the topic itself, but in the long chain of presuppositions that lead rationally and inexorably to each person's view on the topic. Within the closed system of a person's worldview, the point they're arguing makes complete sense to them, flowing logically from the worldview's foundational principles (i.e. the collection of assumptions forming the filter through which reality is interpreted), many or most of which are accepted as givens.

You won't get them to budge on the topic being debated unless either (a) you can convince them that the point they're arguing is inconsistent with the foundational principles of their worldview, or (b) you can somehow erode their confidence in the foundational principles themselves.

Strategy (a) is possible, but only those who embrace the same worldview are likely to see any success. If someone of an opposing worldview tries this strategy, the natural reaction is to question the aggressor's motives (thus allowing the target to ignore the argument being made).

Even if strategy (b) has any chance of eventual success, the foundational principles aren't even part of the current debate, so forget about that.

Image source

Imagine a worldview as a tree. The trunk and roots are the foundational principles; the opinion being argued at the moment is more akin to a cluster of leaves at the end of one of the tree's branches. Everything between the cluster and the trunk is the chain of presuppositions connecting the opinion to the foundational principles. Even if someone succeeds in damaging or lopping off that cluster, it'll grow back in due time -- nothing really gained or lost.

Facebook is where I'm most likely to encounter people of significantly differing worldviews. I've developed an instinct for recognizing when, for my potential opponent, an opinion represents a leafy cluster or something closer to the trunk. If the former, I'm more likely to refrain from joining the fray, because the most likely outcome is bad feelings and nothing else. If the latter, I might cautiously engage, in the hope that something worthwhile might transpire.

With the leafy-cluster topics, I will occasionally come across a viewpoint that baffles me so much that I step back and ask myself, How could someone possibly hold such an opinion? Then, over time, through observation and sometimes through tactfully-worded questioning, I will attempt to discern that opinion's chain of presuppositions. As I analyze the presuppositions, I usually am forced to reanalyze and reaffirm the presuppositions of my own worldview.

While very rare, the process does occasionally lead me to soften or change my opinions (or at least stop thinking of my opponent as insane). But -- and this is the point -- I came to this conclusion on my own, not as the result of being outmaneuvered in an online argument.