Category Archives: morality

Racism Again

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Reverend Joseph Lowery (that Reverend Joseph Lowery—past-president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference), according to The Daily Caller, citing the Monroe County Reporter, told a get-out-the-vote audience on 27 Oct the white folks were going to hell.  For no particular reason, just because, apparently.  He said that

when he was a young militant, he used to say all white folks were going to hell.  Then he mellowed and just said most of them were.  Now, he said, he is back to where he was….

Lowery went on:

I don’t know what kind of a n—– wouldn’t vote with a black man running[.]

Then came the backtracking.  Helen Butler, Executive Director of Lowery’s Georgia-based Coalition for the People’s Agenda, claims

He was saying…based on all of the hatred that’s going on [towards President Barack Obama]….  He just fell that he should feel the way he used to feel.  Of course he doesn’t believe that all whites should go to hell….

Lowery denied to TheDC that he denigrated blacks with that appallingly racist slur.  Butler tried to spin it.

He’s not saying you should support the black guy because of his race, he’s saying you should support a competent black person[.]

Not “support a competent person.”

We’ve already been over the “hatred” toward Democratic Presidential Candidate Barack Obama—any criticism of him must be racist at bottom.

On the larger matter, I have to ask, was Lowery was telling the truth or is Butler, with their mutually exclusive statements about whites?  If Butler is truthful, then I have to ask, on what basis does a man of the cloth, a man who supposedly is a messenger of Christian peace and a caring person, tell such a racist joke?

On what basis does Lowery use an especially appalling term to refer to black Americans?  And to insist that blacks are bound to vote for a candidate on the basis of the color of his skin and not the content of his character?

It would appear that the Reverend Joseph Lowery disagrees with the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King.  But this is the Left in today’s politics.

Incompetence

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Fox News had this little tidbit buried in an article about a related matter—the fact that we knew who one of the Benghazi terrorists was in time to have him detained in mid-escape at a Turkish airport, and we let him get away.  The tidbit is this:

[T]he two Predator drones deployed over Benghazi the night of the attack were both unarmed. The first Predator was redirected from Darnah in eastern Libya, where Al Qaeda has active training camps that the US military has been watching for some time….  It arrived in Benghazi about an hour after the attack began, suggesting the first hour of the attack was not fed back to officials in Washington.

That drone was running low on fuel, so a second Predator, also unarmed, was deployed from Sigonella, Italy, to provide back-up.  It is not clear why the second drone left Sigonella unarmed after the attack had begun.

“While some may think that armed drones could have made a difference in Benghazi, that’s altogether unclear,” a senior defense official tells Fox News.  “You need good intelligence to drive the use of armed drones.  It’s not like you can just send hellfire missiles into a relatively crowded area when you don’t know precisely where the enemy is.”

First, keep in mind that real-time and near real-time data were flowing to State and to the White House via telephone from the consulate’s TOC and via email.

The “senior defense official” ‘s explanation for launching the second (weapons capable) drone into a combat zone unarmed is…inadequate.  The purpose of the drones was not to bore holes in the sky, but to observe the doings and to identify targets.  Perhaps even to launch on one that was being lased from the Annex rooftop later in that fight.  The claim of not knowing “precisely where the enemy is” is a reason for holding fire, not for launching unarmed.

This is really beginning to smack of an appalling paralysis under pressure by the small-time amateurs in the White House and Defense, if not of outright incompetence.

Morality and Politics, British Style

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Mostly, the style is clueless, as this piece from The Guardian‘s Gary Younge illustrates.  For instance,

At times the contradictions are striking.  In August 2009, when opponents of Obamacare were disrupting town hall meetings with claims of death panels, Kenneth Gladney and other members of St Louis tea party got into a fight with Democrats at a public meeting.  He had to go to the emergency room with injuries to his knee, back, elbow, shoulder and face and ended up in a wheelchair.  It turned out Gladney, who had recently been laid off, had no health insurance.  He appealed for donations.

What contradiction is this?  Can Mr Younge really not see the difference between government handouts, which by definition begin as mandated confiscations from strangers, and private donations, which by their nature are purely voluntary?

Trace a map highlighting government dependency and those most reliant on benefits live in Republican states and often Republican counties.  In Floyd county in Eastern Kentucky, 40% of the income comes from the government.  In 2008 Floyd, where almost 20% live below the poverty line and the median income is almost 20% lower than the country, voted for McCain—a 27 point swing against the Democrats and the first victory for Republicans in living memory.

Of course.  Conservatives, far more than liberals, try very hard to avoid government handouts and once having been forced to accept them, to get back off that government dependency before they become addicted to it.  Conservatives understand what it means to be dependent and what it means to be self-capable.  This is what has made America great, even if the folks in Floyd County, for instance, don’t speak of it in these terms.

On some level explaining why poorer whites would vote for the Republicans demands a resource sorely lacking in American political culture at present—particularly during election time: empathy.  There are more to “interests” than just the economic.  If someone’s core conviction is that abortion is murder or gay marriage is wrong then their decision to vote for a candidate who is against abortion or gay marriage is not an act of delusion but conviction.

Indeed.  An understanding of the nature of dependency on handouts matters; this requires more than mere “empathy.”  It requires a basic understanding of the morality of that dependency, with the demand it creates for a share of someone else’s prosperity, which is where the transfer payments that is that dependency originate.  (Never mind the conflation of conservative social policies with conservative economic policies.)

Moreover some people, despite being poor, legitimately believe in free market and small government, even if it doesn’t benefit them in precisely the same way that wealthy people may favour greater government intervention even if it doesn’t benefit them.

Hmm….  But it does benefit the poor quite a bit, if not “in precisely the same way that wealthy people” might benefit.  A free market and small government favor their opportunity to do better, rather than to be trapped into merely getting by on the government’s dole.  They favor the poor man’s work to stop being poor.  Many poor people—generally those who haven’t spent generations on the dole—understand this at a gut level, even if they don’t articulate the strict economic science of it.

Meanwhile, that greater government intervention does benefit the wealthy—but only those wealthy who buy their way into the process and so to influence that intervention.  There is no morality here, only narrow, short-sighted pecuniary interest.  And it is far from universal: the Koch brothers, whom Mr Younge carefully elides in his article, also are firm believers in free market and small government—and they’ve spent enormous amounts of their wealth on supporting those.

Finally…poverty is not necessarily a permanent state.  People fall in and climb out of it.

Indeed.  Even—especially—the poor recognize the truth of this, if only at a gut level.  It’s that desire to improve their and their families’ lot in life, and these folks recognize this is possible only with free markets and limited governments.  Government handouts are designed explicitly to block this—guaranteed bread in return for votes for the incumbent.

In the end, Mr Younge complexifies the matter far too much, and so he gives short shrift to the simple matters underlying the situation.  The moral foundation of self-sufficiency, of being responsible for seeking one’s own (Adamsian) happiness is one.  The simple economic facts of the failure of handouts (which he seems to lump, indiscriminately, with hands up) to free individuals from the outcomes of dislocations, instead trapping them in dependency, is another.  Which he acknowledges in passing [emphasis added]:

In a report…the New York Times examined the growing number of people who were simultaneously dependent on government aid and against more government spending. “Many people say they are angry because the government is wasting money and giving money to people who do not deserve it,” it concluded. “But more than that, they say they want to reduce the role of government in their own lives. They are frustrated that they need help, feel guilty for taking it and resent the government for providing it. They say they want less help for themselves; less help in caring for relatives; less assistance when they reach old age.”

In a country where social mobility is assumed—even if it has in fact stalled—and class consciousness is [weak] the poor may vote in the interests of an imagined, but not necessarily imaginary future, rather than solidarity based on shared economic hardships.  A Gallup poll in 2005 showed that while only 2% of Americans described themselves as “rich”, 31% thought it very likely or somewhat likely they would “ever be rich”.

Because we still know a central truth: we’ve been through these situations before, and gotten out of them before.  We’re not used to dependency, we still decry it, and we still have our dreams and aspirations.  And successes.  Thus, we know we’ve been knocked down today, but we also know we’ll get back up.  We still have our morality to steel our backs.

Mr Younge, with his legitimization of the demand of one for a share of the prosperity earned by another, is a clear demonstration of the result of becoming used to government handouts at the expense of self-reliance, self-respect, and community.  No, “poor” conservatives aren’t voting against their interests when they vote against (or don’t vote for) an Obama or any other Progressive candidate.  These folks are voting for their (moral) interests.  Mr Younge, though, is simply unable to take seriously a moral underpinning for such voting.

Osama bin Laden

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…is in the Federal Witness Protection Program, and not dead, after all?

Or so Rumor Control thinks.

Aaron Klein, of WND, has this on the matter.

Using a Pakistani Internet Protocol and proxy server, a disposable credit card and a fake address, “Osama bin Laden” has successfully donated twice to Barack Obama’s presidential re-election campaign.

The donations were quite up front; bin Laden made no effort to disguise his identity.  He freely listed his occupation as “deceased terror chief” and his employer as “al-Qaida.”

There’s more: in response to the donations,

“Bin Laden’s” email address has received several solicitations from Obama’s campaign asking for more donations.

One response, sent last weekend, offered this good deal:

Thanks so much for your donation of $5.00.  Please take 10% off your next purchase of $10 or more at our online store.

Another, sent by none other than the First Lady herself, Michelle Obama—only recently come into some pride in America—requested an even larger donation after some pro forma blandishments:

You’re one of the campaign’s most committed supporters.

Please make a donation of $19 or whatever you can today.

Oh, wait.  It turns out that the donations, and so the recipients of the follow-ups, were WND staffers running a demonstration of Democratic Presidential Candidate Barack Obama’s campaign fund-raising techniques.  But Obama and his support didn’t know that.  What were they doing, accepting donations from this terrorist, and then soliciting more—and in complimentary terms?

Is that incompetent, or what?  Frankly, I’m unsure about “incompetent;” I don’t agree that these people are that grindlingly stupid.

Bailouts

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Spiegel Online International carried a disturbing story Monday on the subject of bailouts.

The proximate item is Greece’s economic strait, and this is what Spiegel is reporting about that.  The current troika—the IMF, the European Commission, and the European Central Bank—are proposing

[a]nother partial default.  That, indeed, would seem to be the conclusion that Greece’s main international creditors have come to.  According to information received by SPIEGEL, representatives of the so-called troika—made up of the European Central Bank, the European Commission and the International Monetary Fund—proposed just such a debt haircut at a meeting last Thursday held in preparation for the next gathering of euro-zone finance ministers.

But half-measures simply prolong the problem and continue Greece’s addiction to handouts while at the same time providing no mechanism for getting the Greeks to self-sufficiency other than leaving them to their own, already failed devices—both those that drove them to this strait and those of the last three years that have had no useful effect.

Worse, though,

This time around, public creditors would be involved, meaning that taxpayer money from those countries which have stood behind Greece would vanish off the books.

But where is the justice in this?  Indeed, where was the justice, originally, in forcing the taxpayers of entirely separate jurisdictions—other nations—to indemnify the Greeks (and the Irish, and by extension, the Spanish, Italians, and Portuguese) against their own foolish decisions?  Indemnify rather than help, since no meaningful accountability mechanisms were applied.

That’s in the past; those innocent taxpayers already are dragooned into the existing bailout.  The primary question remains, though: where is the justice in compounding that prior error by extending it, by forcing responsible taxpayers to pay for continuing this folly?  And how does this enabling help the Greeks (and Spanish, Italians, and Portuguese; although these three already are attempting preemptive measures so as to avoid their own humiliation)?

Indeed,

Athens has only introduced 60 percent of the reforms [already] demanded by the European Union.

Yet,

The troika has already agreed to give Greece two extra years to meet its austerity goals, a delay that will likely result in a need for up to €30 billion in additional aid, according to the ECB and European Commission.  The IMF believes the funding gap will be closer to €38 billion.

Thus, the EU and the IMF know they’re proposing throwing money down a rat hole, and they’re proposing that anyway.  It’s true enough that cutting the Greeks off from further bailout moves will jeopardize the taxpayers’ money already committed.  However, it’s the nature of bankruptcy—which the Greeks will be better off going through—that such debts get written off and the creditors lose out.  But that’s the only way to stanch the bleeding here.  There’s no useful purpose in committing additional taxpayer funds to this failed effort.

Take careful note of the similarities to our own situation.  Failures here, too, says the current administration, need to be propped up with taxpayer money and, in our case, favored investors protected from the consequences of their decisions.