Category Archives: morality

Progressives and Truth

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Professor Elizabeth Warren, who also professes to be part Cherokee Indian, was on CNN’s Starting Point the other day, as reported by The Daily Caller.  In that appearance, Prof Warren said

You know, I’m proud of my Native American heritage….

Exactly what native American heritage would that be, Madam?

The slender thread upon which Elizabeth Warren’s claim that she is 1/32 Cherokee rests—a purported 1894 marriage license application—has been exposed as non-existent.  Based on a review of the original marriage records found in the files of the Logan County, Oklahoma Court Clerk’s office in Guthrie, Oklahoma, and the statements of ReJeania Zmek, the Court Clerk of Logan County, Oklahoma, it is likely that the ephemeral 1894 marriage license application never existed.

Prof Warren continued in that interview:

Wall Street [et al.] wants to change the subject.

Actually, Madam, you’re the one who brought it up.  You’re the one who self-identified in the Association of American Law Schools as a minority person for your claimed purpose of “meeting other people like yourself”—never minding that the AALS lists its charges as minority, without breaking out the type of minority.  You’re the one who self-identified at UPenn and at Harvard, with the preferential hiring attached by those institutions’ affirmative action programs.  You’re the one who, just by coincidence, stopped self-identifying as a minority after you achieved tenure at Harvard.  What change of subject?

But this confusion of what is truth isn’t limited to Progressive Senate candidates.  It infects other Progressive candidates, also.  Here’s Candidate Barack Obama at the “Saddleback Civil Forum on the Presidency” in August 2008, when he wanted the support of a particular group of Americans in the coming election:

Pastor Rick Warren to Barack Obama: Define marriage.

Candidate Obama: I believe that marriage is the union between a man and a woman.

(Then, with his typical hubris, Obama added, “I can afford those civil rights [of civil unions] to others.”)

Here’s President Obama, now appealing to another group [sorry about the opening ad] whose support he desires in the coming election:

I’ve just concluded that for me personally it is important for me to go ahead and affirm that I think same-sex couples should be able to get married.

Hmm….

A Sense of Privacy

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Last week, the House voted, largely along party lines, to abolish the American Community Survey, the new version of the US Census Bureau’s long-form questionnaire, a survey that was supposed to be conducted annually, The Wall Street Journal reports.  Republicans claim the long form—asking about everything from demographics to income to commuting times—is prying into private life and is unconstitutional.  Oddly, the WSJ disputes this characterization.

That paper says,

[T]he ACS provides some of the most accurate, objective and granular data about the economy and the American people, in something approaching real time.  Ideally, Congress would use the information to make good decisions.  Or economists and social scientists draw on the resource to offer better suggestions.  Businesses also depend on the ACS’s county-by-county statistics to inform investment and hiring decisions.

But the WSJ is living in a fantasy world, as demonstrated by that adverb “Ideally.”  In the real world, we’ve seen the likelihood of “good decisions” (question for the WSJ: whose definition of “good?”) involving personal information emanating from Congress.  We’ve seen the quality of suggestions from the HSWIC* over in the government’s Energy Department.  As for the businesses, see below.

Leaving that aside, though, in the real world, stipulating the argument, the ACS still is an intrusion into my privacy.

The WSJ even shamelessly trades on its “authority” status:

National statistics are in some sense public goods, which is why the government has other data-gathering shops like the Bureaus of Economic Analysis and Labor Statistics.

In the first place, they’re not goods of any sort, much less this baldly asserted public version, until they’ve been collected and thereby gained existence.  Even then, no, they’re not “public goods,” solely because they’ve been collected from a broad public.  They’re still made up of personal—private—data; having been collected up into a common database in no way places them into the commons.  In the second place, the WSJ has just made an excellent argument for abolishing the Bureaus of Economic Analysis and Labor Statistics, also.

In the end, if these data have value for businesses, or any other entity, a market will develop for them (they’re not that hard to collect, and the barrier to entry into this market is, as my town puts it, speed cushions), and people can give up their personal data—or not—in accordance with their own decisions.  There’s no need to have these data confiscated by government fiat.

But the most amazing part of the WSJ‘s demurral is their rationale:

As for privacy, anyone not living in a Unabomber shack won’t be much inconvenienced by making this civic contribution.

Leaving aside the cynically Alinsky-esque claim that a confiscation is a “contribution,” when did individual privacy become something to be invaded at will, so long as it doesn’t “inconvenience” the victim?  Our privacy needs no justification from us to protect; we need no better reason to protect it—especially from a grasping government that’s supposed to be working for us—than that we don’t feel like being exposed.  The WSJ‘s logic is in line with the government’s logic of two centuries ago: the Indians aren’t using the land they’re on, anyway.  And we have a more important use for it than they do.

The inconvenience is the invasion of our privacy.  Full stop.

 

*HSWIC: Head…Scientist…What’s in Charge

Demand for Admiration

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I wrote, below, about Progressives’ need for personal acclaim in their community “organizing” efforts.

Here’s an example of that desperation for recognition in another milieu.  It’s now a legal requirement to give credit to a Progressive for the “good deed” a business might do.

As background, under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act,

insurers that don’t spend a specified amount of revenue on actual medical care—as opposed to administrative costs—must refund the difference to customers.

Now the requirement for hosannas:

Health-insurance companies must tell customers who get a premium rebate this summer that the check is the result of the Obama administration’s health-care law, according to federal guidelines released Friday [11 May].”

Rules…instruct insurers to notify recipients of rebates in the first paragraph of the mailing by writing: “This letter is to inform you that you will receive a rebate of a portion of your health insurance premiums.  This rebate is required by the Affordable Care Act—the health reform law.”

Moreover,

Insurers will also have to send a generalized letter to all other customers explaining that if they aren’t receiving a rebate, it is because the company has met the targets under the law.

Finally, Obama, as part of his Progressive Education Movement, is using his Health and Human Services Secretary, Kathleen Sebelius, to push doctors “to educate people” about the benefits of the law.

Update: Just how desperate can these guys get?

Some Thoughts on Community Organizing

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There’s the conservative way, and there’s the Progressive way.  Below are examples of each, beginning with the conservative version.

One Saturday, Grant Bennett got up on a ladder outside his two-story [house] intent on dislodging a hornets’ nest, which had formed between an air-conditioning unit and a second floor window….  The hornets went right at him, and he fell off the ladder, breaking his foot….  Romney learned what had happened and went over that afternoon to see if there was anything he could do….

About nine thirty that Sunday night, Romney reappeared…carrying a bucket, a piece of hose, and a couple of screwdrivers.  “He said, ‘I noticed you hadn’t gotten rid of the hornets,'” Bennett recalled.  “I said, ‘Mitt you don’t need to do that.’  He said, I’m here, and I’m going to do it….  You demonstrated that doing it on a ladder is not a good idea.'”  Romney went at it from inside the house, opening a window enough to dislodge it.  Soon the hornets were gone.

Hmm….  Problem solving on the fly, too.

Romney’s acts of charity extended beyond just the church community.  After his friend and neighbor Joseph O’Donnell lost a son, Joey, to cystic fibrosis…Romney helped lead a community effort to build Joey’s park, a playground…in Belmont.  “There he was with a hammer in his belt, the Mitt nobody sees,” O’Donnell said.

Romney didn’t stop there.  About a year later, it became apparent that the park would need regular maintenance and repairs.  “The next thing I know, my wife calls me up and says, ‘You’re not going to believe this, but Mitt Romney is down with a bunch of Boy Scouts and kids and they’re working on the park,'” said O’Donnell….

Hmm….  Staying in it for the long term.  And the kicker:

[Romney] did it for like the next five years, without ever calling to say, “We’re doing this,” without a reporter in tow, not looking for any credit.

On the other hand, Saul Alinsky pointed out the essential ego involved in Progressive community organizing:

The organizer’s job is to inseminate an invitation for himself, to agitate, introduce ideas, get people pregnant with hope and a desire for change and to identify you as the person most qualified for this purpose.

Layered on top of this, his community organizer operated from a fundamental mindset of manufactured conflict:

Here our concern is with that tactic of taking; how the Have-Nots can take power away from the Haves.

Never mind that, just as in any economic, or other social, endeavor, it’s not a zero-sum game.  Power sharing (getting to the sharing is, indeed, often a source of conflict in) is power growth for all.  The difference is the difference between consent of the governed and top-down government control.

Progressive community organizing—protesting, threatening disruption or charges of racism, if accession to demandsagreement wasn’t achieved—was used to force 14 major banks to agree to turn a $55 million, 11-city lending program over to ACORN to manage.

Then-community organizer Barack Obama led an education foundation called the Chicago Annenberg Challenge (co-founded by that “guy who lived in his neighborhood,” Bill Ayers) that fed over $100 million to community organizers and radical education activists.

So, why am I only providing Romney examples on the conservative side, but providing a range of Progressives and their activities?  Full disclosure: I support Mitt Romney for President.  That’s not the reason for the focus, though.  Romney is famous, so descriptions of this sort of thing get out, regardless of modesty.  Conservatives, generally, just do it, without seeking credit.  Ordinary Americans’ acts of kindness, of organizing actions for the benefit of their communities, don’t get publicized, because that’s not the goal of the acts.  If it were, they wouldn’t be acts of kindness or benefits for their community, but acts of self-aggrandizement, of glory-hounding.  Of personal political gain.

h/t to Power Line for the Romney anecdotes.

Some Thoughts on Affirmative Action

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Do affirmative action programs accomplish anything in the direction of “fairness?”  No, these programs are, by their nature, racist and sexist.  Such programs do no more than perpetuate the myths that some groups are more equal than others, and that other groups are less equal than some.  How very Wilsonian:

segregation is not a humiliation but a benefit, and ought to be so regarded by you gentlemen.

What are affirmative action programs but a holding apart of some groups from others—segregation?  This holding apart is founded on the gravest of bigoted insults: some groups simply are unable to do for themselves, and so they must have special treatment from Big Government.  This is baser than the simple, honest hatred of most bigotry: it’s the insidiously velvet-gloved slur of low expectations.

Moreover, these programs deny their victims a fundamental aspect of their Americanism, much less of their humanity: their individuality and their individual responsibility.  Those who are the targets of affirmative action are lumped into groups assumed to be so inferior that they must have handouts; such targets are denied their opportunity to succeed or fail on their own merits, they are denied their opportunity to show the best that is in them.

Worse, such targets are denied such capacity in perpetuity: they are made dependent on government as surely and as thoroughly as the administrators of such programs and the politicians who create them are made dependent on these dependencies.

The failures go on.  The targets of affirmative action, even in those cases where they’re allowed to leave behind the preferences, are denied the full pleasure of their efforts.  Anyone who has ever received a scholarship, or a job, or any other success as a result of affirmative action cannot fully enjoy that success: did he earn it, or was he the right color, the right ethnicity, the right gender; did he merely satisfy the right affirmative action criterion?  Our own president is reduced to bragging about having benefitted from affirmative action programs, including possibly having gotten his position on the Harvard Law Review as a result of affirmative action.

In the end, how can we achieve a full integration of all comers into our society, into what it is that is an American, when we continue to hold significant portions of our fellows apart through deliberate special treatment based, not on the content of their character, but on the color of their skin or the chromosomes of their gender?  Where is the morality of such segregation, of this denial of another’s right and obligation to see to his own responsibilities and to make his own way in our common world?  How is this fair by any stretch of that term?