Tag Archives: culture

Some Thoughts on Conservatism

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Jennifer Rubin has some.  For instance,

The old guard has become convinced that Reagan’s solutions to the problems of his time were the essence of conservatism—not simply conservative ideas appropriate for that era.

And

The Republican Party may survive, but only if its politicians, activists, donors and intellectuals rethink modern conservatism and find new issues to defend and new arguments with which to defend them.

There is nothing at all temporal about conservative values.  Nor is there need to “rethink modern conservatism—” which is simply a figment of her imagination—or to find “new issues to defend.”  Conservative principles of limited government, low taxes and government spending, and personal freedom and responsibility, which are the principles Reagan espoused (they were not “Reagan’s solutions” are timeless.  Rubin managed to pack two false premises into those remarks.

Then there’s this:

Even after Obama’s reelection, Reagan-era conservatives have scorned any challenge to the party’s status quo, conducting search-and-destroy missions against ideological deviations from the Reagan playbook.

And

After the top sliver of the Bush-era tax cuts expired, tax increases could not be part of a budget because, as we know, Republicans are opposed to taxes.  Same-sex marriage must be opposed, because Republicans defend “traditional marriage.”  And despite Reagan’s spearheading of immigration reform in 1986, Republicans have to oppose that, too, because theirs is the party of law and order.

These are Rubin’s straw men; it’s her responsibility to defend them, no one else’s.  Except the no more tax increases part: limited government—which demands shrinking the one we have—is, as noted above, a rather timeless Conservative principle.

…principles that voters had rejected in two national elections.

Really?  Voters voted them up in the last two elections in which I participated.  Conservatives made serious gains in Congress and in state legislatures and governor’s houses in both, and they lost fewer Congressional seats than normal in a Presidential election in the last one.  I’d say Conservatives are continuing to gain ground—on our timeless principles.

The rest of Rubin’s piece is just more of this.

Conservative principles of small, limited government, low taxes and tax rates, limited Federal spending, and an emphasis on personal freedom and responsibility—with that limited government as a last resort, not a first—are as valid today as they were in 1790.

Rubin is arguing from straw men and false premises.  As long as she insists on doing this, she isn’t just wrong, she’s irrelevant.

Focus

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Shailini Jandial George, Suffolk University Law School Professor of Legal Writing, posits the following scenario, which she says is growing ever more common in law classrooms:

[Lara Law Student] arrives to her first-year torts class, flips open her laptop, and rests her iPhone on her desk.  Her professor starts his lecture, while she checks her email.  She visits Facebook to check out “must see” photos flagged by a friend.  When the professor turns to the subject of negligence, Lara Law Student remembers that her mom is getting sued and emails her for an update.  She’s then distracted by a text from a friend inquiring about her lunch plans…and so on.

I think George underestimates the deficiency; such behavior is growing more common in all classrooms.  Regardless, she has a solution:

“Instead of conveying all the class information via reading, lecture, and discussion, which can overtax the verbal channel in working memory,” educations should use more pictures….

[L]aw students can greatly benefit from using visuals to remember rules, apply rules to slightly modified hypothetical situations, and apply rules to completely novel situations in exam situations.

Imagine teaching our social compact documents—our Declaration of Independence and our Constitution—and their underlying principles from pictures (how many drawings did Locke use in his Second Treatise?).  Imagine teaching the British constitution—which is much more document intensive than our own—from pictures.

“Conveying…information via reading, lecture, and discussion” does not at all overtax the “verbal channel in working memory;” each of those media already are rife with visual aids (Locke notwithstanding).  What overtaxes “verbal channels” is lack of practice and lack of focus (both of which STEM-ers as well as lawyers need in spades), and that lack results from all of those distractions which George illustrates in her scenario.

Maybe another education reform would be to enclose classrooms inside Faraday cages.

The Boston Lockdown

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While the second terrorist in the Boston Marathon bombing still was being hunted, Boston and a number of surrounding suburbs were put on lockdown, as police recommended (strongly) that everyone should stay indoors while they searched for the terrorist, a terrorist who, as it turns out, had escaped the perimeter the police had set up to enclose a small part of the city.

During that lockdown, Boston took a number of hits, and so I have some thoughts about the pros and cons of the matter.

  • Pros:
    • easier to spot the terrorist on the move (which the police never did)
    • clearer lines of fire should they need to engage
  • Cons:
    • citizens were unable to participate in the manhunt, even though part of a citizen’s duty is to aid the police
    • citizens were unable to go about their own business, except at government behest
    • economic activity in the city came to a halt for the duration
    • a “go inside and hide” mentality makes it easier for a government to dominate its people

The city and people of Boston took hits from the impairment of their individual freedoms (this time, brief) and to their economic activity (this time, both brief and local).  In the end, too, the lockdown contributed very little to the actual tracking and capture of the remaining terrorist.

There are a couple of things about this: for one, these now are tools for subsequent terrorists in their subsequent activities.  On an individual basis, the loss to Boston and to Bostonians was small—but scaled up, with terrorists now acting so as to prompt further lockdowns, the losses can easily mount to a scope far beyond the reach of any physical terrorist act or collection of them done in concert.  Disruptions to our lives get us dancing to the terrorists’ tune as surely as actually killing us.

Widespread lockdowns also get us in the habit of letting the government corral us, for our own good.

Keep in mind Benjamin Franklin’s warning:

Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, will have neither Liberty nor Safety.

Although the warning might be hard for some to understand, it being older than one hundred years.

Immigration and Assimilation

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National Review Online has an article on the unfolding (immigrant) terrorist attack in Boston (unfolded: the two proximate terrorists are dead or caught; unfolding: learning from the surviving terrorist whether they acted alone or as part of a larger op).  In the article, John O’Sullivan talks about the assimilation into British society of the immigrant terrorists who attacked the British subway system 7 July 2005.

For almost the entire youth of the 7/7 bombers, the British had acted as if they were ashamed of their national identity and history.  So young men, with the usual propensity of young men to want to identify with patriotic and idealistic causes, had been told that there was nothing admirable or heroic about being British.  It was a sort of swindle, and one, moreover, that had been perpetrated especially upon people of their ethnic backgrounds.  They had therefore looked around for a heroic cause they could identify with.  The radical Islamists provided them with the cause of radical Islamism—and they embarked on the relatively short road to mass murder.

Sound familiar?  O’Sullivan thinks so, too:

The fact that Senator Schumer has declared ex cathedra that the Boston bombings have no significance for the immigration bill before Congress merely shows that folly has no natural internal limit.

Particularly in light of the older brother’s continued feeling of alienation from American society:

I don’t have a single American friend, I don’t understand them[.]

2nd Amendment Rights and Steamrolling

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President Barack Obama, in his dismay that he couldn’t dictate his position on gun control via demagoguery, expressed his dismay thusly:

The gun lobby and its allies willfully lied about the bill.

The Senators who voted against it are cowardly and had “no coherent arguments as to why we wouldn’t do this.  It came down to politics.”

“A minority was able to block it from moving forward” through “this continuing distortion of Senate rules.”

What Obama chose not to mention, though, is the steamrolling tactics he tried while coming down with his own politics, attempting to impose his minority position through an attempt to preempt actual discussion of the bills—by distorting Senate rules and while outright lying about his behavior and his role in the gun control bills’ failure.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D, NV) could have forced an up-or-down vote on the Manchin-Toomey background check bill—it got 54 votes on the cloture motion, so he might have gotten the bill passed.  No, though.  He and Obama didn’t want debate, they didn’t want Americans—or our Senate stand-ins—to have a chance properly to study the bill and (the horror!) to propose amendments before voting on it.  We all would have gotten that chance because skipping the cloture vote would have required Obama and Reid to sit through 30 hours of public debate and amendment before the vote could happen.  The word came from on high: no scrutiny, do the cloture vote.

In the midst of his crocodile tears over the lost opportunity for the Newtown children, Obama angrily denounced fears over a national registry of gun owners—saying that the just defeated bill explicitly banned the creation of such a registry.  That ban was in the bill, true enough.  But the fears are no less real for that.

Were Progressives to win the 2014 mid-terms and regain control of the House, who can believe that the registry ban wouldn’t be promptly rescinded and a registry created making used of the now additional two years of background checks?

This is another failure of Obama’s doing.  As Stephen Hayes of The Weekly Standard has pointed out, Obama and his cronies have zero credibility after their shenanigans vis-à-vis Obamacare, border security, Dodd-Frank, the present gun control “debate,” demonizing—and slandering—all those who disagree throughout his administration’s rule, etc, etc, etc.  Obama’s blandishments about registry bans simply are unbelievable.