March 4, 2012

Some days ago, my Favorite Blogger posted The Case for Infanticide, as enunciated by a group of Oxfordian medical "ethicists." No, really:

Parents should be allowed to have their newborn babies killed because they are “morally irrelevant” and ending their lives is no different to abortion, a group of medical ethicists linked to Oxford University has argued.

The article, published in the Journal of Medical Ethics, says newborn babies are not “actual persons” and do not have a “moral right to life”. The academics also argue that parents should be able to have their baby killed if it turns out to be disabled when it is born.

Perhaps that's the reason many on the Left attacked Sarah Palin for giving birth to her son Trig: Progressivist "ethicists" must have wondered why she didn't just procure an "after-birth abortion."

The idea that we should allow post-natal killing of babies is, of course, both monstrous and insane; it's so bizarre that only a card-carrying "ethicist" could hawk it. John Hinderaker naturally rejects such an atavistic, I would say satanic ethic, which flies in the face of thousands of years of Western thought. He's not one to accept a lunatic assertion just because it's asserted by a guy who publishes in the Journal of Medical Ethics!

Alas, he then immediately accepts the lunatic assertion next door -- because it's asserted by a guy who publishes in the Journal of Medical Ethics.

Hinderaker buys the same ethicists' corrolary proposition:

They preferred to use the phrase "after-birth abortion" rather than "infanticide" to "emphasise that the moral status of the individual killed is comparable with that of a fetus." [Emphasis added -- DaH]

Logically, then, Hinderaker (and nearly all right-to-lifers) would have to agree with the following syllogism:

1. Since said ethicists admit that the moral status of a foetus is the same as that of a newborn;
2. And since all decent and moral Westerners believe that the moral status of a newborn is the same as that of an adult (i.e., that killing a newborn is morally the same as killing an adult);
3. Thus the moral status of a foetus is the same as that of an adult;
4. And therefore, medical ethicists have "proven" that abortion is murder. Quod Erat Demonstrandum!

And thereby hangs the tail.

In the pro-lifers' effort to prove that abortion is akin to actual murder, as well as in the ethicists' effort to prove that murder is akin to mere abortion, both sides begin from the very same premise: That there is no moral distinction between a zygote, an embryo, a foetus, and a newborn baby. That is, they accept Premise 1 in the syllogism above.

Contrariwise, I demonstrate the philosophical vacuity of that claim by noting that it goes to prove both that killing a newborn is murder, and also that killing a newborn is not murder.

In general, a premise the leads to a logical contradiction suggests that the premise itself is faulty; that's the generic structure of what's called Reductio ad Absurdum: To prove proposition X, you assume its opposite (which can be written ~X) then demonstrate that ~X leads to a contradiction, that is, both conclusions A and ~A at the same time.

This isn't exactly that situation; for one, there is more than one flaw in both syllogisms. Also, it's certainly possible that one side is right and the other simply wrong, which eliminates the contradiction. Still, it's a good bet that Premise (1) is just wrong. As further evidence, most pro-lifers reject it viscerally, even while championing it rhetorically. "Do as we say, not as we do!"

For instance, if (1) above were true, then pro-lifers would treat every early-term miscarriage as a death, and they would hold a funeral for the fertilized egg and mourn for months. Which obviously the vast majority do not. There is certainly sadness; but it's more the sadness of lost opportunity, what might have been, than the kind of long-term grief that accompanies the utterly tragic death of a newborn baby. To be utterly blunt and Spockian about it, I cannot imagine even Sen. Santorum showing his kids a heavy menstrual flow containing a miscarried fertilized egg. It's just not the same thing.

And on the flip side, many, many pro-choicers who support abortion nevertheless utterly reject infanticide; and they don't think of it as "after-birth abortion." I would guess that more than 99% of Americans -- and probably more than 95% of pro-life conservatives -- do not de facto treat a miscarriage as they would the death of a newborn; even more telling, the same ultramajorities would not even treat abortion the same as they treat infanticide.

If a mother who engages a physician to murder her newborn, nearly everyone in America would demand that not only the doctor but the mother herself be sentenced to life in prison or even the death penalty. But how many demand life (or death) for women who obtain an abortion?

There is no way to spin it: Even right-to-lifers by and large treat early-term abortions very differently than they would treat infanticide or late-term abortions. Except for a tiny, easily dismissed subgroup, we all discriminate between those two very different acts. Even those who condemn abortion do not call for the same punishment as they rightly demand for infanticides.

Right-to-lifers often argue, against their own actions, that there is no logical place for humanness to begin other than conception (and, as a hidden assumption, they generally equate humanness with moral personhood). But of course, there are many other points that folks can and historically have believed constitute the beginning of moral personhood, e.g.:

1. At conception (week two -- remember that you begin counting from the last menstruation, typically two weeks before pregnancy).
2. When the fertilized egg implants itself to the uterine wall, indicating that it's now a pregnancy (fourth week).
3. When it first begins to divide, indicating that it's growing (shortly after implantation).
4. At the "Gummy Bear" stage, when it takes on the basic mammalian (quadruped) shape, as seen via ultrasound (sixth week).
5. When the foetus first begins to move, still only detectable via medical equipment (eighth week).
6. When a doctor can first detect a heartbeat (week 10 to 12).
7. At "quickening," when the mother can first feel the foetus move (about halfway through gestation, week 20-21).
8. When the cerebral cortex becomes "human," in the sense of developing the brain structures that will allow the eventual baby to use language and think in a human way, as opposed to merely a mammalian or even primate way (eighth month, roughly half-way through the third trimester).
9. At birth.

And on beyond zebra...

10. When the baby draws its first breath (traditional Jewish teaching is that the soul enters the body at that point).
11. At the severing of the umbilical cord, indicating complete autonomy from the mother's body.
12. After some months or years following the birth, when the liberal "ethicist" finally decides he likes the baby enough not to kill and eat it.

Any one of these points can logically be chosen as the beginning of moral personhood -- the point at which the developing foetus or baby should be considered a person and be afforded the moral rights of all other persons. Most of them have, at one time or other in history, been chosen by some society, primitive or sophisticated; for an extreme example, a number of societies have considered children expendable until they reached a certain age.

In fact, I would say that societies are largely defined by who they consider to be "persons." The more savage a society, the more it tends to restrict personhood to a smaller and smaller subset of the population; they exclude members of non-allied tribes, children under some set age, often women in general, those of insufficient status (especially slaves), those who violate the law, those with mental or physical deformities, those with afflictions or conditions, those thought to be witches or sorcerers, and so forth.

We Americans must choose at what stage of development personhood obtains, as must every society. But we must choose on the basis of a real consensus -- based upon how folks act in real life, not some theoretical construct divorced from day to day life. And since real people in the real world do not treat, and never in our history have treated miscarriage the same as the death of a newborn, I think it prudent to find a consensus somewhere north of conception but south of birth.

This doesn't require that everyone believe that the consensus point marks the place that Nature and Nature's God give us our souls... the consensus point marks only the point at which our society confers legal personhood, pledging to protect, thenceforth, the rights and liberties of the new legal person.

Therefore, pace, John Hinderaker, but... a right-to-lifer can no more call it "proven" that abortion is as morally bad as infanticide -- than can a heartless secularist call it "proven" that infanticide is no morally worse than abortion. Many rational and logical points in foetal development other than either conception or birth can demarcate potential persons, which as yet have no moral rights, from actual persons who certainly do.

I said "north of conception but south of birth": When any pre-natal point other than conception is chosen, then necessarily, during some of the earliest weeks of gestation, the entity is not a legal person, and abortion is legally allowable. On the other hand, during the later weeks of gestation, the foetus becomes a child and is legally a person; after that point, not only would abortion only be allowed if required to save the mother's life (not merely her "health"), but every effort must be made to save the child; removing a baby from the womb without attempting to save its life would constitute negligent homicide at the least.

As you can see, logically, we cannot even begin to proceed deciding what to do about abortion until we first establish a national consensus on where we shall define legal personhood to begin. This national consensus cannot be too close to either extreme (conception or birth), because a forced "consensus" is not a concensus at all but a diktat... and experience teaches that a law that is utterly rejected by a large portion of ordinary members of society is a prescription for disaster, perhaps even leading to national suicide. (Cf. same-sex marriage/polygamy in America.)

Alas, we have never grappled, as a society and in a meaningful way, with the definition of personhood; in particular, when it's conferred and whether there are entities that are biologically human but will never be accorded personhood -- an anencephalic baby, for example, or a human being so severely retarded that he or she has none of the most basic attributes we associate with persons.

Of course, nothing stops a society from choosing to confer "created rights" upon non-persons, pre-persons, former persons, or even animals, protecting both those who are expected to develop human-like consciousness, those who never had human-like consciousness, and those who had it at one time, but through disease or misadventure, no longer retain it; note laws protecting those in an irreversible coma, laws prohibiting cruelty to animals, and laws against desecrating the dead. But such laws are actually to preserve the sacred dignity of the persons who love such non-persons.

A state should thus be allowed to choose to protect the rights and liberty of pre-natal life even if it's not yet legally a person. But all states should be mandated to protect the rights and liberties (including the right to life) of anyone already a person via the national consensus.

My personal choice for the national personhood consensus is Point 8, the humanization of the cerebellum; I believe in a soul, but I believe it can only live in a human, not animal brain; until the brain develops human-like functions, I cannot see that a soul would find a place to fit. But this is likely too far along in the pregnancy to be generally accepted.

Among those who don't believe in ensoulment, I'm sure you would still find much disagreement about when the entity becomes a person, from conception to deciding the kid is cute enough to live (assuming that doesn't disrupt the Progressivists' lifestyle). But we seem to have settled upon a de-facto consensus as somewhere within the second trimester.

For a number of reasons, therefore, I nominate quickening (Point 7) as the logical national consensus for when our society confers legal personhood:

• It's about halfway through the second trimester, hence halfway through the pregnancy; it's a nice, round number, and we all tend to like round numbers.
• It's easily detectable by routine doctor's examination; hence, such an examination would be determinative for legal purposes.
• It marks the first time the expectant mother can actually feel that the thing inside her is a living being, moving of its own volition; she cannot deny that she has another life growing inside her.
• In Western history, It's one of the points during gestation that has been frequently chosen by societies for the moment of ensoulment.

(Notice none of these reasons depends upon the specious Roe v. Wade criterion of "viability," which of course varies depending on the current state of medical technology.)

But whichever point we as a society finally choose, we need to get started on that conversation. Without it, the only principled action we can take regarding abortion, contraception, and reproductive rights is the Monkey Moot: screech hysterically and fling poo at each other.

Cross-posted on Hot Air's rogues' gallery...

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, March 4, 2012, at the time of 4:48 PM | Comments (0)

March 3, 2012

It's tough to write a memorial about someone you've never met, never spoken to or spoken about, and never even heard in an interview until after his death, when Hugh Hewitt played one he had recorded just the day before Andrew Breitbart died. I can only write about what others have said about the man and what he himself has written; which, lacking the personal touch, can seem cold, sterile, Kubrickian.

But I believe he and I were kindred spirits in one sense, and it explains why people like us become the most hated souls in any group that has been infiltrated, possessed, and transubstantiated by the twin demons of liberalism and Progressivism.

Breitbart and I share a characteristic: Neither of us backs down or backs away. We cannot be silenced by special pleading, threats, bullying, bribery, sexual enticements, pity, namecalling, snubbing, exiling, or faux shaming. (Gosh, I feel like Patrick McGoohan.) We can of course be moved by logical argument, by evidence, by some new information that shows we are actually wrong about something we have said or argued; we are not irrational or fanatical. (I speak of Breitbart in the present tense because to split tenses between us is rhetorically awkward.) But you cannot swerve us by irrelevant or immaterial denunciations, demands, or diversionary tactics.

This trait has gotten me into trouble on many occasions. I don't try to pick verbal fights -- not since I was a teenager, anyway; and in my late dotage, I have even started letting stupidities lie where the speaker dropped them, choosing not to take up the smart man's burden, as Isaac Asimov called it, to rush over and show that so and so why he's wrong. (From what I have read, Breitbart was more prone to do so than I; but of course, he was a lot slightly younger than I.)

But when the fight is brought to me, I am relentless in pursuit of the truth as I see it, even when the discussion has turned stale and pointless, and the other guy become so emotionally invested that he will not even grant me the premise that A=A, if that might further my own nefarious argument. I bore in like an earwig into the victim's brain, finding every hidden assumption and slipshod argument and revealing them, naked and bleeding, to the surrounding mob.

And I rarely care whether that mob is on my side or on the war path against me. I don't rest until I have discovered where the logic actually leads; and on those occasions where it leads against me, I own up promptly. Well, reasonably promptly!

I don't argue that this would be a good trait for everyone to have; but it's vital that some people have it. For the rest will generally back away, anxious not to be "the most hated" person in any group, wanting to go with the flow, to get along by going along, feeling sorry for the other bloke, hoping not to talk the lefty hot chick out of the mood, or any of a number of other reasons to drop an argument that you're clearly winning -- even for the sake of simple politeness.

And the Left depends upon that exact tendency, using its own weakness as a weapon: They know that if they chant their mantras long enough ("mike check, mike check!" "four legs good, two legs bad!"), the other side (that's our side) will say, "oh great leaping horny toads, fine, Capitalism really is unfair and we should try to come up with something better; now will you please tell everyone I'm not a horrible person after all?"

So without a few freaks like me and my never-met soulmate Andrew Brietbart, the world would go to heck in a hamfist; the bleeding hearts and artists, or the arts and farces, as Benny Hill enjoyed putting it, would win even more battles than they already do, by dirty tricks and corrupt practice. And that would be a shame.

It takes a personal toll, though; when the Progressivist Left is thwarted in its preferred tactics, it demands vengeance and bears a grudge to the grave and beyond. On such instances of victimization, I can only fall back on my natural contempt for those who cannot debate but only demonize. I suspect, but will never know for sure, that Breitbart lacked that healthy contempt; he may have cared more, fumed more, empathized more, or agonized more about why these lemmings cannot follow a simple syllogism. He may have split himself into too many different directions -- each of great value but totalling more than he could chew -- and taken too much incoming from each. And that may have hastened his very, very untimely demise.

Don't know.

I do know that, because I care only about the point and not the pointer, I generally don't get swept up in the emotional whirlwind: I have a magic charm of indifference to paralogia, intimidation, and argument by incessant and ever-louder assertion. An argumentary epicure, I sample the world; but I suspect Andrew Breitbart tried to swallow it whole; and it's a ghastly great wad to choke down.

I never met the man, so I'm not conversant with his many virtues; but this is what I glean from reading his Bigs, and reading what others who did know him have writ large.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, March 3, 2012, at the time of 2:15 AM | Comments (0)

February 28, 2012

Let's mull and contemplate a movie about a new kind of warfare, and the new, informal, ad-hoc, improvisational kind of men who fight that new kind of war.

Let's make a movie with no real plot in the classic sense, no growth in the characters, no mental or emotional breakdowns. A movie where nobody ever questions his own morality in defending his country. A movie where, when a compadre is killed in battle, the others just carry on the fight, instead of crouching over the body and erupting into hysterical melodrama.

One where, in a supreme coup of "patriotism," the director hires actors who are actually current or former military personnel, from the very same kind of unit portrayed in the film. How little, patriotic hearts must go pitter-pat at such indulgence!

By all means, let's show the unenlightened booboisie, the American people, a movie comprising one victorious battle after another, even though we all know the overarching campaign is a lost cause. Never mind the inarguable facts; show the popcorn munchers a movie where the men are always willing to make "sacrifices," and where the United States is always the good guy who will ultimately triumph, no matter how bad things may look.

Even when there's a setback, by all means, show us only soldiers who suck it up and do it better next time -- and without the weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth that constitutes drama in the minds of sophisticated New York film crickets. No doubts, no introspection, no existential angst; how is that realistic? How does that show the inevitable bestialization of the warmongers?

A movie with no "boy meets girl" or even "boy meets boy" love story, and where alternative lifestyles simply don't exist! A movie where men are men (as if gender can ever truly be deterministic), and men don't discover their feminine side or the inherent inequality of traditional marriage. Heck, a movie where wives refuse to cry until after their husbands or boyfriends have left, because they don't want to "burden their men" with worry when they're about to go on a deadly mission.

Yeah, a movie like that. How nice. Just lousy, damned propaganda; rah-rah, flag-waving Americanism. How disgusting. It's nothing but anti-art; what kind of a brainwashed, mind-melded moron would want to see that garbage? What's the real point... to bump up military-recruitment stats? Make it seem that war can ever be noble? To "lift morale," for cripes' sake? What a low and vulgar consciousness that bespeaks. Who could possibly imagine the brilliant lights of cinema paying even the slightest attention to such "all-American" bubblegum like that.

What film critic could possibly praise trash like -- trash like -- I forget, what's the name of that filthy piece of propaganda we're talking about?

Oh yeah: Films like They Were Expendable (1945), about those crazy, new, fast, maneuverable, and barely armored PT boats, which took on Japanese cruisers and destroyers in the Philippines during World War II. The movie starred, and was partially directed by, Lt. Commander Robert Montgomery (who actually commanded a PT boat during the war) and John Wayne -- two conservative Republicans -- along with liberal Democrat Donna Reed. It's considered a classic film today.

The war against radical Islamism has never been "Barack H. Obama's war," despite the fact that he is the current Commander in Chief -- and despite the fact that, as he brags at the drop of a hijab, he is the man who "got" Osama bin Laden. (Oh, sure, the CIA and the SEALs were the ones who actually tracked bin Laden for years, infiltrated into the wilds of Pakistan, hunted him down, entered his compound, took out his bodyguards, and pulled the trigger to send him to the boiling pitch of Jahannam... acting on orders under a program initiated by George W. Bush. But Obama signed the order! Clearly, he deserves the lion's share of the credit.) But that war was never Obama's war.

No, the war against radical Islamism has always been seen as Bush's war... hence good liberals see it as unalloyed evil, folly, and madness. Any movie extolling the virtues of its warriors is, by definition, propaganda.

Inexplicably, liberals have never affixed that libelous label to the heroes of Roosevelt's war. After all, that's totally different.

Cross-posted on Hot Air's rogues' gallery...

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, February 28, 2012, at the time of 12:45 AM | Comments (0)

February 22, 2012

Many election analysts have noted that President Barack H. Obama, who appears to want another term, has worked with his grand viziers, his mullahs, his Council of Experts, and assorted hatchet peeps to develop two distinct election playbooks, one for each of the two most likely nominees:

• For Rick Santorum, the Obamunists plot to smear him as a religious fanatic who wants to erect a theocracy on American soil, and as an ultra-social-conservative lunatic who wants to disenfranchise the entire female sex, burn gays at the stake, and reinstate official government racism, if not the return of slavery itself.

  Alas, Santorum plays right into this strategy by his increasingly hysterical denunciations of Obama as "not a Christian;" he may well not be a Christian -- I think his religion is Progressivism; but as electoral strategy, attacking your opponent as irreligious is not calculated to reassure the mushy middle that you're fit to serve as POTUS.

• For Mitt Romney, their scheme is both simpler and more complex: The Kingpin of gangster government intends to "smear" Romney for being a wealthy man.

  This is simpler, in that nobody can deny that Mitt Romney would be the richest GOP presidential nominee of all time (that is, since the Republican Party was founded in 1854); he's worth between $190 and $250 million. (JFK -- Kerry, not Kennedy -- is probably the richest nominee ever; but he doesn't count as a counterexample, since he's a Progressivist Democrat, hence by definition busy saving the world, man!)

  But the strategy is also more complex, in that Obama must show not only that Romney is rich, but that there is something disreputable about this; and he must convince tens of millions of voters who are not already "Occupiers" and "99 percenters."

I don't really care about Santorum's response to the inevitable Obamic attacks; I doubt he'll be the nominee; and if he is, having seen him in action now, I believe he'll win only if the economic climate is such that any Republican would win... a pious hope, but unlikely.

Thus, Obama will be forced to pivot his slanderous traducements from "evil conservative!" to "one percenter!", and he's stuck with trying to explain to the American people why multi-millionaire Republicans like Romney are inherently unfit to command, while multi-millionaire Democrats like Al Gore and John Kerry (and Barack Obama) are inevitably great leaders.

And that last is the chink in Obama's playbook, meaning no disrespect to Jeremy Lin; it lies within Romney's power, if not within his will, to utterly destroy that meme of attack -- or better, to drive it right back into Obama's court with an overhead smash. He can! But will he?

Will a Capitalist nation (sort of) implicitly reject anybody who's rich? Egad, I hope not; I can only hope that America has not sunk so low that it treats wealth itself as suspect, and sees liberal Fascism as its cure. Rather, I believe Americans admire achievement; and I believe they understand that wealth "inequality" is precisely what drives the economy, while enforced income equality would kill it... just as water that is all at the same level can do no work: Hydraulics requires some of the water to be higher than the rest; that's what makes the waterwheel, or the turbine, go round and round.

Romney need never apologize for his wealth; instead, he needs to say something along these lines:

My opponent accuses me of being successful and wealthy -- "rich" is the term he uses, I believe. All right, I confess; I am wealthy; I am rich. And you now how I got to be that way? By following the American dream.

My friends, I inherited a lot of money from my dad, George Romney, who worked for decades in the automobile industry in Detroit, Michigan. I also inherited a first-rate education. I kept the education, but I gave my entire inheritance to my alma mater... not because there's anything wrong with money or with parents passing along the fruits of their labors to their kids, but because I wanted to be my own man, to see what I could accomplish on my own. So I can honestly say I've earned every dollar I have.

Unlike my opponent, nobody gave me a suspiciously huge book contract when I was an obscure law student at Harvard; when I was an obscure law student at Harvard, I was simultaneously an obscure business student at Harvard; and I didn't have time to write a dream book about my father, anyway... or put my name on some radical professor's book, as the case may be.

I also never got a sweetheard land deal from a lobbyist and campaign fundraiser who was later convicted of fraud, bribery, and money laundering. So you see, I didn't have the advantages growing up that my opponent did.

Instead, I worked hard, played by the rules, and kept faith with my family, my friends, my competitors, and my God. And I succeeded, as so many others have done before and after, some more, some less. I thank God everyday for the United States of America, for liberty, and for the Capitalism that allows not only the privileged but the downtrodden to rise to heights limited only by their own talent, drive, persistence, and their refusal to accept artificial limits on achievement. Just ask Justice Clarence Thomas.

My opponent is a great believer in limiting achievements. Four years ago, all he could talk about was vague "hope and change," and how his presidency would heal the Earth, calm the oceans, and how the lamb would lie down with the lion. A pocketful of stimuluses, ObamaCares, and trillions of wasted spending later, not too many folks think they're better off now than four years ago. Except the lion, who got a nice rack of lamb on the deal.

This time, all my opponent can talk about are the few minor things he did that more or less worked, tiny islands in a vast sea of failure, diminished expectations, and a long, steady collapse of the American dream and of America itself... if we let him.

Let's not.

Yeah, I'm rich. And I want all of you here, everyone hearing these words, to become rich too -- or to write the great American novel (without a ghostwriter), or invent a molecule-sized computer, or design the most beautiful shopping mall ever built, or become a Justice of the United States Supreme Court. Whatever your dream happens to be, never be ashamed or apologetic about succeeding. Be joyous! Be proud! I'm proud of the companies I helped save when I worked at Bain Capital and made a pile of money; and I kick myself for the companies that we couldn't save.

But that's Capitalism: In order to earn the right to succeed, you must accept the right to fail. Failure can be painful, but it teaches us to do it better next time.

There have been times I've failed, and times I've succeeded. On the whole, I like winning better than losing, not just for me but for everybody.

I guess that makes me both a Republican and an American!

All right, all right, I got a little carried away; but I was having fun cheering and defending achievement, wealth, and Capitalism with joyous abandon; I never apologize for anything but not doing my best.

Barack Obama is my political antiparticle, forever begging forgiveness for the achievements of his betters.

I reckon that makes him a liberal.

Cross-posted on Hot Air's rogues' gallery...

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, February 22, 2012, at the time of 2:19 AM | Comments (3)

February 20, 2012

I sent this as an e-mail to my favorite blogger; but upon further reflection, I think there is something of more general interest here. Hence I turn it into a cheap-jack freebie blogpost pithy observation of the unity of social and economic conservatism we need to oust the occupier from 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.

In John Hinderaker's Rick Santorum post "Are There Republicans Who Think This Is a Good Idea? Seriously?", he quotes Schieffer quoting Santorum:

RICK SANTORUM: But the idea that the federal government should be running schools, frankly, much less that the state government should be running schools is anachronistic. It goes back to the time of industrialization of America when people came off the farms where they did home school or have the little neighborhood school and into these big factories. So we built equal factories called public schools.

I agree that it's death for the GOP to run a campaign against Barack H. Obama mostly about social conservatism. But if you're interested, the bit from Santorum quoted above is straight out of Alvin Toffler's ten-years-later follow-up to his mondo best seller Future Shock, titled the Third Wave -- meaning the third wave of technology-induced cultural revolution: The first is the post-neolithic agricultural age; the second is the mechanical/industrial age; and the third is the post-industrial information age.

Toffler makes sense to me; it's clear that the modern (modernist) public-school system was indeed set up to mimic the factory setting -- a wonderful (at the time) great leap forward from the paltry and classist education available in the agrarian age. Toffler argues that "manufactory" schools have outlived their usefulness, however, and that we need the more individualized learning that computers now make available to every individual, or would if the teachers unions would get the heck out of the way.

But Hinderaker is quite right that a presidential campaign is not the proper venue for such Newt-like speculation on Santorum's part.

I perhaps part company from him -- or perhaps not, as his response indicated general agreement -- on one implication of the piece, perhaps a conclusion Hinderaker did not intend: That the campaign should be entirely about the economy and jobs, with no shred of social issues intruding. I think that is a great mistake; but it must be handled very carefully to avoid exactly what Hinderaker rails against in his post, that is, letting social conservatism drive the GOP, pushing economic conservatism to the back of the bus.

In particular, we must stay away from any social issue that is divisive -- theology, gynecology, school prayer, same-sex marriage, and suchlike. But we can make great inroads by spending about 15% of the campaign energy on issues that pit Obamunism against Americanism; e.g., arguing that Obama's policies, whether by design or incompetence, are anti-family and destructive of traditional American virtues, such as liberty (including religious liberty), individualism, and individualism's counterpart, civil society (churches, service organizations, and community activities, such as bowling leagues), and Capitalism, which has made us the most prosperous nation on earth -- even as Progressivist ideas have made us, at the very same time, the world's biggest bankrupt nation.

I believe a very effective pitch can be made to Hispanic voters, for example, by sending English and Spanish speaking Hispanics throughout Hispanic areas of the Southwest and Florida with the message that Obama is making war on Catholics and on the traditional family and on small businesses, in which Hispanics are very successful players... said message intended to counter the inevitable leftist attack on the GOP for being "nativist" and "racist" and wanting to deport all Hispanics (yes, I know that's a horrible distortion; but that exact distortion is guaranteed to be flung at us by Big Media).

And a pure pitch can be made for individual and family liberty by advocating, not the complete privatization of Social Security (despite my own preference for that very policy) and Medicare, but rather for collecting the payroll tax as usual... but keeping everybody's taxes in separate, family accounts -- under the citizens' own names -- so that the feds cannot raid the Social-Security funds to pay for more madcap spending; and doing the same with the portion of payroll taxes that currently go to Medicare, so that they may instead go towards paying for post-retirement insurance (like Medicare Advantage) instead of qualifying seniors for crappy medical care as second-class patients.

But unquestionably, 85% of the campaign should be about the collapsing economy, ballooning taxes, skyrocketing energy prices (due to crippling our domestic energy production) and other unconfessed inflation, unconscionable unemployment and underemployment, the cost of Obamacare, the Skimulus, and the arrogant, swaggering ignorance by Barack "Bubble Boy" Obama of the most basic and fundamental economic laws.

85% money stuff, 15% non-controversial social issues (liberty, family, community); that should be the big campaign picture. But not the specific stuff Rick Santorum is inexplicably yammering about.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, February 20, 2012, at the time of 10:25 PM | Comments (0)

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