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The Mind of the Moonbat

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I was driving yesterday thinking about being interviewed by Bill Maher. This was not some sort Walter Mitty fantasy. For some reason I was thinking about the time I was sitting next to Bill Maher at a restaurant in Miami a dozen years ago. He was at the table next to me and that had us sitting within a foot of one another. He smelled like feet and looked like he had not slept in a week. I think his companion was a hooker, but maybe he just has a thing for skanks.

That led me to think about how a loathsome creature like Maher has managed to get rich in entertainment. Why would anyone agree to go on his show? Ann Coulter used to be a regular and I recall hearing her say she counts Maher as a friend. Maybe my experience is not indicative of the real Bill Maher, but people I know who do know him say I’m being too kind. Maher is worse than I think.

That’s what led to my imagining what it would be like to sit on his show and interact with. I have, from time to time, watched his HBO show. It is mostly for anthropological reasons, like watching a show on Pygmies or the Papuan. Instead of primitives, it is Progressives performing for other Progressives, not thinking much about who else is watching. It’s like being a fly on the wall of a cult meeting.

The thing with Maher is that he is a good example to use when explaining how members of a religious cult understand and respond to the world outside the cult. From my small sample size of viewings, the typical show is Maher and other members of The Hive leading the audience in the current hymns. Once is a while he has a normal person on in the same way tent preachers bring the town drunk up to be healed. The point is to use the hapless sinner as an example.

On a few occasions I have seen a normal shine the focus on some defect of the Left and this is where you see Maher show himself to be a full spectrum moonbat. He has a physical reaction to hearing contrary information, squirming in his seat and rolling his eyes. It’s not intended to to be dismissive either. It’s a genuine physical reaction to unclean thought invading the safe space.

I’ve tested this on my moonbat office manager. I’ll engage her in some normal chit-chat knowing that she will eventually figure out how to conform the topic to one of the three solas of the One True Faith. This is where I pounce and point out some defect in the faith or some corruption of the party. She will recoil in horror and look furtively around the room, the fight or flight mechanism kicking in like a shot of adrenaline.

The other thing you can observe with Bill Maher is the tactic of shifting the focus. His heretical guest will point out that Obama lied about something or other and immediately Maher will respond with something about Bush or Palin or some other monster in the moonbat pantheon. The purpose is to change the topic of discussion away from that which vexes the faithful to something more pleasing.

In comment threads of new stories critical of Ben Carson, you will see moonbats jumping in when someone points out the double standard applied to black Republicans versus black Democrats. This is very bad think so they chime in with made up stories about how the racist white press in the olden thymes tormented the heroic Obama. That shifts the focus from present reality to something imaginary.

I used to think this was a defense mechanism, a herd instinct in the human personality toolkit that is tapped into by the hive minded or maybe dominant in these people. Every herd animal has some way for members to warn the herd of danger. Progressives hooting about stranger-danger is just an adaptation of this. The trouble with this theory is that Progressives are forever trying to pick fights with normal people. Instead of being a defense mechanism, this is an attack mechanism.

That’s been my observation of shows like Maher’s and others where three-on-one is moonbat fun. They bring the bad thinker in who valiantly tries to make his points. The tactic of shifting the focus inevitably puts the victim on defense. The segment was supposed to be about Obama, for example, but instead devolves into another critique of his critics, hinting that maybe the bad thinker is a racist.

The lesson here is that when dealing with a moonbat, the key is to always keep the focus on them. They are highly skilled at shifting the focus as it appears to be a biological instinct, but if you have some discipline, you can have some fun watching them squirm in agony. This old video of British airhead Piers Morgan being tormented by Ben Shapiro is a great example.

If you watch carefully, you see Morgan desperately trying to shift the focus from himself in order to put the guest on the defense. First he tries the “how dare you stuff” hoping this will put Shapiro off his game. When that fails he desperately tries to change the subject and have the guess address arguments made by some third person.

I’ve always through that this video should be mandatory viewing for the training of normal people going on these shows. This does not happen because the Left signs the checks and the surest way to get fired is to challenge the One True Faith effectively. Even so, for normal people dealing with the moonbat relative or lunatic at the office, knowing how to keep the focus on the moonbat is a valuable skill. If I ever find myself interviewed by Bill Maher, I hope to remember it.

The Faith of the Crazy

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What’s hard for normal people to wrap their heads around, I think, is how modern liberalism is not a set of fact-based opinions, but a crazy quilt of beliefs that are untethered from reality. Normal people tend to assume that people can look around, see the world as it is and act accordingly. Those who fail to acknowledge reality are either mistaken or insane. For as long as anyone reading this has been alive, conservatives have assumed liberals are mistaken and therefore they can be corrected.

Over the last decade, many on the right have come to the conclusion that the people we call Progressives are suffering from a mental disorder. Maybe it is the nutty aunt who thinks Obama is Jesus. Maybe it is that neighbor who has covered his Prius in “coexist” bumper stickers. These are not people with whom you can have a conversation because they find some way to preach Progressive craziness at you, even over the damned weather.

I tend to think of it a third way, which is as a religion. I call it the Cult of Modern Liberalism because what we call politically correct is what we used to call “pious” in another age. The PC enforcers deeply believe in egalitarianism, anti-racism and multiculturalism as pathways to salvation. It’s Congregationalism with God removed from the cosmology. Here’s a good example of it in the Washington Post.

This month, Jennifer Cramblett lost her “wrongful birth” lawsuit, which centered on a troubling ideology that has been creeping into mainstream discussions in ways not seen in decades. Cramblett claimed that the sperm used to inseminate her came from the wrong donor, leading to a biracial child, which she had not wanted. Her lawsuit claimed that this mix-up in the lab caused her and her family personal injuries of various kinds.

This lawsuit was shadowed by a troubling logic: the idea that race is a biological reality with particular traits and behaviors that can be avoided through proper breeding practices. In doing so, Cramblett’s claims echoed arguments made in a darker era of global history of “scientific” racism.

Here’s how the argument goes. Some people are born with outstanding talents, easily mastering basketball, mathematics, languages or piano, if given the right environment in which to grow. What biologist or social scientist could argue with that? But alongside that genetic understanding, an old and pernicious assumption has crept back into the American conversation, in which aptitudes are supposedly inherited by race: certain peoples are thought to have rhythm, or intellect, or speed or charm. That’s a fast track toward the old 19th- and early 20th-century problem of “scientific” racism.

First off, you’ll note the tone. These are two deeply religious people speaking to an audience they assume to share their religion. If instead of “racism” the bogeyman was the devil, it would be something you would expect from certain Christian sects. If the bogeyman was Western decadence, then this would read like a sermon from the local imam. Instead, the bogeyman is biology so it is a boiler plate lecture we’ve all come to expect from people who enjoy diversity seminars.

You’ll also note that the authors are both professors with degrees in nonsense fields like racism and sociology. These are not fields of study that add to the stock of human knowledge about the world. These are fields dedicated to enforcing religious orthodoxy. When your kids go off to college, they are forced to sit through diversity lectures by these types of people as part of the “orientation.”

The Washington Post gobbles up submissions like this because it helps the faithful resist the temptations of biological science, which is becoming a real threat to the Cult of Modern Liberalism. When genetics can trace your genealogy back to the home country by merely taking a mouth swab and correlate physiological attributes to intelligence, biology becomes the same sort of threat to the New Religion as it was to the Old Religion.

Because this new religion inherits so much from the old religion, it even comes with an apocalyptic element. This breathless story on “climate change” is a daily feature in Progressive media. Christianity used to keep people in line by promising eternal damnation in the fiery pits of Hell if you broke God’s laws. Progressives promise an extremely high air conditioning bill if you keep using the lawnmower.

The interesting thing about the New Religion is it is a throwback to the pre-Christian days. Before the Jews gave us a fixed, rational God who created a fixed and rational world, people truly thought appeals to the gods would change the laws of nature. Hang a bull’s penis around your neck and your next kid would be a son. Burn a couple of heretics and the rains would come and end the drought.

Climate change is paganism for guys and gals on the private jet circuit. They force the state to pass some regulation making it hard for you to cut your grass because that will appease, well, whatever is in the blank spot where Elagabalus used to sit. As has always been the case, the rich guy making the sacrifice to the gods is never sacrificing anything of his. It’s always some other guy stretched out on the altar, having his heart ripped out.

Obama: The L. Ron Hubbard of Modern Liberalism

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On a few occasions, here and elsewhere, I compared the recent spasm of monument desecration by the American Left to what we are seeing with ISIS in the Near East. It is an easy comparison. One group of fanatics is attacking the monuments of the past because Allah commands it. Another is attacking symbols from the past because the void where God used to exist in their cosmology commands it.

Look, the primary attraction of the comparison is it makes Progressives nuts when you point out this comparison. Their near total lack of self-awareness coupled with total ignorance of their ideological movement causes them to think they are pure logic machines, the exact opposite of the sky-god worshiping barbarians. It’s a classic example of the hive mentality of cults. Hold a mirror up to them and they shriek in horror.

The joking aside, I do think the Left has jumped the fence and is no longer simply a political ideology. This is fairly obvious with the reaction to Bernie Sanders, who is an old school commie. Bernie is focused on economics, not culture. When pressed, he mouths the Cult-Marx platitudes, but he’s clearly not into it. His defense of American jobs with regards to immigration sent the Vox boys into hysterics.

It’s tempting to think of the modern Progressives as tarted up commies from the previous age, but there are a different breed of cat. Theirs is a spiritual movement, more than economics or even ideology. They see salvation through egalitarianism and multiculturalism. Leveling the economic playing field is simply not important to them, especially since most are in the managerial elite.

An example of what I mean is early on in Obama’s tenure, he talked about creating a domestic army to address the laundry list of ills he thought needed attention. He was not thinking about a teacher corp pr civilian conservation corp. He had something closer to the Jehovah’s Witnesses in mind, an army of young people scolding the non-believers. In other words, they were building a mass movement.

That has eventually turned in Organizing for America, the off-the-books campaign operation that Team Obama used to coordinate, outside the view of Congress, their operations of the 2012 election. Presidents have campaign operations, but this was a radical departure in that it was intended to live on long after Obama left office. It would allow him to co-opt future campaigns by maintaining a private agit-prop operation coordinating with groups like the SEIU and the vast army of non-profits like Planned Parenthood.

This story in the Times about how Obama is doing something different folds in nicely with his dreams of being the spiritual leader of global liberalism, defining the morality of the New Religion and by extension, the nation.

Publicly, Mr. Obama betrays little urgency about his future. Privately, he is preparing for his postpresidency with the same fierce discipline and fund-raising ambition that characterized the 2008 campaign that got him to the White House.

The long-running dinner this past February is part of a methodical effort taking place inside and outside the White House as the president, first lady and a cadre of top aides map out a postpresidential infrastructure and endowment they estimate could cost as much as $1 billion. The president’s aides did not ask any of the guests for library contributions after the dinner, but a number of those at the table could be donors in the future.

The $1 billion — double what George W. Bush raised for his library and its various programs — would be used for what one adviser called a “digital-first” presidential library loaded with modern technologies, and to establish a foundation with a worldwide reach.

Supporters have urged Mr. Obama to avoid the mistake made by Bill Clinton, whose associates raised just enough money to build his library in Little Rock, Ark., forcing Mr. Clinton to pursue high-dollar donors for years to come. Including construction costs, Mr. Obama’s associates set a goal of raising at least $800 million — enough money, they say, to avoid never-ending fund-raising. One top adviser said that $800 million was a floor rather than a ceiling.

What Obama does not want to be doing in his retirement is grubbing for money. What he enjoys most is standing in front of adoring crowds telling them his inner thoughts. Obama speeches have always been an interior monologue broadcast to whoever is within earshot. If the Obama Foundation is a self-perpetuating financial engine that keeps him and his wife in a lifestyle they believe they deserve, Obama is free to spread the gospel.

One top aide said Mr. Obama respected Mr. Bush’s decision to limit his time in public after leaving office, but also admired Mr. Clinton’s aggressive use of the spotlight to press his agenda.

“My sense is that he’s probably a blend of the two,”’ said David Plouffe, one of Mr. Obama’s closest former aides and a member of the library foundation board.

In response to a question from Mr. Doerr at the February White House dinner, the president told the group that he wanted to focus on civic engagement and opportunities for youths, pushing guests for ideas about how to make government work better, Mr. Hoffman recalled in an interview. The president asked if social networks could improve the way society confronted problems.

In their conversations with Mr. Obama and his advisers, people from Silicon Valley and Hollywood are pressing for a heavy reliance on cutting-edge technology in the library that would help spread the story of Mr. Obama’s presidency across the globe. Ideally, one adviser said, a person in Kenya could put on a pair of virtual reality goggles and be transported to Mr. Obama’s 2008 speech on race in Philadelphia.

Some discussions at the dinners have focused on the role Mr. Obama might play internationally after the diplomatic opening with Cuba, the nuclear deal with Iran, the confrontations with Russia and the drawdown of American forces in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Obama is not the hardest working guy in the world, something I actually admire about him, so I question whether he will really want to be the spiritual leader of his own cult. His people clearly think that is his future. Undoubtedly, Organizing for Action will be a part of this initiative. That will allow Obama to control the Democrat Party by wielding financial and spiritual power long after he is gone from office.

Progressive Awakenings tend to run out of steam after a decade or so. The reason is the charismatic leaders tend to die off. Wilson was a vegetable at the end. FDR dropped dead. JFK, MLK and RFK were all shot in the 60’s and there was no one to pick up the torch.

Obama is young and in good health so he could possible keep the torch lit well beyond the normal active phase. He could set himself up in New York City and a mountain lair in Hawaii, where he can direct his followers and issue encyclicals to the faithful. Another book is on the way so it could perhaps be the Dianetics of the Left.

The Prophet Algore Resurfaces

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Way back in the 2000 election, I was pretty sure Algore was having a nervous breakdown. His bizarre behavior in the debates suggested he was losing his grip under the strain of the campaign. His Zelig act in the second debate was one of the more disturbing things I’ve seen in politics. We came very close to putting a madman in the White House. Well, a different sort of madman than usual.

His Old testament prophet act following the election confirmed it for me. He went off into the wilderness, grew a beard and gained fifty pounds. Then, he came back with the good word, as it were, on global warming. His whole act had the feel of a guy thinking he is on a mission from God.

As his crusade grew more craven and ridiculous, he has faded from public view. That and Chocolate Jesus in the White House made the Prophet Al a redundancy. But, with Obama heading to the dustbin, it looks like the prophet is back with the good word again.

Myths and Madness

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Crackpots are often entertaining, but they are usually just tiring. A guy who thinks dinosaurs once had a sophisticated society, but were obliterated by space aliens in order to give mammals a shot is probably a fun guy at the bar. The Brits used to call these sorts of eccentrics “mad” or “daft”, as in harmlessly nutty.

At the other end of the spectrum, you have the sort that you suspect is one nudge away from going bonkers and shooting up a mall. These are the guys sending angry letters to the editor of their local newspaper – every day. Nowadays, they show up on Facebook and Twitter running “campaigns” against public figures. Or, they get a PhD and write articles for Salon.

The American Renaissance Foundation is an extremely conservative right-wing organization that also publishes a monthly magazine of the same name, American Renaissance (AR). The magazine’s first issue appeared in November 1990. The foundation was established by Jared Taylor (1952–) who serves as president of the New Century Foundation and as editor of AR. Taylor has ties to a variety of domestic and international racists and extremists. He is on the editorial advisory board of Citizens Informer, the newspaper of the Council of Conservative Citizens, a virulently racist group whose website has referred to blacks as “a retrograde species of humanity.” He has contributed writings to The Occidental Quarterly, a racist journal. He also has been a member of the board of directors of the National Policy Institute, a self-styled racist think tank, and has received funding from this institute.

Taylor has close ties with members of various neo-Nazi groups and with Gordon Baum, the CEO of Council of Conservative Citizens. He is a frequent radio guest of Don Black’s, operator of Stormfront, a white supremacist online forum that also advertises American Renaissance conferences. He also has ties to Mark Weber, head of the Institute for Historical Review. European racists are among his close associates, including members of the British National Party, a racist, far-right political party in England, and the National Front, a racist, far-right political party in France. Nick Griffin, the head of the British National Party, has been a speaker at two American Renaissance conferences. Frédéric Legrand, a member of the National Front, is a frequent contributor to American Renaissance.

In those 263 words, I highlighted 14 scare words. It reads like something written by the Lyndon LaRouche people. I was expecting some reference to Henry Kissinger and his international communist ties. This is the sort of rant you expect to be hand written on note paper, folded up a bunch of times and then stuffed into a plain envelope. If you read the whole 3,000 word tirade you start to think the guy already has Jared Taylor tied up in his basement and this piece includes his demands.

I know next to nothing about Jared Taylor. I recall Derb writing about him once so I went to the American Renaissance site. I find white identity to be a bit silly for the same reasons I black identity to be ridiculous. Not all blacks are the same and not all whites are the same. In America, blacks at least share a common ancestry and history. You can reasonably argue that there is a “black culture” that is shared by all black people. You can’t say that about whites. Flinty guys from New Hampshire are not a lot like Scots-Irish in Georgia. Then you have all the Poles, Irish, Italians, Jews, Germans and so forth. There’s simply no such thing as white identity.

That said, it is a harmless eccentricity. I’m more concerned about deranged crackpots like Robert Wald Sussman than some old white guys getting together to bitch about the “darkies.” Imagine the poor kids who foolishly take his course only to find they will be getting harangued three times a week by an aging madman.

Pod Poeple on Ebola

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There’s an old joke about the NY Times (or any liberal broadsheet for that matter) goes something like this. A meteor is found to be headed to earth. it is big enough to wipe out all life on the planet. The NY Times runs a headline “Meteor To Destroy Earth” and a subhead of “Blacks and Women to be Harmed the Most.” I recall hearing that at least 30 years ago, maybe longer. The only thing that has changed is the transmission method. By way of example, I offer this gen form CNN.

The tragedy of Ebola is not just its staggering toll. It’s also the implicit racism that the deadly virus has spawned. The anecdotes are sickening, particularly a Reuters report this week that children of African immigrants in Dallas — little ones with no connection to Thomas Duncan, the Liberian Ebola patient who died Wednesday in a local hospital — have been branded “Ebola kids” simply because of their heritage or skin color.

In both the United States and Europe, Ebola is increasing racial profiling and reviving imagery of the “Dark Continent.” The disease is persistently portrayed as West African, or African, or from countries in a part of the world that is racially black, even though nothing medically differentiates the vulnerability of any race to Ebola.

 In both the United States and Europe, Ebola is increasing racial profiling and reviving imagery of the “Dark Continent.” The disease is persistently portrayed as West African, or African, or from countries in a part of the world that is racially black, even though nothing medically differentiates the vulnerability of any race to Ebola.

A Newsweek cover last month showed a picture of a chimpanzee with the headline: “A Back Door for Ebola: Smuggled Bushmeat Could Spark a U.S. Epidemic.” Whatever the intent, the picture was wrong.

Turns out the story was probably wrong, too, as a Washington Post investigation revealed. The new Ebola outbreak “likely had nothing to do with bushmeat consumption,” the Post reported, and there is no conclusive evidence that Ebola has been passed from animals to humans. A theory on animal-to-human transmission with some limited traction centers on dead fruit bats, not chimps.

“There is virtually no chance that ‘bushmeat’ smuggling could bring Ebola to America,” the Post concluded.

But the damage has been done. And as panic deepens, the danger is that racism — on planes and public transportation, in lines, on streets, in glances — deepens further, too.

Ebola is a human tragedy, just like enterovirus D68, which causes sudden muscle weakness and severe respiratory problems, particularly among children. It has shown up in almost all the 50 states, with about 500 Americans infected so far, far more than ever. And it has begun to kill, beginning with a 4-year-old boy in New Jersey. Five new cases were reported in New Jersey alone on Tuesday. And there are no antiviral vaccines or cures. Yet enterovirus D68 is known by a scientific name and number. (Unfortunately for Africans, the Ebola virus was named after the Congolese river where the first outbreak was detected).

The saga of Thomas Duncan reflects racial perceptions. His girlfriend, Louise, whom he had reportedly been visiting in Dallas, had publicly begged for him to be given the same experimental ZMapp medication given to two (white) American missionaries who were infected in Africa and recently flown back to the United States.

“I’m just asking God and asking the American government for the same medicine they’re giving people that come from Liberia,” she said during an interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper. “Please, please, please, please, help me save his life. …Talk to doctors. They’ll find means to get a medicine to cure him. He’s so young.”

Louise refused to allow her last name to be used for fear of repercussions. Unfortunately, doctors and the pharmaceutical developer said there was no longer any ZMapp left for Duncan or any other victim. But the imagery that accompanied his plight lingers: Whites can be flown to the United States or Europe at any expense, while Africans are left to die unattended on the streets of Liberia or Sierra Leone. Or now, without ZMapp, in Dallas.

“It’s easy for the world — the powerful world, who are largely non-African, non-people of color — to ignore the suffering of poor, black people,” Harvard Medical School professor Joia Mukherjee said on PRI’s “The World” last month. It’s easy, she said, to “other-ize” the Ebola crisis.

Fear too often contorts morality and humanity.

It is easy to write off this nut as just another lunatic, but there’s no reason to think she is out of step with the rest of the Cult of Modern Liberalism. It is tempting to think it is just an act. The creepy meta-language is unsettling to the normal ear. Most of us never hear anyone say “other-ize” on purpose. This thing reads like a piece in the Onion so it is tempting to think it a spoof.

But, it’s not. This is how the pod people think.

 

Data Driven Liberalism

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The term “data journalism” as it is mostly just a marketing scheme. It is just a way to decorate popular fads with the veneer of science. The Left has always wrapped itself in the cloak of science, believing it works like garlic on a vampire. In their case it is intended to ward off Christians and “right-wing extremists.” Vox, 538, Grantland, The Upshot and others have glommed onto all of this and recast generic, boiler plate Progressive dogma as “data journalism.”

Ezra Klein is the worst example. He started out in life as a doctrinaire lefty and has now dressed himself up as a technocratic nerd boy. Ezra Klein went to school for political science and maybe took statistics for liberal arts majors, but otherwise could not count his balls twice and come up with the same number. But, the act sells to the intended audience, largely the same people who watch Jon Stewart and Bill Maher. These are people who want to hear the old time religion.

Anyway, this was posted on MR and you see a couple of gags these guys like to play on their audience. The first is the false dichotomy.

In a July 19 New York Times column, conservative economist Tyler Cowen scolded the egalitarian left for not recognizing that on a global basis inequality has been falling thanks to growth in China and other Asian countries even as it’s risen inside almost all rich countries. In a followup dialogue with Eduardo Porter on whether inequality is really a big problem, Cowen returned to the point that “the biggest inequalities are those across borders” so a laxer attitude toward immigration “should be the number one priority for anyone concerned about income inequality.”

Meanwhile, late Friday night House Republicans passed a bill to strip about 580,000 immigrants of their work permits while President Obama ponders executive action to reduce the pace of deportations and conservative columnist Ross Douthat preemptively slams the illegality of the as-yet-unknown measure.

Which is to say that while Cowen’s point about the global picture is both interesting and correct, his political stance is backwards. It’s not fans of Capital in the 21st Century who are pushing nationalism as an alternative to plutocracy, but its detractors. And though the recent politics in the US Congress have been driven by the somewhat odd sequence of events around the arrival of unaccompanied minors from Central America, the underlying pattern runs much deeper than that.

Yglesias imagines a world of only two options, either have inequality or utopia. We either have xenophobic isolationism or borderless one-worldism. There’s never a third option or gradations between the two poles. The hive minded are obsessed with the boundaries between their team and the other team, which is defined as those not on their team. That leads them to see the world in absolutes, black and white.

In the United Kingdom where the transient political factors are entirely different, the ruling Conservative Party runs on a platform of Capping Welfare and Reducing Immigration. Inside the United States, a major debate has taken place inside GOP circles as to what to do after consecutive Republican Party losses in presidential elections. An initially popular idea, especially in business circles, was that the GOP should moderate its stance on immigration and seek Latino votes. This was, of course, countered by the party’s most retrograde elements — the Michele Bachmanns and the Steve Kings. But more importantly, the pro-immigration impulse was also opposed by the most forward-thinking elements in American conservative politics. Douthat, David Frum, Reihan Salam, and other “reform conservatives” have positioned themselves as leading opponents of a compromise with the White House on immigration.

This bifurcated view of the world leads to another error. That is the belief that all issues are moral. Immigration, for example, should be a public policy issue like zoning bills or utility rates. The people, through their representatives, express their preferred polices and those are made law. As opinions change and new experiences raise new objections, the laws change.

Immigration is not a moral dilemma. It is a debate about how many people from foreign lands we would like to permit into our lands. As citizens everywhere, it is our right to set these limits for whatever reason we like. These choices will turn up in the political math of the parties. For a guy who pitches himself as a statistics maven, he sure seems to struggle understanding the simple political calculus. Foreigners vote for Democrats so Republicans will want fewer foreigners.

The hive minded can never accept that. They lose track of where their identity ends and the issue begins. Rejecting their preferred solution is a personal affront, the equivalent of telling them their kids are ugly. It is why they are so emotional and angry. You can’t be in a mass movement without being outraged.

It is this reformicon ideological tendency, not mainstream liberalism, that has embraced egalitarian nationalism.

And the cause of its rise is not left-wing worries about inequality, but the failure of traditional supply-side economics. Reagan-era conservatives could be for welfare state rollback and broadly pro-immigration because they promised a rising tide that would lift all boats. Now that we’re decades into an era of wage stagnation, those kind of easy promises ring hollow. So for Cameron and the reformicons, a tilt against immigrants is the new answer. On this view, the big problem with trickle-down economics is that the bucket is too leaky. Let the rich get richer, but prevent them from hiring maids from Latin America, and soon enough wages for native-born maids will rise.

The moral math whereby this policy becomes more attractive than the win/win/win alternative of broadly freer movement of people paired with progressive taxation and more provision of public services has always escaped me somewhat. It appears to involve putting a negative value on the interests of foreign-born people. But it is a real movement. But it’s a movement on the right of politics in the United States and other English-speaking countries. Progressives, rightly, see no need to chose between equality and cosmopolitanism.

Finally, this is why Yglesias is an intellect. Tired old ideas about progressive taxation, the metastasizing welfare state and free lunch economics pretty much have no audience outside the hive. That’s been true for three decades now. Instead, the Left clutches at its skirts and bellows about the moral defects of their adversaries. Ezra Klein’s brand of data journalism is nothing more than yelling “those other guys are bad because science” over and over so no one notices he has nothing much to offer.

Smokey And The Fatman

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It used to be that public health was focused on the health of the public, which meant basic sanitation, medical care and so forth. An expanded definition would include education about nutrition and prevention of disease though vaccinations and public education. Today, public health means pointless virtue signalling from the ruling class over things that have little to do with public health. The news brings word that New Jersey’s governor is looking to tax e-cigarettes.

Cash-strapped New Jersey is leading the charge against e-cigarettes, with Governor Chris Christie and state legislators proposing high taxes that could propel sales into the black market and diminish the state’s tax intake.

Fox News reports that the booming, currently still unregulated e-cigarette industry is enticing a number of states to propose new taxes to cover for the sales. While the health effects of e-cigarettes are still not fully known, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention claim that e-cigarettes have “far fewer of the toxins found in smoke compared to traditional cigarettes,” and many individuals suggest that they have been able to stop smoking cigarettes by switching to this nicotine-providing alternative. One study found that e-cigarettes are as effective as nicotine patches in helping smokers quit.

Lots of people who have switched to the e-cigarettes and then quit using nicotine entirely. Even heavy smokers, who have tried all of the other remedies have found relief through vaping. They don’t start vaping in order to quit nicotine, but that is a happy result of making the switch. it turns out to be an effective way to break the habit, because it first eliminates the link between the hundreds of chemicals in cigarettes and the nicotine. This seems to make quitting less difficult.

You would think that would be welcomed news by the anti-smoking people, but you would be wrong. They never gave a damn about the health of smokers. The people in these movements just like pushing people around. The advent of e-cigarettes is now making that plain. Instead of encouraging harm reduction, they are trying to ban this new gadget. New York City also banned e-cigs, which is hilarious as it is impossible to enforce, as the user can do it undetected with little effort.

Of course, the politicians just want the money. The hilarious part is this whole thing is it pits the busybodies against the legal plunder crowd. The anti-pleasure fanatics are out trying to ban the sale of cigarettes, while the blood suckers in every state capital are trying to figure out how to make more money from the sale of cigarettes. One side is quietly encouraging vice in order to tax it, while the other side loudly condemns, while quietly happy to have people to lecture.

A group of state attorneys general are asking the nation’s top pharmacy chains to follow rival CVS and stop selling tobacco products.

The prosecutors sent letters to Walgreens (WAG, Fortune 500) and Rite-Aid (RAD, Fortune 500) as well as three other retailers with pharmacies in their stores — Wal-Mart Stores (WMT, Fortune 500) as well as grocers Kroger (KR, Fortune 500) and Safeway (SWY, Fortune 500).

“There is a contradiction in having these dangerous and devastating tobacco products on the shelves of a retail chain that services health care needs,” the AGs wrote.

The push is being made by a bipartisan group of prosecutors, led by New York AG Eric Schneiderman and Ohio AG Mike DeWine, from 26 other states and territories.

The funny part is watching the pols struggle to come up with a way to tax something that may be impossible to tax. There are millions of sites selling these things. Taxing cigarettes is relatively easy. The distributors are licensed by the states and put a tax man on-site. Taxing bits of metal that can be shipped from anywhere on the planet for pennies is a different matter. You could tax nicotine at the manufacturer, but then you raise prices of all sorts of other goods. Nicotine is used in pesticide, for example, in the organic food business. There’s some irony.

Liberal War on People – The Smoking Front

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The Left is slowly working to ban the electronic cigarettes. Their reasoning has nothing to do with science since science clearly says these things are vastly less harmful than smoking. The second hand smoking claims, always dodgy in terms of science, evaporate with these things. What comes out of the smoker is water and no one has ever claimed harm from second hand water vapor. Plus, there’s no smell. That’s one of the major selling points, so, the liberal scolds had to come up with a different excuse:

City Council Speaker Christine Quinn said the ban would make it easier to enforce the city’s Smoke-Free Air Act, which banned smoking in bars, restaurants and other indoor public spaces.

“Because many of the e-cigarettes are designed to look like cigarettes and be used just like them, they can lead to confusion or confrontation,” Quinn said.

So these anti-smoking zealots just hate smoking so much, they don’t even want to see images of it in public.  Therefore, in order to make it easier for the scolds to harass people enjoying themselves, they will now pretend virtual smoking is real smoking. This really does make the point that it was never about public health. It was always about imposing their values on others. It’s not even about the values, so much as the act of forcing people to comply with their rules. It’s about the scold getting scold the wicked.

Smoking is unhealthful and it is proper to encourage people to avoid the habit. At this point, everyone knows this. The costs of deleterious habits should always be on the person engaging in them, where possible. Smokers should be charged a hefty premium on their insurance and taxes levied on tobacco. Banning smoking in closed spaces is fine, even though the science is dodgy. Bars and restaurants that permit smoking should post a sign over the door making it known. Let the market sort that out.

Vaping, from observation and a little research, is a far less harmful activity than smoking and not a burden on others. It may pose no harm at all. If the nicotine is removed, you’re left with an asthma inhaler. The stuff in these things is propylene glycol, the same stuff they use in some inhalers. It is used in all sorts of food and medicines, approved by the FDA for decades. Sucking in anything but air is probably posing some risk and there may be some unknown risks with these things, but they are less harmful than smoking.

Sensible public health policy should always encourage the sorts of trade-offs that improve public health. In this case, giving people an incentive to switch from tobacco to vaping would be the wise policy. yeah, it looks weird seeing people wrapped in a cloud of vapor, but it beats seeing them outside the door smoking. Instead, the busy bodies are running around looking for a reason to torment those hooked on nicotine. It’s a good reminder that the people who rule over us are petty miserable tyrants.

The Opposite Rule of Liberalism

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At various times, I’ve rolled out my rule about how to interpret statements by liberals regarding non-liberals. That rule is the title of this post and it goes like this. Take whatever they say, assume the opposite and you will get close to the truth. When liberals said the Tea Party was “AstroTurf” and liberal groups were genuine grassroots, you could flip it around to mean their gang was a rent-a-mob and the weirdos in the 17th century outfits were just regular folks pissed off and making some noise.

That was in fact the case. The Left has well funded “volunteer” operations to bus in protesters when needed. Often they are paid by their union, like we saw in Wisconsin with the teacher unions. It is a form of projection, for the most part, but in politics it is a way to shift the focus away from whatever crooked stuff their doing. One of the oldest tricks in politics is to falsely accuse your opponent of something, so the story is about the other guy denying it, not about whatever you are doing.

A great example of this comes from a post by Steve Sailer. For as long as I’ve been alive, there have been theories about why there is a Left and Right in American politics. All of these theories claim the mantel of science and all of them come from the Left. The reason for this is, at some level, the Left knows they are not working from facts and reason, but rather a set of beliefs. Rather than confront that, they accuse everyone that opposes them of holding irrational beliefs and acting from emotion.

The formula goes like this. They assign to themselves qualities they wish they possessed, but don’t. “Open minded” always makes the list along with “smart” and “unconventional.” Who would not want to be a smart, open minded guy, who is a little off-beat? Gosh that sounds just like the protagonist of every cool TV show and movie! Then they usually assign some bad qualities to the mythical right-winger or conservative. Then they produce a “study” that confirms all of this as science!

I’ll note that liberals have a long list of words for the people on the other side of the hive walls. You never hear liberals talk about the differences between libertarians and paleo-cons or neocons and paleos. To the liberal, they are part of the undifferentiated other on the other side of the wall. Often they avoid this and rely on their cartoon version of the conservative, which is usually a blend of the 1950’s sitcom dad and a prison guard. It’s Ward Cleaver with a closet full of Nazi uniforms.

Once the basic descriptions are established, they lard it up with pseudo-science and rotten statistics. In a prior age, they would have psychiatrists put their stamp of approval on it. Today, the fake nerd is all the rage on the Left so they conjure up a few characters from the social sciences. Almost always a little digging finds that Doctor Nick Riviera relied on a handful of grad students he paid to answer some questions. But, he was kind enough to lard it up with jargon so the left can claim it is science.

It is not just the normal stuff you see in team sport politics. Liberals invest a lot of time and energy promoting things about themselves that are not true. In fact, the opposite is usually the case. Go look at that Sailer post and the qualities listed under liberal.  Liberals are the most dogmatic people with very narrow opinions on just about everything. Open minded is, unsurprisingly, the exact opposite of a liberal. They think that by embracing things that normal people hate, that makes them open minded. In fact, it just makes them dicks.

The fact that they tend to dress alike and repeat the same things is an example of their narrow mindedness, not their willingness to try new things or be unconventional. When was the last time a liberal surprised you with a non-liberal opinion on something? When was the last time the NYTimes or MSNBC was unpredictable? The people running around accusing others of narrow mindedness are always from this hive minded authoritarian cult that is viciously intolerant and anything that smacks of deviationism.

The most glaring example of the opposite rule of liberalism is how they describe themselves as highly individualistic. Put a liberal in a room full of non-liberals and they are a shrinking violet. Reverse the roles and the liberals will harangue the non-liberal like a group of Crips attacking a Chinese delivery guy. Liberals congregate like all herd animals. They seek protection in numbers. It is why they are over represented in politics, soft-sciences and journalism. These are activities best done in groups.They are also high conformity activities which appeal to the hive mind.

The most important facet of this rule is that whatever the Left is ranting about, whatever bogeyman or vice they see as a great threat, is most likely something they are doing or have recently done. For instance, when the Left is accusing Republicans of abusing government power, it means liberals have either been doing it or are planning to it. All of the vices the Left accuses others of doing are habits common on the Left. Properly understood, the hooting from the Left is both a confession and a warning.

There you have an expanded definition of the Opposite Rule of Liberalism.