Feminism Does Women Wrong

There’s a lot of harm that feminism has done to men and women. I’m not saying there should be subservience, or underpaying, or arbitrary limitations. But feminism hasn’t really focused on equal opportunities and choices for women; feminism has been about insisting there is not difference between men and women, and then pressuring women to hide their femininity and behave as if they are men.

That is not freeing; that is limiting. And it is anti-woman.

There was a conversation I heard this week, an interview on British television, I believe, with Jordan Peterson, author of 12 Rules ofLife: An Antidote to Chaos. I wasn’t familiar with him, and haven’t read the book. But the conversation was enlightening. The Channel 4 woman interviewing him (her name is not mentioned, and I don’t recognize her) was aggressive, pushy, a lot of negative things—but there was, indeed, a conversation.

I'm including the video here. It's about 29 minutes long, so I'll only quote a few parts afterward.

Much of it consisted of her saying, “So, you’re saying…” and him returning, “No, I’m not saying that at all.” I tried to count. I think there are at least a dozen of those instances. Once he adds, “And I’m very very very careful about the words I use.” And another time he said, “It’s because you’re not listening,” to which she talked over him to insist she was listening carefully.

I found him to be very clear. But her misunderstandings come from an assumption that anyone who doesn’t see things the way she does must be asserting something unacceptably negative. So her purpose was mainly to catch him saying those negative things. It didn’t work. But it did demonstrate the difficulty in actually having these conversations.

There are several points he makes about the statistical differences between men and women and the choices they make. She always tried to imply that mentioning those facts was inherently sexist, and she would add on some negative assumptions. And then he would correct her.

For example, at around 6 minutes in, she brings up the 9% pay gap in the UK:

She: But I want to put to you that, here in the UK, for example—let’s take that as an example—the gender pay gap stands at just over 9%. You've got women at the BBC recently saying that the Pollcaster [?] is illegally paying them less than men to do the same job. You’ve got only seven women running the top FTSE 100 companies. So it seems to a lot of women that they’re still being dominated and excluded, to quote your words back to you.

JP: It does seem that way, but multivariate analysis of the pay gap indicate that it doesn't exist.

She: But that’s just not true, is it?

JP: It’s absolutely true.

She: 9% pay gap. That’s a gap between median hourly earnings between men and women.

JP: Yeah, but there’s multiple reasons for that. One of them is gender, but it’s not the only reason. If you’re a social scientist worth your salt, you never do a univaried analysis. Like, you say, well, women in aggregate are paid less than men. OK. Well, then we break it down by age; we break it down by occupation; we break it down by interests; we break it down by personality.

She: But you're saying basically it doesn't matter if women are getting to the top, because that's what skewing that gender pay gap, isn't it? You’re saying, well, that's just a fact…, but it doesn’t matter, because you’re never going to get to the top.

JP: No, I’m not saying it doesn’t matter either. I’m saying there are multiple reasons for it.

Later the discussion turns to the difference between equality of opportunity vs. equality of outcomes. I don’t know whether she ever grasped the difference. But I appreciated his part:

She: Is gender equality a myth?

JP: I don’t know what you mean by the question. Men and women aren’t the same, and they won’t be the same. That doesn't mean they can’t be treated fairly.

She: Is gender equality desirable?

JP: If it means equality of outcome, then almost certainly its undesirable. That's already been demonstrated in Scandinavia. Because, in Scandinavia,

She: What do you mean by that? Equality of outcome is undesirable?

JP: Well, men and women won’t sort themselves into the same categories, if you leave them alone to do it on their own accord.  We’ve already seen that in Scandinavia. 20 to 1 female nurses to male, something like that—it might not be quite that extreme—and approximately the same male engineers to female engineers. And that’s a consequence of the free choice of men and women in the societies that have gone farther than any other societies to make gender equality the purpose of the law. Those are ineradicable differences. You can eradicate them with tremendous social pressure and tyranny. But if you leave men and women to make their own choices, you will not get equal outcomes.

She: Right. So, you’re saying that anyone who believes in equality—whether you call them feminists, call them whatever you want to call them—should basically give up, because it ain’t gonna happen?

JP: Only if they’re aiming at equality of outcome.

She: So, you’re saying, give people equality of opportunity; that's fine?

JP: Not only fine; it's eminently desirable, for everyone, for individuals and for society

She: But, still, women aren’t going to make it. That’s what you’re really saying?

JP: It depends on your measurement techniques. They’re doing just fine in medicine. In fact, there are far more female physicians than there are male physicians. There are lots of disciplines that are absolutely dominated by women. Many, many disciplines. And they’re doing great.

She accuses him of not wanting women to have equal pay for equal work. He points out that the problem is complicated, because you have to ask, who decides what is equal work? There’s more. A lot of it uncomfortably argumentative. But it is revealing.

Men and women are different. They make different choices. There will therefore be different outcomes. If a woman does pretty much the same things as a man, in the same competitive business world—taking away all the different choices, and just comparing raw equal behaviors, which is more an intellectual exercise than an actual experience, you get woman who succeed. You only get more women at the top if more women choose to behave as men do.

That has always been my problem with feminism; it’s so anti-woman.

You see that as well in the recent sexual debate. The so-called sexual revolution was supposed to make it so women had the same sexual freedom as men. But that requires denying that women get pregnant from sex. It also denies that men degrade themselves with casual, commitment-free sex, and a woman only degrades herself when she follows that uncivilized male behavior.

Matt Walsh explained this  well this week. It was an uncomfortable conversation too, but needed. He was responding to the accusations against comedy actor Aziz Ansari. Walsh’s piece is titled, “You Feel Violated After Casual Sex Because You Degraded Yourself. Not Because It Was Rape.” There were parts a little too graphic for me to want to quote. But these paragraphs make the point:

So, you feel violated? Well, you were. But you allowed it to happen; you invited it; you participated in your own degradation, and you did the same to the other person, even if he does not share your regret. What you hear in your heart is your conscience telling you that your body is too sacred to be treated the way you treated it. You. You treated it that way. It wasn’t something that happened to you, it was something that happened through you, because of you. You are 100% responsible, and so is the other person.

In this way, casual sex is no different than any other sin. Whenever we do something wrong, if our conscience is still functioning, we will always look back when the deed is done and think, “Why did I do that? It wasn’t worth the cost.” And we may be tempted to retroactively relieve ourselves of our guilt by rationalizing and justifying. We may say — whether the sin is sex or anything else — that we were “pressured.” And surely we were pressured. Every sin in the history of man has been committed by someone who was pressured, whether externally or internally, to carry it out. But the fact that you were pressured into sex does not mean that you were raped, any more than the fact that you were pressured to smoke a joint in high school means that you were drugged. Moral courage is required to resist pressure and temptation. It is no one's fault but your own if you lack it.

There is one way the Hollywood “casting couch” scenario could have been prevented: If every woman who had ever been placed in that compromising situation had run, yelled for help, and made sure the men who put her in that situation were held accountable, it would never have become a thing.

I’m not saying this is the individual victims’ fault. I’m saying that it is the fault of willing females who sold their souls for a chance at fame, laying the trap for future victims. Every man who did these despicable acts is culpable, fully. And should be prosecuted and brought down. Every person, male or female, who knew about it and turned their head and gave predators a pass is culpable for their part.

But it’s not just a matter of consent. Like Matt Walsh says, even if a man doesn’t recognize why he should regret it, he degrades himself as well. Soul-degrading casual hook-up sex was never a way in which women should emulate men. But let’s not forget that, every time a man has casual sex, there’s a woman choosing to have it with him. This was true in the Ansari episode. The soul degrading consequences are severe for both, but the physical and emotional consequences are more likely to affect women, no matter what the feminists shout.

Feminists were always wrong about casual sex. And they compounded the wrongness by adding abortion, to take away the result of what the woman should only have done within a married relationship, in which the two parents would raise the child. So feminism denies womanhood, and kills babies in an attempt to cover up natural consequences.

I think it’s likely that women would be more respected in the workplace if they were still respected as women, instead of turned either into “just another man” or else the sex object of a man who never learned to respect women.

Incompatible with Civilization

Monday night the Manchester Arena was bombed, at the end of a concert, where many young people—often along with their parents—were attending. The perpetrator was among the 22 dead. He was an Islamist extremist. Of course.

In today’s world, despite news media going far out of their way to hide names, ethnicity, and religion, heinous mass murder attempts are 99% of the time Islamist extremists.

There’s always this overweening concern that if the fact is mentioned, there will be a backlash against non-extreme Muslims. While that backlash has been mostly non-existent, the failure to provide truth is stirring people to anger. Muslims who are not Islamist extremists have a stake in clarifying who they are, in contrast to the terrorists. They need to find a way to separate out the wicked from among them, for their own sake as well as for civilization at large.

I don’t know how they should go about this. But I wish them well, because the friends we’ve had who are Muslim are very well suited to civilization, and we want them with us.

I believe clarity will help. Since I’m about defining civilization, I appreciated a response from Steven Crowder on Tuesday.

Instead of civilization, he refers to Western culture, but for now we’ll call that a synonym. He lays out several beliefs that are incompatible with Western culture:

• Want sharia courts? You’re not welcome.

• Think it’s okay to marry a six-year-old? You’re not welcome.

• Think it’s okay to strike your wife for ANY reason? You’re not welcome.

• Believe in ANY kind of punishment for apostasy? You’re not welcome.

• Believe in ANY kind of punishment for “blasphemy”? You’re not welcome.

It’s a big more specific than what we at the Spherical Model call the requirements for Civilization:

·         Honor God—which must include freedom of thought, freedom of belief, and freedom of speech that disagrees with those who believe differently. As one of the Articles of Faith in my religion puts it, “We claim the privilege of worshiping Almighty God according to the dictates of our own conscience, and allow all men the same privilege, let them worship how, where, or what they may.” [Articles of Faith 11]

·         Honor life—protect the life of each innocent human life, including the weak and defenseless, such as the unborn and the elderly and the afflicted. All human life is valuable, more valuable than other animals; no groups of humans can be categorized as subhuman. Categorizing any “them” as subhuman leads to atrocities.

·         Honor family—respect parents, and reserve sex for marriage, where mother and father raise children faithfully to adulthood.

·         Honor property—never taking what belongs to someone else, never expecting something to be given to you at someone else’s expense.

·         Honor truth—real objective truth, that exists outside ourselves and we are obliged to do our best to perceive.

Crowder’s list mainly targets freedom of thought and honoring life. But he’s right; you can’t get along in the civilized world when you’re believing savage things. We have to say, “If you believe in savagery, you’re not welcome among us.”

The full video is about seven minutes, and includes commentary on the need to “shame” the believers of what he accurately refers to as political Islam—because it’s seeking power rather than righteousness. Worth watching:

Some people are crying that this is Islamic terrorist attack is a new low—targeting children. But that’s not accurate. This savagery has long included targeting children. Michelle Malkin, in her piece "The Forgotten Slaughter of the Innocents," reminds us of eight previous attacks targeting or including young people and children.

She didn’t include Beslan, September 2004. Glenn Beck retells that event, from his days at CNN:

There’s a school in Beslan, and it started on the first day of school. In Russia, they have this tradition that the parents bring their kids to school for the first day of school. And so the parents brought their little kids into school, and there waiting for them were monsters, armed Islamic groups. They ushered everybody into the gym. Anybody who spoke out, anybody who cried, was killed. The mothers and the daughters were raped in front of everyone. It lasted three days. There were 1100 hostages, 777 children. They killed 385.

Every civilized person in the world can recognize this behavior as savage. There is no reason within the sphere of civilization that can include this behavior. The perpetrators will have no place in the afterlife but hell, and they have no place among civilized human beings on this planet.

What should be the civilized response? Celebrities, such as Katy Perry, call for love and unity. Blogger Matt Walsh responds to that call:

I realize that celebrities who pontificate about love and unity aren’t talking about the kind of love or unity that actually requires us to do anything or make any kind of sacrifice. That’s why they feel comfortable telling us about “love” even as they treat their own spouses and children like disposable props. The love that keeps a marriage going is active and self-giving. The “love” Katy Perry refers to is just a vague feeling of pleasant indifference towards all of humanity. She “loves the world” by shrugging her shoulders at it. And when she tells us to respond to these tragedies with “love,” she means only that we ought not do anything to actively stop it from happening again. Instead, we should throw our hands up in loving surrender, and if more of us are brutally slaughtered, well, that’s a price Katy Perry is willing to pay.

Perry and others who call for “no borders or barriers” hypocritically live in gated, guarded homes. They know, for the sake of their own life and property, they can’t just invite the world to “co-own” their home.

But, just to consider the “love” response, let’s keep an open mind and assume, if you could retrain the brains of these brainwashed savages, they could come to choose civilization. Theoretically I’d like to believe that’s possible. 

But you can only do that if you put a stop to their killing first. And that requires defense: killing, imprisoning, or containing in their own walled-off corner of the globe—every single one who holds the belief that killing us is a delight to them and their god.

Education Is a Parental Responsibility

Contrary to popular near-religious belief, public education is not the best way to get an educated populace.

Back when I wrote the original articles for the Spherical Model website, I used education as an example of something government is doing beyond its proper role. And we know that anything government does beyond its proper role will cause negative unintended consequences, most likely the exact opposite of the stated intention.

I’m going to repeat, pretty much intact, that section on education. It’s relevant here in Texas during a week that the state legislature is debating school choice issues.

But I also recommend reading Matt Walsh’s blog today, about the social environment of schools. He makes a good case for not relinquishing our parental rights and responsibilities to a government institution with its indoctrination agenda.

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While the nation has an interest in having an educated populace, the responsibility for educating individual children lies with each child’s parents. They care the most; they have the most interest in the child’s welfare, and the most insight into the child’s learning needs and idiosyncrasies. So, education of children is best decided and provided by the child’s parents. (If you’re not agreeing with me on that point, then carefully consider who you think does hold the responsibility for your child and why. And how did you come to believe that a government entity was more deserving of loyalty as the basic unit of society than is the family? Because whenever society degrades the importance of the family, civilization decays. See the article “Civilization vs. Savagery.”)

A homeschool science experiment, 2007

The nation’s stake in the education of its citizenry does not supersede the responsibility of the parents to provide it (despite the unfortunate ruling of the California appeals court in March 2008, declaring that parents do not have a constitutional right to see to the education of their children, that it is the right and responsibility of the state, a decision that, like many California decisions, was shortly thereafter thrown out). Usurping that responsibility does several negative things. The federal government doesn’t know what challenges a local school (or even more locally, a family) may face. By providing a one-size-fits-all approach, there may be relatively broad mediocre success, but there cannot be success for all (or maybe even most) individual children. That’s why parents who care about their children’s education have always been involved in it: paying private tutors, teaching them themselves, or paying for a high quality private education—or, as a last resort, getting very involved in the local public school to make it as good as possible.

Historically, this last option, public education system, is a recent and not very successful experiment. Government institutional education was only invented as a response to a perceived need in inner cities where a number of poor immigrant families had working parents and no one to oversee the children. Children too often were left to the streets, and were creating mischief, as you would expect. So government assumed responsibility where parents failed (either because of unwillingness or inability to provide). The problem is that government stepped way beyond the actual need (to provide rudimentary educational skills for unsupervised children so as to protect society) and imposed “free” education on all children—usurping parental responsibility and authority. And as you might expect, social engineers (Horace Mann, followed by John Dewey, among others) used this excuse to convince (dupe) the public into believing education was the government’s role, and that it was a “right” everyone was “entitled to,” “for free,” which was actually paid for by taxes filtered through bureaucracy. Since it got into the business, government has always provided this so-called free public education for the very purpose of controlling what was taught. National government education, by definition, is socialist (south/east quadrant of the model).

At the time of the writing of the Constitution, there was no public education in America. Generally children were taught the rudiments of reading, writing and arithmetic at home by their parents. As they got older, some went on to private, often community-provided schools or, if parents were unable to meet the need themselves, they hired tutors. Always the training went through the basics and the classics. Then the young person, when aiming for a profession, continued to be personally mentored and guided in his learning. At the time of the writing of the Constitution, education was so successful that a typical farmer in New York could understand the concepts in the Federalist Papers (as well as the responses provided by anti-federalists), many of which appeared in newspapers and were read by a large portion of the population, a skill that challenges most college students today. In order to enter college, an applicant had to be fluent in Greek and Latin, and be familiar with many of the ancient writings, having translated them. Even our best colleges today would be sparsely populated if that kind of requirement held.

When the country was still new, in 1830, Alexis de Tocqueville visited from France and marveled at how every farmer and tradesman he met could read. We had essentially a fully literate populous before public education, but have never had it since.

Daughter Social Sphere, dissecting a squid
at a homeschool science day 2009

Still, the nation clearly has an interest in having an educated populace. So how should government deal with families where parents won’t or can’t provide for their own children’s education? First of all, it shouldn’t take over a family responsibility for the entire population, at citizens’ expense, to solve a limited problem. Granted, there are going to be exceptions, but in a functioning civilized society, parents unwilling or unable to see to the education of their children will be rare. And, being few, with individual causes and circumstances, they might be best solved locally—by donations from benefactors for individual children, by local schools that provide a rudimentary education that will help a child be at least productive to society, and based on his/her own efforts and innate gifts, the student might move on to some scholarship resource later on.

The solution is free market plus philanthropy—exactly what you’d expect from a Constitution that is silent on government’s role on the issue. (Despite various tortured Supreme Court arguments to the contrary, silence in the Constitution means the federal government has no right to usurp that responsibility from more local governmental levels: see the 10th Amendment.)

Getting back to the education example, instead of the limited customized solution the free market provides, the factory style approach so common today allows very little individualization, so we tend to badly fail those who need remedial help, and, possibly worse for the nation’s future, we fail those who need enhanced opportunity and are held back by the average learning rate and tedium of the typical classroom. In addition, there is so much care taken to teaching only non-offensive “everybody agrees” philosophies of right and wrong (or worse, values the government chooses based on special interest pressure groups over the values of the family), it is nearly impossible for the government institution to instill the values needed to keep behavior in the civilized freedom zone. (See “Civilization vs. Savagery.”)

Federal interest in an educated populace could be justifiably ignored entirely, as it is in the Constitution. Or (I’m being open to meeting government’s interest in an educated populace, but I’m not being prescriptive that this or any other solution is justified) there could be a government entity, but it could be limited to becoming a clearinghouse for ideas, methods, testing, data, and resources that state and local educators (including individual parents) could turn to for assistance—like a big but powerless library. This would satisfy the central government’s interest in assuring an educated populace without usurping the responsibility and power to accomplish it from the parents and the local communities they live in. There could be debate on the issue, to decide what if any form such a government entity could take. But there isn’t any such debate taking place.

Even as you’re reading this, you’re likely thinking the very idea of eliminating federal control of education is the suggestion of a right-wing nutcase. Bringing it up instantly brings the response, “How can you be against the education of our children? Are you crazy?” which is not only untrue, it’s intellectually stilting. If you can’t even debate whether an issue belongs in the purview of federal government control, then the demagogues have already pushed the populous far south of the freedom zone on that issue.

Incidentally, the Department of Education was created, amid much opposition because of its unconstitutionality, as recently as 1979, during Jimmy Carter’s presidency. Despite immediate efforts by Reagan, demagoguery phrased attempts to get rid of the federal department as being against the very education of children. Citizens over their mid-40s today [or mid-50s, as of 2017] all managed to get educated in the US without federal oversight, but immediately federal education became equivalent with all education. Not surprisingly, the homeschooling movement began to grow from then onward.

So, the point is, federal government powers should not exceed what its responsibilities rightly are. Having a national interest is not adequate reason for usurping power from the people. Evidence is that, every time government takes on a responsibility it shouldn’t rightly have, it provides worse service than could be provided locally or through the free market. Anyone considering government’s role in health care should keep that in mind.

The Call for Unity

I have been less than normally interested in the GOP Convention this week in Cleveland. There was drama the first night when the establishment refused a floor vote on the rules—going against law, good sense and rules to do so. But it wasn’t surprising. Just a note about that: it was about rules for the future, not about getting rid of Donald Trump as the nominee. If you didn’t know that, maybe you’ve been lied to. Check out an interview with Senator Mike Lee to get better informed.

I’m assuming there may have been other interesting speeches. But I was only interested in Ted Cruz’s[i]. I had been praying for him, for two things: that he might say something to remind us of the principles of our party and our country, and that he might remain strong in abiding by his principles.

Senator Ted Cruz speaks at the GOP Convention
July 20, 2016   Photo by Behar Anthony/SIPA  AP Photo

I was uncertain that it was wise for him to consent to speak at Donald Trump’s convention. I was concerned that there might be some behind-the-scenes pressure that even Ted Cruz might not have been able to withstand. Reince Priebus and Donald Trump knew he wasn’t going to endorse the man who maligned and threatened his wife and accused his father of conspiring with JFK’s killer. They knew that when they invited him to speak. Maybe they vainly hoped he’d change his mind, but they knew for certain ahead of time, because he provided them his speech for review.

That means Donald Trump is using the lack of endorsement for his purposes. We can see that today. And it reveals the trouble this country is in.

Let’s take a look at what was, and what was not, in that speech.

The main story referred to Michael Smith, one of the officers murdered in Dallas, whose 9-year-old daughter, Caroline, will never be able to hug her daddy again. It was skillfully told, with added emotion, because the Caroline of the story is the same age and has the same name—and if I heard correctly, has a mother by the same name—as Ted Cruz’s daughter. The story had the power to tell us we are in seriously difficult times.

Cruz asks: “What if this right now is our last time? Our last moment to do something for our families, and our country? Did we live up to the values we say we believe? Did we do all we really could?”

Most of the rest of the speech is about principles. Namely, conservative principles enshrined in the Constitution. Principles that are absent from the Democrat party, and heretofore at home in the Republican Party, at least supposedly.

There are things he said that ought not to be controversial:

·         I want to see the principles that our party believes prevail in November. 

·         America is more than just a land mass between two oceans, America is an ideal. A simple, yet powerful ideal. Freedom matters. 

·         Our nation is exceptional because it was built on the five most beautiful and powerful words in the English language, "I want to be free."

·         [following a list of what Obama has done wrong] I am here to tell you there is a better vision for our future. A return to freedom.

·         [following a list of Hillary’s plans, and the freedom she will reduce] Voters are overwhelmingly rejecting the political establishment, and overwhelmingly rejecting big government.

·         We deserve an immigration system that puts America first, and yes, builds a wall to keep America safe.

·         We deserve trade policies that put the interests of American farmers over the interests that are funding the lobbyists.

·         if we stand together and choose freedom, our future will be brighter. Freedom will bring back jobs and raise wages. Freedom will lift people out of dependency to the dignity of work.

·         Our party, the Republican party, was founded to defeat slavery. Abraham Lincoln, the first Republican president signed the Emancipation Proclamation. Together we passed the Civil Rights Act, and together we fought to eliminate Jim Crow Laws. That's our collective legacy, although the media will never share it with you. Those were fights for freedom, and so is this.

Most of this should be agreeable to every delegate at the convention. In fact, to anyone within earshot with the exception of the hordes of liberal media lying in wait to find something they could sensationalize.

Cruz details what we can do to fight corruption and make things better—and they are mainly things Trump claims as his ideas: build a wall to keep America safe, stop admitting ISIS terrorists as refugees, America-favoring trade policies, bring back jobs and increase wages.

This next part, also non-controversial call to vote all the way up and down the ticket, is what drew boos:

We deserve leaders who stand for principle, who unite us all behind shared values, who cast aside anger for love. That is the standard we should expect from everybody. And, to those listening, please don't stay home in November. 

If you love our country, and love our children as much as you do, stand, and speak, and vote your conscience, vote for candidates up and down the ticket who you trust to defend our freedom, and to be faithful to the constitution. 

The boos came mainly from the New York delegation, which Cruz acknowledged with grace. News stories report that copies of the speech were handed out especially to the New York delegation, Trump’s home state.

In other words, it was a manufactured drama. Trump added to it by walking out among the crowd a minute before the speech ended.

It could have been otherwise. Look at the words. In practically any other time, in practically any other person’s speech, the words would have implicitly endorsed the candidate and party. Trump’s New York delegates and others yelling along with them are declaring that even they do not believe Trump is a leader who stands for principle, and will do the things we voters deserve.

Photo from here

If they had cheered and made the assumption (or been directed to act as if they assumed) Cruz was referring to their chosen candidate, there would have been no news story. People wouldn’t have noticed that Cruz hadn’t actually endorsed Trump, because Trump would have acted satisfied with what was said and taken it as pro-Trump-ish enough.

Cruz ended with this additional call for unity:

The case we have to make to the American people, the case each person in this room has to make to the American people, is to commit to each of them that we will defend freedom, and be faithful to the Constitution. 

We will unite the party; we will unite the country by standing together for shared values by standing for liberty.

In this alternate-universe year, that is called divisive. Because everybody apparently knows Trump will not defend freedom or be faithful to the Constitution.

But shouldn’t the Trumpkins at lease have pretended that he will?

Instead, Cruz has been excoriated by many people I frequently agree with and admire. That includes radio hosts Dennis Prager and Larry Elder, who spent the day describing the speech as the world’s longest political suicide note.

However, a few of us have seen through the “we have to win” rhetoric, who heard what I did.

Daniel Horowitz, at Conservative Review, takes on the “we have to vote for the Republican” demand:

Taken to its logical conclusion, there is never a time when it’s not worth voting for the Republican, even when they legitimize and validate the Left’s premise.  If Republicans are ok with codifying transgenderism into civil rights, well, one could always suspect the Democrat will be worse and support bestiality.  This is the attitude so many loyal conservatives—even more so than the moderates—have internalized throughout the eras of two Bushes, Dole, McCain, and Romney. Yet, history doesn’t lie, and the Democrat success in moving the ball on every facet of fiscal and social policy since 1988 is nothing short of breathtaking. Rather than utilizing Reagan’s “new day—our sunlit new day—to keep alive the fire so that when we look back at the time of choosing, we can say that we did all that could be done—never less,” all we did was focus on not electing Democrats.

Matt Walsh prefaces his piece with this summary, which so accurately describes my experience:

I’ve been re-reading the transcript of Ted Cruz’s convention speech on Wednesday night and I can’t quite find the controversial part of it.

He congratulates the nominee. He urges everyone to go to the polls and vote for the candidates who will defend the Constitution. He articulates, quite brilliantly, the principles of conservatism. He calls for conservatives to come together. He talks about freedom, liberty, and the preciousness of human life. And for that, he was booed off the stage.

Walsh laments, as I do:

Cruz spoke exclusively about the principles of conservatism. He offered the Republican Party a chance to unite again around those principles. But it was made clear, once and for all, that many Republicans are not interested in uniting around principle. They aren’t interested in the principles at all. The only principle in the new party is Donald Trump. The only positions that should be taken are the ones Donald Trump takes. The only speeches that should be given are ones centered around Donald Trump. This was precisely the fear of the Never Trump camp; that Trump would devour conservatism and leave only himself standing in the gap; that the new conservatism would be Trumpism, and the old conservatism would be anathema. It seems those fears have been realized.

Steve Deace, also at Conservative Review, noted the irony of the Trump response to the speech, and laments:

Then there were the reports of how angry party people and donors were that Cruz dared tell Republicans to vote their values. Stop and think about that for a moment, and allow it to fully sink in. The party establishment can only be offended by a call to vote your conscience if, indeed, they are at least tacitly admitting that to vote for their nominee could violate one's conscience.

My son Political Sphere posted his response on Facebook before I finished writing. We’re so closely agreed (still not having talked together) that I hope he doesn’t think I’m copying him. He adds this understanding:

Those deriding Cruz as classless and going back on his promise because he failed to specifically endorse Trump appear to have a faulty belief that if Cruz would just forgive Trump for the personal attacks against Cruz and his family and publicly endorse Trump by name, then all the “Never Trump” people will suddenly support Trump. They do not seem to understand the only thing this would do is cause those of us who cannot, in good conscience, vote for Trump to lose respect for Cruz. Such a display would not get us to change our mind on Trump, but instead show us that Cruz, too, has sold out to the Washington D.C. Cartel and is no longer willing to fight for our conservative principles even at the expense of being denounced by the Republican establishment.

I’m glad Cruz didn’t break faith with us.

It's another whole post to cover the accusation that Cruz broke his promise. Let’s just note that Trump already reneged on that—it was no deal unless he won, because he would just accuse the RNC of not playing fair. Cruz is right to assume the deal was abrogated when Trump went after his wife and father—and has failed to offer up any kind of apology for those lies/threats. If you’re unclear on the concept of forgiveness (i.e, if you’re thinking Cruz is the unforgiving one), check out this PragerU video, with Dr. Stephen Marmer, on Forgiveness: Trump isn’t entitled to exoneration, or even forbearance; Cruz therefore keeps his integrity with release.

Deace started out thinking it might have been a mistake for Cruz to have committed to make the speech. But after hearing it, he sees it as a great, historic, defining moment. He ends with this:

I work in this business full-time, and I am a committed conservative. A Christian one, no less, which means "daily disappointment" is in my job description. Over the course of my career, and my almost 25 years as a Republican, I have known a lot of Republican politicians—including Trump. But very few of them have I actually been proud to know, or restored even a morsel of my faith in the system.

Ted Cruz is in that select group.

The attacks have been brutal today. Cruz himself might be thinking that giving the speech in the first place was more costly than he’d anticipated. But if the goal is to do whatever we can to bring us back to the Constitution, to freedom, prosperity, and civilization, Cruz must know in his heart he still has his sacred honor.

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[i] Transcript here. 

Word Control

Words are my tools. And my playthings. A big part of my life. I appreciate a good word, a good phrase, a good sentence. I try to write powerful words, but mostly fall short. Still, sometimes I read some older pieces and think, that was well written. Good for me—and the inspiration that was with me at that moment of writing.

So, because of my interest in words, I’m interested in freedom of speech, and I pay attention when words and ideas are oppressed or suppressed.

image from here

A week or so ago a friend posted on Facebook a piece called, “Why I’m Teaching My Kids to be ‘Politically Correct.’” My Facebook friend is a young mom, non-religious and not very political (but probably leaning liberal and/or libertarian). I know her to be a good person, trying to live a decent life and contributing well to her family and society. Knowing that, I read this piece trying to see what appealed to my friend, to learn from that.

There’s this paragraph near the beginning, that I can almost agree with:

As a writer, I think constantly about how words are being used, and from where I’m sitting, political correctness has gotten conflated in recent years with common decency, kindness, and consideration. On one hand, anyone who dares to acknowledge people who say they’ve been hurt, or who suggests that demonizing an entire group of people is a bad idea, is automatically derided for being “politically correct.” And on the other hand, people will say any awful thing that floats into their mind, claiming that they are “just being honest,” and then when challenged, they will cry about political correctness. (For the record, speaking your mind isn’t a virtue if what’s on your mind is bigoted, obnoxious, or insulting. It’s just rude.)

The problem is, indeed, that political correctness has been conflated with “common decency, kindness, and consideration.” That’s what has given political correctness power—because we decent, kind, considerate people don’t want to be misunderstood or mislabeled as bigoted and hateful. But in reality political correctness isn’t about politeness or consideration for others; it has the purpose of shutting down voices that don’t align with the viewpoint being enforced.

The author of the piece decides to keep the incorrectly conflated definition of political correctness, and insists she will teach her children to be politically correct—because words do have power to hurt, and we should at least make an effort not to offend or be rude. Her complaint is that so many people are sick and tired of political correctness being shoved down their throats that they eschew any controls, even self-control, over what they say:

The war on political correctness has become a scapegoat for people to regress to a less open and tolerant era, as evidenced by the amount of blatant racism, sexism, prejudice, and hatred being spewed in the name of not being PC. The idea that marginalized or historically oppressed groups should be given any kind of consideration is met with eye-rolling and open disdain. In the past year, I’ve been stunned to witness educated adults behaving like petulant children, gleefully claiming they’re taking down “the establishment” by throwing out the baby of human decency with the “politically correct” bathwater.

I agree with her that spewing hate in a misguided rebellion against political correctness is pretty ugly. And she’s probably right that there’s a rebellion going on in a PC reaction. That probably explains much of Donald Trump’s popularity. He does speak things that are not PC, and people who have had enough of that oppression cheer.

However, people are mistaken if they think he does it for the sake of free speech. If you watch how he reacts to people who speak out against him, or disagree with him, you’ll see the very tactics the PC police use: humiliation, coercion, and economic and social pressure. He’s not anti-PC; he’s pro-Trump’s version of what is allowed to be said. He’s into manipulating people by controlling their words as much as anyone else shutting us down for the sin of digressing from PC script.

For someone like me, careful about words, and naturally gentle and kind, yet "painfully honest" (yes, I've been called that), any version of political correctness is a danger; it mislabels me without exploring who I am in my heart.

I’ve lived long enough to watch PC vocabulary change. In my childhood, the N-word was never used; that would have been considered offensive well before I was born. But at that time, in the place where I lived, which had never allowed slavery and never had Jim Crow laws, the word for the race of people descended from various tribes in Africa and identifiable by darker skin and other characteristics was Negro, which comes from the Latin for black. It was just a term, not intended to be derogatory.

Then the term colored became more common (as used by the NAACP). Then we were told that was derogatory and we should use the term Afro-American. Then we were told the preferred term was black. Every time we accommodated, the term was changed and we were accused of being offensive.

Not that long ago we were told that black was derogatory and we should use the term African-American.

As a word person, that term doesn’t make sense; it applies not to race but to place of origin. A Saturday Night Live skit once played on this, because the very blond Charlize Theron is from South Africa, so she is literally African-American. There are major portions of Africa today populated by Arab-type peoples, or Europeans who moved to Africa many centuries ago. Meanwhile, there are people of the black race all over the world who are not American, so you have to know enough about country of origin to refer to their race in any way, even when country-of-origin isn’t salient information. Imagine the awkwardness of talking about the racial aspects of Tay-Saks disease, which affects African-Americans of a certain skin color, and African-French of a certain skin color, and African-Britons of a certain skin color, and Egyptians of a non-Arab lineage, and Angolans of a certain skin color….

It appears to me that there are people seeking to feel offended, and no matter how many times we go along with their requests for yet another politically correct name change, they will come up with something new so they can claim we are offending them.

So, for my personal language style guide, I have settled on black—without meaning any offense. And that seems to be returning as the preferred term, if you can trust such groups as Black Lives Matter or the New Black Panthers.

Would it be nice if we didn’t have to refer to race at all? Yes. But since members of tribes insist on asserting their tribal pride and power, it comes up. And any idea can only be expressed if there are words to use.

Meanwhile, PC continues to be a bludgeon used against people with views differing from a particular “progressive” ideology.

I recently read a piece called “Thought Reform in America,” by Thomas Lifson, comparing America’s political correctness with oppressive regimes of the past:

Political correctness has attained a level of institutional power today in the United States that it can justifiably be compared with the totalitarian brainwashing efforts seen in Mao Tse-tung’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (also known as "fundamental transformation"). The salient social mechanisms shared by the two efforts at thought reform are public shame and self-criticism.

He offers this anecdote:

Decades ago, when China first opened up, I met a prominent Chinese scientist finally able to travel to the USA, who had been denounced, tortured, and imprisoned during the Cultural Revolution for his crimes of having a PhD from an American university and being dedicated to scientific truth instead of political doctrine.  I will never forget the broken man talking about he had been made to confess his crimes in front of a howling mob.

I thought about this sort of pressure when Governor Mike Pence was chosen as the running mate on the Republican presidential ticket. He’s generally a decent person, and has served his state relatively well. But remember when Indiana came under attack for passing a RFRA law to protect religious freedom in the wake of the Supreme Court’s overreaching same-sex marriage ruling. The PC police—in the form of media and loud voices combined with threats, claimed the state should be shamed and shunned and boycotted.

This episode included a newsperson seeking out a Christian family-owned pizza shop and asking them the hypothetical question of whether they were willing to cater a same-sex wedding. The honest owners—who pretty much never catered weddings anyway, as a pizza shop—answered no, and were shut down by the PC enforcers.

In that atmosphere, revealing why religious people needed the protective law, Governor Pence caved to the pressure, and basically apologized for the state’s mistake.

Sometimes it helps to reveal absurdity using absurdity. Blogger Matt Walsh did that this week, talking about the silly, over-the-top PC position that gender doesn’t exist. The satirical piece is entitled “Dear Transphobic Ultrasound Technician, How Dare You Assign A Gender To Our Baby!” As he explains to the politically incorrect technician:

You’re obviously a simpleton, so let me break this down a little further. You cannot tell anything about a person based on their physical and biological makeup. Anatomy doesn’t matter. DNA doesn’t matter. Bone structure doesn’t matter. The reproductive system doesn’t matter. Nothing matters. You can’t tell what a person is just based on what that person is. You can’t even tell if it’s a person just because it’s a person. You can’t tell anything about anyone based on anything.

If we are to win out against the oppression of our ideas, we need to do it clearly, and boldly. Without rancor. Being kind and polite in general, so that the claim that we are uncivilized for disagreeing makes no sense.

It is not particularly brave for me to express these things, here, in safe obscurity, where so far I face little effort to shut me down. But at least I speak. So, with no intention of hurting the feelings of various groups, here are a few things that I believe are true but could be subject to the suppression called political correctness:

·         The most common occurrence of racism in America today is black racism against whites and other non-blacks.

·         The systemic reason for blacks suffering poverty, crime, and other social negatives is the breakdown of the family—with 70%+ children born out of wedlock, and fathers missing from homes.

·         The Democrat party is and has always been about limiting the rights and opportunities of blacks—but they’re willing to oppress others as well.

·         Almost all the terrorists in today’s world are radical Islamists. Islam has a problem: either they must find a way to oust radicals from their religion so we can all identify them and thwart them—or they must leave that religion as unrecoverable, so that we can identify and thwart the terrorists. The very idea of imposing radical Islam on the world is incompatible with civilization and will bring only tyranny, poverty, and savagery. We need a way to identify and stop anyone trying to impose tyranny on us.

·         Marriage is between a man and a woman, permanently covenanting to form a family in which children can be raised by their father and mother. No other sexual relationship has the benefits to society that marriage does. Pretending other relationships are equivalent to marriage harms marriage and degrades the family, leading to the decay of civilization into savagery.

·         Sex outside of marriage is always wrong—and harmful both to the individuals and to civilization.

·         Abortion is a choice against life. It is generally a selfish choice made to get rid of the natural consequences of the choice to have sex outside of a married partnership.

·         Socialism is a form of tyranny; it takes by force from people who create wealth and redistribute their property to those who have not created wealth. It discourages work and innovation and leads to poverty. Best outcomes happen when a free market is combined with voluntary charitable giving.

·         The American Constitution is a model for limited government to protect our rights, and if followed by a self-governing people, it leads to almost unimaginable freedom, prosperity, and civilization. It will lead to these positive outcomes wherever in the world its concepts are adhered to.

The way to freedom, prosperity,and civilization are known. We need the freedom to speak up and teach those ways.

Lives That Matter

It has been a time of mourning for the country, since the mass shooting of police officers in Dallas, Texas, last Thursday. Five were killed; seven others are in various stages of recovery. And the country is in turmoil.

Dallas police, early July 8, 2016, following sniper shooting
photo AP/LM Otero, found here

When the wicked rule, the people mourn.

The president, who was voted into office in a post-racial world, has been the most racially divisive president since Woodrow Wilson. Saying we told you so won’t help, but…

In Stephen Covey’s book 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, one of the principles is “Seek First to Understand, Then to be Understood.” So, with that in mind, I’m trying to understand.

There is NO valid reason for sniper shooting of police officers doing their duty in their professional way, which was the case Thursday. They were calmly and professionally escorting protesters—protesters were claiming that police were unfair to black people. They disregarded hatred and misunderstanding aimed at them and did their job. There were heroic acts on the part of police to keep the protesters—the public—safe once the shooting started.

So understanding the perpetrators amounts to this: These were angry, hateful, evildoers who wanted to murder innocent police officers.

Because some police officers somewhere at some time may have been too forceful against particular black people? That’s the story. But so what? What if some police officer somewhere had been in the wrong? That is in the range of possibility, whether you believe the sensationalized news stories of police-on-black-brutality or not. That would still not justify murder of random cops. It wouldn’t even justify murder of any particular bad cop; such a person would be handled through the justice system.[i]

Unless you do not believe in the justice system—and since the FBI announcement last week that Hillary Clinton would not be prosecuted for the long list of crimes the director laid out, maybe there’s reason not to trust the justice system.

But if we don’t trust the justice system, is being more evil and murderous going to get us to justice? Of course not.

So what we need to understand about the evildoers is that they choose to do extreme evil. And they must be stopped. We don’t need to offer sympathy or justification or rationale. There is no rationale for doing what they have done.

The ones we need to share understanding with are the protesters. I believe many of them are horrified by the violent mass murder of police officers. That was not their goal. Their goal was to raise awareness to an issue they are passionate about—an issue that may only be an issue because of bad media storytelling, because the data does not support their claims.

But stirring up anger and fomenting violence was the goal of some leadership. We need to separate out those who are merely reacting from those who are causing.

Because, among those protesters, and others across the country who sympathize with them, there may be some who can be brought to the truth when the truth, rather than lies, is what they hear and are surrounded by. Just since Thursday, I think many of them are saying, “Not all police officers are bad,” which ought to be obvious to any sentient being, but this is nevertheless progress.

Maybe, while this bit of truth has penetrated, they can also accept other truths.

As Matt Walsh put it in a July 8^th post,

It takes 17 seconds on Google to discover that more white people have been killed by cops this year than blacks and Hispanics combined. White people are almost twice as likely tobe killed by cops than black people.[ii] There were twice as many whites killed by cops last year than blacks. Yes, it’s true that black people are a smaller percentage of the population, but they also commit a disproportionate number of violent crimes, which means they are involved in a disproportionate number of altercations with police.

There were over 900 people killed by cops last year. The vast majority were not black, and the vast majority were armed. 

The false narrative they’ve been told is that police officers are racially prejudiced toward blacks, and are likely to use brutal force or even fatally wound blacks, just because they hate blacks. The data doesn’t bear this out, but something in their experience leads them to choose to believe it’s true.

I want to look for a moment at how preconceptions change our experience. And as an example, I’ll use interactions with police officers.

I don’t have a lot of experience with police; I’m not well connected with the criminal element. But I have experienced the rare but occasional traffic stop. And it is my experience that, while we are respectful to one another, police officers have never let me off with a warning; I always get the ticket.

My son Political Sphere has similar experiences. He even believes that it’s particularly important for him not to speed or roll through the stop sign—because he will get caught. And he will get a ticket. Never a warning.

Why? The mind tries to find reasons. It’s not because of gender, because we are one of each. It’s not because of race, because we don’t find this to be the standard case for others of our race. Even others of our family. It’s not even because we drive sporty cars, because I have a small SUV, and he has a minivan.

We feel a little picked on for no good reason. Even if we were speeding a bit, it wasn’t to the point of endangering others, or even out of intent; usually it’s just momentary carelessness at an inopportune moment. Can’t the police officers tell that we’re the kind of law-abiding citizens who would correct any error in behavior just by giving us a warning?

But if we were black, and we had people telling us the cops had it in for us blacks, and we read news stories and got filled with the repeated narrative that there’s something to this thing about blacks getting picked on because of race, we might think that was the cause. Even when it might be no more the cause than whatever it is in my life and my son’s.

If I were black and had that narrative surrounding my interaction with police officers, and it colored my experience, how would I come around to seeing without that inaccurate filter?

The shocking murder of five police officers might be an opportunity for clarity. Because, like we said, the internet if full of sources for the data. If, among these black protesters, there are those who love the truth, they may react to the facts with, “Oh, I didn’t know that before; that changes what I think.”

That is what should happen among civilized people.

If acceptance of the truth doesn’t happen for all, then among the unaccepting there are a couple of possibilities. One is that individuals personally have experienced something really negative, and they have generalized that such a situation happens to everyone like them. If we’re willing to say, “We understand your experience was bad. You shouldn’t have had to go through that. We’re willing to work on training and on improving the system to correct that so others don’t have to experience what you did. But can’t you see, from the data, that your experience was an anomaly and not the common experience?”

To some people, changing their point of view, even in the face of facts, is difficult. But if they really want society to be better—more civilized—then they must be accepting of truth. We all must.

If they prefer to remain angry, ignore facts, insist that the story of racism in America—and especially among cops—is what they claim it is when reality is otherwise, then they might just be race baiters. People trying to stir up anger and hatred for their own power-seeking agenda.

Until those people are willing to change, there’s no amount of non-racial-bias perfection we can live or think or do that would be perfect enough for them to admit we’re not all racists. And a blog post isn't complete enough to cure what ails them.

I’m still puzzled by those who use violence against innocents as a way of persuading the public to come join their side. This is true for terrorists of any stripe. Do they think that blowing up women and children, or using sniper fire against police officers is going to make us say, “Hmm, maybe they have a point; they’ve persuaded me they’re in the right. They’re the kind of people I want as my leaders”?

I can only assume they really think, “If enough people fear us, they will cower and succumb to our rule.” But a free people, a civilized people, will not give in to evil. Our souls and the lives of our children and grandchildren depend on our not giving in to evil.

We will stop the evildoers, because we must. We prefer to stop them by persuading them to change their hearts away from evil. But that choice will be up to them.

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[i] I wrote about the Ferguson situation here, and violence against the police here and here. You might also want to read The War on Cops, by Heather MacDonald.

[ii] This piece by Larry Elder is worth reading in its entirety. He also spoke about the issue at length on his radio program Friday and Monday. Larry Elder grew up in South Central Los Angeles, and he is black.