"But The Lefties are Just as Bad!"

"The lefties did it too!" is a terrible beginning, because there's no market on the left for that kind of rhetoric. Lefty verbal bomb-throwers do not get $400 million contracts (Rush Limbaugh), rent space on the national mall (Glenn Beck), get their own reality TV shows (Sarah Palin), or get elected to Congress (Michelle Bachman).

When you can point to a sustained, supported, widely praised, and idolized lefty who says the kind of nonsense that routinely comes out of Glenn Beck's mouth, then you'll have some equivalency.

But you can't have it both ways: You cannot claim consistently that the left is made up of a bunch of peace-loving nudnicks who want to take away our guns and leave America completely defenseless, that only the right has the strength and will and character and training to embrace America's martial destiny, and then claim that both sides have an equal receptivity to violent rhetoric.

If you believe in the free market, then believe this: since 2000, a right-wing noise machine has created a market in resentment and advertised violence as a potential solution. Karl Rove's formula, "Aim for civil war, then pull it back just a notch," seems to have worked.

The left seems to have no equivalent market at all: in 2006, at the height of Bush-bashing, a movie about the assassination of George Bush made little more than $400,000, but Rush Limbaugh made $50,000,000.

Saying "Left and Right are equally bad" is false equivalence, and deceit, and wrong. Right-wing resentment is a thriving market with a hundred times more economic power than left-wing frustration.

Re-reading Russell Kirk

I've been re-reading Russell Kirk's most famous book, The Conservative Mind ^{[powells][barnes&noble]}, and I had gotten as far as the foreward when I hit the first of, I'm sure, many realizations to come.

Kirk (and I have to emphasize that this is the Kirk of 1987, writing the Foreward to the 7th edition, not the Kirk of 1952 when he first wrote the book) talks in triumphalist tones about the collapse of liberalism, the rise of conservatism, and the coming Kingdom of God over the Harvest of Man. (Of that last, Kirk doesn't use those terms himself; instead, he approvingly quotes Catholic philosopher Tage Lindbom, who did.) And as he does so, he mentions in passing that there is little intellectual activity going on, within the left, whereas on the right there a call to a life of the mind as:

... a necessary bulwark against a Ortega-like 'revolt of the masses,' the destruction of standards of all sorts, and the widespread reduction of civilized life to the gross satisfaction of petty material appetites.

The egalitarian dystopias of Jaquetta Hawkes, Robert Graves, George Orwell and Aldous Huxley have taken on flesh. The world's evanescent liberal era, in fulfillment of Santayana's prophecy, is giving up the ghost. The outer order of the state falls into the clutch of merciless ideologues or squalid oligarchs.

The first thing I find fascinating in this little paragraph, aside from the triumphalism, is the way Kirk assumes that "Conservatism," especially the Catholic kind he professed, can be contrasted with "the gross satisfaction of petty material appetites."

Yet the modern Catholic League, at least in the guise of its president, Bill Donahue, not only approves of the gross satisfaction of petty material appetites, but goes on to disclaim any attempt to encourage a life of the mind as "class discrimination":

After all, why should the working class pay for the leisure, e.g., going to museums, of the upper class? We don't subsidize professional wrestling, yet the working class has to pay for the leisure of the rich. Not only that, because the elites don't smoke, they bar the working class from smoking in arenas. This is class discrimination and should be opposed by those committed to social justice.

This is what America is becoming: a world where an attempt, any attempt, to educate people is an elitist activity. The masses don't want education, they don't want museums, they don't want concert halls. They want professional wrestling.

Every successful nation on Earth has taken up as one of its goals the improvement of its citizens' life of the mind. That goal, in America is tempered by the notion that people are free to seek the improvements they themselves want, and not those dictated by our elected officials. Every successful nation on Earth recognizes that one of its legitimate duties is to provide education for its citizens. Countries that fail to keep up, fail entirely.

Contra Kirk, this is what the right has become: a rallying cry for deliberately cultivated ignorance, with a dollop of victimhood and resentment about a nebulous "they" who are somehow screwing the equally nebulous "you."

Contra Kirk, again, the world is a lovely place.

Again in the Foreward to The Conservative Mind, Kirk tells us that we must cultivate "a moral imagination and a tragic sense of life" in order to appreciate "an account for what ails mankind today."

Contra Kirk, let's review the last ten years. Or let Charlie Stross do it, but basically it comes down to this: In the past twenty years:

• AIDS went from being a death sentence to a chronic but manageable disease
• The proportion of the total world population unable to acquire food, water and shelter dropped by half
• Africa managed 5% growth, resulting in a billion people seeing an improvement in their quality of life
• In the US, violent crime is at its lowest levels in 56 years
• In the world, the odds of dying in warfare is at its lowest levels since the beginning of human history
• "You have cancer" is no longer an authomatic death sentence either.
• "You had a heart attack" means "You might well live another 30 years."
• In the US, 10 million acres of new forest land were recovered in the past ten years,
• In the US, air pollution is at its lowest levels since the 1950s.
• The US economy grew at 30% between 1980 and 2010, but energy usage went up only 26%
• We're making progress on wiping out polio and malaria
• Despite economic and population growth, the US's water usage has been stable since 1985
• Malthusian prophecies of famine, war, pestilence and death continue to fail as reliably as the Christian Eschaton

The world has problems. But my generally optimistic world view is not informed by a constant dwelling on a tragic sense of life.

Anal sex causes mass bird deaths!

Cindy Jacobs of Generals International (speaking of right-wing martial memes), "Acheiving societal tranformation through the prophetic," self-described as a "prophet" with "the voice of God," tells us:

Marriage is between a man and a woman, so we have to say "what happens when a nation makes a decision that’s against God’s principles?" Well, often what happens is that nature itself will begin to talk to us - for instance, violent storms, flooding.

The blackbirds fell to the ground in Beebe, Arkansas. Well the Governor of Arkansas’ name is Beebe. And also, there was something put out of Arkansas called "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" by a former Governor, this was proposed, Bill Clinton. As so, could there be a connection between Hosea 4 and now that we've had the repeal of the Don't Ask, Don't Tell, where people now legally in the United States have broken restraints with the Scripture because the Scripture says in Romans 1 that homosexuality is not allowed.

Got it? The recent mass deaths of birds and so forth isn't the result of chemical pollution, or opportunistic infections, or freak weather: it's caused by sodomy.

But wait! If orgasms cause anal sex, and anal sex causes mass animal deaths, then it's true: every time you masturbate, God kills a kitten!

[ht: Ed Brayton]

Repeat Viewings, a video about post-Singularity regret.

Dan Ashwood's video, Repeat Viewings, begins:

For most, the death of scarcity and involuntary mortality is a welcome development. For some, however, nostalgia and the allure of the material universe prove too strong.

They are doomed to relive their pasts. This is the story of one such case.

I won't ruin it for you. It's only 12 minutes long, and it's an example of what Nick Bostrom calls "The Simulation Menace." It's also surprisingly poignant.