Roundup

The New Neo Posted on by

I don’t usually just offer a list of links, but I every now and then there are a lot of stories and not enough time to write all I’d like about them. So here you go:

Lots here about Rand Paul’s old-fashioned filibuster, which I support—although John McCain and Lindsay Graham do not (an example of my frustrations with both men, who continually try to position themselves as noble, above-the-fray voices of reason, but who end up being used by the left). See this for more.

The South today, racism, and SCOTUS.

Victor Davis Hanson on the state (in both senses of the word) of California (hat tip: “Don Carlos”).

More on Against Autonomy

The New Neo Posted on by

That book of Conly’s is the gift that keeps on giving, isn’t it? Much fascinating discussion in yesterday’s thread, which is not even the first time we’ve discussed it (see also this and this).

I especially recommend your wading through commenter “kolnai’s” effort; he’s far more erudite than I on the subject.

Discussions about autonomy and government are essential in trying to understand the differences between liberals (especially the left) and conservatives, and where libertarians fit into the mix. Not a whole lot of this was apparent to me when I was younger, prior to my change experience. For one thing, I was not especially political, and I followed the news in a much more surface way.

For another, the trend regarding government regulation of health “for your own good” was easier to ignore. For example, in the New York of my youth, I can’t imagine a mayor trying to ban large soft drinks. He’d have gotten tossed out on his ear for his pains. In fact, in the New York in which I grew up—and in the US as a whole at the time—smoking was everywhere, and no one thought much of it.

And we ate huge gobs of butter, too, if we could afford to do so.

Sigh.

I have no doubt, however, that the left had this agenda long ago, which seems obvious in retrospect by looking at the eugenics movement, which sacrificed liberty for what was seen—using what was though of as scientific evidence—as the public good (see this and this).

Taking on a somewhat different aspect of the topic, I’d like to respond to this comment by Jim Nicholas, :

Do we want the government, whether federal, state, or local, to help us make good decisions in taking care of ourselves? For example, do we want a government to examine and license physicians or do we want the government to get out of the way and let us evaluate whoever claims to be a physician.

If we think that the government should limit our freedom of choice in even a limited way about how we care for ourselves – such as limiting who can take care of us in a hospital – then, it seems to me, it is not always easy to decide what should be within or beyond a reasonable limit.

I am not allying myself with Conly, only saying that a polar opposite stand is also not a wise course.

I think Jim Nicholas’ example is a case where it’s relatively easy to draw the line. We are not stopped from going to a quack. The only thing the law stops us from is being deceived by a quack holding him/herself out to have training he/she doesn’t have, hanging out a shingle fraudulently claiming he/she is an MD or telling that to a clinic in order to be hired (see a this typical example of the way the law against practicing medicine without a license reads).

Licensing doctors does not protect us from ourselves. It protects us (supposedly, anyway) from going to an untrained doctor holding him/herself out to be a trained one. It is meant to establish minimum professional standards for treating other people, not oneself.

The same goes for rules of the road, and vehicle driver licensing.

A much better analogy is mandatory seat-belt wearing laws for adults. Those protect us against ourselves, and as such are much more suspect. The argument for them—an addition to arguments such as Conly’s—is that we all incur health care costs when people become injured, and that society suffers. Those arguments are too broad, IMHO, and can be used to justify nearly any restriction that affects health in any way—which is just about anything (this ties into the eugenics movement, to which I linked earlier).

Jim Nicholas uses the inclusive phrase “the government, whether federal, state, or local.” But those entities are allowed very different degrees of freedom to curtail our freedom. Local governments are allowed to do a lot that the federal government (at least, so far) is forbidden to do. Seat belt laws are passed on a state-by-state basis, and you can see there’s a lot of variation among states. So theoretically you can move to another state if the one you reside in isn’t libertarian enough for you. I wonder how long that will be the case.

Roy Brown Jr. must have known,…

The New Neo Posted on by

…for all these long years, that his obituary would feature the fact that he was the designer of the Edsel.

My guess is that, at 96, he’d made his peace with that:

Roy Brown Jr., a car designer for Ford Motor whose signature creation, the supposedly futuristic but ultimately ill-fated Edsel, became a synonym for bold, bad ideas not long after it was introduced in 1957, died on Feb. 24 in Michigan. He was 96…

Even as the Edsel, his most notable work, fell far short of sales goals, lost hundreds of millions of dollars, became an enduring punch line and prompted an overseas transfer for its designer, Mr. Brown remained satisfied with it

“I’m proud of the car,” he told The Sun-Sentinel of Florida in 1985. “There is not a bad line on the car.”

Many initial assessments agreed.

“The Edsel will be radically different,” said an article in The New York Times previewing the new model in 1957.

I remember when the Edsel came out, although I was extremely young, and I’ve never been into cars and didn’t understand a bit about the furor and the controversy. But in retrospect it looks kind of snazzy (that’s the also-snazzy Roy Brown Jr., at 81, standing in front of his creation):

BrownEdsel

And speaking of “enduring punch lines,” there’s this scene in the very entertaining movie “Peggy Sue Got Married.” I can’t find an excerpt that shows only the scene I want, so I cut to it in this full-length version. Kathleen Turner plays a woman who goes back in time to her teenage years in the 50s, and is living with her family again. She looks older, but due to the magic of time-travel, they see her as her appropriately younger self:

RIP.

[NOTE: I clicked on Brown’s obituary because I mistakenly thought it referred to Oscar Brown, Jr., a favorite jazz musician of my youth. It turns out he died in 2005.]

Against Autonomy revisited

The New Neo Posted on by

I recently wrote about Sarah Conly’s newly-released book Against Autonomy: Justifying Coercive Paternalism here and here, so you’d think I’d be done with the dreadful thing. But a friend sent me a video interview with the author, and I couldn’t resist posting it here for all of you to see (if you happen to be gluttons for punishment).

Remember as you watch it that this woman is a professor at the fine old institution known as Bowdoin College:

Conly’s calm, measured, affectless, humorless demeanor is exactly what you’d expect, isn’t it? She seems to be utterly unaware (or perhaps just uncaring) that :

(a) liberty is an important value for many people, and one of the foundations of our nation and our Constitution
(b) social science research is deeply flawed and should never be a guide to infringing on liberty
(c) there is a large difference between making laws to prevent one person from harming another, and making laws to prevent that person from harming his/her own health
(d) government does not make good decisions for people any more often than people do. One could even argue it makes good decisions less often, because it knows much less about the individual and it has another agenda (or agendas) as well
(e) this approach would hardly be likely to be limited to health concerns

I’m wondering whether Conly has ever read Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. She’s a philosophy professor, educated at the finest of universities, so one would think so. But I wonder. Or perhaps she just missed its ironic tone and thought it was a how-to book?

Here’s an excerpt from Conly’s page, to remind you of the flavor of what she’s saying in a tiny little nutshell that encapsulates the essence of liberal tyranny:

I argue that autonomy, or the freedom to act in accordance with your own decisions, is overrated””that the common high evaluation of the importance of autonomy is based on a belief that we are much more rational than we actually are. We now have lots of evidence from psychology and behavioral economics that we are often very bad at choosing effective means to our ends. In such cases, we need the help of others””and in particular, of government regulation””to keep us from going wrong.

That thing fisks itself—but unfortunately, it’s not self-evident to everyone just how Conly goes terribly, terribly wrong. I recently had two separate discussions on the general topic of nanny-state-ism with two very good friends of mine, each of whom are liberals. The specific issue had to do with Mayor Bloomberg’s efforts to control the eating and drinking habits of New Yorkers. My first friend was all in favor, and although she hadn’t read Conly’s book she seemed to be right on board with the sort of argument Conly advances, with is that we don’t make good food decisions and we need government to help save us from ourselves. The second friend was aghast, despite her liberalism. Not sure what made the difference between them, but it was marked.

Conly’s hard at work on another book to guide us to the Age-of-Government-Aquarius:

I’ve now started on my next book, tentatively titled One: Do We have a Right to More Children? We tend to think of regulating the number of children people may have as morally reprehensible. For one thing, the right to have a family is one we often think of as sacrosanct, articulated, among other places, in the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights. And, we think that women have the right to control their bodies, and while this right is mentioned often in the context of the right to abortion, it may also be held to include the right to have as many children as one wants. Lastly, we think of such policies as having sanctions that are unacceptable, including forced abortions of those who become pregnant with a second child. In One, I argue that opposition to population regulation is based on a number of mistakes: that the right to have a family doesn’t entail the right to have as many children as you may want; that the right to control one’s body is conditional on how much harm you are doing to others; and that nothing in population regulation entails that those who break the law can be forced to have abortions, or subject to any sort of punishment that is horrific. If population growth is sufficiently dangerous, it is fair for us to impose restrictions on how many children we can give birth to.

Chilling. Chilling.

A conservative house divided

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ve written about this topic before, and will probably do so again. I’m writing about it today because this piece by DrewM at Ace’s really resonated with me:

The internecine fighting we see today on the right isn’t simply on how we should react to what Jim [Geraghty] describes as “swarms of voters who believe that government ”“ the very same government who had disappointed them and failed them time and again ”“ will solve their problems.” Our problem is we don’t trust each other as conservatives. It’s the “grassroots” vs. “establishment” fight were seeing and it predates “fiscal cliffs” and sequestration.

The Gingrich Revolution of 1994 eventually became the Hastert-Bush conservative malaise. Yes, the War on Terror dominated the Bush presidency but from No Child Left Behind to Medicare Part D and across the board spending hikes, many conservative felt betrayed. You can even argue it goes further back than that. The Reagan Revolutionizes saw their hard work to move the GOP to the right rewarded with…George H.W. Bush.

One reason so many on the right are unwilling to allow the governing part of the GOP/conservative coalition any room for strategic retreats is we’ve simply seen that when you give them an inch, they’ll take a mile.

Conservatives hear how the GOP is a wholly owned subsidiary of the far, far right, we look at H.W. Bush, Dole, W. Bush, McCain, Romney (along with Lott, Frist, McConnell, Hastert and Boehner) and say, “if only!”.

You can say, well they were elected and nominated by Republicans (including conservatives) and you’d be right. That’s the problem. Most conservatives don’t trust other conservatives or Republicans let alone moderates or liberals.

Until we find a solution to the fractured nature of the center-right coalition (beyond “we hate Obama”), the Obamabots are a secondary problem.

I say, “Hear, hear!” I would merely add that it goes back even further, certainly to Goldwater vs. Rockefeller—and probably even further than that as well; that’s just as far back as I remember.

Typically, posts on this topic here call forth a fusillade of angry responses to the effect of, “I’m not gonna fall for those effing RINO losers any more!” Well, I share the dilemma, actually. I can’t remember the last time a candidate ran for president whom I though was a good one—but I can tell you it was a long long time ago, and that goes for candidates on both sides. If I were construcing the candidate of my dreams at the Build-a-Candidate store, he/she would be conservative, articulate, personable, experienced, feisty, intelligent, wise, a natural leader, likeable—well, you get the idea. And perhaps even those qualities wouldn’t be enough to lead to victory, with the MSM and the left in lockstep, and critical thinking among the populace at such a low ebb.

Perhaps this is as good as good a time as any to try to respond to a tendency I’ve seen recently in the comments section here whenever the 2012 election is discussed, which is that a number of people seem to misremember what I wrote during the 2012 election campaign. The tendency is to recall, wrongly, that I was optimistic about Romney’s chances of winning. Now, a lot of bloggers and pundits were, but I most definitely was not one of them. From beginning to end, I saw him as the best candidate in an unusually weak field of declared candidates.

Perhaps the confusion arises because I most definitely did energetically support him, and strongly, for the above reason, and I also tried to convince my readers that he was more conservative (and a better person) than they had initially thought he was. I continue to stand by those assertions, and I think time has proven me right. He even was a better candidate than I had first thought; he just was not good enough, certainly not to meet what Obama was dishing out. Here’s something I wrote about that back in January of 2012, when the Republican primaries were hot and heavy:

My observation is that people vote at least 75% with their guts, on impressions they have of the candidates. Romney and Gingrich both are unfortunate in that regard, in almost entirely different ways. Romney is bland and goodlooking, and he doesn’t seem to have much fire in the belly or much conviction. Gingrich is quite different, but his personality is offputting to most people who are not already in his camp, and when I say “offputting” I mean it in the most forceful way possible. He repels people on a visceral level. At least, that’s my observation.

The only other president in my memory who won despite a personally repellent quality (although of a somewhat different type) was Nixon. Americans like to vote for people who seem likable. For neither Romney nor Gingrich is that a strong suit, but Gingrich is the more unlikable. Perhaps not to you or to many of the readers of this blog, to a lot of people.

There’s been a lot of post-election talk here about what needs to be done before 2016 in order to have even a chance for a resurgence of conservatism. I would wager we’ll discuss that further, ad nauseam. But one thing we cannot do is design a candidate to order; we have to deal with the ones we have who are willing to enter the fray.

I believe a conservative can win on a national level (although only one ever has so far since the 1930s: Ronald Reagan). But not just any conservative; he/she has to have a more universal human appeal in order to articulate the more-harsh-sounding conservative message (as compared to the “I am Santa Claus” liberal message) in a way that can be understood and supported by a majority of people.

I don’t have a solution for the problem, but I doubt that will happen if we remain so divided and bitter—exactly and precisely what the left wants.

[NOTE: Discussions like this also typically engender responses of the “but the Democrats won because they cheated!” variety. On looking at the evidence I have, I actually don’t think that’s what happened, for a number of reasons. But let’s not argue about that now, because the point I really want to make is that, whether I’m right about it or whether I’m wrong, other than passing more stringent laws about things like voter-ID (which I favor, but whose future seems to be threatened lately), there’s not much to be done about it except follow the old Hugh Hewitt adage, “If it’s not close, they can’t cheat.”]

Predictably enough, the left…

The New Neo Posted on by

…praises Chavez in their valedictories. Ed Driscoll lists a lot of the links here, thoughtfully saving me the distasteful task. Chief among them is President Jimmy Carter, who admits that Chavez had a couple of little flaws but was on the whole a fine and well-meaning fellow.

Zack Beachamp at Think Progress is reduced to a plaintive plea that his fellows on the left not be too quick to give the man his props, because in fact his policies hurt people (i.e. the poor) rather than helped. People in the comments section there are having none of that argument, for the most part.

Hugo Chavez…

The New Neo Posted on by

…has died, according to Venezuela’s Vice President Nicolas Maduro.

Impossible as yet to tell what the repercussions will be: an end to tyranny there, or just a continuation under another leader?

Fausta’s blog is a good place to go for news on Latin America. Here’s an optimistic-sounding article I found from a link on her page.

It will certainly be interesting to see how Obama and his new SOS Kerry will handle this.

Now it can be told: Obama’s Afghan policy

The New Neo Posted on by

Vali Nasr has written a book, a portion of which has been excerpted in Foreign Policy. His piece represents another curious effort to discredit Obama from the left, and is far more hard-hitting than Bill Keller’s.

Nasr is a Tehran-born American academic mover and shaker, writer and expert on the Middle East. Nasr was brought into the Obama administration at its outset by the late Richard Holbrooke, who was appointed by Obama as envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan at State despite his earlier support of Hillary Clinton rather than Obama. Nasr signed on, too, with high hopes of helping to implement a different—and better—kind of diplomacy for the region. He doesn’t feel that either he or Holbrooke was treated well, or even decently, by Obama and especially his closest advisors, the inner circle.

The pattern of these exposés seems to be: wait till Obama has been safely elected, because you’re a Democrat. Then tell all the bad stuff about him.

Nasr qualifies as that familiar type, the disgruntled former employee. In this case, part of his motivation seems to be to champion his old mentor, Holbrooke, as well as to further the narrative that Hillary was the only other good thing about Obama’s foreign policy.

Whatever Nasr’s motivations, a great deal of what he is saying about Obama in terms of style and process rings very true with what has been demonstrated over and over before. The pattern is that Obama hires advisors either to be his weak and sycophantic toadies without a thought of their own, or as window-dressing to foster the appearance that he has strong and knowledgeable advisors and then to ignore them almost entirely, leaning instead on his more trusted alter egos such as Jarrett and Donilin, neither of whom are foreign policy experts but both of whom are political operatives.

Here’s some of what Nasr has to say:

But my time in the Obama administration turned out to be a deeply disillusioning experience. The truth is that his administration made it extremely difficult for its own foreign-policy experts to be heard. Both Clinton and Holbrooke, two incredibly dedicated and talented people, had to fight to have their voices count on major foreign-policy initiatives…

Time and again, when things seemed to be falling apart, the administration finally turned to Clinton because it knew she was the only person who could save the situation…The president had a truly disturbing habit of funneling major foreign-policy decisions through a small cabal of relatively inexperienced White House advisors whose turf was strictly politics. Their primary concern was how any action in Afghanistan or the Middle East would play on the nightly news, or which talking point it would give the Republicans. The Obama administration’s reputation for competence on foreign policy has less to do with its accomplishments in Afghanistan or the Middle East than with how U.S. actions in that region have been reshaped to accommodate partisan political concerns.

Bingo. I have to say that I have no idea whether Nasr was correct about what should have been done about the Middle East, but he shows a remarkable naivete about Obama himself if he thought he’d encounter anything different.

Some tough words here from the liberal Nasr:

By September 2012, when violent anti-American protests swept the Muslim world, claiming the lives of four members of the U.S. diplomatic mission in Libya and dozens of demonstrators, it became clear that we had gotten the broader Middle East badly wrong.

The American people are tired of war — rightly so — and they welcome talk of leaving the region. The president has marketed the U.S. exit from Afghanistan as a foreign-policy coup, one that will not only unburden America from the region’s problems but also give the country the freedom it needs to pursue other, more pressing national security concerns.

This is an illusion. Ending the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, not to mention the broader, ill-defined “war on terror,” is a very good idea, provided it is done properly and without damage to U.S. interests or the region’s stability. But we should not kid ourselves that the rhetoric of departure is anything more than rhetoric…

Gee, he almost sounds like—us.

Here’s how Nasr describes Obama’s decision-making process on Afghanistan. After Nasr and others had prepared and submitted almost endless folders and reports and Obama had read and read and read them:

Obama was dithering. He was busybodying the national security apparatus by asking for more answers to the same set of questions, each time posed differently. Holbrooke thought that Obama was not deciding because he disliked the options before him, and that the National Security Council (NSC) was failing the president by not giving him the right options. What Holbrooke omitted from his assessment was that Obama was failing to press the NSC to give him other options.

In other words, he was dithering because he wanted to dither rather than make a decision and go on record.

Nasr describes a chaotic, political White House, confusing and ineffective, disjointed and meandering. Really, he describes a lack of what one might call foreign policy at all. This rings true, as well; and it’s been largely covered up so far–even by Nasr, who waited till now to write this:

Afghans and Pakistanis were not alone in being confused and occasionally amused by the White House’s maneuvers. People in Washington were also baffled. The White House encouraged the U.S. ambassadors in Afghanistan and Pakistan to go around the State Department and work with the White House directly, undermining their own agency. Those ambassadors quickly learned how easy it was to manipulate the administration’s animus toward Holbrooke to their own advantage.

Obama showed not the most rudimentary notion of tactics or strategy in the conduct of war (unless you call politics “war”):

The Obama administration’s approach to reconciliation, however, is not exactly what Holbrooke had in mind for a diplomatic end to the war. Holbrooke thought that the United States would enjoy its strongest leverage if it negotiated with the Taliban when the country had the maximum number of troops on the ground in Afghanistan. He had not favored the Afghanistan surge, but once the troops were there, he thought the president should use the show of force to get to a diplomatic solution.

But that did not happen. The president failed to launch diplomacy and then announced the troop withdrawal in a June 2011 speech, in effect snatching away the leverage that would be needed if diplomacy were to have a chance of success. “If you are leaving, why would the Taliban make a deal with you? How would you make the deal stick? The Taliban will talk to you, but just to get you out faster.” That comment we heard from an Arab diplomat was repeated across the region.

Yet it was exactly after announcing the U.S. departure that the administration warmed up to the idea of reconciliation. Talks with the Taliban were not about arranging their surrender, but about hastening America’s departure.

This rings true, as well–Obama has a long history of voting “not present”:

The White House seemed to see an actual benefit in not doing too much. It was happy with its narrative of modest success in Afghanistan and gradual withdrawal — building Afghan security forces to take over from departing U.S. troops. The goal was to spare the president the risks that necessarily come with playing the leadership role that America claims to play in this region.

It will be interesting to see whether this article has any effect at all. It will also be interesting to see if other “now it can be told” books and articles written by Democrats start coming out, and if they end up mattering, either.

[Hat tip: commenter “expat.”]

Bill Keller gets his comeuppance

The New Neo Posted on by

Yesterday I wrote about Bill Keller’s Times op-ed giving Obama a little love tap—the mildest of criticisms book-ended between much Republican-blaming—but criticism nevertheless.

Well, as you might expect, Keller’s apostasy has not escaped his journalist colleagues on the left, who have teamed up to let him know what happens to those who dare voice a word against Obama.

No surprise there. In my first sentence about Keller’s piece I called him “rather brave” for writing it. This sort of thing is exactly what I had in mind.

At least they haven’t started the purge trials yet.

Boob school

The New Neo Posted on by

No, it’s not college.

Boob school is where women learn what size bra actually fits them, and are introduced to the perils of the side boob, the quadraboob, the high rider, the super drooper, the big stand-off, and the ledge.

You may think this is funny. But we are not amused (okay, maybe just a little). Ill-fitting bras are the scourge of many women’s existence, and there is a pressing (ahem!) need for education.

I have noticed another phenomenon that the article doesn’t touch on, but that increases the confusion: the enormous profusion of bra styles and types. I can remember a time not so long ago when the lingerie sections of department stores were relatively simple affairs, with choices adequate but not overwhelming. There were the strapless, the halter, and the regular; the wired and the wireless; the low-cut; and the padded and the un. Cotton, satin, and lace, and a relatively small number of manufacturers.

Now the styles have proliferated exponentially, and each has a very special task to do. Eliminate back fat. Minimize. Maximize. Do away with the side boob. Look good under clingy tank tops. Have comfortable straps. And on and on and on. And the efficacy of none of these things can be ascertained by merely looking at the bra on the hanger; all must be tried on.

And don’t get me started on hair products. Or makeup. Makeup! Entire huge stores devoted to makeup (Sephora, Ulta)!

Now, I’ve been wearing makeup ever since I was a fairly young teenager, and that’s some time ago. In other words, I ought to know something about it. But venturing into one of these stores recently I realize I’ve been left behind in a cloud of dusty face powder (which I’ve never worn). I have no idea what most of the products there do, except that many of them purport to eliminate wrinkles, slow aging, and otherwise keep a woman looking like a dewy twenty-year-old.

Well, they may do that for the dewy twenty-year-olds among us—a group that constitutes the vast majority of the clientele in these places, anyway. But there ain’t nothing going to do that for the rest of us, no matter what the price, and no matter how many dizzying variations are worked on the theme.