Capitalism comes naturally; equality (Communism) does not

That is the implication of a recent big paper that looked at all the psychological research on whether or not people prefer equality.  They do, but only where the two parties really are  the same.  When one does more work, people think they should get more for it.  That is a simple summary of the paper excerpted below


Why people prefer unequal societies

Christina Starmans, Mark Sheskin & Paul Bloom

Abstract

There is immense concern about economic inequality, both among the scholarly community and in the general public, and many insist that equality is an important social goal. However, when people are asked about the ideal distribution of wealth in their country, they actually prefer unequal societies. We suggest that these two phenomena can be reconciled by noticing that, despite appearances to the contrary, there is no evidence that people are bothered by economic inequality itself. Rather, they are bothered by something that is often confounded with inequality: economic unfairness. Drawing upon laboratory studies, cross-cultural research, and experiments with babies and young children, we argue that humans naturally favour fair distributions, not equal ones, and that when fairness and equality clash, people prefer fair inequality over unfair equality. Both psychological research and decisions by policymakers would benefit from more clearly distinguishing inequality from unfairness.

Fairness in the lab

How can this preference for inequality in the real world be reconciled with the strong preference for equality found in laboratory studies? We suggest that this discrepancy arises because the laboratory findings reviewed above—which report the discovery of egalitarian motives, a desire for more equality, or inequality aversion—do not in fact provide evidence that an aversion to inequality is driving the preference for equal distribution. Instead, these findings are all consistent with both a preference for equality and with a preference for fairness, because the studies are designed so that the equal outcome is also the fair one. This is because the recipients are indistinguishable with regard to considerations such as need and merit. Hence, whether subjects are sensitive to fairness or to equality, they will be inclined to distribute the goods equally.

This idea is supported by numerous studies, including follow-ups of the experiments described above, by the same researchers, in which fairness is carefully distinguished from equality. These studies find that people choose fairness over equality.

For example, in the study in which children had to award erasers to two boys who had cleaned up their room and chose to throw out the extra eraser, both boys were described as having done a good job. But when children were told that one boy did more work than the other, they awarded the extra eraser to the hard worker28,40. In fact, when one recipient has done more work, six-year-olds believe that he or she should receive more resources, even if equal pay is an option26,41,​42,​43. Likewise, although infants prefer equality in a neutral circumstance, they expect an experimenter to distribute rewards preferentially to individuals who have done more work35.

This preference for inequality is not restricted to situations where one person has done more work, but also extends to rewarding people who previously acted helpfully or unhelpfully. When three-year-olds witnessed a puppet help another puppet climb a slide or reach a toy, they later allocated more resources to the helpful puppet than to a puppet that pushed another down the slide, or hit him on the head with the toy44.

As a final twist, consider a situation with two individuals, identical in all relevant regards, where one gets 10 dollars and the other gets nothing. This is plainly unequal, but is it fair? It can be, if the allocation was random. Adults consider it fair to use impartial procedures such as coin flips and lotteries when distributing many different kinds of resources. Children have similar views. In the erasers-for-room-cleaning studies described above, if children are given a fair ‘spinner’ to randomly choose who gets the extra eraser, they are happy to create inequality46. One person getting two erasers and another getting one (or ten and zero for that matter) can be entirely fair and acceptable, although it is clearly not equal.

Fairness in the real world

It follows, then, that if one believes that (a) people in the real world exhibit variation in effort, ability, moral deservingness, and so on, and (b) a fair system takes these considerations into account, then a preference for fairness will dictate that one should prefer unequal outcomes in actual societies. The ideal distributions of wealth proposed by participants in the Norton and Ariely study, then, may reflect how fairness preferences interact with intuitions about the extent to which such traits vary in the population.

Tyler uses a related argument to explain why there is not a stronger degree of public outrage in the face of economic inequality. He argues that Americans regard the American market system to be a fair procedure for wealth allocation, and, accordingly, believe strongly in the possibility of social mobility (see Box 1). On this view, then, people's discontent about the current social situation will be better predicted by their beliefs about the unfairness of wealth allocation than by their beliefs about inequality.....

We have argued that a preference for fair outcomes is early emerging and universal. But it is also clear that people differ in their intuitions as to which resources should be distributed on the basis of merit. Most Americans now believe that a fair system is one in which every adult gets a vote, but this is a relatively modern intuition. In our own time, there is controversy over whether fairness dictates that everyone should have equal access to health care and higher education. Put differently, there is some disagreement over what should be a right, held equally and unchanged by any sort of variation in merit.

Nature Human Behaviour 1, Article number: 0082 (2017)
doi:10.1038/s41562-017-0082

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How Trump’s Tax Plan Would Affect High-Tax States Like California, New York

Crimping California's power to tax sounds a lot of fun

High-income earners in high-tax states would see a federal tax rate cut, but may pay more in the end if they’re unable to deduct state and local taxes under President Donald Trump’s tax reform proposal announced Wednesday.

The White House released the contours of his tax reform proposal that would lower tax rates and reduce the number of tax brackets. However, the plan would also reduce the number of tax deductions.

When a reporter asked if deducting taxes on state and local income taxes would also be eliminated, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin answered, “Yes.”

“We are going to eliminate on the personal side all tax deductions other than mortgage interests and charitable deductions,” Mnuchin said at a White House press conference Wednesday.

House Republicans were already reportedly considering eliminating the deduction on state and local taxes, which could disproportionately affect wealthy people in high-tax blue states such as New York and California.

This federal deduction basically encouraged states to hike taxes, said Jonathan Williams, the chief economist for the American Legislative Exchange Commission, a state-centric public policy organization.

“The current policy subsidizes high-tax states,” Williams told The Daily Signal in a phone interview. “Using that revenue to pay for cutting rates across the board is a step in the right direction.”

The Trump tax plan would reduce the number of tax brackets from seven to three brackets of 10 percent, 25 percent, and 35 percent. The plan would not tax the first $24,000 in income for a couple, which is double the current standard deduction.

The Trump plan would repeal the alternative minimum tax, phaseout the death tax, and repeal the 3.8 percent surtax on investment income used to fund Obamacare.

On the business side, the corporate tax rate will be cut to 15 percent, from 35 percent. Also, the government would only tax a business’s income from inside the United States, not income from abroad. This is common in other countries and is known as a “territorial tax system.”

Gary Cohn, director of the National Economic Council and Trump’s chief economic adviser, told reporters tax reform is a “once-in-a-generation opportunity to do something really big.”

The last sweeping reform came in 1986.

“This isn’t going to be easy. Doing big things never is. We’ll be attacked from the left. We’ll be attacked from the right,” Cohn said. “But one thing is certain. I would never, ever bet against this president.”

Cohn added:

In 2017, we are still stuck with a 1988 corporate tax system. That’s why we are one of the least competitive countries in the developed world when it comes to taxes. So tax reform is long overdue.

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said the plan is the “same trickle-down economics that undermined the middle class,” and said the president should work on a fiscally responsible bipartisan plan with Democrats.

“Instead of focusing on hardworking families as he promised, President Trump’s tax outline is a wish list for billionaires,” Pelosi said in a public statement. “What few details are here overwhelmingly cut taxes for the richest and do little for middle-class Americans and those trying to get there. Besides which, nowhere does President Trump indicate how his deficit-exploding tax plan will actually be paid for.”

Adam Michel, a tax policy analyst with The Heritage Foundation, said he believes the proposal shows Trump is serious about reform:

For too long, America’s out-of-date and overbearing tax system has put a damper on economic growth while punishing savings and investment. The president’s plan is a great starting point. Now, the president and Congress must work together to finally update our broken tax system. True reform should apply the most efficient and least economically destructive forms of taxation, have low rates on a broad base, and be as transparent, predictable, and simple as possible.

Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform, praised Trump’s proposal.

“President Trump has re-energized the drive for fundamental tax reform that creates growth and jobs,” Norquist said in a public statement. “The plan cuts taxes for businesses and individuals and simplifies the code so Americans can file on a postcard. Reducing taxes on all businesses down to 15 percent will turbocharge the economy.”

Mnuchin called the current 35 percent corporate rate “perhaps the most complicated and uncompetitive business rate in the world.”

He said he anticipates the proposal would return the U.S. to greater than 3 percent growth without an adverse impact on the debt or revenue. Throughout most of the Obama administration, economic growth didn’t surpass 3 percent in a single year.

“This plan will lower the ratio of debt to [gross domestic product]. The economic plan under Trump would grow the economy, will create massive amounts of revenues,” Mnuchin said.

The plan is a net tax reduction, Williams said, and fundamental reform takes cronyism out of the tax code, which could help Trump keep another promise.

“Draining the tax code swamp is a good way to go about getting rid of all those special interest loopholes,” Williams said.

SOURCE

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated),  a Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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Racism -- in the Leftist sense -- is normal

In Leftist usage, "racist" is a very rubbery term.  Any mention of race can cause that mention to be categorized as racist. And consciousness of racial differences is an abomination to the Left.  One would hope that the term were used to describe only those people who propose some sort of adverse discrimination against others solely because of their race but that is clearly not to be.

But it has been known in the psychology textbooks for many decades that some sort of consciousness of one's own group and loyalty to it is in fact just about universal. For instance, Brown in his 1986 introductory social psychology textbook also describes ethnocentrism, racism and their associated phenomena as "universal ineradicable psychological processes".

So Leftist usage flies in the face of psychological reality.  We are ALL racists in the Leftist sense, Leftists themselves included.  The Left are in fact obsessed with race, as their incessant campaigning for "affirmative action" shows.

So it is pleasing to see the latest bit of research that shows we get on best with members of our own group.  See below:


Identity and Bias: Insights from Driving Tests

By Revital Bar and Asaf Zussman

Abstract

How does one's identity affect the evaluation of others? To shed light on this question, we analyze the universe of driving tests conducted in Israel during 2006-2015, leveraging the effectively random assignment of students and testers to tests. We find strong and robust evidence of both ethnic (Arab/Jewish) in-group bias and gender out-group bias: a student is 15 percent more (or less) likely to pass a test when assigned a tester from the same ethnicity (gender). We show that these patterns are consistent with a utility-based interpretation, along the lines of Becker's (1957) taste-based discrimination model.

SOURCE

REFERENCE:  Brown, R.(1986) Social psychology (2nd. Ed.) N.Y.: Free Press.

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Identifying ill-intended refugees

President Donald Trump's first executive order on "Protecting the Nation from Terrorist Attacks by Foreign Nationals," has been met with objection, which grew into hysteria, by opponents on the Left and some on the Right, at home and abroad. The opponents turned to friendly courts, which halted the President's orders.

The opponents of the immigration executive orders vehemently oppose the new American president and his actions to protect the country, as he promised to do. The Left joined by pro-Muslim organizations, such as the Muslim Brotherhood's affiliated Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), have been protesting the suspension of U.S. visas to Muslim refugees and travelers from only seven out of fifty Muslim-majority countries.

The first order suspended immigration from seven countries: Iran, Iraq, Syria, Sudan, Libya, Yemen, and Somalia. All have been identified by the Obama administration as Islamic-terrorist prone countries. The second EO omitted Iraq, after arrangements were made to increase the country's vetting of applicants for U.S. visas.

Trump's first executive order proclaims: "The United States must be vigilant during the visa issuance process to ensure that those approved for admission do not intend to harm Americans and that they have no ties to terrorism. In order to protect Americans, we must ensure that those admitted to this country do not bear hostile attitudes towards our country and its founding principles. Section 2 of the active order states that the policy of the U.S. is

"(a) protect our citizens from foreign nationals who intend to commit terrorist attacks in the United States, and (b) prevent the admission of foreign nationals who intend to exploit United States immigration laws for malevolent purposes"

To prevent such individuals from entering the U.S., the executive order requests the development of a uniform screening program, which in fact would reinforce requirements that have been deliberately ignored by the Obama administration.

The virulent criticism against the EO began with a deliberate disinformation campaign that Trump has issued a ban on Muslims. While he mentioned such a ban before his election, the EO he issued calls for suspension, not a ban.

A major problem with the EO, as some pointed out, was the signaling out of those seven countries, because radical-Islamic terrorists are not limited to the countries listed. There are unknown numbers of ISIS volunteers who returned to Europe and other Western nations, which the new EO exempts. But even if the screening is done by the book, and all necessary documentation has been obtained and verified, and the applicant declares he holds no ill intentions toward America and Americans, nothing efficient is available to the screeners today that would easily reveal that he or she is lying.

An effective way to find out the applicant's intentions would be screening through an efficient, unbiased, and non-intrusive system.  Such a system was developed by an Israeli company with a grant from the Department of Homeland Security, which the Obama administration refused to utilize.

The Suspect Detection System (SDS) has developed counter-terrorist and insider-threat detection technology named COGITO.  This technology enables law enforcement agencies to rapidly investigate U.S. visa applicants (and other travelers) entering the country, insider threats among employees, etc.

COGITO technology is an automated interrogation system that can determine in 5-7 minutes if an individual is harboring hostile intent.  The system interviews the examinee with up to 36 questions while measuring the psychophysical signals of the human body.  The system has 95% accuracy and has helped security agencies globally to catch terrorists and solve crimes.

According to the company's website, the SDS allows the screening of a large number of people in a short time. It "does not require operator training. One operator can handle simultaneously ten stations.  It has a central management and database system that allows storing all tests results, analysis, and data mining, and is deployed and integrated with governmental agencies."

Using this system would eliminate the need to use often biased U.S. Consulate employees.  Moreover, the SDS uses an automated decision-making system, which is "adaptable to a variety of different questioning contexts, different cultures, and languages. The examination lasts 5 minutes when there are no indications of harmful intent, and 7 minutes to ascertain it (with only 4% false positive, and 10% false negative)."

The COGITO is used in 15 countries including Israel, Singapore, China, India, and Mexico.  U.S. airlines operating in Latin America are using COGITO to check their employees.

But last year DHS refused to use the SDS, claiming that it "would constitute an intrusion on the privacy of those screened by the system" and "[i]t may reflect on VISA applicants or Immigrant's civil rights."  However, foreigners applying for a U.S. visa are not protected by American laws.

SDS capability to detect intent seems to fit President Trump's promise of "extreme vetting" of Muslim refugees from high-risk regions.  This and other similarly objective systems would not only assist in making America safer but also be in keeping its policy and tradition of accepting refugees who do not wish us harm.

SOURCE

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Wait, Tariffs Cost Consumers Money?

When Democrats propose health insurance mandates, or a carbon tax, or a higher gas tax, or energy regulations, or a minimum wage hike, or a tax increase on “the wealthy” (i.e., small business owners), or any number of other burdensome costs on the economy, the Leftmedia can only coo about how fair and good those things are. But when Donald Trump slaps a tariff on Canadian lumber, the Leftmedia blares headlines about how much it’s going to cost American homebuilders — between $1,200 and $3,000 per house.

Now, to be clear, they’re not wrong about the cost, but these fair-weather free marketeers are profound hypocrites.

Whenever you tax or regulate something, and a tariff is a tax, the price of that thing goes up and the consumer pays more. This is economics 101. Yet leftists only see this when Trump’s at work.

So what’s going on here? First of all, Trump has long argued that NAFTA is a terrible trade deal for the U.S. and needs to be renegotiated. Without going through the whole history of that deal, suffice it to say that he has a point about other nations not always trading fairly — and there’s definitely a difference between free and fair. For example, Canada and Mexico both subsidize goods more than the U.S. does, which undercuts American producers.

In this case, Canadian lumber is subsidized, and it’s a dispute that has been ongoing since the early 1980s. Trump’s Commerce Department calculated its tariff rates on how much various Canadian lumber producers are subsidized. But the tariff also has to do with Canada’s own tariffs on imported dairy products, which the Trump administration argues particularly hurts Wisconsin dairy farmers. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross said, “The Trump administration has been much more focused on enforcement than had been true previously.”

And whether it’s trade or immigration or foreign policy, Trump the dealmaker is all about sending signals that he means business. Yes, this lumber tariff will cost Americans money, and we’re not arguing in favor of tariffs. But Trump has set about to seek what he believes are fair trade terms. Don’t think Mexico and China aren’t also getting the message.

SOURCE

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Energy Economy Challenges Elitist-Centralized Wealth

It’s easy to understand why there exists an elitist bubble in Washington, DC, and other metroplexes in the Northeast. The nation’s capital and its surroundings have a long history of attracting wealthy individuals. In terms of adjusted gross income, the District is second only to Connecticut. At number three, four and five are Massachusetts, New Jersey and New York. While riches aren’t indubitably a bad thing, the old adage is true: Money begets power. And power corrupts — particularly when that power is put into the hands of lawmakers and their lobbyist cohorts. That’s why Thomas Jefferson in 1821 warned, “[W]hen all government, domestic and foreign, in little as in great things, shall be drawn to Washington as the center of all power, it will render powerless the checks provided of one government on another.”

So those of us in flyover country won’t be shedding tears over the accumulation of wealth in more middle class areas of the country. Thanks to the fracking revolution, the Lone Star State is quickly climbing the ranks on the list of highest county-specific wealth. Time magazine reports, “What’s most surprising is that a state that used to never figure in at the top now dominates the top 10 — including the overall #1 spot on the list. According to [the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse], McMullen County, Texas, which lies in the heart of the Eagle Ford shale patch south of San Antonio, now has the highest average adjusted gross income in the U.S.: $303,717. At #4 is Texas’s Glasscock County ($181,375), which sits in the equally productive Permian Basin in west Texas. And #10 is Texas’s La Salle County ($146,991), which neighbors McMullen County, to the southwest of San Antonio. In 2005, no Texas county was ranked among the top 30 most wealthy in the U.S.”

This is the free market in action. As a caveat, the large conglomeration of wealth in DC isn’t exactly dwindling. It has been ranked as the second-highest “state” in adjusted gross income since 2011, and Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Jersey and New York have all occupied the top five list since 2012. However, the finer details show that middle America is experiencing an influx of cash flow. That’s great news. The better news will be if the trend continues. And the best news? That would be when all extravagant wealth is driven out of Washington, DC.

SOURCE

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated),  a Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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Fascism and Communism Were Two Peas in a Pod

Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini have become, for many of us today, mere Hollywood villains – generic personifications of evil or (in Mussolini's case) buffoonish authoritarianism. Yet their ideologies were rooted in specific philosophical ideas – ideas which had many respectable adherents in their day.

Dictator Fanboys

Many in the vanguard of progressive thought were enamored of Mussolini and even Hitler, considering their dictatorships a useful “social experiment.”

One person who understands this is Jonah Goldberg, author of the 2007 book Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning. Ten years on, the book still holds up. Goldberg argues, provocatively, that fascism shared roots in common with what we call modern liberalism or progressivism.

People often argue over whether Hitler and Mussolini were “right wing” or “left wing.” More to the point is that both men's ideologies had roots in the Progressive movement of the turn of the 20th century.

The Progressive movement was closely tied to the philosophy of Pragmatism: the belief that thought is a tool for action and change. In contrast to the ancient and medieval philosophers, for whom philosophy was the contemplation of reality, the Progressives were animated by the desire to mold reality and to harness knowledge for social betterment. Many in the vanguard of progressive thought initially were enamored of Mussolini and even Hitler, considering their dictatorships a useful “social experiment.”

H.G. Wells, the popular science fiction writer, was one. In a number of speeches and books he praised the militaristic social mobilization in the new fascist regimes: an entire society moving as a single unit under the rule of a Nietzschean superman.

Complete state control of all aspects of life was seen as highly pragmatic and scientific by many. Nationalism and militarism – elements commonly associated with the Right – were actually key components of the Progressive Era, flourishing in particular under President Woodrow Wilson, as Goldberg documents.

Ideological Twins

Hitler and Mussolini's ideologies grew out of the avant-garde progressive and pragmatic philosophies of the late 19th century.

Popular wisdom holds that Fascism and Communism were diametrical opposites. Actually, the two ideologies were (and are) so similar that they had to define themselves in opposition to each other in order to survive. At the very least, both were socialistic in origin: Mussolini was immersed in socialism by his father, and the name of Hitler's party – National Socialist German Workers' Party – speaks for itself.

These regimes fostered hostility to traditional religious beliefs and morality (both men despised Christianity), “salvation by science” (as shown, for example, in the Nazi's racist eugenics movement), and state-controlled health and environmental projects (as shown in a Nazi slogan, “Nutrition is not a private matter!”).

All of these elements grew out of the “scientific” progressivism of the early 20th century. Even the Nazis' vÖlkisch ideology—with its nationalist and traditionalist overtones – was at heart a secular religion-substitute which enshrined the Will of the People, a concept which Goldberg traces to the French Revolution.

It would seem undeniable that Hitler and Mussolini, like the Soviet Union's Joseph Stalin, were revolutionaries and in no sense conservatives or traditionalists. Their ideologies grew out of the avant-garde positivist, progressive, and pragmatic philosophies of the late 19th century.

A Progressive Moment

The point here is not to engage in “left wing”/“right wing” name calling. Rather, it is to realize that all these political movements were tied up in a historical moment – Goldberg calls it the “fascist moment” of Western history – which originated in the French Revolution and came to fruition in the 20th century.

This moment was “progressive” in that it signaled the abandonment of the West's moral and philosophical traditions. And it was embodied, philosophically, in the turn away from the contemplation of truth to “action, action, action.”

SOURCE

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Hannity Is Fighting ‘Coordinated Attempt to Silence...Every Outspoken Conservative in This Country’

In his opening monologue Monday night, Fox News’s Sean Hannity addressed the “well-orchestrated effort by the intolerant left in this country,” which is trying to “silence every conservative voice,” including his.

Following the ouster of Fox New’s Bill O’Reilly, Hannity appears to be the next target at Fox News. He said he has hired lawyers and will challenge his “serial harasser” – an individual he did not name -- in court.

“In this fiercely divided and vindictive political climate, I will no longer allow slander and lies about me to go unchallenged, as I see this now to be a coordinated effort afoot to now silence those with conservative views. I will fight every single lie about me by any and all legal means available to me as an American,” Hannity said.

But he also said this isn’t just about him: “I’m speaking out tonight so that you, our audience, will understand what is really happening and what is really at stake when it comes to freedom of speech in this country.”

Hannity noted that he has worked in radio or television for 30 years, 21 of them at Fox News.

“And during this time, there  have always been efforts and attempts to smear and slander and besmirch me and other conservatives, but it has never been as intense and completely insane as it is right now.”

Things got much worse after the election, said Hannity, who is and has been an outspoken supporter of Donald Trump.

“This is not about Sean Hannity, or one person,," he continued. "There is now a coordinated attempt to silence the voice of every outspoken conservative in this country. If we don't stop it right now, there won't be any conservative voices on radio or television left.

“Now I'm not the only one that these liberal fascists routinely target. Like me, conservatives are monitored on radio and TV, every word they say.”

He continued:

“Liberal fascism is alive lie and well in America today. Their goal is simple. They want to shut up and shut down, completely silence all conservative voices by any means necessary. Here’s the difference. Unlike the left, I don't have any problem with what the other side says. If you want to listen to liberals on radio or TV, read their articles, follow them on social media, go for it.

Now, I’ll call them out for their bias. I’ll explain why they’re wrong. I’ll debate them but I’ll never, ever say they should be silenced. And I won't support boycotts to attack their advertisers, a roundabout way of silencing them.

So let me be clear tonight. Everyone who publicly supported President Trump is a target. This is very political. We have seen repeatedly that the left knows no limits in these efforts. They have gone after and attacked the first lady; they have attacked members of the president's family, every White House advisor. They've even attacked his daughter and his 10-year-old son.

Now ultimately, their goal is to cause as much collateral damage as they can to anybody who supports the president. They have tried to undermine the outcome of this election since November 9th.

Please note, this isn’t about me. This is about the left, concocting boycotts, all in an attempt to silence prominent conservative voices. If we don't take a stand now, if we allow this to happen now, I'm telling you, America as we know it -- freedom of speech as we know it -- is over. Let's stop the boycotts – let’s stop silencing opposition voices. Let all Americans make their own decisions.

SOURCE

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Do Black Lies Matter? Do All Lies Matter?  

No, there’s no typo. These are not rhetorical questions. Do black lies matter? Do all lies matter?

The answers to these questions are important not only to Kamal Dhimal, a legal U.S. citizen from Bhutan, whose Charlotte, North Carolina, market was torched by an incendiary device with a note left at the scene threatening his life. These questions are important to every law-abiding American who is watching a grievance industry create chaos and violence to destroy our nation.

On Sunday, April 9, the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police arrested the perpetrator of an arson that was being investigated as a hate crime. The Central Market in east Charlotte was the target of a homemade ignition contraption flung through the door after a glass window was busted out. The responding law enforcement found, as hoped, a typed letter addressed to “Business Owner” — who fled from the subcontinent of India. The proclamation was signed in bolded larger font, “White America.”

The neatly yet grammatically erred writing was left by the front door. It read:

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

Our newly elected president Donald Trump is our nation builder for white America. You all know that, we want our country back on the right track. We need to get rid of Muslims, Indians and all immigrants. Speci[fic]ally, we don’t want business run by refugees and immigrant anymore.

We are ready to wake up some of our great state including North Carolina and we will take care of the country. Immigrants and refugee are taking our job[s], doing our business and leaving us standard. So, you are not allowed to do business any more.

We know you are one and many of other immigrant[s] doing business here. This is our warning. Leave the business and go back where you came from.

If you don’t follow this warning then we are not responsible for the torture starting now.

God bless America

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

Obviously, the intent of the arsonist was to portray the crime as one committed by a racially driven loyalist of President Donald Trump. You know, like the ones regularly contrived among the national media who can’t get over the fact that Hillary Clinton lost.

As defined by the FBI, a hate crime “is a traditional offense like murder, arson, or vandalism with an added element of bias.” North Carolina officials proceeded with the information at hand, both objective and subjective, to investigate an assailant who had inflicted a crime against the person and property of an individual based on an element of bias or prejudice.

Members of the grievance industry like Eric Levitz, writing for New York Magazine, have postulated that such incidents of hate crimes have directly “coincided with a GOP presidential primary” that featured a candidate supposedly fueled by the prejudices and nativist hatred of immigrants coupled with Islamophobia. Whether peddling conjured-up racism, sexism, gender-bias or “White Privilege,” the new cause célèbre is victimhood at the hands of some conservative Christian or member of the working class.

In the case of the Charlotte shop, the hate crime was supposedly performed by “White America.” Unfortunately for the Presstitutes selling their cheap, adulterated storylines, it was committed by Curtis Flournoy, a 32-year-old black man with five previous arrests in Mecklenburg County.

The problem, as the North Carolina law enforcement experts exposed, was the hate crime was not borne out of politics of the Right, white privilege or any other manufactured demon oft-cited by the Left as they hail and regale victims. The Charlotte crime was an act of hate fueling a lying narrative.

According to a website built on the published work, “Crying Wolf,” by Laird Wilcox, an astounding 80% of hate crimes reported on the confines of a college or university campus are fake. So, of the 10 hate crimes reported on campuses of higher education, only two of those were truthfully crimes based on bias or prejudice.

So, back to the premise of discussion: Do all lies matter?

In 2017, truth has been abandoned for a poisonous recipe filled with substitutes. The modern culture embraces popular, yet uninformed opinion instead of fact, repeats propaganda fit for any Marxist, socialist or statist and honors the celebrity of victimhood rather than integrity and personal achievement.

Indeed, all lies matter. These lies are the lifeblood of the political Left and those who despise American exceptionalism.

SOURCE

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated),  a Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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Taxes on Unhealthy Food Are Ineffective and Hurt the Poor: They come at the expense of the most vulnerable segments of society

The authors make good points below but they could have gone further by questioning the whole notion of healthy food.  Official advice on what is healthy frequently undergoes large changes, even U-turns, so if there is such a thing as healthy or unhealthy food there is no certainty about what that is.  Fat was demonized for decades but it suddenly became good for you recently.  Eat what you like and ignore the food nannies!

Over the past decade or so, paternalistic objections to fat, sugar, and salt have gained traction among policymakers, mostly at the state and local levels of government. Predictably, new taxes have been proposed and imposed on foods and beverages containing those ingredients. For elected officials, the prospect of addressing health concerns while raising new tax revenue is nearly irresistible.

It’s certainly intuitive that taxing sugary soda and bad-cholesterol-ridden potato chips will prompt consumers to buy fewer of those items—and that people will substitute healthier alternatives. But it turns out that consumers’ buying habits do not change markedly in response to the higher prices, and that the burden of those taxes falls most heavily on the low-income, who allocate larger shares of their budgets to food than wealthier people do. Together with our coauthors Adam Hoffer and Regeana Gvillo, we describe these effects in more detail in a new paper published in the Journal of Entrepreneurship and Public Policy.

In assessing these kinds of taxes, it’s critical to understand the consumption choices people have available. Many programs have tried to address unhealthy eating, but individuals eat junk food not just because they enjoy it, but also because of a complex web of eating habits, accessibility of stores, cooking abilities, and time pressures. Even when consumers in lower-income neighborhoods want to buy healthier foods, their options are limited.

High-sugar and high-fat foods are shelf-stable, making them more convenient than food that spoils quickly and giving them a much lower price per calorie consumed. The absence of healthy options in so-called urban food deserts means that taxing junk food will disproportionately harm the people living there. Also, as everyone who has bought food from a vending machine knows, the combination of accessibility and hunger can trigger the purchase of unhealthy food.

Moreover, diet is only one component of a healthy lifestyle. The other components, such as regular exercise and adequate sleep, are not directly related to tax policy.

But the most important, though less obvious, point is worth repeating: expenditures on the items we studied don’t vary much with income, meaning that the poor spend a higher share of their income on these products—making taxes on them regressive.

People do tend to buy more expensive, higher-quality versions of alcohol, tobacco, and some foods as their incomes rise. The largest effect reported in our paper was for alcohol: a household that makes 1 percent more income spends, on average, 0.31 percent more on alcohol. (For the average household, this means that if income goes up by $428 per year, alcohol spending goes up $1.) But the quality of things like soda and potato chips does not scale up, and so expenditures remain basically constant regardless of income.

It is widely accepted that eating better enhances health, lowers health-care expenditures, and improves the quality of life. The problem is that the link between taxes on unhealthy food and the consumption of such food is weak, and that those taxes come at the expense of the most vulnerable segments of society.

SOURCE

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The genius of Trumpism

Julius Krein sits in a cafe on the ground floor of his office building in downtown Boston, wearing a green corduroy blazer and a neat part in his hair.

He’s just launched a tweedy magazine called American Affairs, and the press has dubbed it “the intellectual journal of Trumpism.”

It’s a useful label, in some respects. “Frankly,” Krein says, poking at an apricot tart, “it gets me a lot of clicks.” But it’s also made the magazine a target for criticism.

Trump, as one skeptical columnist put it, is a “deeply flawed tribune” for an intellectual movement — an anti-intellectual, a former reality television star who changes positions at the speed of Twitter.

Can there really be a Trumpism, the skeptics ask, in the face of Trump’s flip-flops? How do you reconcile the president’s many, glaring contradictions?

Krein’s answer: You don’t. Instead, you cut right to the bracing argument at the heart of Trump’s campaign — that it’s time to pull back from the globalism that’s served coastal elites and turn to a vigorous, new nationalism that puts ordinary Americans first.

It’s “ism” as game-changer, as once-in-a-generation challenge to political orthodoxy. And while it’s not clear that Trump himself will stay faithful to Trumpism — he’s already broken from it in some big, public ways — Krein is betting that the idea will survive nonetheless, that the energy the president unleashed will re-order public life in important ways.

Trump’s wild swings are a blow to Trumpism. They may be fatal in the end. But the bet here is that “isms” are built more on the salience of the big idea than the intellectual purity of its namesake; that a malleable “ism” isn’t doomed to irrelevance, but equipped to endure; that you start with a big personality and a big moment, and you go from there.

History suggests that’s a pretty good bet.

SOURCE

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Financial security versus independence

The changing face of the United States should be viewed as an opportunity

James E. Smith and Alex Hatch

In 2015, the Bureau of Labor (BLS) Statistics released the results of a study dubbed the “National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979.”  This survey observed the employment habits of nearly ten thousand men and women of various groups over a 30-year period. Of all the data presented by the study, two numbers most characterize the evolution of the American job market: 11.7 and 93.7.

The former represents the average number of jobs a person will work between the ages of 18 and 48; the latter the percent of people age 30 to 34 who will spend less than 15 years with any single employer.

These numbers reflect the downward trend, if not the death, of the one-time American ideal of being a “company man.”  The average American no longer aspires to grind through a nine-to-five job in his or her perfect first employment scenario. If they did initially, the volatility of the current job market seems to force a more thorough review of reality.

At the very least, they certainly don’t expect to be rewarded with a mantle clock or gold watch after thirty-plus years of faithful service. Even in their early to mid-thirties, an age when most people begin to settle down and raise a family, the average American is still willing to change careers and locations repeatedly to further their long-term economic viability.

In most cases a planned career change provides an improvement in living and working conditions, as well as a boost in income. For most, these improvements are reflected in the standard of living enjoyed, and also with measureable improvements in future financial security, improved net value, greater liquidity, and larger retirement benefits.

For some, the correct choices may also provide the ability to cross the threshold where financial security becomes financial independence: defined as the ability to continue the same, or better, lifestyle without a job; the much-heralded early retirement.

The frequency for this likelihood increases for the case where workers take greater personal and financial risks early in their career by investing in additional retirement plans, stocks and bonds or, more significantly, by contributing their time and future income to innovative technologies and start-ups.

Accordingly, spurred on by the age of the internet, numerous opportunities have sprung up in the last 30 years, resulting in a more than eight-fold increase in millionaires. That demographic can be used here to illustrate the number of people who have become financially independent.

More specifically, in 1988 there were only about 1.5 million millionaires in the United States. By 2017, this number had increased to 10.8 million, showing that, as investment savvy workers and the innovations they support have grown, so too have the number of financially independent Americans.

By and large though, employer mobility, as enjoyed by American workers, has often come at the cost of their financial security.  According to the BLS study, during the 30-year period the bureau analyzed, the subjects spent a total of 22% of their time from age 18 to 48 either unemployed or out of the workforce.  This means that they were out of the working world for nearly seven years during what should be the most productive portion of their lives.

While a good portion of this time was likely related to the pursuit of higher education and training, the result is still the same: the average American now spends more than half a decade out of the workforce during their working careers. This results in years of lost wages and promotions for the individual, lowering their future earnings potential and seniority in a position, in many cases affecting their job security.

In a broader sense, this also means that there are fewer citizens who can make positive contributions to the local economy, as well as to the government in the form of taxes. Today’s employee knows that stability in a career is not a given, and there is very little chance that the government will provide any kind of substantial fallback for them should their employment situation change. Thus, their historically strong employer loyalty has given way to increased financial depth.

The days when Social Security and even company pension plans would provide for future living conditions and survival security are long gone.  Even with all the optional retirement vehicles, the reality is that the American workers must again secure their own future financial security, independent of government-mandated programs that may work initially but can never keep pace with changing economic, demographic, longevity and life-style realities.

Workers must invest in their own future, first through education and training and then by investing in public and private markets, as well as in innovation and entrepreneurial opportunities, not to mention second jobs or the equivalent from their spouses and other family members.

According to the 2016-17 Global Entrepreneurship Monitor report, there has been a significant uptick in entrepreneurial activity in the last decade. Most notably, in 2016, 13.6% of all American adults ages 18 to 64 were involved in either the creation or the operation of businesses that are less than 42 months old.  Thus, millions of Americans have decided to dedicate at least part of their time and financial security to the pursuit of innovation and wealth creation, instead of working exclusively in the corporate world.

While entrepreneurship entices Americans with the promise of great wealth, it is important to note than 90% of all startups fail. For the sake of financial stability, Americans must understand that the social safety nets currently in place simply cannot support entrepreneurs who fail in their endeavors. They must have their own savings and safety nets to help them survive any failures they may encounter.

We are ultimately responsible for our current situation, and more so for the future, since we have time to make the plans necessary for that future lifestyle we have set as our goal. It also means we can bet the house on one throw of the dice. Proper planning is essential and even risk taking must have a safety net.

For these and numerous other reasons, it is important for the stability of our citizens and the social welfare system we enjoy that we take charge of our own financial security and not expect to find the solution to our lack of personal planning during the eleventh hour of our working careers. Programs are in place to provide the fundamental mechanisms for wealth accumulation. We just need the discipline to take advantage of them.

More importantly, with that same discipline and a proper outlook to the future, there appears to be a plethora of ideas that will allow the transition from hand to mouth to financial security and possibly to financial independence. The data show that the United States is primed to make innovation another way to create security and independence. It is our responsibility to make it happen.

Via email

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated),  a Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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Leftism as the politics of hate

The article below is from a few years back but it is a vivid confirmation "from the inside" of all I have been saying about  Leftist hate and elitism

Danusha V. Goska lists "Ten Reasons Why I Am No Longer a Leftist"

How far left was I? So far left my beloved uncle was a card-carrying member of the Communist Party in a Communist country. When I returned to his Slovak village to buy him a mass card, the priest refused to sell me one. So far left that a self-identified terrorist proposed marriage to me. So far left I was a two-time Peace Corps volunteer and I have a degree from UC Berkeley. So far left that my Teamster mother used to tell anyone who would listen that she voted for Gus Hall, Communist Party chairman, for president. I wore a button saying "Eat the Rich." To me it wasn't a metaphor.

I voted Republican in the last presidential election.

Below are the top ten reasons I am no longer a leftist. This is not a rigorous comparison of theories. This list is idiosyncratic, impressionistic, and intuitive. It's an accounting of the milestones on my herky-jerky journey.

10) Huffiness.

In the late 1990s I was reading Anatomy of the Spirit, a then recent bestseller by Caroline Myss.

Myss described having lunch with a woman named Mary. A man approached Mary and asked her if she were free to do a favor for him on June 8th. No, Mary replied, I absolutely cannot do anything on June 8th because June 8th is my incest survivors' meeting and we never let each other down! They have suffered so much already! I would never betray incest survivors!

Myss was flabbergasted. Mary could have simply said "Yes" or "No."

Reading this anecdote, I felt that I was confronting the signature essence of my social life among leftists. We rushed to cast everyone in one of three roles: victim, victimizer, or champion of the oppressed. We lived our lives in a constant state of outraged indignation. I did not want to live that way anymore. I wanted to cultivate a disposition of gratitude. I wanted to see others, not as victims or victimizers, but as potential friends, as loved creations of God. I wanted to understand the point of view of people with whom I disagreed without immediately demonizing them as enemy oppressors.

I recently attended a training session for professors on a college campus. The presenter was a new hire in a tenure-track position. He opened his talk by telling us that he had received an invitation to share a festive meal with the president of the university. I found this to be an enviable occurrence and I did not understand why he appeared dramatically aggrieved. The invitation had been addressed to "Mr. and Mrs. X." Professor X was a bachelor. He felt slighted. Perhaps the person who had addressed his envelope had disrespected him because he is a member of a minority group.

Rolling his eyes, Prof. X went on to say that he was wary of accepting a position on this lowly commuter campus, with its working-class student body. The disconnect between leftists' announced value of championing the poor and the leftist practice of expressing snobbery for them stung me. Already vulnerable students would be taught by a professor who regarded association with them as a burden, a failure, and a stigma.

Barack Obama is president. Kim and Kanye and Brad and Angelina are members of multiracial households. One might think that professors finally have cause to teach their students to be proud of America for overcoming racism. Not so fast, Professor X warned.  His talk was on microaggression, defined as slights that prove that America is still racist, sexist, homophobic, and ableist, that is, discriminatory against handicapped people.

Professor X projected a series of photographs onto a large screen. In one, commuters in business suits, carrying briefcases, mounted a flight of stairs. This photo was an act of microaggression. After all, Professor X reminded us, handicapped people can't climb stairs.

I appreciate Professor X's desire to champion the downtrodden, but identifying a photograph of commuters on stairs as an act of microaggression and evidence that America is still an oppressive hegemon struck me as someone going out of his way to live his life in a state of high dudgeon. On the other hand, Prof. X could have chosen to speak of his own working-class students with more respect.

Yes, there is a time and a place when it is absolutely necessary for a person to cultivate awareness of his own pain, or of others' pain. Doctors instruct patients to do this -- "Locate the pain exactly; calculate where the pain falls on a scale of one to ten; assess whether the pain is sharp, dull, fleeting, or constant." But doctors do this for a reason. They want the patient to heal, and to move beyond the pain. In the left, I found a desire to be in pain constantly, so as always to have something to protest, from one's history of incest to the inability of handicapped people to mount flights of stairs.

9) Selective Outrage

I was a graduate student. Female genital mutilation came up in class. I stated, without ornamentation, that it is wrong.

A fellow graduate student, one who was fully funded and is now a comfortably tenured professor, sneered at me. "You are so intolerant. Clitoredectomy is just another culture's rite of passage. You Catholics have confirmation."

When Mitt Romney was the 2012 Republican presidential candidate, he mentioned that, as Massachusetts governor, he proactively sought out female candidates for top jobs. He had, he said, "binders full of women." He meant, of course, that he stored resumes of promising female job candidates in three-ring binders.

Op-ed pieces, Jon Stewart's "Daily Show," Twitter, Facebook, and Amazon posts erupted in a feeding frenzy, savaging Romney and the Republican Party for their "war on women."

I was an active leftist for decades. I never witnessed significant leftist outrage over clitoredectomy, child marriage, honor killing, sharia-inspired rape laws, stoning, or acid attacks. Nothing. Zip. Crickets. I'm not saying that that outrage does not exist. I'm saying I never saw it.

The left's selective outrage convinced me that much canonical, left-wing feminism is not so much support for women, as it is a protest against Western, heterosexual men. It's an "I hate" phenomenon, rather than an "I love" phenomenon.

8.) It's the thought that counts

My favorite bumper sticker in ultra-liberal Berkeley, California: "Think Globally; Screw up Locally." In other words, "Love Humanity but Hate People."

It was past midnight, back in the 1980s, in Kathmandu, Nepal. A group of Peace Corps volunteers were drinking moonshine at the Momo Cave. A pretty girl with long blond hair took out her guitar and sang these lyrics, which I remember by heart from that night:

"If you want your dream to be,

Build it slow and surely.

Small beginnings greater ends.

Heartfelt work grows purely."

I just googled these lyrics, thirty years later, and discovered that they are Donovan's San Damiano song, inspired by the life of St. Francis.

Listening to this song that night in the Momo Cave, I thought, that's what we leftists do wrong. That's what we've got to get right.

We focused so hard on our good intentions. Before our deployment overseas, Peace Corps vetted us for our idealism and "tolerance," not for our competence or accomplishments. We all wanted to save the world. What depressingly little we did accomplish was often erased with the next drought, landslide, or insurrection.

Peace Corps did not focus on the "small beginnings" necessary to accomplish its grandiose goals. Schools rarely ran, girls and low caste children did not attend, and widespread corruption guaranteed that all students received passing grades. Those students who did learn had no jobs where they could apply their skills, and if they rose above their station, the hereditary big men would sabotage them. Thanks to cultural relativism, we were forbidden to object to rampant sexism or the caste system. "Only intolerant oppressors judge others' cultures."

I volunteered with the Sisters of Charity. For them, I pumped cold water from a well and washed lice out of homeless people's clothing. The sisters did not want to save the world. Someone already had. The sisters focused on the small things, as their founder, Mother Teresa, advised, "Don't look for big things, just do small things with great love." Delousing homeless people's clothing was one of my few concrete accomplishments.

Back in 1975, after Hillary Rodham had followed Bill Clinton to Arkansas, she helped create the state's first rape crisis hotline. She had her eye on the big picture. What was Hillary like in her one-on-one encounters?

Hillary served as the attorney to a 41-year-old, one of two men accused of raping a 12-year-old girl. The girl, a virgin before the assault, was in a coma for five days afterward. She was injured so badly she was told she'd never have children. In 2014, she is 52 years old, and she has never had children, nor has she married. She reports that she was afraid of men after the rape.

A taped interview with Clinton has recently emerged; on it Clinton makes clear that she thought her client was guilty, and she chuckles when reporting that she was able to set him free.  In a recent interview, the victim said that Hillary Clinton "took me through Hell" and "lied like a dog." "I think she wants to be a role model… but I don’t think she’s a role model at all," the woman said. "If she had have been, she would have helped me at the time, being a 12-year-old girl who was raped by two guys."

Hillary had her eye on the all-caps resume bullet point: FOUNDS RAPE HOTLINE.

Hillary's chuckles when reminiscing about her legal victory suggest that, in her assessment, her contribution to the ruination of the life of a rape victim is of relatively negligible import.

7) Leftists hate my people.

I'm a working-class Bohunk [central European]. A hundred years ago, leftists loved us. We worked lousy jobs, company thugs shot us when we went on strike, and leftists saw our discontent as fuel for their fire.

Karl Marx promised the workers' paradise through an inevitable revolution of the proletariat. The proletariat is an industrial working class -- think blue-collar people working in mines, mills, and factories: exactly what immigrants like my parents were doing.

Polish-Americans participated significantly in a great victory, Flint, Michigan's 1937 sit-down strike. Italian-Americans produced Sacco and Vanzetti. Gus Hall was a son of Finnish immigrants.

In the end, though, we didn't show up for the Marxist happily ever after. We believed in God and we were often devout Catholics. Leftists wanted us to slough off our ethnic identities and join in the international proletarian brotherhood -- "Workers of the world, unite!" But we clung to ethnic distinctiveness. Future generations lost their ancestral ties, but they didn't adopt the IWW flag; they flew the stars and stripes. "Property is theft" is a communist motto, but no one is more house-proud than a first generation Pole who has escaped landless peasantry and secured his suburban nest.

Leftists felt that we jilted them at the altar. Leftists turned on us. This isn't just ancient history. In 2004, What's the Matter with Kansas? spent eighteen weeks on the bestseller lists. The premise of the book: working people are too stupid to know what's good for them, and so they vote conservative when they should be voting left. In England, the book was titled, What's the Matter with America?

We became the left's boogeyman: Joe Six-pack, Joe Hardhat. Though we'd been in the U.S. for a few short decades when the demonization began, leftists, in the academy, in media, and in casual speech, blamed working-class ethnics for American crimes, including racism and the "imperialist" war in Vietnam. See films like The Deer Hunter. Watch Archie Bunker on "All in the Family." Listen to a few of the Polack jokes that elitists pelted me with whenever I introduced myself at UC Berkeley.

Leftists freely label poor whites as "redneck," "white trash," "trailer trash," and "hillbilly." At the same time that leftists toss around these racist and classist slurs, they are so sanctimonious they forbid anyone to pronounce the N word when reading Mark Twain aloud. President Bill Clinton's advisor James Carville succinctly summed up leftist contempt for poor whites in his memorable quote, "Drag a hundred-dollar bill through a trailer park, you never know what you'll find."

The left's visceral hatred of poor whites overflowed like a broken sewer when John McCain chose Sarah Palin as his vice presidential running mate in 2008. It would be impossible, and disturbing, to attempt to identify the single most offensive comment that leftists lobbed at Palin. One can report that attacks on Palin were so egregious that leftists themselves publicly begged that they cease; after all, they gave the left a bad name. The Reclusive Leftist blogged in 2009 that it was a "major shock" to discover "the extent to which so many self-described liberals actually despise working people." The Reclusive Leftist focuses on Vanity Fair journalist Henry Rollins. Rollins recommends that leftists "hate-fuck conservative women" and denounces Palin as a "small town hickoid" who can be bought off with a coupon to a meal at a chain restaurant.

Smearing us is not enough. Liberal policies sabotage us. Affirmative action benefits recipients by color, not by income. Even this limited focus fails. In his 2004 Yale University Press study, Thomas Sowell insists that affirmative action helps only wealthier African Americans. Poor blacks do not benefit. In 2009, Princeton sociologists Thomas Espenshade and Alexandria Radford demonstrated that poor, white Christians are underrepresented on elite college campuses. Leftists add insult to injury. A blue-collar white kid, who feels lost and friendless on the alien terrain of a university campus, a campus he has to leave immediately after class so he can get to his fulltime job at MacDonald's, must accept that he is a recipient of "white privilege" – if he wants to get good grades in mandatory classes on racism.

The left is still looking for its proletariat. It supports mass immigration for this reason. Harvard's George Borjas, himself a Cuban immigrant, has been called "America’s leading immigration economist." Borjas points out that mass immigration from Latin America has sabotaged America's working poor.

It's more than a little bit weird that leftists, who describe themselves as the voice of the worker, select workers as their hated other of choice, and targets of their failed social engineering.

6) I believe in God.

Read Marx and discover a mythology that is irreconcilable with any other narrative, including the Bible. Hang out in leftist internet environments, and you will discover a toxic bath of irrational hatred for the Judeo-Christian tradition. You will discover an alternate vocabulary in which Jesus is a "dead Jew on a stick" or a "zombie" and any belief is an arbitrary sham, the equivalent of a recently invented "flying spaghetti monster." You will discover historical revisionism that posits Nazism as a Christian denomination. You will discover a rejection of the Judeo-Christian foundation of Western Civilization and American concepts of individual rights and law. You will discover a nihilist void, the kind of vacuum of meaning that nature abhors and that, all too often, history fills with the worst totalitarian nightmares, the rough beast that slouches toward Bethlehem.

5 & 4) Straw men and "In order to make an omelet you have to break a few eggs."

It astounds me now to reflect on it, but never, in all my years of leftist activism, did I ever hear anyone articulate accurately the position of anyone to our right. In fact, I did not even know those positions when I was a leftist.

"Truth is that which serves the party." The capital-R revolution was such a good, it could eliminate all that was bad, that manipulating facts was not even a venial sin; it was a good. If you want to make an omelet, you have to break a few eggs. One of those eggs was objective truth.

Ron Kuby is a left-wing radio talk show host on New York's WABC. He plays the straw man card hourly. If someone phones in to question affirmative action – shouldn't such programs benefit recipients by income, rather than by skin color? – Kuby opens the fire hydrant. He is shrill. He is bombastic. He accuses the caller of being a member of the KKK. He paints graphic word pictures of the horrors of lynching and the death of Emmett Till and asks, "And you support that?"

Well of course THE CALLER did not support that, but it is easier to orchestrate a mob in a familiar rendition of righteous rage against a sensationalized straw man than it is to produce a reasoned argument against a reasonable opponent.

On June 16, 2014, Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank published a column alleging that a peaceful Muslim was nearly verbally lynched by violent Islamophobes at a Heritage Foundation-hosted panel. What Milbank described was despicable. Unfortunately for Milbank and the Washington Post's credibility, someone filmed the event and posted the film on YouTube. Panel discussants, including Frank Gaffney and Brigitte Gabriel, made important points in a courteous manner. Saba Ahmed, the peaceful Muslim, is a "family friend" of a bombing plotter who expressed a specific desire to murder children. It soon became clear that Milbank was, as one blogger put it, "making stuff up."

Milbank slanders anyone who might attempt analysis of jihad, a force that is currently cited in the murder of innocents -- including Muslims -- from Nigeria to the Philippines. The leftist strategy of slandering those who speak uncomfortable facts suppresses discourse and has a devastating impact on confrontations with truth in journalism and on college campuses.

2 & 3) It doesn't work.  Other approaches work better.

I went to hear David Horowitz speak in 2004. My intention was to heckle him. Horowitz said something that interrupted my flow of thought. He pointed out that Camden, Paterson, and Newark had decades of Democratic leadership.

Ouch.

I grew up among "Greatest Generation" Americans who had helped build these cities. One older woman told me, "As soon as I got my weekly paycheck, I rushed to Main Ave in Paterson, and my entire paycheck ended up on my back, in a new outfit." In the 1950s and 60s, my parents and my friends' parents fled deadly violence in Newark and Paterson.

Within a few short decades, Paterson, Camden, and Newark devolved into unlivable slums, with shooting deaths, drug deals, and garbage-strewn streets. The pain that New Jerseyans express about these failed cities is our state's open wound.

I live in Paterson. I teach its young. My students are hogtied by ignorance. I find myself speaking to young people born in the U.S. in a truncated pidgin I would use with a train station chai wallah in Calcutta.

Many of my students lack awareness of a lot more than vocabulary. They don't know about believing in themselves, or stick-to-itiveness. They don't realize that the people who exercise power over them have faced and overcome obstacles. I know they don't know these things because they tell me. One student confessed that when she realized that one of her teachers had overcome setbacks it changed her own life.

My students do know -- because they have been taught this -- that America is run by all-powerful racists who will never let them win. My students know -- because they have been drilled in this -- that the only way they can get ahead is to locate and cultivate those few white liberals who will pity them and scatter crumbs on their supplicant, bowed heads and into their outstretched palms. My students have learned to focus on the worst thing that ever happened to them, assume that it happened because America is unjust, and to recite that story, dirge-like, to whomever is in charge, from the welfare board to college professors, and to await receipt of largesse.

As Shelby Steele so brilliantly points out in his book White Guilt, the star of the sob story my students tell in exchange for favors is very much not the black aid recipient. The star of this story, still, just as before the Civil Rights Movement that was meant to change who got to take the lead in American productions, was the white man. The generous white liberal still gets top billing.

In Dominque La Pierre's 1985 novel City of Joy, a young American doctor, Max Loeb, confesses that serving the poor in a slum has changed his mind forever about what might actually improve their lot. "In a slum an exploiter is better than a Santa Claus… An exploiter forces you to react, whereas a Santa Claus demobilizes you."

That one stray comment from David Horowitz, a man I regarded as the enemy, sparked the slow but steady realization that my ideals, the ideals I had lived by all my life, were poisoning my students and Paterson, my city.

After I realized that our approaches don't work, I started reading about other approaches. I had another Aha! moment while listening to a two minute twenty-three second YouTube video of Milton Friedman responding to Phil Donahue's castigation of greed. The only rational response to Friedman is "My God, he's right."

1) Hate.

If hate were the only reason, I'd stop being a leftist for this reason alone.

Almost twenty years ago, when I could not conceive of ever being anything but a leftist, I joined a left-wing online discussion forum.

Before that I'd had twenty years of face-to-face participation in leftist politics: marching, organizing, socializing.

In this online forum, suddenly my only contact with others was the words those others typed onto a screen. That limited and focused means of contact revealed something.

If you took all the words typed into the forum every day and arranged them according to what part of speech they were, you'd quickly notice that nouns expressing the emotions of anger, aggression, and disgust, and verbs speaking of destruction, punishing, and wreaking vengeance, outnumbered any other class of words.

One topic thread was entitled "What do you view as disgusting about modern America?" The thread was begun in 2002. Almost eight thousand posts later, the thread was still going strong in June, 2014.

Those posting messages in this left-wing forumpublicly announced that they did what they did every day, from voting to attending a rally to planning a life, because they wanted to destroy something, and because they hated someone, rather than because they wanted to build something, or because they loved someone. You went to an anti-war rally because you hated Bush, not because you loved peace. Thus, when Obama bombed, you didn't hold any anti-war rally, because you didn't hate Obama.

I experienced powerful cognitive dissonance when I recognized the hate. The rightest of my right-wing acquaintances -- I had no right-wing friends -- expressed nothing like this. My right-wing acquaintances talked about loving: God, their family, their community. I'm not saying that the right-wingers I knew were better people; I don't know that they were. I'm speaking here, merely, about language.

In 1995 I developed a crippling illness. I couldn't work, lost my life savings, and traveled through three states, from surgery to surgery.

A left-wing friend, Pete, sent me emails raging against Republicans like George Bush, whom he referred to as "Bushitler." The Republicans were to blame because they opposed socialized medicine. In fact it's not at all certain that socialized medicine would have helped; the condition I had is not common and there was no guaranteed treatment.

I visited online discussion forums for others with the same affliction. One of my fellow sufferers, who identified himself as a successful corporate executive in New Jersey, publicly announced that the symptoms were so hideous, and his helpless slide into poverty was so much not what his wife had bargained for when she married him, that he planned to take his own life. He stopped posting after that announcement, though I responded to his post and requested a reply. It is possible that he committed suicide, exactly as he said he would -- car exhaust in the garage. I suddenly realized that my "eat the rich" lapel button was a sin premised on a lie.

In any case, at the time I was diagnosed, Bush wasn't president; Clinton was. And, as I pointed out to Pete, his unceasing and vehement expressions of hatred against Republicans did nothing for me.

I had a friend, a nun, Mary Montgomery, one of the Sisters of Providence, who took me out to lunch every six months or so, and gave me twenty-dollar Target gift cards on Christmas. Her gestures to support someone, rather than expressions of hate against someone -- even though these gestures were miniscule and did nothing to restore me to health -- meant a great deal to me.

Recently, I was trying to explain this aspect of why I stopped being a leftist to a left-wing friend, Julie. She replied, "No, I'm not an unpleasant person. I try to be nice to everybody."

"Julie," I said, "You are an active member of the Occupy Movement. You could spend your days teaching children to read, or visiting the elderly in nursing homes, or organizing cleanup crews in a garbage-strewn slum. You don't. You spend your time protestingand trying to destroy something -- capitalism."

"Yes, but I'm very nice about it," she insisted. "I always protest with a smile."

Pete is now a Facebook friend and his feed overflows with the anger that I'm sure he assesses as righteous. He protests against homophobic Christians, American imperialists, and Monsanto. I don't know if Pete ever donates to an organization he believes in, or a person suffering from a disease, or if he ever says comforting things to afflicted intimates. I know he hates.

I do have right-wing friends now and they do get angry and they do express that anger. But when I encounter unhinged, stratospheric vituperation, when I encounter detailed revenge fantasies in scatological and sadistic language, I know I've stumbled upon a left-wing website.

Given that the left prides itself on being the liberator of women, homosexuals, and on being "sex positive," one of the weirder and most obvious aspects of left-wing hate is how often, and how virulently, it is expressed in terms that are misogynist, homophobic, and in the distinctive anti-sex voice of a sexually frustrated high-school misfit. Haters are aware enough of how uncool it would be to use a slur like "fag," so they sprinkle their discourse with terms indicating anal rape like "butt hurt." Leftists taunt right-wingers as "tea baggers." The implication is that the target of their slur is either a woman or a gay man being orally penetrated by a man, and is, therefore, inferior, and despicable.

Misogynist speech has a long tradition on the left. In 1964, Stokely Carmichael said that the only position for women in the Civil Rights Movement was "prone." Carmichael's misogyny is all the more outrageous given the very real role of women like Rosa Parks, Viola Liuzzo, and Fannie Lou Hamer.

In 2012 atheist bloggers Jennifer McCreight and Natalie Reed exposed the degree to which misogyny dominates the New Atheist movement. McCreight quoted a prominent atheist's reply to a woman critic. "I will make you a rape victim if you don't fuck off... I think we should give the guy who raped you a medal. I hope you fucking drown in rape semen, you ugly, mean-spirited cow… Is that kind of like the way that rapists dick went in your pussy? Or did he use your asshole… I'm going to rape you with my fist."

A high-profile example of leftist invective was delivered by MSNBC's Martin Bashir in late 2013. Bashir said, on air and in a rehearsed performance, not as part of a moment's loss of control, something so vile about Sarah Palin that I won't repeat it here. Extreme as it is, Bashir's comment is fairly representative of a good percentage of what I read on left-wing websites.

I could say as much about a truly frightening phenomenon, left-wing anti-Semitism, but I'll leave the topic to others better qualified. I can say that when I first encountered it, at a PLO fundraising party in Marin County, I felt as if I had time-traveled to pre-war Berlin.

I needed to leave the left, I realized, when I decided that I wanted to spend time with people building, cultivating, and establishing, something that they loved.

SOURCE

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated),  a Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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Leftists never learn

I reproduce below an article by some VERY uncritical thinkers. What they write reveals their thinking to be just about the same as the thinking of Adorno et al. in 1950.   The great mass of criticism and refutation thrown at the Adorno work (See for instance the first half of Altemeyer's first book) has had no impact on them at all.

But there is a reason for that. In the minds of most psychologists, the Adorno work is impervious to criticism.  No matter how aware they are of the criticisms and refutations of it: Its conclusions are just too delicious to let it go.  In the best projective style, it accuses conservatives of all the faults that liberals themselves have, such as authoritarianism.  Its conclusions are emotionally irresistible.  So the authors below are not alone in continuing to produce "research" that repeats the old catnip.  They quote many others who have not learned from the criticisms either.  Their article is in fact mainstream among Leftist psychologists.

But it takes only a  moment of inspection to show that the latest study, like most before it, is entirely reliant on value judgments.  What seem like sober empirical findings are in fact all "spin".  As is so common among psychologists, they take some highly detailed laboratory task and draw huge conclusions about all humanity from it.  They do not rest at saying that liberals and conservatives respond differently to a particular experimental task but rather claim with great expansiveness that this shows how conservatives think generally.

And they do it all on the basis of responses from an available group of university students -- and students have often been shown as responding very differently from the population at large. The authors conclude that "liberals" behave in a certain way rather than "A non-random selection of 44 students from Northwestern university" behaved in a certain way.  In the absence of representative sampling the latter is the only conclusion they are entitled to draw from their data but they are far more expansive than that.

But two can play at their silly game.  Where they conclude that:

"Liberals solved significantly more problems via insight instead of in a step-by-step analytic fashion"

I would conclude from the same set of results that liberals leap to conclusions whereas conservatives are more careful.  Broadly, "conservatism=caution" so that is hardly a startling conclusion.

An amusing feature of the article is that they accept that liberals have a need for novelty.  They are sensation seekers.  I reported the same many years ago -- and my sample was a random one.  I interpreted the finding as showing that liberals are impulsive airheads but the authors below seem to see it as a good thing.  "De gustibus non disputandum est", I guess.

REFERENCES

Adorno,T.W., Frenkel-Brunswik, E., Levinson, D.J. & Sanford, R.N. (1950) The authoritarian personality. New York: Harper.

Altemeyer, R. (1981). Right-wing authoritarianism. Winnipeg: University Manitoba Press.


The politics of insight

Carola Salvi et al.

Abstract

Previous studies showed that liberals and conservatives differ in cognitive style. Liberals are more flexible, and tolerant of complexity and novelty, whereas conservatives are more rigid, are more resistant to change, and prefer clear answers. We administered a set of compound remote associate problems, a task extensively used to differentiate problem-solving styles (via insight or analysis). Using this task, several researches have proven that self-reports, which differentiate between insight and analytic problem-solving, are reliable and are associated with two different neural circuits. In our research we found that participants self-identifying with distinct political orientations demonstrated differences in problem-solving strategy. Liberals solved significantly more problems via insight instead of in a step-by-step analytic fashion. Our findings extend previous observations that self-identified political orientations reflect differences in cognitive styles. More specifically, we show that type of political orientation is associated with problem-solving strategy. The data converge with previous neurobehavioural and cognitive studies indicating a link between cognitive style and the psychological mechanisms that mediate political beliefs.

Q J Exp Psychol (Hove). 2016 Jun; 69(6): 1064–1072. doi:  10.1080/17470218.2015.1136338

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The Greatest Threat to America Isn’t Islam – It’s the Left

These days, many people are anxious about the threat that Islam poses to the West. The fear is understandable but misplaced. And there are a host of reasons why this proves to be true.

Islam is a religion stuck in pre-medieval times and has rarely produced any civilizational, scientific or technological advancements. Around 40 percent of Muslims worldwide are illiterate. Muslim nations are unable to manufacture even the most elementary of things without the aid of Western engineering, knowledge, and technology. To a great and powerful civilization, Islam can never pose a threat.

The only reason Islam was ever able to conquer two-thirds of the Christian territories after the death of Muhammed was because the Roman and Persian empires had weakened themselves and each other through centuries of warfare. Also, plague and famine had decimated the population in the Mediterranean region, leaving them vulnerable to attack.

The problems we are now facing with Islam are only symptoms of the left’s success in paralyzing the West and preventing it from asserting itself. Islam was never strong. The West has become weak.  That is why fear of Islam is misplaced. The real enemy of the West is the ideological left, an adversary from within which slowly but surely destroys western civilization by debilitating its cultural and political immune system. In many ways, the left is like HIV, and Islam is like a cold. A cold is annoying but hardly life-threatening to someone with a healthy immune system. To someone ravaged by the HIV, however, even a common cold can be lethal.

For more than a century, the left has waged a relentless jihad on the West. In the 19th century, Karl Marx saw Christianity as the cultural carrier and defender of capitalism and launched an intentional attack on religion in general, and Christianity in particular. He believed that, if Christian values could be undermined, it would be much easier to replace capitalism with utopian socialism. As an articulate intellectual, Karl Marx attracted many academics to his cause, and gradually left-wing radicals took over western universities. From this position of intellectual power, they were slowly able to poison the minds of most young people by feeding them lies that effectually turned them into enemies of their own civilization.

The left has been insidious in accomplishing this feat by subtly rewriting academic history textbooks. Today, most positive elements of Western civilization have been erased from academia. Modern students do not learn that capitalism raised billions of people out of poverty and that every single day hundreds of thousands enter the middle class around the globe, thanks to free market economics.

At the same time, negative occurrences about other cultures have been carefully removed. Ask an average student in university, and he will know nothing about the one hundred million people who were effectively murdered under communist totalitarianism. He has not been made aware that almost all places that suffer from poverty in the world are governed by left-wing, anti-capitalistic regimes.

Instead, leftist professors teach only about the vices and atrocities that have occurred in our own history. As a student, you will learn that the West became rich due to slavery and imperialism, but they will never teach that slavery was endemic to all cultures across the world, and that it was Western Christian nations which ultimately abolished slavery.

University professors proclaim all the wealth of the West was stolen from innocent, peaceful cultures around the world. Students are taught that whites are fundamentally racist, but it will go unsaid that all these cultures from which we allegedly stole our wealth had been dirt poor for thousands of years and any racism that existed in the West pales in comparison to that of other cultures.

The professors may not use words like “evil,” but it isn’t necessary. Students infer this conclusion on their own based on the deceptions they are fed. They deduce that the West in general, and specifically the United States, must be destroyed so that all the other respectable and decent cultures of the world can blossom again to create the nirvana that existed before our ruthless impoverishment and exploitation.

The worst part is that decent conservatives and libertarians across the world have allowed this to happen practically without moral resistance. Why? The left has found the great weakness of conservatives: their conscience and decency. When someone accuses them of being racist or some other form of evil, their reflex is to apologize and appease. The more conservatives placate and soothe, the louder the left screams racism – because it works.

The cultural decay of our civilization will continue until conservatives choose to stand up and say “enough.” And the first step in what will certainly be a long process of restoring respect for American culture and values is to quit apologizing and cease pacifying the left.

SOURCE

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No, Trump Is Not a Neocon

BY: RICH LOWRY

With U.S. missiles flying in Syria, the “mother of all bombs” exploding in Afghanistan, and an aircraft-carrier strike group heading toward North Korea, has there been a revolution in President Trump’s foreign policy?

His most fervent supporters shouldn’t get overly exercised and his interventionist critics shouldn’t get too excited. What has been on offer so far is broadly consistent with the Jacksonian worldview that is the core of Trump’s posture toward the world.

Trump’s views are obviously inchoate. He has an attitude rather than a doctrine, and upon leaving office, he surely won’t, like Richard Nixon, write a series of books on international affairs.

What we have learned since he took office is that Trump is not an isolationist. At times, he’s sounded like one. His America First slogan (inadvertently) harkened back to the movement to keep us out of World War II. His outlandish questioning of the NATO alliance, an anchor of the West, created the sense that he might be willing to overturn the foundations of the post–World War II order.

This hasn’t come to pass. It’s not possible to be a truly isolationist president of the United States in the 21st century unless you want to spend all your time unspooling U.S. commitments and managing the resulting disruption and crises. And such an approach would undercut the most consistent element of Trump’s approach — namely strength.

His set-piece foreign-policy speeches during the campaign were clear on this. “The world is most peaceful and most prosperous when America is strongest,” he said last April at the Center for the National Interest. “America will continue and continue forever to play the role of peacemaker. We will always help save lives and indeed humanity itself, but to play the role, we must make America strong again.”

In direct contradiction to isolationism, he said repeatedly on the campaign trail that he would take the war to ISIS and build up our defenses. He even called himself — in a malapropism — “the most militaristic person you will ever meet.”

Now, there is no doubt that the Syrian strike is a notable departure for Trump, and he defended it in unapologetically humanitarian terms. But it’s entirely possible that the strike will only have the narrow purpose of reestablishing a red line against the use of chemical weapons in Syria and reasserting American credibility.

That is particularly important in the context of the brewing showdown with North Korea, which he roughly forecast in his speech last April. “President Obama watches helplessly as North Korea increases its aggression and expands further and further with its nuclear reach,” Trump said, advocating using economic pressure on China to “get them to do what they have to do with North Korea, which is totally out of control.”

The Tomahawks in Syria and saber-rattling at North Korea have Trump’s critics on the right and left claiming he’s becoming a neoconservative — a term of abuse that is most poorly understood by the people most inclined to use it. All neocons may be hawks, but not all hawks are neocons, who are distinctive in their idealism and robust interventionism.

We haven’t heard paeans to democracy from Trump, or clarion calls for human rights. He hasn’t seriously embraced regime change anywhere (even if his foreign-policy officials say Assad has to go). He shows no sign of a willingness to make a major commitment of U.S. ground troops abroad.

Trump is a particular kind of hawk. The Jacksonian school is inclined toward realism and reluctant to use force, except when a national interest is clearly at stake. As historian Walter Russell Mead writes, “Jacksonians believe that international life is and will remain both violent and anarchic. The United States must be vigilant, strongly armed. Our diplomacy must be cunning, forceful, and no more scrupulous than any other country’s.”

This tradition isn’t isolationist or neoconservative, and neither is Trump.

SOURCE

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated),  a Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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