A Time For Choosing

Covers many things we still deal with today.

The Conservative Case For An Assault Weapons Ban – There Isn’t One

From one of HotAir’s quotes of the day, Judge Larry Alan Burns suggests that a real conservative can really be conservative and sustain conservatism while being a big-government statist:

Bystanders got to Loughner and subdued him only after he emptied one 31-round magazine and was trying to load another. Adam Lanza, the Newtown shooter, chose as his primary weapon a semiautomatic rifle with 30-round magazines. And we don’t even bother to call the 100-rounder that James Holmes is accused of emptying in an Aurora, Colo., movie theater a magazine — it is a drum. How is this not an argument for regulating the number of rounds a gun can fire?

I get it. Someone bent on mass murder who has only a 10-round magazine or revolvers at his disposal probably is not going to abandon his plan and instead try to talk his problems out. But we might be able to take the “mass” out of “mass shooting,” or at least make the perpetrator’s job a bit harder.

To guarantee that there would never be another Tucson or Sandy Hook, we would probably have to make it a capital offense to so much as look at a gun. And that would create serious 2nd Amendment, 8th Amendment and logistical problems.

I assume that last line is an attempt at humor.

The facetious “I get it” ignores that infringing on the rights of 310 million other Americans because of a handful of nut-jobs is by no means acceptable.  By this logic, the slippery slope is already there and all guns should simply be banned, since the citizen is incompetent, dangerous, and not to be trusted.  Every citizen is a potential mass murderer, so we must take away all of their rights… goes the logic.

“How a politician stands on the Second Amendment tells you how he or she views you as an individual… as a trustworthy and productive citizen, or as part of an unruly crowd that needs to be lorded over, controlled, supervised, and taken care of.”

- Former TX State Representative Dr. Suzanna Hupp

More from the judge:

So what’s the alternative? Bring back the assault weapons ban, and bring it back with some teeth this time. Ban the manufacture, importation, sale, transfer and possession of both assault weapons and high-capacity magazines. Don’t let people who already have them keep them. Don’t let ones that have already been manufactured stay on the market. I don’t care whether it’s called gun control or a gun ban. I’m for it.

Wow, what a conservative idea!  Prohibition and confiscation, destruction of sports and hobbies enjoyed by millions, all because of a few who slip through the cracks of the mental health system.

Also, you’ll find you may get a bit more resistance on that “don’t let people keep them” than you think, Judge.

I say all of this as a gun owner. I say it as a conservative who was appointed to the federal bench by a Republican president. I say it as someone who prefers Fox News to MSNBC, and National Review Online to the Daily Kos. I say it as someone who thinks the Supreme Court got it right in District of Columbia vs. Heller, when it held that the 2nd Amendment gives us the right to possess guns for self-defense. (That’s why I have mine.) I say it as someone who, generally speaking, is not a big fan of the regulatory state.

So what.  Judge, you’re from California, a place that already has it’s own assault weapons ban, and such onerous regulations that many gun companies refuse to do business with your state.  It’s so bad that Ronnie Barrett won’t service weapons in your state owned by law enforcement agencies because your state perpetually demonizes his products.  California is furthermore a may issue state, not a shall issue state, for concealed carry.  The rich and powerful are given tools to defend themselves, the poor and middle class are left to either break the law or are at the mercy of criminals.  No wonder they have contempt for their government.

And I say it, finally, mindful of the arguments on the other side, at least as I understand them: that a high-capacity magazine is not that different from multiple smaller-capacity magazines; and that if we ban assault weapons and high-capacity magazines one day, there’s a danger we would ban guns altogether the next, and your life might depend on you having one.

But if we can’t find a way to draw sensible lines with guns that balance individual rights and the public interest, we may as well call the American experiment in democracy a failure.

Yeah, Judge, you don’t understand them.  There is a slippery slope, and that’s the intention of the gun-banners.  Mayor “All Guns Should Be Illegal” Bloomberg has already said you don’t need more than 2 or 3 rounds for hunting… which has nothing to do with the 2nd Amendment.  He wants a total ban.

So do you, judge, you’re just too stupid to realize it.

The sensible line is to deal with the crazy factor that is the same in every one of those mass killings.  The lunatic in Aurora, CO, the lunatic in Connecticut, the lunatics like Charles Whitman (with a host of prescriptions and an undiagnosed brain tumor) are all things that can be dealt with by addressing the problem – it’s the people, not the guns.

Taking guns away isn’t conservative.  It’s totalitarian.

And just to further hammer in the point, I’ll beat up on some people in the comments section:

Medusa at 1:32 AM December 21, 2012It’s lunacy to claim a need for assault weapons to ensure “we” can form a civilian rebellion and “take back” government from a future despot.  That claim may have been a valid and possible course of action in 1776, but not in 2016. Rifles will not suffice against drones, satellites, supercomputers, tanks, aircraft, mobile missile lauchers, rpg’s, all part of the wonderful array of weapons that the government would control. Listening to these claims is exactly like listening to a naive, uninformed, yet earnest and sincere child.  It’s a theory,but completely irrational. Yea, a rifle against a nuclear carrier group.Good luck.

This ignores the understanding of how conflict works.  Armed conflict is a test of will.  It’s a question of whether or not each belligerent has the will to win.  I’m guessing Medusa has missed out on the last 11 years worth of news.

Those guys seem to be doing a pretty effective job against the best military in the world with little more than rifles, a few machineguns, and some creativity.  They beat the second best military, and they’ve succeeded in getting the best one’s command at home to give up.

ronocaster at 1:22 AM December 21, 2012Ban semi-automatic assault rifles, cop killer ammunition, and large capacity magazines.  We don’t need to forcibly collect them, the numbers will be lowered through volunteerism and confiscations, and over time our children (or theirs) won’t have to live in fear of these weapons in order to feel free.

Some say that they need the ability to defend themselves from a tyrannical government.  And this could be a real possibility in the future, not likely, but a possibility.  Today’s reality is that little children are lying in little caskets, and a semi-automatic rifle with high-capacity magazines made it easier for that sick monster.  Some seem all too ready to offer the little children of others upon the alter of their freedom.

Ban semi-automatic assault rifles, cop killer ammunition, and large capacity magazines now.

Semi-automaitc assault rifles (a rifle based on looks), cop killer ammunition (includes all deer rifle rounds), and standard capacity magazines… down the slippery slope they go.  Lowered through volunteerism and confiscations?  Oh, lovely.  There will be resistance to that.

Children are smart.  They don’t fear things.  They do fear people.

See, the problem with ignoring the “real possibility in the future” means you disarm yourself against a worse future.  I find it amazing that an anti-gunner could even acknowledge that, but it’s pretty impressive.  However banning the tools to preserve your freedom in the future means you set the stage for worse massacres.

AGAIN:

The Indians and Wounded Knee gave up their guns “for their future”, and it got them graves and a dozen generations of poverty and forcible relocation.

Franklin stated it quite well that those who would give up their liberty for security deserve neither, and will lose both.

Brass Tax at 1:36 AM December 21, 2012

I think you missed the class about the Bill of Rights when you went to law school sir. My god…..you go so far as to say that the only reason you wouldn’t make it a capital offense to even look at a gun are those pesky ammendments and logistical issues. The Bill of Rights specifically ensures the protection of the indiviuals god given rights from the desires and needs of the masses. You anti gun zealots are going to have to find another way around this, maybe next time try finding a solution that would actually work and also doesn’t involve destroying my rights as an American citizen. I could understand a layman feeling this way……but a judge that doesn’t understand the lynch pin document that is the very foundation of the relationship between the people and those they chose to allow to govern them? Shameful, please turn in your robe.

See, you don’t make many friends by telling those in power that the reason for the Second Amendment was to make sure that you had defense against those in power.  Those in power want to consolidate it, not give you the tools to remove them.

There is no conservative case for an assault weapons ban, or any other ban.

And lastly, just to pick on Chucky Schumer, because he’s a moron, albeit a connected, powerful moron, who intends on staying in power no matter what you or I wish, this quote:

Now that Heller has ruled out the possibility of anyone ever taking away their weapons, gun owners should be more open to some reasonable limitations. No individual right is absolute, after all. While the First Amendment protects freedom of speech, no one has a right to falsely shout “Fire!” in a crowded theater, nor to traffic in child pornography. Likewise, the Second Amendment’s right to bear arms also comes with limits.

Heller hasn’t ruled that out, but Chucky goes through the whole piece saying that in order to kind of smooth things over and lull people into a false sense of security.  And “reasonable” is easily translated as “DO WHAT I WANT”, but put into a nicer “just the tip, baby” package.

Schumer notes you can’t yell “Fire!” in a crowded theater falsely.  Amazing that he would change that from the usual leftist argument of can’t yell it at all.  But here’s where Chucky sows the seeds of his own undoing.  Just like you need the First Amendment to protect that right in case of fire, so to do you need the Second to protect you – not for what one horrible person does against the amendment, whether that be yelling “Fire!” to see people trampled to death, or committing murder; but so that you, the good citizen (who vastly outnumber the monsters) can yell “Fire!” when there is one, and defend yourself against enemies foreign and domestic.

And I’ll let one more commenter blast Chucky’s whole idea to pieces:

OC4me

12/20/2012 10:39 PM CST

Q. Why would a Civilian need a high-capacity magazine for self-defense? They are only good for killing large numbers of people. Only the police and military should have these…blah … blah … blah…

A. I don’t know any law-enforcement agency whose job it is to kill large numbers of people, do you? Why would the police need high-capacity magazines? When you figure that one out, there will be your answer.

Thomas Sowell: Gun Control Ignorance

From Townhall.com:

Must every tragic mass shooting bring out the shrill ignorance of “gun control” advocates?

The key fallacy of so-called gun-control laws is that such laws do not in fact control guns. They simply disarm law-abiding citizens, while people bent on violence find firearms readily available.

If gun-control zealots had any respect for facts, they would have discovered this long ago, because there have been too many factual studies over the years to leave any serious doubt about gun-control laws being not merely futile but counterproductive.

…

Guns are not the problem. People are the problem — including people who are determined to push gun-control laws, either in ignorance of the facts or in defiance of the facts.

There is innocent ignorance and there is invincible, dogmatic, and self-righteous ignorance. Every tragic mass shooting seems to bring out examples of both among gun-control advocates.

Read the whole thing here.

ZoNation: Obama Represented, Romney Didn’t

Alfonso Rachel is a very, very sharp guy.

Can we have Colonel Allen West in 2016, please?

He may not be busy, depending on how many extra votes the Democrats find.

A Facebook Conversation Concerning Obamacare

A few weeks ago and after much deliberation with myself concerning the following I have decided to let our readers in on a little conversation I had with a coworker on Facebook concerning Obamacare. I will also be providing some commentary (in bold italics) for the following comments in true Patriot Perspective style. In order to properly frame the following argument I will attempt to recreate  the conversation with some heavy editing because some of the conversation is slang or “shorthand” with little or no punctuation involved with I will correct as best I can. 

To begin I saw the following picture:

I couldn’t help myself so I made the following comment.

Me:

Healthcare isn’t a right gents….

Coworker:

 Well we as Americans feed the beast that is health care, so now we should just let it eat the poor? And your already providing healthcare for probably half the country in uninsured ER visits and Medicaid! I came from a blue-collar family and my parents always had a job with health insurance I was lucky, sounds like you must have come from a similar situation. Talk to someone who had to go hungry because they got sick and if you can look them in the eyes and tell them healthcare is for well off people your wired different then me (my emphasis).

 Notice the attempt to cause me to feel guilt? Also notice that this individual is propping themself up as a, “better than thou,” because my opinion is not his own.

Me:

I never said it’s for well off people. If someone wants the security of insurance they either need to find a better job that supplies it, or make some changes in their lifestyle such as getting rid of bills and stuff they don’t need and maybe buy some health insurance instead. It shouldnt be on me (and other hardworking folks) to provide someone else health care because they can’t or won’t work. I know it happens now, but when they take 50 or 60% of your paycheck how the hell are you supposed to live? And after they (the government) take money from all of us and give it folks who need it how long before there is no one else to produce the money so everyone who isn’t working gets their healthcare?

Coworker:

You are already paying for the people who don’t work. Wal-Mart has a human resource department to teach employees how to file for government assistance. These are working Americans, not lazy asses sitting around watching Jerry Springer, and a better job where at? Up and ups (I think he means people with money) and Halliburton can only hire so many people. Go to Bonham, Texas and look around go to Detroit and see how corporate America has left these people high and dry!

Another attempt to get me to “see” how he is right and I am wrong. Also the following picture is from Detroit, home of some of the most liberal (in a bad way) politicians in these United States.

Me:

Now I am paying for folks that don’t work. I also know that I don’t want to pay anymore. Where is the origin of debt? (Borrowed that from Andrew Wilkow, thanks Andrew!) Who decides that I owe somebody something? You? The government? If I came to your house every day and took half of the food out of your pantry for your kids to eat you wouldn’t be upset? What does Halliburton have to do with anything? Also Detroit has been run by liberals since the 1940′s that’s why it’s jacked up from entitlement programs. Because folks there sure don’t want to do anything to better their live. Why would they? They can just go get a handout. You tell me where the origin of debt is to pay for someone else’s healthcare, whether they work or not…. You show me the Constitutional authority for the government to order me to pay for anything that someone else can buy on their own.

I consider the above comments by myself to be rock solid. I provided this coworker the opportunity to completely shut my argument down here is the much-anticipated response.

Coworker:

That’s fine I got my house in order. If you can look in the mirror and shave knowing your just as greedy as the rest more power to you but I can’t (my emphasis).

Really? Did I ask about your house being order? I asked where the constitutional authority was for Obamacare. Once again notice the attempt at guilt and to position themself as better, more compassionate than myself. My response is as follows.

Me:

I’m not being greedy, I just want what I work for, and why not? It belongs to me doesn’t it? And you didn’t answer my question. Where is the origin of debt and where is the Constitutional Authority? If you can’t answer lets not resort to name calling or calling me greedy. After all, how can I be greedy if I just want more of the money I work for?

Pretty solid response to an illogical argument I think. But wait! There’s more.

Coworker:

And the people need help. Most of them work and pay taxes just like you … the working poor!

At this point I then decided to throw a link in with the cold, hard fact that close to 50% of people in the United States do not pay taxes.

Me:

‎50% of the population doesn’t pay in to the IRS, check this: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2105131/HALF-Americans-dont-pay-income-tax-despite-crippling-government-debt.html

Coworker:

 Poor key word. 100 percent of blind people don’t see well dude, come on!

I must admit the above comment confuses me still nearly two weeks later. I am not sure what my coworker means or which “key word” this individual is referring to.

Me:

Ok, not sure what you are saying to me there. It is fact 50+ percent (of people) do not pay taxes in this country, I think you need to reformulate your argument…. The point I am trying to make is most of those folks at Wal-Mart probably don’t pay into the IRS.

From here the conversation begins to end and seems to devolve especially on my coworkers side.

Coworker:

I don’t have time to argue this because I am going to work. The money I make today, I will pay taxes on don’t worry, I don’t need a tissue. I don’t mind paying taxes. I support a household of 5 with my income so 4 of the lazy no good tax dodgers in my house don’t have too (my emphasis)! Go back and look at your numbers, 50 percent! My spouse stays at home , they part of 50 percent along with my 7, 4, and 1-year-old kids. No it’s true they are the 50 percent!

Now the individual insult his own family members calling them tax dodgers? Three of them are children and a stay at home wife. Even saying they are part of that 50% isn’t correct. No they may not pay taxes, its true, however, they do have healthcare coverage courtesy of this individuals hard work. Also this person says that they don’t have a problem with paying taxes. Guess what fellow coworker, I don’t mind either, I just want to ensure that my money is used by the government Constitutionally and not to pay for a service that people should pay for themselves. This was pretty much the end of the conversation, I closed it out with the following statement, mainly because of the liberal tendency to hate people whose opinions to resemble their own.

Me:

 Look its nothing personal, and it is ok that you don’t agree with me. I am not mad at you or anyone else, I simply am proving my point of view and nothing else.

The above statement is the truth. I don’t have any issue with anyone that I get into discussions with. All I ask is that they prove to me that I am wrong. All this person above did was manufacture an epic fail in the logic department.

Progressive “Science”: The New Phrenology

From The Weekly Standard, Andrew Ferguson has a fascinating piece entitled “The New Phrenology”:

We are entering the age of the psychopundit (we can thank the science writer Will Saletan for this excellent word). Thomas Edsall, for example, is a veteran political reporter widely admired by people who admire political reporters. He has become very excited by social science, as so many widely admired people have. Studies show—as a psychopundit would say—that Edsall is excited because social science has lately become a tool of Democrats who want to reassure themselves that Republicans are heartless and stupid. In embracing Science, the psychopundit believes he is moving from the spongy world of mere opinion to the firmer footing of fact. It is pleasing to him to discover that the two—his opinion and scientific fact—are identical.

…

That the “rich and powerful” are identical to conservatives and Republicans—Edsall’s assumption—is a hoary idea dear to many Democrats and essential to their self-image as the opponents of privilege. It persists even though many of the plushest and most powerful institutions of American life are in the hands of liberal Democrats: public and private universities, government bureaucra-cies, nonprofit foundations, movie studios, television networks, museums, newspapers and magazines, Silicon Valley .  .  . Among the fabled “1 percent,” according to Gallup, the number of self-identified Republicans is only slightly greater than the number of Democrats. As Christopher Caldwell has pointed out in these pages, political donations from 19 of the 20 richest ZIP codes in the United States go overwhelmingly to Democrats, by a ratio of four to one or more. Democrats are the party of what Democrats used to call the superrich. Only Democrats seem not to realize this.

A lack of self-awareness isn’t peculiar to liberals or Democrats, of course, but to judge by the behavior of psychopundits, we can safely say that they are clueless not only about themselves but about their political opposites. A young psychopundit called Chris Mooney has just published a book entitled The Republican Brain: The Science of Why They Deny Science—and Reality, which seeks to explain the Republican “assault on reality.” He is a very earnest fellow, and an ambitious one. He glances over an array of conservative political beliefs and sets himself a goal: “to understand how these false claims (and rationalizations) could exist and persist in human minds.”

It’s a really good piece.  Many of these topics we’ve hit on here before, as leftists insist that conservatives=dumb, conservatives are stupid because they don’t trust “science” (“science” being liberal fabrications to justify their own dogma), and how conservatives and opposing points of view must be purged from the science discourse and treated as insane, etc., etc.

Andrew Ferguson at Weekly Standard continues to tear apart the leftist themes, carrying on from the last paragraph:

His list of false claims is instructive. Along with the usual hillbilly denials of evolution and global warming, they include these, to grab a quick sample: that the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2009 will increase the deficit, cut Medicare benefits, and lead to the death panels that Sarah Palin hypothesized; that tax cuts increase revenue and that the president’s stimulus didn’t create jobs; that Congress banned incandescent light bulbs; and that the United States was founded as a “Christian nation.”

The list of errors is instructive because they aren’t properly considered errors, though the misattribution is in keeping with the modern ideologue’s custom of pretending that differences of opinion or interpretation are contests between truth and falsehood. It’s perfectly reasonable for conservatives to assume that offering health insurance to 43 million people will cost a lot of money, and thereby increase the deficit; and it’s perfectly reasonable to distrust notoriously mistaken budget forecasters who say it won’t. The act redirects vast sums away from Medicare, which should require cuts in service. Palin’s “death panel” was a bumper-sticker summary of a rational expectation—that the act will transfer the unavoidable rationing of health care from insurance companies, where most of it rests now, to the government, which will be forced to bureaucratically reshuffle the vast sums spent on end-of-life care. Mooney is right that Congress did not ban the incandescent light bulbs that most of us are used to; but it did ban their manufacture—a distinction without a difference. As for the Christian nation: The country was founded by Christians who nevertheless resolutely declined to create a Christian government. Mooney’s conflation of the American government with the American nation is an error that conservatives are less likely to make. Studies show.

It’s a very good piece.

Sciency Science! or It’s The Pseudoscience, Stupid

HT HotAir, this piece via LiveScience:

Conservatives Losing Trust in Science, Study Finds

Politically conservative Americans have lost trust in science over the last 40 years while moderates and liberals have remained constant in the stock they put in the scientific community, a new study finds.

The most educated conservatives have slipped the most, according to the research set to appear in the April issue of the journal American Sociological Review. The change in conservative attitudes likely has to do both with changes in the conservative movement and with changes in science’s role in society, said study author Gordon Gaulet, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

“There’s been this need to cultivate conservative ideas in reaction to what is perceived as mainstream culture, which a lot of conservatives would suggest is biased toward secular liberalism,” Gaulet told LiveScience. “Part of what being a conservative means is looking for alternatives for mainstream ideas and bases of knowledge, and science and the media are those.”

No, not quite.  Science has gotten away from observation of natural phenomenon and looking for empirical data and turned into Climategate, medical ethicists that push for infanticide, and again constantly pushes for discredited global warming, and the push for any pseudoscience that further pushes a leftist agenda.  Watermelon environmentalism (green on the outside, red on the inside) keeps pushing for this same crap over and over – with the intent always being the same – control of the individual.

Of course, according to “Science”, non-leftists are dumb anyway.

Meanwhile, science has changed, too. Research used to be done under the auspices of NASA and the Department of Defense, Gaulet said. Both of these agencies seemed far-removed from daily life. However, over the decades, science has become more intertwined with everyday policy. The Environmental Protection Agency is a “poster child” for science informing real-world regulation that some conservatives oppose, Gaulet said.

“It’s almost a contradiction,” he said. “We use science because it has this objective point of view or credibility to figure out which policy to use … but by doing that it becomes politicized.”

Except that’s backwards.  The politicians figure out what they want based on their sociologial theories, then they use “science” to get it.  They use the delta smelt to kill California’s Central Valley, they use the California Condor to go after citizen’s gun rights, and they use fake climate studies to destroy US energy.

Manbearpig has been busted, yet they still push the same dogmatic faith as “science” when it isn’t.

And then there’s things like this, from the same source – LiveScience:

Engineering Humans: A New Solution to Climate Change?

So far, conventional solutions to global warming — new government policies and changes in individual behavior — haven’t delivered. And more radical options, such as pumping sulfur into the atmosphere to counteract warming, pose a great deal of risk.

There may be another route to avoid the potentially disastrous effects of climate change: We can deliberately alter ourselves, three researchers suggest.

Human engineering, as they call it, poses less danger than altering our planet through geoengineering, and it could augment changes to personal behavior or policies to mitigate climate change, they write in an article to be published in the journal Ethics, Policy and the Environment.

“We are serious philosophers, but we might not be entirely serious that people should be doing this,” said Anders Sandberg, one of the authors and an ethicist at Oxford University in the United Kingdom. “What we are arguing is we should be taking a look at this, at the very least.”

Here we go again.

Their suggestions

In their article, they put forward a series of suggestions, intended as examples of the sorts of human engineering measures that people could voluntarily adopt. These include:

-Induce intolerance to red meat (think lactose intolerance), since livestock farming accounts for a significant portion of greenhouse gas emissions.

-Make humans smaller to reduce the amount of energy we each need to consume. This could be done by selecting smaller embryos through preimplantation genetic diagnosis, a technique already in use to screen for genetic diseases. “Human engineering could therefore give people the choice between having a greater number of smaller children or a smaller number of larger children,” they write.

-Reduce birthrates by making people smarter, since higher cognitive ability appears linked to lower birthrates. This could be achieved through a variety of means, including better schooling, electrical stimulation of the brain and drugs designed to improve cognitive ability, they propose.

-Treat people with hormones, such as oxytocin, to make us more altruistic and empathetic. As a result, people would be more willing to act as a group and more sensitive to the suffering of animals and other people caused by climate change.

So, the focus of “science” is control of the population.  It’s force, it’s control, it’s eugenics, the same Malthusian crap that Obama’s Science Czar John Holdren has been spouting for decades.  Mainstream “science” is taking a decidedly leftist bent, intent on telling us how bad we as humans are, how we’re all guilty of original sin against Gaia, and how we need to make people “smarter” so there will be fewer of us, how we need to inflict suffering and sacrifice on the masses of people for the good of “all mankind”, making us more “empathetic” while simultaneously hurting us as a species, as a race, and as individuals.

If “science” weren’t proposing the same leftist Malthusian “New Man” progressive garbage that they’ve been recycling since Margaret Sanger started saying we need to kill black children for their own good and generations of failed eugenicists and mass murderers throughout history have spouted – maybe we wouldn’t be so skeptical of those calling themselves “scientists”.

They’re the damned eco-daleks blowing up kids.  Again and again.

Brit Daniel Hannan at CPAC 2012

HT HotAir:

An excellent speech.  Worth spending the 27 minutes to watch.

Update: Note to HotAir readers (a lot more than normal for a trackback) who stumbled over here, you may want to check the “economic freedom” category of posts.  You’ll find many parallel themes there.

Conservative = Dumb?

Oooh, science!

Via HotAir & Yahoo/LiveScience:

There’s no gentle way to put it: People who give in to racism and prejudice may simply be dumb, according to a new study that is bound to stir public controversy.

The research finds that children with low intelligence are more likely to hold prejudiced attitudes as adults. These findings point to a vicious cycle, according to lead researcher Gordon Hodson, a psychologist at Brock University in Ontario. Low-intelligence adults tend to gravitate toward socially conservative ideologies, the study found. Those ideologies, in turn, stress hierarchy and resistance to change, attitudes that can contribute to prejudice, Hodson wrote in an email to LiveScience.

“Prejudice is extremely complex and multifaceted, making it critical that any factors contributing to bias are uncovered and understood,” he said.

Science.

Polling data and social and political science research do show that prejudice is more common in those who hold right-wing ideals that those of other political persuasions, Nosek told LiveScience.

Whose right wing?

For explanation, read our tag line above:

Helping to Conserve American Libertarian Values and Reestablish Common Sense in Government Since March 2009

JBH is a very, very intelligent guy, and managed to condense a lot into very little with just that line.  Conservatism is about conserving American values.  The original American values are the virtues of freedom – those that are now more recognized as libertarian.  These virtues are those of liberty and freedom.  On a micro scale, it allows the individual citizen his own selfish freedoms, and on the macro scale, it allows large numbers of individual citizens to cooperate and work towards their own interests, and through individual cooperation, they enrich the whole – but still maintain that the most important person is you.  And me.  And her.  And him.  There is no collective, there are a myriad of individuals.  American conservative/libertarian/classic liberal virtues are one and the same – they favor the individual freedom first and foremost, with a government dictated by the Constitution, not the other way around.

Those ideals of the American revolutionaries were to throw off the shackles of the king and allow free men to live free.  Note that George Washington among those revolutionaries was asked to be a king and declined, as that would’ve defeated the point of the revolution.

“Resistance to change” is a hallmark of conservative ideologies everywhere.  But Europe’s conservatives were preserving a monarchy and their royal priviledges.  America’s conservatives are preserving the Constitution and individual freedom.  Resisting change to a revolutionary document that provides for the freedom of all is noble, and conservative.  Embracing changes that begin to bind the citizen to the shackles of government and fetter their enterprises with regulation and control their speech and freedom with laws that exist for the ruling class is considered “liberal” in the US.

Or do we mean Canadian right-wing, as it was Ontarians who did the study?  Are we talking old-school loyalists who want to go back to British rule?  Or are we talking francophones who believe in their own superiority?

Earlier studies have found links between low levels of education and higher levels of prejudice, Hodson said, so studying intelligence seemed a logical next step. The researchers turned to two studies of citizens in the United Kingdom, one that has followed babies since their births in March 1958, and another that did the same for babies born in April 1970. The children in the studies had their intelligence assessed at age 10 or 11; as adults ages 30 or 33, their levels of social conservatism and racism were measured.

Hmmm…  So what does that say about dropout rates?

2009

• White 5.2
• Black 9.3
• Hispanic 17.6
• Asian/PacIsland 3.4
• Amerind/Alaskan 13.2

Over at HotAir, again:

But… but… wait a minute here! I thought IQ tests were useless and reflected environmental effects at a far greater level of impact than any inherent capacity to acquire and retain knowledge? I’m almost sure I read that in Gods and Guns Monthly or something. But, as Fausta points out, James Taranto beat me to the punch.

So IQ tests are racist, except when they’re used to “prove” that people with “socially conservative ideologies” are racist and intellectually inferior.

TheRoot.com has an article arguing that the Republican presidential candidates are racist. It’s about as uninteresting an argument as you can find–but the headline is revealing: “Colorblind Racism: The New Norm.” That Orwellian term, “colorblind racism,” is the pithiest summation we’ve ever encountered of the absurdity of contemporary left-liberal racial dogma.

It also turns out to be a product of academia: The idea of “colorblind racism” was hatched by Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, a professor of sociology at Duke University, a decade ago. Here’s a paper on the subject from the journal Critical Sociology.

Taranto goes on to posit that some of these completely unbiased, intellectually curious academic institutions may have something of a vested interest in proving their point. You see, as the economy continues to falter and conservative, austerity leaning measures begin to take hold and spread at both the state and federal levels, the wellspring of cash which fuels the universities begins to dry up as well. And not to cast aspersions on anyone’s intellectual honesty here, but coming up with a result that casts doubt on the people threatening to dry up your grant money might not be the worst outcome in the world.

I am reminded of the IQ testing done by the Observers in the MST3K episode “The Undead”:

Not to sound like Tom Cruise, but don’t psychologists spit out some crap on occasion that should be easy to ignore as the crap it is?  Heck, it took until 1974 to say gay people aren’t crazy.

To make one more point, conservative talk host Dennis Prager has a line he repeats fairly often: “Generalizations are the mother of wisdom.”  Basically, if it walks like a duck, looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, it’s probably a duck.

Exceptions exist.  Maybe even quack.  But rarely fly.

Generalizations are how some people get through life.  It’s how most people get through life.  If you see this guy:

You can probably make some safe assumptions based on how he looks.  Does that make you racist?

How about this guy?

Or is he a “troubled youth from a community that’s exploited by The Man” and “ruthlessly oppressed by the system and institutionalized racism that prevents him from improving his lot in life”?

No, they’re both, in 1940s terminology, crumbs.

Or else that’s the so-called “color-blind racism” alluded to earlier.  Stop judging people.

There’s the moral to every ugly-duckling and underdog story we’re supposed to learn “don’t judge a book by it’s cover”.  Sure, that’s true.  But look at this book:

I’ll bet you know what’s inside.  There are (cue Sam Kinison volume) WORDS ON THE COVER!   They mean something.

People who have lower socioeconomic status tend to view things more as they are, not how they’d wish them to be.  They view people how they are, not how they wish them to be.  They live in a world where generalizations are used a lot, because they make sense.  Because in general, things are how they seem.  “Git-r-dun” and “Compton” are exactly how they seem.  No need to say “he was a victim, too“.  That’s absurd.  And if an intelligence test or series of psychological screenings is engineered by the shrink to prove that prejudice, which is often there for a reason, is a bad thing, then they can maneuver their study however they like to prove it, regardless of what history and historical outcomes have shown is beneficial to individuals.

Evan Sayet explains in his grand unified theorem of modern liberalism that a lot of what the modern liberal does is fight against discrimination – as in discriminating between two ideas or pieces of data or information.  Sometimes that results in discriminating between people – and there are socioeconomic and historical bases from which to make some decisions in a snap judgement, especially for people with specific life experience they’ve gone through.  Someone who’s had more time dealing with people because they’ve been working longer, rather than hanging out at a university, will make certain distinctions.  Someone who’s dealt with crime first hand will recognize people more likely to be involved in it.  They’ll rely on rules of thumb and generalizations because those are behaviors that lead to success – i.e., not being a crime victim.  Sometimes the socioeconomic makeup of reality doesn’t jive with what academics would like to see in their utopia.

And of course there are exceptions.  Intelligence is knowing that there are.

There are also words on this cover.

Consider the following?

Same age group, same ethnicity.  Different clothing and gender and the second group suddenly appears different.  Maybe some of those are important features when making decisions, whether it be walking down the street, as an employer, or as a parent when your offspring brings one home.

Anyhow, the whole “conservative=closed-minded=dumb” is a pretty simple claim to make, backed up by not asserting what conservative even means, what “intelligent” truly is, what education means vs indoctrination, and is mostly just a conflicting series of nonsense designed to generate interest in an academic’s paper.

Thomas Sowell mentioned in one of his columns that when we say something’s meaningless, we say “that’s academic”.  Often the case.

Santorum on Small Government

Judge Napolitano on FOX news pulled up this interview of Rick Santorum from 2005 saying this:

He’s a “winner” in Iowa’s Republican caucusing, but he’s a big government guy who pretty much outright states he opposes the beliefs of the basic freedoms the US is all about – not having government intrusion in the lives of citizens.  In no way does what he says here jive with conserving the principles of the US constitution – a compact between the citizen and the state – that creates an explicitly limited government.