Bernie Sanders Is the Oldest Child in the World

Based on this interview, it is clear Bernie Sanders has the mind of a child who is not at all serious about anything. He has good intentions, but he’s absolutely clueless as to how economies and societies in general work. He’s been reading so many communist manifestos that he hasn’t taken the time to learn the fundamentals and that magic wands do not work.

This man is demands even more economic hegemony in order to create a socialist economy, one which removes most of the incentives for people to go into business enterprises and develop the goods and technologies that have improved everyone’s life, including those in the poorest nations.

A “moral economy” is code word for a socialist economy where the benefits merit and the justifications for income and wealth attainment are set aside as inconsequential because society will not accept someone making too much money. Simply because someone out there might not feel so good that they didn’t bother getting their high school diploma, didn’t go to college, and is stuck with a minimum wage job.

Actions and decisions have consequences. Suck it up, buttercup, because the society Bernie Sanders dreams of is one which human beings, once they are living in that society, reject. They either don’t play by the rules and cheat within the system or they dismantle the system. The Nordic model is going to last only so long and it’s already beginning to show cracks despite being only a few decades old.

So, no, I won’t be voting for someone who still thinks with the cognitive capacity of a teenager. The only difference between Bernie Sanders and a conservative who has read only Atlas Shrugged is that at least the latter read a book which has at least one tip toe in the realm of reality.

The Left’s Minimum Wage Hike and Our Socialist Future

Once the left pushes a $15 minimum wage, paid leave, and other government-enforced privileges and gifts, they will demand the government simply GIVE them a wage to sit at home. Because, when you stop reading the newspapers that only tell part of the story, the fact is that job loss is part of the equation from the left.

She quotes a variety of liberal economic policy activists who are now hedging their bets. “For its advocates, the question isn’t whether minimum wage hikes will kill jobs, but rather how to help people who end up unemployed when they do,” DePillis reported. That is, “when” they become financially dependent on the federal safety net; not “if.”

 

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“Why shouldn’t we in fact accept job loss?” asks New School economics and urban policy professor David Howell, who’s about to publish a white paper on the subject. “What’s so bad about getting rid of crappy jobs, forcing employers to upgrade, and having a serious program to compensate anyone who is in the slightest way harmed by that?”

 

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For larger firms that can afford to simply eliminate minimum wage positions by replacing them with a touch-screen self-service station, for example, the choice becomes a no-brainer. The self-styled most compassionate among us believe that the priority should be providing those who have their position eliminated as a result of this law with government benefits as soon as possible. While their solution to the problem they created mitigates some immediate suffering, it also robs the newly jobless of their sense of agency and pride. Families deteriorate, neighborhoods follow, and social cohesion worsens.

 

So while people rail on Hillary Clinton nonchalantly saying that the coal miners will lose their jobs, her and Bernie Sanders are perfectly fine with millions upon millions of people losing their jobs.

Academic Hegemony and the Propaganda In Universities

They only reason it seems “facts” have a leftwing bent is because all the people discussing the issues academically are leftwing. In the social sciences, most of the discussions are among avowed Marxists who have the privilege of academic hegemony and use strong-arm tactics to limit discussion within a frame they are comfortable with. This closing of the mind affects intellectual curiosity and teaching, effectively making universities havens of propaganda instead of actual places of experimentation, discovery, and learning.

Only the economists interviewed routinely expressed the conviction that their political convictions were irrelevant to their professional advancement and to the standards of research quality. (The authors seem surprised that right-of-center economists spoke highly of Paul Krugman’s scholarship, if not his New York Times columns.) Economics is also the only field Shields and Dunn studied where professors’ partisan affiliations mirror the general public’s. Marxists are more common in the social sciences and humanities than conservatives.

The modern academy pays lip service to diversity. Yet as a “stigmatized minority,” the authors note, right-of-center professors feel pressure to hide their identities, in many cases consciously emulating gays in similarly hostile environments. “I am the equivalent of someone who was gay in Mississippi in 1950,” a prominent full professor told Shields and Dunn. He’s still hiding because he hopes for honors that depend on maintaining his colleagues’ good will. “If I came out, that would finish me,” he said.

More often, conservatives follow Rossman’s strategy, hiding their views until they’re safely tenured. “Nearly one-­third of professors in the six disciplines we investigated tended to conceal their politics prior to tenure,” write Shields and Dunn. The number rises to nearly half when you exclude economics.

The pattern has also worsened in recent decades. Among those over 65, only 7 percent hid their politics before tenure, compared to 46 percent of those under 45. Without the young economists, that number would look even more extreme.

In their op-ed, Shields and Dunn downplay the common pre-tenure deception as “a temporary hardship.” But the dishonesty corrodes the mission of the university. For instance, a political scientist at a research university told the authors that he wouldn’t assign works by Friedrich Hayek in his political economy class before he was tenured. His fears of political ostracism thereby deprived students of exposure to an influential 20th-century thinker.

Right-of-center scholars also learn not to ask research questions that might suggest the wrong political views. A historian told the authors he’d decided not to write his dissertation on the history of supply-side economics, because he feared the mere choice of the topic might reveal his deviance. So a significant movement in American political and intellectual history went unexamined.

I Disagree With Trump, but On Abortion, He’s Intellectually Consistent

So people decided to get all uppity about Trump saying women who get abortions should be punished if abortions are illegal.

Trump is an asshole and is not fit for presidency under our republic, but this righteous indignation about what he said is ludicrous.

I disagree with criminalizing drug sales and prostitution, but do we not, under the law, punish both the sellers of drugs and the consumer? Do we not punish both sex worker and John?

So why in the hell is there a disconnect among people who think abortion is murder and Trump’s stance? The issue isn’t that Trump is wrong. If you think abortion is murder and the states make that public policy decision to make it murder or make it illegal to participate in the act of having and performing an abortion, why in the holy hell is the consumer end of the criminal activity not being punished?

Trump just showed the anti-abortion demographic that they’re not really all in on being against murder of the unborn.

And this article linked above and the Republican Party commentariat completely fail at noticing that. Mostly because people would rather just feel better about themselves after another Trumpgasm.

#OregonUnderAttack Or Something I Don’t Really Care About

It’s incredibly stupid that a bunch of dumb people with guns decided to take over a federal building in the middle of nowhere in Oregon, where the only people in danger from violence are those very people and the federal officials who might bother to give a shit about that takeover, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

I’ve seen people try to make comparisons to a bunch of black people in an inner city taking over a building and how, if that happened, the police would have already raided the building and killed all of the black people.

A bunch of dumb people with guns in the middle of nowhere aren’t a danger to the greater public. They’re a danger to themselves.

A bunch of people in the middle of a city pointing their guns out into the city is a completely different matter. That’s a danger to not just themselves, but the general public.

The best solution for this “standoff” in The Middle of Nowhere, Oregon is not a bunch of tear gas, a bunch of guns blazing, a bunch of drone strikes, hell, not even a fuck to be given. Literally fence them in out of the range of their guns, turn off their electricity, water, and sewage, and build a prison around them. If they’re so set on staying in that summer home cottage called a “federal building” in The Middle of Nowhere, Oregon, let them. They’ve committed felonies; build their prison around them.

But don’t be that dickhead that makes a bigger deal about it than it is. Because nobody gave a fuck about that first dead person from a homicide in 2016 that happened in Chicago. Nobody will give a fuck about the first person to be shot and killed by a police officer in the United States, most likely because that person is statistically likely to be a white person (despite the fact you’re more likely to be shot while being black, far more white people are shot by police, but nobody cares because nobody should care all that much).

Don’t be that dickhead that pretends to be up in arms about a bunch of idiots being idiots in the middle of the forest. If nobody’s there to give a fuck, no fucks would be given.

Islam vs the Muslim Identity

I think several people I am friends with could get some insight from this conversation between Ali Rizvi and Dave Rubin about the Muslim identity and how both the left and the right have reacted completely the wrong way when it comes to both 9/11 and the Islamic State.

– The left argued that Muslims have to be protected as a minority
– Any criticism of Islam is bigotry

– The right (Fox News narrative) argued that Islam is a violent religion
– We must profile everybody and clamp down on immigration
The mistake both made was conflating “the ideology with the people/identity.”

Most people are Muslim as a birth identity, just like someone may be Jewish as a birth identity but actually be an atheist (or a member of another religion). Ali Rizvi is an atheist, but considers himself to be a Muslim by birth and tradition – in the same way people who are born within a Christian culture celebrate Christmas and other traditionally Christian celebrations.

So the left is making the mistake of conflating the religion, which doesn’t necessarily have to be a thing of evil, with the people who are committing evil acts under the name of Islam. In conflating them and arguing “any criticism of Islam is bigotry” and defending the Qur’an and Islam, the left is actually doing a disservice to the religion. People who are scared about what’s going on in the Middle East are pointing to the terrorists and the IS quoting, correctly, from the Qur’an and other religious texts and the left is defending those religious texts and the religion. That doesn’t quell the fear and concerns of those people and actually leaves the door wide open to far right-wing politicians with better, though incorrect, answers than the left is willing to give.

The right is making the mistake of conflating the religion with the identity of terrorists and the members of the IS as well – out of the same ignorance of the religion as the left is. The right is taking the terrorists/IS on their word and, as a result, are reacting in a way that feeds both the left and the Islamic supremacists. The right is making the point for the terrorists/IS to other Muslims and those Muslims who don’t side with the terrorists/IS see this and react in a way that convinces them to support the IS – arguably with reason.

When the Muslims are seeing their cities being bombed and western countries are barring refugees who want to get away from the madness that is ISIS, they see themselves as being penned up to be eradicated by the west. Of course they’re going to become more open to whatever it is the Islamic supremacists are saying. The poor nerf herder in Syria who just wants to live a simple life but can’t out of fear of their land being bombed aren’t going to see or hear the rationale the bombers are making to do the bombing. They will not recognize their lands are being bombed because ISIS is on their lands when ISIS members are telling their own messed up narrative about the west wanting to eradicate all Muslims. They’re going to join ISIS.

Both the left and the right are making this absolutely devastating mistake and both are equally at fault for the surge in the right-ring: the left for not providing the answers because those answers might seem bigoted (The discussions about terrorism don’t have to be bigoted, but the left won’t bother talking long enough to realize that.) and the right for not taking a more nuanced approach to the Middle Eastern situation.