Category Archives: Leftist Unreality

All those things the Left knows, that ain’t so.

Basic Life Lessons, #s 1 and 2: Fact and Value; Cause and Effect

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It feels weird writing a post with a title like “Basic Life Lessons.”  Especially since I pretty much know the entire readership of this blog personally (their online personae, anyway), and can assure you they need no instruction on life’s basics from me.  But since we hope this site will one day become something of a one-stop shop for the refutation of the most common forms of leftard nonsense, I feel compelled to add a few words about the two biggest barriers to true bipartisanship today.

The Fact/Value Distinction.  Otherwise known as “prescription vs. description,” “the is/ought distinction,” etc., this is a pretty basic idea in modern philosophy.  There are empirically-verifiable observations about the world, and there’s how we feel about them, and there’s no necessary relation between the two.  Or: only facts have logical relationships to other facts.

For instance: There is a marked differential in crime rates between races here in the USA.  That’s a fact.  It might be deplorable.  It might be due to culture.  It might be due to systematic bias in law enforcement.  It might be due to IQ gaps.  It might be due to divine intervention.  But all of those statements, except the first, are hypotheses, subject to further empirical testing.

Rationally, of course, Our Betters know this — we assume they’re not stupid, reluctant as they are to extend the same courtesy to us — but rationality, as it so often does, left the building a few sentences ago.  They really, really, really want those measurable crime differentials to be the result of systematic racism in our nation’s police departments, and so they proceed as if they are the product of racist cops.

At this point, inevitably, Our Betters will try to play gotcha.  They’ll cite studies about “racial profiling” and whatnot.  These, they assure us, are facts.  But: How does someone prove motive?  How do you know the cops are racist?  How do you know you’re not a racist?  Ask any liberal this, and of course she’ll reply that she can’t be a racist — she is, after all, a liberal.  Values trump facts every time.

Cause and Effect:  Mistaking their opinions for facts is bad enough.  It gets worse, though — liberals really do seem to believe that not only does intelligence cause liberalism, but liberalism causes intelligence.

Examples of this are legion, and I’m hardly the first — or the millionth — conservative blogger to point this little truism about Our Betters out.  Because it bears repeating, because so many people are still allowed to get away with it.  For instance, co-blogger Morgan opines on folks who excuse Barack Obama’s and Hillary Clinton’s obvious shame deficiency by… wait for it… blaming Bush:

Maybe this is the epiphany that can help heal the divide, though: “But Bush did this other thing” is not a comparison. I don’t think so, anyhow. I think — it’s a loophole. The person mentioning Bush voted for Obama, and you’ve committed this sin of saying something that makes perfect sense and so, therefore, you are accusing them of having elected a psychopath. What they are doing with the “But Bush” thing is merely providing their excuse. They’re not comparing, they’re saying “I’m not a psychopath, even though, as you accurately point out, it looks like I voted for one.” Number 43 did all these awful terrible things, and they just had to replace him with someone.

Ask a liberal if he’s ever been wrong about anything of consequence.  Go ahead; we’ll wait.  Finished?  I’d bet the national debt that you found plenty of liberals willing to admit their error in small things — Our Betters are nothing if not ostentatiously modest — but there’s a world of difference between not knowing where the nearest post office is and misunderstanding the basic mechanisms of the economy.  I was being nice before; I’m pretty sure Sen. Elizabeth Warren really doesn’t know why the minimum wage isn’t $22 an hour.  Their worldview is designed that way — if all smart people are liberals, then only liberals can be smart.  All the best learning comes from making mistakes, but the entire premise of liberalism is that liberals are never wrong.

And that’s why the Obama voter who is disturbed by Benghazi, the various IRS scandals, Fast and Furious, the AP wiretapping business, Pigford, or any of the others on the ever-growing list of administration scandals has to claim that George W. Bush did it, too.  It’s objectively bad behavior, but liberals can’t be bad… therefore such behavior must be characteristic of politicians in general, and of course those guys are all scum.  Why, just look at ‘em!  Watergate, Iran-Contra, Operation Iraqi Freedom…. yep, assholes to a man.  And we surely didn’t screw up by voting for another politician; we were lied to! and besides, that’s the system, it can’t be helped.

D3: Liberal Transitivity Axiom

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For some reason this came up in a Google Image search from "transitivity." Let's just go with it.

For some reason this came up in a Google Image search for “transitivity.” Let’s just go with it.

The Crimson Reach has noticed part of the Liberal Transitivity Axiom.

Why doesn’t the left, instead of getting bogged down over the question of whether George W. Bush is ‘smart’, just say ‘okay, he’s smart. And? He was still a bad President.’ I’d agree with them!

But to say that, they’d have to recognize that there’s a difference between being ‘smart’ and being a good executive, that they are not the same thing, and (by implication) that a Presidential race isn’t and shouldn’t be a competition for who is the ‘smartest’.

Liberals honestly seem to believe that intelligence, competence, good intentions, and moral virute are non just synonymous, but mathematically identical.  And all of them are identical with the public expression of liberal opinions.  So:

Liberal Transitivity Axiom (n) — the immutable law of the universe by which loudly spouting leftist talking points makes one into the avatar of all that is good.

The LTA is the most frustrating part about talking to a leftist, because it guarantees that any discussion quickly becomes a lecture.  It’s basic math — if “spouting liberal talking points” equals “intelligence,” then anyone who does not spout liberal talking points is by definition unintelligent.  And who “discusses” things with morons?  Talking to a liberal about anything is like trying to explain the designated hitter rule to a dog.

You’re the dog.

 

 

Living Inside the Whale

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George Orwell wrote an essay called “Inside the Whale.”  It’s mostly a discussion of the works of Henry Miller, then very trendy and banned for sale in the United States because of obscenity.  Towards the end he comments on Miller’s use of whales as metaphors, and pens this startling passage:

For the fact is that being inside a whale is a very comfortable, cosy, homelike thought. The historical Jonah, if he can be so called, was glad enough to escape, but in imagination, in day-dream, countless people have envied him. It is, of course, quite obvious why. The whale’s belly is simply a womb big enough for an adult. There you are, in the dark, cushioned space that exactly fits you, with yards of blubber between yourself and reality, able to keep up an attitude of the completest indifference, no matter what happens. A storm that would sink all the battleships in the world would hardly reach you as an echo. Even the whale’s own movements would probably be imperceptible to you. He might be wallowing among the surface waves or shooting down into the blackness of the middle seas (a mile deep, according to Herman Melville), but you would never notice the difference. Short of being dead, it is the final, unsurpassable stage of irresponsibility.

And follows it shortly with this:

Almost certainly we are moving into an age of totalitarian dictatorships—an age in which freedom of thought will be at first a deadly sin and later on a meaningless abstraction. The autonomous individual is going to be stamped out of existence. But this means that literature, in the form in which we know it, must suffer at least a temporary death. The literature of liberalism is coming to an end and the literature of totalitarianism has not yet appeared and is barely imaginable…. But from now onwards the all-important fact for the creative writers going to be that this is not a writer’s world. That does not mean that he cannot help to bring the new society into being, but he can take no part in the process as a writer. For as a writer he is a liberal, and what is happening is the destruction of liberalism. It seems likely, therefore, that in the remaining years of free speech any novel worth reading will follow more or less along the lines that Miller has followed—I do not mean in technique or subject matter, but in implied outlook. The passive attitude will come back, and it will be more consciously passive than before. Progress and reaction have both turned out to be swindles. Seemingly there is nothing left but quietism—robbing reality of its terrors by simply submitting to it. Get inside the whale—or rather, admit you are inside the whale (for you are, of course). Give yourself over to the world-process, stop fighting against it or pretending that you control it; simply accept it, endure it, record it.

That was written in 1940, but a more apt description of the state of affairs in 2013 is hard to imagine.

I’ve been thinking a lot about Orwell’s essay lately.  My significant other, for instance, takes Time magazine.  Our edition had this cover:

g9510.90.50_malalaB.inddThat’s Malala Yousafzai, a Pakistani girl Time proclaims “one of the 100 most influential people in the world.”  And her story is inspiring, except….  well, here’s Wiki:

On 15 October 2012, former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, now the United Nations Special Envoy for Global Education, launched a petition in Yousafzai’s name and “in support of what Malala fought for”…

The petition contains three demands:

  • We call on Pakistan to agree to a plan to deliver education for every child.
  • We call on all countries to outlaw discrimination against girls.
  • We call on international organizations to ensure the world’s 61 million out-of-school children are in education by the end of 2015.

Anybody notice anything missing there?  How about here:

As of 7 November 2012, Mullah Fazlullah, the cleric who ordered the attack on Yousafzai, is based in eastern Afghanistan where he was confirmed to be in hiding according to ISAF sources in Afghanistan. An ISAF spokesman stated Fazlullah was not being tracked by US forces since he was viewed as an “other-side-of-the-border problem” and was not involved in operations against American or Afghan interests

Or here:

The Taliban have been clear in their response to the assassination attempt in that they will continue to target her, despite her survival, with a spokesman saying, “The attack was a warning to all youngsters in the area that they would be targeted if they followed her example.”

In other words:  Absolutely nothing has changed.  The UN’s “I am Malala” petition has had, as of this writing, exactly the same impact as every other UN petition regarding that part of the world, i.e. none.  The Mullah who ordered up her assassination is still at large and making statements.  The Taliban are still determined to kill her.  Pakistani girls are still stoned for trying to go to school.  If you take away all the troposphere warming from Gordon Brown’s hot air and the millions of kilojoules expended by liberals worldwide patting themselves on the back for signing (or, at least, thinking about signing) the petition, the net effect of all this on the world has been… zero.

And she’s one of the most influential people in the world.

Or consider this story, again from Time, profiled at Ace of Spades (Ace link).  As Ace explains it, Time strongly implies that because Boston Bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev was a boxer, and could therefore have been suffering from chronic traumatic encephalopathy, his similarly radical brother could’ve been also.  The magazine’s “Healthland” article concludes

While none of this likely would have deterred Tsarnaev, it might be used to diagnose other people at risk of explosive CTE-related violence and stop them before they act out. By treating a single person’s wounded brain, doctors could one day save uncounted other lives.

leaving it to our imaginations to supply the mechanisms by which Tamerlan’s CTE-inspired violence rubbed off on his brother Dzhohkar.

Meanwhile, the New York Times (h/t Ace) muses on “the complexities of online identity — of the ways in which people strike poses and don masks on the Web (which can sometimes turn into self-fulfilling prophecies), and the ways in which the Web can magnify or accelerate users’ interests and preoccupations.”

Given the layers of irony, sarcasm and joking often employed on Twitter, it can be difficult to parse the messages of a stranger. Yet some of them can seem menacing or portentous, given what we now suspect: “a decade in america already, I want out,” “Never underestimate the rebel with a cause” or “No one is really violent until they’re with the homies.” But others suggest a more Holden Caulfield-like adolescent alienation: “some people are just misunderstood by the world thus the increase of suicide rates.”

Ah yes.  Just your normal alienated adolescent, with a prod from “the complexities of online identity” — except, of course, that this version of Holden Caulfield went on to murder people.

Time Magazine and The New York Times are hugely influential publications, with readership in the millions worldwide.  They are using this influence to push us all further inside the whale.  By pretending that Malala Yousafzai is influential, that Dzhohkar Tsarnaev was a typical alienated adolescent, that Tamerlan Tsarnaev turned violent from a knock on the head, they urge us to lay back and accept the inevitability of Islamic radicalism, of international terrorism, of random violence perpetrated by people we invited into our country and nurtured with our welfare dollars.  

The stark fact remains:  This particular act of violence — the Boston Bombing — could have been prevented.  Not by better cops, or more security cameras, or, God help us, with stricter gun control laws, but by a better immigration policy, e.g. literally any other policy than the one we have now.  The Russians repeatedly warned us about these guys.  The FBI investigated them back in 2011.  And yet, not only did we give them money in the form of welfare, we granted one of them American citizenship.  While he was on welfare.  After being investigated by the FBI.  And after repeated warnings from the Russians.

In any rational society, any one of those facts would have protestors out in the streets.  In America, though, we have our leading organs of influence urging us to calm down, lay back, and enjoy the blubber.

You Don’t Need to See His Papers

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Just when I thought my jaw couldn’t hit the floor any harder, I ran across these headlines yesterday:

This is insane.

It really illustrates that the truth in this spoof video is really pretty much on the money.


Of course, we’re not saying that having an Arab name makes you a terrorist. But there is a pattern, and it’s a pattern that people are apparently more than just a little eager to refuse to see. Political correctness has rendered our news media impotently incurious when it comes to certain subjects.

I have a Muslim co-worker who told me, not terribly long after 9/11, that her teenage daughter had come to her and said, “Mom, I know not all Muslims are terrorists, but it does seem like most of terrorists are Muslim”. So it’s not just me.

There is a difference between religions. Even staunch Atheists Bill Maher and Penn Jillette acknowledge that.  Sure there are crazy people of all faiths and non-faiths who have murdered and who were even inspired by their beliefs in many cases — but there is only one major world religion that has an extremely well-established pattern based not only on the relgious writings upon which their religion is based, but is rife with religious leaders who preach violent jihad and has myriad organizations world-wide to do violence, in the name of their God and their religion and who regularly carry it out.  Can we just say that?   Really?  We can’t?

It now appears that our well-mannered Chechens who blew the legs off of Boston Marathon spectators and acually killed three … were likely recruited as disaffected teens with Muslim sympathies by a Saudi Islamic Radicalizing agent Abdul Rahman Ali Al-Harbi.  This is exactly what terrorist organizations do in the middle east.  Now they’re finding ways of getting it done here (helps get around immigration inquiries if your disaffected youth are already here before they are radicalized).

But you’re not hearing about Al-Harbi in the media, because … the Media is deeply invested in this idea that Islam is just like any other religion when it comes to violence, and it is also in thrall with this administration and will apparently do anything to protect it.

We are in big trouble, folks.

UPDATE: Here’s another one from today. I’m sure there are more.

bostonsandyhook

crossposted at The Clue Batting Cage

Taxes

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Ah, yes.  Tragedy?  Well, never let a crisis go to waste, as Saul Alinsky taught ‘em.

Saw this on facebook today….

taxespayMmmmm.  Yes.  Ok, show of hands of people who don’t think taxes should pay for police and firefighters and EMT’s?

Out of 10,000 people in the crowd here … oh, I think I see three.  The guy 50 yards to the right of Ron Paul, and a couple of anarchists in dreads passing a phattie back and forth.

So what is the implication here?  Since you’ve agreed to farm out some of our essential security services to local government, whenever we want to expand the size and scope of government and rationalize why more of other people’s money really isn’t theirs because they “didn’t build that” … just … shut up?

Yup, I think that’s pretty much what they’re saying.

The Internet, Solipsism, and Socialism

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So the Left are being their usual classy selves at the death of Margaret Thatcher.

Whenever a liberal passes on, of course, we’re instructed by the media and leftwing blogs (BIRM) that treating the deceased with anything less than unqualified deference is beyond the pale of humanity.  When I pointed out this brain-bursting hypocrisy to a Facebook acquantance, I got back a reply that said, in effect*

But Margaret Thatcher was a hateful old bitch.  I’d tell her that to her face.  Plenty of people on both sides say they’re glad when somebody or other dies.  Get over it.

Ahh, the ever-tolerant tolerance of Our Betters.  I was inclined to dismiss the whole thing as typical lefty class, especially the trollish flexing of the beer muscles (sure you’d tell Lady Thatcher to her face that you considered her a hateful old bitch.  Sure you would).  But then it got me thinking: no wonder these people are socialists.  Vile, hateful biliousness is a feature, not a bug, of the community-based reality.

I started trying to enter the headspace of my FB interlocutor.  Since my momma raised me right, my first reaction at the thought “I’m glad Hillary Clinton (say) is dead!” is guilt.  I bet I would disagree with every opinion Hillary Clinton has ever held.  I certainly think the American political landscape would be better off without her, and it would’ve been even better had she taken up needlepoint or something as a hobby instead of communism.  I might even — I confess it, I’m no saint — consider Hillary Clinton to be, in my FB interlocutor’s words, a hateful old bitch.

But… glad she’s dead? No.  I’d feel horribly guilty for even thinking that, even for a second.**

But let’s say I had that thought.  Worse, that thought somehow got out — somebody heard me express it.  My reaction here is shame.  It’s a shameful thought, and I’ve done damage to my soul for even thinking it.  And now everybody can see that damage.

But let’s say I double down and broadcast the thought far and wide, because hey, it’s my FB acquaintance who heard me say it.  Tit for tat, dickhead.  But…. here again I feel shame, because now I’ve not only doubled down on an unworthy emotion, I’ve told the whole world that this is where I’m staking my ground.  This is the rhetorical hill I’m going to die on, and if you disagree with me, fuck you too.

I can’t see that situation ending in anything other than me feeling horrible about myself, and in need of a long stretch of soul-searching.  And those are the emotions I’m supposed to have.  Morality aside, the kind of society which reacts to an enemy’s death with open, unrestrained glee is one that very quickly makes its peace with – if it doesn’t actively encourage– vendettas and clan feuds and secret police and reeducation camps.

Consider my FB buddy’s motives.  He wanted, expected, and received affirmation for expressing the thought “Margaret Thatcher was a hateful old bitch and I’m glad she’s dead.”  This is the face he wanted to present to the world, and he expended effort cultivating a network of people with the same values.

Consider who Margaret Thatcher was.  Whatever your opinion of her administration — and, unless you’re a scholar of very recent British history, it’ll be misinformed — the chances that she, personally, did anything that materially affected my Facebook buddy’s life are nil.  Sending troops to the Falklands and calling Nelson Mandela a terrorist might be things to disagree with — or maybe not*** — but to assume they make any meaningful difference to one’s daily middle-class life in 21st century America is a Kim Jong Il-esque level of delusional narcissism.

Finally, consider the –to me– frankly bizarre and awful justification my interlocutor offered:  “Everyone on Facebook does it; get used to it.”  That’s where vitriol is a feature, not a bug, of socialism.  If man’s being is purely social — a leftist canon — then the only possible arbiters of proper behavior are The People and The Government.  Which incentivises frankly antisocial attitudes — “good” behavior is whatever gets you what you want, and you can take as much as “soceity” lets you until Congress finally passes a law preventing it.  In fact, you’re a fool not to, since all the other hogs will be scrambling for their places at the trough.  That’s why I, personally, was so upset at that Sandra Fluke slut — if I’m paying for her birth control, then you’re fuckin’ A right her vagina is my business.  She made it that way.  It’s a race to the bottom; last one down pays the tab.

This is what the left’s particular solipsism leads to.  And the internet enables it.

 

 

*summary.  As this was a friend of a friend, I can’t see the original

**and for the benefit of our Orwellian state security apparatus:  I have never met Ms. Clinton, have no plans to meet her, and bear her no personal animus.  I sincerely hope she lives a long, happy life…. in total obscurity.

*** Mandela was the leader of a terrorist organization which committed a lot of terrorist acts during his tenure.  This, by liberal logic, constitutes “not a terrorist.”

QUILTS: Priorities

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One QUestion I’d Love To See asked has to do with priorities.

subwaypregnancyYou’ve probably read something about the furor surrounding this ad campaign in NYC.  All the usual idiots are outraged, of course, in their usual boring thoughtless screechy way.  What I’d like to know is this:

Which is worse, these ads or 16oz sodas?

It sounds silly, I know.  But stick with me here.  A large part of liberalism’s appeal is its endless insistence that, contrary to all decrees of God and nature, you really can have everything.  If you seemingly can’t have a healthy committed-but-not-clingy relationship while raising 2.1 perfect kids while making partner at the law firm by age 30 while writing a novel while eat-pray-loving around the world while staying in great shape while enjoying a fantastic smorgasbord of international cuisine while living in an ethnically diverse and vibrant yet perfectly safe neighborhood in a rent-controlled apartment no more than a block away from all major services while finishing your PhD in Women’s Studies, it’s not that this would violate several important laws of thermodynamics.  No, it’s somebody’s fault, damn it!

Given humanity’s lamentable propensity to believe pretty lies, and the media’s insistence that reality shall not obtrude upon the public’s consciousness until at least 2016, asking about priorities is the only chance we have of breaking through the veil.  We need to ask them to make some hard choices.  Even a liberal will admit, I think — if you press them hard enough — that two posters can’t occupy the same stretch of subway wall simultaneously.  So: Should we advertise the soda ban, or propagandize for Planned Parenthood?  Similarly, I think they would agree — again if pressed hard enough — that one police officer can’t be in two places at the same time.  So:  Should he spend his time going after secondhand smokers or under-the-counter consumers of oversized colas?

We have to force them to realize there’s an inflection point, even in liberaltopia, even when pursuing two bona fide Good Things.  How, for instance, are we going to get the unwed teenage mom all the education she needs about the bounteous cornucopia of public support that is hers by right if she’s spending all her time getting the 24/7 postnatal care that is also hers by right?  Which is better: a stint in the Peace Corps, or being a full-time staffer at Organizing for America?

How, in other words, do we rank Good Things?

I’d love to see someone put that to Jay Carney.  Of course, we already know how he’d answer….

 

D3: Goodperson Bingo

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Surprising absolutely nobody, liberal twit New York Times reporter (BIRM 3x) Nick Kristof isn’t too happy about the new Pope’s lack of progressive credentials:

Pope Francis seems liberal on social justice but sadly traditional on sexuality and contraception

(via Ace).

Still Catholic; same funny hat

Still Catholic; same tall hat

Equally unsurprisingly, a great many people are ragging Kristof about this.

So far, so predictable.  But here’s the thing:  Despite being a liberal, a reporter, and a New York Times employee, Nick Kristoff isn’t stupid.  He knows a pro-gay, pro-abortion “Catholic” has roughly the same chance of being elected Pope as I do of being elected chair of the Berkeley Wymyn’s Studies program.

So why does he post crap like this?

I know the answer, of course, same as you.  He’s playing Goodperson Bingo.

Good*per*son Bing*o (n).  A competitive public display of Goodperson status.  Players assert an item of leftist cant in response to a news item.  Points are awarded based on the number of contrary responses.  The more people who disagree with you, the more popular you are; the most popular is by definition the most virtuous.

This is, sadly, one of the keys to understanding the liberal mentality.  Since anyone who disagrees with a leftist is stupid (just ask ‘em!), everyone who disagrees with a leftist in public is one more confirmed kill in the war against idiocy.  So-and-So thinks the Pope shouldn’t be all about gay marriage?  Well, that proves it– So-and-So is a moron.

It’s very important for liberals to have these public affirmations of being smarter than someone else.  Otherwise how would they know?

Remember the functional definition of liberalism:  The lifelong attempt to make high school turn out right.  Being “smart” — or virtuous, or educated, or attractive, or whatever — is, to the liberal, exactly the same as being “cool” is to a high school kid.  Nothing can make you cool.  You either are or you aren’t, and the only thing mere effort can do is to put on the right clothes and get the right haircut and post the right Facebook statuses and maintain ever-watchful vigilance against the thousand and one microscopic social missteps that will hurl you — forever – into the ranks of the losers.

Goodperson Bingo is just a high-tech way of laughing at the fat kid with braces in the cafeteria.

 

*I was going to call this entry “virtue bingo,” but apparently there really is a site called Virtue Bingo out there.  Wouldn’t want to be guilty of the ol’ copyright infringement, ay wot?  Sadly, though, Virtue Bingo appears to be a site where people really play bingo, for money and stuff.  Which I had no idea was even a thing.

 

Things I Wish Liberals Understood: Prices

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Though it might just be simpler to say “economics” or even just “basic math,” it wouldn’t help.  Of course libs can do basic math, and at least some of them certainly think they understand economics.  Problem is — as problem usually is — most of what they know ain’t so.  Not only do they not understand economics, they don’t even understand the basic components of economics.

Start with money.  It’s fun to ask liberals what they think money actually is.  You’ll have to work a bit to get an answer – being so condescending themselves, they’re quick to sense it in others — but if you do manage it, you can bet the entire organic free-range farm it’ll be something like “money is a store of value.”  This fits in nicely with their naive Marxism, which assumes that something’s value depends on the labor that went into its manufacture.  But it’s wrong.

Money is a middleman.  That’s all.  We don’t actually have to trade a cow for three goats, or a day’s labor for a meal, because we’ve abstracted the swap into something standardized and transportable.  We can trade a cow here for three goats on the other side of the world through the mechanism of money, because it replaces the nearly endless series of physical transactions that would have to take occur to do that with living, breathing livestock.

Simple, right?  But liberals don’t get it, and the reason they don’t is because they think money has something to do with price.

This makes sense, again, from the naively Marxist point of view.  If an object’s value depends on the stored labor it contains, then its price is the measure of the capitalist ripoff perpetrated in the sale.  A pair of Nikes costs $2 to manufacture and retails for $200, and the other $198 is why there’s starvation in Indonesia.

A price is information.  An object’s cost-of-manufacture is a part, but only a part, of its price.  The rest comes from things like transportation costs, overhead, taxes, and, most crucially, demand.  Nikes sold at cost wouldn’t be Nikes.

P.J. O’Rourke dedicated a section of Eat the Rich to the Soviet economic system.  This is from memory (Google books doesn’t give a page preview), but it’s close enough, and perfectly explains what price is:

The old Soviet system worked on what it called Gross Output Targets.  That is, some party hack somewhere decided that the citizens of Vladivostok needed 3,000 shoes, and so ordered the local shoe factory to produce them.  Since the factory manager had to requisition everything he needed to make the shoes from some other bureaucrat — and because his very life often depended on hitting the Gross Output Target — he’d make shoes as cheaply and efficiently as possible…. which meant his factory would crank out nothing but baby shoes.  If the party hack checked up on his work and ordered the factory manager to produce 3,000 shoes for men and women as well as children, the factory would produce 2,998 baby shoes, a pump, and a wingtip.  If the manager were ordered to produce 3,000 pounds of shoes, the factory would grind out an enormous pair of concrete sneakers.

Price is the feedback mechanism that gets the goods to the people who need them.  The Average Josef in the USSR was as invisible to the factory manager as he was to the Party Chairman, since all any of them could see was that the Gross Output Target had been fulfilled in accordance with the Five Year Plan.  Capitalism has its own inefficiencies and injustices, of course, but you can’t sell a pair of concrete sneakers at any price.  The main thing price reflects, in other words, is demand.

Liberals want to turn all that into a moral judgment.  Demand is inherently irrational.  You don’t need a pair of $200 sneakers.  But the marketing department at Nike, those dastards, have convinced you that you do, which means you’re “wasting” $198 that could go towards midnight basketball programs or eradicating crotch rot in Indochina.  And every weekend, Phil Knight and his cronies lock themselves in their vaults and roll around in a big pile of ill-gotten gains.

Basically it boils down to choice.  Liberals don’t want you to have any.  Since they’ve cloaked their ignorance of price in faux-altruism, they can berate you for buying Nikes while themselves purchasing organic carrots at three hundred times the market rate.  Your choices are the manipulations of evil marketers; theirs stem from concern for the planet.  And the only solution, of course, is to legislate what you can or can’t buy, since everyone knows that sneakers really only cost $2…..

 

Authoritah!!!

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CartmanAuthoritahOver at Morgan’s we’re having another endless thread about “science.”  This time it’s about the proper use of “authority,” and the fallacy of Appeal to same.

An Appeal to Authority is a logical fallacy of the form “X is true because person Y says so.”  It’s a fallacy both formally and informally.  It’s formally wrong because the truth of a proposition doesn’t depend on the speaker — two plus two is four even if Hitler says so; it’s not five even if Gandhi insists it is.

It’s infomally wrong because it’s nebulous, and here’s where it gets interesting.  Most people trust authorities up to a point.  It’s part of the social contract.  If I’ve got a cold, I go to the doctor instead of cracking a textbook on cell biology and firing up the bunsen burner.  The doctor in turn trusts his mechanic when it comes to engine repair, the mechanic trusts his accountant on taxes, etc.  Society as a whole benefits from such specialization, and so we’ve agreed to outsource a part of our thinking to field specialists.

Part, but not all.  If you go to the doctor with a headache and the first thing he wants to do is order up a colonoscopy, a reasonable person asks for an explanation.  This is true no matter how many degrees the doctor has or from where, his publication record, or anything else.  It’s just common sense.

Liberals, as a general rule, don’t seem to believe this.  Which is funny, because they write endless polemics showing that liberals are more comfortable with nuance, or that conservatives are more authoritarian.  Yet when it comes to a lists of Things Which Shall Not Be Questioned, the liberal list dwarfs the conservative.  Things like:

  • the proper capacity of a rifle’s magazine
  • the point at which life begins
  • the future temperature of the atmosphere
  • how much money is “too much”
  • that IQ exists
  • that men and women have inherent differences
  • that powers not delegated to the federal government, or to the states, are reserved for the people
  • that our common citizenship is trumped by ethnic ancestry
  • that the life of a fetus is only the mother’s concern, but the life of a tree affects us all

&c.

It’s one of the main reasons I’m not a liberal — it’s too confusing.  Anne Hathaway makes a million dollars for two months’ work, which means she’s Made Enough Money (TM), but she’s also a feminist, so she gets a pass.

The only way out of this dilemma is to outsource all your thinking.  Anne Hathaway is a kulak, but Lena Dunham says she’s ok, so we’ll go after that Ann Coulter bitch instead.

This is the mentality that makes the liberal world go.  It’s frankly Stalinist, but since Alinsky-lite liberals and neo-Gramscians have taken over the organs of our culture, it’s the attitude that makes modern society go.  It’s ok to hate, provided an authority figure tells you how… and whom.

It’s the only way to overcome the Molotov-Ribbentrop dissonance that would cause more honest heads to explode.  Eventually the Party leadership will decree something that is so perpendicular to common sense that your whole worldview will be thrown into disarray.  At that point, the intellectually honest will leave the Party… while all the various toadies, lickspittles, and other asskissers who cherish their group identity above their balls will elevate Appeal to Authority from a logical fallacy to the infallible lodestone of life.

This is one of the nastiest implications of 1984.  Winston Smith spends his days doctoring history in the Ministry of Information, but it’s unnecessary.  The Party members– the only ones who have the power to challenge Big Brother — are so invested in their Party membership they’d believe no matter what their lying eyes said.  We’ve always been at war with Eastasia.

Welcome to 2013.