GayPatriot

The Internet home for American gay conservatives.

They’re coming for the smart people

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I knew this day would come. In trying to make successful people feel guilty, Social Justice Warriors are ready to take us to full-on _Idiocracy_ or _Harrison Bergeron_. The SJW columnist Dan Williams says:

There are many kinds of privilege besides white privilege: cognitive privilege, for example. We now know that intelligence is not something we have significant control over but is something we are born with… below a certain threshold of intelligence, there are fewer and fewer opportunities… Thus, the accident of having been born smart enough to be able to be successful is a great benefit that you did absolutely nothing to earn. Consequently, you have nothing to be proud of for being smart.

His claims are contrary to science. There are plenty of things you can do, to enhance your intelligence or to damage it. For example, some studies show that frequent marijuana use can permanently damage your memory, concentration, and overall IQ. Whereas those things can be preserved or enhanced by healthy lifestyle, or some forms of education or problem-solving. So yes, your intelligence is something you “have significant control over”, long-term.

Williams’ claims are also contrary to my life experience. Throughout my life, I have consciously worked long and hard at becoming smarter and doing better things than I would have otherwise. It was no accident. It used to be called “self-improvement”.

But I suppose that, if you’re a modern-day lazy pot-smoking type of “smart” person – someone who was born talented and has indeed drifted along, doing little or nothing to forge your unique self, and falling into a six-figure salary all the same – then Williams’ comments might make sense to you. You would be too ignorant to know better. And you would need the SJW Religion for its cheap grace, or as a way to live with yourself.

From the comments: Heliotrope highlights another significant quote from Williams’ piece:

Any of us could have been born the unluckiest person on the planet, which, by definition, picks out precisely one person. But we all have the privilege of not being that person. We are all privileged by comparison.

This highlights the religious aspect of SJW-ism.

  • “Privilege” is the new Original Sin, the guilt-from-birth that no one escapes (except Williams’ hypothetical “unluckiest person born”, maybe).
  • PC “Social Consciousness” is the new Redemption (the cheap grace that I mentioned).
  • Revolution would be the (longed-for) Apocalypse or Last Judgment.
  • and Social Justice, the (unattainable) New Jerusalem or Kingdom of Heaven.

Why leftie men often look like cucks

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I missed this last week, but here it is now. Study: Physically Weak Men More Likely To Be Socialists.

An academic study from researchers at Brunel University London assessed 171 men, looking at their height, weight, overall physical strength and bicep circumference, along with their views on redistribution of wealth and income inequality. The study, published in the Evolution and Human Behavior journal, ​found that weaker men were more likely to favor socialist policies than stronger men.

Brunel University’s Michael Price believes this may be a product of evolutionary psychology. “This is about our Stone Age brains, in a modern society,” said Dr. Price. “Our minds evolved in environments where strength was a big determinant of success. If you find yourself in a body not threatened by other males, if you feel you can win competitions for status, then maybe you start thinking inequality is pretty good.”

So, physical “haves” feel less threatened and enjoy inequality. In other words, they’re dumb jock bullies. That’s one interpretation. But it’s undermined by Brunel’s own evidence:

“When Dr Price factored in time spent in the gym some, but not all, of the link disappeared,” notes The Times, suggesting there may be something to men with capitalistic views hitting the gym.

[ILC stares at his shoelaces, wonders if he should cough] That strikes me as more truthful.

  • Those who go to the gym, tend to be stronger.
  • And they tend to understand the importance of health and strength in daily life: not only in appearing impressive to people, but in actually having more energy, being able to move more easily, having a reliable daily feeling of accomplishment and positive discipline, etc.
  • And they tend to understand accountability for your own results. (Physical training teaches nothing, if not that.)
  • From there, and at the risk of over-generalizing, they often drift into common-sense libertarian-conservative views, emphasizing personal responsibility.
  • The process can also work in reverse: if you believe in personal responsibility, you may find yourself going “Hey, why don’t I hit the gym / get strong?”

At least that’s been my experience. I know some leftie gym buffs – again, you can’t over-generalize – but I live in a super-lefty area. (And the few who like MSNBC for real are always either women or weak, older men.) The percentage rate of being libertarian-conservative seems, to me, a bit higher among gym buffs than the general population. And the link is: philosophy of personal responsibility.

If you’d like to learn about strength training, a good place to start is www.startingstrength.com. (No affiliation.) They emphasize perfecting your “form” or technique to prevent injury. And that strength training is something for all people, of all ages. The leader, Mark Rippetoe, is sort of a gruff, dogmatic, ex-power-lifter – and I *think* he’s libertarian-minded, or at least anti-Hillary.

Reminder: Government health care is sub-DMV health care

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Talk to a leftie and you will often hear how wonderful Canadian health care is. “Why can’t we be like them?” Crowder did an expose of Canadian health care in 2009 that is still relevant:

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Here’s the summary. Canadians pay huge taxes for “free”, “universal” health care. It makes people wait, and wait, and wait. Many people either give up altogether (and their condition gets worse), or go to a private clinic.

That’s how they reduce patients to a manageable number. Economics 101 teaches us that all goods must be rationed by one means or another, and “waiting” for people to quit the queue is how they ration Canada’s public health care.

From Crowder’s anecdotes it seems that Canadians, if they don’t quit, will wait usually about four times as long as Americans. For example, last year I went to an emergency room on a Sunday afternoon. It took 20 minutes to get the triage nurse’s attention, then another hour to see a doctor. In Crowder’s video, they visit a Canadian emergency room on a Sunday. It takes them about an hour and a half to see the triage nurse, and then 5+ hours to see a doctor (except they quit at the 4-hour mark).

Likewise, an acquaintance of mine recently needed a cancer surgery. He got it in weeks; in Canada it would have taken months. This is what Bernie and Hillary want to bring us to.

Lefties: No moral self-confidence – and fearfully proud of it

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I had a lunch discussion recently with two former co-workers. Both of these men are engineers in their 30s who are fairly hard-working, competent and successful, pulling six-figure salaries. In the free and dynamic America of yore, these men would be proud of where their choices in life had taken them. But this is 2014, they are white, and they are MSDNC-watching left-liberals in a “Blue” area.

“Mark” started saying how lucky he feels to be an engineer because the work is physically so much easier and safer than being a field worker or factory hand, and pays more. I agreed, while reminding Mark that the work is mentally exhausting, something much-demanded by society (the market), and something most people wouldn’t even attempt. In other words, reminding Mark that he deserves his salary.

As if to answer me, “Ross” instantly went into a description of himself as “born into privilege”, saying how he had never really chosen anything in his life, but his course has always been determined by the social forces pushing him along and granting him privilege. This was strange, because I know for a fact that Ross works hard, which is a choice right there. So I reminded him of the constant stream of choices that he faces – be it as simple as “go back to work after this lunch, or not?” – and how those choices affect his results, like having a salary or not.

I won’t bore you with too many details. The conversation continued as a debate of Free Will implying self-responsibility and pro-liberty politics, vs. Social Determinism implying “you didn’t build that” and re-distributive, left-wing politics. We didn’t get into politics much; it lurked in the background.

But I want to tell you about the discussion’s ending. Here’s the short version: I was nice enough, yet Ross and Mark were red-faced with anger and embarrassment – because they didn’t “win”. I punctured their bubble.

At first, Ross could not process my point that all people have choices, by which they determine their own success. Asking near-childlike questions, he had me explain the concept over and over. “What if a person is born in poverty?” I’d explain how poverty is indeed a circumstance shaping the person’s life; but they still choose their *response* to it. Poverty may limit a person’s range of choices, but even poor people still face a stream of choices, that only ends when a person dies.

If a poor person joins a gang or develops a drug habit – and sticks with it, in adult life – that’s a series of choices they made. Likewise if, for better success, they work hard to get a G.E.D. and become a shift manager at the local McDonald’s, it is a series of choices they made. Likewise, my life-long self-education has been a choice. Thus I explained.

As Ross caught on, he correctly saw the implication that the McDonald’s shift manager would *deserve* her success being greater than the gang member’s or drug addict’s – just as he, Mark and I each deserve our success. And Ross didn’t like that idea. Smiling his best “Jane, you ignorant slut” type of patronizing smile, he suggested that I was out to rationalize backward, unjust notions.

With a smile right back, I pointed out that nobody was rationalizing anything; my success having come from my hard work and personal choices was not a rationalization, but a fact; and a fact that his determinist philosophy badly needed to deal with. That was the exact moment when Ross turned beet-red.

His words turned sarcastic (suggesting anger), while his voice turned quavery (suggesting anxiety). I could see that Mark, now silent, was also getting red – with a deer-in-the-headlights look of uncertainty around his eyes.

Mind you, nobody raised voices in this discussion; nobody called names or made the least of personal attacks. All I did was display my moral confidence, my certain knowledge that I had earned my success – and imply that Mark and Ross should also be morally self-confident, as they had earned theirs.

My doing that alone, nothing more, made these two men visibly feel both uncertain and violated. The interaction ended there, as we’d run out of time. I think it says a lot about left-liberals.

Lefties live in a world where lack of moral self-confidence is a required personality trait. Humility is not required; leftists usually proclaim their beliefs with arrogant certainty. But among those beliefs is a dogma to the effect that no one, including the leftie, *deserves* to have any confidence or any certainty, since no one is ever better than the worst “poor” criminal out there. Any educated, enlightened person must genuflect and display his official, dogmatic lack of confidence that he could ever be right about anything. THEN he can go on to make arrogant proclamations (provided they are left-wing).

If someone shows a different way of being – if someone thinks differently from the leftie, and has moral confidence in doing so – showing, for example, confidence that her success is deserved – many a leftie will find that person threatening. Tactic A is to smile and patronize the person as benighted; perhaps tactic B would be ridicule. If neither works – if the tables are turned, if the left-liberal’s worldview is punctured or exposed as the hollow thing it is – then the average leftie will go into fear and anger.

Sad!

The Left’s hair-trigger praise of…itself

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First there were the Nobel Peace Prizes for Al Gore – who had only spread a hoax, a junk science – and for President Obama – before he’d done anything peaceful or otherwise, like (say) attacking Libya or Syria.

Now (via reader Peter Hughes) there is Hillary Clinton’s Elton John Foundation award for her support of gay rights…even though she opposed gay marriage as recently as March 2013, AND left the Middle East a mess where anti-gay forces are on the march.

If these people ever taught at universities, they’d give themselves all A’s, just for showing up. Oh, yeah.

Liberal Logic on Display: Two Prime Examples

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I’ve seen two examples this week of jaw-droppingly appalling liberal logic which, I figure, just have to be shared in the same way that unusual specimens belong in a museum.

The first one appeared in Salon on Tuesday, and it purports to be a treatise on the necessity of “positive” rights.  It says that the original Bill of Rights doesn’t go very far, and conservatives are foolish and “short-sighted” to insist that those rights are essential and shouldn’t be tampered with.  According to the author of the piece, Michael Lind, what we really need is to endorse FDR’s “Second Bill of Rights”–which includes things like the right to a job, to a good home, and to medical care and good health.  Lind writes: “FDR’s Second Bill of Rights, and similar proposals, are not intended to replace the original bill of rights, but only to supplement it. Progressives believe that we should have both the right to free speech and the right to minimal healthcare at public expense.”

Lind’s article uses both appeals to authority (FDR and Cass Sunstein) and some sleight of hand to avoid tackling the very real contention that we can’t demand “positive rights” at other’s expense without in some sense enslaving those who are tasked with providing or paying for those “rights.”

In a brief rebuttal at PJ Media, Stephen Kruiser cites his own, contrary authority:

The negative/positive rights debate is brilliantly explored by Richard A. Epstein in his book Mortal Peril. He begins with a general discussion but his focus is on American health care. He points out that the positive rights frenzy contains “certain remnants of a discredited socialism” and that “…the protection of these newly minted positive rights invests government at all levels with vast powers to tax, to regulate, and to hire and fire the very individuals whose rights it is duty-bound to protect.”

The story, of course, is one we’ve seen over and over. The government continues to bloat itself as the social welfare state grows and in the process more rights are trampled upon than created.

The title of Epstein’s treatise can apply just as easily to the second, even more stunning example of liberal logic, which I saw linked by several folks on Facebook today.  It’s an article in Slate entitled “If You Send Your Kid to Private School, You Are a Bad Person: A Manifesto.”  The idea behind the article by Allison Benedikt is that public schools are ruined because students whose parents care enough about educational quality to devote their own resources to education aren’t forced to remain in the public school system.

Nowhere does it occur to this genius that perhaps the real problems with the public schools have to do with the teachers’ unions or with the educational bureaucracy which has arisen at public expense.  No, according to this author, the solution to all the problems with the public school system is that if everyone has to go, they will get better because parents will demand it, even if some large number of kids who would or could have had better options has to be sacrificed for the sake of liberal mediocrity.  (You really do need to read the article to believe it is not some sort of ridiculous hoax.  Even the usually liberal crowd of commenters at Slate are put off by the article.)

A much saner, contrary view appeared several days ago (before the absurd Slate article was published) at the Sippican Cottage blog (hat tip Transterrestrial Musings).  The whole piece is worth reading, but this excerpt nicely encapsulates the tone of the piece:

You see, there are no public schools in America that I know of. They’re reeducation camps for people that weren’t educated in the first place, maybe, or little prisons, or pleasure domes for creepy teachers, or places where tubby women work out their neuroses about eating on helpless children at lunchtime — but there’s not much schooling going on in school. A public school is a really expensive, but shabby and ineffectual, private school that collects their tuition with the threat of eviction from your house.

To liberal “thinkers” like Allison Benedikt and Michael Lind, unfortunately, that sort of a situation apparently sounds like a “great society.”