"Government isn't an all-purpose social-utility machine just waiting to help us make better decisions..."

"... if only we'd be willing to give up our stubborn adherence to the principle of individual autonomy."

Even if we were to set aside all our cherished notions about how liberty is intrinsically good, it would still make sense to be skeptical of whether regulators know or care about the full consequences of their regulations.

And:

If helping people involves insulating them from the natural consequences of their actions, this could "nudge" them to be more irrational. For instance, everyone knows that students sometimes act irrationally: they procrastinate, they write substandard papers when they're capable of doing better, they turn work in late, etc. Given these realities, it's an open question how teachers should nudge students to do less of this kind of thing. The teacher who's willing to give any grade from an A+ to an F- might be more effective than the teacher who gives everyone a B+ or A-.

"Nudge" is in quotes because the author of the linked post — disclosure:  he's my son — is talking about an article — which we discussed recently — written by Cass Sunstein, who's made "nudge" his buzzword.

I wonder if the tendency to lean libertarian or fascist has more to do with how much you love autonomy or more to do with how much you trust government.

(Sorry about writing "libertarian or fascist." I know it's inflammatory. I was going to put "right or left," but it just didn't make sense. Some righties are out to control us, and some lefties — especially on some issues — love autonomy.)

"59% Think Most School Textbooks Put Political Correctness Ahead of Accuracy."

A Rassmussen poll.

It’s important to note that the question did not define the phrase "politically correct." The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines it as “conforming to a belief that language and practices which could offend political sensibilities (as in matters of sex or race) should be eliminated,” and it has come to be understood by many as prohibiting critical comments about politically sensitive topics and groups....

Conservative voters are nearly twice as likely as liberals to think most textbooks put more emphasis on political correctness than on accuracy. Military veterans are more skeptical of those textbooks than those who have not been in uniform....

Of course, everyone actually wants a certain type or amount of political correctness in schoolbooks. They just tend to think of the term "political correctness" when they picture their political opponents  inserting ideology that they think doesn't belong. Conservatives want the Founding Fathers to be presented in a favorable light, and they may want to soft-pedal the downside of industrialization and to stress individualism, optimism, and opportunity.

Anybody putting together a schoolbook has to think about inspiring children and building ideals and character. I'm saying that even though I lean strongly in the direction of straightforward, factual information, and I think that it's a serious moral wrong to use compulsory education to indoctrinate children.

At the Ice Cold Café...

... we see the Wisconsin Capitol building reflected on the glassy clear and oh-so-thick ice of Lake Mendota, where hearty men fish and full-blooded dogs romp, while timid souls linger on the shoreline and fret about safety. It's America, baby! It's Wisconsin! There is room for the bold individualists and the hand-wringing collectivists. All contribute to the molten mush of human thought here in this moment we were made for. God bless Madison, Wisconsin, and God bless the United States of America.

ADDED: The full-blooded God dog:



The hearty men:




Closer:

"I used to enjoy reading Althouse's blog because she wrote about some interesting topics, but this blatant display of Liberal emotionalism, racism..."

"... and lack of self-awareness combined with a sickening display of sanctimony is disturbing. It's as if you found out a good friend is secretly a child molester."

There's a denouncement of me over at Free Republic, talking about my post "Just How Racist Is the 'Obama Phone' Video?," notably not linking to my post, just characterizing it, as they curl up into to their people-who-see-racism-are-racists cocoon.

Fish politics, insect politics.

You may know I'm a longtime fan of the 1986 movie "The Fly," especially the part where the main character, the scientist-turned-fly, has his rant about "insect politics." ("Have you heard of insect politics? Neither have I. Insects don't have politics.... they're very brutal. No compassion.... no compromise. We can't trust the insect. I'd like to become the first insect politician. I'd like to, but.... I'm an insect.... who dreamed he was a man, and loved it. But now the dream is over, and the insect is awake.")

I'm always alert to stories that can take my blog tag "insect politics."

And I love lawprof/public intellectual Stanley Fish, who's written many cool books and in recent years has been doing a column on the NYT website. I was already delighted to see that Fish had put up a new column on the Dinesh D'Souza movie "2016: Obama's America," but my delight bubbled over into ecstasy when I arrived at the insect politics:

Unlike the once glorious but fallen empires [D'Souza] recalls reading about as a child in India, America, he declares, is an “empire of ideals” — individual rights, freedom of choice, upward mobility limited only by your willingness to work hard; and the fact that the nation has not always lived up to its ideals is a testament to the power they exert even as they are being breached.

In contrast, Obama, first at Columbia and later at Harvard, is influenced by leftist teachers like Edward Said and Roberto Unger, immerses himself in texts by Marxist, feminist and ant-colonialist authors, and thus fleshes out the lineaments of “his father’s third world collectivism.”

Ant-colonialist authors! This sounds very brutal! I thought Obama was the "empathy" guy, that he was 22 points out ahead of Romney when people were asked who cares about you. But now... No compassion. Whatever happened to the dream?

[D'Souza] rejects birtherism, the contention that Obama was born in Kenya and is hence not an American citizen; but he replaces it with a back-door, or metaphorical, birtherism when he characterizes Obama as an alien being, as a fifth-column party of one who has pretended to be an American, and technically is one, but really is something else.

You mean... the ant-colonialist?

Now, let's get serious. Fish says D'Souza "founders on the fallacy of assuming that the adjective 'American' has a fixed meaning with which everyone, or everyone who is right-thinking and patriotic, agrees." Here we go! No fixed meaning... Fish himself is was part of the intellectual stew in which  young Obama was immersed in college and law school.

But the meaning of America is continually contested in essays, books, backyard conversations, talk shows and, most of all, in elections. It is often said, and it is true, that the opposing parties in an election have “different visions for America.” There are many ways of describing the alternative visions offered to us in a year like this; but describing one of them as un-American and its proponent as a foreign intruder is not to further discussion but to foreclose it and to replace the contest of ideas with the rhetoric of demonization. 

Let's assume Fish is right and "the meaning of America is continually contested." D'Souza is simply fighting hard in that contest. He's got a powerful argument. And Fish wants D'Souza to disarm. You can't make that argument. It doesn't "further discussion." It "foreclose[s] it." Another way to put that is: D'Souza is winning the argument! It's too good of an argument. It doesn't give the other side enough of a chance to win. Hey, if it's a contest, both sides get to fight.

Fish says D'Souza's ideas are not ideas. Is that an idea? Fish says D'Souza is doing "demonization." Is Fish demonizing D'Souza? Who gets to say what can be said in this contest over the meaning of America? Must one side don boxing gloves while the other side punches back — "twice as hard" — bare-fisted?

"I emphatically denounce Paul Ryan’s use of my song ‘We’re Not Gonna Take It’..."

"... as recorded by my band Twisted Sister. There is almost nothing on which I agree with Paul Ryan, except perhaps the use of the P90X."

It's a rare entertainer who wants the association with Republicans. What's the upside? You might get some publicity, but the better publicity is in this sort of righteous refusal.

What was it, anyway, that Twisted Sister was saying it was not gonna take? Here are the lyrics. And here's the full-length video that includes the beginning with the dad yelling at the kid (who suddenly turns into Dee Snider). The thing not to be taken is pretty generic. The band claims the "the right to choose" and to "pick our destiny." They're also annoyed at whomever it is they are talking to, from whom they want "nothing" (which sounds pretty un-left-wing to me). The "you" addressed in the song is called "jaded," "trite," "worthless," and "weak" — which sounds like they're more opposed to the welfare state than to rugged individualism.

I'd say it's pretty good as a right-wing song, whether it was originally intended that way or not. But I can see why a performer embedded in our culture would cringe seeing his fairly generic protest song take on specifically right-wing meaning.

Limbaugh says his prayers are answered: The campaign is now about ideology.

He wants — he says he prays for —  a campaign of "ideology... not just policy analysis, not just Electoral College analysis, but principles and ideas." And he thinks that now, with Paul Ryan, that's what we've got.

We're gonna take it straight to [the American people] and we're gonna win or we're gonna lose articulating exactly who we are and exactly what we believe and exactly what our vision for America is....

Going back to a CPAC speech Paul Ryan gave in 2008, Rush gets very excited about converting voters to conservative ideology. He uses that word, "ideology," over and over again. Go to that second link and read the whole thing. I'm making a big deal out of this because, listening to the podcast, I got worried about ideologues.

"There are those who say that modern society is too complicated for the average man or woman to deal with."  And that is being said.  That's the whole premise of liberalism.  You're incompetent.  You can't manage your own life.  You're not smart enough. You're not able enough. You're not competent enough to make the right decisions in your life.  "There are those who say modern society is too complicated for the average man or woman to deal with. This is a long-standing argument, but we heard it more frequently after the mortgage credit collapse and financial meltdown in 2008. They say we need more experts and technocrats making more of our economic decisions for us. And they argue for less 'political interference' with the enlightened bureaucrats … by which they mean less objection by the people to the overregulation of society.

"If we choose to have a federal government that tries to solve every problem, then as long as society keeps growing more complex, government must keep on growing right along with it. The rule of law by the people must be reduced and the arbitrary discretion of experts expanded..." So you buy into this complexity argument, you are automatically buying into "only government can fix it."...

"If the average American can’t handle complexity in his or her own life, and only government experts can … then government must direct the average American about how to live his or her life. Freedom becomes a diminishing good. But there’s a major flaw in this 'progressive' argument, and it’s this. It assumes there must be someone or some few who do have all the knowledge and information. We just have to find, train, and hire them to run the government’s agencies.  Friedrich Hayek called this collectivism’s 'fatal conceit.' The idea that a few bureaucrats know what’s best for all of society, or possess more information about human wants and needs than millions of free individuals interacting in a free market is both false and arrogant. It has guided collectivists for two centuries down the road to serfdom -- and the road is littered with their wrecked utopias. The plan always fails!" It always has failed.

And yet there are a lot of Americans (we talk about this a lot): Government comes up with a program and it's a debacle. It's a mess. So what's the fix? Government! Another program. We continue to go back to the architects of failure to fix what they broke in the first place. And Ryan simply argues that we are all capable of living our lives in freedom much more productively, much more capably, than being told how to live by a bunch of people who can't even manage their own lives.

Where are these magicians who know how to live their own lives? Who are they? And how do they magically end up in government? Well, they don't exist, and they aren't in government, and this is the ultimate argument. Small-government conservatism means turning your life back over to you. This then raises the question that we all are asking ourselves: How many Americans want that responsibility anymore?

How many takers are there who'll just as soon punt all the responsibility and accept whatever little things they get and they're happy, versus how many people really want the opportunity to be the best they can be with as few obstacles in their way as possible? Thomas Jefferson, in his first inaugural address, was actually one of the first people to articulate this whole point that Ryan made at CPAC. "Sometimes it is said that man cannot be trusted with the government of himself.

"Can he, then, be trusted with the government of others? Or have we found angels in the form of kings to govern him? Let history answer this question." And again, even Jefferson said there has never been a time in history where a government-run, top-to-down country has prospered. The greatest example of human prosperity is the United States of America, and it was not made up of the way Barack Obama sees it or wants it to be seen or wants it to exist....

But I like the fact that there's somebody who's gonna be on the news every day that can talk like I do.... We've got somebody who can articulate what we believe. It's in his heart. He doesn't need crib notes. He doesn't need briefings. He doesn't need a consultant to tell him what to think or how to answer a question. He knows it. He's lived it. It's his soul.

In a way that sounds good, but it's asking for a leap of faith, and it's asking for you to embrace a faith and accept all the consequences. And in that articulate presentation of the reasons for the faith, there's a key matter that you've got to believe: That people really can provide for themselves. If you just cut them free, they'll take responsibility. They're smart enough and competent enough to figure things out for themselves and take all the precautions they should. But I can't believe that! And we're too compassionate to allow old people to live in the streets or a child to be denied medical treatment and so forth. So there's no way anymore to tell people they're all on their own.

Come on, everybody, let's be ideologues! That seems quite dangerous and absurd to me.

Now, on some moderate level, I can see saying that as we structure our various programs, we ought to try to maximize personal freedom and responsibility, but I want sensible, realistic politicians thinking carefully about these things. Rush kept saying he was "jazzed" about Ryan. Jazzed at the opportunity to make it all starkly ideological.

I'm skeptical.

"50% Now View Paul Ryan Favorably; 43% Say He Was Right Choice."

A new Rasmussen poll.

Eighty-three percent (83%) of Republicans view Ryan favorably, and 72% think Romney made a good choice in picking him as his running mate. Fifty-four percent (54%) of Democrats give Ryan unfavorable marks, and only 18% view Romney’s selection as a good one.

The choice is now sharply defined.

Seventy-one percent (71%) of voters regard Ryan as ideologically conservative, including 40% who say he’s Very Conservative.  That’s more conservative tha[n] voters think Romney is and puts Ryan nearly as far to the political right as voters think the president is to the political left.

It's rough for people like me who fear both the right and the left. 

"The Dark Knight Rises" "is a bold apologia for free-market capitalism..."

"... a graphic depiction of the tyranny and violence inherent in every radical leftist movement from the French Revolution to Occupy Wall Street; and a tribute to those who find redemption in the harsh circumstances of their lives rather than allow those circumstances to mire them in resentment."

Says Andrew Klavan (in the WSJ).

Let me restate an old theme of mine: Art is right wing, even when the artists will only consciously voice political opinions of the left-wing kind.

"France's far-right National Front is to sue Madonna..."

"... after an image at the US singer's Paris concert showed party leader Marine Le Pen with a swastika imposed on her face."

National Front vice-president Florian Philippot said the party could not accept "such an odious comparison."

Idiots. Use the "more speech" solution or you are helping her make her point.

I'm sure she doesn't mind the publicity. Go ahead, make me a free-speech martyr.

Idiots.

"New York City is not about wringing your hands; it’s about doing something."

"I think that’s what the public wants the mayor to do."

Elsewhere, "all over the United States," they "are wringing their hands saying, ‘Oh, this is terrible,’” but not in New York. In New York, they are doing something.

Do something — what a wonderful concept, often heard in the old cry for help: "Don't just stand there; do something."

It's the the motto of the liberal. The corresponding motto of the conservative is: First, do no harm. Or to put it in the form that I thought up (in another context) and have adopted as a kind of a personal motto: Better than nothing is a high standard.

"Ann Althouse pushes back, and she has a point. But watch a few episodes of 16 and Pregnant..."

"... and you might think that 'it’s wrong' is a useful heuristic for people incapable of fully understanding what 'it will be hard' actually means."

Writes Instapundit, pushing back to my pushback on the "Dan Quayle Was Right" article.

Let's take a closer look at this "useful heuristic" concept, which expresses something truly profound about the role of traditional religion and other conservative philosophies in society. Look at what is being admitted. There are a whole lot of people who are insufficiently smart, competent, and emotionally stable to make a decision involving a complex set of factors, so we need to dominate their minds with a starker structure of "right" and "wrong," even where those of us who are really smart and able to process complex factors know it's not really a matter of right and wrong. 

Instapundit continues:

At any rate, after twenty years of hearing SUV drivers described in terms more applicable to Himmler, the 1992 condemnations of moralistic language from political leaders ring particularly hollow.

So... because lefties put their arguments in starkly moralistic terms, it's tiresome to hear about the way righties overuse morality talk. I get the point. In fact, what bugs me the most about lefties — what motivates me to go after lefties much more than righties on this blog — is the way they set themselves up as the good people and prance and stomp all over the place shaming and blaming the people who won't agree with them. Having lived in Madison for the last quarter century, I am fed up with their domineering bullshit. The reason my blog appears to skew conservative — when I am a political moderate — is that I am not surrounded by pious, overbearing right-wingers sneering at me and gasping about what a bad person I am.

BUT: I am not saying that domineering bullshit from righties is okay because lefties do it too or do it more or do it nearer to me. I don't like it.

Sarkozy "has made a cynical attempt to win over the first-round supporters of the National Front’s Marine Le Pen..."

"... (while formally opposing an actual pact with the party), despite the Front’s deep hostility toward immigrant communities and the European Union, and the fact that its founder (her father, Jean-Marie) had a well-deserved reputation for racism and anti-Semitism."

Le Pen is ''compatible with the Republic,” he stated soon after the initial voting. Sarkozy’s stunning acknowledgment of Le Pen’s legitimacy can only help her cause: In the days after the first round, nearly two-thirds of Sarkozy voters told pollsters they favored an electoral pact with her party in the legislative elections that will follow soon after the presidential campaign. Le Pen herself clearly wants Sarkozy to lose, declaring that she will cast a blank ballot in the second round. She has called [Sarkozy's party] no different from the Socialists, and, indeed, her nationalist stance offers a starker alternative to the two major parties than they do to each other. Can this alternative achieve major party status? Having helped to dissolve the traditional French right while failing to replace it with a coherent or popular ideology of his own, it now appears possible that Nicolas Sarkozy’s principal legacy will be the rise of Marine Le Pen.

Opines Princeton history prof David A. Bell at The New Republic, under the sub-headline "The implosion of the French right." Is that the right word, implosion?

Anyway, there's also some interesting discussion of Sarkozy's claim to be a Gaullist, and what "Gaullism" is really supposed to mean. (It includes concepts like "France cannot be France without grandeur.")

ADDED: "Implosion" is "The bursting inward of a vessel from external pressure" (OED).

W. B. Carpenter in 19th Cent. Apr. 615   A sealed glass tube containing air, having been lowered (within a copper case) to a depth of 2,000 fathoms, was reduced to a fine powder almost like snow, by what Sir Wyville Thomson ingeniously characterised as an implosion.

The figurative usage, which is about all we ever hear, dates back to the 1960s. Marshall McLuhan seems to have seared it into our brains. There are 2 appearances of this metaphor in his 1964 book "Understanding Media":

The rush of students into our universities is not explosion but implosion....

Our speed-up today is not a slow explosion outward from center to margins but an instant implosion and an interfusion of space and functions.

I can't believe I'm in the middle of explaining how people used to make more sense! Whatever. You talk now.

Is Althouse drifting leftward?

Is Althouse drifting leftward?
	Yes, and it's terrible.
	Yes, and it's grand.
	No, and it's a shame.
	No, and that's the way I like it.
	Althouse will always be wandering around blandly in the middle of the road.
	Althouse excels at sharp perceptions seen from the middle or some intriguingly aloof position.
pollcode.com free polls

"Our society has let [children] down by not being supportive of mothers, and even fathers, who dedicate their time and often their lives to their children."

Please read the 3-paragraph-long book passage that I've added to the post about whether Rick Santorum is committed to equality for women. He fights what he calls "radical" feminism, but he's expressing a feminist position. He calls the radical feminists "misogynistic" (for making "working outside the home the only marker of social value and self-respect").

What determines whether Scott Walker's name appears in the Wisconsin State Journal?

Let's draw inferences from these 2 related examples:

1. Scott Walker's name does not appear in today's article "Spectrum Brands to move headquarters to Middleton."

The company, whose brands include Rayovac, Remington and Cutter, said in a news release that it is shelving plans to move its base to Miramar, Fla., home of Russell Hobbs. Spectrum Brands bought the small appliance company in 2010.

2. Scott Walker's name appears in this column about how "anti-government right-wingers" like to say that government "doesn't create jobs."

If the government does not create jobs, then why did Republicans such as Scott Walker and Ron Johnson make job creation pillars of their campaigns for government jobs? Why did the Walker regime throw $4 million at Spectrum Brands... under the guise of job creation or retention?

"This is not a joke" = the subject line of email from Barack Obama's campaign manager...

... received just after the email from Rick Santorum, blogged in the previous post. Where Santorum addressed me "Patriot," Obama's guy (Jim Messina) addresses me "Friend." (How much does that say about the difference between conservatives and liberals?) Excerpts:

The extremist Tea Party agenda won a clear victory [in Iowa]. No matter who the Republicans nominate, we'll be running against someone who has embraced that agenda in order to win -- vowing to let Wall Street write its own rules, end Medicare as we know it, roll back gay rights, leave the troops in Iraq indefinitely, restrict a woman's right to choose, and gut Social Security to pay for more tax cuts for millionaires and corporations....

Vowing all these things? The Democrats' campaign — or perhaps only its scheme to extract money from those who might yield money — is to scare us about how terribly right-wing the Republican candidate is.

[T]he path ahead for Romney -- or whichever of the Republican candidates is going to emerge from this process -- is sadly and starkly very clear: to run even further to the extreme right, and make even more dangerous promises that threaten not only the progress we've made but the fundamental fabric of American society.

Extreme! Extreme! Dangerous!!!

Watching the circus on TV, it's tempting to think it's almost funny -- but this is not a joke.

Funny? Who writes this stuff? I'm picturing clowns — they're familiar with the circus — who really have a lot of ironic distance and have the instinct to laugh at Republicans. Think of Alan Colmes, who thought he could be funny mocking Rick Santorum for "playing" with his dead baby. I imagine that Colmes mostly talks with smart, cheeky guys whose natural habitat is distanced observation and edgy humor, and he just didn't realize that ordinary people are more closely interwoven with what some ironist trying to get serious might call the fundamental fabric of American society.

These distanced observers, who see the world in terms of humor and tell ordinary people to get serious... how do they push us to seriousness? Not with rational arguments and accurate information, but by making extreme overstatements about extremism and urging us to feel afraid. And yet they call me "Friend."

Friend... before you came, Barack Obama, I was all alone...



The full text of the email...

These Republican candidates spent in some cases more than a year -- in Mitt Romney's case seven years -- campaigning in Iowa to be the next president.

But tonight, GOP voters there couldn't decisively get behind anyone.

Who exactly leads the Republican race going forward isn't clear, but we do know two things:

1) The extremist Tea Party agenda won a clear victory. No matter who the Republicans nominate, we'll be running against someone who has embraced that agenda in order to win -- vowing to let Wall Street write its own rules, end Medicare as we know it, roll back gay rights, leave the troops in Iraq indefinitely, restrict a woman's right to choose, and gut Social Security to pay for more tax cuts for millionaires and corporations.

2) We'll be facing an onslaught of unprecedented spending from outside groups funded by corporations and anonymous donors. In Iowa alone, so-called "super PACs" spent $12.9 million on almost exclusively negative ads. These groups will turn their fire even more directly on us in the weeks ahead to prove that their candidate is the most anti-Obama.

This race is officially on -- and if we want to win, the only way is to out-organize them on the ground.

Sign up to volunteer your time now, and one of our organizers in your community will give you a call by the end of next week to talk about how you can help.

Many observers still think Mitt Romney will be the Republican nominee. If he is, we will be prepared. But it's curious that no one can really explain how, when or why the 70-plus percent of Republicans saying in polls and in Iowa that Mitt Romney's not their candidate will suddenly come around.

So the path ahead for Romney -- or whichever of the Republican candidates is going to emerge from this process -- is sadly and starkly very clear: to run even further to the extreme right, and make even more dangerous promises that threaten not only the progress we've made but the fundamental fabric of American society.

We also know that candidates who take these extreme positions can, in the right circumstances, win not only a primary but also a general election in just about any state.

Just ask the Tea Party senators from Pennsylvania and Kentucky, and the Tea Party governors in Florida and Wisconsin.

Watching the circus on TV, it's tempting to think it's almost funny -- but this is not a joke.

We've got to be ready.

What you decide to do next will determine which kind of politics wins this election:

http://my.barackobama.com/After-Iowa

More soon.

Messina

Jim Messina
Campaign Manager
Obama for America

The problem with relying on private charity.

Criticize government spending all you want, but the right-wing preference for private citizens making decisions about where to make their altruistic expenditures has never impressed me. It's stuff like this. Of all the problems to throw $4.5 million at, this guy chooses panda fucking. Look. Deal with it. The pandas have lost the will to live. Yes, they look cute to us, because we mistake the black fur around their eyes for huge eyes. But from the inside, it's grim. They don't want babies. Don't force it on them. Keep your charitable hands off my panda body. The pandas have said no. What part of panda no don't you understand?

"Not every human problem deserves a law."

"While I appreciate the value of wearing a ski helmet, I am concerned about the continuing and seemingly inexorable transfer of authority from parents to the state."

Who said it?



Jerry Brown!

Re-taking the Political Compass test.

Wizbang calls attention to this test, which has been around a while. I knew I'd taken it before, but I took it again. A re-test. Some people have told me I've gotten more "right wing," sometimes attributing the phenomenon to my intimacy with Meade.

Here's how I came out:



Economic Left/Right: 2.00
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -3.79

Then I did a search to find my previous results, from January 2007:

Economic Left/Right: -0.63
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -4.21

So I am a bit more right wing and a bit less libertarian. Not much. You can see I'm awfully close to the center.

I see there are some other political tests I could retake, but I'm tired of answering questions now.