More Prop 8 Stuff

Man, I didn't think that this would still be growing as an issue, either way. I was wrong.

LA Times: Angrier response to Prop 8 steps up

I've read that more minds have to be won, as if that's the simple answer. I don't think this is all about winning minds. I think it's about winning hearts and minds.

My thoughts on strategy and the recent protests:

25% of the voters will vote for this, no matter what. 25% will vote against it, no matter what. I remember a ballot measure a few years ago in California that seemed to me a no-brainer. The vast majority agreed. The measure passed 75-25.

Accept that. 75% is as close to unanimous as you're going to get. Don't look to ballot initiatives to eliminate your personal insecurities about being gay, or straight, or whatever, because you won't get unanimous agreement, and your opposition will tend to be somewhere between vocal and vocally unhinged.

Now that that's out of the way...

The 50% of voters "in the middle", where these things are decided, will decide based on a variety of factors. These are the people who need to be the targets of any attempts at persuasion.

I believe that a primary factor is what and who a given voter pictures when he/she imagines a gay person.

If some of one's friends and neighbors are gay, and they seem nice enough, and responsible members of the community, the chances of that voter supporting gay marriage are high. In the voting booth, the image that this person has is of his/her gay friends, who seem like they'd be a good married couple.

If voters don't really know any openly gay individuals, or only encounter them occasionally, then their perceptions will be based on a more distant assessment of who and what gay people are. (Yes, since much of California's openly gay population has chosen to move to particular communities, this is entirely possible. I don't think the inland voters are all bigots or something. Clearly, though, they're less likely to have gay couples as friends than people who live in or near cities with large gay populations.) If they imagine a conservative (lifestyle, not politics) gay couple who wants to marry, they may support same-sex marriage. If they imagine indecent Pride Parade participants, or "activists" knocking crosses out of the hands of old ladies, I'd guess they wouldn't support it.

Now I'm no fan of using a cross as a metaphorical club as this woman was doing.

Tactically, though, anti-8 protesters would have been far better off just leaving her alone. It would have made her look bad, when now she is a hero to some, dubious as that may seem.

Maybe I should go to a protest with a sign that says, "Maybe on 8. Screw both sides! You all suck!" and march around in front of cameras. Unfortunately, it seems that all protesters have one thing in common: no sense of humor.

No on Prop 8 Rant

No, this is not about voting on California's Proposion 8. This is about the terrible ad campaign the No on 8 people ran here (I've been in California for the election season).

I never knew that TV commercials could be closeted before, but now I know they can. Where were the gay couples? Where was the warmth? The human touch?

Dark commercials with abstract text about "equality"? Come on! Everybody has seen that before. If you want to persuade people that opening marriage to gay couples is not a threat to them, SHOW that. That's the issue here: some people see same-sex marriage as a threat to them. The only way to win in an election is to show them that it's not.

And Diane Feinstein?!? I don't think that many Californians who aren't self-identified liberals like her, and most anyone to the right of center can't STAND her. News flash: there was no point in aiming No on 8 commercials at self-identified liberals in California. That was a lot of really expensive preaching to the choir.

I don't know if you could get him, but if I were running the campaign, and I could get him, I'd get Dick Cheney. Stir some things up! Create cognitive dissonance that works in FAVOR of the objective. If you're going to use divisive individuals in ads, then turn the tables. Don't use Diane Feinstein, for the love of Pete.

Whoever did those commercials should have been fired months ago.

When Donkeys Fly

Nancy Pelosi says that a permanent tax cut is necessary to stimulate the economy.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122600310456906045.html

I'm still reeling from that one. Nancy f'in' Pelosi?!? What a difference a day makes.

Do the Democrats oppose the Bush Tax Cuts because they're tax cuts, or because they have the word "Bush" in them?

Reminds me of some of Kurtz's rantings in Apocalypse Now.

I've seen horrors... horrors that you've seen. But you have no right to call me a murderer. You have a right to kill me. You have a right to do that... but you have no right to judge me. It's impossible for words to describe what is necessary to those who do not know what horror means. Horror. Horror has a face... and you must make a friend of horror. Horror and moral terror are your friends. If they are not then they are enemies to be feared. They are truly enemies. I remember when I was with Special Forces. Seems a thousand centuries ago. We went into a camp to inoculate the children. We left the camp after we had inoculated the children for Polio, and this old man came running after us and he was crying. He couldn't see. We went back there and they had come and hacked off every inoculated arm. There they were in a pile. A pile of little arms. And I remember... I... I... I cried. I wept like some grandmother. I wanted to tear my teeth out. I didn't know what I wanted to do. And I want to remember it. I never want to forget it. I never want to forget. And then I realized... like I was shot... like I was shot with a diamond... a diamond bullet right through my forehead. And I thought: My God... the genius of that. The genius. The will to do that. Perfect, genuine, complete, crystalline, pure. And then I realized they were stronger than we. Because they could stand that these were not monsters. These were men... trained cadres. These men who fought with their hearts, who had families, who had children, who were filled with love... but they had the strength... the strength... to do that. If I had ten divisions of those men our troubles here would be over very quickly. You have to have men who are moral... and at the same time who are able to utilize their primordial instincts to kill without feeling... without passion... without judgment... without judgment. Because it's judgment that defeats us.

Maybe Nancy Pelosi really IS former Viet Cong...

Thoughts about Social Conservatism

Okay, a bit of a rant, but I hope an intelligent one....

As the GOP tries to regroup, I hope that it considers the damage that prioritizing Social Conservative goals, while throwing Classical Liberals under the bus, has done to its brand. Just a few years ago, people were talking about a permanent Republican majority. That's a laugh (but it should also be a warning to the overconfident Democrats right now).

So here goes...

A lot of Social Con stuff makes me cringe—mostly those parts that show the ignorance of the speaker.

I have a degree in evolutionary biology, and I can assure you that creationism is utter BS. I can’t tell, from science, whether there is a God, and I wouldn’t try. I've never seen evolutionary biology as some sort of proof that there is no God, nor that there must be.

What I do know is that spontaneous order is quite real.

When I hear Social Cons going off with attacks on evolution, what I hear is a bunch of people whose beliefs center on their insistence that the world is static. This is incompatible with free-market thinking. This is one way that economic conservatism and social conservatism are utterly incompatible. It’s also a way to chase off the educated, as the GOP has evidently done.

WRT “pro-life”, I want to know why this is in the GOP platform. Why does it need to be? One can have personal beliefs, and live them (as Sarah Palin has) without telling voters that you will force them to agree. "Pro-choice" shouldn't be in the platform, either. There's nothing in there about bicycle lanes, spaying or neutering cats, or many other political issues that can ignite passions among certain people at certain times. That's because people can disagree on them without differing in basic principles, so there's no reason to define "Republican" or "Democrat" according to these things.

There’s a difference between one’s personal convictions and what one would force others to do. I understand that hardcore pro-life advocates can’t understand this, but this is the view of the majority of Americans, liberal and conservative, like it or not.

Republicans want to point to Iraq as the main reason the GOP lost support, and maybe that’s part of it. But that ignores the insanity surrounding Terri Schiavo, whose case had already been investigated by the pro-life Governor Bush of Florida. For some reason, Republicans wasted their control of Congress on this case, rather than enacting any real economic reforms, which clearly we could have used. Voters NOTICED. I sure did.

Terri Schiavo showed that Republicans really didn’t believe in Federalism, and that the new Conservatism was all about grandstanding Social Conservative fanaticism to try to divert attention from corruption. There was nothing Reaganite left in the critical mass of the GOP in DC at that point.

I am not advocating throwing social cons under the bus as a strategy. What I am advocating is that the GOP concentrate on issues that actually matter to the majority of Americans.

Abortion will not be illegal in the US in the foreseeable future. Deal with it on your own time, if that bothers you.

But candidates should not campaign on being anti-abortion. They need not hide their beliefs, but trying to make this an issue in a campaign is stupid. It’s superfluous, and it does not attract voters, who generally care a lot more about other things. If anything, it reveals that the candidate has nothing significant to talk about.

Reason Votes

Reason just did its regular pre-election feature.

Do I just not "get" libertarians any more? I think I am one. Maybe I'm not the magazine editor variety, or something.

I can see the merits of a libertarian engaging in "strategic voting", e.g. Kerry in 2004. Kerry was without merit, but the bar was set pretty low in 2004, and divided government certainly has its merits.

I also think there's plenty of evidence of BDS among many of the above libertarians. I'm not a Bush apologist, but I'll miss a few things about the Bush administration, such as a policy of looking after our own interests at the UN instead of pretending the UN is benevolent. The same goes for Kyoto, the ICC, etc. Bush, for all the legitimate complaints about his undermining civil liberties, has not attempted to silence his critics, and those who think the Bush administration is dirty have very short memories. One would think that libertarian journalists could think of a few things -- unless they were just venting their emotions.

Obama has already tried to use the courts to silence his critics. This impulse does not bode well for civil liberties under an Obama administration. He favors "redistribution of wealth," by whatever means necessary, including through SCOTUS. He favors severe restrictions, or bans, on armed self-defense by law-abiding citizens. His major goals include raising taxes, raising government spending, and making health care a Federal program.

For those who believe that Obama is an intellectual, so that makes him better, consider Wilson. Wilson had a PhD, and he'd be my vote for waterboarding. An erudite fascist is what? A more effective fascist? Wilson was quite effective -- in all the worst ways.

McCain's baby, CFR, is an affront to liberty. McCain is a "national greatness conservative" who worships at the altar of TR. As someone who grew up with Goldwater conservatism, I don't see McCain as a conservative at all. I can surely see why a libertarian couldn't vote for McCain.

Bob Barr offers a viable protest vote, without having to vote for either Pepsi or Coke. The GOP will still get their needed drubbing, if one votes for Barr. A vote for Barr (or any 3rd Party candidate, or a blank ballot) will still be a vote against the GOP.

I'd just like to know how can a libertarian vote FOR Obama? I can find little about him that's not the polar opposite of what libertarians would want. We're not talking about a divided government in 2009, either, with a Democrat in the White House.

Perhaps this article in the Guardian gets it right:

Depending on what Kool-Aid you have been drinking, when it comes to Obama your glass is either half full, half empty or overflowing, or you've smashed it lest anybody else imbibes its poison.

People come to Obama with extraordinary amounts of baggage and dump it at his door. For the most part their responses to him tell you far more about them than they do about him.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/jul/21/barackobama.uselections2008 (This article is positive about Obama, by the way.)

It's a bit surprising to see the phenomenon manifested in a magazine called "Reason." Where are rational reasons for a libertarian Obama vote -- not just a vote against McCain or the GOP, but a vote FOR a candidate who is a far-left ideologue and a demagogue, to boot?

Obama "will be very good for business," Craig Newmark says? Huh? Maybe he would be good for Newmark's business (craigslist), but only because on-line ads for cash-payment services and bartering will become more popular... Or does Newmark think that the economy will become so depressed that everyone will be selling off their old crap on craigslist to pay the bills? I'd be interested in hearing what Newmark sees in Obama's policies that will be "very good for business."

Have otherwise smart, mature libertarians fallen under his spell, in that they, like so many naive liberal college kids, see what they want to see, in Barack Obama?

Reverse John Galt? Or formula for misery?

Tom Spaulding wrote here about "The Reverse John Galt."

Well, I've tried it. It doesn't really work, at least for those of us who want "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." Doing something like that short-term, in protest, might be a good thing. But longer-term, it's not.

I tried it at a job where I wouldn't be rewarded, had no further opportunities, but wouldn't be fired, and where others who didn't deserve to, made more than me. I stuck around and took my salary, but did less and less for it.

The problem was this: it depressed me.

Ayn Rand's story isn't just about Atlas shrugging. It's about the resilience of the human spirit. In the novel, the Gulchers founded a new community where they could individually rise to their potentials.

The story of John Galt isn't just about dropping out, and keeping one's ideas and efforts to oneself. It's about how it's impossible to kill the human spirit.

Rand believed, correctly, that the free market, innovation, achievement and reward are vital to the human spirit.

So the important question isn't, "What can we take?" It has to be, "What do we do to keep that spirit free?"

But in the short term, Tom Spaulding has a good point...