ShrinkWrapped

Politics & Self Esteem

Yesterday Judith Weiss commented on a New York Times article describing the devolution of political discourse in interpersonal relations.  Judith made the point that she long ago discovered that discussing politics with her liberal friends was impossible:

Everyone is buzzing about this article in yesterday's NYTimes which tells it like it is for me and all my Liberal Hawk/disgruntled Democrat/Republican/conservative friends. Everything we had been complaining about since 2003, acknowledged in ink on newsprint, by the former Paper of Record :

FOR years, Sheri Langham looked at the Republican politics of her parents as a tolerable quirk, one she could roll her eyes at and turn away from when the disagreements grew a bit deep. But earlier this year, Ms. Langham, 37, an ardent Democrat, found herself suddenly unable even to speak to her 65-year-old mother, a retiree in Arizona who, as an enthusiastic supporter of President Bush, “became the face of the enemy,” she said.

“Things were getting to me, and it became such a moral litmus test that all I could think about was, ‘How can she support these people?’ ” said Ms. Langham, a stay-at-home mother in suburban Virginia. The mother and daughter had been close, but suddenly they stopped talking and exchanging e-mail messages. The freeze lasted almost a month. “Finally, it hit me that if one of us got hit by a bus tomorrow, I don’t want my final thought to be, ‘She supports George Bush,’ ” Ms. Langham said.

This woman is a 37-year-old adult with a child, and she freezes out her child's grandmother over politics. 'Nuff said. (Maybe if she actually asks her mother about her views, and listens, her question will be answered.)

This situation is probably familiar to any apostate liberal who has had the temerity to re-examine his own positions and actually change his mind.

In the past I have commented on the difficulty in discussing politics with people who use their political postures to support their self esteem.  A liberal who believes that liberals are smarter, more caring, and just generally better people than conservatives, who by comparison are evil or supporters of evil, is a person who will have trouble giving any credence to opposing view points.

Reproaches of Our Fathers

Over the weekend I saw Flags of Our Fathers.  Donald Sensing has a review which captures some of my sense of the film.  He points out that one of its drawbacks is that the movie never quite settled on its point of view:

This movie’s technical merits are excellent beyond all praise, but good luck trying to figure out just what is the story line. I remember what Alfred Hitchcock said decades ago: Before everything else about a movie, you have to have a story. And FOOF doesn;t really have one. Instead, it has three or four, and winds up telling none of them well.

The story(ies) is (are) told almost exclusively through flashbacks. Sometimes what is really a single flashback by one of the characters is split into two scenes in the movie - one key flashback consists of two parts separated by about an hour (maybe more) of running time. And it’s not always clear who is having which flashback. I think Eastwood and the screenwriter chose to make the movie this way because they wanted to focus not so much on the battle itself as the battle’s after-effects on the three men who lived long enough after the flag raising to be pulled back to the States to make a war-bond tour. (Three marines who raised the flag were KIA before they knew they were being hailed as heroes.)

Part of Eastwood's problem is that he was trying to tell a pre-Modernist story from a post-modernist perspective.  The success of post-modernist deconstruction, which has insinuated its point of view into so much of our educational system and public discourse, renders most filmmakers incapable of telling a story without radical de-mythologizing.   While there is often merit in historical revisionism, it has become so extreme and so poorly recognized that it devalues everything it touches.

Yet in a more subtle way, Flags of Our Fathers succeeds in illuminating one of the underlying dynamics that has been at work in our culture since the heady days of the 1960s.

The Council Has Spoken ...

This week's winning Council post was A LIBERAL MANIFESTO AND OTHER HALLOWEEN FRIGHTS by Rich Moran.  He does his usual thorough job deconstructing a type of Liberal ideology that is best described as sanctimonious and narcissistic.   Second place was taken by Marc Schulman, the newest Council member, who proves the wisdom of the Watcher's choice by posting an excellent summary of many of the issues involved in North Korea's ongoing efforts to obtain nuclear weapons, Japan, North Korea and Nuclear Weapons.

Among non-Council posts, Elder of Ziyon won with the kind of informative article that should be found in the legacy media.  Archaeological Temple artifacts drive PalArabs crazy actually tells you something you might not know about a problem that has been festering and poorly described by the MSM, for 30 + years.   In second place was Greyhawk's Fighting Back at the Mudville Gazette.  He eloquently makes the point that we are in a propaganda war and too much of the legacy media either doesn't realize it, ignores it, or consciously is on the other side.

As always, all the nominees can be found at the Watcher of Weasels and all will reward your time and effort.

Conflicted About Conflict

One of the great divides in our country, and in the West in general, is between those people who believe that as bad as Islamic terrorism can be on a local scale, there is no way it can threaten our civilization, versus those who believe that our civilization is actually more fragile than people realize and that it could indeed be  changed in irreversible and unfortunate ways; in other words, we could in fact lose this Long War.

For those who believe that Islamic fascism is more nuisance than peril, it follows that the Iraq War was and is a disaster that can only damage our country and our military.  For those people, getting out as quickly as possible is the only option that makes any sense.  The cost to the Iraqis and to our future position in the world is minor compared to the ongoing drip of casualties, a kind of Chinese water torture for the country. 

[I purposely omit consideration of those, especially on the left, who see our country as basically evil and in need of another Vietnam-like "corrective" experience so that we will be more hesitant to use force in the future.  They are effectively anti-American and I doubt they can convince most people of their good will.]

Tom Barnett, whose Blog is a useful tonic for despair, writes brilliantly about what he sees as our poorly considered post-war efforts.  He sees Islamic fascism as a mere blip on the radar screen, with the larger story being the increasing tendency of formerly failed and marginalized parts of the globe (the Gap) joining the modern world (the Core.)

About the Children: Gay Marriage

In 1974 the Supreme Court substituted its judgment for the more complicated, slowly developing, textured legislative approach to abortion and ushered in 32 years and counting of controversy which has done much to sour our national political discourse.  The pro-life members of our population felt that their beliefs were thoroughly disregarded about a fundamental tenet of greatest importance to them and those who are pro-choice celebrated.  Many years later we find our country in the position where the pro-life argument has made a fair amount of progress, in part because our unease with the ease of terminating a life, or a potential life, has been accentuated by the demand by the most extreme pro-choice proponents that there can be no restrictions on abortion in any circumstance.  The idea that a viable third trimester pregnancy can be terminated on a whim, even if in reality this is extraordinarily rare, troubles the vast majority of Americans of good will.  This is because a third trimester pregnancy is a baby and despite the frequency with which we relegate our children to second class status in this country, we still believe children are important.  So, what does this have to do with Gay marriage?

Psychoanalysts tend to be both strongly individualistic, even libertarian, and deeply conservative.  When you work so closely with a person exploring the deepest strata of the mind, the realization of how difficult it is for someone to change is unmistakable.  At the same time, our theories, and a growing body of sociological evidence, suggest that the optimal environment yet devised in which to raise children who can become healthy and successful adults, is a nuclear family with married parents. 

I have read a number of reports on the New Jersey Supreme Court decision about Gay Marriage.  Captain Ed offers a reasonable synopsis and analysis about a muddled court decision that suggests Gays should have all the rights of heterosexuals in a relationship except the right to call their relationship a marriage:

Is Nothing Sacred?

In one of history's sad ironies, the early Psychoanalysts derogated religious belief, to the detriment of both religion and psychoanalysis; the estrangement continues to this day and continues to resonate in unfortunate ways.  The irony is that there is no necessary contradiction between Psychoanalysis and religious belief and in fact, they both address some of the same questions; a synthesis would enhance both (though I think Psychoanalysis would gain the far greater measure.)   

Psychoanalysis emerged at a time when man's rationality was being elevated to an idealized position.  The Existentialists had dispensed with God, and science, specifically evolution, had dispensed with the need for God.   (Both of these statements were/are thought true by sophisticated thinkers, though their falsity is demonstrable; in this post I will address their psychological falsity and leave it to others to discuss their philosophical and rational falsity.) 

The  brilliant insight of Psychoanalysis was the recognition that our rational minds existed as a thin, fragile, overlay of more primitive irrationality.  The Psychoanalysts thought that if they could interpret unconscious conflicts and bring the unconscious mind under the purview of the rational mind, man would be protected from all the primitive passions that had led to so much pain and torment for the human race.  The irony is that their own unconscious minds sabotaged them from carrying their argument to its obvious conclusion.  Freud recognized that there is no such thing as a man who is in complete command of, and aware of, all the vagaries of his own unconscious mind.  As such he recommended periodic re-analyses for practicing Analysts, just so they would not fall under the sway of their own unconscious passions.  That he, and others, failed to realize that their certainty that religious belief was irrational was based on their own irrationality, is truly ironic.

In my post Political Deification, I explore some of the reasons why, in the absence of God, we use our own ideas as a replacement for God:

Saying Whatever Comes to Mind XI

The latest Sanity Squad Podcast is up; listen in while we place "Moderate Islam" and then the execrable Teddy Kennedy under the Sanityscope.  Join Siggy (even more outraged than usual), Neo-neocon, Dr. Sanity, and myself as we put things into a saner perspective.

You can find all of our past Podcasts at Pajamas Media Politics Central and can also subscribe or down load them through iTunes.

Junk Science

The legacy media never fails to miss an opportunity to educate their readers about science. Yesterday the Blogosphere was abuzz with reports of a political ad by Michael J Fox, a wonderful young actor suffering from a devastating illness, Parkinson's Disease, in support of Claire McCaskill, Democrat running against Jim Talent for the Senate from Missouri. Unfortunately for the public, the ad fails to differentiate embryonic stem cells and adult stem cells and differentiation makes all the difference.

Embryonic stem cells exhibit pluripotentiality, that is, they can differentiate into all the thousands of types of cells that make up a human being. Studying embryonic stem cells would be worthwhile as basic research in order to work out the multitude of chemical signals involved in differentiation. Embryonic stem cells, in point of fact, are worthless for clinical research studies because in order for them to be useful, they must first be differentiated into more mature cells. If you are trying to replace lost dopamine secreting cells in the parts of the brain involved in movement, ie to treat Parkinson's Disease, you need cells that have already partially differentiated to make nerve cells. Thus, is makes much more sense, clinically, to use adult stem cells, which are already partially on the way toward functional adult cells. There is a source of Adult stem cells that is readily available and would avoid all issues of rejection, and Reason points it the benefits that might accrue form this:

It is straightforward to see that when useful stem cells can be generated easily, then research, the technology base, and the development of therapies will progress more rapidly. I suspect that, from the perspective of twenty years hence, the real value of adult stem cells and first generation autologous stem cell therapies will be in the technologies, infrastructure and experience gained from the exercise - especially experience in controlling the differentiation of stem cells into the desired type.

Talkin' 'bout My Generation

The post war Baby Boomers, (I'm "talkin' 'bout my generation") grew up in a world that revolved around them and they continue to believe the world revolves around them.  Our childhoods were spent in the ease and comfort that our parents' generation sacrificed so much to provide.  Our parents lost 500,000 of their best defending Western democracy in WWII and another 54,000 on the Korean peninsula.  Children who are raised to believe the sun rises and sets for them are loathe to risk their own comfort for anything that does not directly threaten them.  After all, since the ascendancy of the left among the Western elites, the idea that there could exist anything more important than the attainment of one's personal happiness (usually confused with the pursuit of pleasure and material accumulation) has been accepted as the only sine qua non for a just society.  The heightened Narcissism of my generation is the substrate upon which so many of our troubles rest, which is why I write about it so often.

Last week the population of America reached 300 million.  Demographers determined that a baby born last Tuesday morning was the three hundred millionth American.  His or her arrival was greeted with some degree of excitement in certain precincts of the Blogosphere.  Mark Steyn pointed out the contrast between the slow demographic suicide of Europe (and Europeanized America, like Vermont) and American vitality in his greeting in the New York Sun this morning:

The reality is that in a western world ever more wizened and barren the 300 millionth American is the most basic example of American exceptionalism. Happy birth day, kid, and here's to many more.

Steyn also pointed out that within the elites, more common were expressions of unease:

The Council Has Spoken!

This week, the winning Council post was my post on Trauma, Passivity, & the Fear of Aggression.  There was a four way tie for second place.  Sometimes there are ties because no post is particularly outstanding; this week there was a tie because so many of the posts were so excellent.  Read them all:

NO GREATER LOVE by Right Wing Nut House

So Julia Wilson And Her Parents Are Idiots, But Hey What Else Is New? by Rhymes With Right

Sanctions on North Korea: The Weakest Link by the newest Council member, Marc Shulman at American Future

Running Down the Middle by Abbagav

The winning non-Council Post was Prison Jihad? by Daveed Gartenstein-Ross at the Weekly Standard which explored how radical Islamic charities exploit their access to the prison system.  The second place post was by Cassandra at Villainous Company who explained What It Means To Be A Conservative; she made a lot of sense to me.

As always, all the nominees can be found at the Watcher of Weasels and all will reward your time and effort.