ShrinkWrapped

Our Post-Modern Left

The story of the week is the response of the Left-Liberal intelligentsia to the Arizona shootings.  By now, all but the most partisan recognize that the shooter was a seriously disturbed psychotic man who was responding to his own internal delusions and had no relationship with the Tea Parties, Sarah Palin, or any Conservative ideology.  The attempt to hijack this incident for political gain is noxious in the extreme; sadly, it is further evidence of the Left's need to demonize its opponents rather than engage their arguments.  There is a relatively simple reason why they need to follow this well marked path:  Leftism, as an ideology, has failed, is incoherent, and is truly post-modern; in other words, there is no core belief system for Leftism, there is merely emotional resonance disguised as rational argument.

For the Left, the use of martial metaphor and terminology by the Right creates a climate in which violence, even when non-political or coming from the Left, is caused or increased.  At the same time, political violence from the Left and their allies is never considered to be symptomatic of Left wing excess.  At one time this formulation worked to control the speech and thinking of most people; the Media was the gate keeper, not only of information, but of narratives, and when you hear the same story line repeated over and over again, most people do not spend the requisite time and energy to question the narrative.  As I have noted on many occasions, our brains and our minds (which may overlap in the space they inhabit but are not equivalent conceptually) are conservative, that is, they aim to limit the expenditure of energy.  In other words, biology is lazy.  There is nothing wrong with recognizing that truism, but it does mean that when the narrative imposed on reality is limited, it is, for most people, too much work to question.  That has changed with the advent of new media.  The great problem for the Left is that the new media narratives are easier to understand and better reflections of most people's quotidian reality than the more complex narratives constructed by the post-modern Left.

A brief example should suffice:

For the Left, Anthropogenic Global Warming was an excellent narrative when it was first proposed.  It explained warming trends, justified a massive expropriation of money and power from the wealthy world to the power brokers of the international elites (under the rubric of helping the poor who rarely ever saw a fraction of the appropriated money and none of the power), and it served as a useful weapon against the hated capitalist system.  The problem was that as time went on the dire consequences of the world failing to end on time meant that the narrative had to be amended time after time.  Now we are told that human derived CO2 is causing Climate Disruption or Anthropogenic Climate Change, née Anthropogenic Climate Warming.  Granting there is a non-zero risk that through so far unexplained and undiscovered feedbacks, tiny increases in trace gases in the atmosphere are throwing the entire system into chaos, the current Conservative narrative is simply easier to understand and fits the visible facts better than the Ptolemaic epicycles built by the AGW proponents.  That is, climate varies naturally, probably in relation to the sun's output and other long term variables over which man has no control; technology will increasingly allow us to reduce our dependence on carbon emitting energy sources; and the single greatest protection we have against Climate Change, human derived or otherwise, is increasing wealth, also enabled by our burgeoning technology.  Game, Set, and Match to the AGW skeptics!

Because the post-modern Left has no core beliefs, they are capable of the most overt contradictions.  For example, if they truly believe that martial verbal productions create a climate of fear and violence, then they should be appalled at what occurs on a daily basis in the Muslim World.  Professor Barry Rubin explains:

If One Extremist Gunmen Can Do So Much Damage in America, How About Ten Million Such People In The Middle East?

When one crazed or ideologically obsessed gunman named Jared Loughner  starts shooting in Arizona, people condemn him and start bemoaning the state of their society. How about a place with ten million people like that who are treated as heroes?

America this week is awash in a huge and passionate debate over whether angry political disagreements and harsh criticisms of certain views or groups inspired the attack on an American congresswoman (Jewish and a strong supporter of Israel, by the way). I’m not going to enter into that argument right now but I want to point out the Middle Eastern ramifications of what's going on here.

Every day for more than a half century, Arabs and Muslims have been inundated every day with hatred for Israel, America, the West, Jews, and often Christians. You can read transcripts of Syrian broadcasts or Palestinian speeches from 50 years ago that sound just like what is being said by their successors  now.

Let’s say that the proportion of lies, slanders, extremism, and incitement in the American discourse is one-tenth of one percent of all the words spoken on controversial issues. The equivalent figure for the Middle East is well over 95 percent.

In addition to that tone, there is not only a total lack of balance but an absence of the other side altogether. It's all one-sided.

And in addition to those two points, the level of factual accuracy is farther away from reality than anywhere else in the world. (Though, admittedly, that gap has been narrowing in recent years as Western academic and journalistic standards decline).

And in addition to those three points, while extremists tend to be marginal in the United States, they are in control--either politically or at least setting the terms of discussion--throughout the Arabic-speaking and Muslim-majority worlds.

Thus, the level of incitement, imbalance, lies, and the hegemony of hatred in that region towers above that in the West like the World Trade Center towers over an anthill.

Oh, the World Trade Center doesn't exist any more. Well, that has something to do with this situation, too, doesn't it?

Or to put it another way, in the Middle East, the crackpot is often (usually?) given more credit than the rational or factual.

I won’t take your time with lots of examples but one might start with the widespread belief that the U.S. government or Israel carried out the September 11 attacks, coupled with the contradictory belief—held often by the same people—that it was something to be proud about. Or all the ridiculous conspiracy theories about Israel, as in the cases mentioned here and here. Or the editorial in al-Ahram, the most important Egyptian newspaper, that claimed all terrorism in Iraq was a U.S. plot to divide Muslims.

Read his whole post; it is replete with smart insights and includes a wonderful image that should be seen and savored.

Once again, the lack of core beliefs dictates that the Left must create its post-modern ideology on an ad hoc basis.  There are general guidelines, such as "Capitalism bad, Socialism good" and "America and Israel bad, Arabs and Europeans good" but there is no coherence to the structure.  As a result, those who follow such a belief system are forced to censor their own perceptions and attempt to limit the perceptions of others; too much reality threatens the narrative. 

Please watch Melanie Phillips explain to an Israeli interviewer how abysmally Israel has failed in their hasbara, ie public relations; especially pay attention to her explanation of the difficulty Israel's positions have in gaining any oxygen among the British intelligentsia:

My fondest wish is that Melanie Phillips appear more often and in more venues.  Americans still tend to hear better when a speaker has a refined and delightful British accent, perhaps a remnant of the respect one has for one's parents even after having declared independence from them.

The committed Leftist cannot help but force all data to fit his narratives; when the narratives change, the data is reinterpreted to fit.  They have created a protean ideology that has no core and is impossible to combat in the realm of ideas (in part because they can not and will not argue ideas but can only argue power and money.)  The Left and the parts of the economy that they dominate are losing power and influence as the need to become more efficient in producing the tangible assets requisite for life becomes ever more overt.  Their livelihoods are threatened since they are fundamentally parasitic; (when was the last time a Left wing Professor of Literature produced anything of tangible value?) and as with any life form that feels its life is threatened, their defensive struggles are only going to become more and more vicious until they are marginalized and defeated. 

If we are lucky, 2008 will one day be seen as having been the high water mark of Leftism, the moment when its inevitable decline into irrelevance began.  More likely it will persist and return to threaten the freedoms of succeeding generations; in the future, however, the growth of uncontrolled information sources means that they will never again be able to control the narratives as they once did.

Elites versus Bloggers: Who "Owns" the Zeitgeist

Herewith two articles from charter members of the elite MSM and one from a female blogger:

First, Tom Friedman, who always has his pulse on the interests and opinions of his liberal, moneyed friends:

More Poetry, Please

More and more lately, I find people asking me: What do you think President Obama really believes about this or that issue? I find that odd. How is it that a president who has taken on so many big issues, with very specific policies — and has even been awarded a Nobel Prize for all the hopes he has kindled — still has so many people asking what he really believes?

I don’t think that President Obama has a communications problem, per se. He has given many speeches and interviews broadly explaining his policies and justifying their necessity. Rather, he has a “narrative” problem.

He has not tied all his programs into a single narrative that shows the links between his health care, banking, economic, climate, energy, education and foreign policies. Such a narrative would enable each issue and each constituency to reinforce the other and evoke the kind of popular excitement that got him elected.

...

“You can’t get nation-building without shared sacrifice,” said Sandel, “and you cannot inspire shared sacrifice without a narrative that appeals to the common good — a narrative that challenges us to be citizens engaged in a common endeavor, not just consumers seeking the best deal for ourselves. Obama needs to energize the prose of his presidency by recapturing the poetry of his campaign.” 

You can be forgiven if Tom Friedman's article seems somewhat incoherent.  After all, his point is that the details of policy (more troops to Afghanistan, more trillions in borrowing for poorly specified programs, more than 1900 pages for healthcare "reform")  don't matter.  what matters is the mellifluous sound of Barack Obama's voice as he entices Americans to get on board with his plans to expand the government (and the debt) to a size never seen before.

E. J. Dionne gets a little more specific:

Hearts, Minds and Health Care

The next health care fight has already started. It's the battle to define the bill that President Obama will eventually sign as a victory for consumers, taxpayers and the common good.

You might say this view is premature. Legislation has yet to pass the House or the Senate, there are differences between the two bodies, and some moderates still have doubts.

But barring astoundingly self-defeating behavior by Democrats, a decent bill will get to Obama's desk. He and his party will then own the most sweeping reform of the American social safety net since the passage of Medicare in the 1960s and, arguably, Social Security in the 1930s.

Both parties know this. That's why much of the rhetoric you'll hear in the coming weeks will not really be about whether to pass a bill. It will be designed to shape how the voters who will decide the 2010 elections -- and, ultimately, the fate of health care reform itself -- come to view the new system.

Republicans will try hard to minimize the benefits that will flow from the reform and set themselves up to claim that anything bad that happens to anyone's health care in the next few years is Obama's fault. It will be a bit like those New York City taxi drivers during the late 1960s and early '70s who despised Mayor John V. Lindsay so much that they were prepared to blame him for bad weather.

And since most of the changes don't become effective until 2013, the next few years will be a time of uncertainties and unknowns. Citizens typically want to know what's in this for them, and what they'll get right now.

That's why the most important document House Democrats released last week when they unveiled their bill was a list of 14 benefits that will be created immediately.

Dionne is correct to say that most Americans would be supportive of (many of) the 14 benefits listed.  At the same time, a great many Americans must be wondering why it requires 1980 pages of arcana to describe these 14 benefits.  And here is the fundamental difference between bloggers, who know nothing and typically sit around in their pajamas pontificating all day </sarcasm> and elite opinion writers shows up.  I would wager that neither Tom Friedman nor E. J. Dionne have actually read the healthcare bill(s) that meet with such approval from their wise and lofty position.  In this they are no different from the vast majority of democratic Senators and Congressmen who have never shown any inclination to actually read and understand the legislation they propose.

Lofty sentiments are fine but when you are proposing to vastly expand the size sand scope of government, the devil is in the details.  And that is the "on the other hand."

On the other hand, there are bloggers who have the intellectual abilities and the curiosity to read the legislation and, not surprisingly, they note that the built-in "unexpected" consequences of the legislation are dramatic.  (The consequences are unexpected because of the limitations of curiosity and intellectual ability of our Representatives as well as because many of the unintended consequences are probably fully intended but hidden and obfuscated.)

Consider the difference between the approach of our elite sophisticates and our own over-burdened Southern gal:

House Medical Plan

I had a bunch of stuff to post on, but I am not feeling well at all, probably due to taking off the flat, putting on doughnut, getting tire fixed, and putting on tire in the cold wet. Most of the time I do pretty well, but either the flu blew something loose internally or this is my old trouble back again, because this morning my muscles had stiffened so badly that I was nearly immobile.

So I decided that since I was in pain anyway, I'd do some research on that 1,990 page health care bill. I didn't get too far even with the summary before I cracked up laughing and did myself further damage. I think I tore something loose in my rib cartilage. So be warned - you might want to exit to safety before reading on. Here is the summary and it is only 11 pages. This has many awesome features worthy of Dilbert, but the one that did me an injury is on top of page 2. The bill contains a mandate to provide coverage for businesses, and if they don't, they have to pay 8% of wages to the exchange. For a lot companies currently, that would be a good deal, so I have always seen this as a severe problem that will shift coverage to the subsidized exchanges.. But this - this takes it a step further:

Small business protections. Small businesses with annual payrolls below $500,000 are exempt from requirements to offer or contribute to coverage, including the 8 percent payroll contribution for failure to provide health benefits to their workers. As a result of this exemption, 86 percent of America’s businesses are exempt from any requirement to provide coverage to their employees. The 8 percent requirement is phased in for small businesses with an annual payroll between $500,000 and $750,000.

Well, there are many ways to structure businesses and employment, and I suspect that within three or four years after passage, it will be more than 86 percent. For example, there is employee leasing - the legal structure of which is that your employees work for another business. It would not be difficult for some large employee leasing firm to set up a franchise system in which most employees worked for small units that basically were shell firms below the 500K which would then contract employees to much larger firms for a percentage cut of payroll - say 2%. How much do these DC bozos think the average employee earns? Since one person can own any number of these luscious little profit centers, I think I'll plan to own about 20. It takes paratisization to a new level, but hey, in the land of the crooked only the honest are slaves.

Needless to say, this is going to be like a dagger to the heart of large businesses in the US, because smaller low wage competitors just got handed an 8% of payroll price advantage. The natural result would be to force all businesses to the lowest level of wages, shift employment structures massively, and throw most employees on the exchange.

Roaring with laughter as the light dawned, I shot over to Coyote, who sees the writing on his wall in the form of "Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin".

The implications for my business is staggering. I have already mentioned in the previous post that it imposes an 8% tax on wages on my business — a business where 50% of revenues go to wages and margins are in the 6-7% range. You do the math.

Worse for us is that nearly all our competitors are ma and pa companies with less than $500,000 in wages a year, meaning that our competitors will be exempt from these taxes, giving them an automatic 4% cost advantage over our company. Great.

Twelve seconds after this thing passes, I will be on my phone to my attorney to figure out if it is possible to break my company into multiple corporations that all fall under the 500,000 wage limit. The paperwork and administration for this would be a huge hassle, but it can’t be as high as 4% of sales.

Well, the other option is employee leasing, Coyote. I may have just found my next million-dollar idea. Because damn straight, it's going to be easier and cheaper for you to lease them from multiple businesses that provide a unified type of service than split up your whole company. Call me. We'll go into business together. We'll make millions the first year. That is, we will if I can keep my rib cartilage whole.

It just goes on and on like this; the incentives in this bill are for all large companies to fire most of their employees and shfit their workforce to part-timers and leased employees. Thus, and I was already in pain from convulsive laughing when I reached the top of page three where what to my wondering eyes appeared but:

I will leave tit here and suggest you get on over to M_O_M's post-haste because she has lots more, the kind of detail that can only be gleaned and understood by actually reading the damn bill, something our betters would never deign to stoop to.  The level of detail in M_O_M's post (in fact, in all of her posts) which so often includes the kinds of quantitative analysis rarely seen in the MSM, should shame the efforts of the Dionnes and Friedmans, who wouldn't recognize a quantitative analysis if it bit them on the nose.  Perhaps if they were willing to read more bloggers' posts they might not be quite so dismissive of our concerns about the size and scope of government.

Our elites, and the technocrats and/or ideologues writing these abominations they call legislation, have come to depend upon a docile population with neither the time, energy, ability, nor inclination to actually watch what they do.  Once upon a time it was the business of the elite media to keep an eye on our leaders and bring their excesses and foibles to light.  The MSM long ago signed onto the liberal maximalist government agenda (now going so far as to ask to be put officially on the payroll since their business model is crashing and burning around them)  and it is only the advent of the internet that has allowed we, the people, the opportunity to see what our leaders have been up to.  We, the people, do not like what we have been seeing.

The elections tomorrow will be understood as many things, a confirmation or repudiation of Obama's policies, perhaps, or a signal of whether Conservatives can win running essentially as disguised libertarians (ie, socially liberal, fiscally conservative; in the three most prominent races, the Conservatives have not run on a social Conservative platform and have tried to minimize the impact of social issues); in addition, I would suggest that the results, if the Republicans win, will confirm that an irritated peopel are better served by those who wish to inform us rather than those who wish to tell us what to think. 

The Reavers of Islam

People recognize that when we try to communicate with each other, our tools of language and image are almost always inadequate to convey our full meaning, and at the same time, convey multiple meanings that we do not consciously intend.  The War on Terror, also known as the War on Isalmofascism, is being shaped by these meta-communications in ways that some of the main players seem not to recognize.

Yesterday,  Apollon Zamp guest blogged at Gates of Vienna, and in his post The Reavers' Jihad explicitly compared Islam to the marauders of the Firefly series.  The comparison may be an exaggeration, and may be based on a limited view of Islam, however it is a view that the proponents of Jihad have been assiduously advancing and in this our MSM have been complicit.  Here is Apollon Zamp's description of Reavers:

For those not familiar with the TV show “Firefly” and its subsequent film production, Serenity, the story line includes a savage breed of beings known as Reavers. Since the Firefly universe is set five hundred years in the future, one might — on a steady diet of Star Trek and other such sci-fi favorites — expect danger to come in the form of alien life. However, danger comes instead in the form of the Beast Within — the savage side of man’s nature that in civilized cultures is held in check by proper social conditioning, an instilled sense of morality, and regulation of the id by the superego.

The Rehabilitation of John Walker Lindh

Vodkapundit today takes a look at the "Long War" and wonders if we can Stay Focused.  He does not believe our society is doing what is required in order to in the war, and I see little to disagree with in his formulation:

If we’re going to win a long, ideological war, we need our primary schools to [teach] our children what patriotism is - and for the most part, they don’t. We need our college professors to give our best and brightest the intellectual ammunition to confront our destroyers – and for the most part, they don’t. We need our public thinkers to defend our laws and our way of life against foreign aggression – and for the most part, they don’t. We need our entertainers to choose the home team – and for the most part, they don’t. We need our politicians to show the backbone of Churchill, but for the most part, they don’t. And we need our military to understand, embrace, and put everything on the line for their country.

One out of six? That’s pretty bad. Is it enough? Probably not.

Our schools, our public thinkers, our entertainers, and our politicians either do not realize we are at war (which is hard to believe, but possible) or understand we are at war yet are unable to break out of their sclerotic paradigms.  Our media continues to view the world through the dialectical lens of Political Correctness.  In the PC world, there are only victims and oppressors and once a group or an individual has been determined to be a victim, they are held to minimal standards of accountability and seen as innocents whose atrocities are explained as the result of their desperate circumstances (especially their oppression by the West.)  Among other things, this allows the media to simplify the news in the service of "Stories" or "Narratives."  Although the media often has pretensions of sophistication and nuance, in reality, they have very little time or ability to explain complex stories in any depth and falling back on the ready made "victim" template is the easiest way to get stories into print.

John Walker Lindh is now being actively rehabilitated in the media.

Fast Forward: Part III

Iraq has been the central front in the war between Modern Civilization and totalitarian Islam since the United States and its coalition partners invaded.  The purpose of the invasion was primarily to destroy the regime of Saddam Hussein in order to change the dynamic in the Middle East, decrease the risk of Iraq expanding or recreating their WMD programs (the jury is still out on the whereabouts or existence of any Iraqi WMD but that is not germane to this issue at the moment, in any event), and present a third option to the world's Muslims, most of whom have lived their entire lives under authoritarian or totalitarian rule, either secular or theocratic in nature.  Democratizing Iraq was often posed as an after-thought, but it was and is a crucial aspect of the larger war against Islamofascism.

The  destruction of the dome of the Golden Mosque Samarra has been the latest and perhaps most effective, attempt yet to ignite civil war in Iraq.  Bill Roggio suggests that the next few days will be key.  In Looking for Signs of Civil War in Iraq, he offers a variety of guideposts by which to determine the likely direction of future events and concludes:

Iraq has yet to encounter any of the problems stated above. The Sunni led Iraqi Accordance Front has suspended talks to form a government, but have not withdrawn from the political process. The Iraqi Security Forces have taken appropriate measures and suspended all leaves, but there are no indications they are cooperating with militias or abetting the violence in any way. There have been both encouraging statements by the Shiite and Sunni leaders. There also have been some irresponsible statements from the politicians on all sides, but this can be understood as tensions are running high. The Shiites are devastated by the destruction of the Golden Mosque and the Sunnis are horrified at the retaliation attacks. What is critical is what is said and done by these politicians in the next few days and weeks.

What are they Thinking?

Sometimes news stories appear that make me scratch my head and wonder, "What are they thinking?"

This morning I took a five minute break from FNS to watch a few minutes of Meet the Press, where  Tim Russert had Madeline Albright and Lindsey Graham as guests.  (I don't have a transcript and may have some details wrong, but the meaning is clear.) Russert asked Lindsey Graham what could be done to increase the level of civility of discourse in politics.  Graham answered that it would help if the opposition stopped claiming that Bush lied, and Cheney lied, as a start.  When Russert passed the question along to Albright, she couldn't do it.  She looked down at the table and nearly sotto voce, said she wondered why Bush and Cheney had misstated the intelligence.  Russert persisted and quoted her own words back to her, to the effect that Saddam Hussein had WMD and added that she was part of the Clinton administration when regime change was voted on by the Senate to be official policy of the United States; was she repudiating that now?  Her response was that they had Hussein in a box and the threat of WMD was not imminent. (This has been proven repeatedly to be a real "lie" used by the opposition to discredit the admin; Bush said we needed to act before the threat became "imminent".)   Does she really believe what she is saying despite all the evidence of how the UN (Oil for Food scandal that most of the MSM and Democrats have apparently slept through) was corrupted by Hussein and how the Iraqi embargo was failing? Add in, can she really believe she was lied to about the intelligence when she was part of an administration which, while in office, apparently believed the same intelligence and was even more extreme in their rhetoric that the Bush administration was?  It is a puzzle and I am stumped and I wonder: What are they thinking?

Next, I bring to you the new Hollywood blockbuster, Brokeback Mountain.  Apparently, the critics love the movie.