Author Archives: conserveprolet

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minimum mcdonlds

by Reid Fitzsimons

A retired friend of mine, a conservative, expressed his frustration in discussing the drawbacks of raising the minimum wage with his liberal/progressive friends. He felt his arguments were solid but perhaps he was presenting them ineffectually. For whatever reason he has confidence in my abilities of articulation and asked if I would write some basic points that would win over his progressive friends. I have to admit I fully lack economic credentials. I have certainly worked for minimum wage and at times for much less and, along with my wife, have paid the wages of local workers in our Central American charity project, but I never even took Economics 101.

My friend, however, joined by essentially all conservatives, is completely clueless in his rationale: that a reasoned, thoughtful, and logical argument can sway a person engulfed by the progressive mindset. For better or worse, my life experience has afforded me an opportunity to know the progressive mind close-up, and it is indeed hermetically sealed. Trying to describe this is not unlike attempting to describe an odor or color without similes. We’re essentially talking about people with addictions to a worldview that cannot be challenged, and not the kind of addicts who have some degree of insight or even awareness a problem exists. We’re talking about rock-bottom addicts who have permanently scarred their loved ones and otherwise lost everything they ever had and will angrily protest that just a little more scotch or cocaine will be their redemption. We are talking about minds so closed that undeniable direct evidence is dismissed with contempt, suspicion, and hostility. ...continue reading →

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drone result edit

During the Bush administration, suspected terrorists were captured, imprisoned and interrogated. Some critics (including Obama) argued that it would be better to view terrorist acts as crimes needing prosecution and punishment rather than as acts of war needing retaliation. Now the Obama administration, eschewing American soldiers on the ground and imprisonment or interrogation without “due process”, is relying instead on blowing up the terrorists in drone attacks. There is a tactical difference, and a legal similarity, between the two approaches. The difference is that the live prisoners at least had the possibility of revealing important information, whereas the corpses at the drone attack site do not. The similarity is that the death penalties meted out to the drone attack targets and their friends also lack legal “due process” and trial in a civilian court with lawyers present. To me those were, and still are, interesting topics, but it seems that many who found them interesting during the Bush administration are not interested in thinking and talking about them now. Why is that? Forward progress in developing our morality and ethics seems to be stalled. http://www.amazon.com/The-Violence-Peace-Americas-Obama/dp/0984295178

However, progress in science and technology continues. (Actually, it seems to me that that disparity is at least 500 years old now. During that period, progress in science has been real, whereas progress in ethics has been mostly imaginary, existing mostly in human imaginations as an artifact of human narcissism.) Because of aerospace science, the US President will soon be able to deploy a small fleet of Lockeed-Martin / Kaman “K-MAX” unmanned external-load helicopters “as-is”, carrying a squadron of weaponized Lockheed-Martin unmanned “SMSS” vehicles http://www.lockheedmartin.com/us/products/smss.html The K-MAXes will drop the SMSSes near the target, and they will carry out their attack against a terrorist wedding, or whatever. After the “battle”, the K-MAXes will be able to go in to retrieve the surviving SMSSes and airlift them back to base, with no American humans being physically present for any of it. The unrecovered vehicles will be taken by the “enemy” to Iran for reverse-engineering, to discover and duplicate the latest tech secrets used in their design. However, one capability is still missing: that tactical plan does not yet include the option of capturing any suspects alive, imprisoning them, and interrogating them. Aerospace science "progress" means for military applications what it has meant for the last 100 years: increased ability to kill along with reduced risk of dying. But Augustine and Aquinas, cited by Obama during his Peace Prize acceptance speech, would not view that as "progress" at all. Hundreds of years ago, both of those guys viewed killing as far more problematic than dying.

Maybe all of that is OK from a “liberal” point of view, as long as no American soldiers are killed or injured, and none of the corpses are at any point subject to imprisonment or interrogation without due process. Maybe the meaning of the term “liberal” is changing over time, like everything else.

I suspect that living in Africa has enhanced my ability to imagine an attack like that from the point of view of the targets, and to extrapolate from that viewpoint what the long-term impact of it might be on America’s reputation in the world, and American success in the global war on terror. An obvious part of it will be the spread of the sentiment: those Americans who just send their demonic death machines to kill us, and are afraid to come out and fight us themselves, are the worst kind of vile cowards. But I’m just an ordinary guy, whose viewpoint does not matter much. For Samantha Power, current US Ambassador to the UN, it matters a lot, when she finds herself (for example) recommending to the President and to the UN that we keep soldiers out of Libya, but launch air attacks against one side in the Libyan civil war. From a distance I watch Samantha and try to see what she is seeing, but my perception of it remains unclear.

 

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genocide

Imagine a cathedral crammed with 2000 unarmed civilians, all terrified that they are about to be killed by the screaming crowd outside, who are waving the machetes which they intend to use for the killing. Then imagine a thin line of 20 armed UN peacekeepers, equally terrified but well-equipped and well-commanded, dispersed around the entrances to the cathedral, carrying out their assignment to protect the people inside the cathedral from the ones outside. Understand this about the protesters outside: they believe that they are there protesting for social justice, and that they mean to correct the injustices and oppression accomplished by the people gathered inside the cathedral, and their ancestors. The worst crime of which those “oppressors” stand accused is “racism”, yet the protesters themselves have selected the targets of their current anger based on “race” as they understand it. It may sound absurd to American ears, but the moral and ethical arguments of those protesters is sufficiently compelling, that many of their country’s liberal and social-justice minded Catholic priests support them (although of course the priests are always careful to say about that support, that they would “never condone violence”). The US ambassador in that country is a pacifist-minded Quaker, but he also feels a great deal of sympathy for the plight of the “oppressed” protesters. The government of France also generally supports them. ...continue reading →

kazinga

I had a flight to Queen Elizabeth NP and back today, and snapped this photo of the wildlife there. Notice the elephant Mama on lifeguard duty. She has told the little ones: stay between the hippos and the shore, and she is not watching them, but watching for crocodiles.

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Stephen Schwartz’ 1971 musical “Godspell” featured a duet for Judas and Jesus called “It’s All For the Best” (performed on the top of the World Trade Center Towers in that youtube clip). Schwartz composed a clever play on words in which Judas and Jesus use the same phrase with opposite meanings. Judas means that he thinks elites (like himself) are entitled to have everything, while Jesus is just asserting that things will work out OK in the end, for both the proletariat and for the elites, if they want. “Godspell” the musical is based on Matthew, but in the original Godspell of John (“Godspell” is an archaic spelling of “Gospel”), ch. 12, there is a real dialog between Judas and Jesus which has some interesting parallels to the dialog written by Schwartz. ...continue reading →

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Pardon my French (and Latin)

In math, "equality" (A=B) and "diversity" (A≠B) are contradictory and mutually exclusive hypotheses. Mathematicians (except those working on Schrodinger's Cat) generally do not try to hold contradictory hypotheses as both true. However, in modern political and social theory it is necessary to value both "equality" and "diversity" at the same time, especially for those on the left who admire the French Revolution more than the American one. The French said "equality!” in French, while the Americans said "from diversity, unity!” in Latin. ...continue reading →