So I'm paying attention to the media....

I see a clip of a press conference where the governor of California says he's recruiting an "army" to start going door to door to check on people who are sheltering at home.  He says the next phase in that endeavor will be that, if someone tests positive but is living with people who test negative, the patient will be removed from his home and placed in some kind of care facility to..well I guess to ride out the disease and get what I hope to be actual treatment if necessary.

Got that?

During a pandemic of modest severity but significant (read:  self-inflicted) economic impact, a government official is recruiting civilian collaborators to round up people from their homes and stick them together somewhere.  Does this sound like anything students of history should recognize?

"Sticking people together somewhere," specifically nursing homes, is what got the governor of New York the worst infection rate in the country.  Maybe that was an honest mistake at the time, but in hindsight it was an obvious one and it needn't be repeated.

Meanwhile, next to New York we have Pennsylvania, and someone from that otherwise-fine state called in to Breitbart News to report that in her attempts to ensure treatments for the covid would be available to her mother who is in a nursing home, she was led via from facility management through the governor's office to the state department of health (whatever they call it), where they asked the mother's age and then said flat out that no treatment would be provided even if she tested positive.

To be fair, I don't know that this has been corroborated yet, but I can think of few dumber policies to enact.

Are you a post-Marxist communist who wants to get rid of some useless eaters this way?  It may well work, but if people start getting sick and not getting treatment, they will start infecting more valuable citizens, and there's your next wave of the pandemic.  You're just not going to be able to keep it under control by refusing to take certain obvious treatment steps.

But all that is not directly what my point is about.  I want to tie those things together with the other anecdotes we've heard about needless infractions on civil rights and thoughtless would-be concessions to people who want to reopen.

I'm talking people staying in cars in a parking lot and lone paddle boarders getting ticketed or arrested for violating social distancing.  I'm talking restaurants being told they can reopen but not with a seating capacity high enough to support a clientele that could provide enough custom for the restaurants to stay open.

The former is giving license to totalitarians in blue uniforms, to men who don't really want to protect and serve but just want to be able to drive fast and talk shit.  I'm sorry, I respect the institution and the badge, but there are people like that.

The latter is how how central planners failed to prevent bread lines in the Eastern Bloc (or possibly were able to deliberately effect them; I haven't looked at every case outside of Stalin and Mao).

So what I'm saying is this:

The natural goods are a lot like the moral goods that God gives us.  You can sacrifice a higher one for a more proximate one--lie to get out of jail, give up freedom for security--but statistically it will turn around to bite you in the ass.

"God will not be mocked" is not some warning that He is a bad sport who can't take a joke.  It is the insight that He cannot be without some blowback being put in motion--He's not just that vigilant; it simply can't happen.  It is the abstraction from the principle that if you burn your hand on a hot stove "I was only kidding" will not make it better.

So go ahead, criticize people who won't shut up about civil liberties if you want--again, I'll be fair, this is uncharted territory and we should all be patient with each other while we establish new precedents--but it's looking like they were right after all.

What people don't want to look at

Every so often—too often, yes—there is a mass shooting, and usually it’s a massacre. And there is a cry to ban guns. And it is pointed out that banning guns won’t make violence just stop and it won’t stop would-be criminals from utilizing other weapons or improvised weapons.

And this is admitted, but it’s pointed out that at least it would help.

And conservatives point out it wouldn’t be enough to make up for the other problems that would come from flouting the second amendment and effectively taking guns away from law abiding citizens but not other criminals or the government.

These are worthwhile things to discuss, don’t get me wrong.

But there is an opportunity here, and I think the reason it is not taken advantage of is that it doesn’t actually achieve the real, unstated goal.

You want to make even modest efforts to restrict school violence? Okay. Gun rights advocates have pointed out things they think would work better than a gun ban. So you’re not going to get a ban rammed through Congress tomorrow. So why not try to achieve the things that nobody is opposing?

Maybe it won’t be as good as your pet project, sure, but you already admitted you’d rather achieve a partial victory than none.

So how about it? Willing to put your money where your mouth is?

Or do you want to keep blaming the other side for every failure that results from your preference for ideological purity?

On crying wolf over "dog whistles"

If you’re the only one who hears them—and we know this is true because you’re the one going around telling people what they’re not hearing—maybe it’s not the accused who is racist and trying to use them to send some kind of secret signals to other metaphorical dogs.

Maybe you are.

Letting a good crisis go to waste

A year ago the secprogs were praying, after their manner, for a recession that would get Trump voted out of office in 2020. It does happen in such a circumstance; look at Carter and George H.W. Bush and Herbert Hoover.

But they can't seem to stick to one script, and in the era of social media, it's a lot harder to talk out of both sides of your mouth without the same audience hearing opposing stories from the same person. When there was a little less information and a lot more control, a lot of people will hear one bad story, and a lot of other people will hear another bad story, and most of the rest will hear both but only in small enough parts that it will seem less like a contradiction and more like a complex mass of bad news. The few who grok both prongs of the conspiracy for what they really are, were few enough not have much electoral impact.

Not anymore. Now most of us have the whole story at our fingertips. There's still more information and disinformation than we as a society are savvy enough to see all the way through yet, but the genie is out of the bottle.

So now when false rape accusations get made against high profile political appointees, we still have people picking sides based on inadequate evidence, but everybody can see how embarrassing the process of sausage making is. Faith in the old institutions is eroded, but not just in the targets that those who stooped to low tactics hoped to disparage.

And when a potential crisis arises in Hubei, the Dems poo-poo Trump for overreacting and don't let him do anything but cut off trade with China, and say "go to the Chinese New Year parade or you're racist."  When that turns out to be inadequate, they poo-poo him for not having done enough, and cite as evidence a bunch of watery out of context quotes that were intended to give people some hope and instill peace, and stay mum about having discouraged social distancing at a critical time because it may have been too early to know but racist signaling in retrospect is really not a fair counterpoint to a public health concern. When the damage that was done continues to blossom, they poo-poo him for his optimistic naïveté and start doing their Chicken Little impressions.

So now we're basically in a recession. If this all ended tomorrow, maybe it wouldn't qualify as a real recession; it's not so much that people are fiscally battening down the hatches to weather out a storm of low confidence, but everybody just putting their business on hold.  The demand is pent up, not gone, and the big companies that operate a lot on LTAs are stuck between trying to get out of them and just trying to manage them in the new situation.  But after a while people run out of the capacity to keep waiting, and businesses do board up, and workers do try to find alternative sources of income, and after a while longer the chances of the band getting back together start pointing at zero.

But even now this isn't really a recession. The stock market's behavior is just a symptom. What this is, is a crisis. And a crisis is like a war: the leaders who demonstrate the willingness and intent, in word and deed, to help America survive and thrive, are the ones who will keep or gain the reins of power until normality returns.

But the Dems have been telling us for over a decade now that, either by name or by effect, America needs to end, and we either ought to be subsumed in either some kind of global identity or anonymized under a swarm of immigrants and intersected identities that still think the brass ring known as the American dream is still here to be grasped.

Whatever the world as a whole is going through, these considerations are a luxury that Americans are decreasingly willing to indulge in. We finally have a real taste of toilet paper shortages and bread lines, and "well, at least the billionaires can't hoard any more than the rest of us" no longer sounds so comforting.

In the end, who is more likely to keep the power?  The known quantity, or the challenger who has no relevant experience (remember when that was a meaningful criticism)?  In the end, who is more likely to win the election?  The guy who stumbles along the way but at least tries to remind us that this isn't the end of the world and is actually trying to do something, or the guy who still thinks pronouns and replacing convicts in prison with socially distant paddle boarders are more pressing concerns than toilet paper and access to food?

Governor Whitmer, if you were trying to recoup your executive failure by appealing to Trump to shut down Michigan for you...

...this was not the way to do it.

See here for my original, recent post on the Michigan governor's "audition for VP" theory.

But she ran primarily on a "fix the roads" platform, which to be fair was a high priority before the pandemic.  That's kind of like Ralph Nader running on an airbags platform, except she won.  Now what, though?  This is harder than a state infrastructure crusade, isn't it?

Maybe the powers that be are thinking "ja wohl, she might be our kind of people after all," and hope that in seven or fifty-five months people will only remember the name and face when they go into the booth.

So they for three years periodically accused Trump, by dint of doing anything they didn't like, of being a dictator, as if exercising his duties in well precedented ways they didn't approve in his particular case, constituted by itself or in any degree tyranny.

But then the Wuhan virus hits and after poo-poohing him for overreacting, they "suddenly" panic and demand martial law, they demand shelter in place rules, they demand money be printed (or at least taxed) to support people who can't go to work and then divert some of it to the Kennedy Center, which lays off performers anyway.

My favorite example: the governor of Michigan begs after a fashion Trump to do the things I enumerated above, and then does them herself when she gets tired of waiting.  She should have done it herself immediately; if she has the power now, she had it when this all started too, and it was her duty to tend to Michigan more than it is his.

Like a friggin' cop who shows up and then calls 911.  Call for backup if you want, but you still have a job to do while you're waiting.

Apparently her strident posturing is to win the electoral affections of Biden, but I think it worked the other way. I'll explain in a minute.

Trump has the authority to impose martial law. He does not have the authority to violate the peaceable assembly clause. Whether groups of ten in this circumstance don't meant the peaceable criterion is debatable, but either way it's not the president's purview to regulate such things.
A governor, on the other hand, can make the state national guard enforce her will to some degree, including forcing large groups of people to disperse. It's been done before.

Ms. Governor of Michigan, the Mayor Ray Nagin Memorial Bus Depot is on line one. They'd like to interest you in some ironic optics about exercising executive power.

So it's weird how the Left seems so ready to invest more and more power in authorities and then when they have an opportunity to exercise some power, they run crying to daddy.  Even if daddy is a Republican.  Do they think they can bait and frame him with something more unpopular than their esoteric political aesthetics?  Do they still fail to understand they don't have the clout to overcome all the Constitutional checks and balances and electoral memory that would prevent them first from inventing tyrannical laws and then preventing the other side from ever getting the chance to use them?

Best I can figure is it's sort of a litmus test. Nagin failed; he did provide an opportunity to score some cheap points against Bush (but in those days that was like open mic night), but he did not show that he could step up and set an example. The governor of Michigan failed in the same way; she screamed her rhetoric but seems angry only because orangemanbad didn't do as soon as she wanted what she should have done, by her own power at any time, until she was I guess forced against her will to stand in the breach.  Lucky for her Trump's not running for governor of Michigan.

Pols who can take the reins in a crisis have a chance of a national career. Some people who never have the opportunity of such a crisis get there anyway. But pols who don't, finish their careers like varsity athletes who peaked in high school, periodically calling to the public mind what was so important about them but never accomplishing anything greater ever again. And I wonder if the DNC looks at it exactly that way.

Which is not to criticize. It's not uncommon to see people make a professional error of some magnitude and then find themselves, whether they ever realize it or not, off the career track. But it's interesting and it makes me wonder to what extent such figures are merely tolerated for what little they can contribute after all, and not "encouraged" to move on and let newer blood prove itself.

This is a little more politically hot than I usually like to get into, but...

...have you seen #filmyourownhospital?

I suppose there will always be a few hospitals that aren't as busy as the ones that we keep seeing footage of on the nightly news, but after a while it will be fair to ask "is the real crisis ever really going to happen?"

It may still be premature on my part, true, but I'm starting to smell a parallel between a couple things.

The first is three years of "the proof of Trump's collusion with Russia is imminent."

The second is "the coronavirus surge is no longer racist paranoia but imminent."

The scientist in me is interested in seeing what kind of data we'll get from this epidemiological experiment.  But the historian in me wonders how many patriotic sheriffs are out there who will refuse to support the encroachment on civil liberties that is happening because of all this.

I'm not talking about real threats to public health.  I'm talking about one guy paddle boarding by himself getting accosted by two boats and arrested.  I'm talking about 19 year old Pennsylvania girls getting $200 tickets for driving after "curfew" despite being socially distant from everyone except the cop that pulled her over in the first place.  

I'm also talking about the strange policies that sound like they're supposed to reduce human contact but in effect only make it worse.  Does a store get 100 customers during the ten hours it's open each day?  That's about ten customers an hour.  Cut that down to five hours and the hundred customers now have half the time to go shopping, and if it's an essential business like a grocery store, people on average aren't going to stop coming.  In the short run it may, since people will binge shop and then stay home, but when people come back to find empty shelves, they'll come back more often hoping for a restock, and thus we have more shopping trips than we would have seen otherwise.  So we have 100 customers coming in five hours instead of ten, and thus instead of ten customers per hour, we have twenty.  Twice as many.  Was this just stupid, or was it irrelevant to the real goal of the exercise?

The historian in me also wonders if the patriots who are staying at home for now and issuing warnings about post-Weimar Germany on social media will notice when the last chance to stand up, to draw the line in the sand, comes and passes.

I recently heard...

...that, due to the economic slowdown from corona, about 1/3 of all investment wealth (I think in the US) has been lost.

 This predominantly affects the wealthy, since they not just invest more in terms of absolute number of dollars, but tend to invest a larger proportion of their income or otherwise-liquid assets in businesses, the stock market, etc.

 Is this considered an acceptable mode of wealth redistribution?

I don't always buy the political stuff Neil deGrasse Tyson puts out... (edited)

...but when I do it seems like it's going to be one of those "the Left eats its own" cases.

I saw recently a tweet of his from late last summer trying to put into perspective the different high profile causes of death in America.  He showed how things like the flu and cancer cause tens of thousands of deaths a year but the total number of school shootings deaths is still in the hundreds.

Of course, we can't let facts get in the way of condemning guns, so someone tweeted back how we're doing so much to reduce the number of deaths to influenza and cancer but we're doing f-all about guns, and that's why people are disproportionately upset.

The hell "we" aren't.  

Hell, I'll say it again without sarcasm quotes:  the hell we aren't.

Cosmetic AR-15 bans, bump stock bans, permits to buy ammunition, magazine capacity restrictions, "gun-free zone" laws and signs where laws might not apply, increase in the presence of "resource officers" at schools around the country.

It's not that we aren't doing anything.  It's that most of the things they try aren't working.  NDT's point is that getting mad but insisting we try the same ineffective things even harder is not going to help.  We've been fighting the flu and cancer for  as long as people have been getting sick, and yes, we have made progress, but the one is a disease that looks like it will never really go away, and the other is a disease that really we barely even understand.

Really, it's a bad analogy.  Let me draw some parallels.

You’re not working to reduce medical errors by taking away scalpels.
You’re not working to stop the flu by taking away tissues.
You’re not working to stop suicides by taking away guns. Well, you are, but....
You’re not working to stop car accidents by taking away cars or roads.
But you think taking away guns will stop homicides, and are tone deaf to the UK's creeping knife restrictions.

Why don't we get more angry at people who take a dump or sneeze and don't wash their hands?  Why don't we put more social pressure on people who still smoke in public or put undertested chemicals in food or household or other personal products?  

We've done some of that and it's helped, but there's no controversy there, even though people are still getting sick and coming in to work.

There's barely any controversy about when armed security refuses to confront a shooter, even though that's the one thing they're trained and paid to do.

Historically though we haven't held the school shooters responsible, and I'm not talking about the fact that some of them were legally juveniles.

Thank God the discussion is finally starting to turn towards what makes people go postal.

Yeah..."Postal."  Remember when that's what the problem was?

And like with corporate health and safety policies, regular people wake up from the latest environmental fad and realize it was a one dimensional issue after all.

What do I mean by that?

Look back to my brief harangue about how (in particular) New York banned plastic grocery bags, demanding we buy reusable ones or revert to paper bags--but we have to pay for those, and the first time I got one, the bag ruptured twice just in the process of picking it up.

Some of you are old enough to remember when plastic got popular, on the grounds that it was easier to recycle than brown bag paper.  Maybe the technology has changed and paper really is lower impact these days.

But in their push to ride the crest of this green trend, everyone failed or declined to consider other factors that should have gone into the calculus.

Maybe there aren't enough people like me who like using the bags as bathroom trash can liners to make a difference.  I'm skeptical of that, but to be fair all my data are anecdotal.

Back when the Chinese restaurants were open, orders were often placed in plastic bags even if they were first in a paper bag, because plastic is waterproof so if my mo shu leaked I wouldn't get stains on the passenger seat in my car.  Most people don't order enough at one time to fill up a cardboard box like is sometimes used, and those are bulky enough you'd need to have a catastrophic spill to soak all the way through before getting home, but the restaurant probably wouldn't have enough boxes to go around, anyway.

Anyway, fast forward to the pandemic and everybody suddenly realized that reusable bags can accrue germs when the sit on the floor of the car, or on the ground, or soak up spills.  That's not good for the home team.  Or for the immunocompromised team.  So now plastic bags are back on the menu.

I'm just going to leave it at that.  Next time, can we at least try to anticipate some unintended consequences first?

So now Biden was accused of...things far worse than hair sniffing.

Back in the 90s, this was, and she told people at the time, so this isn't some Russian-fomented bimbo eruption.

If you like your evidence from one side of the spectrum, there's a sufficient article  here.  Another one that is in the Lifestyle section instead of Politics or...I don't even know if they have something like a police blotter section...can be found here if you want another example of the different levels at which journalistic bias can be engineered.  If you want to read something from the other side of the spectrum, look here.

The flip-flopping in social media by people who were outraged by the mass of accusations they felt added up to evidence against Brett Kavenaugh, the insistence that it doesn’t matter because Trump has more accusations (I'm not even sure that's true) just telegraphs you're not on any moral high ground, you're just doing the marketing work for your favorite team.  (h/t to Shoe0nHead for the metaphor).

If you can't even demonstrate that your side is actually better, if your best attempts to do so only make it worse, why should we be swayed by the skin suit you peeled off a moral human being and put on to parade around in front of us?  Didn't it occur to you we'd be even more off-put?

Same thing with the virus "hoax.”  Anybody who says Trump meant "the virus is a hoax" instead of "this is another political opportunity like the hoaxes that brought vaporous impeachment charges," especially since he was already trying to do something about it, wants it to mean that, don’t even want to acknowledge the perfectly neutral fact that he was in the crosshairs for years, it failed, and they’re trying to do it again with this—without even having to argue about whether it’s real.

America is so laden with propaganda...

...that white, tenured professors and journalists who barely have three credit hours each of history and economics still succeed in making generations of Americans believe that capitalism leads to a few rich billionaires and a destitute lower class, without even thinking to ask the questions "where'd the middle class come from, then?" and "why aren't we talking about the dearth of historical evidence that any alternative to capitalism has not just fewer billionaires but fewer middle class people and more poor people?"

Never mind Russia....

We need to look into China's meddling in American political affairs.  

The election isn't here yet so the disruption of legitimate political activity could still be minimized--at least, where there's nothing untoward that might be uncovered--and any collusion not uncovered would still be chilled as dishonest agents who wanted to stay below the radar, kept themselves below the radar.

Why is that when pro-choicers point to programs intended to help break the cycle of poverty as part of their efforts that have the effect of reducing abortion...

...they don't allow pro-lifers to make the same argument?

Maybe someone volunteers at soup kitchens, helps minorities in juvenile detention learn reading and other life skills, but if he goes to pray one rosary across the street from an abortion clinic or goes online, he's accused of not taking a holistic approach to honoring the dignity of human life and therefore isn't sincere at all.  Meanwhile his accusers do nothing but show up to shout at him, vote D, and then say "we pay our taxes to support these things."

Yeah, and he pays the same taxes.  Then he donates time and money willingly where he thinks it will make the biggest difference.


"Studies have shown 100% of abortions are carried out on women who don't want to be pregnant, and 0% on conservative white Christian men, so butt out."

Nice rhetoric, but you can only get that 100% figure by including women who don't want an abortion but aren't allowed to be shown alternatives, and women who want to have their babies but are dragged to clinics by their boyfriends who may use phrases like "do the responsible thing" but actually mean "avoid paternity hearings," and girls who are reluctant but undecided yet whose mothers drag them to the clinic on the grounds of "you live under my roof and I drive you around and feed you and I'm supposed to raise you, but since I failed to teach you to be 'responsible' then you must also have not learned what it takes to be a mom, so instead of showing you we're doing this," and girls who are reluctant or undecided yet whose boyfriends drag them to clinics while using phrases like "do the responsible thing" but actually mean "avoid statutory rape charges."


As for the 0%...there are atheist pro-lifers, and liberal pro-lifers, and female pro-lifers, and none of them is negligible in number, so why don't you stand your ground and defend your position, and log off or stay home for a while when you get tired of being reminded that people exist who disagree with you?

So much hangs in the balance....

Earlier this evening Mark Levin was justly mocking various high level leftoids for using melodramatic rhetoric about the importance of the November elections--stuff like "civilization as we know it hangs in the balance!"

I think, though, that they're technically correct.

If they win, the United States will be the point source for more societal poison administered by marxists and the caliphate, pushing us farther down a sleep and slippery path to cultural suicide.   This just happens to be what they want, as long as they can keep their hands on the reins.

If they lose, western civilization as we know it will last a little bit longer, and who knows how much there will be to hope for in 2022 or 2024?

This is how one knows one lives in a post-Christian society

They go on social media and post memes like "If you see a problem, you can pray about it, and it will be quick and easy and absolve you of the responsibility of solving it, and it won't solve anything, but if you put in the effort, it won't be quick or easy or absolve you of responsibility, but you will have solved it."

All the while assuming that what you and they might agree are social problems are things every decent human being anywhere across the world and throughout history would would also recognize as social problems that both must and can be fixed (or, at least, deserve the attempt).

This is, of course, not true.  

Look back to the founding of our country.  Most people at the time were not giving slavery as an institution a good prognosis in the long run, but there was some doubt as to whether it might be eradicated entirely and freedmen might really be able to enjoy the benefits of all that rhetoric about liberty.  

Look farther back, and you find concubines common not just in secular royal courts but even in the Vatican where it was doubted that the ideal of sexual continence was even possible.  I know, rumors and scandalous news articles these days support the notion that it's aiming a bit high, but plenty of priests and religious have shown that it is possible and that it need not settle for being honored more in the breach.  

Look elsewhere, and almsgiving is an obscure concept.  In India dying people are stepped over.  In China you are likely to be asked why you're tipping the homeless.  When religious orders go to such countries and do what little they can with the resources they can scrounge up, they're criticized for not meeting FDA standards (which no one outside the US honors, so...ethnocentric much?).

In the West, though?  Helping the destitute and lifting up the downtrodden are so built into our society that it doesn't occur to these "your faith doesn't fix things, I do" folks that helping the hopeless  doesn't occur to just everyone.  It's so ingrained in our secular culture they don't realize it came from religion--and the Christian religion in particular--or that they wouldn't even be motivated to criticize if they hadn't been raised to believe even that much.

Which leads to some interesting dynamics, where the believers start bringing science and logic to the table and it's the unbelievers who start getting wishy-washy about philosophical questions like "what's a person?" and "Who gets human rights?" when they're not even getting basic facts about embryology right--or they choose to categorically forget that there are pro-lifers who not only disbelieve in Christ, but disbelieve in any sort of god at all.

Then they come around and twist the establishment clause and try to school us with more memes like  "You have the right to hold your religious beliefs, but you do not have the right to impose them on others."  

Well, friend, I happen to believe murder and assault and theft and (perhaps with qualifications, but let's not get off track) the male gaze are sins, and my reasons are in no small part religious.  Do you want to take those off the table too?  

Two things I encounter in the world that make me most confident that the Catholic Church is the true Church

1)  Anti-Catholic apologists who take a contrary position to some straw man and, despite all attempts to clarify and correct, refuse to acknowledge that their understanding was in error, even in the interest of developing more relevant arguments against Rome.  They've got their arguments pat, by gum, and there's no need to let facts get in the way.

Not that this is always the case, but it happens often enough that I'm left with the impression that lame arguments are favored because good ones just aren't available.

e.g.:
"Catholics think they get a second chance at heaven with purgatory."
"No we don't.  Our fate is sealed at the moment of death; purgatory is just a matter of how Christ's sanctifying graces get applied to us once the judgment is rendered."
"That still sounds like a second chance."
"No, it really doesn't.  We're saying that for those of us who get invited to the wedding feast of the Lamb, some of us are met at the door by the maitre'd and told we will be provided with a shower and formalwear before the party starts.  It's a service that is only offered to people holding an invitation.  It's not the same thing as a bouncer stopping you and telling you to go make yourself presentable in the hope of finding an invitation that had blown into a storm drain or something."
"Seems like it to me."
"Well, it shouldn't.  Purgatory does not get you saved.  Purgatory gets people sanctified.  Only saved people get to have it.  Even if you don't accept it, if you won't recognize the distinction I'm trying to make here, I can only conclude you are willfully or shamefully declining to engage the argument, and are persisting in your misconceptions, that the Church teaches something it doesn't teach, and therefore your arguments are not intended for my ears, and I will not bother myself with more of us talking past each other."
"Well, it still sounds like..."
"I'm sorry, but 'it sounds like' isn't really an argument."
"Well then, it looks like--"
sigh.
Do not judge as man seeth, for man seeth those things that appear, but the Lord beholdeth the heart.

As it has been said, if this is the best argument that can be made against Rome, then the argument for Rome must have some meat to it.

2)  Anti-Catholic apologists who are apparently so zealous about saving Catholics from Rome they forget to be charitable and develop sweeping powers of telepathy that they handily employ in alternatingly attempting to prick our consciences and flat-out judge us (perhaps with only intent of doing the former).  The amateur ones tend to demand that Catholicism be proven by Protestant means (which is largely impossible, unless one proves that Protestant means are self-defeating, since non-Catholic policies of exegesis and ecclesiology had to be invented to justify the Reformation in the first place), and failing the presentation of a compact answer, declare themselves head and shoulders above the confusion.  The professional ones (of this sort--not conflate them with people who make a living doing this sort of thing) tend to dredge up the material that usually goes into Catholic arguments, declare the preponderance of history to be on their side, and conclude that we Catholics are too stupid or lazy to find our own way out of the maze of Romanism.  These claims are quite bold, considering they are often repeated liberally, and often applied to individual arguments that are only intended to rebut particular claims, often to individuals who have not contributed enough to the debate to allow any fair party with the normal range of senses to judge the extent of their education, let alone the quality of their motivation or the state of their soul--and oddly, often paired with reminders that they are only being rude out of a charitable concern for our eternal destiny.
Some people do have a gift of discernment, but applying it so sloppily, like a politician would twist the words of an opponent, only suggests that the alleged discerner is not accurately gauging the knowledge intuited to him, or that he is merely speculating being judgmental for political or personal reasons, or that he is lying. In none of these cases can he be relied on to provide meaningful information at face value.

So Fidel instituted a literacy program...

(edited 227-20)

Great. But were there books for his allegedly literate comrades to read?  Even if there were, what were they?  What was the literacy rate before he came along, that the Cubans needed reeducation education?  For that matter, who told you they needed some schoolin'?  Fidel?

What reason do we have to believe that a revolutionary who belongs to a movement that has a long and rich tradition of propaganda is going to prioritize literacy (or is Bernie talking a lot about communal farms and national paved roads that I'm not hearing? We're not going to get into health care right now)...out of the goodness of his heart?

Even if he did...that's setting the bar pretty low.  Like "at least Hitler made the trains run on time" low--it's true, it's not bad, but it's not adequate justification.  Hell, Hitler was a passionate orator too, but I wouldn't want to spend a minute of my life listening to what he has to say.

I don't understand why people think "Bernie is consistent" is such a strong argument.  It's something, at least potentially, but consistency is only laudable when it's a good thing that's consistent.  Consistent cancer or mugging would not be good.

But Bernie's position?  At least he's not flip-flopping, and he's loyal to whomever who bought him, right?  

I suppose.  But he's had decades to revise his position after gathering new evidence.  I'm not so whacked that I expect he'd inevitably come around to my way of thinking if he made an honest effort, but I would expect that after the first dozen imploded second world states he would develop a little more nuance or sense of perspective.

This is the same failure that gets levied against the New Atheists, whichever ones they were who said "I was sitting there in my second grade class when it occurred to me how dumb an idea God was, and I have never seen the point of questioning the judgment of that eight year old child."

But "bread lines are a good thing," huh?  Everyone waits in line to get their fair share instead of billionaires hoarding everything before anyone else gets fed, right (assuming there would still be any billionaires)?  Well, not so much.  Over here, billionaires get more than they need, and more than everyone else, but most of the 99% still get not just enough but more than most of Bernie's idols; in the Eastern Bloc, Party officials got more than anyone else and got it first, regardless of whether what they got was enough or not--or whether those in the back of the line got anything at all.

Bad comes to worse, pull a Jean Valjean.  The universal destination of goods permits this.  The thing is, though, that in a bread line economy, there's no bread for Valjean to steal, but in a free market economy, there's more than enough left over after he's taken what he needed to feed his family.

That's the nice thing about having food waiting for people instead of the other way around.

I wasn't a regular reader of Reason magazine, but this article by Stephanie Slade struck me.  There's a lot to it that's interesting but I don't want to get into, like how the capitalist ideal of enlightened self interest won't guarantee that a successful and stable free market populated by good Christians will resemble a successful and stable one populated by a bunch of greedy bastards, but I want to quote this longish bit from near the beginning and make one point about it:

Since the first papal encyclical on modern economic questions, Rerum Novarum, was promulgated in 1891, Catholic pontiffs have had harsh words for "unbridled capitalism" and "philosophical liberalism." In Quadragesimo Anno (1931), Pope Pius XI wrote that "the right ordering of economic life cannot be left to a free competition of forces. For from this source, as from a poisoned spring, have originated and spread all the errors of individualist economic teaching." In Octogesima Adveniens (1971), Pope Paul VI argued that "structures" should be set up "in which the rhythm of progress would be regulated with a view to greater justice." 

The upshot—that a capitalist system cannot be trusted automatically to produce what the Church views as morally acceptable outcomes—may seem to require Christians to support a robust central government. If society is to be oriented to the common good, surely some person or body needs to have enough power to do the orienting. What, besides the state, can regulate the market? 

But when Pope John Paul II gave an audience to the board of the European Automobile Manufacturers Association in 2001, he offered a different, orthogonal answer: "As presidents of the major automobile companies of Europe," he told them, "you have important responsibilities, not only in guiding the growth of your own industry, but also in ensuring the right development of an increasingly globalized economy. The process of globalization, while opening up new possibilities for progress, poses urgent questions regarding the very nature and purpose of economic activity.

John Paul is suggesting an important insight into the germ of totalitarianism.  At the EAMA audience, he exhorted the automotive executives themselves to think, act, behave in ways that are more human, and not by meddling in what they do.  The Pope there was acting in the place of this purported centralized moralizing bureaucracy, but without resorting to force of positive law.

This is something that would have to happen in a centralized government that hoped to ward off tyranny, anyway.  By this I mean that even if czars and branch managers try to impose some kind of moral standard backed by fine, bar, and bullet, if they can't inspire the economic free agents to do good, then all they can do is try to force them to follow policies that are often poor stand-ins for the good; if they cannot appeal to the higher natures of entrepreneurs and capitalists, then they will have to exert greater and greater efforts to achieve compliance.

And eventually that always comes to an end.  But a righteous man is an end in himself.

So I didn't see the whole Democrat debate last night...

...but it made a question occur to me.

Most of those people are socialist to some degree or another; maybe they just want to "bring progress to the nation" or they're really Bolshevik agents testing the waters, but that's the side of the spectrum most of them tout.

They're also one percenters.

Do they think we hope to acquire millions of dollars and multiple personal properties by voting or espousing socialism?  

Do they?