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?

An open "Dear John" to someone who has taken Trump to to be a justified target of rage instead of one for hope and mercy; against a laundry list of arguments trying to make peace between the Democrat Party and voting Catholics

A while ago I stopped reading a popular Catholic blog that, looking back, was already on the decline. The blogger is a well informed convert who, perhaps a bit like me, failed to resist using his soapbox to indulge his anger.  Honest readers got banned for asking critical questions that previously rarely came up because they were rarely prompted by his posts(I no longer recognize anyone who comments there, and once upon a time a typical post could draw hundreds of meaty comments from dozens of regulars several times a day), apologies for his overreacting in a medium where everyone is autistic went from being something I admired for their elegance and humility to something quite rare.

It started with me just spending less time there overall because there was less combox discussion going on for me to follow, and I eventually got tired of saying to myself "Well, when he foams at the mouth over the evils of some group he partially disagrees with, he doesn't really mean me because my motives are clearly not what he describes."  He did make this argument himself from time to time, which made me feel less like I was just rationalizing being judgmental, but after a while it only happened when someone in my shoes asked for confirmation, and eventually he just stopped talking about anything else.

Not literally--it's more like how I used to be on here a few years ago, is all I mean--but every time he posted on a hot button topic I had to make excuses for him in my mind.  Eventually I gave up--it had become a daily occurrence, so clearly he was done making room for people like me in his target audience, which was weird considering everything else he still wrote didn't seem to exclude me--and like I did when I gave up network television for the substantial minority of questionable content (probably not really a minority, but even then there were things I wouldn't watch), I afterwards realized how much I had been deceiving myself about the level of vice and acrimony I had been trying to desensitize myself to. 

Sometimes I would wonder if I was overreacting or if he was just going through a phase, and I would go back; the stuff he did that was good, was very good, and I honestly missed it.

Every time, though, I'd be proven right again.  He still churned out the same good and bad product, but he didn't seem to have his heart in the good anymore.

It's not all vitriol, but like before, when it's a hot button topic, the gloves and the muzzles come off.

I just had to dive in one more time, though, and I couldn't resist compiling some of the questionable reasons given in a post and its combox for why voting Democrat is necessarily the morally superior option these days.

Before I post any of that here, though--I don't need any excuses to go back yet again and get angry at people until I get banned too, even if that would only take five minutes--I want to clarify that I do believe it's possible to discern that voting for any of the parties is the best choice.  We don't all have the same priorities, we don't all predict the same crises or whims of history, we don't all have the same local candidates to consider or problems to contend with firsthand, we don't all have the same information, but we all have to make our best effort.  So when he says that he votes (D) with a clear conscience, I can accept that, even if I don't think everything he says adds up to much more than "I'm angry and this will show them!"

One of the first points brought up was that Trump increased funding by 8% in the past year to Planned Parenthood, and so the GOP doesn't really mean to do anything about abortion.  They put up disappointing SCOTUS justices, talk a good game, PP gets some milage out of the scary possibilities on the horizon, everyone goes home to the status quo but richer.  I think there's a little truth to this; it's kind of the same thing flipped with gun control.  But 8%?  PP's federal subsidies in 2008-2009 were $363 million, and in 2016-2017 were $544 million.  That's like making a point of criticizing Hitler for his mustache.  Meanwhile during that time period Obama cancelled the Mexico City policy and tried to get federal funding to PP an unremovable item of the federal budget.  Trump undid both those things.  Clutch your pearls over 8% if you want, but don't talk to me about purity of intent.

"But abortions go down with a Democrat in the office!"  And contraception goes up, right?  "Yes, more comprehensive sex ed!"

Oh, you mean the stuff where kindergartners are taught to masturbate and encouraged to experiment for themselves even though they're not mature enough to perform, let alone comprehend, the act? Or do you mean the stuff where kids who are of the age where they need some guidance are taught to be "heteroflexible" and that all sexuality is a human construct except for noncisbinaryism which is in-born, which doesn't seem to do much except send teenagers to get scrips for an SSRI and start bringing guns to school?  This blogger and some of his readers are Catholics, and like I said before they are well informed; they know that while contraception might not be quite as grave as abortion, they are intrinsically linked; the two practices come from the same mindset and they have the same social outcomes, and they pass through each other along the way.  So I struggle when people at that blog make an argument that sounds like it's going to be something like "I'm not positively choosing the lesser of two evils, I'm just trying to mitigate the moral damage to society," which would be fair because the voting booth doesn't have room for that kind of nuance, but ends up being "This single matter of abortion is the whole of the issue of reproductive morality, so if I can make the number of D&Es drop tomorrow, then I will accept anything that follows after."  Double effect doesn't excuse you when the secondary effects outweigh the primary ones, and it's not like our arguments are pie in the sky abstractions against things no one has seen happen in society everywhere contraception is liberalized.

Say the temporary and slight drop in abortion is worth it, but don't say that's the end of the story.  Even Democrats who want more abortion tell us that it would be nice to practice eugenics by more community-friendly means that are harder to implement.

"Well, millions got health care from Obama they didn't have before!"

Maybe so.  But what civil liberties were jeopardized by the casuistry that made this precedent?  How many people lost their health care?  That's a number I never see; that's a question I only am answered with silence.  How many didn't get to keep what they liked? How many besides the Little Sisters had a little choice before but got it taken away and replaced with something morally offensive?  "Well, they don't have a choice, so it's not like they're formally cooperating with evil; only materially!"  That is a discussion to be had within one's conscience, not a point to be used to justify subsidizing evil.  Now there's talk about Obamacare imploding, but it's all Chicken Little and Trump; practically none is "crap, this sure looks like it was designed to fail all along and they knew it well before 2016; how can we get out of the particular mess we're in without making it worse either way?"  And that's why I sometimes wax skeptical about this blogger's intellectual honesty these days; only so much can you overlook as the lack of perspective, especially in someone who talk about this for a living.

"You MAGA cultists are only making things worse by swallowing his propaganda.  After my analysis I believe God is commanding me to vote Democrat."

Maybe He is, but in my experience, usually when God does that, it's because of something specific going on in your life, and not because God is heavy handedly intervening in society--and if he thinks I'm another "MAGA cultist" after all because I'm honestly responding to something he said that struck me as off point or I'm new and missed the last time he said he weren't really criticizing the people who were thoughtful or pinched their noses when they voted for Trump, then maybe he does need to remind not just his readership but himself of whom he means when he uses epithets. Anyway, God can do as He sees fit, including raising up angry prophets, but usually He's more subtle.  I don't make this point to put God in a box, but  a year ago he was saying "I can vote (D) with a clean conscience," but now it's all "directive from God?"  Really?  Follow God to the best of your ability, by all means, but does he hear himself?  Whom is he trying to convince?

There's a saying about dogs and fleas.  You don't have to feed one or take one into your home to pick up fleas, you just have to lie down with them.   You see it’s already working?  They’ve got him supporting—for he certainly is silent on these points, which does little but scandalize non-evil Trump voters who might be open to changing their minds—things that are just as morally and socially destructive (which should concern all educated Catholics; these people clearly are willing to cook the golden goose if they get too much resistance to pull a Scandinavia, and then how much help will the little darlings be getting?  This is not some pie in the sky abstraction that can’t hold a candle to the reality of suffering people you know personally, this is something we see happening in the world right now), and all for only the low low price of:

• promoting a culture of abortion and contraception, even if raw numbers for the former are dropping when Dems are in power (would you consider the possibility that this is deliberate—that they skew their marketing to change what appears to be trendy, so they can claim that it's their policies and a friendly administration that help pregnant girls more effectively than Welfare helps the homeless?), and like I said before from the Catholic perspective abortion and contraception go hand in hand, but have you looked to see if or how much contraception has gone up compared to the drop in abortion?  I'm not sure it's fitting or even possible to make a numbers argument, but it might be worthwhile to consider the proportionality of things to see if there are any trends that will need to be addressed in the next generation.
• encouraging not simply libertine and hospitable immigration policies but a whole movement of flouting rule of law. However bad those cages are, they were there long before 2016 and the bureaucrats really are not just moving anonymized kids around the country to be jerks and kids cartoon villains—at least, not any more than before. 
• supporting a movement that is long on symbolic gestures—you’re familiar with these on the other side, as you always point out—that are fraught with mixed results (high costs, lopsided success stories, habit of following unsuccessful historical patterns)
• supporting a movement that has done little to prove they haven’t outgrown their uncivilized roots or just ported their rhetoric into more egalitarian pursuit of power, except for their frequent and contradicted say-so.
• supporting a party that likes to put obstinately and openly heretical Catholics front and center with the express purpose of propagating scandal
• supporting a party that promotes gender confusion and uses double-talk to assault the Church. And I don't want to hear some hoo-rah about Republicans being hypocrites for talking a good moral game but failing to meet the marginalized in the street, so to speak; a standard that is low enough to follow successfully is no standard at all, and I raise this point under this bullet and after the one preceding particularly because gay marriage and naked pride parades and so on are scandals that flow into and through and out of the abortion movement, and a Catholic with a scintilla of history education will know that these things cannot stay separated.  Or is hypocrisy only a problem when a politician espouses old fashioned values but doesn't practice old fashioned charity, and it's okay when a politician turns old fashioned charity into government programs but rejects the truth?

If you're a single issue voter, that's fine.  Some things really can be so important that nothing else is worth considering.  But few things that are that important are also so simple that you can take a snapshot of a single outcome and declare victory--it's the epitome of cherry picking.  

I'm not saying a pro lifer can't honestly vote Democrat because of their record on abortion, despite my skepticism; Republicans habitually fall short, probably in no small part because it is more useful for them to have that fight to fight than it is good to have won it.

But if all you're doing is looking at one number under when the White House has (D) versus when it has (R), talking about how one of those parties never succeeds without even thinking about how the other party vacillates on a daily basis between seeing abortion as an evil that should be prevented but not opposed and something to be celebrated (seriously: this blogger used to talk a lot about how Moloch corrupts, without resorting to the genetic fallacy or invoking the halo effect, so he knows better)...then maybe you need to reconsider how honest you're being with yourself.

A caveat about racism

I see accusations against me and my kind of all kinds of racism.  Usually it's a little indistinct or indirect; a passing comment that has a whiff of parental "one oughtn't do that" that is more about behavior than free speech, and progressive minds register "fascist!" and mouths blurt "Nazi!" even when the unhealthy or unhealthful behavior has nothing to do with demographics or comprehensive thought and act and word legislation.

Other times it's explicit but out of left field.  A woman crosses her arms on TV and the MSM spend days speculating about secret messages encoded in the way her fingers happened to settle on her sleeve.  How many times do the chans have to troll the MSM before they wise up?

A cliche that apparently no one has become too ashamed to belabor yet is the use of the label "brown" for ethnic groups that recently your Orwellian betters have decided need to be distinguished from the American big three--white, black, and yellow.

Red they'll lump in with brown because it lets them steal legitimacy when someone points out they forgot something important from American history.

Outside of leftist politics I've only heard brown used as a label twice:  along side red, the big three, and purple in the lyrics of "Rapper's Delight;" and as a throwaway line in "Swingers," which being made in Hollywood might not really qualify as an exception.

Leftists tell us we hate brown people because they want you to believe that we can have no grounds for saying anything negative or even refraining from praise, other than some irrational and deep-seated resentment to out-tribers.  Thus, when 19 middle easterners of diverse skin tones took over a handful of passenger jets one September morning and flew them into buildings for politico-religious reasons, we were told (after a discretionary interval of silence) that we were upset because they were "brown."

Look.

Remember those standardized tests where you had to specify your race and sex?  Maybe I'm dating myself here, but the main categories were caucasian, black, Asian, Hispanic/Latino/non-Anglo white, Pacific Islander, Native American, and other.  Anil my classmate from India would qualify either as caucasian or other; anthropologists might argue one way, statisticians the other.  I mean, not the same way as the anthropologists; not necessarily "the non-caucasian option."

That's pretty much how it was.  Conservatives had taken the advice to be color blind, and race was just another thing that made a person interesting.  Leftists, though, having gone in this country from pushing one side of a race-charged social problem to pretending to fly above it so they could inflame parties on both sides with an illusion of objectivity, decided they had to do more division before they could conquer further, and invented a category that not only fit uncomfortably between black and white, but was a big tent that could account for Latinos, people from anywhere around the Mediterranean, and anyone else from a low latitude island or subcontinent.  It didn't make any sense to group them together (cue the "when you say white people can't tell Chinese from Korean, do you mean French or Celtic or can't you tell?" joke), but that just made it easier to sneak in opportunistic accusations of ignorance and insensitivity.

Meanwhile we're trying to get on with our lives and being told we're not sensitive enough to race.  What?  It's a thing but we're not getting hung up about it; we're being polite and letting you talk about it to the extent that you want to discuss things, just like with any other personal matters that you're not supposed to pry into unless the other person invites a dialog.

So all we hear in one ear is race race race, and racist racist racist in the other.

Do you know how I can tell when someone is racist?

It's not because they ignore race.  It's because they won't ever shut the hell up about it.

So I'm at the grocery store...

...and the main chains in town are pushing for reusable bags, which you can buy there, and they'll be charging five cents per disposable bag after some date in the near future.

I knew this was coming, but tonight on the PA they said this was in accordance with New York state law.

Bravo, Empire State.  Way to major in the minors.

I'm all for good custodianship of the Earth, but what good are you going to accomplish that isn't going to be more than offset by everybody else not following suit?  How much did you waste discussing this bill on the floor and then publicizing it?

Or are you taking a strategic break from fruitless gun control efforts so you can push the envelope of what NY residents consider an acceptable degree of intrusion into their private lives?