Category Archives: Politics

From an example of congressional bipartisanship (SOPA) to an example of ideological bipartisanship.

January 20, 2012 – 12:00 pm

Our school’s library gets a lot of magazines, and occasionally I take a peek at them. Over the past few months, the National Review – the United States’ conservative magazine of record – has published stories with, essentially, the following messages:

  • “Hey, you know, maybe those Occupy Wall Street guys have a point, maybe these big banks might just have a little too much power?”
  • “Hey, I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but it’s harder to move from relative rags to relative riches in America these days.” (This was the cover story of the same issue as the above.)
  • “Hey, maybe we should get all this Wall Street money out of the Republican party?” (Another cover story; I didn’t read this one, but this was the gist I got from the table of contents.)

I don’t know if this says more about the National Review, the state of the country, or the state of the Republican Party, but I do know I will have much more to say about this sort of thing next week, and especially in March…

By Morgan Wick | Comments (0)

Programming Note

January 18, 2012 – 8:00 am

(From MS Paint Adventures: Homestuck. Click for full-sized blackout.)

I had heard of SOPA before today’s protests thereof, but I generally don’t like jumping to conclusions and following whatever people tell me I should think. Nonetheless, in light of current events, next week will see a special four-part series on the future of content. Some of this will likely be things that would have made my book on the Internet had I ever written it, and not all of it will be related to SOPA; there will also be things specific to this site’s main two topics, sports and webcomics.

Also, MorganWick.com will go down today sometime between 9 AM and noon PT, but not because of SOPA. I’m finally upgrading to WordPress 3.x series; seems someone finally got around to taking over the plugin that powers the Sports and Webcomics subsites.

Also, as I write this, it is 1:35 AM on the West Coast, and many webcomics have not updated yet, and I still feel confident saying that no other webcomic will protest SOPA as well as Homestuck, even if no one will get it later. (Although now that I’ve seen xkcd, I like its alt text too.)

By Morgan Wick | Also posted in Blog News, Internet adventures, Webcomics | Tagged | Comments (0)

The Day of Reckoning Revisited

May 25, 2011 – 2:36 am

Due to space constraints, I barely scratched the surface of how far into the gutters the political discourse remains in my first Understanding the News post last week. Here are the titles of a few recent sample threads on the Democratic Underground site: “Teabaggers: Tools of Bin Laden?” “FUCK YOU CONDI RICE.” “An Open Letter to Delusional Rightwing Folks.” Not to be outdone, here are a few excerpts from posters on the right-wing forum Free Republic: “These presstitutes make me sick!” “‘I had no hesitation about taking a human life’… Neither did Stalin. You can’t have a moral dilemma when you have no sense of morality.” “We all know his pappy is a commie, his momnie [sic] is a comie [sic] and that he aint a po azz black boy down fo de struggle. He was raised a privileged white communist punk by his rich ass grandparents.”

I edited these out of my original post fairly early on (and in fact I’m missing even more such comments as a result of my quick hatcheting) because anyone like me can cherrypick the worst comments from public forums where anyone can post like DU and Free Republic, but as I hinted at in my original post when I talked about how partisan views can be self-reinforcing, extreme viewpoints have a tendency to go unchallenged, and hence increasingly legitimized, on partisan forums. For one thing, extreme viewpoints tend to be more vocal about it. This isn’t just a tendency inherent in the positions themselves (the status quo is more of an outrage the further your own position is from it). Consider a hypothetical Democratic message board, with posts from various parts of the spectrum represented. Some posts may be very moderate, others may be all-out Marxist, but they all share one thing in common: assuming there are no trolls, they are probably all in disagreement with the Republicans. Indeed, to feel strongly enough to sign up for an explicitly Democratic message board, one is probably not terribly moderate.

That means there are certain micro-level issues that all of the board’s members are in agreement on. Whenever there is a thread on one of these micro-level issues, the extreme Marxists and the relative moderates will have scarcely any difference between them, in theory. But on issues that might produce more controversy, the moderates are less likely to speak up, because they might be construed as agreeing with the enemy. (In my experience, individual posters tend to have less individual identity on the most popular political message boards.) On the other hand, those that hold relatively extreme positions just on the fringes of what is considered acceptable are allowed to speak freely. Their positions are legitimized, allowing new frontiers to be opened and eventually closing off more moderate positions as the social controls against dissent take effect.

Despite the seeming demise of any principles with which to define and control society – from the naked greed of large corporations to the demands for rights coming from any corner large and loud enough to be heard – the tendency to make such rules, and form societal associations organized around these rules, is endemic. We find it anywhere you look in society, wherever cliques or subcultures are found, and one ignores or underestimates this basic tendency of human nature at their peril. Right now such tendencies have put us on the brink of the abyss, and while I’m still not certain what needs to happen, something definitely needs to happen. Congress will only find the middle ground when America as a whole will, so let’s put together each side’s solutions and the problems with each, and find a way to solve those problems, reason out why one solution is ultimately better than the other, find a solution that incorporates the best of both sides, or at least come to an understanding of each position.

In addition to everything I suggested in my original post, this will require a voice for moderate voices that can recognize the merits of each side and point out their flaws, and hopefully suggest synthesized solutions. The aim is not so much to convince either side so much as to provide a voice for the silent majority in the middle. But for the same reasons mentioned before, moderates tend not to care as much about politics, at least if they’re prone to seek compromise, because they tend not to have very solid views (given their propensity to waver between them) and tend to be okay with whatever comes out, if they even pay attention to politics given how little they care about them. And once again, they’re not likely to escape charges of bias, and may even show some real bias if they become increasingly convinced one side is superior to the other. The entrenchment of our political positions works to keep them from leaving the trenches, and I don’t know how to break the cycle.

I will say that our present system of electing our government on a geographical basis, though it appears reasonable at first glance, does not encourage healing the divide or giving a voice to moderates. Political positions have always been partly geographically determined, whether it was the north being against slavery and the south being for it before the Civil War, or urban areas being more Democratic and rural areas more Republican now. The result is that, even without much gerrymandering, districts have a tendency to become “safe” for one party or the other, which does not encourage and, with our increasing partisan divide, may even discourage the election of moderates. This makes it easier for Congress to reflect the partisan divide in the rest of the country; moderates do get elected, but they do not tend to have much of a voice, especially since their districts may be more vulnerable, and they risk being demonized on the national level among their nominal peers, as Joe Lieberman and Arlen Specter know well; better to give the leadership positions to those more likely to stay in Congress longer. (I don’t believe changing this necessarily requires amending the Constitution, which to my knowledge only governs the division of representation among the states, not that those representatives need to be elected by geographic sub-divisions.)

The geographical system of electing our Congressmen is not the only aspect of our electoral system that furthers the divide. Our “first-past-the-post” plurality system of voting discourages the formation of more than two parties, as should be obvious to anyone who sat through the effect of Ralph Nader on the 2000 presidential election; any viable third party needs to be able to attract exactly as many people from each side. With only two parties, polarization is all too easy; with at least three, one party can synthesize the best ideas of the other two and come up with some ideas of their own that might be better than that suggested by either side. There are ways to address both problems, but I’ll save them for future posts because they’ll take quite a bit of explaining.

By Morgan Wick | Also posted in Philosophy | Comments (0)

Understanding the News: Ignoring the Day of Reckoning

May 18, 2011 – 1:32 am

Note: As this was heavily edited down from a post three times the size, I’ll issue another post greatly expanding on this one.

On January 8, 2011, 22-year-old Jared Lee Loughner shot US Representative Gabrielle Giffords in the head during a meeting she was holding with constituents near Tucson, Arizona. Although Loughner was a mentally disturbed man who held extreme views on all sides of the political spectrum and paid more attention to conspiracy theories than anything that could be called “news”, the shooting came as a shock to a country deeply divided between left and right. Attention turned to a map made by former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin in the lead-up to the 2010 midterm elections showing candidates in vulnerable districts targeted by crosshairs.

People on both sides called for bipartisanship, civility, and toning down the political discourse, and later that month at the State of the Union Address, congressmen of both houses sat in the chamber regardless of political affiliation, breaking with tradition. Even Keith Olbermann, who arguably was one of the standardbearers of the division of the political discourse on the left, apologized for anything he may have ever said that might have been construed as supporting violence. Later that month, Olbermann’s MSNBC show, Countdown with Keith Olbermann, was abruptly cancelled.

Did anything result from all the calls for bipartisanship? Not really. Other than Olbermann, the same figures are the most public representatives of left and right, and I see no evidence any of them have changed their MO. Radio host Laura Ingraham recently expressly rejected another call for unity from President Obama, and another radio host, Mike Malloy, suggested that the Navy SEAL team that took out Osama bin Laden should have taken out George W. Bush instead. And I found these incidents from, respectively, Media Matters for America, which had a column calling Obama’s haters “deranged“, and Newsbusters, which called one recent claim of radio host Randi Rhodes “lunacy“. Even Keith Olbermann will restart Countdown on Current TV next month – and it’s worth noting that the breakup with MSNBC may have been in the works ever since Olbermann was suspended the previous November for donating to Democratic congressional candidates.

In my view, the left seemed more self-aware about their sins than the right. While Olbermann fell on his sword, no comparable conservative figure shared the same fate that I know of (with Glenn Beck’s Fox News program only being cancelled in April). While Olbermann apologized for any perceived sins, Palin – from whom one could have drawn a more direct line to the shootings in Tucson – refused to take any responsibility and instead attacked the media for allegedly jumping to blame the right for the attacks. In the end, the left’s reluctance to play the same game as the right only came out as a win for the right – one side pulls the conversation as far right as they want, but the other side is too reluctant to do likewise. I’d like to think it wouldn’t take a conservative figure being shot to shock the right out of their complacency, but I’m not sure if even that would work. But if an assassination attempt can’t bring “red America” and “blue America” together, what can?

Tribalism is a natural result of the human experience. We like to think that we’ve risen above tribalism, but we merely live in bigger tribes today, and smaller sub-tribes among them. One of the most important aspects of any group of people are the moral precepts and core beliefs holding the tribe together. These core principles are at the heart of the tribe’s identity; they allow its members to identify other members of the tribe, beyond those they personally know, and they serve a more practical purpose in keeping the tribe together by creating social controls against those who undermine the rest of the tribe. These controls, and the principles themselves, can have nasty consequences. Anyone who disagrees with a group’s core principles will not remain a member of that group for long.

So it is that our two great political persuasions have purged themselves of heretics and seek complete purity. The other side is pure evil; it is the enemy; to even consider it for a moment is to introduce an impurity. When these core beliefs are held in unanimity, they can be self-reinforcing, and as such they are often deeply held, thought to be self-evident, so now the enemy becomes stupid too, if not outright liars; after all, aren’t our positions so obviously right? At this point, they have become fundamentally religious beliefs, so deeply held that those who hold them cannot make any decisions, cannot even function, if they find themselves forced to throw them out.

In the case of our two great political persuasions, it is thought that the course of action most in accordance with these core beliefs is always in the best interests of America, in every situation and on every issue, regardless of whether or not it contradicts other beliefs they claim to be just as core; to claim otherwise is an absurdity, a heresy. Regardless of what they may claim their principles to be, both parties will sacrifice their principles to support their true clientele. Republicans will always seek the best result for corporations, while I suspect there is some truth to the Republican cariacture of Democrats as not-so-closet socialists.

To make matters worse, the media – Fox News, MSNBC, and major radio companies such as Clear Channel, but all the media to some extent – have gleefully exploited and furthered the political divide. By providing mass outlets for those who would drive each party further into the fringes, they further legitimize such extreme positions and in fact make the likes of Rush Limbaugh and Keith Olbermann instantly mainstream. That it is eminently understandable (outrageous positions attract attention and ratings) does not make it any less shameful.

The media are responsible for the divide, and they have a responsibility to put that divide back together. In previous posts I’ve mentioned my frustration with CNN for trying to stand in the middle rather than on both edges, and specifically that letting Jon Stewart shame them into cancelling Crossfire was a mistake. But while that’s still important, I now suspect it’s doomed to failure without more sweeping changes, because the divide is now being driven by forces outside the media, and there’s probably no convincing Fox News to stop furthering the divide.

I don’t know anymore how to really begin healing the divide, or even stopping its growth. It will take a humanization of the enemy – a realization that there are real people who are persuaded by the other side, and they aren’t all misled or delusional – a recognition that we are all Americans who have to live with the people and ideas of the other side; a recognition that politics is not some sort of zero-sum game where the only goal is to “win” but something with real consequences; a sober assessment of our values, what they mean, why they’re desirable, and when they can be too much of a good thing; and above all, it will require a recognition that the partisan gridlock now afflicting Congress – a natural reflection, and microcosm, of the division of the country – is preventing us from moving forward.

I’m not sure if either side really wants to do any of this, and I’m not sure how to get them to – our political persuasions are so entrenched it seems impossible to pull them out of the trenches. But something needs to be done… or else I fear the shots that were fired near Tucson will prove to be the first shots of a new civil war.

By Morgan Wick | Also posted in Media bias, Understanding the News | Comments (1)

Finding Common Ground and Starting the Debate

October 29, 2010 – 8:23 pm

We’ve seen two different viewpoints, two very different perspectives, on the current state of the union. You can see from today’s posts how heated and diametrically opposed the two sides are in our present political climate, and honestly, I don’t actually believe the posts I wrote would do much to convince someone on either side.

And yet, there actually is some common ground between the two sides, although some of this common ground may be believed more by one side than the other, and each side holds similar views of their own and the other side. Both state their faith in the greatness of America as the beacon of hope in the world, as a place where you can be anything you want to be, though Republicans are more adamant about it (and tend to deny the opposition their similar belief). Both sides claim that the opposition’s policies are bad for the economy; both want to protect against terrorism in different ways. Both accuse their opposition of needing to wake up to the “real world”, and implicitly, that their own position is rational while the opposition’s is emotional. (On the one hand, Democrats are emotionally attached to the plight of the poor while Republicans see the poor as a necessary side effect of capitalism; Republicans are emotionally attached to their limited-government, free-market principles while being allegedly blinded to their limitations.)

Both sides claim to have America on their side, claiming that most Americans believe in their principles (though the Republicans seem to have more credibility) and that they have America’s best interests at heart, and accuse the other side of being pushed by interests out to squash the message of their own side by spreading misinformation – “big corporations” in the case of the left and the “liberal media” in the case of the right – and this explains the focus on media bias, since if the media weren’t biased everyone would obviously believe their own side.

But perhaps most importantly, the difference between the parties comes down to a difference in priorities, and at least at first glance, these priorities aren’t incompatible with one another. Republicans are concerned with limiting the size of government and maximizing the freedom of business to serve as the engine of the economy; Democrats are concerned with ending poverty and the equitable distribution of the wealth. You will even see Democrats claim that their desire to reduce the influence of the military is partly a reflection of limited-government principles, and Republicans claim that unrestrained capitalism will actually make the poor better off (the familiar “trickle-down economics”). Both sides do recognize the force of the other’s priorities, at least under certain circumstances; they just differ on which to side with when there’s a conflict. Democrats claim that helping the poor is a moral prerogative while one can’t be dogmatically opposed to all government; Republicans claim that the total amount of wealth in the system is more important than how it’s distributed.

Here’s where the conflict comes. At least in theory, the Republicans are right to claim that, if the wealth were perfectly evenly distributed, no one would have any incentive to work because they couldn’t get ahead of anyone else. (There are a few problems with this theory, but we’ll assume it for now.) Similarly, if the government took 100% of your income, you wouldn’t have any incentive to work because no matter how much you earned, all of it would go to the government. (This is a simplified version of the problem with applied communism.) Therefore, any wealth inequity produced by capitalism should be allowed to stand, or else you’re robbing the capitalists’ incentive to keep producing more wealth. Any effort to smooth out wealth inequities results in a reduction of the total wealth coming out of the system, although Democrats deny this. Further, any government interference, such as a tax, in the machinery of capitalism reduces the profits earned by the firm producing goods, and accordingly, reduces the amount of product produced by the firm.

So a limited government, in this model, is a precondition to the smooth workings of business, which may or may not naturally create a gap between rich and poor. A gap between rich and poor is, therefore, one possible consequence of limited government, or at least limited government in certain areas. (The argument applies more broadly when you argue, as Republicans are wont to do, that in general, people following their natural inclinations without government interference, only government protection, results in the best overall outcome for the economy.)

It does not follow, however, that the converse is true, that closing the gap between rich and poor requires a governmental solution. At least in theory, even the free market can solve some problems of wealth inequality, even if you don’t agree with trickle-down economics per se, so Republicans may be excused if they’re skeptical about Democrats’ belief in small government and their claim that government involvement is just what works to help the poor. You will sometimes even see Republicans claim that government interference itself is actually a cause, or even the cause, of wealth inequality. On the other hand, Democrats argue that, if closing the gap between rich and poor creates more consumers, it could have a positive effect on the economy that outweighs the negative effect. Now that we’ve reached this point in the debate, Democrats and Republicans could start brandishing numbers and studies backing their respective viewpoints, arguing over whether it’s better to limit government or help the poor, but they can also start debating ideas that synthesize both their priorities, rendering such debate over priorities unnecessary. (One is at the above link.)

We agree that America is the best country on Earth, the symbol for the ideals of democracy and freedom around the world, and a place where the lowliest of children, at least ideally, can grow up to become a titan of industry, though we may disagree on how realistic that is. We agree that we need to be attuned to the way the real world works and not become overly attached to our principles, and work to achieve what is best for America. We agree that, necessity aside, too much government can strip us of our freedoms and make us less happy and less prosperous, that absolute power corrupts absolutely, that even at low levels it leads to confusing and expensive bureaucracy, and that this has been proven in the past. We agree that, necessity aside, the gap between rich and poor and the existence of poverty is not something we like.

If we all admit that we are all in agreement on these four principles, it will not necessarily be easy to extend the common ground from there, especially when we are prone to disagree on basic facts, but if we focus on these principles we can use them as a framework to find solutions to our problems and disagreements that we can agree on. Some of these solutions may not be comfortable for one side or the other; they may represent a major concession. Then the question becomes to find out why one side or the other is uncomfortable, and either to explain why such things are not problems, or to find some other solution that takes those problems into account. Sometimes Republicans may have to accept a governmental solution because the cost for some group of people is too much; Democrats may have to accept a less equitable solution because the cost in government control is too much. And sometimes, we won’t be able to find a middle ground in this calculus because the difference in the proposed solutions comes down to the difference in priorities, and neither can be said to totally outweigh the other. Hopefully this last class will turn out to be smaller than it now seems.

Over the next few days, weeks, and months (I originally intended this past week but was stupid and procrastinated for two weeks, just as I’ve been procrastinating on this whole series all summer), I’ll be making several posts intended to illustrate how we can debate the issues by laying out our positions and trying to adjudicate between them. Rather than yelling and name-calling, I will model how we can have a civil debate by focusing on the issues themselves, recognizing our opponents’ concerns and reacting to them rather than dismissing them out of hand, and always keeping in mind our agreement on the four principles – and potentially more that will come out over the course of the debate. I can’t say that we will come to an absolute best solution for every problem, or that if we do it’ll be the right one, but I hope to bring each side to an understanding of their opposition and either a moderation of their perspective or at least a clarification of it through the perspective of the opposition. In short, rather than merely calling to “restore sanity” as Jon Stewart will do on Saturday, I’ll be trying to show how we can actually do it.

It won’t be easy, it won’t be pretty (these will still be emotionally charged debates), I can’t guarantee any sort of success, and I certainly can’t guarantee that I’ll singlehandedly heal the rift between left and right in this country, certainly not before the election, but someone needs to start the dialogue. And it needs to start by doing what I’ve tried to do: explain each side’s position in terms explicable to the other. Even if the dialogue is just me publishing the debate going on in my own head, an abstract liberal and conservative talking to each other is better than nothing. My hope is that real liberals and conservatives will take up where I leave off and continue it – and maybe then we can start to heal the rift.

By Morgan Wick | Also posted in Blog News | Comments (0)

The Liberal Case to a Conservative

October 29, 2010 – 10:00 am

Click here to find out what this is all about.

Sometimes I wonder how a Republican can stand by, in good conscience, and support some of the things he supports, oppose some of the things he opposes.

How can you stand by and watch as millions of Americans suffer in poverty, without health insurance, without jobs? How can you stand by and watch as the top 5% hoard more than half of the wealth and live in opulence while millions go hungry? How can you stand by and do nothing as big corporate CEOs practically get away with murder at the expense of the American people? How can you let children of poor families go to school in dilapidated, worn-down schoolhouses and living in dangerous neighborhoods where they’re constantly exposed to drugs and crime while children of rich families get every privledge imaginable, sent to the best schools and isolated from the real world? For all your Christian rhetoric, how can you call yourselves Christians and let all this happen?

It’s wrong, it’s unfair, and it’s – dare I say it – un-American. I completely agree that America is – or at least should be – the greatest nation on Earth. America is supposed to be the land of opportunity, where even a humble little boy from a small town can grow up to become President of the United States. “Give us your tired, your hungry, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” But I don’t dogmatically and religiously believe that just because we say it’s so necessarily makes it true, and right now, for millions of Americans, that American dream is just that: a dream. (And when the dream does come true, it’s not exclusive to America.) They’re trapped in misery and feel powerless to escape, not even having a chance to win, because powerful forces want them to stay where they are. How can we live up to our ideals if we don’t give them what they need?

But you don’t care about that. America can go ahead and suffer for all you care, so long as you get to keep your sacred cows of “limited government” and “unrestrained capitalism”. Well, it’s time to wake up and see the real world, because all it’s gotten us is increased concentration of the wealth and naked greed – greed, incidentially, that isn’t good for the economy, and neither is poverty where people don’t have money to put into the economy. We’ve tried trickle-down economics, we’ve passed huge tax cuts for the rich, and it doesn’t work. Big corporations and rich people don’t care about America as a whole, only their own bottom line. How can anyone honestly feel admiration rather than shame and outrage at the obscenely wealthy? In this context, fears of “expanding government” seem trivial and petty. Government is not the problem, but misuse of governmental power; in this country, “big government” is a myth. We are a democracy, and government is supposed to work for all of us, and it can be a powerful ally.

And Republicans don’t “reduce the size of government” like they’re always talking about anyway. Every time Republicans come to power, they slash funding for services Americans need (they even tell you they’re going to repeal health care reform!), they privatize others to companies that only care about the almighty dollar, but then they turn around and spend, spend, spend on the military. Reagan and the Bushes, they all saw ballooning deficits, while we actually saw a surplus under Clinton. We saw Bush II send our young men to fight and die in Iraq, a country that had nothing to do with 9/11, to follow the imperial dreams of the neocons. It’s a policy that has led us to be hated around the world; we were once seen as the beacon of freedom around it, but policies like these are why the terrorists hate us.

America spends many times more on its military than any other nation; in fact we spend twice as much per person than the total income of two-thirds of the world’s population. We need to be united by our common humanity; America is just antagonizing the other nations of the world, even our alleged allies, and it’s ultimately making America less safe, not more. America can’t keep being the policeman of the world. Let’s stop fighting each other and start loving each other; let’s stop the killing and bombing and start the feeding and caring.

But no. Big, moneyed interests support the status quo, and money talks. It’s these big corporations with an interest in the status quo that own the big news networks; the notion of a “liberal media” is just cover for how they push their conservative agenda. Journalists may be liberal, but that’s because they see everything that’s happening around the world; the organization they work for won’t publish anything the boss won’t allow. And the big corporations spend billions of dollars spreading misinformation, trying to convince you they really do have your best interests at heart, even though they’ve proved time and time again that they don’t. Just because everyone believes something doesn’t make it true, and there are a lot of people who have spent many years trying to figure out the best way to do things. Most Americans would be on board with the progressive agenda in a heartbeat once they knew what it was, but the big corporations want to make sure you remain in the dark, and just demonize it as the work of “liberal elitists”.

And it’s not just the big corporations keeping ordinary Americans down. There are forces out to take away a woman’s right to choose and take away her control over her own body, to take away the right of gays to serve in the military or to enjoy the same protections given to any other loving relationship, to make non-Christians, especially Muslims, feel unwelcome, to make a particular religious agenda, often a disturbingly hateful one, the national agenda over the objections of those it hurts and offends, to keep guns on the streets and Americans unsafe.

It seems Republicans’ respect for the Constitution doesn’t include the Bill of Rights (except the Second Amendment of course!), and “freedom” just means the freedom for corporations to lead us all into the ditch, especially with all the spying on Americans the last decade, not that you heard the corporate media talk much about that either. It’s funny to hear the Tea Partiers talk about comparing Obama to Hitler or Stalin and preaching about “government interference in people’s lives” when we really did flirt with Orwellian totalitarianism under Bush. Do you really think his party has changed? Or is the old saying really true: “fool me once…”

It’s time to wake up to reality and come together to solve America’s problems, not turn a blind eye to them and go around thinking everything is just hunky-dory when it’s not.

By Morgan Wick | Comments (0)

The Conservative Case to a Liberal

October 29, 2010 – 3:54 am

Click here to find out what this is all about.

The Founding Fathers knew what they were doing when they created this country and its constitution.

They had just seen first-hand what happens when people get too much power. They had just fought a war to free themselves from the tyrrany of King George. They knew they had to do something to make sure America never had to suffer like that again. They knew the power of government had to be limited to keep from interfering in the lives of ordinary Americans, because when Americans are left to their own devices, they have proven time and again that they can do some wonderful things. So they set out to create the freest nation on Earth, one that would be the envy of the world, a beacon of hope for oppressed peoples the world over, a place where anyone, with hard work and determination, could be anything they wanted to be.

For over two centuries that was exactly what America was, the greatest nation in the world. In the 1940s, when Nazi totalitarianism threatened to enslave the world, America made sure the world remained free. In the next half-century, when the threat of Communism threatened to spread all over the world, America remained the haven of free enterprise and took the lead at halting the spread of socialism and communism, culminating in the fall of the Berlin Wall and of the Soviet Union itself.

And yet, now, after America’s greatest triumph, liberal elitists like you want to turn America into its opposite. You want to reach the tentacles of government to every part of American lives, to make each and every one of us dependent on our government, to impose socialism – the very ideology we spent half a century fighting – right here in the USA, here, in the greatest stronghold for free enterprise in all the world! And they have the gall to claim to know better than most Americans because we won’t go along with their America-destroying ideas – as though we’re just a bunch of stupid morons who should stay in their place and let the smart people run things. We’ve seen what happens when government gets absolute power, but I suppose the liberal elitists never studied history while getting their fancy-schmancy college educations.

Or economics. Because as much as you’ve demonized so-called “Big Corporations”, the fact remains that capitalism is the greatest economic system in the world. Competition, free enterprise, these things are more powerful forces than the liberals realize. They put money in people’s pockets and allow a rising tide to lift all boats. Other countries have tried socialism; the Soviet Union is dead, China has moved towards capitalism (because they recognize what the liberal elitists don’t), and Europe takes all your money, crippling life and the economy. We don’t need an Europe-style welfare state where everyone is coddled and pampered. Private business knows what’s best for America, because their task is to get the most out of their money, and they don’t need government regulation mucking things up. Even when it’s benign, government doesn’t have any motivation to provide the best service, since it has a monopoly; private business has to compete, so it does have to provide the best service for the money.

I know how sad you are to see poor people out there, but it’s time to wake up to reality. If you put everyone on a level playing field, if you give people wealth without work, no one will have any incentive to work because no one will be able to get ahead. Success through hard work is the most fulfilling kind of success; the American dream isn’t “the government will magically make you rich”. You can’t make everyone mediocre; you need to free people to aspire to wealth, and that means you need to have wealthy people for them to aspire to. Otherwise, the economy stagnates, and we get passed by China and India.

And on top of that, you want to cripple our military? That hippie pacifist crap went out with the 60s. You want to know why those European socialist countries don’t have any military? It’s because they rely on the United States military, finest in the world, to protect them for them. It’s the US military that protects freedom from those who would destroy it. I’m not going to defend Bush’s intelligence tactics, much as he was slandered by the media – apparently Democrats got the wrong message when the voters rejected his expansion of government into people’s lives – but don’t deny the continued threat of al-Qaeda and other enemies of America. You gut the military, and who will keep America – and the world – safe from terrorists and rogue states who want to hold the world hostage with nuclear weapons? You want to live at their mercy, or would you rather go move there and coddle them and give in to their every demand? But that’s not all; you also want to take away guns from private citizens, leaving us defenseless (except for the government’s police of course!) against petty criminals and especially against our own government?

But – as if all that weren’t enough – to complete the socialist takeover, you want to take away God from our lives. You want to turn doctors into murderers, you want to undermine the sanctity of marriage between a man and a woman (because what’s the point of marriage if it can’t produce a child?), and most of all, you want to deny the Christian foundation of this country and turn it into a godless, atheist place. It’s one thing to destroy America, it’s another to guarantee yourself a place in hell and drag America down with it by offending God, much as you want to deny His existence. Yeah, try denying His existence when you’re burning in hell; pretending He isn’t there doesn’t make it so.

This is all common sense. So how come it’s now legitimate to talk about a complete government takeover of the health care industry, about expanding government to solve all our problems, about crippling this nation’s ability to defend itself and spread the message of freedom, about destroying the foundation of marriage and offending all God’s morals, and how come anyone who talks about how all this will destroy America – which is to say most Americans – is shouted down and insulted? It’s because the liberal media won’t tell the truth. Whenever the liberal media talks about businesses and their leaders, they always insult them and paint them as corrupt con-men. Apparently all the good business leaders give all their money away so the poor get a free ride. And all they ever talk about is the military killing people or committing some atrocity; they never talk about all the good the United States military does around the world, and in general all they talk about is what’s wrong with the world, not what’s right. In fact, anyone who so much as tells the truth or talks sense with Americans is slandered and painted as some extremist. And there is a liberal media; actual academic studies have proven it.

Well, America’s not going to take it anymore. America is a center-right nation, and it’s time to climb down from the ivory towers, stop looking at your beautiful abstract models that blind you to the real world, stop deluding yourselves into thinking Americans just need to know more about your little plot, and stop trying to lead America in a direction we see very well and don’t want to go. We’ve had enough of “change”. We like things just the way they are, thank you very much.

By Morgan Wick | Comments (0)

An Emergency Summit between Left and Right

October 19, 2010 – 7:12 pm

If last year’s health care debate and the rise of the Tea Party movement have shown anything, it’s that the 2008 election was not the messianic defeat of conservatism that many on the Left hoped it would be.

The Left saw itself as putting firmly to an end the abuses of the Bush era, the capstone of the rise to power that started with the 2006 takeback of Congress. I felt, and I suspect many on the Left did as well, that with Obama in power and a Democratic Congress, the “progressive” agenda could be pushed forward, and if it worked, it would kill the Republican party for a generation. Obama received one of the largest electoral vote wins in history; Democrats won a nearly filibuster-proof majority in the Senate. The people had given the Democrats a mandate to pursue their agenda however they saw fit, and had firmly repudiated the conservatism of George W. Bush.

It did not work out that way. The Democrats received pushback. Obama struggled mightily to get anything at all passed; the country remained mired in the recession; and far from being killed, Republicans started beating the Democrats at what used to be their own game, marching and demonstrating. Now Republicans look likely to win seats, if not control, in both houses, and many on the left claim that this happened because the Obama administration wasn’t leftist enough. One wonders if the best thing for the Democrats would be to lose the White House and be marginalized almost to the point of irrelevance in Congress to force the Democrats back to their base and their own Tea Party-style movement.

What actually happened was that the Democrats put too much stake in politics. They felt that if they just elected enough of the right politicians they’d bring a “progressive” heaven on earth. We just needed to defeat the moneyed corporate forces trying to destroy our future. But there are actual conservatives out there, actual people listening to the likes of Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck, and they aren’t just misled by misinformation being spread by Big Corporations. The Left has claimed that the Tea Party is nothing but a big astroturf movement by moneyed interests, but at this point it’s difficult to see that as anything more than a tinfoil-hat conspiracy theory. After all, it’s taken aim at fellow Republicans, defeated GOP favorites in the primary, and made the claim that they lost in 2008 because they’re not rightist enough. The final Democratic triumph won’t occur until it sees the conservatives beyond the corporate boardrooms and recognizes their grievances and the forces behind them. At the same time, the Republicans need to realize that there are real Democrats out there, and they aren’t all misled by the liberal media – both sides need to realize that neither side is dominated by lunatics. After all, many of them have taken to the blogs in much the same way Republicans took to talk radio 20 years ago, and one of their complaints is that the media is if anything conservative!

And ultimately, the media is at the heart of all of this, accused of liberal bias on one side and conservative pandering on the other. I once tried to read both Media Matters for America and Newsbusters and came away with the idea that the media is just plain incompetent. Sure, everyone – including journalists – has an opinion, but why can’t the media simply report the facts as they are? Why can’t the mainstream media simply report all the relevant facts and leave them up to the reader’s interpretation, the way Fox News’ slogan claims – give us the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth? After years of being pilloried by left and right, how could the mainstream media still be biased?

The short answer is that your definition of “truth” is dependent on where on the political spectrum you lie. There will always be another fact you could have added, another study you ignored, and then some of the facts and studies you did cite may be misleading and just plain inaccurate. Every “fact check” you perform is showing bias in favor of the side you come out on. And then if you try “investigative reporting”, even in the past you had to choose where to send your resources, and then you’re effectively choosing entire stories that could show a liberal or conservative bias. And then on the flip side are those potential stories left behind, and no matter how radical or ridiculous the story sounds, if you refrain to report it it will ironically give the story more credibility than if you had reported it: “See, the mainstream media is covering up this story!” This is how we got 9/11 truthers and Obama birthers. The mainstream media could do a better job of bringing up these fringe theories the moment they come up and decisively squashing them, laying out all the evidence, but then one side will say you’re “legitimizing” the fringe theory (the fear that has been the mainstream media’s problem in the past), while the other will say you’re showing bias by presenting the “opinion” that the theory is wrong “uncritically”, which proves the first side right by legitimizing the theory.

And so the media can’t win. And in a landscape where the media can’t win, the winners are those places that are telling them the media is wrong in the first place. If you can’t trust the media, you can trust the partisan echo chambers known as talk radio, blogs, Fox News and MSNBC. Each political persuasion now has their own media, independent from each other and from the mainstream media. It is now possible to cocoon yourself and only expose yourself to those media that present a viewpoint that meshes with your own, that tell you how obvious it is that you’re right, how those big bad people on the other side want to ruin everything, and how the media are hiding the truth and coddling them. Party politics in this country is taking on almost religious connotations, with many of the same aspects of worldview, explanation, and reassurance – and it may be becoming literal, if Glenn Beck is any indication. (It would help if there were more than two political parties, but as Ralph Nader has proved, that’s difficult to accomplish as is, and the status quo arguably reflects one of the oldest divisions in the country, North and South, and maybe one of the oldest in the world, haves and have-nots.)

It becomes a vicious cycle: The partisan machine says mainstream media is biased, so you need to get your news from partisan sources, and that feeds the partisan machine. And the end result is that we now have two factions that are increasingly not speaking to each other – indeed, they increasingly can’t even understand each other. How can they? Admitting the other side might be right about something is a win for them. If they so much as claim that the risks of your position aren’t worth the benefits, you need to raise the stakes, ramp up the risks of their position, lest your followers potentially give in to the enemy. So every issue becomes an apocalyptic battle for the future of America. (On the plus side, no one now plausibly says there’s no difference between the parties.)

And not only are the mainstream media throwing up their hands and giving up on resolving the divide, they’re profiting on it and making it deeper. Complaining about the divide fills up time on political talk shows, but very little is done to do anything about it. CNN profited off the divide for a time by hosting Lou Dobbs’ rhetoric; MSNBC, where Keith Olbermann was once an anomaly, has now decided to plunge headfirst into becoming the liberal equivalent to Fox News, virtually matching if not exceeding Fox note-for-note in pundits with talk shows. Nowhere is there any serious effort in any of the three camps to bring the warring parties back together, to expose them to the other side’s views both on politics and the truth and give a reality check, to start a real conversation on common ground.

CNN tries to be nonpartisan. I think it would be better for the political discourse if it were bipartisan. I actually didn’t like it when Jon Stewart went on Crossfire, lambasted it, and led to its demise – that was one of the few places where left and right could come together and have their respective ideologies meet. In my view, the failure of CNN to see the true character of the political discourse in this country is reflected in its attempt to revive that format, Parker Spitzer. I saw an episode last week and saw a show where the hosts’ differing political ideologies seemed like a coincidence. It was a genteel setting where the hosts mainly engaged in roundtable discussions of high-level issues. There was very little effort to play left and right against each other, or even to represent them. Even in the opening segment, where each of the hosts presented their “opening arguments”, they basically agreed with each other that Obama needed to defend himself better. It’s like the show is living in a completely different universe than the rest of the political discourse, and not in a good way.

Defending the show to Richard Viguerie, who had expressed how unconvinced he was as a conservative about the show’s goals, Eliot Spitzer claimed that CNN was interested in fairness and balance, but it was also interested in the truth. That, to me, is the failing of the show. For many, Obama being born in Kenya or 9/11 being an inside job is the truth. If CNN really wants to correct the political discourse in this country, it needs to dwell on the fringes. I don’t want to see a debate between Kathleen Parker and Eliot Spitzer; I want to see a debate between Glenn Beck and Keith Olbermann, Sarah Palin and Al Sharpton, Michelle Malkin and Michael Moore, Rush Limbaugh and Markos Moulitsas. And I don’t want it to be a cable version of Charlie Rose, I want it to be a political version of ESPN’s Pardon the Interruption. I once brought up this issue in a class and was told that, precisely because of the religious fervor and diverging worldviews of each side, it could lead to nothing but the sort of shouting matches that Stewart criticized Crossfire for – neither side would really get anywhere because they wouldn’t be arguing from common premises and couldn’t argue to the other side’s values, so they’d just go around in circles repeating themselves.

I don’t believe that’s the case, and I know that because I myself have found myself agreeing with or at least understanding conservative positions online, despite my own liberal leanings. In fact, while most people seemingly believe whatever they encounter first, I find myself agreeing with whatever I read last. I’ve found myself getting very self-conscious about my own liberal leanings when I read something from a conservative point of view, and worrying about whether or not I really am ruining America. Unfortunately, people like me seem to be few and far between, and they’re getting fewer and farther between. In reality, I suspect they make up the majority of Americans, but most of them just don’t hold strong positions, don’t feel strongly enough to speak about it, and are turned off by the shouting that goes on by the people who feel strongly enough to speak up. And I’m not terribly optimistic about the potential for Jon Stewart’s Rally to Restore Sanity to bring them out of the woodwork. (Especially when whatever serious message may lie behind the comedy is undermined by the parallel “March to Keep Fear Alive”, and especially when several in the media paint it as a “progressive” response to Glenn Beck’s rally, taking part in the breakdown of the political discourse instead of trying to fix it.)

Unlike a lot of people, I don’t believe we’re becoming a nation of two colors, red and blue, with completely different cultures that can’t understand each other. I certainly hope that’s not where we’re going, or it could lead to another civil war. However, we could get there if the current political discourse is left unchecked, so I’m using my understanding of both sides to force an intervention, one more substantial than the Rally to Restore Sanity. Over the next few days I will attempt to explain the basic credo of both left and right – but the political discourse has fallen far enough that I don’t believe it’s sufficient to merely explain but also to defend, and it’s not sufficient to defend, but also to actively attempt to persuade. I will attempt to promote the political ideology of the left in an appeal to conservatives, and attempt to promote the political ideology of the right in an appeal to liberals.

I’m going to lay my biases up front: As someone with liberal leanings, I am more likely to do the left justice than the right, and I am more likely to show a comprehensive understanding of liberal values than conservative ones. Note also that in order to properly appeal to each side, I would need to follow up on things said while defending that side – to argue one side to the other, I’d need to appeal to the other side’s values, which I would have established while defending that side – so things may seem a little disjointed. I’ll then attempt to find some sort of common ground between them, to the extent there is any, and use this framework to look at various issues in the political discourse.

By Morgan Wick | Also posted in Media bias, Truth Court | Comments (3)

Random Internet Discovery of the Week

February 3, 2010 – 7:15 pm

I know I said I was going to be more descriptive in my RIDs, but there are no words that can describe this.

(Besides, that promise was for more serious fare anyway.)

By Morgan Wick | Also posted in Random Internet Discovery | Comments (0)

Revisiting Da Blog’s 2009 Predictions

January 1, 2010 – 8:47 pm

One year ago, I gave you my predictions for the year ahead, and for years to come. How did I do? Let’s take a look:

  • The year in sports is a massive disappointment. Not really. I predicted a Dolphins-Vikings Super Bowl, and we did get one team that wasn’t exactly a “name” team, and the Steelers kinda sorta pulled the same trick they did three years before, though not quite as surprising. But who would have guessed that the Vikings would have actually been a name team by the end of the year? Or that we’d get a Super Bowl that people were hailing as the best ever one year after Patriots-Giants? The national championship game in college basketball did go back to being a laugher, but while North Carolina didn’t go undefeated, far from losing in the Final Four, they won the whole thing. Neither the Cavs nor Spurs made the NBA Finals, and LeBron to the Knicks is still a very real possibility, but the new hot idea is teaming LeBron and Dwayne Wade somewhere. The Stanley Cup Finals turned out to be Red Wings-Pens again, and America tuned in as much as they ever do for hockey, but if it’s Red Wings-Pens a third time I think we will start to tune out. Philadelphia made the World Series again, and the Red Sox lost in the first round, but far from not making the ALCS, the Yankees won the whole thing.
  • Tiger Woods did indeed fail to win a major, though he didn’t miss much time, but no one could have predicted what happened to him by year’s end. Jimmie Johnson did indeed win another Sprint Cup in a laugher – NASCAR really needs to review the Chase idea to see if there’s something about the structure of the Chase that Jimmie is exploiting. But far from not making a major final, Roger Federer made every major final, and won twice. There were five undefeated college football teams at season’s end, not three after Week 4, but I picked two of them – but I sure as hell didn’t pick what happened to USC this season, and while it was a down year for mid-majors in general, we got two BCS busters and the closest any mid-major team has yet gotten to making the national championship game. The Arena League, who I may have had in mind when I predicted one league would completely cancel a season, folded entirely, but MLS seems strong as ever, and the IRL isn’t cutting back at all, even adding a title sponsor. But NASCAR may well pass it backwards anyway… and the UFC certainly attracted a lot of attention for UFC 100. These are stories to watch for the next decade.
  • We don’t know what’s happening with the Olympics or NHL contracts, but we do know they won’t be in Chicago. Rio won’t be all bad for American television, but still.
  • “The Saints challenge for the NFC South” indeed! “The Lions are at least respectable”… not so much, though I will say right now that the Browns or Raiders will make the playoffs in the 2010 season. Brett Favre did retire, but then he unretired again, but the Jets hold their own playoff destiny in their own hands. Matt Cassel joined the Chiefs and Super Bowl contenders they are not, but it’s still too early to say he (and thus, Tom Brady) was entirely a creation of Bill Belichick. (Wasn’t he injury-rattled this year?) The Pats are back in the AFC East driver’s seat, the Cowboys are in the playoffs, have shook off the December blues, and could take the division, and Vince Young is officially Tennessee’s quarterback of the future.
  • I actually made three different predictions for the year in politics. Sadly, the first one seems to be the closest to coming to pass. Troops aren’t even entirely out of Iraq yet, though we have stopped paying attention to it. Most of Obama’s stimulus plans are gimmicky (Cash for Clunkers, anyone?) and don’t provide enough PR boost. The politics of the last eight years don’t change and in fact get worse, because they involve cultural factors bigger than any politician, and can only be changed by the people taking part in it – us. (In retrospect, Obamamania is a symptom of a persistent problem the Left has these days, of assuming that if we just elect enough right-thinking politicians, everything will be hunky-dory. It blinds the Left to politics’ limitations and to other avenues to change, which led the Right to beat them at what used to be their own game this year with the tea parties and town halls, as well as the reasons why electing the right politicians can be so hard.) The Left still loves Obama, though some people don’t find him leftist enough, and the tea partiers don’t find many in their own party rightist enough, which scares me in terms of what the politics of the next decade will be like. I don’t normally make New Year’s resolutions per se, but mine is to try to do something to change the state of politics in this country before it’s too late. Interestingly, the tea partiers and people like Glenn Beck make Ron Paul’s views more mainstream, while the GOP base still defends what Bush did as president, so my “fascist-anarchist” GOP prediction isn’t far off.
  • The Internet’s metamorphosis this year basically amounts to the rise of Twitter; it doesn’t seem to be benefiting from the recession as much as I thought, though the rest of my prediction may yet come to pass this year.
  • Because of that, webcomics haven’t exploded yet, though we may yet see a new golden age in this coming decade. Sandsday won’t be part of it though, and I still intend to revisit my State of Webcomics Address.
  • The people who read my webcomics criticism, including what amounts to semi-big names in webcomics, like it, but there aren’t enough of them. I didn’t really do much to attract new audiences to politics other than the Sandsday global warming series. I’m effectively repeating this point for the coming year.

By Morgan Wick | Also posted in Predictions, Sports, Webcomics | Comments (0)