Stacy McCain touches upon an idea I had last night but hadn't really developed. He's talking about the Left's promise to fix everything (by placing it under state control):

The answer to this kind of Pixie Dust nonsense is not for Republicans to try to steal the Pixie Dust formula, offering their own magical policy panaceas. Rather, the GOP needs to speak the brutal truth: there are no pixies and no magic.

There are no panaceas. We can neither return to some mythical edenic Golden Age nor are we marching toward some future Utopia of perfection. Decades of trying to vote ourselves into Heaven-on-Earth have created the very problems -- e.g., the actuarial nightmares of Social Security and Medicare -- which today's promise-'em-anything Democrats claim they'll fix.

"Grow Up, America" would be an accurate slogan for what the nation really needs. It wouldn't be a popular message, but it would be a true assessment of what ails us: a childishness, a politics of wishing, of which the naivete of Peggy Jones was but an extreme example.

The problem with most Republicans is that they are trying to offer the same things as the Democrats, only slightly more restricted, responsible, and less overreaching. Republicans tend to run about a generation behind the Democrats on policy. Moldbug points this out nicely:

Consider the difference between the Procedure and the democratic strategy of conservatism. Conservatism seeks to either halt the decay of USG where it is, or return USG to some ideal state of the past - restoring, for instance, the Constitution of 1789. Or at least the Constitution of 1932. Or maybe just the Reagan Administration.
...
Ie: it may be obvious to anyone who takes a clear look at the matter that America was better governed in 1909 than 2009. But this study produces neither any consensus on what year is preferred, for what issue, or how to translate that year's form of government into 2009. There is no little blue manual for going back to governing America like it was really America. This would be your conservative Schelling point, if it existed, which it does not and never will.

The current strategy of 'vote conservatives into Washington' is doomed to failure. Elected and appointed officials make up only a small part of the USG power structure. You'd also have to replace the civil service with conservatives (or more likely throw most of the civil service out and not replace it at all), as well as replacing the academia which teaches people to be liberal.

As McCain says, people need to grow up and stop relying on mommy government to take care of them. Christians should be ideally suited to teaching people to grow up. We have Truth on our side. We know life is not and never will be fair. We know some people are evil and some people are good. The goal should not be to take back government, but to teach people Truth.

Several interesting questions come out of this. How do we teach people truth, especially given the opposition of our current education system? What would happen if Christians withdrew from politics, the let the liberals run the state unfettered? Would even be allowed to teach at that point? What would happen to people's faith in the state if liberals ran everything? What would it take, and how long would it take, for enough people to realize the true effects of liberalism?

I think these are important questions that need answers. America has been shifting leftward for generations. It is a decline that will eventually lead to collapse, and our current strategy is not working. It has only slowed it, not reversed, or even stopped it. But to find a solution, I'm going to have to go beyond sounding off in the empty little bubble that is my blog. I need some help.

Moldbug continues his long running, oft interrupted series on the actual power structure of the United States, and what might be done about. Or at least what might be a better alternative.

For those who do not want to read the whole thing, allow me to give a brief summary. Power in the US is wielded by a distributed, undirected movement (the Left) whose goal is to have as much power as possible, for as many people as possible. A bureaucracy is well suited for this, since it means more people are involved in any given task, and thus, more people wielding power. Actual productivity is not important, only how many decisions you can affect.

At the top of this mess is academia, who, under the cover of Science, develop public policy. And since it's from Science and not men, these professors are not responsible if things go awry. This public policy is then sold to the masses by the media. Public opinion has now been formed. Which is what various politicians and Supreme Court justices look to in making their decisions. Said decisions actually being implemented by the largest and most byzantine civil service every created by man. Populated to the man (and woman, they're all PC) by people who have been raised to believe that science and democratic consensus are the only ways to make a decision. Physics created the atom bomb, therefore Women's Studies can't be wrong.

OK, so that's a brief and incomplete description of the problem. But recently, Moldbug began looking at what to do about it. Some weeks ago he posted his first step in replacing the US government, where he includes anyone who tries to influence policy as a part of the government (such as Universities). Simply put, don't resist the government. Accept that the Left controls everything. They have all the power.

This is very difficult for most people to accept (and by most people I mean something closer to all of them). Moldbug's reasoning is that without an opposition, the movement will simply weaken, lose energy, grow apathetic. I see two basic problems with this. It doesn't strike me as too hard to simply create an opposition 1984 style. The Left does this some already, demonizing people (remember, there are 5 A's in raaaaacist) with little regard to actual truth. It's not much of a step to continue using the caricature without finding an actual person.

The second problem is with human nature. There will always be someone that will not submit, and that is enough to fuel the Left.

But there is a side to this that Moldbug has not considered. God has commanded us to submit to authority. In 1 Peter 2:13-15:

Submit yourselves for the Lord's sake to every authority instituted among me: whether to the king, as the supreme authority, or to the governors, who are sent by him to punish those who do wrong and to commend those who do right. For it is God's will that by doing good you should silence the ignorant talk of foolish men.

We are, by God's own command, to submit to earthly authorities, even ones that are unjust or cruel. Christ Himself submitted to Roman and Jewish authorities, even though that got Him executed on trumped up charges. But there are none who can claim that Christ didn't cause a ruckus in the establishment. There is quite a difference between submitting to authority, and admitting that the authority is correct.

As Christians, we should obey our leaders in Washington and all the laws that they pass. And we should do it cheerfully and courteously, though it erodes our freedom to nothing. There must be a marked and obvious difference between Christians and everybody else. Having a Christ-like attitude combined with a firm refusal to worship the State instead of God should be all the protest we need to make. Remember that the early church did not try to conquer Rome, but rather preached the gospel.

I have faith and stubbornness. Put them together and you have a dynamic duo. When I come to a brick wall, I can go over it, I can go under it, I can go around it, I can just go through it. I don't know what I'm going to do, but I'm getting to the other side.

David Ring

And David Ring's ultimate challenge to people who think something can't be done: "I have cerebral palsy. What's your problem?"

Found on Instapundit:

How can Obama win the Nobel Peace Prize on the same day he's becoming the first POTUS to bomb the Moon?

Mataconis

Obviously the Nobel organization believes in peace through superior firepower. After all, they once gave it to a genocidal Palestinian warlord...

Blind choice is not free choice, and too many aspects of State-controlled life are hidden behind a shroud of complexity.

In the path of an aggressive State, there's really no way to remain above politics. Indifference becomes consent.

Dr. Zero

This is quite a scary statement. Even where I to make an informed vote (as opposed to my normal strategy of voting for whoever seems least liberal), with only a 1 in 300 millionth say in the process, the State can even take over my life if I say no. Indifference may amount to consent, but failed opposition gets the same results. Tyranny of the majority indeed.

Hat Tip to Linkiest.

With video! I found this on Viral Footage (hat tip to Linkiest).

You know, the view on vampires actually is actually a pretty good indicator of society's health. Stoker portrayed the vampire as a savage beast that had to be destroyed in order to save the innocent, whereas Meyer shows the vampire as a pillar of strength in a dangerous and meaningless world. The question for us is whether we ought to stab the monster so it can't hurt anybody, or cling to the monster and hope it hurts someone else.

"Use protection." Heh

Some of us are willing to tolerate any sort of personal ridicule in order to avoid supporting the wrong decisions;

The rest of us are willing to support all kinds of wrong decisions, in order to escape any sort of ridicule.

Morgan Freeberg

An insightful comment on the difference between liberals and not-liberals. Freeberg calls it Yin and Yang, where Yin are the people who go out and build things, and Yang are the people who socialize and network.

The Yin theory is actually a very accurate description of my life. I'm a builder by nature; I spent my entire childhood playing with LEGOs or K'Nex. Yes, there was running around outside with the standard compliment of boy's toys (GI Joes, Nerf guns, bat and ball), but I spent an equal amount of time making things. I didn't bother developing social skills until I got to high school, and was well in to college before they were sufficiently advanced that I could deal with people normally.

What is critical to Freeberg's theory is that for a Yin to make something, he has to understand how things actually work. If his knowledge of reality is wrong, what he makes won't work. And he is forced by his experiences to modify his knowledge of reality. See engineers for further details.

The Yang, however, want to show that they have the right social connections. They have to show they are connected to the right people, and distinguish themselves from those who are not. But fashion and popularity aren't really constrained by physics, so they can go in any bizarre direction.

Which brings us back to the quote at the top. Some people want the right answer, and some people want to belong. Very often we have to pick one or the other.

I'd rather be right than popular.

Update: Welcome House of Eratosthenes readers!

Posted by Robert Stacy McCain, in response to Da Tech Guy's Statement of Common Principles:

Hmmm. It's all foreign policy. I don't see anything objectionable here, but I've never been much interested in foreign policy, which is an expert's game and I'm not all into that diplomacy stuff.

So far as I'm concerned, the world can be divided into four categories:

1. U.S.A
2. Countries that we're at war with
3. Countries that we're not at war with
4. Countries that are watching from the sidelines and thinking, "Hmmm. Maybe we should jump in on this war against America."

The objective of policy should be for category 1 to whip the living dogshit out of category 2, and thereby transfer them to category 3, so as to send a message to category 4: "Don't even think about it, assholes."

Peace Through Superior Firepower. Anybody got a better idea?

I think that's a swell idea. Fire for effect.

I have returned from the Great Debate and I am rather disappointed in both sides. The first part of the debate mostly consisted of D'Souza and Hitchens making assertions. They rarely addressed anything brought up by their opponent, and provided little, if any, reasoning or evidence for their beliefs. In this regard, I think D'Souza did slightly better than Hitchens, but I could only understand his arguments because I had read his book What's So Great About Christianity. I can only guess at Hitchens line of reason, because it was never stated.

Which puts my predictions for the debate way off. Hitchens made no personal attacks, and only a few sarcastic remarks, some of them directed at the moderator. Hitchens was definitely the more entertaining of the debaters. I do, however, give the money quote of the debate to D'Souza. Towards the end of the debate, each person was allowed to ask their opponent one question. Hitchens asked if D'Souza would rather Hitchens stay an atheist, or convert to some non-Christian religion, like Islam. S'Souza's reply: "It's much safer to debate you as an atheist than a Muslim."

I thought there were a number of fallacies and historical in Hitchens assertions, but D'Souza never dug into them. And D'Souza's arguments were not as strong as they could have been. He could have used some additional evidence and reasoning.

The last part of the debate was a little more lively. The moderator took a few questions from the audience, and Hitchens or D'Souza gave a short answer, and then the other gave a short rebuttal, and they did a bit of back and forth until the moderator cut them off. This is where Hitchens made some of his more egregious claims (the Nazis were a Christian group, the Communist founded a state church based off Eastern Orthodoxy to worship Stalin) that just don't stand up to the historical test. I'm not going to analyze or refute Hitchens' arguments until I've had a chance to read God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, since I really don't know more about Hitchens' position except that he believes every evil in the world is caused by religion and he thinks that religion is immoral because of it. So I want to get his take on that where he has a chance to explain in detail his beliefs.

It was an interesting debate, but I didn't really learn anything from it. I'd heard most of the arguments from both sides before, and without much explanation for their assertions, the ones that were new didn't mean much to me. It was more to see how the two men debated than to really learn anything. It looks like formal debates are terrible forums for either informing or persuading.

Over at Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler, I find my favorite photo from the Washington, DC Tea Party:


Silly boy, don't you know it's racist to point out that they always call you racist no matter what you do?

Over at the Instapundit, we have a close runner up, with the only good czars in America:

This Thursday I am going to the Great Debate between Christopher Hitchens and Dinesh D'Souza. For those who do not know, D'Souza is a Christian apologist and Hitchens is his atheist counter-part. The debate is billed as asking whether religion (read: Christianity) has been good or bad for civilization. It has generated a great deal of interest here in Orlando, with over four thousand people registering to attend, many times more people than the organizers originally expected.

I am most interested in how Christopher Hitchens will present his arguments. I am already quite familiar with the Christian side of this debate, having read D'Souza's book What's So Great About Christianity and then teaching it to a small home group. And in another bible study, we have gone through I Don't Have Enough Faith to be an Atheist by Norman Geisler and Frank Turek. And as a part of that study we watched the debate between Chistopher Hitchens and Frank Turek.

So after all that study, I am convinced of both the historical accuracy and truth of the New Testament as well as the social benefits of Christianity on civilization. Hitchens, however, believes that religion in general and Christianity in particular has been a destructive evil and civilization is well to be rid of it. So I am curious to know what evidence Hitchens has and what reasoning he will use to show the evilness of Christianity.

I am afraid he was not terribly convincing in the Turek debate, seeming to rely on general accusations and insults, avoiding or ignoring any issues raised by his opponent, and otherwise not actually answering the question of the debate. I rather expect him to use the same tactic, but it would be nice to see the pattern established. It might be time to obtain a copy of God is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything and see if he is any more reasoned when he has time to put his thoughts in order.

Meanwhile, I expect D'Souza to show up with statistics, historically verified facts, and common sense and debate straight from his book, which addresses debate's question directly. I don't expect Hitchens to be impressed with D'Souza's arguments, but I would like to see if he actually refutes them or if he dismisses them with a snide comment and moves on. I also want to see how D'Souza approaches Hitchens. Turek seemed to be somewhat out of sorts trying to debate someone who wasn't actually debating anything and I want to see how D'Souza handles that.

Post debate analysis to follow this weekend.

[The Department of] State is a corporate culture, a set of employees that gradually turns over (the last corps within USG selected by that true dinosaur of American history - civil-service examinations), and of course a set of power networks that are utterly and completely invisible. There is one thing you can say for scattered-authority systems: they are impossible to decapitate. Critical individuals are not to be found. Thus, these systems (commonly known as "bureaucracies") are not only very ineffective, but also very stable

Mencius Moldbug

But lets not forget my favorite bureaucratic quote:

The bureaucracy is expanding to meet the expanding needs of the bureaucracy.

Thus, the same amendment protecting speech also separates church and state. Where the country has gone off the rails is allowing Critical Theory to drive towards a separation of church and culture. Into this breech steps an ideologically driven president.

Smitty

Perhaps the dirtiest secret of decolonization is that bureaucracies prefer the postcolonial model to the colonial model, "advice" and "aid" to actual rule, because the postcolonial model generates more jobs. Vastly more Westerners are involved in failing to run the Third World, than ran these same countries successfully when they were colonies.

Mencius Moldbug

...or is this what everyone else's life is like?

Cracked, by way of Linkiest