Talking : Loud :: Saying : Nothing

Here in Israel, it is quite common for people to know the truth about various subjects and to think about it and even express it among themselves, but it is extremely rare to find anyone willing to put down uncomfortable truths in a respectable newspaper. That’s why this article in Jpost about Taibe was so surprising to me.

I mean truths like these: Arabs don’t pay taxes. Arab neighborhoods and municipalities are hellish, filthy dens of sin, despair, iniquity and crime. Arabs don’t much mind not having basic services like sewer systems in their municipalities (the ones who are ready to pay taxes and receive services are the same ones who move their families into Jewish neighborhoods). Arabs’ loyalty is to the family, clan and tribe, and not to the society – even their own society.

The Jpost article was an eye-opener to me, not because I didn’t know the facts of the situation in Taibe (the details were news to me) but because some editor didn’t have a problem printing them in a straightforward manner. Everyone should read this interview.

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Here’s some more stupidity from Randy “The Ethicist” Cohen!

The question:

I am a nurse-midwife. Some of my pregnant clients are illegal immigrants from Mexico who are treated under a federally financed migrant-workers’ health-care program using their real names. They are sometimes employed under an alias. When they miss work for appointments or their deliveries, I’m asked to write excuses using those aliases. I would ordinarily write such an excuse, but must I refuse unless I can use a real name? JENNIFER COLLINS, MANNING, S.C.

The half-truth:

You may not commit fraud, and that’s what you’d be doing if you typed up letters with fake names. (Or ran off a lot of $20 bills on the office color copier.)

Actually, there are many ways to commit fraud. Cohen knows two of them, but it is also fraudulent to be an accessory to someone else’s act of fraud.

The false comparison:

But you shouldn’t erect obstacles to people seeking medical attention either, and taking an action that forces someone to sacrifice a day’s pay can be just such a hurdle.

No, erecting obstacles to prevent someone’s illegal and immoral attempt to defraud the taxpayers is not the same as erecting obstacles to people seeking medical treatment. Actually no attempt is under discussion at all to prevent people from getting medical care. The only issue is whether it’s right to allow them to lie in order to get it.

The terrible, terrible answer:

“Write the note, but leave the name off the note, and let the patient fill it in.”

Wrong. So wrong. So, so, so wrong.

The obscurantist rationalization:

It is not unusual for a health professional to provide some information and have the patient complete the paperwork. When children need a medical record for summer camp, for example, some pediatricians hand parents the office-exam form and have them add a child’s name and address. You’d be doing something similar.

But in those cases, the pediatricians are sure that the parents won’t lie and aren’t cheating anyone! In this case, the nurse-midwife not only isn’t sure they won’t lie, but she is sure that they will lie. Surely Cohen doesn’t believe that these two superficially similar circumstances are actually comparable?

Now he goes on to recommend institutionalizing the fraud:

You might create a standard work-absence form and leave a space where the patient must fill in her name (“I treated ______ on this date”).

Again – this lazy idea might not be disastrous if she were dealing with an inherently trustworthy population – people who had no incentive to lie, like the aforementioned parents with their children.

There is no reason for her to tell you what name she uses on the job (or what she does with her office’s color copier) — such information is beyond your purview as her nurse-midwife.

But formalizing the facilitation of fraud must surely also be beyond her purview as a nurse or a midwife or both?

More distractions:

It is pertinent that the federal government has made it a matter of public policy to care for these workers.

Actually, it’s not, because the nurse-midwife is not the government.

And remember that medical ethics (and many laws, like those protecting patient confidentiality) urge health professionals to give a higher priority to providing access to care than to serving other social goals, like enforcing immigration or labor law.

Medical ethics say the nurse-midwife should provide medical attention to people who need it. Said ethics don’t say she has to lie about who received the treatment. Moreover, by telling the truth she would not be “enforcing immigration or labor law.” The decision whether or not to enforce the law is still left up to the police.

As Mortimer observes, “The states where I’ve worked have all had amnesty policies that allow health-care providers to care for patients without any need to report immigration status to anyone.” This is a wise policy for patients, for health-care providers and for the wider society.

Again, this is totally irrelevant. The questioner never indicated any pressure or a desire to report anyone’s immigration status. Writing an honest letter with her patients’ true names leave all relevant legal decisions to someone else.

The summation: progressives believe in open borders and free movement of people between countries (just as long as the people going from one country to another are indigent and will remain utterly dependent on progressive largesse, and as long as they’ll vote for progressive parties and policies). Supporting illegal immigration is a progressive value because illegal immigrants can be relied upon to vote progressive; it’s ok to lie, cheat and steal, and to tolerate other people lying, cheating and stealing, because it’s done for progress.

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Isn’t it lovely when one man’s sarcasm is another man’s insight? Check out this wonderful article in Salon that attempts to mock the people who want to maintain America’s mixed public-private health care system by hyperbolizing a private justice society. Salon is reliably progressive, and often annoyingly so, but this almost could have been published by the Mises Institute. One man’s sarcasm is another man’s insight. I like that.

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I once attended a public lecture given by an economist who wanted to make people think about inflation. “How many of you,” he asked us, “would agree to a doubling of prices every 15 years or so?” One or two people put their hands up. “Ok,” he continued. “How many would accept a modest inflation rate of 5% annually?” Almost everyone in the room put their hands up (mine remained folded in my lap). And that is what is wrong with people.

If you didn’t catch it – an annual 5% inflation rate means that prices will double in about 15 years. To save you the trouble of figuring out which formula to use, here are the figures (source: Google).

year 0 (ie, the imaginary present): $100.00
year 1: $105.00
year 2: $110.25
year 3: $115.76
year 4: $121.55
year 5: $127.63
year 6: $134.01
year 7: $140.71
year 8: $147.75
year 9: $155.13
year 10: $162.89
year 11: $171.03
year 12: $179.58
year 13: $188.56
year 14: $197.99
And after 15 years of 5% inflation … $207.89.

Wow, so a little bit of inflation really goes a long way! Ok, so what’s so bad about inflation after all? I mean, if we can keep the rate constant, then it won’t affect anybody or any generation more than it affected others, and that’s fair, right? Theodore Dalrymple has something to say about the moral effects of inflation. In a brief and episodic way he shows that inflation isn’t just something that is, but that it’s something that happens, because people want it to happen and cause it to happen and that it actually hurts people.

Inflation is how governments steal from people who save money, the most productive class. It is also how the young steal from the middle aged and how the middle aged steal from the old. I don’t want to paint old people as victims, of course. Old people today, the so-called “greatest generation,” are the greatest only at self righteousness and are in fact the worst generation since the Protestant Reformation. But they did create quite a bit of wealth when they were being productive so their children could earnestly piss it away now. My generation will grow up to have enjoyed less material wealth than our own parents, but we will of course do our best ruin whatever they’ve left standing.

How does the ruin work and what is its mechanism? It’s different in every case, I’m sure, but I invite you to enjoy this wonderful essay (actually the transcript of a speech) about inflation in the Roman empire that I devoured while waiting for a concert to begin last week. To settle the issue before it’s raised – no, we don’t study history because history repeats itself; we study history for the same reason we study literature and art and philosophy: to grasp at understanding human nature and the human condition.

I love to see that there are people who care and worry about inflation as much as I do. But why isn’t everyone angry as hell about this massive theft? Inflation is actually central to progressive designs and there is nothing they won’t do to convince people that it isn’t bad and actually that it’s a good thing (one sign of their success is the amazing proportion of people attending a free market seminar who don’t think 5% inflation is any big deal).

During long periods, stretching over hundreds of years in late medieval and early modern history, entire societies actually experienced deflation: that is to say, their currency actually increased in value over time. And who wouldn’t want this? We all want our investments to appreciate, don’t we? This goes from my parents’ home to my Roth IRA to my friend’s gold – and it should go for everyone’s money. In fact, my parents might not be so fanatic about their house and my friend might not be so fucking annoying about his damn gold, if the same currency they used for every day purposes – namely, currency – would actually hold some value.

But progressives want you to think there’s something wrong with that. Deflation – or at least stable currencies – means that people will tend to be rewarded tomorrow for their hard work today. It also means they’ll tend to plan for their future by such activities in the present as self-denial, saving, careful and wise investment. Every one of these things is exceedingly dangerous to progressives.

Wait a second. Wait just a second. Progressives haven’t figured out a miracle anti-aging medicine. They also get old and their money also turns to dust and blows away. Doesn’t Inflation ruin their fortunes too? It does, but progressives want everyone to be totally dependent on the state. Their answer is for social security pensions to be adjusted for cost of living. This means: first, old people who rely on social security don’t suffer from inflation and are immune from it; second, they actually contribute to it by continually receiving higher and higher payments from the government and putting more and more money into the market to chase after the same number of goods and services; third, and most crucially frightening, they benefit from the process because they are close to the source of the new money, which means they get to spend it first, before prices rise. All the rest of us who don’t spend public money are paying prices that are already high from the government-driven inflation happening all around us.

So government of progressives, by progressives and for progressives steals from producers and savers in the name of their own power. I don’t expect ever to be wealthy, but I would like to enjoy as an old man what I’m producing now. Unfortunately, I know that it will never happen. Inflation is very much a matter of crime and deserves as well to be one also of punishment.

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Since it seems like the United States will soon bring upon itself a medical system as bad as Israel’s, I’d like at least to register my opinion about the debate before it’s over.

This is the dumbest political debate that I’ve ever done my best to ignore.

Socialized health care by all rights should have been enacted as part of the New Deal, but Roosevelt apparently thought at the time that it would be too much for Americans to handle. There were also lots of other attempts through the years to ram it down the Americans’ throats, climaxing in the early 1990s, but the most progressives could sustain were piecemeal programs like Medicare and Medicaid. Normal middle class people are harmed by Medicare and Medicaid, since they fund those programs but don’t use them, but this doesn’t have the effect that progressives desire, which is the eradication of the middle class.

Of course, I’m grateful to have grown up in a country with at least a mixed public-private health care system. When I left university and wasn’t eligible to be covered by my parents’ employers’ plans, I bought my own health insurance like a responsible adult and it was the best health care I’ve ever consumed. For the record, I am not in good health generally, so I have quite a bit of experience dealing with both America’s system and Israel’s.

It goes without saying that America’s medical system is going to be ruined by this “reform,” as medical care is only a service like any other, whether it be education, transportation or entertainment. Any attempts to escape the law of supply and demand, to impose a monopoly and to dictate to a market what it must provide and under which terms, are doomed not only to failure in the customer service sense (actually, very few Americans will remain customers, since a dwindling minority pay more and more for the benefit of a growing majority), but to the worst effects of monopolies: over- and under-production, shoddy pricing, no innovation, billions wasted on ludicrous promotional campaigns that promote to nobody but a captive audience, and Keynesian demand management.

That’s all true, but what frightens me, as I imagine myself in 2109 looking back on 2009, is that medical care will have become quite what education already has become. Private education is immeasurably better than public education in every way. But it’s also utterly inaccessible to the people who need it most: intelligent youths of lower and middle classes who, by filling their heads with knowledge and upper class ideas, could turn themselves into upper class adults. In many, many ways, medical care is the next education. And anyone who does not rail against public education, refusing it for himself and his children, has no right to argue against the implementation of public medical care.

Like with public education, the imposition of public medical care will be irreversible because progressives have completely convinced everyone else of its inevitability. This partially explains why they didn’t fret so much when it wasn’t passed in the 1930s or in the 1990s: they knew it was coming and that it would never go away once it arrived. In theory, the United States is a democracy, and in 2010 or at some later date, they could vote in a new majority that will dismantle socialized medicine. But that scenario is an utter impossibility; if it ever got to that point, a progressive-dominated Supreme Court would only have to discover a “right to medical care” in the Constitution and all debate would end.

Many decent people have foolishly waged a quixotic struggle for a sort of education voucher system or for public charter schools. While these have been implemented in a few isolated urban areas, overwhelmingly they will never succeed because progressives need to be in total control of education so they can use it to brainwash other people’s children (*). In a century and a half, there will be a similar debate over whether to allow charter hospitals and public voucher system to send poor people to private hospitals so they can get the treatment that the normal public system is unequipped to offer. As they do now, progressives will do everything in their power to prevent these initiatives, but in the end they won’t mind making a few concessions because they’ll always be able to regain lost ground later. In a society with democratic values, what’s private is always bad and what’s public is always good.

Similarly again, progressives are going to come out the day after their “reform” passes to proclaim it a wild success. And they’re going to keep saying it’s successful in the following months, years and decades – no matter how unsuccessful it proves to be by the standards of their current system. This has of course been the case with every progressive idea that, made into government policy, caused and facilitated the breakdown of civilization we all experience daily. To a progressive, no-fault divorce is a success because it results in more divorces – of millions of men and women who’d heretofore been locked into unhappy matrimony; public education is a success because, well, everyone is educated – in the intricate details of gang violence, drug abuse, sexual assault and political correctness, if not in civics, history, literature and how to write a fucking paragraph with basic literacy, let alone my grandparents’ penmanship; welfare is an unmitigated success because it has wiped away poverty … at least of the working poor; and so on.

Yes, America is about to slide a bit further toward the abyss. But, to my American friends, don’t worry – you’ll still be able to feel sorry for us.

(*) By the way, anyone who doubts that children are brainwashed by public education can simply ask my parents if they remember a seven year old version of me coming home from second grade and telling them that the inventor of CFCs (a chemical that’s supposed to torment baby seals, or destroy the ozone layer, or cause acid rain) ought to be executed for his crime against humanity. And the fact that I remember, more than 20 years later, that CFC stands for chloroflourocarbon, and how to spell it, is testimony to how insanely effective the brainwashing is.

Tags:   america · education · israel · medical care · pollution · progressives · rights government · socialism6 Comments

For someone who despises progressives, it may seem like I spend an inordinate amount of time and energy consuming their media. I usually explain this tendency by pointing out, for example, that Haaretz is simply of undeniably superior quality to Arutz Sheva (I scan the headlines from both but rarely bother reading the articles from either).

I do make a point of reading some of the more intelligent middle-brow American journals, like the very progressive but usually honest Slate. Thanks to this practice, I’m often reminded just how sinister progressivism really is and, occasionally, just how evil a specific progressive is (or was). Such is the case with Timothy Noah’s obituary of Ted Kennedy. While he was alive, I knew a few things about him: he was a Kennedy, possibly a murderer and certainly at least criminally responsible for a young woman’s death, a filthy drunk and a rotten and nasty progressive.

But Timothy Noah’s article is like a wonderful charge sheet, an indictment of most of Ted Kennedy’s most serious crimes! He plainly estimates Kennedy’s influence thus: “Every one of these laws [that Kennedy passed] expanded in tangible ways the promise of American life.” Of course, decent and civilized people know not to promise what they can’t deliver, but no one ever accused a Kennedy of being decent or civilized.

Noah even describes what Kennedy did at Chappaquiddick as “criminally irresponsible behavior,” which is quite remarkably close to the truth. Of course, to a normal person, someone who’s committed any kind of criminal behavior ought to be treated like a criminal, but no one ever accused progressives of being normal.

Tags:   arutz 7 · crime · haaretz · kennedy · progressives · slate · timothy noah2 Comments

Progressives claim that torture, when used to obtain information from a suspect, is ineffective.

I can’t verify this argument because I’ve never tortured or been tortured and because I’ve never seen any convincing evidence either way.

But, supposing it’s true, why do militaries and intelligence agencies all over the world prefer to use torture in at least some cases?

Tags:   human rights · intelligence · military · progressives · torture2 Comments

Are you afraid of a one-state world? I’ll admit that sometimes a day or a week can pass when I hardly worry about it at all.

But then a greasy, sleazy progressive in my vicinity will utter some grotesque, boorish tripe about peace or the United Nations, and I’ll be reminded of “progress,” the world’s never-ending march, led by progressives, to sameness, to the obliteration of the wonder of uniqueness and differentiation, of their slobbering lust to suck all the joy out of life like marrow from a bone.

Yesterday was such a time, when I listened to this podcast: Alexander Wendt on why a one state world is inevitable. I caught it on “Big Ideas,” via the iTunes store. Interestingly, some of the ideas contained therein actually are quite big. I listened to an interesting lecture by BHL last week that didn’t bother me quite that much. Do check it out.

Tags:   alexander wendt · bhl · itunes · peace · progressivism · united nations3 Comments

Progressives, like most people, believe that they are smarter than average and that intelligence, thoughtfulness and common sense inevitably lead to their own views. This isn’t so extraordinary, but the other side of it is that they believe conservatives are necessarily dumb (when evidence proves otherwise, they concede that a particular conservative might not be a fool but is consequently a knave).

I’ve seen this many, many, many times. The best example for a long time was Ronald Reagan, a man of above-average intelligence who was treated as a dolt by progressives. He actually knew a lot about many different topics at the time he started his political career and when he was governor and running for president – independently, because he read and researched a lot. But it was treated as common knowledge that he was a moron and, when reality proved otherwise, that he was suffering from Alzheimer’s long before he really was. George W. Bush is a much better example for my generation, and continues to make progressives make fools out of themselves while trying to make a fool out of him. He is not a stupid man – his intelligence is probably average, and there’s nothing at all wrong with having average intelligence plus excellent connections and social skills. But progressives played a big role in getting him elected twice by vastly (mis)underestimating who is is, what he’s all about and what he’s capable of. Most egregious might have been the “Curious George,” where he was made out to be about as intelligent as a monkey. Imagine what would have happened if someone had compared Barack Obama to a monkey.

Sarah Palin is not like Bush or Reagan in an important way: she actually is not bright. That makes things pretty difficult for her, and it hurts all the more that she doesn’t have the gifts of communication or relating to other people or wealthy, influential relatives that those guys had. But – and this is a big but – how much of a dimwit is she really? Is anyone out there prepared to say that she’s more than two standard deviations less intelligent than the mean? More than one SD? I’d guess her IQ is at least 90. That makes her very close in intelligence to most people, probably including me (I’ve never been tested) and you, and whoever else is reading this.

To continue claiming, half a year into the Obama administration, that Sarah Palin lost the election for McCain, is ridiculous. There are a million reasons for McCain to have lost and for Obama to have won, but before and after all of them, 2008 was always going to be the Democrats’ year. Even the extraordinary coincidence of their choosing an exceptionally strong candidate and the Republicans choosing an exceptionally weak one barely managed to budge the vast majority of the electorate who knew very long in advance how they’d vote.

I actually know a bunch of people (chief among them: my parents) who claim to have wanted to vote for McCain but ended up voting for Obama because of Palin. This is bullshit – there’s nothing wrong at all in preferring Obama to McCain because they’re both … well, I wouldn’t vote for either of them … but my parents are clever enough to be able to separate in their minds the roles and responsibilities of president and vice president, and the skills and qualities necessary for both, and divorce intelligence from them.

I am of the opinion that choosing Sarah Palin was the best decision McCain made during his entire doomed campaign. He had no chance of winning anyway, so in an honest-to-god attempt to win, the only thing he could really do was make wild risks. Palin was a huge risk and, whether or not she paid off by bringing some social conservatives into McCain’s camp, I think her selection reflects a sensible and realistic understanding that risky behavior is sometimes necessary. What kills progressives is to think that McCain was really, actually trying to win the election; they preferred him to all the other Republican candidates because he’s manifestly not a culture warrior and his links to social conservatism are quite tenuous. When he chose Palin instead of a progressive like, say, Joe Lieberman or a nihilist like Mitt Romney, McCain infuriated the progressives by signaling that he was in it to win it instead of just for shits and giggles.

The smear campaign that destroyed Sarah Palin’s reputation was classic progressive and was so easily engineered that it practically invented itself. But despite it all, I’m not convinced that she said and did more stupid things between late August and early November than anybody would have done in her situation. Most people are thinking stupid things most of the time, and if they are made to broadcast those thoughts publicly, they will look stupid. I feel pretty bad for Sarah Palin after all this. Sure, I would never vote for her. Of course, I wouldn’t even vote. But it is past time to let Sarah Palin go back to doing whatever it is that she does.

Tags:   alzheimers · conservatives · democrats · george bush · intelligence · john mccain · lieberman · progressives · reagan · republicans · romney · sarah palin · statistics · vanity fair5 Comments

Stupid job interview questions … and the honest answers I wish I could give:

• Tell me about yourself. Oh god! My name is Nobody and I’m looking for a job. Whatever else you need to know is on my CV, which is right in front of your blank, expressionless face. If that doesn’t satisfy you: my favorite color is blue; I have a dog; when I get out of this interview, I’m going to cry. There, are you happy?
• Where do you see yourself in five years? Retch! Relaxing on a beach somewhere, filthy rich. Or: still slaving away for conspicuously dodgy internet companies. You decide.
• Sell me something. Anything. Vomit! For sale: one immigrant in his late 20s with relevant experience in several internet companies, willing to work for money. Tell him what to do and he’ll do it. Some training may be required.

Tags:   employment · stupidityNo Comments.