Artists on the Cutting Edge

Most artists today who see themselves as daring and cutting edge are nothing more than conformists producing devotional works dedicated to the cult of progressive dogma and political correctness. Brave has become, in Orwellian fashion, a synonym for craven. Ed West points it all out in his blog at the Daily Telegraph:

... yet British theatre itself distorts reality for its own political ends. As I wrote a while back, while British arts folk love to “break taboos”, the highest praise, they only like breaking the taboos of 30 years ago, not the sort of ones that today will actually lose you friends. After all, where are the plays about the persecution of Christians in Arab countries? Or plays about the euro delusion? Or even a play that showed modern secular do-gooders as hypocrites in the way that so many show their predecessors and rivals – priests – to be? Or, God forbid, some of the downsides of ANC-run South Africa. They just wouldn’t be made.

The Gap between Rich and Poor

Left leaning condemnations of the gap between rich and poor are not really about the gap itself but rather about the pernicious existence of the rich. If it were the gap that really mattered, the Left would be interested in measures that would narrow the gap by making the poor richer, but invariably their methods of reducing the gap always entail making the rich poorer. Not that elitism bothers the Left. In fact, elitism is an essential component of progressive philosophy. The problem with the rich from the progressive point of view is that they have acquired power and elite status simply by making or accumulating or inheriting money, whereas, in the ideal world of the Left, power is restricted only to those who have proven themselves ideologically correct. Ideological purity must be the measure of achievement for the Left, not business acumen. Thus it is a question of control. Anything else is a threat.

Fair Share: the real meaning may be found in the words of a certain German philosopher

When they say the rich should pay their "fair share" of taxes, what do they really mean by this deliberately vague phrase? Two assumptions underlie it. The first is that making money is inherently evil, or, in other words, that capitalism is a scourge and egalitarianism, regardless of personal accomplishment, is an ideal that will usher in a paradise on Earth. In this sense, "fair share" does not mean the rich should pay their fair share of taxes, whatever fair means in that context, but that by being rich the wealthy have accumulated more than their fair share of wealth and property, as if there is some sort of objective scale for determining such things, and society has the obligation to relieve them of this excess and unnecessary accumulation.

The second assumption in the term "fair share" concerns the purpose of income tax. Many of us believe income tax is a revenue generating device enabling the government to fund itself so it can undertake various public projects, such as road building, police and fire departments, national defense, etc. But experience has shown that raising taxes actually tends to lower government revenue because the wealthy respond to higher taxes by moving away or sheltering their income from tax or refusing to start businesses, leading to more unemployment and fewer people paying taxes. It seems obvious that getting the wealthy to pay their fair share in taxes actually gives government less money. So why do progressives insist on it.

Progressives see income tax as a means of redistributing wealth, not principally as a revenue raising device, taking from those who have more than their fair share, and, through government, giving to those who don't, thereby leveling the playing field. Or as Karl Marx wrote, "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need." This is the real meaning of "fair share." Any American who wants to prevent the country from becoming Zimbabwe should challenge not just the assumptions of this phrase, but its very legitimacy.

When they say the rich should pay their "fair share" of taxes, what are they really saying withthis vague phrase. For one thing, "fair share" is incredibly vague and it has a basic underlying assumption, that making money is inherently evil, that capitalism is a scourge and that egalitarianism regardless of accomplishment will usher in paradise on Earth. What they really mean is not that the rich should pay their fair share of taxes, whatever fair means anyway, but that by being rich they have accumulated more than their fair share of wealth and property. So another underlying assumption of the phrase "fair share" is that

200,000 is not a Million

Calling something Orwellian is rather overwrought these days to the point where it's becoming meaningless, but how close to Newspeak is it to demand tax increases for "millionaires and billionaires" when in reality the increase starts with people making $200,000. The Wall Street Journal editorial writers understand the difference between the two amounts and this is what they said about what they call the middle-class bait-and-switch:

Like Mr. Obama, Mr. [Warren] Buffett speaks about raising taxes only on the rich. But somehow he ignores that the President's tax increase starts at $200,000 for individuals and $250,000 for couples. Mr. Obama ought to call them "thousandaires," but that probably doesn't poll as well.

The President needs to levy his tax increase at such a lower income level because that's where the money is. In 2009, 237,000 taxpayers reported income above $1 million and they paid $178 billion in taxes. A mere 8,274 filers reported income above $10 million, and they paid only $54 billion in taxes.

But 3.92 million reported income above $200,000 in 2009, and they paid $434 billion in taxes. To put it another way, roughly 90% of the tax filers who would pay more under Mr. Obama's plan aren't millionaires, and 99.99% aren't billionaires.

Mr. Buffett says it's only "fair" to raise his taxes, but he's lending his credibility to raising taxes on millions of middle-class earners for whom a few extra thousand dollars in after-tax income is a big deal. Unlike Mr. Buffett, those middle-class earners aren't rich and may earn $250,000 for only a few years of their working lives. How is that fair? 

They hate the bourgeois middle class and it's them they're after and always have been.

 

Tolstoy quote of the day

Tolstoy, War and Peace, Book II, part 2, chapter 2:

No one can attain to truth by himself; only by laying stone upon stone, with the cooperation of all, through millions of generations, from our forefather Adam down to our own day, is that temple raised which is to be a worthy dwelling place for the Almighty God.

The Fall of the Communism as seen by a student of Tatar history

From Nationalism and the Drive for Sovereignty in Tatarstan by Sergei Kondrashov:

The initial alliance between the Gorbachev leadership and the intelligentsia paved the way for an important feature of the Gorbachev period--a prominent role in society for the intelligentsia in general and its democratic wing in particular. The main weapon that secured this position for the democratic intellectuals was their criticism of the vices and ulcers of Soviet society from the moral high ground. The Victorious Analysis focused on two overarching problems. Firstly, it subjected to thorough examination all the alleged achievements of the seventy years of the Soviet state. Secondly, it left no stone unturned in assessing the costs related to these achievements. 

Ultimately, the Analysis arrived at the final verdict that the seventy years of the Soviet system were wasted years in the history of the peoples of the USSR. Absolutely nothing had been achieved that one might be proud of while the costs--human, social, economic, and cultural--had been horrendous. People learned that the industrialization effort had created an outmoded, extremely wasteful and polluting industry that was as good as a heap of scrap metal; that their living standards were comparable with an underdeveloped country of the Third Word; that the great Soviet science had been able to produce nothing but a stockpile of outdated military hardware; and that the aggressive West was not that aggressive after all. Furthermore, the Soviets learned that their friends in the Third World were nothing but parasitic dictatorial regimes, and that their allies did not just dislike the Soviets, but despised them. And the final conclusion was: the sooner the Soviet system in all its totality was disoposed of, the better it would be for the country.

False arguments

In a recent issue of Esquire magazine, Stephen Marche wrote of the Obama presidency,

Because twenty years from now, we're going to look back on this time as a glorious idyll in American politics, with a confident, intelligent, fascinating president riding the surge of his prodigious talents from triumph to triumph. Whatever happens this fall or next, the summer of 2011 is the summer of Obama."

Aside from the insipidness of the content of Marche's comments, the objection I have is to the use of the words "twenty years from now." This is becoming a common rhetorical device, evoking the authority of history to stamp one's opinion with some sort of unassailable imprimatur. Other ways of putting it include: "history will show," or "future generations will recognize," etc. And it's time to bring it to an end. It resembles the logical fallacy of appeal to authority where the truth of a point is proven by simply pointing out that a higher authority has pronounced it true. For example, global warming exists because the United Nations panel says it exists. 


Obviously it's not true that Stephen Marche knows what people will think twenty years from now. No one does. So why does he use this rhetorical phrase? To invest his lame argument, really a non-argument, with a phony and cheap authority which it doesn't possess if left all by itself.

Star Trek TNG reevaluated

After all these years, I'm sad to say that Star Trek TNG doesn't hold up. It's pieties and worldview are false and here's why.

 Look at the episode called Redemption, the one about the Klingon civil war. The Federation, personified by Captain Picard, are allied with the legitimate government of the Klingon empire, personified by their council leader Gowron. But the rival Klingon Duras family, backed not-so-secretely by Romulans, have launched a coup that has turned into a civil war. Picard, obsessed with the non-interference dictum known as the prime directive, refuses to involve the Federation in the fighting, despite the desperate pleas by Gowron, his ally.  Picard knows he must help or else the enemy Romulans, the power behind the coup, will control the Klingon empire. So, in keeping with the prime directive, Picard devises a non-violent solution. Set up a blockade of Klingon space to catch the Romulans bringing in aid to the rebels. Once the blockade exposes the Romulan role in the civil war, the theory goes, the Romulans will back down and the coup will fail. And this is precisely what happens.

The non-interference, non-violent policy advocated here is not far off from what is put forward by some in the world today: Expose the bad guys for what they are, but don't get involved in fighting them. War is bad. The only problem with this paradigm is that it doesn't work. And that it doesn't is something that is easily proved. Just look at a real world example that parallels the Redemption plot almost exactly: the Spanish Civil War 1936-1939.

In Spain, there was a legitimate government, left of center, which was allied with such countries as Britain and France. A coup was launched by General Franco's rightists and a civil war ensued. Despite pleas from the legitimate and elected Spanish government (known as the Republican side), France and England and the United States refused to come to their aid, and France was even a socialist government ideologically sympathetic to the Spanish Republicans. Instead, Britian and France instituted, like Picard, an embargo on Spain to prevent any country from supplying aid to either Franco's Nationalists or to the Republican side. The idea was to let the two sides would fight it out themselves. If another country attempted to supply war materiel or aid, the embargo would expose them and presumably they would therefore back down.

But in real life the opposite occurred. Hitler's Germany and Mussolini's Italy, the main sources of aide for Franco, were caught many times breaking the blockade-Italian troops were even captured in Spain during battles-but naturally they didn't back down for a second. Mussolini even signed onto the embargo, but he regarded it as a joke. So did Hitler (see Guernica). German ships running the embargo even fired on British ships enforcing it, but there were no repercussions for the Germans. For the truth is that when people like Hitler and Mussolini see that you're not going to do anything to stop them except a toothless embargo, they will go ahead and do whatever they want. Eventually, the Republican side had to pay millions in gold to the Soviet Union to get their help and by that time the embargo was a joke for everyone. The ultimate result: the Republicans lost and Franco was dictator of Spain for the next thirty-six years. And that is the true lesson of Star Trek TNG's Redemption episode.

Greg Morris has my eternal gratitude

I truly believe the actor Greg Morris, who played Barney in the original Mission Impossible, understood the difference between his show and the Tom Cruise version. That's why he walked out of Tom's premier and called it an abomination. The original show was principally about the Cold War. It viewed America and the American government as a source of good and freedom and liberty in the world. The IMF would go behind the Iron Curtain or into a Third World dictatorship and subtly shake things up in the interest of freedom and democracy. The men and women on the IMF weren't realists as the term is known today, but idealists in the best sense of that word. Tom's version, aside from being mostly incoherent, is the opposite. It's about the evils of the American government and the West. It's like the Bourne movies: the U.S. government is the enemy, the source of corruption and all things bad. It's the modern, Hollywood, progressive ideology. Vanessa Redgrave was Tom's co-star. What more has to be said? I'd like to think that Greg Morris realized all this, he must have, and that's why he walked out of Tom's premiere. And for that, I am eternally grateful.  Simon