House of Eratosthenes

Do either of you remember one of Morgan’s posts where he was talking about how conservatives have ceded so much of the public square to liberals because “we’ve got shit to do” and now conservatives are starting to realize that such was a mistake? (I found a few posts where he mentions the idea but I could swear there was one where he fleshed it out.)

These assignments are always pretty tough, for me most of all, because these thoughts are hovering in the background ready to find their way out into the open — and they do, multiple times. As the interested party notes, and this happens often…there’s one post where I really tear down the bunny trail, and it would be good to find that one, not one of the others that came before or afterward.

Well…Score! I think. Half a year ago, this time. Turns out I was talking about science, and what lately has been happening to it. Then I drifted just a bit…

Think back to decades ago when our liberals commanded us to question authority, as opposed to agreeing with authority all of the time to prove we’re not racists. I don’t mean in the build-up to the invasion of Iraq, I mean more like Vietnam. In those days, politics became the dominion of liberals. Conservative parents wanted their liberal kids to get haircuts, and jobs. The liberal kids wanted to protest. From this split came a situation in which the liberal kids concentrated on getting, keeping, and using a voice, and the passion persisted until they were no longer kids. Conservatives, meanwhile, figured out the chickens weren’t going to gather their own eggs, the roofs weren’t going to repair themselves…they didn’t have time for this shit.

Throughout this time, you see the liberals still lost elections. But they lost them after having won the previous elections, after the public got a good clear view of the harm that comes from liberal policies. These decades represent repeated laps around the unnecessary-mistake track; laps taken by, unfortunately, the entire country.

Now we are at a critical juncture. The conservatives who clean the crap out of the sewer lines and lay the foundations upon which buildings will be erected, that will house all sorts of publicly funded liberal-egghead think tanks, have come to the unpleasant realization that previous generations never quite learned: They have to make the time for politics. They’ve got to attend to it, as if it’s yet another chicken with eggs not yet gathered, otherwise everything else they’ve done is for nothing. They’ve got to write the code that works, they’ve got to build the diesel engines that successfully contain the explosions, they’ve got to manufacture the action boxes for 9mm pistols that don’t rupture under the stress, and do all the other things that liberals can never do. Then, they have to participate in politics like the liberals do. And the conservatives have to grow all our food.

Can you imagine a liberal being a potato farmer? It would never work. He would decide “this soil is good for growing potatoes,” and then he would do what liberals do all the time: Promulgate the narrative. The very last thing to figure into his actions would be the lingering question of whether or not the soil is any good…and come harvest time, there’d be no potatoes. If you want a big bundle of excuses about how everything is Republicans’ fault, liberals are your guys. Or, gals, or zhers or whatever. But if you want something to actually work then that’s not where you go. It’s not their bag, baby.

If liberals ever toil away under any sort of standard, their first move is to re-negotiate the standard. They’re so busy re-defining things, they’ve made themselves into strangers to the concept of ever getting any actual work done.

So conservatives have to make things work…food that can really be eaten, code that can really be run, combustion chambers that really do contain explosions…then they have to make time to argue with liberals who don’t have to worry about any of that. Wrestle with the pigs in the mud.

So there are two problems here. One, liberals fancy themselves to be too good for any task that involves dirty hands…any task whose completion status is testable. We no longer live in the era in which such neglect bears consequences. If you think yourself too good to cook hamburgers, you can still get hamburgers whenever you want. So, liberals are running around on the Internet, on blogs and on other forms of social media, because Barack & Michelle have asked them to — and, they’re bored.

The other problem is that if the liberals ever did sweep the sidewalks or embalm the bodies or kill the weeds or design the car engines, they’d just do it until they found the entertainment factor to fall short of their expectations, which would be pretty damn soon. If they didn’t get the task done satisfactorily, who’s to say? So either way, they’ve got a lot more time for this than conservatives do, since the conservatives are doing things that are testable, which takes a great deal more time. Anytime you vote in an election, you have to be prepared to lose; anytime you gamble, you must be prepared to lose; and whenever you run tests in good faith, on anything, you must account for that proportion of times that the tests are going to fail.

Conservatives are building the bridges on top of which the cars are going to be driven — we wouldn’t have it any other way. Would you really want to drive a car upon a bridge built by a liberal? Not if you want to see your next birthday. So people are counting on the conservatives, the conservatives have to work away at the task until it’s really done, and the whatever really does work. While, the liberals are bored…so of course the liberals have taken over the arena of rhetoric. Add to that, the fact that conservatives are naturally harder to get engaged in any sort of coordinated political action, because they think too independently. Contrast the recent Trump vs. Cruz contest, versus the Hillary vs. Bernie contest; no need to comment further on that, I think.

Still, the conservatives win elections. The liberals only have the White House, nothing else. It isn’t because conservatives have gotten good at participating in this verbal cage match. Rush Limbaugh, and a few others in the same business with the same leanings but not nearly approaching his stature — versus academe, cable, liberal blogs that have become media phenomena, the residual power of the printed daily. On top of which, anything anywhere that is any sort of bureaucracy, naturally tugs left.

So why are the conservatives winning elections when the liberals are dominating what the conservatives still have yet to effectively challenge? Just the experience of the electorate, that’s all. Big government looks like the answer, only to people who haven’t actually dealt with it yet. People who haven’t gone through the experience of waiting in line for a building permit…because they haven’t built anything.

That’s the problem with the post-scarcity world. Time was, everybody was fairly “conservative,” as even the richest and most privileged Westerners experienced “tough shit” moments daily. Carriage crashes, polio, no climate control, no running water… unless you actually were the Queen of England, every day you saw some easy, obvious thing that would make your life better, and it was juuuuuuust out of reach… hell, even if you were the Queen — catch Victoria with a toothache, and she’ make you Viceroy of India for some some over-the-counter aspirin.

But now, a level of material comfort that would be literal heaven to 99.9% of the world’s population for 99.99% of human history — and for a great many people even now — is taken for granted. Our “poor” people are fat and have flat screen tvs. I doubt there are more than 1 in 1,000,000 Americans who have ever experienced actual hunger — that is, I need food and have only a very remote possibility of getting any. So why shouldn’t everyone get everything he wants, the second he wants it? It’s no faaaaaair if I don’t!

I’m not suggesting we turn the clock back to the Middle Ages — that’s a liberal preoccupation — but I am suggesting that perhaps the greatest gift you can give your children is enrolling them in Little League. Something, anything, that teaches them that no matter how strongly you feeeeel about it, some people are better at some things than others, and sometimes the ball takes a funny hop.

[PS wasn’t that the thread that finally got the Cuttlefish banned? Something about a whole bunch of farmers are liberals because Butler County, Iowa, doesn’t have a stop light? What a gong show].
- Severian | 08/12/2016 @ 09:03
Institutions and Premises

Free Markets:

Free markets are the best way to allocate scarce resources. To do so, free markets require continuous, instantaneous, minute adjustments, and in all dimensions of potential exchange. Even then, markets are only ever approximations, constantly approaching but never reaching equilibrium.

In order to have a free market, there are crucial premises that must be fulfilled: many small, independent agents; open flow of information; no monopolies; no tariffs, barriers, etc.

Absent those, we find rent-seeking, cronyism, monopolies, mercantilism and all the other “toothpicks in the thermostat” to which human nature is wont.

Today there are certain deficiencies in markets, the most egregious of which is cronyism.
The erroneous socialist remedy is to encumber the cronies, amercing them for taxes and contributions. This is no fix; it merely makes the cronies into unrecognized collectors on behalf of government. The proper fix is first of all to shrink government, so that a senator is not a better investment than a factory.

Democracy:

As with free markets, there are premises to democracy. Here the premises are free elections, free speech, multi-polar society and all the rest. The most important of all is an independent and honest judiciary.

Today shockingly few of those premises prevail. Free speech is assailed with impunity. One after the other of the multiple poles has been subverted – the imperial presidency is unchallenged by congress or courts; federal government has reduced states with unfunded mandates and coercive block grants. Outside government, the left has marched through media, academia, and Hollywood. Then other institutions like the church, Boy Scouts, Salvation Army and all the rest have been beaten down, especially by media and academia.

Worst of all, the independence of the judiciary is compromised. From Wickard down through Sibelius, SCOTUS is an ever more feeble check.

Other players in the judicial system are similarly warped. Just a few years ago, it was unimaginable that the IRS might become an overt weapon for suppression of dissent. Or that the AG would meet privately with the husband of the target of an active FBI criminal investigation. Or that a compelling FBI case would not recommend indictment of any person, no matter how “eminent.” Or that such failure to recommend would be excused for “absence of intent,” which was clearly proven, and not even required.

Game Theory

You will recall the optimal strategy for iterated prisoners’ dilemma. ‘Tit for Tat” begins with a green and thereafter plays whatever the opponent played in the prior round. It is trusting, retaliatory, forgiving and transparent.

All politicians and bureaucrats are to some extent self-serving and venal. Throughout history, that has usually expressed itself as pecuniary gain. A drain on society, but with rare exceptions (Rome c. 280 AD) not fatal.

Something far more sinister arose in America in the early 1900s: progressivism, with its endless appetite.
C. S. Lewis understood the new religion: Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victim may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated, but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.

Progressivism, being an aggressive faith , is relentless in its quest for power. It recognizes no tolerance or reciprocity, respects neither precedents nor appeals for comity. That is why all violations of norms and cruel innovations in political warfare arise on the left.

Sedition Act, threats to pack the Supreme Court, the infinitely elastic Commerce Clause.
Lawfare, election frauds, parliamentary cheats and bad faith that opened the brief crack, through which the left crammed down Obamacare.
Suppression of Constitutional rights, fabrications of new “rights,” dereliction of the fundamental government duties to protect the border, keep civil peace, and enforce contracts. Tribalism.

At each descent, there has been no Tit for the Tat.

With the original feedback mechanisms jammed, it is mere sentimentality to hope for the system to right itself.

As an otherwise-worthless community organizer once said, we must “punch back twice as hard.”
- Robert Arvanitis | 08/12/2016 @ 17:42
[…] last, but not least, House of Eratosthenes discusses what Conservatives must […]
- Sorta Blogless Sunday Pinup » Pirate's Cove | 08/14/2016 @ 06:31
“We’ve got shit to do” is what made up most of my working years. I always thought, maybe assumed that a part of the social contract in paying taxes and being a productive citizen was that the institutions that “we” funded were supposed to be responsible and provide the services as advertised.

It used to work. Until someone got into the kitchen and screwed with the recipe!

Damn those politicians in whom we put our trust and faith while we did our part. They were supposed to have our backs and now looks what we have wrought? More people need to learn about the teachings and wisdom of people like our Founders who knew well and good where the weaknesses in government lay.

They lay right at our feet. Politicians are no better than scoundrels. Like bankers, we keep an eye on our accounts on a regular basis to make sure our hard earned money is fine. We needed to do the same with these weasels all along.

“Every government degenerates when trusted to the rulers of the people alone. The people themselves are its only safe depositories.” – Thomas Jefferson
- LetsPlay | 08/15/2016 @ 02:03

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What Conservatives Must DoThursday, August 11th, 2016

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Thursday, August 11th, 2016