We Should Live - Ben Bateman

We all have self-destructive urges. They’re as natural as death. They push down on us constantly, urging us to abuse our bodies, neglect important tasks, deny ourselves happiness, and in many other ways intentionally degrade our lives. Pushing against this death-urge, or thanatos, is the natural urge to live. Each urge grows weaker as it succeeds until the counter-urge overcomes it and pushes in the opposite direction, creating a natural sine wave.

For example, one of my big weaknesses is staying up too late. One day I’ll conclude that I’m tired all the time and can’t focus properly, so I’ll go to be early and wake up feeling great. I keep going to bed early for several days, until I start to feel that my level of energy and focus are so stable that I don’t need to devote much attention to maintaining them. So I turn my attention elsewhere, and my bedtime slowly slides backwards. Over the course of a week or so I steadily lose energy and focus until I realize my mistake, and then I’m back to an early bedtime.

This assumes that I hold a conscious belief that I ought to get plenty of sleep, feel good, and wake up each day with lots of energy. That belief makes the life-urge a bit stronger than the death-urge, so that the overall sine wave hopefully slopes gradually upwards toward more energy and happiness. But many people don’t hold that belief. Many people don’t believe that they ought to live. Many even consciously believe that they shouldn’t live, and push steadily downwards to help their urge to die overcome their natural survival instinct and fear of pain.

If that last sentence seems too extreme, consider New Yorker Colin Beavan aka No Impact Man, whose family is several months into a year-long experiment in living the radical environmental lifestyle, which he summarizes as:

For one year, my wife, my 2-year-old daughter, my dog and I, while living in the middle of New York City, are attempting to live without making any net impact on the environment. In other words, no trash, no carbon emissions, no toxins in the water, no elevators, no subway, no products in packaging, no plastics, no air conditioning, no TV, no toilets… (more…)

I’ve written several recent posts criticizing atheism for its lack of a moral foundation. The problem isn’t that atheists are bad or immoral people. Their morals are usually some version of the Christian morality that they were taught as children. But even though they do fine with everyday moral questions, difficult or unusual situations will almost always break through the rote learning and reveal a lack of understanding as to why the answers they were taught as children were the correct answers.

This isn’t limited to atheists. I pick on them because they make the most noise, but many if not most nominal Christians can’t coherently state their religion’s moral premises, nor the logic by which those premises apply to specific difficult moral situations. A major factor at work there is certain the decades-long campaign against the very idea of moral certainty.

Clayton Cramer provides an excellent example of this with polygamy. The idea of multiple wives generates an ick factor with nearly all Americans, but few can explain why it’s actually a bad idea. If it leads to spousal abuse, then the solution is to combat domestic violence. If you’re concerned about the demographic or social consequences of polygamy then you had best keep quiet, because the only permissible social argument in America today is that everyone should be free to follow their every whim, and even thinking too clearly about demography is vaguely immoral. (more…)

Leftists in Portland, Oregon hold a rally in which they

1. burn the American flag,
2. march with big signs that read: “No God, No Country, No Masters” and “F*** the Troops”, and
3. burn a US soldier in effigy.

Now can we question their patriotism?

We all have an urge to die (or to sin, if you prefer), and expressing it is usually very pleasant, at least at first.  But the problem with toying with death is that there’s no bottom to it.  It never ends.  And that’s why you can never negotiate with it.  Feed the current gang of loon and thugs, and you ensure that the next gang will be worse.

These people don’t want to live, and they don’t want us to live.  They want destruction for its own sake.  The message could hardly be clearer.  Of course, they say that they only want to destroy the evil capitalist government so that a new socialist workers’ paradise can emerge.  But then, that’s what Lenin said.  That’s what Mao said.  That’s even what the French revolutionaries said.  Somehow, the rebuilding after everything has been destroyed never works out quite as promised.

Dilbert creator Scott Adams expresses some skepticism on evolution here.  The best paragraph:

To be fair, there’s still plenty of evidence for evolution. It’s not going away anytime soon. But personally, I’m cautious about any theory that keeps the same conclusion regardless of how many times the evidence for it changes. There was a time when the seemingly straight line of fossil evidence was the primary foundation for the theory. Now it seems that that straight line was like Little Billy from Family Circus finding his way home from the playground. And there was a time when it seemed evolution was probably a fairly continuous and gradual process. Now it seems it happened in bursts, relatively speaking. And there was a time when it seemed that mutations had to give some sort of survival advantage to endure, and now scientists believe that isn’t necessarily true.

He has it mostly right.  It’s a red herring to ask whether evolution is better than some other theory, because that foolishly assumes that we must have some theory.  Like Mr. Adams, my main point is that evolution as currently understood, especially by non-specialists, is false.

It doesn’t take much study to find the pattern that he’s describing: First evolution is true because of X.  Then it turns out that X is false, and that proves evolution, too.  It’s like the North Pole expedition to dramatize global warming, where they had to turn back after one of the leaders suffered frostbite.  An expedition organizer explained:

“They were experiencing temperatures that weren’t expected with global warming,” Atwood said. “But one of the things we see with global warming is unpredictability.”

Warmer temperatures prove global warming, as do colder temperatures.  And probably average temperatures, too.  No matter what happens, it will prove global warming.  And its supporters, rather than hide in shame at their obvious foolishness, tout their theory’s non-falsifiability as evidence of the theory’s strength.

Liberals have been wailing for years about how America is teetering on the brink of, or perhaps already in, a Dark Night of Fascism and Theocracy from which it will never escape. And they’ve been flogging that meme hard enough and long enough that it has probably seeped into the mind of many moderates and conservatives. Yes, they begin think, we must always guard against tyranny from those lunatics on the Right.

It’s always foolish to respond to charges of malice by pleading your innocence and goodwill. It’s much more effective to counterattack. So let’s see what a real Dark Night of Fascism and Theocracy really looks like.

John Noonan, guest blogging for Michelle Malkin, passes along video from a National Geographic special about North Korea. A western doctor and his staff were allowed to live and work inside North Korea for several months to help people blinded by cataracts. Their ability to file was restricted severely but not entirely, and they cobbled together the bits of video they were allowed into this special. You can also access the video directly from YouTube: Part 1, Part 2.

We should all know intellectually that these sorts of horrible governments operate around the world. But that knowledge isn’t nearly the same as the emotional kick of watching a roomful of people frantically worshiping a picture of Kim Jong Il, and thanking him for restoring their sight. At the end of Part 2 the crew is allowed to visit the apartment of an ordinary Korean family. The interviewer asks the family: Is Kim Jong Il ever wrong? And the response isn’t ‘No’. Instead, they are apparently unable even to understand the question. Kim Jong Il is worshiped as a living god in North Korea, and these two little videos vividly illustrate exactly what that looks like.

The Nevada State Democratic Party had scheduled a mid-August debate among the Democrat presidential candidates, to be co-hosted by Fox News.  John Edwards, standard bearer of the loony left, was the first to object and refuse to attend.  Now the whole party has pulled out, and the gig is off.

I used to wonder why Republican presidents would deal at all with the liberal press.  Since the president has the power to choose which reporters representing which outlets will be invited to press conferences, etc., why not use that power to punish reporters and organizations that are openly hostile to you?

Now I see the other side of it.  The loony lefties think that they’ve scored a great victory in keeping their party free from the taint of conservatism.  But Fox CEO Roger Ailes had the more accurate analysis.  In a prepared statement, he said:

News organizations will want to think twice before getting involved in the Nevada Democratic Caucus, which appears to be controlled by radical fringe, out-of-state in interest groups, not the Nevada Democratic Party. In the past, MoveOn.org has said they ‘own’ the Democratic party. While most Democrats don’t agree with that, it’s clearly the case in Nevada.

What Ailes understands—and the nutroots don’t—is that elections are won in the middle, not at the fringes.  Fox News has a big audience, and it’ll be difficult to win a general election without any of them.  This cancelled debate is a small sign, but it portends well for the 2008 election.

Thinking over my earlier post on compact fluorescent light bulbs, I’ve had a sudden change of heart. Suddenly I’m in favor of an iron-clad federal law mandating their use, complete with bloated enforcement bureaucracy.

There’s one catch: We would have a phase-in. Homes and offices wouldn’t be required to change over for twenty years. But effective immediately, it would become illegal to even possess an incandescent light bulb in any movie studio, television studio, or theater.

We would start with the entertainment industry for two reasons: First, they all use lots of enormous hot incandescent lights—spotlights, footlights, etc.—that are obviously using way too much power. Second, the entertainment industry is full of sensitive liberals who are committed to protecting the environment. Pale greenish skin is a small price to pay to protect Mother Gaia. I’m sure they won’t mind.

Last night I shocked my great-books club by stating that most of the panic stories we’ve heard justifying government regulation of the economy are frauds, from the robber barons of the 19th century to Al Gore.  The other lawyer in the group became particularly agitated when I refused to accept his version of the Ford Pinto story.

So I’ve done a bit of digging this morning, and found the law review article proving what I suspected: The Ford Pinto story was almost entirely propaganda.  The Pinto wasn’t the safest car ever made, mostly because it was a subcompact.  And it was vulnerable to fires resulting from rear impacts, though that type of accident is relatively rare.  Overall fatalities involving Pintos were proportional to other subcompacts.  In short, mistakes were made, but the public’s perception of the magnitude of those mistakes remains wildly removed from the reality.

I had hoped to find some conservative resources debunking socialist fairy tales like this.  Do any of you readers know of one?  If not, maybe I’ll start my own.

Conservative brains seem to be softening recently on energy consumption and global warming. Maybe it’s the link between energy and the War on Terror. But conservatives need to splash some cold water on their faces and try to think a little more sensibly.

Australia’s Prime Minister John Howard is what most Americans would call a conservative, and a staunch ally in the War on Terror. But recently he announced plans to phase out incandescent light bulbs in favor of compact fluorescent bulbs.

To be fair, this may just be a clever election-eve political maneuver by Mr. Howard. But it’s still depressing, and it encourages loons in the California legislature to do the same.

Compact fluorescent light bulbs are ugly. Not just the bulbs themselves, but more importantly the light that they emit. Most of these bulbs give everything in the room a bluish or greenish tint. Perhaps you imagine that you wouldn’t mind having everything in your office or bedroom looking like it’s covered in a thin layer of slime. If so, that’s fine. Go buy all the ugly light you want. But don’t try to make me do it. (more…)