Facing Facts

I keep finding evidence, as I read blogs and watch TV news, that people are really, seriously deluded about a number of things. As a public service, I’d like to break a few truths to you, should you be among the deluded:

1. The UN is not and will never be a force for peace, justice or progress. The UN is a collection of outsized bureaucracies searching for a way to perpetuate the problems they were formed to solve, so that they can keep their cushy jobs. The UN is largely staffed by fans (and employees) kleptocratic tyrannies; largely controlled by internationalists whose main uniting force (besides the cushy international travel part) is hatred of the West in general and Liberty in particular; and largely paid for by the US taxpayers. The UN isn’t even as dignified as the “debating society” put down would have it, because most of the “debate” is about how bad Israel is for existing, and how bad the US is for letting Israel exist. Depending on the UN for help is like depending on the jihadis for mercy. There’s a reason I used that comparison; figure it out.
2. NATO is broken. The NATO mission ended with the Cold War, and it was merely our lack of the courage to realize that that has prevented NATO from dissolving. Non-US NATO members maintain almost no effective power projection force, and use US defense guarantees to avoid military spending sufficient to defend their own interests. While France uses NATO as a means to try to contain America, NATO provides nothing to America that the individual NATO members would not provide in any case. Basing rights and the like could as easily (and more flexibly) be obtained with bilateral agreements.
3. The French government defines itself in opposition to America. They are not our allies; they’re not even neutrals. Instead, they are hostile and obstructionist. Effectively, France is as useful to us (and in much the same way) as is Syria. The French people see themselves as subjects of the French government, and do not get involved to change government policies (unless the government tries to make them work more than 35 hours per week), so this will not change any time soon.
4. The government schools operate as a socialized babysitting service. Their goal is not education, but compliance, social conformity, parroting of “right” opinions, and a total inability to think through the consequences of those opinions. To the extent that government schools do teach skills, they are essentially teaching students how to understand written instructions they are given. Most private schools are similar, though they tend to teach more skills. Things that kids will learn virtually nothing about in government schools include economics, philosophy, logic, history beyond a survey level, history more recent than WWI, psychology, responsibility, morality, ethics, classic literature, government theory, Western culture and how to communicate coherent thoughts in a convincing way. This is not likely to change, because it’s easier to warehouse children than to educate them, and we have collectively given up on cultural transmission of values and outright job training.
5. All Muslims do not hate the West, the US or Democracy. All Muslims are not jihadis, nor do all Muslims sympathize with the jihadis. But even if the number of jihadis is 1% of Muslims, and the number of sympathizers is 10%, that is respectively 12 million jihadis and 120 million sympathizers. Let’s hope that the numbers are much, much smaller than that, because we will have to eventually kill pretty much all the jihadis and many of their sympathizers: you don’t convince a religious zealot that they are wrong. We may be able to split the sympathizers from the jihadis, and thus destroy the jihadis capability to fight, by democratizing the Middle East and removing the grievances that feed the conspiracy theories that motivate the sympathizers. If we stop fighting the jihadis in the Middle East, they will come here to fight us. In other words, the only alternatives to President Bush’s expansive, optimistic and risky effort to democratize the Arab/Muslim world are surrender and decimation of the Muslim world.
6. “Never again” is a crock. No government cares enough about genocide to actually do anything about it. That pretty much includes the US, sadly enough.
7. Intellectuals are not very bright, as a rule. If you don’t believe me, try reading what they write. Most professors are pretty ignorant of everything other than their narrow area of study, and a surprising number of them are pretty ignorant of their own areas of study because they aren’t trained, as a rule, in logic. Indeed, many professors simply believe that logic is not meaningful as a way of understanding the world.
8. Leftists aren’t generally all that compassionate. Activists tend to be self-interested jerks rather than being interested in helping their communities or countries. Activism has become an occupation instead of a tool.
9. There is not a lot of difference between the far Left and the far Right. As Heinlein put it, there are two kinds of people: those who want to control others and those who don’t. Extremists at both ends of the spectrum want to control others. A surprising number of people who are not extremists are OK with that.
10. The Constitution is dead. To all intents and purposes, the Constitution is only meaningful to the extent that the Supreme Court says it is. The Court has found a remarkable number of government powers are constitutional even when they directly contradict the plain meaning of the words of the Constitution, and has found a remarkable number of rights (including pretty much everything in the Bill of Rights) are civil – that is, exercised at the pleasure of the government – rather that natural and inalienably part of all humans’ birthright.
11. The core rights that all people must have are Life, Liberty and Property – Locke was right all along. Where people are relatively secure in these rights, they are by and large prosperous, healthy, inventive and happy. Where these rights are non-existent, life is, as Hobbes put it, “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short”. This holds throughout all times and all societies in history. Communism large failed because of the lack of strong private property protections. Most of the world that lives in poverty does so because of a lack of strong private property rights. Representative government is great and all, but if you want to bring freedom and prosperity, you’re more likely to make it stick with deeds than ballots.
12. By and large, the Left does not want the US to win the Terror Wars. Were we to do so, it would largely invalidate convictions held by the Leftists with religious fervor. These convictions most prominently include “war is not the answer” to any problem. See the above point about convincing religious zealots.
13. The government is not here to help you. The government exists specifically to limit freedoms. This is a good thing, so long as the government itself is strictly limited in its powers. The government today is not limited at all. (See the above point about the Constitution.)
14. Any people without a frontier will stagnate. Space and underwater are the only frontiers remaining to us. Fortunately, space is an infinite frontier, if we have the guts to grab it.

There’s more, but that’s enough ranting for now.