Smear the queer

The equals sign has become almost ubiquitous as the supreme court considers the issue of same-sex marriage. Why are gay rights so chic at the moment?

Putatively fighting for equality is always an easy way to obtain cheap grace.

Additionally, though, I suspect it is because the same-sex marriage crusade feels purer than other potential civil rights crusades do. A black guy who hasn't accomplished much of anything has been twice elected to the presidency in large part because he is black. Affirmative action and racial quotas give non-whites all kinds of special privileges that result in, ceteris paribus, NAMs being favored over whites of equal ability. Anyone who has spent any time in the corporate world knows that rather than there being a glass ceiling keeping minorities and women down, managers fall all over themselves in an effort to lift up and promote people who will make the workforce more demographically diverse. The contemporary struggle for gay rights, in contrast, is perceived as truly being about egalitarianism.
 

Perhaps at some point in the future SWPLs will begin to have some misgivings about having possibly pushed the gay rights ratchet too far as well, but we haven't reached that point yet. The pickings are slimmer than they were half a century ago when it comes to finding victim groups to shed a tear for, but the tree isn't bare yet.

Gay marriage and having sex with your sister

With the supreme court considering California's proposition 8 regarding same-sex marriage*, my social media feeds are full of self righteous crusaders crusading for the cause. Leaving alone the legal considerations and even questions about the potential socio-moral fallout in denying people civil rights or alternatively in devaluing marriage, the supercilious sanctimony of so many of the morally superior proclaiming in favor presents an almost irresistible opportunity to play confounding contrarian, so--inspired by Jonathan Haidt--I've been posing the following questions as thought experiments:

Is having sex with your sister in the privacy of your own bedroom, with protection and the knowledge that neither of you have an STD, wrong?

Is eating your pet dog after it gets hit by a car wrong?

Is consenting to have parts of your body preserved after you die to be used as home decor for those interested in them wrong?

Is a cop who secretly gets off to infant pornography confiscated from a child sex offender before turning it in as evidence, but who would never buy the stuff or encourage its being created, wrong in so doing?

The crusader's mental framework consists of an obvious moral good championed by ethical people being denied by homophobic bigots who nefariously want nothing more than to make gays miserable. But for many people--I'd guess most, actually--opposed to same-sex marriage, the opposition stems from a visceral reaction of disgust to gay sex, specifically gay male sex. That reaction is no more irrational or illogical than the negative reactions most people--supportive of same-sex marriage or not--have to the four hypothetical questions posed above. In fact, negative reaction to gay sex is, logically-speaking, more sensible than negative reactions to any of the four questions are because in those cases no one is harmed nor is the harm of others encouraged, while there are lots of negative real-world consequences of gay (male) sex, most notably AIDS. The rectal lining isn't 'designed' to take the thrusting abuse of an erect penis like the vaginal lining is.

I took the moral foundations questionnaire and scored lowest on the purity/disgust dimension. Personally, it's not difficult for me to find in favor of same-sex marriage and all four of the above, and am amenable to the argument that same-sex marriage should be permissible now since the majority of the country favors its becoming so, while the others should be publicly condemned at present in accordance to the predilections of the majority. But just like I'm worried that the society I live in is increasingly coming to share my sentiments when it comes to spirituality and religion, I'm similarly unsettled by the thought that the rhetorical devices employed above won't be effective for much longer. Not much is sacred anymore (at least not in the liberalized West, anyway, but then again, the liberalized West is the past, Africa and Islam is the future).

* I prefer the phrase "same-sex marriage" over "gay marriage", since it more accurately captures the essence of the issue in a strictly legal sense. There is no prohibition on gay people getting married--the question is whether or not a man may marry another man or a woman another woman, irrespective of their expressed sexual orientations. The Civil War vs The War Between the States vs The War of Northern Aggression, I suppose.

Depicting reality or escaping from it?

I'm finally getting around to reading Steven Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature. The descriptions of how widespread and commonplace violence was in the 'popular culture' of the medieval and middle ages make for fun reading, but I wonder (because I don't know) how representative said popular culture was of the larger societies it existed in at the time.

I bring this up because that doesn't appear to be the case today--if anything, the inverse seems to be true. Agnostic has indefatigably documented a whole host of things, including this, in a long-running analyses of cultural differences between rising (and high) crime eras and declining (and low) crime eras. Check out comic books from the low crime mid-20th century, for example. Video games, a sort of contemporary successor to comic books, have become far more graphically violent and intentionally realistic in their depictions of said violence (having previously opted for stylized depictions of violence and a predilection for surreality) over the last few decades as actual rates of violent crime have steadily dropped.

As real life in the West has become increasingly more peaceful over the last twenty years, football has clearly surpassed baseball as America's pass time and MMA has left boxing behind. In many ways, as we've become less violent, our popular culture has become more so. Moving outside the US, the exceptionally pacifistic Japanese are into some extremely gruesome and disgusting stuff.

More generally, Quentin Tarantino is a successful director and producer, but if aliens were to try and surmise what life on earth is like for its human inhabitants by viewing Kill Bill and Django Unchained, their conceptions would be wildly off base. Western popular culture is way more violent than life in the Occident actually is.

Deficit spending is about who's doing it

After mulling it over, I think we need a third party presidency for budget deficit reduction to become a sustained, acted upon priority.

Pew has tracked public prioritization of reducing the nation's federal budget deficit for nearly twenty years, and from someone whose default position is one of starving the beast, looking at how partisan positions flip flop depending on which party controls the presidency makes for depressing viewing. The following graph shows the percentage of survey respondents indicating that budget deficit reduction (from '02 onward; prior to that the query was on paying off the national debt, which, while not the same thing, captures similar sentiments) should be a top governmental priority. Results come from surveys conducted in January of each year:

During Clinton's presidency, Republicans cared more about cutting the deficit than Democrats did. Under Bush that flipped, and during Obama it flipped back again. It makes sense if you're all for redistributive spending so long as your guy is the one doing it. It doesn't make so much sense if your party is putatively the one opposed to leviathan's accretion, however.

It's often said that reducing the deficit and restoring fiscal sanity is important in determining the world that older generations will leave to their kids and grandkids, but those kids care less about it than their elders do. Of the 21 issues examined, the only one with a wider old-young (50+ and 18-49 years, respectively) gap is "securing social security", for obvious self-interested reasons.

There might be some reason for cautious optimism, though. Over the last decade, the trend has been upward across the political spectrum, and the GOP now has a high profile champion or two on the issue.

Pivoting to provide Republican pols with political advice, how about emphasizing opposition to gun control? While it's politically savvy, it's not pusillanimously appeasing--a state's gun ownership rate is one of the strongest predictors of how it votes. The higher the rate, the redder the state. And of the 21 issues Pew asked about prioritizing, gun control garnered the highest "should not be done [at all]" response rate of all.

Opposition to restrictions on firearm capacities and ownership is highest among the young, the wealthy, and the well educated, while support for increasing restrictions is highest among the old, the poor, and the uneducated. Excepting the political angle, contemporary demographic trends on the questions of gun control and same-sex marriage are pretty similar. Unlike a lot of other 'social issues' that see the conservative standing athwart history yelling "stop" (which, while I'm personally sympathetic to, is usually portrayed and conceived of in the popular consciousness the antithesis of being hip and forward-thinking), the right to bear arms is important to people who are going and who have gone places in their lives.

Rand Paul wins google poll

Rand didn't just win the CPAC straw poll, he's winning the Google interest poll, too. Here are the search results for the rest of CPAC's top four, as well as for Jeb Bush, who the AP, swimming against the grassroots tide--in vain, one hopes--describes as "perhaps the highest-profile establishment figure [in the GOP]". Results track from December 2012 through the present (that is, they're post-election):

The filibuster was a publicity stunt. So what? It was in no way at odds with the positions he's maintained from the beginning of his political career, and it worked. It netted him more google traffic than Marco Rubio's insipid state of the union response. The guy's adroit media savviness and polished public presentation are attributes his father sorely lacked. This Paul has a legitimate shot.

Parenthetically, his murky positions on immigration worry a restrictionist like myself, but, unfortunately, whose in the GOP don't? Paul thinks the 14th amendment has been misread to grant birthright citizenship to the children of non-citizens and wants it challenged in the supreme court. If unsuccessful there, he wants to add an amendment explicitly denying birthright citizenship to the Constitution. There's hope for the man, and, just maybe, there's hope for this country, too.

Human biodiversity needs you!

In a recent Taki's column, the Derb parenthetically notes the unfortunate competition for primacy of the acronym HBD that the phrase "human biodiversity" shares with the phrase "happy birthday".

Nothing against congratulating people for managing to survive another year, but the former phrase is enhanced by the abbreviation while the latter is cheapened by it. Human biodiversity doesn't have a wikipedia page yet, but HBD does have an urban dictionary entry, albeit a shared one.

I'd grown complacent after human biodiversity easily attained the top spot shortly after its debut over a year ago, but subsequently (possibly as a result of the tripe Derb examined in his article), happy birthday retook the summit, in large part due to a slew of negative votes for human biodiversity. Help keep our version of HBD on top by dropping in to vote human biodiversity up and happy birthday down.

We can spare the state department, but that's it

Rand Paul is spitting into the wind. Unfortunately so from my perspective, but it's what he's doing all the same.

Pew recently released the results of a survey in which respondents were asked whether they would increase, decrease, or maintain current spending levels across 19 different expenditure categories if they were writing up the federal government's budget. The following table shows the public appetite for spending increases (decreases) by category, computed by simply taking the percentage of respondents who indicated they would increase spending in an indicated area and subtracting from it the percentage who said they'd decrease it (and letting be the percentage who wanted to keep it the same). The first numerical column shows the broader public's predilections. The three subsequent columns show results by partisan affiliation:

Spending up (down) on...	Total	Rep	Dem	Ind
Education	50	31	70	47
Veterans' benefits	47	48	45	47
Social security	31	18	46	25
Combating crime	27	24	42	19
Natural disaster relief	22	3	33	21
Roads and infrastructure	21	7	25	27
Medicare	21	3	45	15
FDA inspections	19	(5)	38	17
Scientific research	17	(10)	37	17
Health care	16	(28)	51	11
Energy	15	(5)	34	13
Agriculture	14	2	23	11
Anti-terrorism defenses	13	26	18	1
Environmental protection	11	(28)	44	10
Military defense	8	37	(4)	1
Aid to needy in the US	3	(40)	30	3
Unemployment assistance	(8)	(47)	28	(12)
State department	(20)	(26)	(13)	(20)
Foreign aid	(27)	(63)	8	(33)

Statism is alive and well in the US. Combined spending for unemployment benefits, the state department, and foreign aid--the three areas for which there is more desire for attrition than accretion--constituted less than 5% of all federal government spending in 2012. While there is some aversion to sending our pooled money overseas, the masses want it gathered up and spread around by a federal apparatus at home.

Even self-identified Republicans want spending increases in more areas than they want decreases, and more importantly, in the three gargantuan spending categories--social security, defense, and medicare--they want the federal government to spend more, not less, than it's currently spending. In 1980, Reagan's platform included abolishing the department of education. Today, only one in ten Americans (and barely one in seven Republicans!) say they'd like to see federal spending on education cut, let alone abolished entirely.

Leviathan loves the tacit agreement between Demopublicans and Republicrats to allow for increases in international defense offense defense spending in return for acquiescence to increases in domestic spending back home. Consequently, the only outlay category that voters in both parties express a desire for cuts in is the state department (with a $0.030 trillion budget from the $3.746 trillion the federal government spent last year). What percentage of Americans even know what the state department does? Besides being derelict in attacks on diplomatic missions in places like Benghazi, that is. Heh, maybe that's why they aren't overly eager to give it more money.

I'm not qualified to proffer financial advice, but every day that passes sees me becoming more and more satisfied with the investment strategy I've been employing for the last few years--buying gold and silver, exclusively. In retrospect, I wish I would've started when I hit legal adulthood in 2002. Better late than never, though, I guess.