Pro-abortion, but Not Pro-choice about Life in General

A left-leaning friend of mine explains in a recent Facebook post that he’s not pro-choice, he’s pro-abortion.

If he were talking about anything else, he would sound like a great Lockean libertarian:

On Innovation and Inequality

At National Review Online, Kevin Williamson explains that with health care as with other goods, it’s natural for the rich to be able to afford the best, cutting-edge technologies.  In a prosperous free market economy, those new technologies often come down in price and become commonplace over time, but they would never have existed if there weren’t very wealthy people to make it worth it to develop them in the first place.

Murderer Says He Got It from College

Via Mark Steyn, Gateway Pundit, Wintery Knight, and the Daily Caller, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports that the man who shot three white women in midtown Atlanta in 2011 (killing one and permanently paralyzing another) says he was just responding to what he had learned in college:

During his testimony Wednesday, Thandiwe suggested that his reason for even purchasing the gun he used in the shootings was to enforce beliefs he’d developed about white people during his later years as an anthropology major at the University of West Georgia.

‘You Didn’t Get There on Your Own’

In the course of reflecting on President Obama’s speech at the convention last week, Yuval Levin reflects on the modern American left more generally:

. . . he persisted in the dominant trope of this convention—and, it seems, of contemporary progressive thought: the jump from the sheer fact of human interdependence to a defense of every federal program in precisely its current form. It’s the liberal welfare state or the law of the jungle, and no other alternative is imaginable. This mental gesture—which simultaneously offers an excuse for ignoring the imminent collapse of the liberal welfare state and for ignoring what conservatives are actually saying and offering—really deserves to be thought through. It is a fascinating indicator of the contemporary Left’s intellectual exhaustion.

‘The rule is, jam tomorrow and jam yesterday—but never jam today.’

Jonah Goldberg has an interesting piece at National Review Online today: “The Myth of the Good Conservative” (“For liberals, he always existed yesterday”).  The thesis is as the subtitle implies: that certain liberals are always praising particular conservatives of the past and/or hypothetical conservatives in general, to whom particular conservatives and conservative policy proposals of today supposedly compare unfavorably.

Liberals Can’t Understand the Other Guy’s Point of View

If you’re going to disagree with someone, I think it may be pretty important that you understand his point of view.  That doesn’t mean you have to agree with him, by any means—on the contrary, in a way, it’s only after you understand his position that you can truly disagree with it.

Via the Nullspace, self-described liberal Nicholas Kristof calls our attention to an interesting study:

Conservatives may not like liberals, but they seem to understand them. In contrast, many liberals find conservative voters not just wrong but also bewildering.

Obama Inadvertently Caricatures Liberalism

Is it becoming mainstream not to take the United Nations seriously?  Even the liberal Washington Post, in a recent editorial, offers a scathingly candid assessment:

SO FAR, a U.N. monitoring mission in Syria has had one tangible effect: It has gotten people killed. On Sunday and Monday, monitors toured neighborhoods in the city of Homs and in the Damascus suburbs of Doura and Zabadani. When they left, the areas they visited were shelled, and security forces carried out sweeps in which civilians suspected of speaking to the monitors were taken from their homes and shot or had their houses burned down.

‘One reason the western world is sliding off the cliff is because of an excess of “conventional wisdom”’

Great line from Mark Steyn:

One reason the western world is sliding off the cliff is because of an excess of “conventional wisdom” on everything from unsustainable welfare programs to climate change to Islam. Yet, at precisely the moment when we need to be broadening the bounds of public discourse, in Britain, Canada, Australia, Europe and elsewhere the same ideologically insecure political class that got us into this mess is growing ever more comfortable in regulating what the citizenry is allowed to say, read, listen to — and, indeed, think. I say nuts to that.

Acting Against Interest

I was reading a piece by a certain liberal columnist recently, and it struck me that the author, and other liberals I’ve heard, have two very different ways of thinking about voters’ acting against their (presumed, by liberalism) self-interest:

• If they’re poor or middle-class, and they support lower taxes and less spending on “entitlement” programs (i.e., they want to seize less of the property of the wealthy for themselves), it’s treated as some kind of bizarre anomaly that cries out for explanation (possibly involving staggering stupidity), even a moral failing (e.g., by Paul Krugman or blog commenter Snoodickle).

Mark & Mark!

(Via Steyn Online, whence the title of this entry.)

Mark Steyn had a great line in an interview with Mark Levin about Steyn’s new book:

What I think is the difference when you talk about the divide in America is I think most conservatives exist in a kind of oppositional world.  They know every time they go and see a Hollywood movie, every time they switch on a sitcom and hear a certain kind of cheap joke, every time they happen to be stuck at the airport and they’re watching some drone on CNN—they understand the other guy’s point of view, they’re exposed to it relentlessly. 

News Media Still Liberal, Liberals Still Uncivil

Jonah Goldberg in the Corner reviews the double standard in the liberal media’s treatment of Congressman Giffords’s shooting and the recent debt-ceiling fight.  (In the former, war- and death-themed metaphors were deemed per se inappropriate and conservatives were accused of debasing the national debate with their supposed incivility; in the latter, members of the liberal media and liberal politicians disparaged conservatives by calling them “terrorists”, etc.)  The Media Research Center discusses further and provides links to a few examples of the latter.

Hat tip to the Foxhole.

Republican Leaders Make Two Great Points

Speaker of the House John Boehner at a press conference today:

. . . the fact is that House Republicans have a plan. We passed our budget back in the spring, outlined our priorities. Where is the president’s plan? When’s he going to lay his cards on the table?

Top Senate Republican Mitch McConnell today on the floor of the Senate: 

Separation of School and State

During my last semester of law school, we read an interesting case for Corporations class, A. P. Smith Mfg. Co. vs. Barlow, 13 N.J. 145, 98 A.2d 581.  In this 1953 decision by the New Jersey supreme court, the question (basically) was whether the corporation was allowed to donate money to charity, or whether donating would be an illegal waste of the shareholders’ money.  I won’t bore you with the legal details (the court found that the corporation was allowed to make such donations), but listen to some of the testimony in the case: 

On Liberals, Conservatives, Intelligence, Wisdom, and Knowledge

Are liberals smarter than conservatives?  It’s an interesting question, if you like, and you can find interesting studies and speculations on whether and why, but intelligence isn’t the same as wisdom.  A person gifted with higher than average cognitive ability can still be a fool.

Some liberals certainly think that liberals are both much smarter and much wiser than conservatives.  Arguably that belief is an intrinsic part of the ideology of the American Progressive movement.  A commenter on this blog has said, “. . . the American people are by and large an idiotic bunch. . . . And these are the people that are voting!” 

On Conservatism and Global Warming

I had a conversation a few days ago with a (liberal) friend of mine about conservatism and liberalism, liberty and tyranny, regulations, “entitlements”, and other things.  It was a good conversation, but she asked one question that got lost in the back-and-forth and I never answered:

What is the conservative answer to global warming?

It’s a good question.  I have some thoughts.  My answer can be divided into two parts. 

Liberalism Caricatures Conservatism, Inadvertently Caricatures Self

From “Protest voices opposition to ALEC group”:

A group of conservative state legislators from across the U.S. met in Cincinnati last week and drew the ire of local college students and union members during a protest Friday.

. . .

The demonstration began with a play portraying the ALEC as a monster attacking the rights of women, minorities and workers. 

I don’t go out looking for these; I just happened to pick up a copy of the student newspaper today, and there it was, staring me in the face!

Postscript on Civility

Two months ago, someone shot a lot of people at an event in Tucson, Arizona, including Congressman Gabrielle Giffords.  Six of those people died; many others were injured.  Liberals argued that conservatives (e.g., radio-talk-show hosts) participate in the great national debate a little bit too boisterously, and that eruptions of such violence are a natural result of that debate (i.e., a natural result of what I think Mark Steyn has called the rough and tumble of a free society).  Liberals talked about the need for “civility” in the national discourse, ambiguously attempting to deligitimize debate.