Links

Simon Grey has an epic rant about the Chick-Fil-A episode, with advice to both conservatives and liberals.  For conservatives"

Furthermore, gay marriage isn’t even ruining marriage.  Feminism, coupled with no-fault divorce and a misandrist family court system have done more damage to the social institution of marriage than Adam and Steve ever could.

For liberals:

The majority of the people that hate you do not hate you because you are gay.  They hate you because you are assholes.  Most straight couples have the common courtesy to not kiss in public, or make awkward public displays of affection.  This is because most straight people are well-adjusted, and not delusionally narcissistic.

Get over your martyr complex.

It's well worth reading the whole thing.  The only thing I'd really add is to point out the hypocrisy of the left preaching "tolerance" while being very selective indeed in applying that to their own political philosophy.  PostSecret hits center mass on that:

And while you're over there, he takes on the "Romney is better than Obama" meme.

Nagasaki

Reader Dave emails in response to my post about why we dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima.  It's something to think about on this 67th anniversary of the second atomic bomb.  Reprinted with his permission:

I highly recommend D.M. Giangreco's Hell to Pay: Operation Downfall and the Invasion of Japan, 1945 - 1947. BLUF: any invasion would have been bloody, extremely bloody, costing hundreds of thousands (some estimates ran as high as a million) American dead and perhaps ten times as many Japanese.

I also highly recommend Rev. Wilson Miscamble's The Most Controversial Decision: Truman, the Atomic Bombs and the Defeat of Japan.  Rev. Miscamble also calls attention to the additional lives saved in Japanese occupied Asia, where tens of thousands more were being killed every month the war continued.

The truth is more nuanced than we're told, even by people who claim to value nuance.

Leftie Professors take Seniors' Social Security checks

The Universities are reliably leftist, filled with intellectuals who despise the free market:

The schools, too, exhibited and thereby taught the principle of reward in accordance with (intellectual) merit. To the intellectually meritorious went the praise, the teacher's smiles, and the highest grades. In the currency the schools had to offer, the smartest constituted the upper class. Though not part of the official curricula, in the schools the intellectuals learned the lessons of their own greater value in comparison with the others, and of how this greater value entitled them to greater rewards.

The wider market society, however, taught a different lesson. There the greatest rewards did not go to the verbally brightest. There the intellectual skills were not most highly valued. Schooled in the lesson that they were most valuable, the most deserving of reward, the most entitled to reward, how could the intellectuals, by and large, fail to resent the capitalist society which deprived them of the just deserts to which their superiority "entitled" them? Is it surprising that what the schooled intellectuals felt for capitalist society was a deep and sullen animus that, although clothed with various publicly appropriate reasons, continued even when those particular reasons were shown to be inadequate?

And so what do these leftie intellectuals do?  They set up a system of student loans that cannot be discharged in bankruptcy.  In theory, your Social Security check will be garnished to pay for your Post-Modernist Gender Power Studies degree.

Oops, did I say "in theory"?  I meant "it's happening now":

According to government data, compiled by the Treasury Department at the request of SmartMoney.com, the federal government is withholding money from a rapidly growing number of Social Security recipients who have fallen behind on federal student loans. From January through August 6, the government reduced the size of roughly 115,000 retirees' Social Security checks on those grounds. That's nearly double the pace of the department's enforcement in 2011; it's up from around 60,000 cases in all of 2007 and just 6 cases in 2000.

But remember, it's those evil greedy capitalists who are making Seniors have to choose between buying food or buying their medications.  Did I say "evil, greedy capitalists"?  I meant "leftie University Professors":

The government's withholding power also extends to Social Security disability benefits. Tammy Brown of Redding, Calif. says that the government has been taking $179 out of her Social Security disability check each month for the past five years. Brown, 52, became disabled in 1986 after being involved in a car accident. Unable to work, she fell behind on her student loan payments. She says the Social Security check is now too small to cover her food and medical bills, so she quit taking prescription pain pills. "It's kind of hard to live on this amount of money," she says.

OK, look - maybe some disabled people can't afford to eat every other day or so, at least there's money for a new Diversity Vice President!  And Americans weigh too much, anyway.

Hey Progressives - I'll believe that your Righteous Rage at the market is actually moral when you direct an equal rage at your own institutions.  Otherwise, I'll just assume that you're being tribal - and not even being particularly smart about it, either.  Right now your howls about the heartless market sound like, well, drivel.  I'd like a higher caliber drivel, please.

Blow it out your ears, Atomic protesters

Today is the 67th anniversary of the first use of atomic weapons.  The day will no doubt be commemorated by the Usual Suspects - those motivated by modern politics rather than sympathy for the souls of the dead*.

We will no doubt hear how this a a barbaric, despicable act, one that was entirely unjustified.  Those who say this will probably not have heard of anything that I relate in this post.  In short, it is the empty noise of ignorance that sees in itself wisdom.  They don't know that there was a moral justification, and a practical one.

The Moral Justification for dropping the bomb

There are people who think that justice requires a response, that karma will be balanced in this world or the next, and that crime and punishment cannot be separated.  We frequdntly hear this from those who seek to establish the guilt of this Republic with charges of crimes committed long ago.  And so the bill of indictment for the Imperial Japanese regime in August 1945 runs like this:

The Bataan Death March

The Rape of Nanking


The Manilla Massacre

Forced Prostitution

Experiments on Humans

This is an abbreviated list, but to those who claim that this current Republic is guilty of past crimes, and that those past crimes demand justice, this list is entirely sufficient to strike the Atomic Bombs from the moral case against us.  Using internally consistent logic, of course, which is not often seen when debating such people.  But the moral case is indeed present and accounted for.

The Practical Justification for dropping the bomb

On November 20, 1943, United States Marines hit the beach on Tarawa atoll, facing 3,600 Japanese and 1,200 (possibly forced) Korean laborers.  Three days later, only 17 Japanese soldiers and 129 laborers were alive; the others had fought to the death.  1,000 Marines died, and another 2,000 were wounded.

On June 15, 1944, the US Marines moved closer to the Japanese home islands, invading the island of Saipan.  This island would finally put the Japanese home islands within the range of the B-29 bombers, and was defended by nearly 30,000 Japanese.  All but 900 of them died, 5,000 of who were civilians who killed themselves rather than be captured by the American Devils.  3,400 Marines died, and over 10,000 were wounded.

On September 15, 1944, US Marines stormed the beaches of Peleliu.  Of the nearly 11,000 Japanese defenders, all but 200 fought to the death.  1,200 Marines died, and over 5,000 were wounded.

On February 19, 1945, the Marines landed on Iwo Jima's back sand beaches.  Iwo was the only battle in the entire war where America suffered more casualties than did Japan.  27 Americans were awarded the Medal of Honor here, more than any other battle in history.  Of the 22,000 Japanese defenders, only 200 survived the battle; a large number of these committed suicide, although a few hid out in the tunnels until finally captured.  The last of these was captured in 1951.  America lost almost 7,000 dead and nearly 20,000 wounded.

On April 1, 1945, American forces finally touched Japanese soil, in Okinawa, an outlying island.  Not quite 100,000 Japanese combatants and civilians died or committed suicide; only 10,000 survived.  America suffered over 12,000 dead and nearly 40,000 wounded.

This was the situation in the summer of 1945.  Each battle that got closer to Japanese soil became more costly for both America and Japan.  Japanese defenders were fanatically dangerous, mostly choosing to die to the man if it gave them a chance to bleed the American forces.  Looking at an invasion not of isolated atolls but of Japan itself, President Truman asked for an estimate of casualties in the planned Operation Olympic to seize Kyushu and the subsequent Operation Coronet for the remainder of Japan.

The Joint Chiefs told him that based on what had been seen in Tarawa, Saipan, Peleliu, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa, that he could expect American casualties to be in the millions.  The lowest estimate was 1.2 Million casualties, the highest was 4 million - including 800,000 dead.

Japanese casualties were not well estimated, but were assumed to be ten times the American figure.  Half a million Purple Heart medals were ordered, so many that we have not manufactured any since; the United States still has around 100,000 of these in stock.

It is entirely plausible that none of the protesters you might encounter today will have the slightest idea about this: that two thirds of a century of American wars have not depleted the medals ordered for a portion of the invasion of Japan.

The wonder is not the Truman ordered the bombs dropped, the wonder is that he waited as long as he did.  And that was the right decision.  Millions survived the war because of it.  People who do not know this, or who choose to ignore this are frivolous.

* Think I exaggerate?  Where were these people on March 9?

UPDATE 7 August 2012 10:01: Not just lefties, it seems.  Libertarians, too.

The media are largely responsible for the decline in civic discourse

Via Insty, we find a chin tugging complaint that while the whole Harry Reid is a Pederast meme is funny, it's wrong:

Nonetheless, while giving someone a “taste of his own medicine” is no doubt satisfying and perhaps even instructive, wrong is wrong, and spreading intentional lies, even about a public figure as devoid of decency and scruples as the Senate Majority Leader, is unethical. No conduct, no matter how nauseating, by its target can justify this. Stooping to Reid’s level can only further degrade civility and dignity in American public discourse, which is the objective of political sewer-dwellers like Reid, not anyone with the best interests of the nation in mind.

That last sentence strikes me as particularly wrong.  The Media in an earlier and less degraded age actually did act as a referee.  While there was probably never a time when they weren't biased, there was at one time a basic expectation of standards.  Harry Reid would have been pilloried by the media in the 1970s and 1980 for his "sumdood told me that Romney like totally didn't pay taxes" charge.

Quite frankly, when the media enforced basic standards, we did have a higher level of civility in the public discourse.

And then that all turned into 60 Minutes airing 30 year old Microsoft Word documents, and the baiting of Joe the Plumber, and the silence on the media's part towards Reid.  The media have decayed to the point that they see no need to enforce minimum standards of decency on one side, while imposing absurd standards on the other side ("You don't support Obama?  I wonder if it's because you're racist.").

And so to Mr. Marshall's complaint on ethics grounds.  What's interesting is that there's quite a lot of theory about this.  If we are interested in a long term enforcement of ethics norms, can that theory give us guidance as to the strategies most likely to result in higher levels of civility?  It can indeed.

Game Theory is the study of strategic decision making, and has been well studied for generations.  The Prisoner's Dilemma is one of its most famous problems - two prisoners are each offered a choice: give evidence against the other or not.  If neither rats the other out, they both will get light sentences.  If both rat out the other, they will both get longer sentences.  If one rats and the other doesn't, the rat goes free and the other serves a very long sentence:

	Prisoner B stays silent (cooperates)	Prisoner B betrays (defects)
Prisoner A stays silent (cooperates)	Each serves 1 month	Prisoner A: 1 year Prisoner B: goes free
Prisoner A betrays (defects)	Prisoner A: goes free Prisoner B: 1 year	Each serves 3 months

What's interesting is that politics falls very neatly into an "iterated prisoner's dilemma" model, where a series of incidents are played out, one following the other, in a never ending ethical dilemma.  So what strategy does Game Theory recommend to increase ethical outcomes (in this case, to prevent ratting)?

Tit For Tat is the model that optimizes outcomes.  The rules are as follows:

This strategy is dependent on four conditions, which have allowed it to become the most successful strategy for the iterated prisoner's dilemma:^[1]

1. Unless provoked, the agent will always cooperate
2. If provoked, the agent will retaliate
3. The agent is quick to forgive
4. The agent must have a good chance of competing against the opponent more than once.

In the last condition, the definition of "good chance" depends on the payoff matrix of the prisoner's dilemma. The important thing is that the competition continues long enough for repeated punishment and forgiveness to generate a long-term payoff higher than the possible loss from cooperating initially.

It's a perfect fit, and one that quite frankly used to be played by the media.  In days past, Senator Reid would have found that retaliation for his bogus charges would have come from them, in the form of increasingly disbelieving questioning and increasingly negative reporting about him.  He would have learned not to take that sort of tack in the future, as we see when Tit For Tat computer models run for multiple iterations - they fairly quickly reach a stable equilibrium with a minimum of rats.

Alas, the media have abdicated this role, and so the Internet has stepped up as an alternative channel.  My fundamental disagreement with Mr. Marshall is that he is not advocating for ethics in the long term, but only in the short term.  His quote again:

Stooping to Reid’s level can only further degrade civility and dignity in American public discourse

Tit For Tat disagrees, and in a world where the media no longer enforce the same ethical norms on both sides of the debate, the ethical payoff to "turn the other cheek" is precisely the continued degradation of civility that Mr. Marshall so rightly deplores.  In fact, the Harry Reid is a Pederast meme is precisely the correct response, because it is becoming so successful that the media may have to cover it - and there's simply no way to cover it without reference to Reid's own original charges.  In short, more of these may in fact nudge the media back towards a more neutral referee stance.  If not, the very success of the memes will hasten the media's demise.

In either event, we're likely to see increased levels of civility as one side finds that it is no longer able to rat on the other with impunity.