Curt Doolittle

Theme: Deception

  • Cause And Effect In AGW Debate

    Over on Climate Etc, Judith Curry writes Blame on Heartland, Cato, Marshall, etc.

    The fossil fuel industries have been funding dedicated minions at the Heartland, Cato, and George C. Marshal Institutes (among others) to generate misinformation about global warming and global climate change. They have attempted to attack the climate science message (such attacks actually part and parcel of the scientific process), but without much success, since the foundations of climate science are more than strong enough to withstand such challenges. Having failed in discrediting the climate science message itself, they have resorted instead to attacking the climate science messengers with character assassination, political innuendo, stolen e-mails, etc.

    To which I replied:

    There is another answer: 1) Libertarians and libertarian theory are economic disciplines with economic history that they rely upon for judgement. Economics is a chaotic and mathematically rigorous discipline. It also consists of a long and deep history of narratives and logic within the history ideas. 2) Libertarians have, and continue, to represent the branch of logic that advocates that economic models are not predictive. Not only that they are not predictive, but that they CANNOT be predictive. Not only that they cannot be predictive but that statistical analysis is only relevant to closed systems – and economies, due to innovation, the plasticity of utility of resources, and changing human wants, renders categorical forecasting impossible. This logical framework is supported by the fact that economic models are in fact, not predictive. And this is one of the issues with current political methods: that we rely upon economic models for policy purposes despite the fact that they are decidedly not predictive. 3) External entities with economic interests fund libertarian institutions because they are disposed to view government solutions as detrimental to the economy, and because libertarians are naturally hostile to models which purport to be predictive. They are highly agitated because of the rapid increase in external competitive forces run by non-market governments, and their advantage is being weakened by both external competition and an increasingly academically unprepared and uncompetitive work force. 4) Libertarians do not generally take the position that AGW is true or false. Their position is that (a) the AGW models are highly questionable, (b) there are alternative explanations that seem more probable, and certainly that previous climate movements to date have been false, and (c) even if AGW is true, that the solution is to create a green social movement rather than a system of increased taxation. The current green movement is working. It has become a generationally dominant social value. People will not pay for the long term, whether it is saving, retirement, health care. They will not pay for what they suspect. The AGW movement will do far better and make better progress if it does not seek legislation and in fact, actively does NOT seek legislation, but eschews legislation. This will make it more acceptable. Otherwise all libertarians and conservatives hear is that it is an excuse to fund abusive government. It is hard for liberals to understand that they are the minority of 20%, and that libertarians are the thought leadership of the conservative party, and while they, like convicted marxists, are a minority, they provide the thought leadership of the majority and are more likely to, and have consistently created, more conservative policies – ie: policies that do not empower government to make economic decisions. We are in a period of economic and cultural and even political uncertainty. Until we exit this period (which according to economic history, may or may not ever happen) people will have nearer term priorities. They will not be charitable to future generations in the face of current circumstances of decline and uncertainty.

  • problem with the guardian’s position, is that Gifford’s attacker is a radical LE

    http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/jan/09/gabrielle-giffords-shooting-rightwing-rhetoricThe problem with the guardian’s position, is that Gifford’s attacker is a radical LEFTIST. He wasn’t agitated about anything ‘right wing’. He was angry that the congresswoman wasn’t LEFT WING ENOUGH. (Yet another example of the vast delta between the urgency of news reporting and the accuracy of what’s reported.)

    Source date (UTC): 2011-01-10 10:34:00 UTC

  • Putin: Your Cow Better Be Silent

    Putin Slams West for Wikileaks’ Assange Arrest : Putin Suggests U.S. Criticism Is the Pot Calling the Kettle http://abcnews.go.com/International/putin-slams-west-wikileaks-arrest/story?id=12364345 Putin criticizes supposedly democratic institutions for clamping down on a dissident.

    “The villagers say, that if your neighbor’s cow is mooing, yours better be silent”. Which is the Russian equivalent of ‘the pot calling the kettle black’.

    [callout] In fact, what’s impressive about the Wikileaks data, is that the USA actually looks like a pretty benevolent, if mildly overstretched and incompetent, empire, whose only material problem is creating a responsible, peaceful, core state for Islam[/callout]

    I wrote two days ago that arresting Assange is nonsense unless we have a real property crime. Unless property is transferred (technology secrets) and unless there is material harm ( our people get killed), or a trust is broken on a contract with a foreign government (we are trying to help rescue some government from oppression) there is not really a crime. In fact, what’s impressive about the Wikileaks data, is that the USA actually looks like a pretty benevolent, if mildly overstretched and incompetent, empire, whose only material problems are assisting in the maturity of market-participating states everywhere, and in particular creating a responsible, peaceful, core state for Islam – solving a serious problem for the world by helping modernize a violent, non-market, ignorant, superstitious and primitive expansionist culture so that it can play with the rest of the grownups in the world. Putin is one of my personal Heroes. I think, for Russia, he’s a perfect leader, and the leader that they need. Is Russia, and is all of Byzantine Christianity corrupt? Yes. Is the state an oligarchy? Yes. Is that bad for Russia at this point in it’s lifetime? No. Democracy, or at least, civic republicanism is NOT something that’s intrinsically good. Corruption is bad. Democracy can be a check on corruption. But only when the middle class is fully active, and fully enfranchised. Otherwise, the people will vote themselves into totalitarianism. Russians in particular will do so. Putin should be Tzar. Russia needs a King. The west needs kings. We all need kings. Not kings that can write laws. Kings that can veto abuses of the law. We may not know what we should do. But we can know what we should not do. And that is a job of a great monarch. Kings make it impossible to compete for political power, and force people to compete for economic power. That’s the beauty of monarchy.

  • Arresting Assange For What? Say Again?

    OK. I just dont get arresting Assange for getting women to sleep with him, and not using a condom. We’d need an awful lot of additional jails. Either arrest the guy for the real reason that you want him, or you’re abusing the justice system. I’m not a fan of this guy, and I think public opinion will crowsdsource his guilt or innocence correctly. But this kind of legalism is simply abusive. I don’t let the state use my violence on my behalf for injustice. I give my violence to the state to use on my behalf in order to prevent and resolve disputes between my fellow citizens over theft, fraud and violence. I do not give my violence to the state to use on my behalf to trump up bad manners into illegal actions for the purpose of political nonsense. It’s just proving his position that our governments are corrupt. Arrest him for distributing state secrets (even if they are meaningless so far). Make an example of him if you want. But we’re going to have to legalize prostitution, universally license all women, and men are going to have to ask for receipts in order to have sex and prove it was voluntary. Ridiculous. Brits should be ashamed.

  • to this point, other than as a diplomatic inconvenience, the information leaked

    http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-11923766Up to this point, other than as a diplomatic inconvenience, the information leaked has been a non-event, and nothing was in the cables that wasn’t discussed in the community, right out in the open. Actually, what’s been interesting is just how mundane the content has been – illustrating nothing more than the natural incompetence that arises from imperial overreach. But if this new list exposes potential targets I thi

    Source date (UTC): 2010-12-06 01:46:00 UTC

  • A Study On Corruption, Without A Definition Of Corruption. Is That In Itself Corruption?

    From http://dmarron.com/2010/10/31/how-corrupt-is-the-united-states/

    “According to a recent study, the United States has more public sector corruption than do many other developed economies.”

    “Perception” is only a measure of popularity. It is not a fact of relative corruption. The problem faced by the USA is that it is too large, and our political system is insufficient for a democratic republic of this size and complexity. The vast progress that has been made by human beings has largely been due to the invention of technologies, namely the scientific method, mathematics and in particular probability, but including laws, regulations, accounting, banking and interest – technologies that improve our fairly limited if not entirely incompetent perceptions. Our perceptions are notoriously faulty. So what instead are meaningful measures of corruption. Corruption defined as the privatization of public office for personal benefit? Most people confuse corruption with immorality or incompetence. And those three artifacts of human behavior each have different causes. The vast majority of the references that people actually refer to are the result of natural bureaucratic incompetence when bureaucrats are isolated from the market process of competition. The rest are either the natural side effect of the democratic process which all but requires deception, or the difference between an individual’s perception of the real world, and the actions that are possible under this form of government given the size and diversity of classes, races cultures and economic interests that exist in the polity. As such the rating is nonsensical. It is trivial for Denmark to have lower perceived corruption than the USA. However, it is in fact, far harder to to create lower perceived corruption in the vast bureaucracy of an international empire like the USA. Because perceptible corruption is largely the result of whether you agree or disagree with what you perceive. People in government are rarely evil. They are more likely lazy, ignorant, incompetent, or simply happy to profit from their isolation from the market process and their ability to dodge the delivery of customer service we experience in the rest of our lives.

  • A Method For Moderating Dialogs

    “The Cult Of Offensive Moderation” Note: I am in the process of creating a plugin for political moderation of debates, without censorship. There is far too much censorship on debate sites and blogs. Especially censorship of in-group language. The sentiment of inclusion in Democratic Secular Humanism (our current religion in the west) is at odds with the change in our word-wide status and economic position as a polity. In-grop sentiments are becoming increasingly important again.

    [callout]Solution? Categorize posts in a debate as to whether they are:
    1) content free or off topic
    2) sentimental expressions
    3) mythical, Platonic, or scriptural reasoning
    4) Objective rational arguments
    5) scientific arguments (using survey data but which are very fragile in the social sciences) and
    6) economic arguments (which because of scale and aggregation allow cultural comparison.)
    If you could filter conversations by these arguments,the reader could participate in a conversation of his own level of capacity.[/callout]

    1) The strategy of moderating sentimental (non rational) expressions will not work, because it leads to regression – increasing sensitivity as a means of ostracizing people to the point where commenting becomes more an act of policing until the board declines. It increase the transaction cost of participation. 2) As someone who runs a large advertising agency that must help companies and groups understand ‘social interaction’, I spend a great deal of time trying to educate editorials that the ONLY thing people find interesting is CONFLICT. Talking head shows are either internally engaging in conflict (crossfire), or externally (oprah/hannity). Conflict leads to ratings and ratings to participation. WIthout conflict, in either a novel, sort story, or a talk show, there isn’t much to hold anyone’s attention. And the more attention that you hold (the more viewpoints included) the more likely one is to have a member of the audience identify with one of the participants, and become involved. 3) People learn by first identifying the SENTIMENTAL statements that they agree with, and then seeing those statements refuted. If you eliminate the religious nuts, or the racists, or the culture-ists, you’re actually killing off the social value as well as the attraction of your medium. Because all people operate by sentiments. They may learn to articulate those sentiments as mythology, as reason, as science, or as economics, but they are still, almost universally, articulating their sentiments – simply with a different degree of precision. 4) Personalities (contributors) cannot be allowed take over the board or its brand and become the show itself. That’s board-hijacking, rather than thread-hijacking. So if you have permanent troublemakers that begin to draw too much attention to themselves then it is better to heavily moderate them. But not because of the content and form of their arguments. You ban them because they dominate the conversation and make their own ‘show’ on your dime. Losing participants is dangerous for any medium. Even bad ones. Sanitizing a board usually ends up with no board at all. 5) Increasing the number of editors so that they split posts into new threads is better than banning or correcting. Remember – people are largely seeking attention for their niche fantasies. Ignoring people is the most effective means of negative reinforcement. 6) Sentiments (unarticulated expression) are the most common form of narrative. They are analogical arguments. Reason (to the degree that few people can actually articulate causal properties of categories), science (directly measurable subsets) and economics (indirectly measured supersets). Religion as we mean it, refers to scriptural command, or external non-human knowledge, in the monotheistic meaning. Polytheism and history are simply differences of degree. It is scripture. 7) it is particularly troubling to eliminate what is called hate-speech or inter-group expression of sentiments. That ‘s because the most important dialog of our age is the change in group sentiments now that the worldwide change in status and power hierarchies has come about because of the worldwide adoption of western economic and material technologies. SOLUTION? Editing and moderating are hard. It is very, very, difficult to ascertain the quality of an argument in the social sciences. We are fairly sure that the entire Marxist religion, masquerading as a political movement, is as irrational as the Islamic political movement masquerading as a religion, are both extremely dangerous to mankind. But since we live in a POLITY, and the member of that polity largely use SENTIMENTS rather than reason in debate, and that their beliefs and debates are highly influential upon the outcome (more than reason by a long shot), and that most people criticizing these sentimental arguments lack causal depth in their own arguments, then the best board, the best discussions, the best social outcome, is determined by keeping an argument on track, rather than censoring it. An alternate solution, (and I have done a little work on this) categorizing posts in a debate as to whether they are 1) content free or off topic 2) sentimental expressions 3) mythical, Platonic, or scriptural reasoning 4) Objective rational arguments 5) scientific arguments (using survey data but which are very fragile in the social sciences) and 6) economic arguments (which because of scale and aggregation allow cultural comparison.) If you could filter conversations by these arguments, you would be able to stack them by methodology, and the reader could participate in a conversation of his own level of capacity. DIFFERENT IDEOLOGIES Although, we should note, that as scripture, you will have a hard time actually arguing against catholic doctrine as it’s based upon natural law: the observation of what men actually do. WHich is, what appears to be, the general sentiment and strategy underlying most semi scientific argument on this board. (Which I admire). If you want to argue using reason, the libertarian methodology will most likely lead you to correct conclusions. However, libertarianism consists of a set of branches, some of which do NOT correspond to reality, including 1) Rothbard’s principle of non-violence which is a silly argument, since the entire problem of social order is non-violence 2) free trade would lead in the end, to as state of affairs not any different from world-governance 3) libertarians have not included the cost-of-forgone-opportunities which is how we pay for the creation of some set of property rights, and therefore, failed to account for the cost of developing social order. As such, it’s a platonic fantasy counter to evidence. Conservatism is the best strategy for preventing social destruction, revolution and un-meritous rotation of elites. It is very skeptical of power – power should be obtained by public service in the market, or in the military in the defense of the market. Any other grab at power is specious. That’s the sentimental origin of the western city-market building shareholder system we call ‘citizenship’. But conservative philosophy has not provided a solution to our vast increase in the division of knowledge and labor. It has not provided us with an updated set of institutions for the contemporary world. And FWIW : Conservatism is largely an unarticulated sentiment that is more complex than left-liberalism, as conservatives rely on at least five axis the most important of which is group persistence, and liberals only one (harm/care). The combination of harm/care simplicity, egalitarian equality, Keynesian macroeconomic policy (statistics, full employment, liquidity) and democratic government, are ideal tools for competing with a sentiment thats primary purpose is to avoid hubris, and protect the group for the long term. In other words, consumption on the left versus capitalization on the right.

    [callout]The balance between liberalism (Pareto’s Instinct for Recombination, or Machiavelli’s Foxes) and conservatism (Pareto’s Preservation of Aggregates, or Machiavelli’s Lions) is a necessary conflict between the forces of stability that must allow change, but not disruption, and those that desire change regardless of consequences – because both innovation and stability are valuable to a civilization This debate in sentiments is particularly useful because reason is insufficient for solving this problem, largely because we have failed to make the same progress in induction and the social sciences that we have in deduction and the physical sciences. And partly because the physical sciences are vastly less complex than the more heuristic social science governed by the properties of the human mind.[/callout]

    The balance between liberalism (Pareto’s Instinct for Recombination, or Machiavelli’s Foxes) and conservatism (Pareto’s Preservation of Aggregates, or Machiavelli’s Lions) is a necessary conflict between the forces of stability that must allow change, but not disruption, and those that desire change regardless of consequences – because both innovation and stability are valuable to a civilization This debate in sentiments is particularly useful because reason is insufficient for solving this problem, largely because we have failed to make the same progress in induction and the social sciences that we have in deduction and the physical sciences. Partly because the physical sciences are vastly less complex than the more heuristic social science governed by the properties of the human mind. And just so we’re all living in rational reality not committing the error of confusing our own religion with neutral objective science, much of what is argued for on this board by well meaning products of our the past sixty years of western educational system, most often is doctrine of the RELIGION of Democratic Secular Humanism (which is a religion as it is contrary to the facts). Or of egalitarian equality, which is is a property of the Democratic Secular Humanist religion, and is also contrary to the facts. Or the assumption that freedom is the desire of the majority is counter to the facts. That is, as long as we realize that people are racist, culture-ist, class-ist, nationalist, cultist, members of competing civilizations, and they all are, because they all act that way under DURESS, and that it’s advantageous both for elites and for the underclass to be ‘anything-ist’, and that these traits are beneficial to economic man, beneficial to individuals, and an enduring part of the human experience. And if one doesn’t think so, then truth isn’t one’s objective, platonism is. Truth is correspondence with reality.

  • “Extend And Pretend”

    I lost the source of this quote, but thought it captured the sentiment correctly:

    The government has been playing “extend-and-pretend” based entirely on the idea that pent up demand in consumers would grow until it busted out and the recovery would be on – fueled by consumers. What has happened is the exact opposite. This is very serious. We are running into 3 years now, and 4 if you look at what commodity speculation did to consumers starting back in early 2007. Remember the prices for wheat and such that were even driving the price of pizza up 30% or more? And then we have such things as “staycations”. And so the concern should be whether or not we have a permanent shift in consumer behaviors. Three or four years is plenty of time to break old habits and establish new ones.

    1) People forget. Their forgetting follows a ‘forgetting curve’. Knowledge is perishable. Habits are perishable. Relationships are perishable. Even wants are perishable. 2) People don’t ‘unforget’. They have to learn new techniques, develop new habits, and form new relationships. And it takes time. 3) People school or swarm on opportunities. Demand is created by those people who invent ideas then bait people into swarming on them. Developing swarms, especially large scale swarms takes time. Months, even years, because people have to learn from the person closest to them, how they can participate in the swarm. Then as the swarm grows, they must learn enough to break off from the main body and find and exploit new niche opportunities.

    This last swarming behavior is the general problem with the Keynesian approach to aggregate demand. People are infinitely acquisitive as long as their acquisitions increase either their entertainment, security or status. But opportunities are not infinite. And the less knowledge, the fewer resources available for risk, and the fewer relationships they have, the less likely they are to identify and swarm new relationships.

  • I’ll Counter Paul’s Prediction With One Of My Own

    Paul writes:

    Predictions I Wish Had Been Wrong Looking for some other stuff, I found this post from October 2008 in which I predicted a level of right-wing craziness about Obama similar to that facing Bill Clinton, but worse. I really, really wish I had been wrong about that.

    But this is followed by interesting comments. All from liberals. Like these:

    Palin makes and breaks candidates in the GOP now — she’s far and away the most powerful person in the party. Fox News is #1, and they’re basically a beacon of disinformation. When a paper like the WSJ joins in, it makes a lot of people think that what’s being said is legitimate. I try to challenge this stuff each and every time I encounter it, but the truth is that I’m never able to persuade anyone who believes it that they’re wrong. It’s as if the whole country has gone insane, and no one is ashamed to lie or hate people any more.

    and

    You certainly weren’t Professor Krugman. If they gain enough credibility to have a substantial influence on the electorate, then the whole country is in peril.

    And this:

    The Right has to act crazy, for one thing they are; for another, the Right knows that if the Left takes control of the government, hunting will be outlawed. The Spanish must have their barbaric, anachronistic bullfight/torture ceremony and the gun-lovers must be allowed to shoot Bambi throught the heart. This is a culture war plain and simple. It is not a civil war, but a highly dangerous and uncivil one. I hope the Right loses, but they have the guns, so I’m doubtful. (Un)civil wars are usually costly in terms of lives lost and sheer destructiveness. I can refer you to the Spanish Civil war to give you an idea. Remember, the Fascists won that one, after something like a million people died.

    And this:

    There was something about Obama’s can’t-we-all-get-along rhetoric, and then confirmed by a first year of making nice with a bunch of thugs who’d as soon lynch him as have lunch with him (with no result, I must add), that showed this is a man who cannot wield power.

    Interesting comments. I think they miss the point though. The country is demographically center-right. Liberals, comprising no more that 1/5 of the population are a minority compared to independents and conservatives. People seek status more than they seek money. Cultural dominance in each class determines status signals. People will surrender money unto Caesar, but they will never surrender their social position willingly. As Paul has stated before, the left and right are committed. The independents are the only people who determine elections. They are don’t play the great game except at election time, are disinterested, pragmatic, and swayed by whatever emerges as deciding key issues and the personalities of the candidates. The purpose of both parties is to establish simple sentimental memes that can help frame the candidates currently up for election. Amidst a long term downturn, and faced with a government that passes a law that affects their health care, over the will of the majority, and the country’s only remaining competitive technology, deprived of their cultural status, it’s only rational that they rebel. White guilt was easy to sway when they were an entrenched majority, and especially when suffrage, then feminism, both the result of mechanization of the household tasks, could be brought against the christian sentiments of the dominant male fraternity. But as a minority that is embattled and demonized, as a cult of family and freedom, they see their status under direct threat, their values and way of life under threat, and they are beginning to act like a minority whose status and way of life is threatened. They no longer see room for compromise. They no longer feel guilt. They are angry. It certainly looks like in the long term, the cyclic historians are right, and that the political system no longer works as designed – which is the assumed binding mythology of our country. Despite having certain cooperative and organizational technologies unavailable to the ancients, our government no longer works because it is a system of empire over people with dissimilar cultural-status-political and economic-financial-organizational ambitions. And both the domestic and foreign nations are beginning to revolt – because they can sense that both domestically and internationally, the government is no longer legitimate. A government over people with dissimilar interests must of necessity oppress all. The current political status holders will not easily surrender their positions. The bureaucracy is enormous, in government, unions, academia, education, the vast white collar clerical system, the media and the arts – all the people who do not participate in the market process, but are intentionally insulated from it as intentionally protected classes. The decline of the centralized media has been instrumental in assisting in the change, and major media will continue to decline, as each subsector of society increasingly seeks confirmation bias for its fantasies, and each race, culture and class will seek confirmation of its underlying assumptions leading to increasing fictionalization. This election cycle, and this economy, is simply part of this broader change in the distribution of world economic and political power, and the decline of the international attractiveness of, and personal ambitions of, the western secular humanists — a class whose only strategic option now is to ally with the numeric superiority of Islam as a replacement for Marxism, in order to maintain their control and isolation from market participation. That is my prediction to equal Paul’s. Without cultural cohesion permitted by the wealth generated by selling off the north american continent to immigrants, the unnatural dominance of the dollar, and military control of world trade routes, trade and money, the coalition of DC (violence), NY (Money) and LA (Propaganda) cannot hold. And as Paul senses, and as most synthetic historians have stated for a century or more, a long term economic stagnation or decline will accentuate inter-group differences, as people rely on intra-group status symbols and traditional alliances for support. Egalitarianism is a convenience of a debtor economy.

  • Paul Krugman Says “No” To Responses To Critics. I Explain The Consequences

    Would I Please Respond? I get a lot of comments along the lines of “Would you please respond to the criticism of your work in ______?” Um, no. Do you have any idea how many articles there are out there attacking me? I literally don’t have the time to respond to them all, or even to differentiate between the usual sliming and actually interesting critiques. Just saying.

    Paul, You know, it might not hurt to have some grad student compile the top five criticisms and respond to them. (You would certainly have plenty of volunteers.) Most of the time, I disagree with the preferences implicit in your goals, not your analysis. These differences aren’t arguments over some form of absolute truth but disputes founded in preferences, demographics, social order, culture, class and in race warfare. Your egalitarianism is mathematically accurate in application. But your failure to incorporate into your rhetoric that these differences are meaningful to people, and these differences bear material costs to those who you impose your egalitarianism upon — including costs to monetary, cultural, status, and political capital. Each of these costs affects their consequential opportunity costs. Taking people’s money is one thing. Taking their culture, their political power, and their social status is another. Taking it and funding things they absolutely disagree with vehemently is something else (foreign wars, or immigration). Imposing a permanent social cost structure upon a people who have a very uncertain view of the future, or one that is far more pessimistic than you do is not a matter of scientific argument. It’s one of fantastic and deceptive narrative. Unless you address these issues, both you and your critics will continue to wrestle with scientific but inapplicable, and possibly deceptive arguments on your end, and sentimental and inarticulate arguments on the conservative end. Both of you are struggling for power, the power to implement your ideas. Power is not obtained by honest debate. It is obtained by pragmatism. And whether you understand it or not, you’re talking past them just as much as they past you. But if you do address these issues, you will bring into the open the basic problem: the USA is a domestic as well as international empire with significant tensions both internally and externally. The loss of our ability to issue debt is simply ending our ability to mask these differences with consumer credit. And the underlying duress is emerging with the economic circumstances. Under duress people revert to tribalism. They do so because it is smart for them to do so. Conservatism has led to stability for centuries. It doesn’t have to be right. It just has to increase the cost of change enough that the most stable, least dangerous model evolves. Pick on the neocons for seizing their opportunity for Roman glory. That’s rational. They failed. Pick on conservatives for fighting socialism and communism, and rejecting redistribution of status, cultural dominance, and political power, and you’re simply wrong. Conservatism is a sentiment. That does not mean the sentiment is founded on irrational principles. It means the principles are either un-articulated, unable to be articulated, or people are unwilling to articulate them. And at least since Burke, if not since the English civil war, conservative sentiments have been very helpful for Anglo civilization. Perhaps even the cause of it. Perhaps the honest answer is to lead by addressing the real issue. Not circumventing it. It is rhetorically and politically convenient for both sides to avoid the real issues. But if we discussed the real issue there might be room for compromise.