"How could you??" she screamed, crying and quaking with rage.

"How could you??!?"

She threw the pictures down on the table in front of him. How could he be so heartless? To betray her like this? After everything she'd done for him, every intimacy they'd shared, and all the years they'd spent together! And to be stupid enough to photograph the whole thing and keep the evidence in his desk, where she found it???

He had nothing to say. His face hung down, sullen.

"I never meant to hurt you," he finally offered, at last.

The excuse hung in the air, lamely.

She turned and ran from the room, a fresh wave of sobbing starting in her throat.

Somehow, we've gotten to the point where as a culture, we think of not intending evil as some kind of virtue. "I never meant to bankrupt my employer; I just kind of wanted the money for myself." "I didn't mean for you to have such a horrible childhood; but let's face it, I had more interesting things to do than spend my time with you." Of course, the second part of those sentences go unspoken.

Unless we're some sort of sociopath (and probably even then...) the problem is never that we mean to do evil. It's just that it wasn't very important for us to do good.

The husband who cheats on his wife doesn't do so with the goal of destroying her trust, self-image, and ripping her very soul to shreds. No, the tradeoff goes more like this: On one hand, I could get some action with that very hot-looking chick who seems to like me. On the other hand, I do the right thing and keep my marriage vows. And the first option wins, because the promise of hot passion wins out over virtue.

The person who signs up for some unethical MLM doesn't mean to hurt most the people they sign up. Instead, it just wasn't very important to figure out what the odds of success were for people they'd sponsor. They were too busy thinking about all the money they'd make.

The person who gossips about another doesn't mean for it to get back to them and hurt them. They just found it more pleasurable to share a juicy rumor than to hold the tongue in case they were wrong or somebody got hurt.

Several billion such compromises are made each day.

Ideally, we'd all do the right thing. But the most common form of evil is simply to care less about some moral rule than our selfish desires. And only sociopaths set out to deliberately hurt people or do evil -- or who knows, perhaps even they do not. The "I never meant to" excuse falls into category #2; our society's whole excuse for every misdeed is to point out that there are some worse people out there, hypothetically.

Yeah, that works: "Well, I may have brutally murdered 36 people, but let me point out to you that Hitler killed, what 6 million? I'm nowhere near that bad." "I may have stolen $12,000 from you, but aren't you grateful I didn't burn down your house as well?"

Sorry, finding someone worse than you doesn't make you good. Or me.

Again, it doesn't mean much that we didn't mean to do evil. The real problem is that we often don't mean to do good; "doing good" often loses big time to our desire to benefit ourselves.

As a recovering "centrist" who still harbors definite left-leaning tendencies, one of the more "leftist" ideas I believe in is the goodness and rightness of anti-trust law. I still cheer, mentally, when I think of Teddy Roosevelt telling the awful robber-barons that he intended to break them up, and negotations would be of no use whatsoever.

But I'm also aware that most my other left-leaning ideas have been proven wrong, and have heard rumors that anti-trust laws might also not be all they seem.

So today I thank Dawn Eden for pointing me to this tidbit, which seems to strike a blow against my cherished belief in anti-trust law:

Producers who charge more than their competitors, Paterson observes, can be accused of price gouging. Those who charge less are guilty of predatory pricing and unfair competition. Those who charge precisely the same must surely be engaged in price fixing. Any of these accusations might therefore be leveled against a firm by a competitor, making "status," or political power, crucially important to commerce. According to Paterson, the malleability of the notion of "anticompetitive" practices means that in effect, firms will seek prior approval before innovating, merging, or splitting and selling off subsidiaries. The effect, ironically, is to inhibit competition.

That, I can understand.

Not sure I'm entirely sold yet, but it makes for a funny read.

Also, Dawn's article about Hollywood pimping for Soviet spy Alger Hiss in the SF classic "The Day the Earth Stood Still" is very interesting. I had no idea that was the subtext. Hollywood hasn't changed much, have they? Just as shameless as ever.

History repeats.

Democratic Congressman Maurice Hinchey, regarding Ra^thergate:

Now, I mean, I have my own beliefs about how that happened: it originated with Karl Rove, in my belief, in the White House. They set that up with those false papers. Why did they do it? They knew that Bush was a draft dodger. They knew that he had run away from his responsibilties in the Air National Guard in Texas, gone out of the state intentionally for a long period of time. They knew that he had no defense for that period in his life. And so what they did was, expecting that that was going to come up, they accentuated it: they produced papers that made it look even worse. And they — and they distributed those out to elements of the media. And it was only — what, like was it CBS? Or whatever, whatever which one Rather works for. They — the people there — they finally bought into it, and they, and they aired it. And when they did, they had ’em. They didn’t care who did it! All they had to do is to get some element of the media to advance that issue. Based upon the false papers that they produced.

Much of the left refused to admit the documents might be forged. Now, they're finally forged, but Karl Rove did it! And of course, CBS still has no responsibility for vetting the documents, still. Even funnier, Congressman Hinchey has no idea who Dan Rather works for.

Recently, in frustration, I wrote:

Yes, every time you show some left-wing evidence is fake, that fraud itself becomes further evidence of how evil and insidious the nefarious Bush administration is! It never becomes evidence that there are a lot of nut-jobs over on the left who have no ethics and will stop at nothing to scare people, and who are also generally incompetant in doing so.

History repeats.

At one time, I admired Noam Chomsky. I had absorbed this attitude, unquestioningly, through my college education. I at first knew him only as a semantic pedant, one who deals with taxonomy of languages. Only later did I discover his political side, through left-leaning Salon magazine.

Over the years, I've come to the impression -- though there are certainly some conservative myths -- that leftism is in general constructed out of a tissue of lies. To mix metaphores: I felt as though I had confronted a huge insurmountable wall, and examined a single brick which crumbled under my slight probing. Then I examine another, which cracked easily as well. Then another and another and another, each crumbling when touched or examined.

Finally, I stood back and stared, realizing the whole edifice was undoubtedly built the same way: lie upon lie upon lie; myth upon misconception upon deception.

Oliver Kamm details such a case in Frontpage Magazine today. A political scientist named Samuel Huntington argued, during the Vietnam war, that the US could not beat the Viet Cong, so we instead should accomdate them. He summarized his argument in a article entitled, unsuprisingly, "The Bases of Accomodation."

A rather straightforward liberal position, one might think.

But Noam Chomsky had other designs, apparently. According to Kamm, Chomsky's desired narrative framework has been an equivalence between the US and Nazi Germany. As such, one is pressed to find parallels. When they don't exist in real life, unethical people create them.

Kamm demonstrates how Chomsky inverts Huntington's meaning by omitting key phrases, to misrepresent Huntingon as advocating genocide, not accomodation. Huntington wrote:

…the Viet Cong will remain a powerful force which cannot be dislodged from its constituency so long as the constituency continues to exist. Peace in the immediate future must hence be based on accommodation.

Yet here's what Chomsky did to Huntington's words (elision mine):

Professor Samuel Huntington, Chairman of the Government Department at Harvard and at the time (1968) .... explains that the Viet Cong is "a powerful force which cannot be dislodged from its constituency so long as the constituency continues to exist." The conclusion is obvious, and he does not shrink from it. We can ensure that the constituency ceases to exist by "direct application of mechanical and conventional power ... on such a massive scale as to produce a massive migration from countryside to city," where the Viet Cong constituency—the rural population—can, it is hoped, be controlled in refugee camps and suburban slums around Saigon.

Just by omitting the second sentence advocating peace and accomodation, and adding a quote which did not even originate from Huntington, Noam converts Huntington from an accomodationist to an advocate of genocide, in one deft deception.

Elsewhere, to lay it on even thicker, Noam attempts to parallel this false representation of Huntingon's position with that of Nazi Germany, comparing it to policies that a "Himmler or a Streicher would have advanced."

As he must have seen the second, omitted sentence which advocated peace and accodomation, there is no way to believe Chomsky's distortion was anything but deliberate. It was apparently so important to Chomsky to find some person involved with the Vietnam war advocating Nazi-like policies that it justified fabrication from the whole cloth, at the expense of one Professor Samuel Huntington, whose policies most leftists would have approved.

Kamm then traces the myth through those who unquestioningly turn to Chomsky as a reliable narrator of history, and details some of the consequences of Chomsky's deception: how Professor Huntington was then harrassed on his campus, subject of a campaign of intimidation, had speaking invitations withdrawn, and how this was all recounted approvingly by the founder of a group named, ironically, the "Council for Academic Freedom and Democracy."

He also gives evidence that Arundhati Roy repeats the myth.

The left is forever talking about "lies" -- by which they usually mean things they simply disagree with, or inaccuracies for which they can prove no malicious intent. They insist to us that they strongly disapprove of these "lies", and cannot for a moment further tolerate any such "liars."

Yet it is my experience this sort of deconstruction may be done to most of their prophets, and most their prophets' arguments, as John Ray is doing over at Marx Words. Yet when the left is confronted with such counter-evidence, it is my experience that they are suddenly not interested at all in the depravity of lies, nor will most equally repudiate actual, proven liars like Chomsky, who knowingly weave their destructive deceptions with eyes wide open.

Instead, we are to infer that the "ends justifies the means" -- the lie was okay, we now see, because it forwarded a cause they believed in. And so we learn why so many remain fellow travellers with Chomsky: They don't mind his methods -- quite to the contrary, they share them.

One of the odd things about Quixtar is the way it attempts to conscript religion or religous arguments into selling "the business." In my case, Quixtar IBOs were attempting to enlist people from my church into their "business opportunity". My friend, who approached me, told me something very similar to the quote Jason cites over at Sinking in Quixand:

I have personally seen the leaders I am associated with LEAD THOUSANDS OF PEOPLE TO CHRIST. Literally THOUSANDS, even with the usual "seed on rocky soil" etc, that is pretty darn impressive...

Is that true? I have no idea, but it seems to be a common story or myth. I've never yet met anyone who said, in the long term, it had a positive experience on their relationship with God, but I don't deny it's possible.

My friend also assured me that although many in Quixtar had a decidedly "Christian" bent, that the meetings also offered different services for others of various religious persuasions.

As a Christian and political conservative, after doing some research into this, my main objections to Quixtar became that it's (a) disobedient to Jesus's teachings, and (b) not a form of positive economic activity.

And it was easy for me to see abuses going on: During my initial meeting with my friend's upline, I was assured I was clearly disobeying God by following my chosen career. I expect that kind of line is not uncommon.

So, the question I'm posing to anyone who wants to answer is: How has this organization affected your view or relationship with God? I'm not interested in short-term effects, such as "I made a decision" but more long-term effects.

Did it increase your faith at one point?

Did it make you more cynical about religion when you left? Or at the time?

Or did having a bad experience cause you to try to clarify your own values?

Did it give you a bad view of Christianity, the faith they pretend to represent? Or did it encourage you to look into it?

If you're not a Christian, did you feel your own faith, or non-belief, was respected? Or was there any heavy-handed attempts to pressure you into something you didn't believe?

Did your experiences make real differences in the way you live? Do you treat other people better? Did being in Quixtar help you attend to get involved in non-Quixtar religious organizations regularly? Or did it draw you away from whatever faith you had?

What are your actual, first-hand experiences?

Fire away...

Regarding Eason Jordan, Baldilocks quips, pithily:

Observe as a new meme is born: the right-wing blogger as First Amendment antagonist.

I agree with the sentiment, but sadly, it's nothing new. This critic said I was engaging in censorship when called a biased CNN poll "idiotic":

taking someone's right to freedom of speech and immediately assuming its idiotic is an attack on freedom of speech itself, which goes against what are very forefathers laid down for us.

(Yes, our forefathers died to prevent me from calling polls "idiotic".)

And of course, everyone currently suggesting that professors should be fired when they fabricate major historical events (not to mention their own credentials!) are also being portrayed as "censors", and are being told that such ideas should are against the first amendment.

Remember: Orwell was writing about what he saw in socialism when he came up with the term "doublethink". Some things just don't change.

Update: More along this topic from Powerline:

Chris Matthews' Hardblogger site takes a shot at bloggers for their role in the demise of Eason Jordan, and in the process exhibits a profound misunderstanding of free speech. The author, Mike Moran, believes that it was unwise "for CNN to provide the enemies of free expression, critical thinking and The First Amendment with a victory" over Jordan due to his "controversial (but hardly blasphemous) statement" that the U.S. military has been targeting journalists in Iraq for death. For good measure, he claims that, during this affair, bloggers showed "all the interest in the truth shown by the Gang of Four."

Moran never tries to explain how it's inconsistent with free expression, critical thinking, and the First Amendment to call on those who accuse public officials of murder, or a lesser but related charge, to either defend or abandon their allegations.

It's become the ultimate liberal dodge. When liberal speech is disproven, disagreed with, or has consequences (brought about by other speech), claim the other speech violates the first ammendment while yours doesn't.

One of the arguments brought to bear regarding gay marriage is that marriage a private affair. Glenn Reynolds today expressed the same sentiment, saying it's "creepy" to think that the state is involved marriage. Huh? It is?

Another argument offered is that marriage is a "right", or should be. Should it?

Let's back up a bit: First, let's note that marriage does involve governmental recognition. Why? Well, why does goverment do anything? Why does the state build roads or run sewer lines? Is it because they're all "rights"? Is there a "right" to have a road or a "right" to garbage collection?

The Constitution says our government exists to "establish justice, ensure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty." Regarding marriage, note in particular "ensure domestic tranquility" and "promote the general welfare."

Marriage is not and has never been (except on frontiers) a purely private affair. Marriage has always been a matter for the community. When two people get married, what to they do? They take a vow in front of a community. And what does the community do? Often, objections are allowed to be aired -- at least ceremonially. Furthermore, the community is asked to "support" the marriage for as long as it endures. And, of course, it is encouraged to endure as long as possible.

Marriage was understood to be a community affair. That's also why people were punished for adultery -- it was offense against the community. And, indeed, it is the presence of the "community" -- the public profession of vows of fidelity -- which differentiated "marriage" from "shacking up."

Likewise, with the state's involvement: When Bob and Zelda got married, the state does not recognize their marriage because it will make Bob and Zelda feel emotionally validated. No, historically, the reason the state is involved was because it was widely believed that society in general had a strong interest in promoting and protecting marriage, just as it built roads.

In "olden" days -- just a generation ago -- the state took this further by protecting marriage with the force of law. Adultery was an offense against the state, not just the spouse. A man was not just allowed to dump his wife if she displeased him. Divorce had to demonstrate cause. (Given the burdens imposed on society by divorce, this is not an irrational stance.)

Today we're instead drifting (apparently thoughtlessly) towards the idea that marriage is primarily about how the two people getting married feel. It's all about the individual, not society. And, in our conceit, we imagine we're getting "smarter" or "wiser" by doing so.

But again, stop for a moment, let's back up, and ask a couple questions before we embark upon this grand social experiment many people, like Glenn, promote:

1. Does marriage actually benefit society? Conversely, does its dissolution hurt the "general welfare" and "domestic tranquility"?
2. Does it do so enough to warrant the state's interest?
3. Does "gay marriage" provide the same benefits?

Last I checked, the way to find these kinds of answers was to do a little thing called "research". Instead, it seems the popular technique today is to just pull assumptions out of thin air. (For inhabitants of an age which prides itself on being "scientific" we do little or no "science" before jumping to our conclusions.)

The answers I arrive at are:

1. Impact on society: Study after study shows the dissolution of marriage DOES harm both "domestic tranquility" and "general welfare". City Journal, for example notes:

The Sexual Organization of the City a recent University of Chicago study of sexual relations in various Chicago neighborhoods, finds "transactional" sexual relationships, infidelity, and domestic violence on the rise throughout the city, but things are worst in Southtown, the pseudonymous African-American neighborhood.... Worse, the study's authors argue, infidelity often leads to violence

Another article in the same publication by Iain Murray is chock-full of evidence connecting stable marriage to a healthy society, or the converse.

One study:

[The study] examined three scenarios, based on the employment status of the mother. In all three—whether the mother was unemployed, worked part-time, or worked full-time—marrying her child’s father boosted her annual family income by around $11,000. This income bump lifts the majority of poor children with single moms out of poverty. For unemployed single-mother-headed families, for example, marriage pushes 65 percent of the children above the poverty line (from all the kids being below it prior to marriage); nearly a third of the children in this family category rises 50 percent above the poverty line. Mothers employed part-time and full-time who wed see even bigger gains for their kids.

And another, in the same article:

... new research from the National Institutes of Mental Health and the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, recently published in the peer-reviewed journal Child Development, has uncovered new evidence of how marriage protects kids. Looking at the impact of father absence on the behavior of teenage girls, the study found that the earlier a father was absent from his daughter’s life the more likely she was to engage in risky behavior, particularly early sexual activity—increasing the risk of teen pregnancy. The researchers’ conclusion: “these findings may support social policies that encourage fathers to form and remain in families with their children.”

And these effects are not just limited to our culture: This article reports on the wave of rising poverty in Japan, a wave that researchers find is tied directly to the dissolution of marriage and a skyrocketing divorce rate.

Study after study demonstrates that the dissolution or absense of marriage has long-term consequences for, drug use, crime, increased poverty of women, the mental health and suicide rate or children -- not to mention the obvious effects like STD transmission.

The evidence is so great, the only way around it is to simply ignore it and pretend it doesn't exist. Which is, frankly, what so many do.

2. Are the impacts large enough to warrant the government's involvement?

Oh, I don't know -- tell, me: Does the government currently get involved with trying to stop poverty? Does the government take an interest in mental health, suicide, or domestic violence? Are there government programs meant to combat drug use or teen promiscuity or sexually transmitted diseases?

We construct huge, expensive, frequently intrusive, and often questionably effective social programs to combat all of these. In light of that, it is utterly incoherant to argue the state has zero interest in marriage, which impacts every single one of these problems.

3. Does gay marriage provide the same benefits?

A frequent argument we hear is that marriage will help society by extending the benefits of marriage to gays. And once again, the preferred method of "research" elites use is apparently to pull the answers they'd like to believe out of thin air. Unfortunately, both common sense and a bit of research reveals they're dead wrong again.

Yet gay marriages are not like straight marriages. A recent study found that "long term" gay unions lasted, on average, about 18 months, and that men had an average of eight partners outside their marriage.

It is hard to see how these sort of arrangements will benefit society in general, much less children put into such circumstances.

I hate to say it, but the argument that "marriage" will similarly civilize gay men is the height of cluelessness. How many neurons does it take to realize that it is a bond to a rather-different woman which civilizes the man, not just "marriage"?

Wrap-Up

In conclusion, the evidence is plentiful that marriage benefits society; everyone basicly understood this intuitively until this stupid generation. Sadly we, for the first time, have direct scientific evidence of this -- that the breakdown of marriage contributes to a host of social ills including but not limited to disease, crime, poverty, mental illness. But we will not even look at it, nor consider it as part of our policy arguments.

It irrational to create intrusive programs to "solve" these problems, while arguing the state has no interest in marriage, and thus saying, falsely, that marriage has no benefit to society.

Finally, there is no evidence that homosexual marriage is anything like heterosexual marriage (and plenty to the contrary), and thus no particular reason to think the state should have the same interest in promoting it.

But hey, that's apparently a little to sensible for most people.

Leftists are so weird. Tonight I heard a woman claim that it wasn't any of our business whether Ward Churchill was Indian or not. She said he could choose to be whatever race he wanted to be. Another supported stated: "He writes from an indiginous perspective, which is a state of mind."

You know, genetically, I'm from Danish and Welsh descent.

But I think I'm going to choose to be African American for a while.

So please, congratulate me on my new ethnicity.

Maybe I'll be Hispanic when I get bored with that.

Or Native American. That seems to have worked out well for Ward. Maybe it's time I got me some of that.

And what is the "state of mind" necessary to be one of these groups? Leftist, of course. Amazingly, just by being a leftist, you can be any ethnicity. And, even if you are black, Hispanic, or whatever, if you're NOT a leftist, you're not really that ethnicity either.

Could I spout leftist doctrine for $110,000 a year? Hmmm...

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