A Modest Proposal to Increase Correctness in Corporations

Corporations from Walmart to Amazon to Ebay have been rushing around removing the rebel battle flag and, one presumes, clothing and toys displaying it from their inventory. Apple has gone further and banned even Civil War games  depicting the flag incidentally as part of a historic scene.  These companies are free to do so, and I have no interest in owning a Confederate battle flag. I’m strictly a Union man. However despite these gestures in the way of correctness and approved thinking, there remains  a long way to go before achieving total purity. 

Imagine an organization still existing and still influential today which was the main political supporter of slavery, an organization whose members started the Civil War to defend slavery  and then, after losing the war, created and defended segregation and Jim Crow for almost a hundred years. Imagine that organization gave the country its only pro-Klan and segregationist president and had an admitted Klansman as one of its leaders as recently as a couple of decades or so ago.  One would have  to expect the same companies which have distanced themselves so righteously from a mere symbol (and a somewhat ambiguous one at that) would have to wash their hands of such a tainted group.

Well such a group does exist. It is called the Democratic Party, and its members did all those things. So in the name of consistency, shouldn’t  these companies and   Apple in particular need to cut all ties to the Democratic Party and remove any items or apps related to that party or showing its symbol in any way?  After all, there is no point in being halfway correct or sort of pure on something like this.

Rebel Battle Flag

In the last few days there has been new controversy over the rebel battle flag with the governor of South Carolina suggesting it is time to remove it from the state’s capitol.  That seems to be a good idea since it should not have been flown there in the first place.  Individuals are of course free to display the flag as they choose, but one should question whether they should.

There are various reasons for displaying the flag.  Some people will say they do it only as  homage to the memory of brave and gallant soldiers of the South and not as any endorsement of the policies and goals of the Confederacy. It is certainly possible to respect the honor and character of men such as Lee and Jackson without in any ways wishing  they had won, just as many people respect certain things about Rommel or Yamamoto or Crazy Horse without wishing that the axis had won World War II or that bands of Indians were still raiding farms and ranches in the great plains.  

Others say they display the flag only as  an act of defiance against convention, conformity, and authority. Such defiance is a wholly admirable sentiment. In our present situation the more defiance of convention, conformity, and especially authority we have, the  better off we are. We surely  need more Americans standing up and telling our would be betters and civil masters where to get off.

The problem is that flying the Confederate battle flag conveys other things. It suggests approval of and nostalgia for the Confederacy and its cause of slavery. There are ways to honor ancestors and brave soldiers which do not send this message. There surely are other ways to show one’s disdain for convention and authority. Rejecting  the rebel battle flag in favor of the  jolly roger,  the Gadsden flag, or, for Texans, the Gonzales "come and take it" cannon flag is a solution which comes  to mind immediately.

For these reasons, I  believe people of good will should not fly or display the rebel battle flag, unless, of course, the government bans doing so. In that case we might all have to get one.

News Media and a Shooting

A reasonable person’s opinions on the set of subjects usually called race relations would be the same this morning as they were a few days ago before a white man shot nine black people in South Carolina, because there has been no meaningful new evidence to cause him to change them.  The actions and attitudes of one criminal  demonstrate nothing about the general situations. Yet the media are full of people claiming they do and finding spurious meaning in  the  event. The whole journalistic business of improperly attaching broad significance to  single acts and playing to people’s emotions suggests that those doing it are themselves  foolish and driven by emotion or  are cynical manipulators who assume those in their audience are or are some of each.  It is dishonest on more than one level and cheapens discourse. 

One could also wish those in government and the traditional media, including black people in government and the traditional media,  would start treating  black people as adults.  A terrible crime was committed by a bad and probably insane  young man.  He was captured by the police and is now in jail.  Except for some  predictable gleefully ghoulish opportunism  from the gun control lobby, that would have been the end of the story as big news if the victims had been white, Asian, Hispanic, or just about anything else except black. Instead we saw  hand wringing and posturing and talk of “healing”  all around to comfort and reassure and make political points with  the poor black people  - not  the ones whose friends and relatives had been killed and who probably needed comforting, but rather  black people in general.  The whole business was sloppy and  suggested  more than a little condescension about the ability of black Americans to cope with life.  Black people should have found it insulting. 

Hot, Dead Chicken

Years ago, after the end of AT&T’s monopoly, the company had to adjust to having competition, and some people thought the transition was a difficult and not necessarily well handled one.  A mild joke circulated at the time that the company was so awful at marketing  that, if it  bought Colonel Sanders, it would advertise its product as hot, dead chicken.

I  thought of that old joke recently when I read an article by a conservative describing what he saw as the fundamental difference between his side in politics and its opponents. The profound difference he said was that while their opponents have an optimistic view of humanity and believe people are capable of improvement, progress, rationality, and goodness, conservatives recognize people for the depraved creatures they are and  understand they need to be held in check  by tradition, law, religion, and authority.

 In the first place this is not true. A belief  in the potential of human beings to be good and wise and in the possibility and desirability of improvement and progress through education, reason, and science is an important aspect of the liberal tradition. However  the conservatives’ opponents these days  are more apt to be authoritarian leftists, often of the green variety,   than liberals and to have no more  truck with progress or  trust in the potential of humanity than the most dour of traditionalists. (The most likely place at present to find people holding these liberal notions  is among  libertarians,  though there also are many people on the general left and general right side of politics who do so as well.)  

Besides that it is terrible, hot dead, chicken marketing. It amounts to telling Americans “we think you are inherently flawed, base, and sinful and so is every else, including us, and we’d surely like you to vote to put us in charge of your government.” As an advertising pitch, it doesn’t exactly sing. So conservatives who hold these opinions and want to win elections should keep them to themselves. They should  remember that the most successful Republican politician of the last hundred years was not that sort of conservative, but  in this respect  very much a liberal.

            

Disputes - Scientific and Otherwise

Scientific controversies are not uncommon and often are necessary and valuable in areas where conclusions are conjectural and the known information is changing. An obvious example is the question of whether the best guess from the facts and analysis available  is  that the universe will continue expanding indefinitely or eventually contract back into a state leading to another big bang. Each side of the question has seemed the more likely at various times, and the disputes have been lively and useful. However, in this and in other such controversies, those favoring one side or the other -  while they might get excited and even consider their opponents foolish, hidebound, or just not smart enough to get the right answer – would not think of labeling them as  unbelievers, deniers, or embodiments of evil.  That sort of disputation belongs in the areas of politics and religion, not science.  Yet it is precisely what we see from the advocates of global warming as an apocalyptic disaster in the making and something totally and unquestionably due only to people’s burning fuels.

Their  mode of expression thus should serve as a clue to an objective observer that the public discussion on global warming has left the realm of science and entered that of religion and politics. The political aspect is obvious. Politicians and bureaucrats  of the left have  hopes  to use a scare over warming to increase their power. In some ways it is a last refuge for them. The religious is almost as obvious. The green movement posits a former ideal state corrupted by humanity’s sins, offers sinners a path to salvation based on self denial, threatens the world and its unbelievers  with a horrible future fate,  condemns its critics as not merely mistaken but evil, offers believers an assurance of righteousness  and superiority based solely on holding correct beliefs, and is uninterested in facts  which contradict its doctrines  or events which invalidate its prophecies.  By what is commonly called the quacking duck test, it is a religion, and a dogmatic and crusading one at that. The apocalyptic view of global warming is part of its holy writ. 

A very  instructive illustration of how far all this is from science or scientific behavior came in the last couple of days from a US senator from Rhode Island who, representing what one might call the jihadist or Dominican branch  of the green faith, suggested throwing dissenters into prison for their heresies. That should help to show a fair minded person just how much  this  business really has to do with science and how much with faith and power lust. It should also brand that senator as an anti-American authoritarian unworthy of holding any office in a free country ( and also as an opponent of free scientific inquiry).

Of course the behavior of scoundrels and fanatics does not prove there is nothing to  the notion of   burning fuels contributing to warming as some conservatives have claimed.  Burning fuels does have an effect, and it would be useful to have a better understanding of what sort of effect that is and through what sort of feedback  or other mechanisms it occurs.