Monday, January 16, 2023


How Political Bias Explains Everything

This is a very well-informed article which confirms everything I learned during my research career. I long ago learned that facts will not dislodge Leftist belief so have focused in recent years on trying to understand the often weird things that Leftists believe.

And in a nutshell, it is basically approval-seeking. Leftists will accept any belief that they think will make them look good (kind, wise etc.). The obvious strategy for conservatives in that case is to focus on the bad consequences that normally flow from Leftist policies. An example of that we are beginning to see something of in the now frequent reports from de-transitioners -- who report horrors from the Leftist encouragement of surgical trans-sexual procedures


According to the dogmas that currently rule America’s elite institutions, the single most important fact about any individual is their racial and gender identity. This quasi-religious belief results in conflict between the new identity-based framework and the older ideal that people are rational actors capable of arriving at an objective truth, independent of their personal background. But both of these views are wrong according to the attitudinal model, a paradigm that is popular in political science but widely ignored outside that discipline. Though it is not well known, the model almost perfectly explains the current “crisis of experts,” without resorting to the gaslighting and moral panics that so many “experts” have used to deny or explain away their failures.

Simply put, the attitudinal model is the codified idea that political preferences, especially when combined with a few other variables, generally predict how individuals will behave. The concept was first introduced by the political scientists Jeff Segal and Harold Spaeth, in their 1993 book The Supreme Court and the Attitudinal Model. Segal and Spaeth assert that the notion that decisions by leaders capable of independent action, a category that includes SCOTUS justices, “are objective, dispassionate, and impartial [is] obviously belied by the facts.” Clearly, “different courts and different judges do not decide the same issue the same way,” and even decisions from the same court are invariably larded with concurrences, dissenting opinions, and so forth. A key point these authors make is that there will generally be enough respected precedent cases available on all sides in a major legal matter—or enough potential variables available in the context of an academic model—that anyone intelligent could find “no dearth … to support their assertions.”

What, then, determines leadership-level decisions? Personal attitudes, albeit somewhat constrained by individual rules and norms. “Decisions of the Court are based on the facts of the case in light of the ideologies, attitudes, and values of the Justices,” Segal and Spaeth write. The authors test this claim empirically—that is why the book is famous—and find that the position of individual judicial decision-makers on a standard (-1 to 1) scale measuring personal conservatism/liberalism predicts roughly 80% (.79) of all of their votes. Across a set of prominent death penalty cases, the political-ideology metric – that is, a measure of the individual justices’ ideological leaning compiled from their past voting behavior, “newspaper editorials,” and “off-bench speeches and writings”—predicted the behavior of every SCOTUS Justice in 19 out of 23 situations.

Attitudinally driven behavior among leaders stretches far beyond Supreme Court justices or appellate court judges. Segal and Spaeth also find that ideology is a near total predictor of executive branch nominations of judges: 87% of all Supreme Court nominees (126/145 at the time of writing) have come from the sitting president’s party. In theory, we might like to believe that a president selects the judge they believe is most qualified for a position, but in practice we know that they simply pick the person whose political attitudes are closest to their own. This trend dates back to the very beginning of the United States, apparently: George Washington at one point nominated 11 highly partisan Federalists for the bench in a row.

Indeed, partisanship is a better predictor of being an elite judicial nominee than is “being a qualified judge,” as determined by past judicial service and players like the American Bar Association. Only 91 of the 145 Supreme Court nominees—73% of Republicans and 48% of Democratic picks—met the American Bar Association’s standard, Segal and Spaeth write. Similarly, basic ideological variables predict 95% of the Yes/No votes of senators deciding whether or not to confirm these presidential judicial nominees. Within the court system, the attitudinal model is measurably predictive beyond a few top benches: Segal and Spaeth note very early on that the model “will fully predict other courts to the extent the environment of those approximates that Supreme Court.”

The largely undisputed fact that ideology shapes the behavior of solo leaders matters because of the extreme trend toward siloing in modern upper-middle-class life. Within my field—the academic social sciences—a 2006 survey found that about 18% of all faculty members identified as Marxists, another 24% as radicals, and 20%-21% as activists. In contrast, perhaps 5% of American soft-scientists are conservatives. In an environment this politically slanted, the odds are good that many shifts of focus attributed to new theory or empirical data—and indeed many overall social science conclusions—are largely the products of ideology.

What are some examples of such conclusions? For decades, academics believed that authoritarianism was an almost exclusively conservative trait. The idea dates back to Frankfurt School scholar Theodor Adorno’s book The Authoritarian Personality, and dozens of studies have “confirmed” it over the years. However, in 2021, skilled Emory Ph.D. student Thomas Costello noticed something simple but key: Tools used to measure authoritarianism tend to be “designed from the left,” and to focus on social problems which a right-winger would be more likely to oppose.

A typical survey question might read: “How important do you feel it is that American society harshly control (Communists)?” Costello realized that scholars could as easily frame nearly identical items from the other direction, asking—hypothetically—about the need to crack down on “Insurrectionists” or “anti-maskers.” His published article, containing a left-wing authoritarianism scale more complex than what I have described here, but based on similar principles, was just published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. It now appears likely that left-wing authoritarianism is one of the more common forms of authoritarianism.

Then there is “racial resentment.” For decades now, many political scientists have argued that citizens giving affirmative answers to questions like “Most Black people who receive money from welfare programs could get along without it if they tried (Yes or No)?” or “Italian, Irish, and Jewish ethnicities overcame prejudice and worked their way up—do you think Black people should do the same without any special favors?” provide a meaningful measure of the subtle racism that supposedly pervades American society. However, in recent years, skeptical scholars have begun administering the same racial resentment scales to minority Americans—most of whom score quite high on metrics of racial pride, and obviously almost none of whom are conventional bigots.

Results have been telling. According to a recent survey sponsored by the Kaiser Family Foundation and CNN, 42% of Black respondents believe “lack of motivation and willingness to work hard” is a “major cause” of hardships within the Black community, compared to 32% of white respondents who believe so. 61% of Black respondents, meanwhile, believe that “Breakup of the African American Family” was a “major cause” of those hardships, compared to roughly 55% of white respondents. Still another study, by Riley Carney and Ryan Enos, found rates of agreement with the provocative questions on the racial resentment scale did not change at all when lower-income or immigrant-origin white groups (i.e., Lithuanians) were substituted in for Black people. Dislike of affirmative action and welfare, it seems, correlates with conservatism and traditionalism across all groups, rather than with white racism.

The Assault on Empiricism

In a thousand subtle ways, ideological bias can not only shape whole disciplines and domains of knowledge, but it can also weaponize scholarship against reality. To provide one example from my field: While the large numerical majority of police shooting victims in the U.S. are Caucasian, Black Americans are disproportionately likely to be shot by cops. We make up 13%-14% of the U.S. population, and roughly 25% of those fatally shot by law enforcement personnel in a typical year. However—and far fewer citizens know this—the Black violent crime rate is almost exactly 2.5 times the white violent crime rate, and any adjustment for this or for the racial difference in police encounter rate eliminates the discrepancy.

But many leftist academics have begun to argue that the crime rate disparity is simply itself more evidence of racism. Dr. Ibram Kendi, author of How to Be an Antiracist and a professor at American University, famously contends that any gap in performance between large groups must be due to systemic bias somewhere, and there are points that can be made about (say) differential enforcement of the United States’ drug laws. Though badly flawed, as I have noted elsewhere, nevertheless these arguments are widely accepted. And, whether a particular scholar concludes that patterns of American police violence are racist or not might well depend on whether or not she believes these claims and so excludes differential crime rates from her models as a predictor variable.

In this environment, a smart skeptic would expect that “solo leaders” in academia and the media will behave in much the same fashion as those sitting in the courts. Rather than presenting impartial empirical evidence, research results will often strongly reflect the ideological priors of those producing the research. Taking the very simple “crime rates” example given above, in a situation where the vast majority of academic sociologists lean to the political left, we would expect a comparable percentage of researchers to drop the crime-differential variable from their equations and thus conclude that American police operate in a racially biased fashion.

Let’s say that 90% of conservatives and Libertarians believe in a paradigm X (“Most policing is fair and nonbiased”), while 90% of leftists believe in paradigm Y (“All Western institutions are corrupt”), we would expect 87.3% of sociologists (.97 x .9) to believe in paradigm Y and to reason forward from it. As the examples and data given above indicate, considerable evidence exists that essentially this is true.

In a thousand subtle ways, ideological bias can not only shape whole disciplines and domains of knowledge, but it can also weaponize scholarship against reality.

But there is a bright spot to the discovery of entrenched ideological bias in academia. We can actually use attitudinal analysis to determine, with some accuracy, which ideas are truly bad. Citizens are frequently told that “the majority of the scholars in (Z) field” support one thing or another—with “gender affirming care” for minors being a recent example—and that the hoi polloi should not question the expert consensus. However, from an attitudinal perspective, whether such opinion majorities are relevant depends heavily upon the ideological priors of the experts in question. If field Z leans 85% to the left, and 90% of American leftists support transgender surgeries for minors, but only 60% of the .85 leftist pool of experts does, this actually indicates that gender affirming care is probably a terrible idea: Those most aware of the potential risks of the procedure are far more opposed to it than ideological peers with less empirical “inside information.”

Interestingly, something like this just occurred in the real world. The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) recently drew headlines after publicly reaffirming support for gender surgeries and hormone treatments for teenagers. However, the very left-leaning organization did so only after a hotly contested vote on an opposing resolution (“Addressing Alternatives to the Use of Hormone Therapies for Gender Dysphoric Youth”), which received 57 public endorsements from AAP members during the very brief period leading up to the referendum. Whatever their own politics may be, the nation’s leading academic pediatricians are by no means as actually unified on this issue as MSNBC makes them sound.

More broadly, a technique that could be used to develop a general attitudinal adjustment for field-specific bias is as follows: Simply determine (1) the L/R ideological breakdown of a particular academic field or sector, (2) the level of support for thing A within that sector, and (3) the level of support for thing A across all of the L/R ideological groups in society. This allows the calculation of (4) what level of support for thing A would almost certainly look like if the field ideologically matched society as a whole. Overall, we can probably say that popular niche ideas (“Defund and disarm the police”) that would be roundly rejected by any group that resembles the actual population are likely to be bad ones—and that ideas which are more often rejected than one would expect, even by partisan but experienced experts, are very likely to be bad ones.

But, in any case—while we’re calculating percentages—recall that there is a 100% chance that the output of any field at any time heavily reflects the ideological tastes of the very human people who make it up. We should recognize this, try to shift ideological monocultures at the extremes, and never ignore reality.

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The "incorrectness" of mobile phone evidence in rape cases

Bettina Arndt

‘Why are the police withholding evidence?’ The young man’s cry of bewilderment is understandable. The PhD student came to Australia from a country where citizens have good reason to be nervous about facing its justice system. But he expected more from his chosen place of study, a liberal democracy boasting adherence to the rule of law.

That’s the claim. The reality is different, at least when it comes to sexual assault. He’s been accused of rape by an ex-girlfriend who was angry when he refused to get back together with her after their initial breakup. He has phone recordings of her telling him she’ll drop the charges if he falls into line, plus her social media messages pleading for sex long after the alleged assault.

But the police aren’t interested. They refused to properly examine the accuser’s mobile phone, claim they’d been unable to view her chat messages apart from a few carefully selected messages, and refused to examine copies of the full conversations from the student’s phone.

‘My chat messages were enough to prove perjury, yet the police still decided to go ahead and charge me. It seems like everything I have worked for in my life is on the way to destruction,’ wrote the despairing student.

The role of phone evidence in proving guilt or innocence in sexual assault cases is a hot button issue. Police and prosecutors are now routinely withholding or deleting phone evidence that could be used to exonerate accused men. The feminist demand for privacy for victims trumps the search for truth regarding the alleged crime. And the public push for more rape convictions means impediments like exculpatory evidence are conveniently overlooked or swept aside.

In Australia, this issue usually emerges only in the stories of individual men seeking justice in our courts but in the UK, the controversy is playing out in a very public arena.

Five years ago, I wrote about a huge scandal when a series of high-profile British rape cases fell apart because it was discovered the police and prosecutors had withheld social media evidence that could have disproved complainants’ claims. The best known was Liam Allan, where the disclosure of 40,000 text messages revealed his accuser had pestered him for sex. Allan avoided a likely ten-year prison sentence only because the prosecution barrister, after the trial had actually commenced, insisted the police hand over the phone evidence to the defence lawyers.

This was only one of many cases that collapsed due to very late disclosure of mobile phone evidence which challenged the complainant’s claims. With one man, Danny Kay, the evidence which exonerated him came to light only after he had served four years of his sentence.

One amusing sideline to the whole kerfuffle was the Metropolitan Police announcing that they were ditching their previous practice of ‘believing all victims.’

As Dr Rick Bradford explains in his excellent blog The Empathy Gap, the press interest in these disclosure failures pushed the Crown Prosecution Service into conducting an investigation but the resulting report was ‘a disgraceful exercise in obfuscation’.

In stepped the Justice Select Committee which is required to oversee such matters. Their report included all manner of revealing statements, including the fact that prosecutors underestimate the number of cases which fell apart due to disclosure errors ‘by around 90 per cent.’

The Select Committee had very clear advice for the prosecution services, namely:

‘Prosecutors must always act in the interests of justice and not solely for the purpose of obtaining a conviction.

‘It is fundamentally important that all police officers recognise both that they are searching for the truth and that they have core disclosure duties which are central to the criminal justice process.’

The key issue in the battle over disclosure is privacy, with the feminists arguing that it violates a complainant’s privacy to demand her phone correspondence. Whilst acknowledging this is important the Select Committee stated that this factor was trumped by other considerations: ‘The law is clear in that the right to a fair trial is an absolute right which cannot be violated to protect the right to privacy,’ they said, putting the onus on the prosecutors to actively address disclosure issues.

Along came a new DPP, Max Hill, who made it clear whose side he was on in his first public speech. ‘Rape complainants must have their personal privacy, including mobile phone records, protected,’ he said. He showed the feminists that he was their man, and the sound work of the Select Committee went down the gurgler.

According to Bradford, the disclosure issue then dropped from the public agenda and feminists were soon on the march demanding rape prosecution decisions be taken out of the hands of the Crown Prosecution Service. Boris Johnson responded by promising targets on the police to refer more ‘high quality’ rape cases.

Here’s Bradford: ‘And how, exactly, are the police supposed to improve the “quality” of rape cases? Well, that’s simple. They try hard to build a prosecution case, but they put no effort into finding exculpatory evidence. In other words, they revert to the negligent practices which led to the debacles of the recent past – disclosure failures.’

The ultimate irony is DDP Hill has now launched Operation Soteria – in Greek mythology, Soteria was the goddess of safety and deliverance from harm. But Hill’s deliverance works only one way. He’s requiring police to work with the DPP to ‘build the best possible cases more quickly … to drive up the number of successful prosecutions’.

Last year I quoted the prominent Sydney silk, Margaret Cunneen, a former Crown Prosecutor, speaking at The Presumption of Guilt Conference run by the Rule of Law Education Centre. She revealed that Australian police are now required to refer to complainants as ‘victims’ and treat them accordingly, pushing all cases through to trial. ‘There’s not much more investigation that goes on. There’s a zeal to get to the end and convict the charged person.’

NSW Police Commissioner Mick Fuller reinforced this point when he said, ‘As police, our primary role is to support victims who courageously come forward to police to report sexual assault.’ Nothing about the right to a fair trial. No mention of the search for the truth.

In our courts, the consequences are clear. Just before Christmas, a jury acquitted a young man in a retrial of a sexual assault case which had cost a Sydney family six years of their lives and over $650,000 in legal fees. The family is now suing the NSW Police for gross negligence over withholding phone evidence that ultimately contributed to their son’s acquittal.

It all started in 2016 when their son – I’ll call him ‘Michael’ – was at a boozy party on NSW’s Central Coast. Most of the young people present were totally wasted after a long night of drinking and drugs. Suddenly a girl jumped up from the couch where she had been spooning with Michael, and claimed she had woken up to find his fingers in her vagina. She later made a further accusation about him doing a similar thing three years earlier at another party, yet they’d remained good friends in the interim.

Three years later the case was decided. Michael was found guilty of sexual assault. A sympathetic judge sentenced him to 450 hours community service, taking into account his history of depression. But this young bloke had become a convicted felon, listed on the sex offender register, and marked for life.

Michael’s father, Colin, decided to appeal and that’s when things really got interesting. They employed an ex-cop with the skills to investigate Michael’s mobile phone. The police claimed it had been sealed away in the period leading up to the trial but in fact, it had been tampered with and critical conversations erased or not provided to the defence. Plus, it was revealed they had cloned his phone so they could monitor Michael’s emails and phone messages and track his movements.

The scene was set for Margaret Cunneen to make mincemeat of the accuser’s story in the retrial, as she forensically exposed holes in the stories of the accused and her friends.

Michael’s accuser repeatedly claimed he had assaulted her with his left hand, until it was revealed that hand was incapacitated due to surgery. Then she conveniently switched her claim to the right.

Then there was the size of the couch, which Cunneen proved was unlikely to have fitted the hulking young man and his victim if he assaulted her from behind, as alleged, unless he was somehow holding her in place.

Hundreds of social media messages were now available to prove the accuser had pursued Michael, even after the first alleged assault.

How about the fact when she woke up and allegedly found his fingers in her vagina she just asked him, ‘What’s the time?’ No sign of distress or alarm, only growing discomfort when she later realised everyone had seen her making out with Michael, who was a friend’s ex-boyfriend.

The jury made the decision to toss the case out in less than 2 hours. Once they were presented with the truth at retrial, the decision was easy.

Michael had a family who had the resources and faith to see justice was done. Pity the other falsely accused when our police and prosecutors believe only victims and do their darndest to make sure that is the only story heard.

https://spectator.com.au/2023/01/mobiles-in-the-dock/ ?

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Feud Over Soccer Player Refusing to Kneel Gets Worse After She Wins $100K Settlement

Wanting others to kneel before their beliefs is intrinsic to Leftism

A First Amendment feud between a college soccer player and her school has only grown worse despite the fact that she won a large monetary settlement.

Former Virginia Tech women’s soccer player Kiersten Hening filed a lawsuit against head coach Charles “Chugger” Adair, saying that he verbally attacked her and decreased her playing time after she refused to kneel in support of the Black Lives Matter movement.

She eventually agreed to a monetary settlement of $100,000, which included no wrongdoing on the part of her or the coach. But although a settlement has been reached, the fighting seems to be far from over. In fact, it has only gotten worse.

On Monday, 76 current and former Virginia Tech women’s soccer players signed a statement in defense of Adair, claiming that the allegations against him were baseless and that Hening was lying.

“We have spent countless hours training, traveling and playing under his leadership and are devastated and appalled to see his character and integrity severely impugned,” the statement reads.

“We firmly believe that these allegations are nothing more than a distorted representation of the facts.”

First of all, many of the players graduated before these events allegedly took place and before Hening was even on the team. How do they know what happened between her and Adair?

Also, this statement does not disprove Hening’s allegations; it just proves that these players have the same political beliefs as the coach. It seems likely that they just want Hening to face punishment for her politics.

Furthermore, if her claims were baseless as the statement claims, why did the university pay the $100,000 settlement? The fact that Virginia Tech agreed to dole out that amount of money suggests that the university believes the case was credible.

Adair, for his part, released a statement on Twitter after the settlement was reached, saying, “Today, we have the clarity that this case lacked any standing, and without evidence, the truth has prevailed.” But Twitter was quick to put a context label under the tweet, noting that he had agreed to the settlement.

This looks like another example of someone in a progressive environment being bullied for not submitting to the woke mob.

We have seen that sports, especially the NFL and women’s soccer, have increasingly become a platform for woke athletes and celebrities to preach about leftist causes, while conservatives have been chased out and silenced.

It seems that in this case, though, people are being held accountable, and while the settlement did not include an admission of wrongdoing, it was an indication that the left can no longer just bully people into compliance

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The importance of sincerity

Nick Kastelein comments from Australia. Had he been a traditional Australian, he might have spoken of the importance of being "fair dinkum"

When it comes to the Culture Wars in 2023, I have two simple resolutions:

* Assume they are sincere.

* Be sincere.

Recently I consumed as much of the speeches of Professor Stephen Kotkin as I could find for free online.

For those who are unfamiliar with his work, Stephen Kotkin is a historian who knows more about the Russian Revolution than most people know about their children. He is a fellow of the Hoover Institution, and you really need to listen to his insights – especially in light of the war unfolding in Ukraine.

One of his comments about the dictatorship of Joseph Stalin stands out strongly in my memory. He said that the communists in Stalin’s circle were sincere. They truly believed in communism. They loved and needed Stalin’s leadership because he was truly dedicated to the communist cause and worked tirelessly for it. He even tried to resign a few times but his cabinet wouldn’t let him.

There is a temptation when we don’t agree with someone, and lack the ability to put ourselves in their shoes, to instead assume that they are insincere in their beliefs.

‘They say it is about equality, but really it is all about power.’ ‘They say they want justice, but really they are trying to relieve feelings of guilt.’ ‘The communists didn’t really support Stalin, they were just afraid of him.’

We filter their actions through our worldview, rather than seeking to understand theirs.

Even though these positions may sometimes be true, assuming sincerity is the best workable way to interact with those we disagree with from opposing political viewpoints. If they are insincere, and perhaps they are, then that is their problem; but if we assume their insincerity, then we become the problem.

Just because you cannot personally sympathise with an ideology does not mean that someone else does not actually, genuinely, think the things they declare. Assuming insincerity is a dangerous fallacy, which I also have been guilty of. I’ve also been on the receiving end of this error from progressive-minded people who assumed that my conservative views must be motivated by fear or resentment. It is abominably frustrating! By all means, imagine my ideas to be delusional, but at least show me the courtesy of believing me properly deluded.

If you cannot empathise with what someone thinks, then perhaps you haven’t thought about their position enough. And you probably haven’t talked to them enough. If you do, you may find that their views have been reasoned from different facts, or even a different worldview that departs from yours at a deeper level than you have yet explored.

Why this caution now? Because when I heard it suggested that Victoria returned their Labor government due to ‘Stockholm Syndrome’, it didn’t reflect what I know of Labor voters and of many Victorians. No, the problem is both bigger and simpler… A large swathe of voters genuinely think that Dan Andrews is a force for good and that he is truly giving them what they want in a leader.

It increasingly feels like the Left hold the West’s political centre of gravity. Theirs is the viewpoint that is normalised by our culture. They enjoy a ‘home-ground advantage’ of sorts. The Left always argue from their principles, whereas everyone else has first to argue for their principles. If you say ‘all people should be treated equally’, everyone sagely nods their head, but if you say ‘people should be free to speak their minds’, their brows crinkle and they start muttering, ‘yes, well… no freedom is absolute…’

Though truly the change is oversimplified by the Left/Right political dichotomy. A total progressive package of views on the environment, sex, race, identity, religion, and economics bubble up together from an underlying worldview that goes beyond politics.

It’s interesting to speculate how and why so much of the population have become more communist than Marx… Some blame the many institutions that have themselves been occupied by the Left – media, education, and entertainment. The progressive package is pervasive and the latest generation of young adults – Generation Z – have been steeped in it since birth. Doubtless, this plays a role.

I personally consider a more relevant factor to be that Australia is two generations removed from anything approaching real hardship. The left-wing utopic vision of a cost and obstacle-free life has been true for most people, especially those dwelling in the metropolis. Why should they believe that it doesn’t work or can’t last?

Perhaps our having fewer children is also a factor? Perhaps it is not really wealth, responsibility at work, or accumulated wisdom that makes people more conservative when they get older, but rather that it is a side-effect of having children. Young families are little microcosms of a welfare state and a very practical lesson in supply-side economics!

Whatever the cause for the political distribution that we now enjoy, we ought to assume that it is sincere. That does not mean that we should assume it is irreversible. I doubt very much that the politics of Generation Z is unshakable or that it is all hopeless. Instead, I’m concerned that many are supportive of the Left because they’ve never seen the Right put up a fight. They’ve never seen it courageously championed.

Which brings me to my second point. Regardless of how hopeless or otherwise our society’s current predicament may be, there is only one palatable path forward for each of us:

Be sincere.

I didn’t watch much of Victoria’s election night, but I switched on long enough to see one unfortunate Liberal being hounded by, well, everyone else on the ABC’s panel. It was agonising to watch:

‘You’re raiding the future fund!’

‘No, we’re paying off debt.’

‘By raiding the future fund, yes?’

‘No, we’re not, we’re paying off debt.’

From the fear of a negative soundbite, the Liberal refused to say something basically true – that they were planning to raid the future fund.

No wonder they lost. How about fighting for a decision you truly believe in? How about saying, ‘Yes, we’re using the future fund, because a government in debt shouldn’t have a freaking future fund.’ How about saying, ‘Only a moron holds a high-interest debt in one hand, and a low-interest deposit in the other. Your viewers know this – people at home would at least set up an offset account for their home loan! It’s a good policy and I’ll defend it to the hilt!’

I can imagine why he didn’t say that. Various political consultants and thinkers had carefully decided how they should most advantageously characterise their policies. They looked at the statistics – raiding the future fund won’t poll well. The net effect of all this strategising? He couldn’t even back a basically good and very ‘Liberal’ policy on election night after the polls were closed!

There’s a big lie in the world of politics. I heard it stated explicitly by a senator last year. The lie is this: the main task of a political party is to win elections.

Actually, it isn’t. The main task of a party is to stand for what their members stand for. The main task of the Liberal Party, then, is to be the Liberal Party. With that in mind, winning an election is not about changing the soul of the party to become what the people want, but to convince those people to change what they want – to win the argument that your politics and philosophy is worth choosing. The job of the Liberal Party when campaigning is to convince the people that they ought to be Right-wing because it is the right thing to be.

Many on the political Right look with a sense of dread and depression at the Australian electorate, for all the reasons mentioned above. They despair over the seemingly intransigent Generation Z vote – will it ever sway to the right? Do we even have any means left to us to get through to these brainwashed fledglings? So they try to ‘connect’ to the younger generations, speaking to their beliefs and priorities and embarrassing themselves hopelessly in the process.

Instead, we need to quit our defeatist whining! I refuse to believe that Gen Z are so radically different. They’re just young, they’re not Martians! Whether it works of not, we need to see more courageous dissent. And it might work! It isn’t natural for the social centre of gravity to sit so far from the centrist position, and truth is inherently stronger than lies.

In any case, we cannot win by pretending to be what we are not. If we aren’t genuine, then we have lost before we start. If we aren’t genuine, then even if we win, we didn’t win, our façade won. What fighter fights for a hollow victory?

I’ve framed this so far in terms of politics, where I have been most frustrated, but it is true in any matters of difference of opinion. Any issues where truth is at stake.

I’m cautious to give a specific example, because I don’t want to be guilty of Monday morning quarterbacking, but too many times recently, I have watched truth being smothered to death by the comfy pillow of winsomeness. It comes with a persistent smile, and persistent evasive non-answers; it’s so polite, and it’s so understandable. We just want to choose what direction we illuminate the truth from – we want to pick the lighting and the backdrop so it looks sexy. We want to prevent our message from being misrepresented, or we want to avoid giving offence.

Well, that’s what we tell ourselves our reasons are. But sometimes we just don’t want to be disliked, or we lack faith in the truth of our own position, which is more devastating.

Don’t get me wrong. There is wisdom in winsomeness. Communication across barriers of difference ought to be strategic and even crafty, or you’ll be eaten alive. Sometimes withholding the truth is ‘not casting pearls before swine’, and sometimes deflecting a question is the more surely to argue the more pertinent point. But it must not come at the cost of honesty and sincerity.

The problem is when winsomeness goes from being the method to being the goal. The ultimate goal is to expose and defend something that is right and true. Sometimes the truth itself is confrontational. When the truth needs to make an impact, it will not thank you for cushioning its fall. When the truth needs to cut, it will not thank you for blunting its edge. Here the truth is trying to set people free, and you’re concerned about opening the prison doors quietly enough not to wake them!

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was a writer and a deep thinker, who was imprisoned in a Russian Gulag. He understood that there is more to being true than saying only things that are true. He wrote, ‘The simple step of the courageous individual is not to take part in the lie.’

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My other blogs. Main ones below:

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)

http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs

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1 comment:

Anonymous said...


The Police should not abandon the "Believe all victims" stance, that simply returns things to the way they were before. The problem isn't that they believe, it's that they fail to ALTER their belief in the light of uncovered evidence.

Believe until it becomes apparent that the "victim" is not actually a victim. That's not too hard to accomplish, it's called "investigation". What the Police were doing in the case was ignoring evidence, that's no way to to run an investigation.

And for Pete's sake, prosecute the liars who try to weaponize the Police to the full extent of the law and after you've done that a few times the word will get out that it's not a good idea to try that kind of stuff because it weakens the cases for the real victims.