Thoughts on America's Foreign Failures

Introduction


We live in a turbulent and effervescent time. This turbulence and effervescence is not limited to the borders of the United States, however; as recent events such as the Arab Spring and the South Sudanese secession have shown, it is a worldwide phenomenon that has, if anything, become more relevant over the past two decades. The United States operates in an increasingly globalized and increasingly interconnected web of international affairs, so it follows logically that we ignore these changes to our peril.
Equally perilous to any nation exercising statecraft in today's sociologically and economically influenced world of global politics is an ignorance of history, especially recent history. A nation which acts in a manner that is historically ill-informed will necessarily be unable to understand the cause-and-effect of its own actions. It will blunder about in the manner of a man trying to kill a butterfly with a hatchet, and will soon come to heel when the international community begins to recoil from such heavy-handed buffoonery.
It is my contention that The United States is just such a hatchet-man. Our foreign and diplomatic policies are bringing us closer and closer to international humiliation, and when combined with our military polices, are making us less secure and less free. Further, if our over-arching diplomatic goal is to serve as a model and example for the rest of the world- small developing nations in particular- and to spread democracy, then those goals are ill-served by our present stature and system of policy.


Concept: Blowback


Perhaps the chief lesson that our policy-makers must learn, vis-a-vis correcting the above noted ignorance, is the lesson we are taught by the (surprisingly intuitive) phenomenon which the CIA was the first to label. The name that 'The Agency' gave this phenomenon is both crudely descriptive and memorable, so it is the name that I shall use for the purview of this post: 'blowback.'
Indulge me, if you will, in a thought experiment. The United States, lets say, has just elected a new president in an open and fair election, and that president has broad support from a clear majority of American citizens.
This president is not, however, to the liking of the Canadian government. This new president-elect has promised to engage in policies which the Canadians find to be against their own principles. So the Canadians, acting unilaterally, send covert operatives to Washington to assassinate this potential threat.
Once they have done so, the Canadian government seizes upon the turmoil that follows in the wake of the assassination to install a puppet president of their choosing. They then begin to fund this puppet regime to support a vast military presence (perhaps even supplemented with Canadian troops) which would be used to police the nation, to the detriment of freedoms and rights of citizens all across the United States.
Imagine how you, as an American citizen, would feel. Imagine the resentment toward Canada that would well up inside you. Think of how such an intrusion would tend to foster rebellious and insurgent tendencies. Even if the puppet regime operated in such a manner that it benefited you; providing education, jobs, et cetera; imagine how you would naturally feel affronted and frustrated with the interference in your sovereign affairs by an alien, foreign power.
One could easily understand the motivations of, and perhaps even sympathize with the methods of, an American underground resistance movement in such a circumstance. A resistance which targeted Canadian presence and Canadian influence by actively disrupting military and government operations would be a logical consequent of the above described Canadian interference. The group may even go so far as to strike at the Canadian homeland in order to make a political statement about the solidarity of the American people.
Have you imagined this scenario thoroughly? If you haven't please do so before reading on. It is imperative that you understand that sensation of being occupied; the realization that your nation is no longer sovereign, but is instead a de-facto subject.
What does this have to do with blowback? Well, put simply, blowback means this: people the world over resent having their internal affairs muddled with, and when a powerful nation interferes with a weaker nation, that weaker nation's population will almost inevitably think of that interference as a belligerent and unwelcome presence, and will react accordingly. When a powerful nation attempts to manipulate smaller or weaker states, those states will tend to see those attempts as hostile, and will often react with hostility in kind.
It follows that any nation engaged in such activity must expect some sort of deleterious reaction from the indigenous peoples involved. Speaking in terms of concrete example, America cannot engage in the activity of managing foreign nations, especially by using force or coercion, without stirring up anti-American sentiment and, on occasion, anti-American actions.
There is an important counterpoint to be made here: the concept of blowback and the idea espoused above (that nations should be aware of the consequences of their actions in this regard) is most emphatically not to say that smaller nations (or groups therein) are justified in using whatever tactics they choose to cast off the imperialistic influence of or interference from larger nations. Again, to cite a specific example, regardless of the actions of the United States in the Middle-East throughout the latter half of the 20th century, the terrorists who attacked the World Trade Center were not justified or vindicated in doing so.

That having been said, it should have been immediately clear to all Americans why they did what they did; and no, it wasn't because they hated our decadence and freedom or for any religious ideals (though I'll not deny that those were contributing factors). Primarily, and foremost, it was because of their political motivations in response to the perceived arrogance and belligerence of the United States in particular; the Western world in general. And we, in the United States, should be wary of undertaking the same sorts of actions which provoked (though, I repeat, do not not excuse) those attacks.


The Rise of Terrorism,  Through The Lens of Blowback


The last quarter of the 20th century and the first decade of the 21st has become, to any but the most disinterested of observers, the age of the terrorist in the same way that the gilded age was the era of the tycoon and the 1950s post-war period belonged to the Communists. Terrorism has become the great evil that defines our time; the scourge against which what seems like our entire national effort is directed. International terrorism has become the bogeyman hiding in our collective closet- and closet is an apt metaphor here, for we as a nation insist on looking away from the problem as if shutting it out of our minds or responding to it with crude force is enough to make it go away.
Yet perhaps Frankenstein's monster is a better metaphor to use when talking about terrorists. And the metaphor holds further, for just as when young Victor tried to create a beautiful new life he instead breathed existence into a hideous monster hell-bent on tormenting its naive and misguided creator, today's terrorists are the perverted and misshapen result of our best efforts at breathing new life into nation-states around the world. Just as Victor was insufficient as a man to play the role of God, so are we as a nation insufficient for playing the role of arbiter of the world's geopolitical landscape.
If we look at what are today the hotspots of terrorism around the world, we inevitably find that in the recent past, those were areas of intense Western (in particular, American) intervention.
In the 1950s, when Iranian revolutionaries overthrew the oppressive (and pro-Western) Shah and installed their own popularly elected leader, we went in and covertly removed him and re-installed a repressive regime, only to have that regime once again overthrown in 1979. This was, of course, followed by the now infamous capture of the US Embassy's staff who were then subsequently held hostage. While we feigned surprise at this action, the Iranian students who carried it out knew precisely why they did it, and they were happy to tell anyone who asked: they did it because of our constant interference in their affairs, and the very real grievance that we had propped up a murderously repressive government in their land.
Subsequently, we funded the war effort of a bellicose young dictator named Saddam Hussein in his bloody war against Iran all throughout the 1980s, providing both money and materiel to keep his sustained offensive going. This war cost many Iranian lives, a fact that certainly no Iranian is going to forget. Yet we seem to be genuinely nonplussed when confronted today with an Iran who is vehemently and avowedly anti-American.
Since the 1940s, we have supported a government in Israel which has been nothing if not antagonistic toward the entire Middle-Eastern region, Iran being a part thereof. We seemed to waver between outright support of at best, and mere indifference to at worst, the acquisition of nuclear weapons by a nation (Israel) who has subsequently threatened to use them against Iran (among other nations) should the need arise, while at the same time our opposition to Iran's own nuclear program is unreserved and unyielding, even going so far as to consider strikes against Iran to prevent them from furthering it. Yet we wonder why it is Iran is so willing to harbor and fund known terrorists with such a violent anti-Western and anti-American streak.
Now, I'll not go so far as to say that Iran is justified in doing anything that it has done (or that it will be justified in doing whatever it plans to do). I'll not say that Iran's actions (and the actions of those harbored by Iran) against the West and America are morally correct. In fact, if anything, Iran displays a moral culpability by housing murderous terrorists, etc. However, for us to view Iran's actions as unprovoked is quite simply wrong.
Whether what Iran does is moral or not, though, is neither important to the point that I am making nor to the application of realpolitik in today's international climate. What is important, however, is that we understand that our actions today influence the reactions of tomorrow; that our belligerence and heavy-handedness today inspire the revolutionaries and reactionaries of tomorrow. We cannot continue to cross our fingers and hope for the best- not all revolutionaries are liberal and not all reactionaries are benign.
As if this were not evidence enough, I now quote the infamous Osama bin Laden in his 1998 fatwa entitled Jihad Against Jews and Crusaders (Crusaders being a radical-Islamist term for Westerners) on his reasons for wishing to attack the United States:

"First, for over seven years the United States has been occupying the lands of Islam in the holiest of places, the Arabian Peninsula, plundering its riches, dictating to its rulers, humiliating its people, terrorizing its neighbors, and turning its bases in the Peninsula into a spearhead through which to fight the neighboring Muslim peoples.
If some people have in the past argued about the fact of the occupation, all the people of the Peninsula have now acknowledged it. The best proof of this is the Americans' continuing aggression against the Iraqi people using the Peninsula as a staging post, even though all its rulers are against their territories being used to that end, but they are helpless."

No more needs to be said. In his own words, the man who masterminded the World Trade Center attacks clearly states his primary reason for doing so: American intervention in his homeland, the Arabian Peninsula. We have been hoist upon our own petard. We have empowered those who already wished to destroy us with the reasons they could then give others to inspire those people to help them do so.

Nation Parenting, National Security, and Failure


Clearly there seems to be an incentive for the West to engage in the manipulation of the internal affairs of other states. Interestingly enough, America in particular has been rather lucid in detailing its motivations.
First, according to America, they seek to spread liberal democracy 'round the world, providing all peoples with the liberties of self-determination and 'human rights.' When asked to justify America's global interventionism, those who defend her policies often cite this goal as chief among many. In this view, America is a generous entity, taking on the role almost that of a parent, chastising the adolescent spasms of nations around the world and correcting their behavior with the end-state of betterment as the desired outcome. 
Second, and today almost as commonly cited as the first, is the maxim that America must retain an overseas influence in order to remain secure against threat in her homeland. America must, so the story goes, actively counter and thwart any (potential) threat against her before it materializes into an actual strike. To advocates of this strategy (if it can be called that), the best defense is a good offense.
Though there are many other rationales, I will focus on these two alone because, together with being the ones most commonly referred to, they are the two with the most important rebuttal in terms of adjusting our current national policy, since they are the two which inform it the most. Both of these claims would be valid justifications for America's present national foreign policy where they true, yet unfortunately for the supporters of global interventionism, they are palpably false.
The first is an example of a logical conundrum. When America interferes with a foreign state to influence it's government, it is always to the end of fashioning that foreign government into a facsimile of our own. The local people are only give a modicum of real choice and latitude in determining their own fate; one need look no further than the regimes propped up in Iraq and Afghanistan to see that. Just as Henry Ford once (supposedly) said, "you can have the Model T in any color so long as it's black," American intervention seems to tell struggling states around the world, "you can have any form of self-determination you want, so long as that self-determination looks just like ours." Further, the newly forged micro-Americas are expected to be not only reliant upon America's foreign aid (the better to retain control over them!), but also to genuflect before American national goals and policies. They are not, then, truly sovereign, but closer to puppet-states or colonies, in all but name. If that sounds like self-determination and the spread of true democracy to you, then you are profoundly deluded.
The second is morally abhorrent. It implicitly seeks to sustain a policy of perpetual prophylactic war. Let us not delude ourselves; war is death. War is misery. War is always a terrible, impoverishing, wasting, destructive, and murderous affair. Sometimes, there are worse things than war; it is then, and only then, that war is justified. We do not execute citizens who might become murderers; we ought not wage war against those who might one day attack us. We certainly should not use war as a tool for forwarding our national agenda in the way that we currently do - it is morally reprehensible that we send our troops around the globe and engage in preemptive strikes. But all of this begs the question. If we've engaged in a policy of prophylactic war aimed at keeping us safer here at home, and we have, then has is been successful?


Are We Safer Now?


With troops stationed in nations around the globe, with the Pentagon's yearly outlays increasing with no end in sight, with new and more terrible weapons constantly under development, and with the wars of the past two decades, each billed at least in part as a step toward a more secure world for America, are we safer now having done all of it?
The short answer is, to little surprise, no.
Look at what has happened where we have exerted the greatest national effort, in money and in lives, over the last 10 years and you'll see my point:
In the time that we have been in Iraq, we have caused the deaths of thousands of Iraqis, combatants, non-combatants, and 'other' alike. The government cobbled together is corrupt and ineffective, broken by sectarian strife and civil grievances alike. For the duration of our combat presence there, what would otherwise have been marginal groups have found the popular support they needed to carry out civil terrorism all throughout Iraq.
In the decade (and more) that we have been in Afghanistan, we have done far more damage. Al Qaeda continues to draw popular support in Afghanistan and in neighboring nations (such as Pakistan) because of our military presence there. As is the case with Iraq, the government we inflicted on the Afghan people is totally incompetent at providing basic services (which still must be provided by the "coalition" military forces), and reeks with corruption from the provincial level on down.
Because of these blunders and missteps, those who seek to portray America as an evil power bent on taking over the world have had to do little work in convincing their neighbors. Anti-American sentiment has not decreased since our invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, they have increased. More Americans have died in the mountains of Afghanistan and the sands in Iraq than have ever died from terrorist attacks on American soil, and a great many more have had their lives forever altered by misshaping, mutilating injuries and the terrible demons of PTSD. Point blank: the cost in lives, money, and materiel that we have given ourselves far outstrip anything that terrorists have ever done to us. 
Further, our continued presence in the Middle East is assuredly empowering the leaders of groups like Al Qaeda and others who can now point at current events as an 'I-Told-You-So' in their polemic anti-American rants. Even as you read this article, the next generation of terrorists are training to attack America, and plans are most certainly in the works to carry those attacks out. Our blowback is coming.
Just as our ham-handedness in Iran led inextricably to the situation we now face with them, our crude and blunt military occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq are informing and arming the terrorists and rogue-states of the 2020s. We are today laying the foundations that the demons of tomorrow will use to prop up their scaffolding of backwards ideologies, radical Islam, jihad, and hate.
We are more vulnerable, more at risk, today than we ever have been because we insist on prodding the hornet's nest again and again. The terrorists thwarted our best efforts to curtail them in 2001; they will do so again whenever they have been provoked enough.


Changes In America's Global Position


All of the mistakes I have detailed above, combined with our explicitly stated national intention not to change radically the foreign policies that induced them, have led to a standing in the world that has diminished greatly from just a century ago. In some ways America retains a hegemony; our economy is still (for the time being) the world's strongest and our military still ostensibly the world's most effective. Yet in the 'hearts and minds' (to shamelessly borrow the phrase with tongue planted firmly in cheek) of leaders and citizens around the world, we are a tarnished nation on the descent.
In the past century, our nation has gone from being a creditor to being a debtor, in hock to China, among others, to an degree that would embarrass any other sensible nation. It has gone from a position of moral eminence and from an ethical high-ground to being a perpetrator of nearly endless war and death, raining our bombs on brown people the world over for the slightest offense. It has gone from being a place of refuge for the disaffected and oppressed masses the world over to being an imperialistic world-cop supporting brutal regimes whenever it serves convenience or expediency.
We have castigated ourselves on the global stage and our conduct in the past 50 years ought to be a cheek-reddening humiliation to anyone who loves this nation, as I most certainly do.
As a nation, what is imperative now is that we begin to curb our offenses as immediately as we possibly can, that we might work toward regaining some of our once immense credibility. Our list of allies and supporters is growing thinner by the year, and that is naught but our own fault. We must cease our morally terrible and strategically damning policy of global interventionism now, lest we stand alone as a hated and reviled has-been shell of a nation, an outcome most certainly not too far over the present horizon.


Conclusion


As we have seen, our current policies are neither strategically desirable nor ethical. They do not serve our national interests and, in fact, by turning away our allies and creating resentful new enemies, they precisely counter what is good for us as a nation both in the short term and in the long run.
Our fling with interventionist world policing has failed utterly and terribly. We are now beginning to reap the harvest we have sown: our total national debt is now greater than our yearly Gross Domestic Product, thousands of Americans have been put into body-bags and as many family have been destroyed as a direct result of our actions, money and resources that could have been used to fix our ailing Midwestern region, hit so hard by the recession, have instead been invested in the failed attempt to fix the Middle East. We cannot sustain our present course for much longer.
I leave you, dear reader, with this thought:
"[In war,] the best would be this: a life of perpetual fear and tension; a burden of arms draining the wealth and the labor of all peoples; a wasting of strength that defies the American system or the Soviet system or any system to achieve true abundance and happiness for the peoples of this earth.
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed...
...The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school building in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement.
We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. 
This is, I repeat, the best way of life to be found on the road we have been taking.  
This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron."
The man who spoke those words was no peace-loving leftist liberal campaigning against the invasion of Iraq, nor was it a counterculture hippie from a protest against the Vietnam War, though it serves the purposes of both. It was Dwight D. Eisenhower. 
We must change. Now.

Whence Cometh Rights?

I Have A Right...
Every day, it seems that we hear something about rights. We hear discourse on what constitutes a right and what doesn't, who deserves what rights, which rights are more or less important, whose rights are more or less relevant, and so forth.
What seems to cause many of these issues is a difference in opinion regarding just what a 'right' is. For instance, a fiscal conservative will tell you that it is a person's right to operate a business with little interference from a central government, whereas a liberal might argue that consumers have rights to openness from said business, and so forth. Clearly, there are a myriad of opinions on what constitutes rights, and who has them.
However, it is difficult to say just where the line ought to be drawn for the same reason. Do we have the right to be housed? Fed? Do we have a right to a successful career? A right to love? To happiness?
It seems to me that what is lacking from many of these discussions is an underlying theory of rights, if you will. If we were to agree on a source of rights; a process by which they come into existence, perhaps, or an inferential construct that shows where rights come from, then we might be more inclined to agree on what these rights are in the first place.

What is a 'Right?'
Before we get too deep into this topic, I think it would first be prudent to define just what we mean when we say the word 'right,' as distinct from, say, privileges or something similar.
I think that the easiest way to define a 'right' is to define what it is not: a privilege. A privilege is something which cannot be abridged; it is given by the governing body voluntarily, and can be taken away without moral consequence.
For instance, being permitted to practice medicine.  Nobody in their right mind would argue that each and every person should have a 'right' to perform surgery. However, we all seem to agree that certain members of our society who demonstrate the requisite skill ought to have the privilege of doing so, for all of our benefit.
Now, to the contrary, rights are something a bit more untarnished. A right is more than a privilege; it is something that a government must permit, lest that government be rightly viewed as immoral and unjust.
The right to freedom of expression comes to mind as a handy example. There is something about expression which intrinsically yearns to be free. We rightly judge governments who clamp down on expression in its myriad forms to be totalitarian and oppressive in nature. There is something within this freedom which seems to indicate that it ought to be free, independent of other factors.
Yet again, we're left with the inadequacy of our understanding. We must be able to distinguish where rights come from before we can judge which principles are rights and which are not. Again, some sort of explanatory construct is needed.

Common Explanations for Rights
Something like such a construct is often postulated by those who typically fall on the 'right' of the 'left/right' political spectrum: that rights are inalienable because they are 'god-given.' That is to say, that people are 'created' as 'endowed with certain liberties,' which they then proceed to define in various ways.
This would satisfy our requirements, to be sure. Clearly if this hypothesis were held to be true, it would follow that whichever 'rights' this 'creator' 'endowed' would clearly be the only valid rights; all others would be privileges or the like. 
However, what about those of us who don't accept the claim that such a creator exists (atheists, agnostics, etc)? Or that such a creator would bother to delineate rights (deists, wiccans, etc)?
Clearly, since both scientific evidence and reason point us away from the idea of a creator god, a better explanation for rights must be found.
Another explanation for the origin of rights, at least here in the United States, is that they are bestowed by the Constitution. Such a claim can be relatively easily countered by simply asking two questions:
Do non-Americans have rights?
Would your rights go away if the Constitution went away?
Clearly, the answer to the former is 'yes,' and the latter is, 'no.' But these answers drill a hole in the middle of the 'rights come from the Constitution' argument, and for obvious reasons. So, again, this is an inadequate explanation.
Call it arrogant, but I think that I've hit upon an explanation of where natural rights could come from without invoking a supreme being or claiming that they're bestowed by a mutable document.

Imagine A Person Alone
To begin, I'd like you to image a single person alone in the word. For sake of argument, let's imagine that it is today's world; indistinguishable from how the world is right at this moment save for the fact that it is inhabited by one person only.
What may this person decide to do?
Clearly, he or she may decide to write whatever they wish on whatever subject they wish. They may speak whatever words they wish. They may create whatever art they wish, and display it. And so forth.
They may go wherever they wish of their own volition. They may eat whatever foods they choose; those that are available, anyhow. They may wear whatever clothes they choose, whatever ornaments they choose.
Now, let us imagine that this person's world is suddenly populated with many other people but, as yet, there are no governments. What may he or she do now?
Clearly, he or she may enter into mutually-agreed-upon arrangements with other people, including transfers of property or social arrangements such as marital union or sexual congress.
Without going into too much redundant detail, I think that you get the idea.

But What Does This Have To Do With Rights?
If you haven't guessed it already, here it is:
I'm arguing that a 'right' is essentially 'that which a person in isolation or in a society free of government has the liberty to do.'
Now, there are important limitation on what this defines as a 'right' that are worth discussing rather early on.
The first is that this definition doesn't include things which our person has not the ability to do. Our person hasn't the right to suspend the law of gravity and float in the air, because he or she lacks that ability, even in isolation.
The next is that there are certain other things which are not, in this model, 'rights.' For instance, being provided food and shelter are not rights, because a person in isolation must provide these things for him/herself, and in our anarchist model, our person may either provide them for him/herself, or enter into an mutually agreed-upon arrangement to acquire these things. In either case, he has the 'right' to undertake the action which leads to being fed, or sheltered. Yet being fed and sheltered are not themselves rights, among others.

Extension
If we assume that this postulate is a valid explanation for where 'rights' come from, then it is rather easy to define, as we have above, what is a right and what isn't.
This comes into sharper focus when we synthesize this idea with the theories of Social Contract as described by, among others, Hobbes, Locke, and Montesqieu.
In a rather brief summary (I encourage you to read the works of the above noted authors if you haven't already for a more detailed, eloquent, and textual exploration of this idea), 'social contract' simply means that governments come about when citizens voluntarily band together for mutual protection and benefit.
An important aspect of this theory is that the people, when doing so, necessarily lose some of their natural rights. They voluntarily give them up in order to acquire things like stability, safety, protection, etc.Viewed this way, we can see that any government is intrinsically a body which abridges some or all natural rights, no matter how virtuous that government may be.
It follows, then, that the best sort of government (when viewed through the lens of liberty) is that which strikes the most economical balance between delivery of these social goods (safety, et al) and the preservation of as many natural rights (i.e. the abridgement of as few natural rights) as possible. In the context of the ideas I outlined above, this means that that government is best which restricts our hypothetical person in isolation the least, all else held equal.

Rights Can Neither Be Created Nor Destroyed
Despite the best efforts of folks on both sides of many debate to claim or assert the contrary, I don't think that natural rights, as described above, may be created or destroyed.
Let's look first at the creation of rights. Can this be done? Well, no. We cannot go back and give our idealized person in isolation any abilities that he or she doesn't already possess and, therefore, we may not give ourselves any new natural rights in the process.
We can, however, acquire new privileges. Privileges may be granted at will, and are limitless in their potential scope and breadth. A government may, if it wishes, provide all of its citizens with the privilege of being given a new car upon graduation from University. However, the granting of this privilege doesn't implicitly or explicitly grant the citizens of this rather generous nation a new 'right.' The distinction is important.
Contrariwise, rights cannot be destroyed either. They may be abridged, true enough. They may be denied. But just as we cannot go into our idealized world of thought experiment and specially endow our person in isolation, we cannot cripple and hobble him, either.
We can, and should, view any attempt to deny people of their natural rights as defined above as immoral, undue, and deride it as such. However, we must remember that we, as humans, still retain those natural rights regardless of whether they are recognized or not and they are, in that sense, inalienable.

You Don't Have The Right...
Clearly, when viewed through this paradigm, there are many 'rights' claimed by all sorts of groups or citizens which are not natural rights in the strictest sense. Now, this is not to say that these principles are not worth protecting as a privilege, just that there is nothing intrinsic about them which dictate a special consideration as immutable or inherent in any way.
An obvious example of this is health care. Many groups around the country have claimed, in my view erroneously, that it is (or ought to be) a right for each citizen to be provided health care throughout his or her life, yet in my view, this is not a right at all (for reasons that, I'm quite certain, are by now clear to you).
It is, however, a privilege which may be a desirable one to bestow on our citizens; at least, upon those who haven't the ability at present to provide it for themselves. That debate is one that can be had, and the fruitful result will hopefully be a policy which is at once economically feasible and compassionate.
Most emphatically, however, this does not bestow any rights! This does not imply that to receive health care is a right! Just that it is a privilege; a privilege which may or may not be granted.
This may sound quotidian or, perhaps, semantic in nature, but I think that it is vastly important to point out which ideals are natural rights and which ones are not.

Conclusion
I hope that, more than anything else, I have inspired you to take a second look at your notions of what constitutes a right and what doesn't, and where those rights really come from.
In the end, I think that liberty and freedom are things worth preserving, and they are ideals which are both increasingly important in our modernizing society and increasingly under attack by those who would seek to profit or gain power at our expense.
I urge you, reader, to identify your rights, and strive however you can to defend and protect them. For they cannot be taken away; they are yours forever; but they can be taken away.
And functionally, that's the same thing.

*Cue the Beastie Boys music*

In Defense of Attacking 'Faith'

Introduction
 

Those of you who don't already follow Grizwald Grim's blog (the link is in my blogroll) really should. His posts are well-thought-out and very well written. In fact, one of his most recent posts, entitled "Atheism in 2012 - The Faithful Deniers of Faith," is the subject of my own blog post here today.

In his post, Griz delineates a subset of atheists who become abraded when they hear things like the accusation that they have as much faith as any religious group, or that atheism is itself some sort of religion (however interpreted) He goes on to compare this group, which he describes as a disproportionately vocal minority of a minority (as it were), with the various 'Occupy' movements, inasmuch as he claims that they both sense a problem but that they also both lack a coherent answer for how to solve it.

I won't go into great detail here summarizing his excellent article,  but I recommend that you read it immediately after finishing this post in order to retain an understanding of context.

Just What IS Faith?

As Griz, and many other commentators on the subject, have quite accurately noted is that the word 'faith' is, like many words in the English language, one with multiple meanings. If quoted from Dictionary.com (like so many people are wont to do), the definition of faith is:

1. confidence or trust in a person or thing: faith in another's ability.

2. belief that is not based on proof

3. belief in God or in the doctrines or teachings of religion

Key to the discussion here are the slight differences between the various definitions provided. But before we go any further, I would like to interject with what I think is a rather more complete definition of the word, this one taken from the Oxford English Dictionary online. The OED defines faith briefly as, "belief, trust, confidence," and then goes on to say,

"[faith is] confidence, reliance, trust (in the ability, goodness, etc., of a person; in the efficacy or worth of a thing; or in the truth of a statement or doctrine). In early use, only with reference to religious objects; this is still the prevalent application, and often colors the wider use,"

and,
“[faith is] belief proceeding from reliance on testimony or authority.”

This definition, which also provides some of the context of etiology, is more instructive in the correct meaning of ‘faith’, however it may be used colloquially today.

The point that I wish to make here, in my own rather obtuse way, is that precisely what a word means is in constant flux, and any word’s precise meaning at any one time is highly dependent upon the context in which it is used.

 

The Functional Definition is the Important One

That having been said, I think that the definition that is most germane to most discussions about the relative merits of faith is the last one, provided by the OED. Discussing the merits and demerits of ‘having confidence and trust in a person or thing’ would be daft, and a waste of almost everyone’s time and effort.

It is also a rather sneaky red-herring, or perhaps a poor attempt at a straw-man, to try to draw the discussion away from the (presumably) generally understood meaning of faith (that is to say, from faith as a ‘confidence… in the truth of a doctrine… [often] with reference to religious objects’ or ‘a belief proceeding from reliance on testimony or authority’) to a rather unrelated definition of faith as some benign confidence or trust in another. Clearly, the readers understand which meaning of faith is intended, and germane, and to draw the discussion away from this definition by proffering another that is technically correct but contextually incorrect is fallacious at best, malicious at worst.

For the purposes of this discussion, as well as any other that I participate in on faith, I think that it is no great leap to assume that you, dear reader, will know quite well which definition of faith that I am referring to, and which I am not.

The Fallacies of Defending Faith

Since it flows rather conveniently from my above point, I would like to take a moment to outline some of the more egregious fallacies that I have found often come up during a discussion of faith, address them each in turn, and then proceed to dismissing them altogether.

Usually, the first objection proffered when I criticize faith is a decidedly droll comment along the lines of, “You criticize it, but you yourself have faith. You have faith that you won’t fall through the chair when you sit down in it [et cetera, et al, ad infinitum…].” Whilst this objection may or may not be true (for a further discussion on the issue, please refer to my blog entry entitled ‘Do We Need Faith?’), it nevertheless commits the fallacy of tu quoque, itself a subtype of the ad hominem fallacy. Essentially, this fallacy is committed when, instead of addressing my argument, the respondent addresses my person; in this case, specifically when they cry ‘yeah, well, you do it too!’ For those not fluent, ‘tu quoque’ transliterates into ‘you too.’

I mentioned it above, but I think that the red herring fallacy deserves a bit more attention, since it is at once subtle and prevalent. Briefly defined, a red herring occurs when the respondent attempts to ever so slightly divert the argument (and discussion) away from the issue at hand and onto a related, but distinct, issue in an attempt to divert the argument away from the point they wish to defend. It gets its name, illustratively, from the practice of dragging a reeking herring fish across a scent path to throw off a bloodhound.

This fallacy occurs all the time, but in the scope of this post, it tends to crop up when I attempt to pin down precisely what faith is, and is not. In order to really criticize something; in order to really attack it; one must first immobilize it. One can far more easily direct the artillery of argument at a stationary target than a fluid and moving one. The defenders of faith seem to know this, consciously or instinctually, and so they consistently resist my attempts at defining faith in general, or their faiths in particular. This is a red herring, and nothing more, and should rightly be dismissed as such.

The final fallacy which I will address specifically here, but by no means the only other fallacy committed in the course of discussions about faith, is the fallacy of the straw man. Time and time again, my arguments are intentionally misrepresented in a rather grotesque and exaggerated manner in order to present a better target for response. 

Claiming that I advocate the repression of religious freedoms, that I intend to abolish religion, or that I find faithful people to be evil (as has been done) is just a rather obvious attempt at redefining my argument as something which it is not. At no point have I made any of the above (rather absurd) arguments; I have only claimed that faith itself is a detrimental mental process, and one which ought to be avoided.

Critique of 'Atheism As Faith' 

Related to each of these fallacies is the counterclaim often posited by the fine folks whom I am often at-odds-with over the issue of faith. This counterclaim comes in two distinct subsets, each of which I will deal with in turn.

The first is that it requires more ‘faith’ to ‘believe’ in atheism than it does to believe in (insert your pet religious dogma here). This is patently incorrect for two independent, yet mutually damning, reasons.

The first reason is rather quotidian, so I need not enter into a long elaboration. The definition of atheism, when one breaks down the word syllabically, is ‘without a belief in god.’ It most emphatically does not mean a belief in the lack of a god, or any other perturbation of those words. It means, quite literally, to be without a belief in god. Therefore, an atheist is one who lacks a belief in god.

I understand that I am repeating myself a bit here, but that is only because the point is so important. Atheism is not a positive statement of belief, it is rather a lack thereof. Consequently, one cannot have faith in atheism, since atheism is not a belief in which faith could be placed.
The second reason that claiming that atheism requires more faith than religion is so absurd is that observational, experimental, and logical evidence all lines up in favor of one and in denial of the other. The simple fact is that faith, the confidence in an idea based upon testimony or authority, is simply not necessary to deny religion, yet is absolutely necessary to accept it. It is religion, not atheism, which requires the buttressing of faith.

Which brings us right along to the second counterclaim; that is, that one must have faith in atheism, as one must have faith in any idea that one holds to be true.

The error this statement commits should now be obvious to you. This is a blatant attempt to use the wrong definition of faith. Clearly, yes, one must have confidence in the efficacy and truth of one’s ideas as a matter of course in holding them to be true. This much is a tautology. But the definition of faith that one would commonly understand to be the one in use when discussing religious issues is the confidence due to authority or testimony and a belief that is not based on truth. 

To use any other definition of faith, explicitly or implicitly, is to not only miss the point, but is also to derail the discussion from productivity to mere point-and-counterpoint semantic quibbling.

Moving Toward a Better Understanding of Faith as a Whole

Obviously, the issue of faith; the question of whether or not it is a good thing; is one which is not to be resolved definitively anytime soon. There is a lot at stake on either side, and each side has a vociferous and committed advocacy.

I think that in order for us to genuinely move forward constructively on the issue, both sides must be willing to approach the discussion with a modicum of decorum and maturity. Part of that decorum must include a mutual willingness to avoid ad hominem attacks of all kinds, and part of that maturity must include a mutual willingness to understand which meaning of a word like faith, which has so many different meanings, is being used.

Clearly, the word ‘faith’ has a different meaning to different people. It also has a different meaning depending on the context in which it is used. Approaching each discussion with the time-honored dictum of seeking first to understand and then to be understood will go a long way toward healing some of the misunderstanding that has regrettably taken place on all sides. 

Uniting Under a Common Banner 

Within the atheist circle, there is a related split; one which Grizwald so clearly delineates in his own blog posts of late. Summarily, there is a widening gulf between atheists of a more benign tack who simply disbelieve in god, and those of us with an admittedly more caustic approach to religion- not simply disbelieving it, but refusing to draw parallels between it and ourselves.

Each has its own validity, and refereeing between them is a role which I don’t intend to take with this post. However, I think that whilst there are very key differences between all atheists (just as there are among all theists), I likewise think that our similarities outweigh these differences.

If we come together as a confederation of reason, and agree that whilst our specific ideas regarding the role of faith in belief, and the goodness or badness of faith itself, may differ widely, our common commitment to reason and skepticism as a means toward understanding the universe will surely serve to bridge those (largely semantic) chasms. 

Why I’m Still Going To Attack Faith

All of that ecumenical rhetoric aside, I would like to make it clear that I intend to continue to decry faith as an outmoded, unnecessary, hugely inaccurate, and potentially very dangerous method of attaining truth. I see faith as a detriment to our modern society, and as I would any other detrimental poison, I intend to criticize it and publically denounce it.

Faith, in the religious sense, is an evil, and the sooner that we recognize it as such and begin the long, uphill battle toward replacing it with reason, the better off that we will be.

Coda

This blog, while not specifically intended as a criticism of faith, has certainly laid the groundwork for such an assault. I encourage you, reader, to begin thinking critically about every idea that you hold to be true, and ask yourself a few questions:

1. Why do I hold this idea to be true?
2. Do I hold this idea to be potentially falsifiable?
3. What would it take for me to abandon or modify this idea?
4. What process led me to this idea- reason? Intuition? Faith? Some other process?

In doing so, I think you will find that there are ideas that each of us hold true that we shouldn’t; ideas which we hold true that need more support of some kind or another.

It is only through this sort of introspection that we can begin to systematically and categorically eliminate the bias of faith from our beliefs and begin to reach a reasoned, rational understanding of the universe.

Do We Need Faith?

The topic that I wish to discuss here is, obviously, faith. I wrote this in response to an argument that I often hear that is phrased in a few different ways. The core of this argument is either that we all have faith in something or another, or that statement's corollary, that we need faith/cannot live life without some sort of faith.

This line of thinking is deeply troublesome to me, for several reasons. But before we launch into my critique of the argument, let us first examine an example of how it is usually brought up in discussion, typically with some form of religious adherent or another (all of these statements have actually been observed):

There's just one question that you have to ask
yourself. Is that car going to stay in it's lane, or
not? Well? Do you feel faithful, punk?
Well, do ya?

'Everybody has faith in something or another. I have faith in God. You have faith that there is no God. You have faith that the oncoming drivers will stay in their lane and not swerve over into yours. You have faith that when you sit down in a chair that it will support your weight. We cannot avoid having faith, therefore, we all have faith. And since we all have faith, faith is (and here is where it can differ) a good thing (or) an intrinsic part of being human that cannot be avoided.'

At first glance, this seems like a legitimate counter to (my) claims that faith is something which is to be avoided, and something which is not desirable as a part of the cognitive processes in the quest toward truth. If, in fact, we all have some sort of faith, then clearly faith cannot be avoided. And (and this is the unspoken part which is perhaps the most incisive of all) since we must use faith in our everyday life to navigate our environment (think: the chair, the drivers), faith can be a valid path toward truth.


First, we must unfortunately play the semantics game. I find myself constantly having to pin down the definition of what the word 'faith' means in the context of these discussions. So, here it is, once more:
Faith is a noun. It means a belief that was formed in the absence of evidence and/or experience, or that is held despite evidence and/or experience to the contrary, regardless of whether that evidence and/or experience was available at the time the belief was formed.
Important to note here is that at no point does that definition include mention of superstition, religion, deities, et al., and so therefore I do not consider a belief in such to automatically be faiths (though they often are).

So, on to the refutation. Do we all have faith?


1. Must we have faith?

I wonder if this boy is aware of the philosophical
ramifications of his chair-sitting

To specifically address the example with the chair (again, because the chair example seem to be the one which is trotted out time and again, but I digress...), I submit the following:

I do not have faith that the chair holds me up. More precisely, even if I choose to have faith that the chair will do so, I don't need to have that faith, and I can operate just fine without that faith. But how?

I see the chair in front of me. I have learned, through the course of my life (trillions of repetitions) that I can generally trust my eyesight's reliability (especially when it comes to recognizing chairs and other solid objects). Ergo, I can rationalize my decision to rely on the information my eyes are giving me; in this case, that there is a chair in front of me.

As I sit down on this chair, placing my weight upon it, I do so because through years and years of repeated experience I have learned that the solid objects in the world around me tend to be impermeable to my body. I also know why this is so (it has to do with the Pauli exclusion principle), but that is not necessary. It is enough that I have repeated (at least) tens of thousand of what might be called experiments, and in each, my body has failed to pass through a solid object (though it has, in some cases, broken them).

Now, you might ask, what about the first time that one comes upon a chair? With no prior knowledge, isn't that first experiment; the first time that one sits in a chair; a leap of faith? Even if we discount every instance when we encounter a solid object from birth to that moment, we can still rationalize that sitting in a chair is safe. We see other people do it all the time, with no deleterious effect. We can reason that such an object was created for a purpose, and that that purpose appears to be for sitting. There are literally dozens of ways that one could figure out that a chair is most likely safe for seating without having to recourse to faith.

I feel like I'm exhausting the point, but I want to be absolutely clear that no faith is required for that particular example.

We can then proceed with argument by analogy that faith is not necessary in any circumstance. An open challenge that a few acquaintances and I have formed seeks to find some instance when faith is incontrovertibly necessary. No challenges have succeeded. Faith just isn't necessary.

That is not to say, however, that faith is impossible or that faith is necessarily undesirable. Clearly, one could simply have faith that the chair will bear his or her weight. But, and this is a crucial 'but,' they don't have to. They could, should they choose, use reason. And since we can always use reason instead of faith, faith is not necessary.

This is really only possible because we have a fortunate consistency in physical laws and the observations thereof. No matter where we look in the universe, and no matter how many times we repeat an experiment, we always see the same laws of nature. It is this consistency, and our experience therewith, that allows us collectively and individually to accumulate knowledge and make accurate predictions about the future.

Including that the damned chair will hold up my weight No faith need be involved.

2. Is faith good?


Now that we have established that faith is not necessary, an important question comes up: is faith desirable? Since we have a choice between faith and reason (and guessing, for that matter), what is the best choice for a route toward truth?

Clearly, both faith and reason seek to discover (or establish) precisely what is true and what isn't. However, the two processes, faith and reason, are drastically different in their approach.

Faith, as we defined earlier, is a belief (about what is/isn't true) formed without evidence or held in spite of evidence. In other words, one simply makes an assumption about what is true, and stops there. Often, this assumption is guided by one's desires to see something be true. Other times, it is based upon what one is told is true. Rarely, it is based upon previous experiences. In each case, the core process is the same: an assertion is made and that is where the process stops.


Reason, on the other hand, begins with an assumption [in this case called a hypothesis] but then move on to testing and modification. The hypothesis is tested with logic and/or experiment and modified according to the results of that test. To put it another way, one begins with an assumption. Then, that assumption is checked for logical soundness and validity. Next, that assumption is tested in some sort of experiment in which it's truth can be directly tested. Finally, the results of those checks and experiments are used to modify the original assumption into a new one.

But the process is not over. The new assumption, the result of modification based upon testing and checking, and now called a 'theory,' is now fed back in to the beginning of the entire chain and the cycle starts anew. Through this process, an idea is constantly refined and modified in relentless pursuit of truth.

At any point along the continuum, the resulting theory is better than the assumption/hypothesis that we begin with. Whether a theory has been fed through the cycle once or one thousand times, it is necessarily closer to the truth than it was to begin with. This is why reason is superior to faith.


Faith has the potential to get the right answer, but contains no mechanism for self-correction or even of verification. When one uses faith, one has no real way of knowing whether or not that faith is true, nor of correcting if it is not. Essentially, the best that faith can do is an educated guess; a shot in the dark.

Without delving into morals (which would provide another plank in the case against faith), we can demonstrate that it [faith] is inferior to reason as a path to truth. So, in the end, no. Faith is not preferable to reason in any case. Faith is not good.

Some Thoughts on Evolution

Having had the opportunity recently to participate in a discussion about the theory of evolution by natural selection, my brain has been going full-tilt on the issue. Ergo, I have decided to do some writing.
First, I want to deal with the idea that one either 'believes' that evolution is true, or 'believes' that it is not. The term 'belief' implies faith, and there is no faith involved when one accepts a scientific proposition. Either the evidence supports it, and we hold it to be true, or the evidence does not, and we hold it to be false. All the while, of course, understanding that a new evidence comes in, our original position will most likely need to change. 

The Tree of Life

I don't see evolution as an absolute truth in the way that some folks seem to see religion. I don't have 'faith' in evolution. Nor would I stand by it in the face on contradictory evidence. I know what it would take for me to stop thinking that evolution is true. And I know that our current understanding is probably not the whole picture, simply because our understanding is limited and our knowledge is finite. The only reason that I think evolution is correct is because it fits the observed data better than any alternative, and has far greater predictive and explanatory power than any alternative. When this ceases to be so, my support of the theory will likewise cease. You know what that is called? Skeptical, scientific thinking.
On the contrary, I have noticed that folks who don't think evolution is a correct theory tend not to be so skeptical or scientific in their views. They go into their study of the theory knowing which outcome they plan to draw, which is quite the antithesis of good thinking.
Evolution, both microevolution and macroevolution, are well-documented and supported by (literally) billions of individual pieces of mutually-buttressing evidence. They are elegant and simple explanations that account for life in its amazing splendor, but they are unfortunately often misunderstood or misrepresented (in particular by those who feel they have a theological reason for disbelieving in them).
One of the more common misconceptions that I've run into is that evolution by natural selection means that life came from non-life. It doesn't. All evolution by natural selection describes is what happened to that life after it got started. The life-from-non-life phenomenon is described by the theories of abiogensis.
Another misconception about evolution is that it implies that the universe had no creator. Evolution has nothing to do with cosmology; there are a myriad of cosmological theories, some consistent with a creator, some not.
Also, despite what creationist in particular wish to say, evolution has nothing to do with luck. There is often a straw man argument put out claiming that evolution must be wrong because the statistical odds of a, for instance, human randomly coming to be is akin to a tornado blowing through a junk yard and assembling a 747. Now, they're right in saying that such a thing spontaneously happening is ludicrously improbable. However,  evolution is driven by natural selection, which is the opposite of luck, and mutations in the genetic code, which happen quite frequently thanks both to shoddy biochemistry and radiation from cosmic sources. When you add together all of the individual probabilities along the way with this in mind, we see that such an occurrence isn't unlikely at all.
I like the way that Richard Dawkins put it- life is the result of non random selection of randomly varying replicators.
Or, some Darwin for you: there is a grandeur in this view of life.
Nor is the current understanding of the theory 100% accurate. No theory is 100% accurate, because we do not know 100% of the evidence (and never will). The best we can do is eliminate the biases and errors that we find, and continue to refine our scientific best-guess. That doesn't make the theory wrong, just imperfect (like every other theory). When folks try to claim that one piece of evidence (which they, of course, are privy to) totally disproves the theory of evolution (usually with the addition: 'and therefore creation theory is correct), they clearly fail to understand the scientific process as detailed above.
I have likewise seen claims that the laws of thermodynamics, entropy in particular, to discredit the theory of evolution. Using the second law of thermodynamics in attempt to discredit evolution is, pulling no punches, daft. Entropy applies to closed systems, which the earth (with its constant influx of energy from the sun and release of energy through various processes) is quite simply not. Furthermore, the constituent organisms themselves are not closed systems either. Put simply, entropy has no deleterious effect on macroevolution.
 In the end, I think anybody who approaches the theory of evolution by natural selection with a skeptical, critical, unbiased mind will find that it fits all the evidence, that it has tremendous explanatory power, and that it isn't this kid-corrupting evil that some folks seem to think that it is.
It is a truly remarkable achievement of the human mind, and it allows us to see the world in all of its true glory and splendor in a way that simply shrugging one's shoulders and appealing to divine authority just simply doesn't permit. I'm awestruck at the variety, complexity, and cooperation of life here on Earth.
When you understand how it all took place, it is even more beautiful.

Chicks Dig Jerks

So, maybe I'm a bit disgruntled. Or maybe I'm just more perceptive right now. Either way, the following are some thoughts on the fairer sex that have been rolling around in my gourd for the past few weeks.


We humans are no different than any other species insofar as we have certain predispositions coded right into our DNA, thanks to evolution. I don't think that there will be much resistance to that assertion. We are predisposed to find sugars to be sweet, for instance, because they are an energy-rich source of food, and our ancestors millions of years ago who thought that such substances tasted good ate more of them, and had more energy, and had more sex. There's no controversy (among educated folk, that is) here.


Now, I will assert that one of these predispositions is that women seek mates with certain properties. We see this sort of thing all over the animal kingdom. Peahens select for mates the peacocks with the most brilliant plumage, et al. But we human males don't have bright tail feathers (I'm sad to say). So in order to understand this phenomenon, we have to understand what the underlying message is. The females don't prefer the tail feathers for their own sake; they prefer what they represent. They represent a robust male with a healthy immune system, among other things, for only such a male has the energy and resources to grow such a tail. The tail also correlates with testosterone levels.


Ah, testosterone. The most combustible chemical known to humankind. An accelerant better than any hydrocarbon in the arson of life. Testosterone may allow the peacocks to grow their bright displays, but it does other things as well. LIkewise, in humans, testosterone allows men to grow facial hair, have deep voices, and so forth (the so-called secondary sexual characteristics). And, likewise, the testosterone does more than just that in men as it does in peacocks.  


Testosterone is directly proportional, in men, with aggressiveness, competitiveness, assertiveness, violence... Your alpha-male mentality is caused, largely, by high levels of testosterone in a man's blood. Okay, no surprise there. Everyone knows that. But what does that mean?


Well, here's what I think. I think that, just a peahens are genetically predisposed to favor peacocks with the brightest and biggest tail feathers (a display of testosterone), women are largely predisposed to favor men who are aggressive, assertive, competitive, and so forth. 


Now, of course, human women are sentient and intelligent whereas the peahens are, largely, not (at least not to the same degree). Human woman are members of a society, and have evolved a frontal lobe that the peahens lack. There is a social veneer on top of the animal instincts in modern humans, and I would be wrong to ignore such a veneer. I'm not suggesting that women will always choose the most testosterone-laden mate; there are many other factors involved in a woman's choice. But I don't think that I am remiss in saying that women will be, on average, most attracted to such men, whether they choose them or not.

It is cultural. Our (Western) society tends to lionize and reward asswipes. The cutthroats get ahead time after time, and the good guy, as they say, often finishes last. It is a dog-eat-dog world out there, especially among men. Mens' social hierarchies tend to be much more stratified and rigid than womens' social hierarchies, and right there at the tops are invariably the alpha-male personalities.


Would you like an example of what I'm talking about? Well, here you go. Contemporary women thought that Marlon Brando's character from 'A Streetcar Named Desire' was one of the sexiest men they had ever seen, and fawned over him. That's right.  Even though he beats Stella, and cheats on her, women at the time found him almost irresistible. Such a hunk. I think that says a lot.

I have my own  anecdotal evidence, as well. I won't go into extreme detail, but I have personally experienced throughout my life, and have talked with many other men who have experienced throughout their lives, being passed over for somebody who is at least a tad more of a jerk. Ask any guy about how many times he's been put into what is colloquially called 'the friend zone' because they come across as nice, caring, and compassionate. They'll bear me out on this one.

So here is my cynical conclusion. If a guy wants any chance at getting a girl, he will almost certainly follow the following prescription:
1. Be aloof. It drives most girls crazy when they don't have your attention, and they will devote time and energy in getting it
2. Be unsympathetic. Don't listen to a girl's problems or desires.
3. Constantly avoid spending time with her, except when it is convenient for you and not her. I don't know why, but this works almost every time
4. Tell her that you don't care. Even if you do. Or at least, don't bring the subject up unless you absolutely have to.

That combo right there works 4 times out of 5. Men will change once they've got the girl, and then they'll be the nice guy that they probably are. But out the gate, you can't be nice. You'll lose to the tactics I described above almost every time.

In short, chicks dig jerks. But it isn't their fault.

Marriage

The following is a discussion that I had with one of my favorite intellectual sparring partners. We got to talking about whether or not gay marriage ought to be allowed, and it became a discussion of not only that issue, but also of the virtue of having the government involved in the marriage business at all. If nothing else, I think that it was an interesting conversation. I would love to hear each of your thoughts on the matter!

So, without further ado:


ME: I cannot understand why the government feels the need to be involved in marriages...

THEM: The family is the fundamental unit of society. The traditional family unit (father, mother, child) is the BEST environment (I understand there are GOOD environments, too many to be listed here). Strong/healthy "best" family environments equals an educated, responsible, socially confident/competent, et al, person. For a philosophy of government envisioned by our founders (one of self government) there is no better family endorsement to make. That being said, I don't think restrictions should be placed on other associations among adults (co-habitating). Government endorsement (marriage licenses) of the traditional marriage is practical and essential for the "best" society.
Let me clarify, best family environments are the MOST COMMON place to find the "educated, responsible...". I understand bad people can come from "best" environments. The validity of my point still holds. Government should endorse specific family relationships for best society and government.

ME: I think that the issue of whether or not marriages (in the traditional sense) foster healthy children is irrelevant to this issue. The government ought not endorse any form of marriage; at least, not at the federal level. There is no valid reason for it to do so.
To take your argument to its logical conclusion, one would have to also crack down on single-parents (divorcees or widows/widowers alike), since they also don't fit the 'one-man-one-woman' definition of marriage.
The government has no business issuing marriage licenses any more than they do issuing pregnancy licenses or faux-hawk-hairstyle-wearing licenses. A marriage is, quite simply, a religious ceremony symbolizing a union between to individuals. Legally, it is a civil union between to adults, wherein the formalize their relationship with one another and become, for some purposes, a single legal entity. The federal government has no business interfering with religion or the free exercise of property rights (which is in essence what such a legal union breaks down to), so I can't see how it has business interfering with a marriage, either through endorsement or denial.

THEM: Healthy children/adults are not irrelevant. Good government (federal or state) requries good citizens. We have already clarified that government endorsement and not punishment of freedoms is best government. That government had original support of its citizenry and continues to have mine.

ME: My problem is not quotidian, it is from first principles. The concept of limited government ought to be extended into this realm; the government should not get involved in marriage one way or the other.
And then there's the edge-of-the-wedge side of things... if we permit the government to micromanage our personal lives in this regard in the name of 'healthy families,' then what is next? The abolishemnt of any form of non-traditional family- get a divorce and your children become wards of the state? Become widowed and have 180 days to remarry so that 'the children can have a father?' Where does it end?
And even you will admit that a traditional family doesn't always produce good results, and non-traditional families don't always produce poor ones (in fact, from as far as I have been able to research, the rates of success in children is statistically independent of whether they were raised by heterosexual parents or homosexual parents, but I digress...). So how can you presume to legislate accordingly?

THEM: Good government (We the People) saw the benefits of a best marriage relationship (from religious ceremonies or not) for society and government as a whole and [we] want those to continue. If government endorses all relationhips or none, the same [result then] follows. I know, currently, [the] government does not endorse all relationships but it has divided and marginalized its support for the traditional family since at least the 60s. What has happened? Bigger government and an unwise, unhealhty, citizenry growing ever more dependant on government for its sustanance and survival. If government fail to endorse the best [family format] we will naturally get whatever else comes.

ME: It seems that you're making the argument that a shift in government policy toward alternative lifestyles has led to the nanny-welfare-state that we have now, and I must say that I emphatically disagree.
The modern quasisocialist state that we have today traces its roots to the Progressive movement around 1890, culminating in the election of our second-worst President ever, Woodrow Wilson. It was Progessivist ideas that seeded the soil; it was FDR who watered the fields and sowed the crop of increasing government with the tractor of War.
I would contend that our reliance on the Federal Government for basic necessities comes more from the actions of those Presidents, and later on in Johnson's 'Great Society,' than from any cultural shift toward tolerance. To claim that giving homosexuals basic civil rights would lead to a more invasive federal government is a leap that no amount of argument or evidence could bridge.
The government should neither endorse nor condemn any particular form of 'family.' We should treat marriage as a legal matter similar to incorporation, since that is what it really is. Any added context to marriage is supplied on a personal (or community/religious level) and ought to stay personal.

THEM: Of course the welfare state was started by someone, I think we agree on the historical context. You won't disagree that the disintegration of the traditional family unit (nurturing mother, protective providing father) adds to the welfare state? I don't argue tolerance or alt lifestyle, let them do what they want. The question was (if I'm not mistaken) does government have a purpose in supporting/endorsing the institution (incorporation) of marriage? Since our government (when its healthy) relies almost exclusively on the product of traditional families I say the answer is yes it does and can endorse that incorporation. Based on your last statement our society (which is essentially the government) has endorsed that in the past. Asking "why?" seems imply more that it's silly. I don't think so.

ME: You are correct in ascertaining that my purpose was to call into question whether or not government has a purpose in supporting/endorsing (or, for that matter, denying/preventing) matrimonial incorporation. I don't think that it does; I can't foresee a breakdown in society simply because children are not exclusively raised in the type of family you described above.
As a microcosm, I offer myself up as an example. My parents are divorced, and each has remarried and redivorced (and in the case of my mother, married thrice). One of my brothers lives in OK, one in ID. My father doesn't fit into the protective stereotype described above, and my mother doesn't fit the nurturing one. Yet I would say that I am a productive member of society; certainly, I am not a detriment to it.
I know that what I just described is anecdotal evidence, but my point is this: the government, on principle, should not interfere with what is essentially a business decision, and a religious decision. As long as that decision is agreed upon by two consenting adults, I honestly don't see the problem. And honestly, a homosexual couple with a child is overwhelmingly likely to have adopted that child, and I submit that child who is adopted by parents in a stable, loving relationship who are committed to raising that child is going to do better than they would have in the situation they were adopted out of, regardless of whether those parents are black or white; straight or gay. There are good parents in each category; there are bad parents in each.

THEM: I allow exceptions in all cases as long as it's accepted that there is a best situation for a child to be reared into a productive member of society. It's the traditional family which has served well in that position for ages, and it that situation I think our government (society) has the right and repsonsibility to endorse and protect. Luckily most of us are okay despite what our parents (in any situation) have done to us. However there are common denominators (family background included) among those on social assistance, and those who are incarcerated. Strong healthy traditional family is not THE answer, but part of the answer. I come from almost exactly the same background as you. My mother, too. Being a father now, I hate to admit or accept my weaknesses as a father, but they are painfully obvious to me. I used to think it was better my father wasn't around because I would be more like him (not what I wanted). Now that I am a father I am not so sure. That's always what we argue from, our own perspective.

ME: At the end of the day, I don't see any reason whatsoever why a homosexual couple who desire to get married ought to be treated any differently than a heterosexual couple who wishes to do so. The sociological evidence is quite clear- there is no appreciable distinction between a child raised by the latter and a child raised by the former. Any time there is resistance to giving homosexuals their right to legal unions it almost always comes from the religious right. They couch their arguments in sociological terms, be we all know what the real deal is: they're inspired by a religious bigotry, and nothing more.