I have a tendency deeply rooted in my psychology . . . perhaps it’s all too common among blogger types and other highly opinionated people. I am a contrarian, finding fault among the right and the left. Perhaps, I am seeking some Aristotelian mean, or perhaps I’m just plain mean. I don’t quite know.
I think part of it is I’ve never expected much of the left and have always been critical of its excesses, its utopianism, its sentimentalism, and its disregard for truth. Among the right, though, my story has been one of disillusionment and increasing discontent. I’ve become disillusioned as I’ve realized how much of the Republican establishment and even the right-wing blogoshere and intelligentsia is not that intelligent, not that committed to principle, and not that consistent. I once thought these were provinces chiefly of the left, but I now see what Russell Kirk meant when he said true conservatism could never be an ideology and if it were to become one it would lose its conservative character. When I first read that I was confused; I think I see what he means. True conservatism is a disposition, not a set of formulas. It’s flexible and also diverse in its own way. It allows both for strength and compassion, unity and diversity. It does so in its relation to particulars, not by the application of pre-set and all encompassing formulae.
I accept the possibility I’m just ornery and inconsistent. But I’ll let my readers be the judge. Here I stick up for what might be regarded as a certain authoritarian set of values, poo-pooing those that worry about administration data mining that can be and has been used to interrupt terrorist plots. And here I castigate the knee jerk response to various war crimes allegations against American service-members. Are these positions reconcilable? Is my concern for administration authority capable of being balanced with my concern for militaristic trends in our political culture.
Maybe the answer is as simple as the mantra of one of my misanthropic friends: “Everybody sucks.”
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“Everybody sucks”? Geez, that’s so offensive and reductionist.
I believe you mean, “Everybody but me sucks.”
You’ve got to talk to Wade on that one.
“Everybody but Wade sucks”? That can’t possibly be right. . . .
Why do you assume exclusion by the author; there is such a thing as “self-loathing” as Hunter S. Thompason has reminded us.
Such is the danger of using the internet to make jokes, Chris.
I’m not sure what this series of “insider”-sounding comments means, but thanks for linking to the very interesting dispute at Blackfive about the status of the accused under military justice.
Essentially, it seems that you, Chris, are saying that the U.S. Marines aren’t about to charge some of their own with a very serious offense just for frivolous reasons, and that the only sensible thing for outsiders to do is allow the military legal system to proceed on the basis of the evidence.
Your critics, when they aren’t sounding like grade school children in making fun of your family name, seem to believe that (1) the charges are inspired by politics and (2) it is disrespectful to the Corps and the accused to treat prisoners under arrest as prisoners under arrest.
(1) is conceivably true, but no real evidence is offered to back it up. (2) is illogical. A murder suspect is legally innocent until proven guilty, but civilian courts as well as (I presume) military courts almost always order some degree of restriction on the freedom of the accused while the legal process goes forward.
I don’t believe your stands on the two issues you cite are contradictory. One of the things I find scariest about the automatic dismissal by much of the mainstream media and academia of the war against terrorists is that it breeds an equal but opposite reaction. Some of those on the right then see the military as the only True Patriots, none of whom must ever be judged or criticized because “you aren’t at the sharp end so you don’t know what they’re up against.”
The American military have done an A-1 job in Iraq, considering the strategic muddle their commander-in-chief has put them in, and deserve our respect. But it won’t do to encourage the idea that they are the only Americans who can be trusted and must be allowed to cover for each other regardless.
Rick,
They weren’t intended to be insidery, just bad jokes. They were so bad, unfortunately, that their status as jokes was called into question. Ouch.
I think you leave out one aspect of the commenters at Blackfive, though you touch on it obliquely: They perceive these charges to be motivated not by a belief of guilt, but by a need to assuage the guilt of those who oppose military action. I think that is the unspoken undercurrent to much of the attack on Chris, though Blackfive himself seems to do a better job of explaining it – there is every chance that these guys are sacrificial lambs to the whiners on the Left to get them to leave the rest of the military alone – than the others do. This is an understandable reaction when all the news coming from the mainstream media seems to be that our troops are unrepentant war criminals.
Not that I disagree with you or Chris, but I think it is important to be fair to the arguments Blackfive’s commenters are making, even if they are not explicitly saying so themselves.
Without agreeing or disagreeing on the merits of the cited arguments, I thought this was an insightful self-analysis. I’ve linked to it today as re: another topic, with thanks.
Grim, thanks for the link. I actually think personalit and politics only partially overlap. There are harsh, mean-spirited, and bullying liberals. There are kind, compassionate, and charitable conservatives. Indeed, a certain kind of faith in human nature, may lead one to ask less of politics. And a certain kind of misanthropy might demand state-sponsored charity and social safety nets.
There’s a good discussion in Leo Strauss’s “What is Political Philosophy” about why value-neutral social science has requried moral thinking to come in the backdoor under the rubric of “psychopathology.” We saw this most dramatically with Adorno and all the “Authoritarian Personality” stuff in the 1950s. But even now, in our life times most certainly, any kind of fellow feeling for one’s own kind, heterosexuality, normal competitive impulses, and who knows what will be defined as “pscyopathological.”
I’ve often thought the realm of mental health needs to be thorughly revamped and refounded on sounder and more sensible and consistent concepts. Take the concept of “functionality.” It’s ultimately social; are you so cruel and crazy and moody that you drive everyone around you crazy. But there is still in so much of psychology, particularly Freudian psychoanalysis, this myopic focus on individual issues, letting go of all controls–internal or otherwise–that are founded on the needs and reasonable wants of others. It seems to me that a properly grounded concept of mental illness must by necessity be social and relational, but if it is so, then some of the classic concepts related to authenticity and what-not need to be dumped. In other words, that Kinsey movie and Woody Allen’s life show the problem with the practice to date.
I think you’re right about all of that. Some of the worst advice I’ve ever heard was on those tapes that psychologists sell to unsuspecting victims. I borrowed a car from a young lady once, and found her father had left a tape by a prominent psychologist on ‘finding love by learning to love yourself.’ The central notion was that you had been “damaged” by society in your upbringing, so that the wonderful person you were as a child was scarred. If you could just learn to reject all that socialization, you’d return to a blessed state in which it would be easy to love yourself, everything about yourself, and then naturally…
Which is total nonsense, of course. First of all, the idea that someone who loves himself without reservation will be an attractive mate is an unlikely idea at best. Second, the socialization being unlearned is the very thing that allows you to meet and interact with potential mates at all. A person who rejects every usual mechanism of their society will have trouble spending enough time around anyone to get to know them, let alone have them fall in love with him.
My own sense is that psychology should be restrained by law into precisely the place we permit to tarot-card readers: not at all illegal, for entertainment purposes, and a person who wishes to invest religious or mystic sentiment into it may do so. But no government agency employs a tarot card reader to determine if someone should be hired or fired, stripped of their legal rights as a citizen or a parent, or for any other serious purpose. So it should be with psychology, which has just about as much reliability.