The Religious Cult

No Difference

In Bari Weiss’ Free Press this morning I was reading about the aftermath of the SCOTUS term. In typical Weiss fashion, instead of putting an out-of-the-closet conservative on her panel, she had three people that were liberalish/middle.

President Joe Biden criticized the court as abnormal and in the wake of the last two SCOTUS terms, Democrats are doing all they can to discredit the court.

Democrats, virtually all left-wing and moving ever harder to the left every day, see it as a highly politicized entity, but that’s only their projection. They’d like to make it a malleable highly politicized entity they control. One example of how it might work is the Illinois State Supreme Court or the Governor’s office in the state of Michigan.

These three quotes from Bari Weiss's article stimulated me. The data will surprise you based on the overwhelming rhetoric being spewed from mainstream media.

Here are some fun facts from this term: 50 percent of the Supreme Court’s decisions were unanimous; 89 percent of the decisions had at least one liberal justice in the majority. Only 8 percent were decided with the six Republican appointees on one side and the three Democratic appointees on the other side. That means only fourteen cases last term were decided that way, and this term was the lowest number of straight ideological split decisions in the last six years.

And,

I wouldn’t go that far, but it is inaccurate to say this decision means it’s fair game to turn gay people away from stores because you don’t want to do business with them. I also don’t think this was an easy case. A lot of it depends on who the specific people are and what religions they are. Like, if you ask is it okay for a kosher caterer to say “I am not going to cater your wedding because this is an intermarriage between a non-Jew and a Jew”? And if the kosher caterer says, “I will do any other event that you want to do, but I will not do an interfaith wedding because that’s just not something that I approve of.” I’ve heard of those situations and I’ve always thought of that as completely okay and plausible and within the free speech rights of the caterer.

And,

take all of us as writers and content producers. Do we want to be compelled to provide, say, our ghostwriting or editing services to somebody who comes to us and says, “Actually, I want to write a book that is a screed against gay people?” Do I want to be compelled to do that? I absolutely do not. 

The hypocrisy of the left is unflagging.

It occurs to me that Leftist Politics isn’t about politics at all. It’s not any different than a centralized religion. Their slogans read like catechisms or creeds. Here is the Apostle’s Creed I learned growing up. It is a distinct and deliberate statement of personal faith:

I believe in God, the Father almighty,
      creator of heaven and earth.

I believe in Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord,
      who was conceived by the Holy Spirit
      and born of the virgin Mary.
      He suffered under Pontius Pilate,
      was crucified, died, and was buried;
      he descended to hell.
      The third day he rose again from the dead.
      He ascended to heaven
      and is seated at the right hand of God the Father almighty.
      From there he will come to judge the living and the dead.

I believe in the Holy Spirit,
      the holy catholic* church,
      the communion of saints,
      the forgiveness of sins,
      the resurrection of the body,
      and the life everlasting. Amen.

Definitely religious. Definitely based on faith. No denying that. There is a statement of belief in a risen Lord, and there are actions that you must be accountable for in your daily life hidden in that statement. As a Christian person of faith, there are bedrock principles to try and live by.

Here is the Black Lives Matter yard sign you might see plastered around your town in yards of the people who love to virtue signal.

Is this “Law”? Is it “natural law”? Are there bedrock principles that you can be held accountable to in it? Is the statement rooted in something provable by hard empirical facts? Or is it a statement of faith?

I say it’s a statement of faith and that’s exactly why it is hard to defeat leftism with logic and transparent, verifiable, provable facts. Leftism is a religion.

The problem with this sign is every word on it is wide open to various meanings and interpretations. There is nothing concrete about it at all except the smugness of the person that puts it in their yard and wants to tell you how you should interpret it.

The policies that Leftists enact to carry out their goals are diametrically opposed to hard-wired deeply encoded human instinct. They wind up doing a lot more harm when they were intended to help people.

Their policies eliminate freedom of choice and enforce values at the tip of a spear. The central authority decides for you. The central authority implements “choice architecture” to give you the illusion of choice when you really don’t have one. This is why governments based on the principles of totalitarianism or communism always fail in the end.

I find the entire global warming thing a struggle between religious fanaticism and actual science/economics with clear costs/opportunity costs. The fanatics will stop at nothing to create fear and obfuscate data. When you point out the clear costs/opportunity costs of their ideas and offer a reasonable actionable solution, they dismiss you.

Extending this idea further, look at the rhetoric from people on the left ever since Elon Musk took over Twitter. Left-wing journalists are cheering constantly for Musk to fail. Hint to them: that will embolden him. Now that “Threads” has started as a competitor, journalists are cheering it on. Where is the objectivity?

No one can tell me anything Musk has done to Twitter to make it worse other than the new 800-viewing tweet limit or the charging for Tweetdeck. It’s all knee jerk reaction. “I see only conservative comments in my timeline now.” That’s because Twitter throttled conservative speech before and censored millions of tweets as it worked hand in hand with left-wing bureaucrats to spin events. If anything, Facebook proved it is willing to rollover to anything the government asks it to do and Threads won’t be any different.

As Musk remakes Twitter, I wouldn’t go short. When I think about the worldview and culture that Musk instills in every company he creates, it’s a worldview based on satisfying customers, creating something great, and making money. It’s apolitical.

Twitter never operated efficiently as a public company. It never really made money and it never maximized. Its leadership was overpaid, and fat. They were lazy. Musk is running it as a startup. He is going to make mistakes and he will also have to institute some constraints while he builds stuff that makes Twitter better for customers as he defines them.

I find it hilarious that journalists who didn’t have to pay for a blue check before object to paying a mere $8 a month for one now out of “principle”. What? They don’t believe in open competition and free speech? No, they don’t.

Before the blue check was a sign of status. You made it through the Twitter censorship department. Now it’s capitalistic. The only reason I bought a blue check for @pointsnfigures1 is that I wanted to support the idea of free speech and $8 per month is a cheap way to do it. I am paying for my virtue signaling, and I am not forcing it on others.

Musk has turned over the reins to a new CEO. She’s female yet he gets no credit for that. She’s a career advertising person who had a sterling track record, yet Musk gets no credit for putting someone like that in charge since her hiring was based on merit and not on anything else.

Zuckerberg on the other hand is political. Politics come first, then profit. They plow profits into political enterprises that work hand in hand with leftists. Facebook has languished for years. That’s what happens when you put politics ahead of profits.

There is a big difference between the two and it is often hard to spot. But, if I were running a long/short hedge fund, I think you know what I’d be buying and what I’d be selling.