Month: May 2019

Parenting Thoughts: The Virtue of “No”

Posted on | by hr | 1 Comment on Parenting Thoughts: The Virtue of “No”

I think I did alright in the child-raising department. There are a lot of things I don’t do well, and a few I do very badly, but I think I’ve been a good parent, particularly in the last decade or so. There’s quite a bit of on-the-job training involved in parenting — hardly any other kind, in fact — and I think I was better at it when I finished than when I started. I’m sure my older children would second that, perhaps with more vigor than I’d like.

If I could pass on a bit of advice, it would be on the important topic of saying “no” to your children.

There are other things, of course, essential things: love them and don’t let them doubt that you love them, control your temper, never be cruel, show them that you love their mother and respect their father, give them security. I’d like to simply assume those things, because they’re pretty obvious and, as I said, essential.

What isn’t obvious to everyone — and I think this is particularly true for single mothers — is that it’s good for children to hear “no.”

I think a lot of parents feel that they have to justify a “no,” that they have to be apologetic about it, or have a defense ready in case the child responds with “why not?” That’s nonsense: parents have enormous discretionary authority, and there’s nothing wrong with using it. If “no” feels right, don’t think you have to defend your answer — and certainly not when you deliver it. If “no means no” is ever true, it’s true when talking to children.

Kid have nothing but time, and will argue, whine, wheedle, negotiate, and act as if nothing in the world is more important than the thing they want right now. They’re wrong. Not only don’t they need to watch that show/play that game/eat that dessert/buy that thing, but they’ll ultimately be happier if they have to develop the ability to accept defeat, shift their focus, and go find something else to do. They won’t be scarred by disappointment.

Children who can’t accept “no” as an answer are going to be unpleasant to deal with, and are going to face difficulties in life. They’ll grow up acting like typical progressives: nothing will ever be acceptable except exactly what they demand. By all means, discuss your decision-making process with your kids. But do it at your convenience, not theirs. Getting what they want is the highest priority for children, and nothing is ever more pressing for them: if they really want to discuss it, let them come back when it’s convenient for you.

Above all — and, this is particularly important for single mothers — don’t think for a moment that you are going to lose your child’s love if you say “no.” Mothers have an enormous, primal claim to their children’s love, and nothing short of sustained, monstrous misconduct will endanger it. Don’t be afraid to say “no” when you think it’s the best answer.

Two final points.

First, learning to say “no” is particularly important at meal time. Kids should learn to eat what’s served. We made it a point not to make meals that were especially difficult for any of our children; those simply weren’t on the family menu. But, beyond that, the kids were expected to eat what was put in front of them — and, after some learning, they did.

Secondly, if your children are fortunate enough to be in a stable, two-parent household, they should learn that the first “no” means “no”: if mom says “no,” don’t ask dad, and vice versa. Having both parents on the same page communicates to the children that their resistance is futile — and heightens their respect for parental authority.

OpenTwitter: A Wish List

Posted on | by hr | 2 Comments on OpenTwitter: A Wish List

People who care about the free exchange of ideas — of any ideas, not merely the ideas that conform to the popular orthodoxies — are frustrated by a seeming paradox: though we are a free people living in an era of unparalleled connectivity in which the communication monopoly represented by old-fashioned media has effectively been destroyed, a small number of high-tech gatekeepers can, and sometimes do, impose their ideological restrictions on the rest of us.

Google, Facebook, Amazon, Twitter, and the various social media companies these giants own, collectively control the vast majority of public online content. They are all left-leaning technology companies that periodically suppress content they consider objectionable; that content is, more often than not, conservative. Though they each post a statement of content guidelines or community standards, the actual censorship strategies they use are opaque, and often seem arbitrary and subject to the whims of activists. In particular, conservative voices are routinely de-platformed — blocked, filtered, suspended — for seemingly trivial reasons, though high profile users are typically quickly re-instated, usually with a perfunctory apology for the “error.”

There is an obvious danger to the concentration of so much arbitrary editorial authority in the hands of a very few technology companies, particularly when they all broadly subscribe to the same left-leaning orthodoxy. Much was made of a bit of Russian “fake news” propaganda aimed at influencing the 2016 election. Any of the social media giants can, in an instant, have a greater impact on the information available leading up to an election than the Russians could ever dream of achieving.

I want a social media alternative that is effectively immune to institutional bias. It should have the following qualities.

  1. It should be free, open source, and easy for anyone to use. It should be available as web service, a PC-based application, and on mobile devices.
  2. It should be distributed, without any central data repository that would necessarily make it vulnerable to the owner of that repository. This means that it should be either a peer-to-peer system in which the information is stored in the individual computers of all of the users, or federated, meaning that an arbitrary number of servers together store the network’s contents, and anyone can add a server and become a repository.
  3. As a true platform, the system should impose no limitations on the content posted. All filtering/censoring/content restriction should be chosen by the user, and should be completely transparent to the user. Users may choose to “subscribe” to content filters created by others, but should always be able to determine what those filters restrict, and always be able to suspend or disable those filters.
  4. It should be possible to “white list” specific content providers, or collections of providers assembled by others, so that their content is never blocked. Further, it should be possible to receive notifications when content filters to which a user subscribes attempt to block that user’s white-listed providers; in general, it should be easy to discover when those you’ve trusted to filter your content are making choices with which you might not agree.
  5. Every implementation should adhere to these standards of openness, and an automated mechanism should exist to verify the compliance of any web site or application that claims to be a part of this social media system.

There are several open source social media platforms available, and a growing collection of interface standards. I don’t know how close any of them are to what I want, but I’m looking into them. Perhaps conservatives can get behind an alternative and begin to create a robust, truly open network that doesn’t suppress the discussion of ideas that challenge the left’s orthodoxy.

The Left’s Shabby Vision

Posted on | by hr | 3 Comments on The Left’s Shabby Vision

I think we conservatives sometimes feel inadequate, as if we lack the joy and enthusiasm that the left seems to bring to its various causes. It’s hard, after all, to wax rhapsodically about fiscal responsibility, deregulation, federalism, and other principles that distinguish conservative philosophy from the ever-expanding universe of leftist passions and causes. We don’t do sit-ins. We don’t chant. Conservatism is, well, conservative, and just not very exciting.

But if you scratch the surface, if you look beyond superficial enthusiasm and consider the worldviews that truly motivate left and right, you discover something interesting and, I think, counter-intuitive. You discover that it is conservatism that is optimistic, positive, enthusiastic, innovative, and forward-looking — in short, hopeful — and the left that is, overwhelmingly, motivated by a grim, desperate, fearful, and impoverished view of both humanity and our prospects.

Ever fretting about an environmental apocalypse, the left tells us how we must light and heat our homes, drive our cars, sort our trash, water our lawns. If the left had its way, every decision involving energy consumption would involve the Washington bureaucracy, and our lives would be smaller, slower, darker, colder. Conservation has it place, but that place must not be as the primary motivating principle of our lives: that is a call for stasis and an ever diminishing existence, and is the very antithesis of the progress, innovation, and increasing prosperity that has always defined our nation.

The left’s response to the expense of health care is to make health care less free, less innovative, less varied — to diminish choice and quality by imposing the same poor standard on everyone. Rather than allowing the market to drive health care in new directions, creating new treatments and new delivery systems, new price points and service levels, the left’s vision of health care is, like that in other countries with socialized medicine, of a commodity product that’s “good enough,” and needs only to be spread as cheaply as possible over as many as possible. We could guarantee care for the poorest among us while trusting the reduced regulation, the free market, and individual choice to take care of the rest. Instead, the left would prefer, once again, that an elephantine bureaucracy impose its sclerotic vision on the most innovative health care system in the world, and that everyone be forced to live with the consequences.

I don’t doubt that this approach to health care is motivated by a desire to provide health care to those who can’t afford it. The problem is that the left’s impoverished vision is of a country in which most people can’t afford health care, and in which most people never will be able to afford health care unless health care is diminished in quality and variety, reduced to the medical equivalent of a McDonald’s Dollar Menu selection.

On matters of race and identity, the left’s vision of comity and tolerance is dark: we are, by their reckoning, a nation perpetually at war with itself, dividing and sub-dividing into ever smaller and more passionately aggrieved micro-identities. No victories have been achieved, no improvements made, and every victim group remains as oppressed today as it ever was — this despite countless examples to the contrary. It is a worldview rooted in pessimism, promising nothing but anger and resentment and ever smaller factions fighting for the title of most downtrodden.

Again and again, the left’s assumption is one of failure: people will fail — fail to provide for themselves, fail to arrange their own affairs in a sensible way, fail to move ahead, fail to get along, fail to be responsible, fail to prosper. This is certainly true for some people, but it isn’t true for most people. The left’s answer is, almost without exception, to restrict: restrict choices, restrict markets, restrict freedom. Whether we’re talking about the environment, or guns, or health care, or free markets, or even free speech, the left’s perspective is one of fear, pessimism, lack of confidence in people and their ability to make choices — and, consequently, a desire to reduce those choices, and to herd the public into an ever narrower and less optimistic future.

America has always been an optimistic country. We still are, the shrill protests of the left’s angry pessimists notwithstanding. It’s time conservatives appreciated that we are the ones with the optimistic vision — that we are the true champions of progress, in that we embrace the principles and practices that have achieved the astounding real progress of the past two centuries. The left, with its tired ideas of central control and forced redistribution, with its vision of ever smaller, ever more pinched and restricted lives, is mired in a fearful past, unable to imagine the bright future most of us take for granted.