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Conservatives and urban dwellers — 50 Comments

  1. ‘asked them what it is they like about Brooklyn and Austin’

    And they would go on some spiel about diversity and the like and then what?

  2. I have heard that one of the reasons for the urban = liberal = more gov’t, rural = conservative = smaller gov’t, divide is that gov’t intervention in rural settings is usually restrictive (i.e. things one can’t do), while in urban settings gov’t is the provider of services (tough to drill your own water well or dig your own septic system while in a 4th floor apartment).

  3. It’s a complex topic.

    Without having read the entire referenced article, I think Williamson has it dead wrong. Conservatives are reactive by nature. We are not the ones who initiate actions; we respond to the actions of others. The problem is not us rejecting big cities, it’s big cities rejecting first our values and in more recent years, us.

    The urban/rural divide is as old as civilization itself and neither side can fix it. Urban centers make things like specialization and formal education possible; they also naturally draw diverse populations, as people are drawn from all over to take part in the opportunities for trade and other exchange of goods and knowledge. Back in the hinterlands, we rural/conservative folk live in a different place, with a different mindset. It has not been that long since living outside of the city means knowing how to build a competent building, knowing how to plant and harvest crops, knowing how to manage livestock, knowing how to handle everyday medical emergencies, knowing how to defend oneself and one’s household against, well, anything else looking to do you harm.

    So, yes, there’s a huge difference in the urban vs rural mindset, because throughout the whole of human history, we had different experiences and challenges.

    It seems to me that elitism of urbanites, projected against rural populations, has been a constant feature of the relationship between our populations. They have a basic point: without urban centers, we would all still be living in pre-modern conditions. When every single household has to spend all of its time and energy doing the same things every other household is doing in order to eat and live, there’s no possibility for higher learning, advancement, interaction with faraway populations, etc. However … the urban center cannot exist without those who grow the food, which cannot be reasonably done to support dense urban environments within those environments.

    Taken to unhealthy extremes, urban elitism becomes an attitude that we flyover country folk are serfs and they are our betters; that they are the educated elite and we are stupid rabble. They don’t realize that reality is right of center. Reality doesn’t care what’s fair, or that you had a bad childhood, or what color you are. Reality kills you if you routinely make bad choices, or don’t feel like working, or are terrible at what you do. Only in urban environments can any significant portion of the population have the luxury of giving reality the middle finger.

    What Williamson’s quotes dismiss is that the rejection and judgment has come from urbanites, directed to us. It ignores that such judgment from the left now comes part and parcel with hatred not just of dissenting ideas but of people who _might_ have those ideas. When relationships skew as unhealthy as they presently do, you can count on the urban elites to feel compelled to crush the stupid troglodytes and because, by definition, they vastly outnumber us, they are now dangerous to us. Only now in recent years have conservatives come to realize that it’s time to get seriously worried about the violent hatred directed toward us. Williamson has the gall to blame us.

    The original article which Neo is quoting makes it sound as though the writer is a concern troll. The idea that we, the conservatives, have initiated the hate, by judging the urban “sin dens” and that everything would be so much better if we would just reach out and be friends, has all the hallmarks of a typical lefty trying to imagine what conservatives are like while projecting their belief that if the bad people would just try a little harder to get along, everything would be peachy.

  4. neo writes, “I’ve lived in blue enclaves most of my life, and visit cities such as New York and San Francisco with enthusiasm . . . .”

    I’ve lived in blue enclaves *all* of my life, up until my retirement, that is, and even now, I can hear the blue meanies coming. My little seaside town in California was *supposed* to be safe for routine social intercourse with normal people, but the blue meanies, they are a-comin’.

    And oh, I “visit cities such as New York and San Francisco with” trepidation, and only when obligations compel me to set foot there. No “enthusiasm” with this fish-out-of-water dude, but a simmering contempt.

  5. “How to counter that is the question, and I don’t have an answer. But neither does Williamson.”

    The first and most important counter is to defund Universities that have been secretly discriminating against Republicans. It’s long been an “open secret”, but it has seemed to be “not a problem”. It has always been at least a small problem; some time ago (with Reagan?) it became a big, tho unrecognized problem. Now it’s a huge problem.

    Our tax dollars go to fund elite Republican-haters who hate Reps … because they’re Reps. Universities are filled with administrators, especially, and professors who suffer from Democrat Derangement Syndrome. They project some bad intention or meaning on every Republican running for office, and then believe whatever is said by that Rep to justify their own hate-filled belief.

    Dem Derangement Syndrome, nurtured in academia first, and amplified by Dem media and now, Dem Deep State criminals. All who commit illegal acts, like secret email servers, without punishment.

    Defunding the anti-Rep Universities is a necessary, tho possibly not sufficient, step — but our culture won’t seriously improve without it.

    Polarization comes from that indoctrination.

    @KyndllG is also correct that the hate, contempt, and PC-despot behavior against Freedom, like the Mozilla founder needing to resign because of political campaign support, these attacks have long been coming from the Dems. Blaming Reps for defending their culture and their freedom is unfair and misguided, but Dem liars are great at creating such justification lies.

  6. The first thing to ask any liberal is where does the government get its money? Too few people realize that the government has no money except what it taxes away from the citizens. Yes, the Feds can print money, but we know from history that excess money creation leads to ruinous inflation like we see in Venezuela or Zimbabwe. In a democratic republic the level of taxes should be agreed to by the citizens. Too much money being extracted from the citizens in the form of taxes leads to less economic activity. Those are conservative ideas and too few people understand them. People like Bernie and Occasio-Cortez certainly don’t grasp them. Most LIVs are abysmally uninformed about those economic principles as well. It’s a big education project that is needed.

    I always ask my liberal friends to explain to me why they want to give tax money to the government to spend in ways they don’t agree with. They always assure me there is plenty of money if the government just makes the rich and corporations pay their fair share. They don’t believe me when I tell them that the top 20% of income earners in the U.S. pay 80% of the income taxes. Some get it when I tell them that corporations don’t pay income tax, their customers do. But most don’t.

    Few understand that the plans to “fight” global warming will have minimal effect on temperatures, but will decrease living standards because, in spite of the slogans, solar and wind are not going to replace fossil fuels any time soon. (We’re waiting for an Edison to find a way to store massive amounts of energy that will make solar and wind feasible.) Because of MSM propaganda they don’t understand that the theory of global warming being caused by CO2 is still only a theory. That trying to abandon fossil fuels is a fool’s game.

    I try to get people to see the things I see. but it is a hard, as we all know. We need a great communicator like Reagan who can speak to the people over the heads of the propagandist MSM Many Trump supporters get these ideas on a gut level but can’t tell you exactly what they are. People outside the cities just tend to be more self reliant than those who constantly depend on government services that they are accustomed to seeing in cities where they live.

  7. “Only now in recent years have conservatives come to realize
    that it’s time to get seriously worried about the violent hatred directed toward us.” KyndyllG

    Leftists and their liberal enablers have yet to realize that there is a limit for tolerating violent hatred manifested physically, economically, politically and through ‘legal’ machinations.

    Establish a new political reality that effectively eliminates the rule of law through a double standard and a grave reckoning becomes ever more certain.

    They imagine that they can vote away inalienable rights.

    In our first civil war, both sides grew their own food and were essentially self-sufficient.

    Today, blue cities are utterly dependent upon three imports; food, water and electricity. All three are easily disrupted…

    They obviously fail to consider that 85% of the military did not approve of Obama’s policies and that America’s gun owners and veterans overwhelmingly reside on the right.

    Children who play with fire eventually get burned.

  8. Even without the influence of left-wing academia, there’s still the tremendous (or overwhelming?) influence of popular culture, in which leftist ideas are firmly embedded. Not to mention saturated with a less-than-conservative approach to sexuality, etc. It really more and more feels like a losing battle.

  9. Williamson equates ‘city’ with the core municipality of a metropolitan settlement. Such core municipalities are commonly more populous than suburban municipalities, but most of the metropolitan settlement’s population is outside the core city. Republicans compete satisfactorily in suburbs, but in the settlement as a whole lose due to being swamped 5 to 1 in core municipalities.

    It’s not difficult to identify some of the factors which account for those 5 to 1 majorities. Core municipalities tend to be collecting pools of demographic segments which favor the Democratic Party: blacks, Puerto Ricans, California Chicanos, unmarried people, professional people.

    The best and brightest of them keep going to the colleges we [conservatives] hate, studying for the professions we hold in suspicion or contempt,

    Lessee, in 2015, the number of bachelor’s degrees awarded in these taxa were as follows:

    Business: 364,000
    Engineeering, Engineering technologies, architecture: 124,000
    Biological and biomedical sciences: 109,000
    Criminal justice &c: 63,000
    Computer science / IT: 60,000
    Physical sciences: 28,000
    Mathematics and statistics: 20,000

    In re which of these do we hold them in ‘contempt’? (And is it his contention that the ‘best and the brightest’ are getting degrees in psychology, communications, education, and social work?)

  10. Ambition for advancement, and the wealth and status that comes with it, was until five minutes ago part and parcel of American conservatism.

    No. Some of these sentiments emerged during the Reagan era (mixed in with other things). What was present prior was a set of understandings which endorsed the value and perspectives of ordinary people, refusing to see them as fitting objects of contempt or hostility from above or below. Before that, you had a critique of the New Deal which emphasized personal independence (while admiring people who built businesses).

  11. Williamson has forgotten Jerry Ford’s address to the Republican National Convention in 1976. Ford could be a fine public speaker when he put some effort into preparation. At one point, he had this to say, “You are the people who pay the taxes and obey the laws”. It’s not opposed to personal advancement, but orthogonal to it. Small town wage earners pay the taxes and obey the laws too. Kevin Williamson despises such people.

  12. The people the elitists thumb their nose at are the people who built their home, show up when their home is on fire, hunt down criminals who might harm them, fix the leaky plumbing, grow the food they eat, drive the vehicles that deliver everything they consume, and the list goes on and on. Out in flyover country we know they need us and we do not need them. When it comes to the essentials of life we are the ‘masters’.

  13. It is long past time to rebalance the power disparity between rural and urban peoples. I would propose separation of all metropolitan areas of greater than a million into city states, with their own polity. They can tax themselves and pay for their own vision. Urban areas after all contain the greatest wealth producing sectors: finance and IT to name two. Rural areas would continue to make money from mining, farming, energy production and tourism. There would naturally be beneficial exchange of populations back and forth.

  14. Kevin Williamson writes well, clearly and colorfully. I didn’t think he should have lost his job at The Atlantic. But he has always struck me as eccentric and untrustworthy, that he has a chip on his shoulder as a gay conservative and he’s fighting that battle.

    I read his column earlier today and found his riff on conservatives and blue cities the sort of thing someone with issues would write.

    If he should flip to the left like Andrew Sullivan, I wouldn’t be surprised, though in Williamson’s case that will be a harder row to hoe, given his serious, principled objection to abortion.

  15. KyndyllG makes interesting and solid points. Let me add in a culture change that is exacerbating the urban/rural divide. Young people are not marrying and having children. When you have children – certainly when you have more than two children – you want space, you want distance from dangerous neighborhoods, and you move to the suburbs. Often, the only affordable suburbs are the ones farthest out, still with rural or small-town features.

    This feeds on itself, as young couples living in cities put off children even more than they otherwise would because they “just can’t see” how they could make it work. Having children is a conservative act, and raising them even more so. One becomes less concerned with the “legacy” of such things as environmentalism and rooting out sexism across the nation, and more concerned with the legacy of what they are teaching Kyle and Ashley in the schools, and what the job prospects are going to be.

  16. I used to read Williamson regularly, but he went bonkers somewhere in the last few years, or simply didn’t address those topics earlier. I drew the line at his insistence that the rust belt just give up and die already. He’s still of that opinion.

    “We prefer the “Real America,” which apparently means depopulated rural areas and moribund Rust Belt mill towns, outer-ring suburbs, declining mega-churches, Idaho, Oklahoma, Utah, Wyoming. We aren’t even very sure about Montana these days.”

    As for Fort Worth being the biggest city still in the Republican camp:
    There is a reason many Texans refer to the denizens of Dallas as damn Yankees.

  17. High-density population centers must be subsidized. So they favor Obamacare, expanded Medicaid, shifted environmental pollution, and similar salves (out-of-sight and out-of-mind). Also, because of diversity (of color), diversity (of character), and close quarters, people maintain at least an air of tolerance. Then there is democratic leverage (for politicians and activists) and market density (for employers and employees) to consider. And the cultural variety is favored by the young and extroverted. The treatment of the transgender spectrum, including homosexual elitists, bisexuals, transvestites, neo-sexuals, issue is a political wedge (a la “minorities”) to secure the former, and is noticeably politically congruent (“=”), rather than equal. The same for Pro-Choice/selective-child (or two choices too late), which promotes social progress, GDP, stability, and democratic leverage.

    As for conservatives and libertarians, they like their space, voluntary activities, voluntary endorsements, and a functional market to assess pricing, control distribution, and limit progressive costs.

  18. I agree with pretty much everything J J said, but this in particular resonated with me:
    J.J. on December 10, 2018 at 7:11 pm at 7:11 pm said:
    The first thing to ask any liberal is where does the government get its money? Too few people realize that the government has no money except what it taxes away from the citizens. well. It’s a big education project that is needed.

    I always ask my liberal friends to explain to me why they want to give tax money to the government to spend in ways they don’t agree with. They always assure me there is plenty of money if the government just makes the rich and corporations pay their fair share. They don’t believe me when I tell them that the top 20% of income earners in the U.S. pay 80% of the income taxes. Some get it when I tell them that corporations don’t pay income tax, their customers do. But most don’t.

    * * *
    My older sister is intelligent, well-read, and not a raging leftist by any stretch, but when, some decades ago now, I mentioned to her this simple fact — that businesses pass taxes through to the consumer — she simply refused to accept it.
    I have kept that example in mind while making my own shift to the right.

  19. KyndyllG on December 10, 2018 at 6:31 pm at 6:31 pm said:
    It’s a complex topic.

    Without having read the entire referenced article, I think Williamson has it dead wrong.
    * * *
    Agreement with your rebuttal, which is very well written, and you didn’t need to read the whole article, but there was one tiny thing at the end that Williamson did get right.

    “We didn’t defeat Communism and win 49-state landslides in 1972 and 1984 by hunkering down on Oklahoma hog farms. We did that with a couple of California globalists, one of them a Hollywood union boss who gave his most famous speech in a European capital.

    Ronald Reagan of Los Angeles won New York and California both in 1984.”

    Nixon may have been a California globalist, but he won (twice) because the leftist Democrats spent a couple of years showing their true colors to the public, and he was the beneficiary.

    Reagon won for his “shining city on a hill” aspirational speeches.
    BUT, in both cases, New York and California (in this context, NYC and LA/SF), still had competitive Republican parties, so I really don’t think the examples are making the point Williamson thinks they are.

    Got it right, but still so wrong.

  20. Young people are not marrying and having children.

    There’s been a dismaying decline in the marriage rate in the last 20 years, but 2/3 of the youth population is still marrying. The total fertility rate is too low at 1.8 children per woman per lifetime, but only about 15% lower the very highest value recorded in the years since 1971.

  21. I mentioned to her this simple fact — that businesses pass taxes through to the consumer — she simply refused to accept it.

    She was right not to accept it. There is a distinction between the obligation manifest in the accounting and the economic burden of a tax. The accounting obligation adheres to the vendor, who pays the state treasury. The economic burden is apportioned between vendor and customer according to the properties of supply and demand in the market in question. The full economic burden will be borne by the customer only if the supply of the commodity in question is perfectly inelastic.

  22. High-density population centers must be subsidized.

    No, they needn’t be. Metropolitan commuter belts are more affluent than counties outside such belts. Those non-metropolitan counties have a personal income per capita about 23% lower on average in this country. Exurban zones, which are morphologically small-town and rural but have a critical mass of commuters, might be more affluent that deep country counties, but I doubt you’re going to find many that compare favorably with the ordinary run of tract-suburbs unless there’s resort property therein.

    It is true that higher density requires, ceteris paribus, more public consumption than low density. Sewer systems replace septic systems, municipal water replaces wells, municipal trash collection replaces do-it-yourself or private collectors. Budgets for general municipal services might account for about 4% of discoverable personal income in the population at large. People living in core cities and tract suburbs have from their larger income flows the wherewithal to pay the costs.

    There is one qualification in re these matters. Core cities are often somewhat impecunious on balance because they’ve got the slum population. However, the cross-subsidy which would address the most acute problems in these core cities wouldn’t be devoted to the provision of general municipal services, but to the police and child-protective apparat. And, of course, the cross-subsidy could and should be provided by adjacent suburbs, not by small towns and country townships.

  23. Kevin Williamson writes well, clearly and colorfully. I didn’t think he should have lost his job at The Atlantic. But he has always struck me as eccentric and untrustworthy, that he has a chip on his shoulder as a gay conservative and he’s fighting that battle.

    I think you’ve confused him with someone else. The Kevin Williamson who writes for NR has been married in the past and, I think, still is. I’d wager their managing editor Jason Lee Steorts favors unorthodox sexual practices, but he’s never made an explicit public point of it.

    What an inspection of IRS 990 forms distributed by ProPublica has revealed is that NR is not one of the more scrupulous philanthropic concerns. A certain number of non-profit executives with compliant boards engage in a certain amount of looting. The presidents of the Council on Foreign Relations, FreedomWorks, and Catholic Answers have all been caught doing this. Richard Lowry, Kevin Williamson, and John Podhoretz haven’t been as egregious, but they’re still paid over $200,000 to supervise a two-digit population of employees in an organization reliant on donor income. That’s one reason you shouldn’t trust them.

  24. Consider that urban areas have been more ‘liberal’ or ‘progressive’ or ‘radical’ (pick an adjective) since time immemorial – at least as far as we have any sort of reliable history: classical writers, both Greek and (especially) Roman often spoke of rural areas as the source of solid republican virtue and the cities as subject to the mob. In more recent times, many of the Founders worried about the cities and praised the (more or less) self-sufficient yeomanry. And, of course, the French Revolution really was a creature of Paris, not of France as a whole. Similarly, most revolutions….

    The American Revolution, and perhaps the Glorious Revolution in England which preceded it, and to which it is related, are among the few exceptions, which may provide some insight into why the Anglo-American experience has been so different.

    I think part of the problem historically is how disconnected the urban dweller is (and it’s far more true now than ever) from the production of the things necessary for urban life: food, clothing, even technology.

    There’s much more, which others have discussed, and that l’d love to add had I the time…. but I didn’t seen anyone else put this dichotomy in historical context.

  25. NeverTrumper does not make any effort to understand Trump voters.
    News at All The Time.
    (Who’s being rigid and conservative and wallowing in bygone stereotypes, not realizing that their time has gone by? NeverTrump.)
    I’m a native San Franciscan, ivy-league educated, and an attorney. Pro Trump.
    Because what choice did I have in the election? What choice do I have now?
    Trump v. Screeching fear-mongering guilt-tripping hateful punitive harridans.
    Who demand payment for being themselves.
    Nothing has changed.
    Except now obliviously backwards snobs (Thurston Howell III) are self-identifying as proud partners of the harridans. Too good to get on the Trump train or bother to know us or describe us honestly even though we’ve been backing “elite approved” conservative candidates for decades. Were they lying all along?

  26. It is long past time to rebalance the power disparity between rural and urban peoples. I would propose separation of all metropolitan areas of greater than a million into city states, with their own polity.

    I think I’d like the current range of superordinate local governments replaced with a set of metropolitan governments (which would be federations of agglutinated boroughs composed of densely settled territory) and county governments (which would be federations of discrete and densely-settled small towns and country townships). The counties would have a minimum population of about 85,000 and be able to take on a full range of services. The boundaries of the metropolitan authorities and the small towns would be adjusted each decade in accordance with the advance of tract development.

    I think if you allocate a selection of globular metropolitan settlements their own provincial powers, the residual territory in their respective states will have a satisfactory balance between settlements of different size categories and the countryside. Others you might do so because they’re currently sprawled over multiple state boundaries. So, greater New York, Philadelphia, Washington, Miami, Dallas, Houston, Chicago, Phoenix, Los Angeles, San Francisco / San Jose / Oakland. You might add some smaller cities that dominate their respective states, like Honolulu, Las Vegas, and Providence. On the other end of the business, interstate compacts to provide joint services would allow certain small and highly provincial states to piggy back on their neighbors for certain things (in the Mountain West and northern New England and Appalachia).

  27. <iThey have a basic point: without urban centers, we would all still be living in pre-modern conditions.

    Remember that cities were population sinks until quite recently, probably around 1900. Without in-migration, they would have disappeared as their residents died of diseases created by crowding.

    John Snow made cities viable but it took another 50 years.

  28. The blue model of urban government is failing broadly. Sometimes for social contradictions, sometimes for financial ones, in a couple cases for all-of-the-above. Blue cities are in precarious positions, and when their residents are asked to catch up for all those overpromises to their unions, there will be major political change.

  29. Consider also that uniparty enclaves (like urban zones and California) can freely manipulate the voting process, with “harvesting” of votes (and probably related dumping of suspected “bad” votes) being the latest scheme, and “immigration” to replace/cancel out the votes of existing and increasingly cynical votes being the most obvious scheme. See also, felon voting, grievance group voting, cemetery voting, vote dumping, misrecounting of ballots, “ranked choice” voting, and pending citizenship voting. In uniparty enclaves there is no effective means to push back.

  30. You couldn’t pay me enough to move to a California city! (Bidding starts at $5 million…..)

  31. I think you’ve confused him with someone else. The Kevin Williamson who writes for NR has been married in the past and, I think, still is.

    Art Deco: No, I know who I am talking about. The NR Kevin Wiiliamson may have been married in the past — it’s not unknown for gays — but his sexuality is not a mystery. My gaydar isn’t infallible but I lived in San Francisco for 35 years.

    “Kevin D Williamson Is Gay? Ain’t That A Victory For Classical Liberalism?”
    https://www.continentaltelegraph.com/culture/kevin-d-williamson-is-gay-aint-that-a-victory-for-classical-liberalism/

    He’s bald with a bushy beard and sometimes an ear-ring or two. He looks like any one of a hundred Daddy Bear guys I saw in the Castro when I went to pick up my pizza at the Sausage Factory.

    (Great pizza! And the location really had been a butcher’s shop that made sausages.)

  32. Art Deco: No, I know who I am talking about. The NR Kevin Wiiliamson may have been married in the past — it’s not unknown for gays — but his sexuality is not a mystery. My gaydar isn’t infallible but I lived in San Francisco for 35 years.

    Dunning-Kruger alert.

    He married Amanda Kerri Norris on 12 June 2000 in Lubbock. He was 27 years old at the time. Public records searches give her various addresses in the northeast, including Norwalk, Ct. and Norristown, Pa. Williamson was once editor of a newspaper in Philadelphia. It wouldn’t be surprising if they divorced. She was 19 when she married him and girls in that age bracket don’t build durable domestic and amatory relationships as a rule.

    Two possibilities: he’s the one man in 200 who got married in spite of troublesome homosexual impulses or (2) you actually don’t know what you’re talking about (as people commonly don’t when they’re commenting on the daily life of someone they’ve never met).

  33. “Kevin D Williamson Is Gay? Ain’t That A Victory For Classical Liberalism?”

    Who refers to a different web page wherein a commenter to a post makes this assertion. There’s evidentiary exactitude for ya.

    He’s not listed in the Texas Divorce Index, which covers 2.9 million filings from 1968 to 2004, so if he and his wife divorced it was after he left Texas.

  34. Art Deco: Did you read the link I posted:

    It comes to my attention that Kevin D Williamson, fired from the Atlantic over his comments concerning abortion, is gay. This isn’t something to remark upon these days except to remark upon how no one is remarking upon it. I’d regard that as one of the great victories of the classical liberal ideal in recent decades.

    https://www.continentaltelegraph.com/culture/kevin-d-williamson-is-gay-aint-that-a-victory-for-classical-liberalism/

    As I said, it’s not unknown for gays to marry. I didn’t realize I was saying something controversial.

    Dunning-Kruger indeed. If you’ve got something better than KW was married once upon a time let us know, but spare me the insults.

  35. I’ve already given a description of your ‘evidence’. He links to another blog where some random person asserts that in the comment thread. Offering that as some sort of proof is just silly.

    As I said, it’s not unknown for gays to marry. I didn’t realize I was saying something controversial.

    So what? The probability of any randomly selected 46 year old man having this particular personal history is less than 1%.

    Dunning-Kruger indeed. If you’ve got something better than KW was married once upon a time let us know, but spare me the insults.

    Your original argument was nonsense. Someone points that out to you and you whine about being insulted and repeat your original bad argument. I can explain something to you. I cannot comprehend it for you.

  36. Art Deco: Well, I don’t like you much nor do I find your arguments persuasive and your tone to me is often insulting.

    I suggest we disengage.

  37. Art Deco: ” The full economic burden will be borne by the customer only if the supply of the commodity in question is perfectly inelastic.”

    The money to pay the taxes must come from the customers. The vendor may pay taxes with borrowed money or capital raised from stock sales, but for long term success their income, which has to come from customers, has to cover all their costs – borrowing, overhead, dividends, and taxes. What is left over is profit. Where else will the money come from than from customers?

  38. In a few of his pieces for National Review and elsewhere, Williamson has described himself as a conservative Catholic. Don’t know if that has any bearing on questions about his sexuality, though.

  39. Where else will the money come from than from customers?

    Again, you’re interested in the distribution of consumer and producer surplus under two different scenarios, one with the excise and one without. You have a loss of surplus to both parties, some of which takes the form of revenue to the government and some of which is deadweight loss.

  40. Art Deco: Well, I don’t like you much nor do I find your arguments persuasive and your tone to me is often insulting.

    You found a remark by an unidentified pseudonymous person in a comment box not only persuasive but probative, You also find the fact that he’s bald and has on occasion worn an earring to be persuasive. What you didn’t find persuasive was an actual public document which allows a probability assessment.

  41. Williamson has described himself as a conservative Catholic. Don’t know if that has any bearing on questions about his sexuality, though.

    It suggests he’s not deferential to the gay lobby and it suggests he doesn’t assess institutions or controversies by the degree of deference offered the tastes and prejudices of active homosexuals. There number of homosexuals who have that particular disposition is small, at least among people who write.

    Other than producing theatre criticism, there’s nothing about Williamson’s subject matter, interests, reactions, and mannerisms which suggests a gay sensibility. In re Jason Lee Steorts, who threw a public hissy fit when Mark Steyn quoted an old joke by Dean Martin (Q “How do you make a fruit cordial? A “Be nice to him”), that’s not the case.

    See here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ec9XhidyjCI

  42. Art Deco, I’m too simple minded to understand your explanation. Sorry about that. You’re way out of my league.

  43. CatoRenasci on December 11, 2018 at 11:25 am at 11:25 am said:

    The American Revolution, and perhaps the Glorious Revolution in England which preceded it, and to which it is related, are among the few exceptions, which may provide some insight into why the Anglo-American experience has been so different.
    * * *
    There is a lot about the Anglo-American experience of government that differs from mainland Europe; thanks for the reminder.

  44. To huxley and Art Deco in re Kevin Williamson’s personal life preferences:
    I don’t know anything directly, but the conversation led me to do some looking around. Only the two articles you both discussed even talk about the question, but a later commenter at the Samizdat article says this:
    https://www.samizdata.net/2018/04/it-seems-the-atlantic-monthly-doesnt-want-diversity-after-all/#comment-749867

    Ian
    April 7, 2018 at 10:32 am
    “Not quite sure how this has gained currency, so I think it’s worth noting that Kevin D. Williamson has never said he’s gay. Here he is in conversation with Charles C.W. Cooke (from this podcast @ 17m50s):

    [Y]ou get this every day […] it doesn’t matter what you or I ever write, “you’re a racist, you’re a sexist, you’re a homophobe”, and […] people call you a religious fundamentalist all the time, you know, even though you’re an atheist […] You know I get half the time that I’m a homophobe, and half the time that I’m a closeted homosexual, and then well maybe there’s some crossover between those, as some people imply that both of those things are true.

    I’m not sure classical liberalism really has anything to do with it.”

    The classical liberalism point is actually well made in the Continental Telegraph article, and is the main driver of that post, rather than the gayness of KW or not (he could have selected some other person as an example), that being:

    https://www.continentaltelegraph.com/culture/kevin-d-williamson-is-gay-aint-that-a-victory-for-classical-liberalism/

    “Which is the thing I note about this current furore. Absolutely no one thinks that Williamson’s sexuality has anything to do with anything other than his own sexuality. He’s not being attacked nor defended upon the basis of it. His ideas, sure, they’re being machine gunned. And I think that’s a vast advance. In that properly classical liberal direction.

    We rather went from no one knowing about the sexuality of a commentator, through to both a prurience about it and also an assumption that leaning one way would mean belonging to one particular thought gang, to today’s who gives a shit? Yes, that is a better society. It’s a pretty good definition of that classical liberalism in fact, that where and when you affect some third party we need to take note but for the vast majority of how you live your life who gives a shit?”

    On the topic of married gay people and how many are there, I slogged my way through the book “Coming Out Under Fire” (about LG people in the military being forced out; that was in the days before they added the BTXYZ part) and one thing mentioned quite often was that a gay couple and a lesbian couple would marry each others partners for the record, and then privately shift back to the preferred pairing. There are certainly anecdotes abounding of heterosexual married couples divorcing when one of them leaves to be with a romantic partner of the same sex.
    One instance I know about is that of a Mormon writer, Carol Lynn Pearson, whose husband left her for his male lovers, but came back to the family (they ahd several kids) when he needed medical care. It was a big story in the LDS community back in the day.

    https://people.com/archive/carol-lynn-pearson-pens-a-moving-memoir-on-her-gay-husbands-death-from-aids-vol-27-no-5/

    What proportion of LG people do these kinds of things?
    Only Kinsey knows, and he made up the numbers.

  45. I didn’t want to trigger the excess-link-alert — this is a very good article about Pearson and her interaction with the gay and LDS communities. Counting her own ex-husband, it mentions four gay married men.
    (And other things of interest, but that is the topic of the conversation here.)

    https://www.sfgate.com/g00/performance/article/Mormon-author-Carol-Lynn-Pearson-tries-to-2546687.php?i10c.encReferrer=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuZ29vZ2xlLmNvbS8%3d&i10c.ua=1&i10c.dv=6

  46. Art Deco, I’m too simple minded to understand your explanation. Sorry about that. You’re way out of my league.

    No you’re not and no I’m not. Transactions are mutually beneficial. They’re entered into voluntarily because each party gets something (though one may benefit more than the other). What the vendor gets out of it is his surplus. What the consumer gets is his surplus. You impose an excise, and you add a third party, the state. The total surplus available to all parties to the transaction declines some; that’s the deadweight loss. The remaining surplus is reapportioned between the vendor, the consumer, and the state. Both the vendor surplus and the consumer surplus decline in this scenario (because it’s apportioned to the state and there’s some deadweight loss). The change in the vendor’s surplus is his portion of the tax burden, the change in the consumer’s is his portion.

  47. There are certainly anecdotes abounding of heterosexual married couples divorcing when one of them leaves to be with a romantic partner of the same sex.

    It’s a big country with > 300 million people in it. That you can locate anecdotes doesn’t mean that a scenario is at all probable. The question at hand is not whether it is possible that Kevin Williamson is a homosexual. The question is whether that is at all likely given that he’s been married. Again, one of the more recent assessments of the prevalence of homosexual conduct (Edward Laumann et al) put it at 2.8% of the adult population. If you’re looking at a population of middle-aged bachelors, of course that share is a great deal higher. If you’re looking at middle-aged married men, it’s a great deal lower. If you’re looking at middle-aged divorces, it might be higher or lower but certainly in single-digits and not something you would assume about someone. (You can do a text search of his 2009 book on Amazon. His wife is not mentioned in the acknowledgements, which suggests they were no longer married by 2009, or at least separated; the Texas Divorce Index has no listing for them, so they weren’t divorced during his residence there (2000-04, 2008); a White Pages search locates an Amanda Norris Williamson of the right age in Carlisle, Pa, which suggests they separated during his interlude in Philadelphia and she stayed in Pennsylvania).

  48. ” He’s bald with a bushy beard and sometimes an ear-ring or two. He looks like any one of a hundred Daddy Bear guys …”

    Why the hell would any man put a goddamn ring through his ear … or any other part of him for that matter? In aid of what?

    There must be some wavelength to human experience – or in the experience of some humans – that is invisible to me. I have asked guys getting voluntary tattoos why, as well.

    The answer I got was always along the lines of “I just think it’s cool”.

    “Why is it ‘cool’ ? What makes it cool? ”

    “I dunno … I just think it is”

    My only conclusion has been that whatever it was that convinced them that it was “cool”, it was not a rational evaluation or cost benefit analysis process which was accessible to me, that was behind it. Or else the benefit seemed so trivial and ultimately worthless, that I could not see it as any kind of benefit in any event.

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