Remember when dissent was the highest American value?

Of course, that only applies when there is a Republican president.

//You may recall Brendan Eich. The cofounder and CEO of Mozilla was dismissed from his company in 2014 when it was discovered that, six years earlier, he had donated $1,000 to California’s Proposition 8 campaign. That ballot initiative, limiting marriage to one man and one woman, passed with a larger percentage of the vote in California than Barack Obama received nationally in 2012. No one who knew Eich accused him of treating his gay coworkers badly—by all accounts he was kind and generous to his colleagues. Nonetheless, having provided modest financial support to a lawful ballot initiative that passed with a majority vote was deemed horrible enough to deprive Eich of his livelihood. Which is one thing.

What is quite another is the manner in which Eich has been treated since. A year after Eich’s firing, for instance, Hampton Catlin, a Silicon Valley programmer who was one of the first to demand Eich’s resignation, took to Twitter to bait Eich:

Hampton ‏@hcatlin Apr 2

It had been a couple weeks since I’d gotten some sort of @BrendanEich related hate mail. How things going over there on your side, Brendan?

BrendanEich ‏@BrendanEich

@hcatlin You demanded I be “completely removed from any day to day activities at Mozilla” & got your wish. I’m still unemployed. How’re you?

Hampton ‏@hcatlin Apr 2

@BrendanEich married and able to live in the USA! .  .  . and working together on open source stuff! In like, a loving, happy gay married way!//

Truth versus Ideology.

Here is another example of how ideology creates a dangerous congitive dissonance. 

The Ft. Hood shooting has finally been the subject of a careful after-action analysis — a study that DOD should have done but didn’t. The analysis was done instead in a bipartisan report by Senators Lieberman and Collins, who lead the Homeland Security committee. Their report reveals few new facts but offers disturbing insights into DOD’s cultural dysfunctions.



On November 5, 2009, witnesses say, Maj. Nidal Hasan leaped on a desk at a Ft. Hood readiness center, shouted “Allahu Akbar” and began executing the unarmed soldiers all around him. Thirteen people were dead and thirty-two wounded before an armed police officer managed to shoot Hasan five times. Now confined to a wheelchair, Hasan is expected to go on trial shortly.


Anyone who paid attention to news coverage after the rampage knows that the Army had plenty of warning about Hasan’s Islamist views. Classmates say that he questioned whether he could fight against other Muslims and made presentations justifying the murder of non-Muslims, suggesting that Muslim-Americans in the armed forces might kill other servicemembers, defending Osama bin Laden, and justifying suicide bombers. The servicemembers in the audience were so appalled that the instructor finally stopped one of Hasan’s presentations. Off the record, it seems, everyone thought Hasan was dangerous, a nutjob, or an Islamist, and perhaps all three.

On the record, though, no one would criticize him. You don’t rise in the armed forces if you can’t read your superiors. And the rising officers who met Hasan knew what their superiors wanted without having to be told. Islam was a religion of peace, and Muslims in the Army were a welcome sign of diversity. Treating Hasan as a dangerous Islamist would put those messages at risk.

And:
 

DOD quickly stood up an independent review of the Ft. Hood shooting by former Secretary of Veterans Affairs Togo West and retired admiral Vern Clark. A staff of full-time contractors and military personnel served West and Clark, who were asked to look hard at internal threats to the military. The result of all this effort is a model of politically correct mush — a classic of contractor-speak, in fact.


Fifty members of the military community were gunned down, their ears still ringing with “Allahu Akbar!” shouted by a man wearing their own uniform. And the official DOD report on the attack never mentions Islam once. In contrast, it touches on the threat posed by “low self-esteem” four times.

The closest the report comes to blaming Islamic extremism for the attack is a single sentence identifying the sources of domestic terrorism. In case you’re wondering, they include “animal rights, environmentalism, nationalism, white supremacy, religious causes, and right-wing politics.”

And:

Okay, that’s a little unfair to Secretary West and Adm. Clark. But only a little. In its delicate sidestepping of Hasan’s obvious motivation, and its irresponsible sidestepping of the shocking PCness epitomized by Hasan’s evaluations, the West/Clark report is part of DOD’s problem. It stands in stark contrast to the aggressive DOD action in 1996, when two Army soldiers carried out a racially motivated murder of an African-American couple. Then, the Army had no trouble adopting a policy on extremist activities that forthrightly named white supremacist activities as a basis for disciplining soldiers.

Repealing "Don't Ask, Don't Tell."

From the Weekly Standard:

The conventional narrative makes much of the claim that most of the service members surveyed believe that repeal would not have a negative impact on military effectiveness. The key to “overcoming resistance” to repeal of the current law, the report concludes, is “training and education.” Well, stand by for politically correct “sensitivity training” run amok. And the Marines and the Army will get it in spades because as the report shows, those services, the mission of which is to conduct close ground combat, are the most “resistant” of all.


Indeed, the report reveals that 45 percent of Army troops and nearly 60 percent of Marines (67 percent of those in Marine combat arms: infantry, artillery, and armor) who have been in combat zones say that repeal would have a negative impact on unit effectiveness. And this is the crux of the problem with the Pentagon report: it misses the point.

The “functional imperative,” i.e. the purpose of the U.S. armed forces is to fight and win the nation’s wars. Success in combat requires trust and personal/unit bonding. But as a number of commentators have noted, the report does not identify a single benefit of repealing the ban when it comes to recruiting, retention, unit effectiveness, and readiness of the force.

And:

Instead, the report seems to be predicated on the idea that the integration of open homosexuals into the military is merely the most recent manifestation of the quest for civil rights that began with African Americans after World War II. According to this view, lifting the ban against military service by open homosexuals is analogous to President Truman’s executive order racially integrating the military services.


But Truman’s order was motivated by concerns about military effectiveness, not civil rights. For a variety of reasons, segregated African-American units generally did not perform well on the battlefields of World War II. Truman’s actions were in response to military-manpower experts who believed that integration would improve the military effectiveness of black soldiers.

The report repeatedly asserts that the actual difficulties of repealing the law will be less than the survey’s responses would indicate. This is where “training and education,” aka political correctness and sensitivity training, comes in.

Why doesn't the government work?  Because government agencies can't focus on their mission.  Instead they have to incorporate a variety of ideological missions - what Jonah Goldberg refers to as the "liberal Gleichshaltung" -  that distract from each agency's "functional mission":

And this is where the Catch-22 catches. The dream of a nimble, focused, problem-solving government is undone by the reality of hyper–mission creep. When every institution is yoked to an overarching philosophy or mission, its actual purpose can become an afterthought. In 2005, volunteer firefighters from all over the country offered to help with Katrina’s aftermath. But FEMA sent many of them to Atlanta first to undergo diversity and sexual-harassment training (which most already had).


Such examples are everywhere. What is political correctness other than the gears of the liberal Gleichschaltung? The financial crisis was worsened because Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac became tools for liberal social engineering. Let’s not even mention public schools.

The White House is determined to be a great friend (i.e., servant) to the unions, so everything from the stimulus to the automaker buyout to the Gulf spill must first pass union muster. Remember those vital, “shovel-ready” weatherization jobs the stimulus was supposed to pay for? The Labor Department delayed them for nearly a year while trying to figure out how to comply with pro-union “prevailing wage” rules for each of more than 3,000 counties

The Liberal Gleichshaltung is inconvenient in the domestic field; it can be disastrous in the military.