My roommate was a Rush Limbaugh conservative named John. He was not however a typical Rush Limbaugh conservative. He was an accomplished saxophone player who wanted to become a doctor. He was talking to me about how other music students were liberals
because they were thinking with their emotions.

I was at that time very much on the Left; although I have since then moderated my views. Particularly I moderated my views on gender relations - an issue on which I, coming from a country where women were for the most part better than men, started out
being almost universally in favor of women. Anything human – male or female – is capable of choice; and anything capable of choice can be good or bad. Which means that it does not make sense to side either with women against men or with men against
women.

On some issues John's views actually did make sense. On others they were completely wrong. When I talked to him about environmental damage, he said that the Earth is huge and that nothing that people could do could seriously affect it. I told him that
the Earth is not huge at all; you can fly around it in two days. The Universe is in fact unimaginably huge. The Earth however is not.

John was a good enough guy. Of course with me he got a fairly colorful experience of college life. I met up with him several years later, when I was doing well in the computer industry, and he asked me how I reconciled my liberal views with commercial
success. According to some, if you are liberal and not doing well you are a loser; if you are liberal and doing well you are a hypocrite. What these people do not understand is that conservatives do not own prosperity, and that there are all sorts of
people from all sorts of places practicing all sorts of ideologies who are capable of commercial success.

If you think that you and yours own success, then anyone who achieves success who is not a part of your club would be regarded as dangerous. They would be dangerous for two major reasons. One was that they may be in the position to help the people whom
you want to see downtrodden. Another was that he would be refutation by counterexample of your claim that only you and yours are successful. So when Barack Obama comes into power he is a sociopath; when Reagan comes into power he is a great man.

One thing that happened around that time was that the conservatives defunded the academia. The result was brainy idealists who otherwise would have been academics going into the private sector and creating the computer industry boom. Here were people who
were not conservatives, who became financially successful. To many conservatives this must have been very disconcerting. However they are to blame for this for defunding the academia.

Once again, you want you and yours to own strengthening qualities and to destroy the same in others. So a woman who has emotional intelligence is manipulative; the businessman or politician who has it is competent. A liberal who becomes financially
successful is a hypocrite; a conservative who becomes financially successful is a proud son. If Jews make money they are greedy; if Texans make money it's "money talks, bullshit walks."

What I like to tell these people is this. The world needs many people. It most certainly needs businessmen; but it also needs scientists, teachers, police, military and many others. There are many countries that had the market system, and most of them
were poor. The prosperity that we have now is based on technology, and technology comes from science. The teacher educates both the businessman and the worker. The military protects the country, and the police enforces property rights. A conservative who
considers the above to be losers is wrong absolutely. He needs all of the above. And that means that he needs to be good to all of the above, even if he does not practice his stated Christian faith of loving one's neighbor.

So Hurricane Carter was seen since childhood as a dangerous person. He was dangerous because he was a black man who was not a loser and refused to be treated as one. Similarly if we have a woman from a disadvantaged background sporting a brain, she would
be seen as dangerous - because she stands to help other disadvantaged people and because she is a proof that not all people of that background are stupid or weak. And now there is a lot of grumbling about the Jews, because many Jews became successful in
America. However it is the Jews that embody American's principles rather than do the people who hate them. They became successful honestly and rightfully. The people who spread irresponsible conspiracy theories do not. If there was a Jewish conspiracy I
would have been invited a long time ago. And if Jews were in control and if Jews were evil, then people saying such things would be facing a firing squad.

In my case, the choice that I appeared to be faced with was to either not be financially successful and be seen as a loser, or to be financially successful and be seen as a hypocrite. I have done both at different times in my life. However the fact that
academia was being defunded at the time convinced me against pursuing an academic career. Also convincing me against it was the fact that academics spent 60% of their time applying for research grants and the ugly politically correct climate on the
campus.

I ended up coming under impression that the only way that I stood to be credible was if I made lots of money. I realized later that this is incorrect, and that there are any number of ways toward credibility. As for conservatives, they need to understand
the consequences of their own policies. Specifically they need to understand what happens when you defund the academia, and what becomes the direction of brainy idealists who otherwise would have been a part of the same.

https://sites.google.com/site/ilyashambatbiography

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