Category: Politics

Politicians

Paul Brunton, Notebooks, vol. 9, Human Experience, p. 126, #520, emphasis added:

Politicians — more interested in their own careers than in sincere public service, ambitious to gain their personal ends, unwilling to rebuke foolish voters with harsh truth until it is too late to save them, forced to lead double lives of misleading public statements and contradictory knowledge of the facts, yielding, for the sake of popularity, to the selfish emotions, passions, and greeds of sectional groups — contribute much to mankind's history but little to mankind's welfare. 

Dead on in substance, but also stylistically instructive.  A good example of how to write a long sentence. Interesting because most of the content is sandwiched between the dashes.  The thesis flanks the dashes with the supporting considerations between them.

Few read Brunton.  But I read everything, ergo, etc.

Gingrich and the Kama Sutra

"Newt has more positions than the Kama Sutra." I just heard Michael Medved say this on the Dennis Prager show.  Medved intends it in the best possible sense.

Medved thinks that both Romney and Gingrich would make good presidents.  I agree.  Indeed, any of the Republican candidates would be better than Obama the Incompetent. And I agree with Medved that Gingrich is preferrable to Romney.  But is he more electable than Romney?  He's an intellectual with a funny name.  The average schlep of a voter looks for a regular guy he can relate to.  Like Bill 'Bubba' Clinton.

The Manifesto of the Modern Protester

I found the following in the archives of my first weblog.  The hyperlink has long been dead.  The author is Nicholas Antongiavanni.  Curiously timely in light of the antics of the 'Occupy Wall Street' crowd.  This may  be only  an excerpt.  I cannot find the original document.

1. No ill is so trivial that it can be borne, even for a day; no grievance is so slight that its redress can wait, even for an hour.

2. Until the world is made perfect and justice reigns supreme, getting on with life or transacting any public business is immoral and selfish.

3. Therefore all means (up to and including violence) are justified–nay, obligatory–in stopping the movement of ordinary life until such time as all grievances are redressed.

4. One's moral worth is determined far more by one's social and political opinions than by one's actions or behavior toward others.

5. With one exception: The most noble, moral, and courageous thing one can ever do is participate in (or, better yet, organize) a protest.

6. Therefore, whatever a protest is ostensibly about, it is fundamentally about itself.

7. There are no such things as chance or fortune or bad luck or inherent, irreducible flaws or problems. If something–anything, anywhere–is wrong, unfair, unequal, tragic, inconvenient, annoying, vexatious, or merely perceived to be such, it is not only someone's fault, that someone is profiting unjustly at the expense of someone else. Which is to say, Lenin's "Who/Whom" question–"who" is sticking it to "whom"?–is fundamentally true regarding all human interaction.

7a. All peoples and individuals may therefore be categorized as either oppressors or oppressed.

7b. The oppressed as a whole are a coalition of various oppressed groups. Whatever their apparent differences, they share the same fundamental interests by dint of their all being oppressed.

7c. Whatever the oppressors say about standards of justice or morality is a priori wrong, since it must be presumed to be sophistry concocted for their selfish benefit. The most clever–and most pernicious–of these sophistries is the notion of natural right, i.e., that there is a permanent standard of justice not determined by human choice or opinion. But in truth every professed standard of natural right is a tool of those oppressors who devise and promote it. The only reliable information about justice comes from the oppressed, because they alone are public spirited and pure of heart. Also, because the oppressed alone suffer whereas the oppressed only cause suffering, the oppressed alone can judge what suffering is and how it affects the human soul. Since there is no permanent standard of justice, the response or reaction of the individual soul to any action or actions is the only dispositive factor in determining the justice or injustice of any action. Therefore, justice and injustice are whatever the oppressed say they are.

A Bit of Freedom Comes to Castro’s Island

Fidel Castro came to power in 1959.  In his socialist worker's paradise home ownership was legally forbidden until just now.  Suppose you were 30 in '59, at the age when many are in a position to buy a house for the first time.  Well, now you are 82 with a year to live.  You can buy a house to die in. 

Ain't socialism grand?  That's why leftists want it here, there, and everywhere. 

Private property is the foundation of individual liberty.  This being Friday afternoon, I reckon I'll fix me a Cuba Libre and hoist my glass to liberty.

Demands of the ‘Occupy Wall Street’ Protesters

Here is a list of their individually puerile and jointly inconsistent demands.

One wonders how

Demand nine: Open borders migration; anyone can travel anywhere to work and live

is consistent with

Demand two: Institute a universal single payer healthcare system

and

Demand four: Free college education.

Libertarians believe in the foolish notion of open borders, presumably because they cannot think in any but economic terms; but at least libertarians are intelligent enough to realize that one cannot combine open borders with a full-tilt welfare state that provides 'free' health care, 'free' college education, etc.   The anti-capitalist punks, utopian dumbasses that they are, dream the impossible dream of a welfare state that allows millions upon millions to flood in to grab the goodies that the government will magically provide for them.

Welcome to Cloud Cuckoo Land.

The Great Obama Catharsis

A brilliant article by Victor Davis Hanson. Makes the case that we are really better off with Obama than we would have been with McCain.  Punning on 'catharsis,' a witty commenter writes, "We have met the enema, and his name is Obama."  Obama will precipitate a Huge Dump which will void us of the crap of leftism.

I now think I was wrong to criticize those conservatives who refused to vote for the wishy-washy pseudo-conservative McCain, thereby aiding Obama.  I overlooked the latter's aperient function.  (Bill Tingley, if you are still reading this blog, you were right.)

‘Politicization,’ National Debt, and Global Warming

The Republicans were accused of 'politicizing' the debt crisis.  But how can you politicize what is  inherently political?  The debt in question is the debt of the federal government.  Since a government is a political entity, questions concerning federal debts are political questions.  As inherently political, such questions cannot be politicized.

If to hypostatize is to illicitly treat as a substance that which is not a substance, to politicize is to illictly treat as political what is not political.  Since governmental debt questions are 'already' political, they cannot be politicized.

This is not to say that 'politicize' does not have a legitimate use.

Questions about global warming are not inherently political.  They are questions about the earth and its climate.  Since the earth is not a political entity, these questions are not political, nor can they be made political.  It is therefore illict to politicize these questions as both conservatives and leftists do. Here are three global warming questions that are at the top of the list with respect to logical priority:

1. Is global warming (GW) occurring?

2. If yes to (1), is it naturally irreversible, or is it likely to reverse itself on its own?

3. If GW is occurring, and will not reverse itself on its own, to what extent is it anthropogenic, i.e., caused by human activity? This is the crucial empirical question. It is obviously distinct from (1) and (2). If there is naturally irreversible global warming, this is not to say that it is caused by human activity. It may or may not be.

None of these is a political question.  Therefore, it is illicit to 'politicize' them. 

Unfortunately, too much of present day 'science' is ideologically-infected.  Global warming alarmism is yet another ersatz religion for liberals.  See here.  Of course, I also condemn  those conservatives and libertarians whose knee-jerk rejection of GW is premised on hostitlity to any empirical finding that might lead to policies that limit the freedom of the market.

Why Pay Taxes . . .

. . . when the government fails to do what it is constitutionally mandated to do such as secure the borders (Article I, Section 8), yet does all sorts of things for which there is no constitutional justification? Or has my reading of the U. S. Constitution been too spotty for me to find the mandate for Social Security?

Whether the Federal government should administer such programs as SS, or a substitute system suitably streamlined and reformed, is negotiable. But that border control is an indisputably legitimate and undeniably necessary function of government is not open to reasonable debate.

Theocracy and the Left

I wrote, "To reverse the scriptural phrase, they will swallow the imaginary gnat of 'theocracy' while straining at the all-too-real camel of Islamo-terrorism."
 
A reader comments, "I'm not so sure it's gullibility as much as flat-out dishonesty half the time. Honestly, when I first heard the 'Dominionist' rumblings again, I thought it was comedy. As in, someone was making a joke, not that this was a serious charge. Imagine my surprise."

It is indeed dishonesty and we can expect more of it as Perry and Bachmann gain traction.  The Left will trot out the same old tired exaggerations and lies that they deployed during the Bush administration.  So it is appropriate that I repost  the following 2005 entry from the old blog.

………………

Serious thinkers, those who aim at the truth, do not engage in linguistic sleight-of-hand. This is a tactic of ideologues and polemicists, whose goal is not truth but power. So my advice to all contenders in the political arena who want to be taken seriously as serious thinkers is that they avoid trying to advance their positions by way of the misuse of language. One sort of misuse is verbal inflation: one takes a word with a fixed specific meaning and inflates it to cover phenomena to which it cannot legitimately be applied. A good recent example is the loose and irresponsible use of the word 'theocracy.' I should think that this term counts as a pejorative for most all of us, whether on the Left or the Right. Very few of us want a theocracy. But to proceed further, we need a definition. 

Theocracy is a form of government in which the rulers are identical to the leaders of the dominant religion, and  governmental policies are either identical to or strongly influenced by the principles of the majority religion.  The idea is much better conveyed by 'ecclesiocracy' since 'theocracy' is something of a misnomer inasmuch as God himself does not rule in any so-called theocracy.  But the word is in use and we are stuck with it.  In a theocracy, the government claims to rule on behalf of God or a  higher power, as specified by the religion in question.

This definition of 'theocracy' is clear enough and comports well with standard usage. In light of it, those who refer to the Bush administration as 'theocratic' are clearly inflating and misusing the term. They are trying to win the debate by changing the rules of the debate in midstream. Among these rules is one that forbids tampering with the neutral terminology in which alone a reasonable debate can be conducted.

Let us see if we can be clear about some elementary points. A  conservative is not the same as a theist. A theist is not the same as a Christian. A Christian is not the same as a fundamentalist. A theist is not the same as theocrat.

Lefties need to be careful about their identity theories. Theist =  theocrat is perhaps not as outrageous as Bush = Hitler, but just as false.

Are there advocates of theocracy here in the USA? Yes. Do they pose any sort of threat? Not that I can see.  But lefties don't care about truth; they care about winning.  And they will do anything to win.  The end justifies the means.