Are the Republicans Exploiting the Fiscal Crisis for Ideological Ends?

Many Democrats are arguing that the Republicans are using the current fiscal crisis to further their ideological agenda.  The suggestion is that their stated fiscal concerns hide their real motivations which are ideological.

This fiscal vs. ideological distinction is as bogus as John Kerry's war of necessity vs. war of choice distinction.  Obviously no war is a war of necessity, and every war is a war of choice.  Consider the so-called Civil War of the USA which began on this day 150 years ago.  (So-called because it is better described as a war of secession.  The war was not about the control of the central government in Washington; the war was one of secession: the southern states wanted to secede from the union and achieve independence similarly as the the thirteen colonies wanted to secede from the Crown and be independent of British domination.)  Now the Civil War was certainly not necessary: the North could have let the South secede.  Was U.S. involvement in WWI or WWII necessary?  Obviously not.  And so on.  No war, strictly speaking, is necessary.  You can refuse to get involved in foreign conflicts; you can refuse to defend yourself if attacked.  You can accept dhimmitude.  So every war is a war of choice.   Kerry's distinction is therefore bogus. 

The same is true of the fiscal vs. ideological distinction.  Every fiscal decision reflects underlying ideological commitments, and no ideological commitment is such that its implementation does not cost money.  Obviously, the fiscal policies of both the Republicans and the Democrats are ideologically driven.  It makes no sense to speak of 'politicizing' fiscal decisions since every such decision is already political in nature.  

For example, both the funding and the defunding of NPR, NEH, NEA, Planned Parenthood, etc. are both fiscal and political and reflect different notions  of what  government is for:  what it must do, must not do, and may do.  Imagine  a conservative and a liberal arguing about National Public Radio.

Conservative:  We need government, but "That government governs best that governs least." (Thomas Jefferson).  We need government to do certain jobs that we cannot do ourselves.  But the essential functions of government are limited, and public broadcasting is not one of them.  Public broadcasting may under certain circumstances be a legitimate function of government, but it is obviously not an essential function of government.  There must be limits on governmental power since "Power tends to corrupt, etc."  So, given that we are in dire fiscal straits, and cuts have to be made, and since public broadcasting is not an essential function of government — though it may perhaps be a legitimate nonessential  function of government under financially rosy conditions –  one of the things that must be done to save money is to zero-out the NPR and PBS budgets.  But there is a further reason to defund these agencies, and that is that they are not fair and balanced: they take a liberal-left stance in their programming.  That would be no problem if they were wholly in the private sector.  But surely it is morally wrong to use taxpayers' dollars to promote partisan sociopolitical views, thereby violating the convictions of the vast number of libertarians and conservatives who hold, rightly or wrongly, that liberal-left politicies are pernicious.

Liberal:  I don't buy any of that.  You conservatives and libertarians think of government as a necessary evil when in fact it is a force for untold good that cannot be achieved in any other way.  We need more government, not less.  A just society is a fair society, and a fair society is one in which wealth and other goods are distributed equally.   A severely progressive tax code may infringe the liberties of certain individuals but it helps in the achievement of material equality which is surely a much higher value than the liberty of the individual.  The wealth of the nation belongs to all of us, and it it legitimate for government to spread that wealth around in an equitable manner.  "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need," as a very great man once said. Everyone has a right to adequate health care, for example, and it could easily be provided for all if the rich were taxed at appropriately high levels.  As for NPR, its programming is of high quality precisely because it doesn't have to kow-tow to mass demands of hoi polloi.  It helps enlighten the dumb denizens of fly-over country who cling to their guns and bibles.  Sure it tilts to the Left, but leftism is true.  Public broadcasting, contrary to why you conservatives think, is an essential function of government.  Without it, the masses cannot be properly enlightend and educated.

The point here is that both the conservative and liberal positions are rife with ideological commitments.  So it is asinine and contemptible when Dems claim that Republicans are driven by ideology, or that they are exploiting the fiscal crisis for ideological ends.

I wouldn't be so contemptuous of the Dems if they weren't so bloody mendacious and so blind to their double standards.

Be Hard on Yourself

The better people are hard on themselves.  The exemplify the anti-Bukowski property: they try.  They set themselves difficult tasks and strive to complete them.  They make intellectual, moral, spiritual, and physical demands of themselves.  They are alive to the discrepancy between what they are and what they ought to be.

But they also know how to relax and enjoy life.  Be hard on yourself, but honor yourself and permit yourself a bit of self-congratulation at obstacles overcome and goals attained.  The true conservative knows how to appreciate and enjoy — and that includes appreciating and enjoying dear old self.

Big Government on the Brink

We are in deep trouble as Robert Samuelson ably documents in this troubling piece.  So what does Nero Obama do?  He fiddles while Rome burns and its legions get mired in Libyan sand and other sinkholes of the  benighted and backward.  Even if Obama the Irresponsible and every worthless Democrat were sent packing we'd still be in deep trouble.  Meanwhile gold approaches $1500 an ounce.  'Lead'  ain't cheap these days either.  It is a bad sign when gold and 'lead' appear to be wise investment choices. 

Overextended abroad, collapsing within.  The bigger the government, the more to fight over.   It's time for a return to good old American self-reliance. Make your plans and prepare for the worst.

Who is Dave Lull?

If you are a blogger, then perhaps you too have been the recipient of his terse emails informing one of this or that blogworthy tidbit.  Who is this Dave Lull guy anyway?  Patrick Kurp of Anecdotal Evidence provides an answer:

As Pascal said of God (no blasphemy intended) Dave is the circle whose center is everywhere in the blogosphere and whose circumference is nowhere. He is a blogless unmoved mover. He is the lubricant that greases the machinery of half the online universe worth reading. He is copy editor, auxiliary conscience and friend. He is, in short, the OWL – Omnipresent Wisconsin Librarian.

For other tributes to the ever-helpful Lull see here.  Live long, Dave, and grease on!

Survivalism

Almost anything can be made into a 'religion.'  (I am using the term very loosely!)  Survivalism, for example.  See J. W. Rawles' SurvivalBlog.com for a taste.  This post provides some insight into the mentality of a distaff survivalist.  It is quite revealing, I think, of both the 'logic' and the propensity for extremism of the survivalist type.  But extremism is everywhere, in the longevity fanatic, the muscular hypertrophy nut, and so on.

But don't get me wrong.  A wise man, while hoping  for the best,  prepares for the worst.  But the prepping is kept within reason, where part of being reasonable is maintaining a balanced perspective.  A balanced approach, for me, does not extend to the homemade rain barrels that the linked-to survivalist lady mentions.  But I do keep a lot of bottled water and other non-alcoholic potables on hand.  Here are some questions you should ask yourself.

1. Are you prepared to repel a home invasion?
2. Do you have sufficient food and water to keep you and your family alive for say three weeks?
3. Do you have the battery-operated devices you will need to survive the collapse of the power grid, and enough fresh batteries?
4. Can you put out a fire on your own? 
5. Do you have a sufficient supply of the medications you will need should there be no access to pharmacies?

These are just some of the questions to consider.  But how far will you go with these preparations?  Will you sacrifice the certain present preparing for a disastrous future that may not materialize?  Wouldn't that be foolish?  Wouldn't it be as foolish as the ostrich-like refusal to consider questions like the above?

And then there is the question of suicide, which you ought to confront head on. Do you want to live in the state of nature after the collapse of civil society?  Under what conditions is life worth living?  Civilization is thin ice, a crust easy  to break through, beneath which is  a hell of misery.  (Yes, I know I'm mixing my metaphors.)  When the going gets unbearable, can you see your way clear to shooting your spouse and then yourself?  Are there good moral objections to such a course of action?

Think about these things now while you have time and enjoy peace of mind.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: The Marvelettes

In the calendrical '60s, before the '60s became the cultural '60s,* there was a lot of great music from girl groups like the Marvelettes.  I spent the summer of '69 delivering mail out of the Vermont Avenue station, Hollywood 29, California.  One day out on the route two black girls approached this U. S. male singing the Marvelettes' tune, Please Mr. Postman.   Ah, yes.  Ever dial Beechwood 4-5789?  Playboy.   Don't Mess With Bill.

*I reckon the cultural '60s to have begun on 22 November 1963 with the assasination of JFK and to have ended on 30 April 1975 with the fall of Saigon.  Your reckoning may vary.

The Politically Incorrect Incendiarism of Ann Barnhardt

I confine my politically incorrect incendiarism to the occasional lighting up of a fine cigar. In some circles that is 'incendiary' enough.   I don't believe in burning books.  If you want to understand National Socialism, you must read, not burn, Mein Kampf.  If you want to understand Islamism, you must read, not burn, the Koran.  

Ann Barnhardt, Koran-burner, does both.  She reads, then burns those pages that she has marked with strips of bacon.  A pretty lass with balls of brass.  Gypsy Scholar provides commentary and links.  Check it out!  Move over Terry Jones.

Companion post:  Legality and Propriety: What One Has a Right to Do is not Always Right to Do.

Is Obama Bush III?

Those of you who voted for Barack Obama to offset the depradations of the evil Bush II must be gnashing your teeth long about now.  In the main, he's out-Bushing Bush!  It is with a certain amount of Schadenfreude that I contemplate the spectacle of the Bush-bashing boneheads of the Left waxing apoplectic over the antics of Barack the out-Bushing Bushite.  See Lorne Gunter, The George W. Bushification of Barack Obama.

Senator Charles Schumer (D-NY) Caught Lying

Here at 3:40:  The Tea Party "has an ideology to get rid of all government."  That's a blatant lie.  A lie is not the same as a false statement.  Every lie is a false statement, but not every false statement is a lie.  A further condition is necessary: one must make the false statement with the intention to deceive.  And that is exactly what Schumer is doing.  His intention is to deceive.  For he is not so stupid as not to know that limited government is not the same as no government.  He knows full well what Tea Partiers and other conservatives advocate.  He's lying to hold onto power.

We need to make it clear to him and his  ilk that when they  lie about us we will tell the truth about them.

 

A Common Misunderstanding of So-Called Cambridge Changes

There are philosophers who think that 'Cambridge' changes and real changes are mutually exclusive. Thus they think that if a change is Cambridge, then it is not real. This is a mistake. Real changes are a  proper subset of Cambridge changes.

Consider an example. Hillary gets wind of some tomcat behavior on the part of Bill and goes from a state of equanimity to that lamp-throwing fury the Bard spoke about. ("Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned!"). Bill, on the other hand, as the object of Hillary's fury, also changes: at one time he has the property of being well thought of by Hillary, and the contradictory property at a later time. Common to both the real change (in Hillary) and the relational change (in Bill) is the following: x changes if and only if there are distinct times, t1 and t2, and a property P such that x  exemplifies P at t1 and ~P at t2, or vice versa. Change thus defined is Cambridge change. The terminology is from Peter Geach:

     The great Cambridge philosophical works published in the early
     years of this [the 20th] century, like Russell's  Principles of
     Mathematics and McTaggart's Nature of Existence, explained change
     as simply a matter of contradictory attributes' holding good of
     individuals at different times. Clearly any change logically
     implies a 'Cambridge' change, but the converse is surely not true.
     . . . (Logic Matters, University of California Press, 1980, p.
     321.)

In sum, every (alterational) change is a Cambridge change, but only some of the latter are real changes. The rest are mere Cambridge  changes. It is therefore a mistake to think that Cambridge and real   changes form mutually exclusive classes. What one could correctly say, however, is that mere Cambridge changes and real changes form mutually  exclusive classes.

But what about existential (as opposed to alterational) change, as when a thing comes into existence, or passes out of existence? Are such changes real changes in the things that pass in and out of   existence? Are they merely Cambridge changes? Or neither?