tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-84621793745884222342024-03-05T06:07:52.682-05:00e.m. cadwaladrUnknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger127125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8462179374588422234.post-52537461922955039552019-01-29T11:46:00.001-05:002019-01-29T11:48:12.645-05:00A Prayer in the Dark<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 106%; margin-bottom: 7.8pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Georgia",serif; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 106%; mso-bidi-font-family: Georgia;">You speak to me at 3:00 AM when it is too quiet
to ignore you.<br />
Something outside of me – and yet nearer to me than my bones.<br />
My life is a leaf stirred by the wind of your breath --<br />
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>I go as you direct<br />
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>A creature not of doing but
of seeing.<br />
<br />
You are the potter and I am the clay.<br />
You pound me none too gently into the shape of your choosing --<br />
And yet none too harshly either<br />
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>I being fashioned from
unyielding material.<br />
<br />
But we do yield, all of us,<br />
Some are better, some are worse,<br />
Some superbly formed --<br />
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>And some grotesque<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Georgia",serif; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 106%; mso-bidi-font-family: Georgia;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Some
seeing at least dim glimpses of our destinies<br />
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>And some caught in the hell
that is merely the reflection of ourselves<br />
<span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span>The cold<br />
<span style="mso-tab-count: 3;"> </span>dark<br />
<span style="mso-tab-count: 4;"> </span>complicated
emptiness<br />
<span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span>That is the
illusion of the self-creating man.<br />
<br />
Thus I am made by your hand<br />
A shadow of your will<br />
<span style="mso-tab-count: 3;"> </span>unsuited
to know the grandeur than has cast it<br />
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>And yet<br />
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>By your very being I exist<br />
<span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span>As a blade
of grass among the millions that all turneth toward the sun<br />
<span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span>Their roots
in the clay<br />
<span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span>They grow by
their inmost nature toward the sky<br />
<br />
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>They sayeth<br />
<span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span>in discordant<br />
<span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span>and excruciating
longing<br />
<br />
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>“Make me not in vain<br />
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Oh Lord<br />
<span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span>Make me not
entirely in vain.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8462179374588422234.post-36887515106714179652017-06-30T13:10:00.000-04:002017-06-30T13:10:26.945-04:00On the death of a friend<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-top: 12.0pt;">
Sitting in the sun on the back of
your chair<br />
Paws folded<br />
Serenely smiling<br />
(Already the cancer ate you from within<br />
(I did not know<br />
You did not know<br />
)<br />
Life outstretched in the bright of the day<br />
(Death hidden<br />
under the
skin)<br />
).<br />
<br />
Where have you gone<br />
my
little friend?<br />
(Where is your spirit<br />
in the wide
cool universe of stars and galaxies<br />
(Where the curiosity<br />
the
impatience<br />
of
your wordless little life?<br />
)<br />
Where among my thoughts<br />
Do you rest easily forever in a sleep<br />
Or were you
spread thin into nothingness<br />
Or cast into
the dark abyss<br />
?<br />
(I too<br />
am but a shadow here<br />
)<br />
I have cared for you<br />
and watched you<br />
and been
glad for your existence<br />
(Are you nothing now<br />
Or
something?<br />
<br />
Am I to see you again<br />
Or are you
atomized into the ashes<br />
and the dust
from whence we came<br />
?<br />
)<br />
)<br />
<br />
All life loves life<br />
<br />
In its smallest breath<br />
(In the beating of its most unfathomable heart<br />
God’s handiwork<br />
is written
in infinities<br />
(<br />
<i>Requiescat in pace</i><br />
my
little friend<br />
)<br />
<br />
I will remember you as long as I can<br />
)<br />
.<o:p></o:p></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8462179374588422234.post-31575364821330107652016-04-13T12:25:00.000-04:002016-04-14T12:01:21.546-04:00The Defense Never Rests: A Lawyer's Quest for the Gospel – a critique and reflections<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif;">My pastor
recommended <i>The Defense Never Rests</i>
some time ago as a kind of Lutheran alternative (or perhaps supplement) to C.S.
Lewis. I am rather new to Christianity,
having spent five decades, more-or-less, as an atheist. On its face, I was skeptical of the idea that
the author, Craig A. Parton, had succeeded in making a substantial proof of the
truth claims of Christianity. If anyone
had succeeded in doing that, I presumed, it would probably have made news. While Mr. Parton’s arguments haven’t entirely
shaken me from that initial suspicion, his book is nevertheless a worthy effort.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif;">The book divides
into roughly four sections. The first is
a sort of religious biography of the author himself. Christian readers may find much in this
section to relate to. Even as a recent convert,
I found material there that struck a chord.
However, if you are a hardened atheist and looking for the meat of
Parton’s arguments, you might do well to tear the book approximately in two,
and give the first half to some Christian relative – preferably one that has
run away screaming from a liberal church.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif;">The second section
is a brief compendium of positions regarding apologetics in the abstract. If one has an interest in apologetics <i>as a discipline</i>, this section provides
some good introductory material.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif;">The third section is
the substance of the author’s argument, which I will talk about at more length.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif;">The fourth section
consists of ruminations about alternative apologetic material for those more
likely to be persuaded by their emotions than their intellects – people whom Parton
calls, somewhat awkwardly, “the tender-minded”.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif;">There are also a
number of appendices, as one would expect in a scholarly work.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif;">My primary
interest is in critiquing Parton’s core arguments and contrasting them with my
own experience of faith. I will
summarize Parton’s arguments for those who have no intention of reading the
book, but no summary is really adequate.
By all means, buy the book and read it for yourself. Then you can skip my insultingly brief
summary.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif;">Parton begins
boldly, making it clear that he is going to make his case for Christianity
entirely on the secular naturalist’s terms.
He sets out to prove the reliability of the Gospels as historical
documents, showing that their provenance is as good as, or better than, most
other documents from the ancient world.
He then examines the writers of the Gospels as witnesses, showing, by
various means, that they do not exhibit the characteristics of liars. On this basis, Parton concludes that
resurrection itself is proven to have occurred – by the standard of being
reasonable though not beyond all possible doubt. From the resurrection, he concludes Christ’s
divinity, the veracity of his statements, and, by extension the truth of scripture
as a whole. It is a good case, overall. It might prevail in front of a jury of a
dozen average, unbiased people – if such a group of people could be found.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif;">Personally, while
I find the arguments reassuring, my own faith springs from other sources. I give the author credit for attempting to
take on materialism on materialism’s own ground, but, having spent a very long
time in that camp, I can still imagine the objections from that quarter very
clearly. While I have sworn an oath
never to advocate on the Devil’s behalf (as Mr. Parton probably has himself) I
don’t believe it is an affront to God to speculate about the Devil’s
counterarguments. With respect, then, I
will now dust off my atheist hat and put it on – being careful to remove it
again once I am done, and make my closing comments from a much more comfortable
Christian perspective.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif;">First, there is a
principle in inductive logic, dating back at least to David Hume, that proving extraordinary
claims requires extraordinary evidence.
If I tell my wife I parked the car in the garage it is reasonable for
her to believe me based merely on the fact that I do not lie as a matter of
course. On the other hand, if I tell her
I parked an elephant in the garage, it would be prudent for her to have a look. From any non-believer’s perspective, Christ’s
resurrection is certainly an extraordinary claim. By the usual inductive standards it should
require a bit more than a lack of evidence of deliberate deceit. Even if the documents and the witnesses look
quite good, the evidence is probably insufficient to overcome the sheer
uniqueness of the event. I say “probably”
because, to the best of my knowledge, this standard doesn’t have a quantifiable
test.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif;">The way the
standard is supposed to work is that the “strange” assertion has to compete
against all the existing “knowledge” that its acceptance would overturn. So, if you want to prove that Santa Claus
exists, you have to overturn your audience’s present knowledge about the flight
characteristics of reindeer. You have to
persuade them that their parents, who may have eventually admitted to buying them
Santa’s Christmas gifts, were either delusional or liars. Et cetera.
By that standard, an intelligent atheist with what he assumes is a
fairly extensive knowledge of how the material world works will simply balk at
Parton’s argument. Evidence just
sufficient to convince a jury to acquit or convict will probably not do.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif;">Now, balking at Parton’s
argument certainly doesn’t <i>disprove</i>
Christ’s resurrection either. All manner
of events occurred in the ancient world that we cannot now prove happened. The evidence to either prove or disprove them
conclusively has eroded with time. What
we are left with in this particular instance is a miserable epistemic dichotomy. If you begin with a Christian worldview, the
body of evidence for Christ’s resurrection looks fairly conclusive. If you begin with a secular naturalist
worldview – it just isn’t enough.<sup>1</sup><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif;"><sup><br /></sup></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif;">Another argument Parton
offers for the resurrection that falls a bit flat is Frank Morrison’s examination
of the respective motivations of the Romans, the Jewish religious leaders, and Christ’s
disciples. Morrison<span style="color: red;"> </span>argues that hiding Christ’s body would have been
counterproductive for all three parties.
It would have undermined the authority of both the Romans and the Jews
(the Sanhedrin) to give credence to the idea of Christ’s divinity. The disciples, on the other hand, would have
only helped to make themselves martyrs to a religion they would have known to
be grounded in a lie. Therefore, since
none of these parties would have profited from hiding the body, Christ must
have actually risen. Sadly, this
argument is simply a false dilemma.
Since the first of three Jewish revolts against the Romans occurred a
mere thirty-three years after the Crucifixion, it is reasonable to assume that
there were people in Judea in Christ’s time who would have been well-motivated
to undermine the credibility of both the Romans and their Jewish
collaborators. While we have no record
that Jewish revolutionaries removed the body, we cannot reasonably expect such
a thing to have been carefully recorded.
We have no proof, but the mere possibility is enough the break the power
of the dilemma.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif;">Beyond the
credibility of the resurrection itself, I would expect determined atheists to
have difficulty with Parton’s sudden leap from the resurrection to the veracity
of Christ’s words. It does not follow
that a being with supernatural powers (or perhaps a being who has merely been <i>acted upon</i> by supernatural powers) must
always tell the truth. I do not claim
the Greek gods were anything but myth, but the people who believed that those gods
existed also believed that they were profligate liars. Here on Earth, power and truthfulness often
have quite an inverse relationship. I certainly
do not believe Christ lied, but I <i>do</i>
believe there is no strictly logical connection between supernatural power and
veracity. Satan, who has considerable
power, is the king of deceptions.
Linking Christ’s resurrection to the necessity of his truthfulness is
probably an unintentional instance of <i>begging
the question</i>. Again, I think the
whole persona of the trinity is so well ingrained within the lifelong
Christian’s mind that he leaps rather quickly from the resurrection to the
veracity of Christ’s words, then to the veracity of scripture in its entirety –
but for the non-believer new proofs are required at each step. One can believe in the resurrection without,
by <i>logical </i>necessity, believing the
whole of Genesis.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif;">I will take my
atheist hat off now, take an aspirin, and pray that I have not incurred the
Lord’s displeasure. My final objection
fits well enough within the Christian sphere.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif;">Before Mr. Parton
begins his case proper, he dispenses with the idea of a sort of “try-it-you’ll-like-it”
approach to Christianity. I will not
argue with the cited philosopher, Anthony Flew, because a penetrating
discussion of his position would be an essay in itself.<sup>2</sup> In any case, I think I can make my point
without resorting to that. I believe
that by rejecting the “try-it-you’ll-like-it” approach entirely, Parton is, at
least by implication, narrowing the path to belief a little too much. Although he goes on to discuss alternate
approaches to faith for the “tender-minded” near the end of the book (via music
or literature, for example) I was left with the impression that he believes the
historical/legal approach is somehow better or more complete than any other. I do not believe this is true.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif;">The reason for my
own belief, as best as I can express it, is disappointingly circular. <i>I
believe because I can. </i>Let me unpack
that. If you told me I had to believe in
Santa Claus to make everybody happy and to fit in with the world around me, I
could easily pretend to. I could figure
out what reality + Santa Claus would have to be like, and talk to believing adults
the way that I currently talk to believing four-year-olds. But I could not actually <i>believe </i>in Santa Claus<i>.</i> There are no hoof prints on my roof. The stocks of toys on the shelves in the
local Walmart dwindle suspiciously in late December. Sure, I could act the part, eventually quite
automatically – but belief is not a <i>choice</i>. My experience of Christianity is nothing like
that. Somehow, midway through the
Catechism I attended with my wife, I simply found that I <i>believed</i>. In the beginning,
I had only suspended <i>disbelief </i>– the
way one does when one is watching a movie.
Then, there it was, unbidden and unexplained, – <i>faith</i>. Now, this sort of
phenomenon does not fit neatly into either of Parton’s categories. I had certainly not been “tough-minded,”
bowing only to substantial evidence, but I hadn’t been “tender-minded” either –
bowing to some aesthetic event. The Holy
Spirit, in my case, planted faith inside my head with all the awe-inspiring
drama of a mailman putting a letter in a mailbox. It was just <i>there – </i>an anomalous presence in an otherwise fairly
analytical life. Now, with guidance this
kernel of belief has gone on to make all sorts of far-reaching changes to the
way I understand the world, and I struggle with all sorts of problems like any
other wretched sinner – but faith itself wasn’t something that I put there or
could have put there by my own effort.
This is not merely the regurgitation of Lutheran doctrine – it is my<i> actual</i> experience.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif;">What is important
about my experience of faith is that it is utterly worthless as a piece of
evidence for anyone but myself. The
contents of my head are not open for public scrutiny. A materialist skeptic could shrug my
statements off as some mild form of mental illness – as a delusion pure and
simple. I could not prove such a person
wrong. It is perfectly possible, too,
for a fellow Christian to doubt my faith.
None of that concerns me very much.
If I cared, I could as easily impugn a skeptic’s motives for being
dismissive. It is a common enough human
tendency to bolster one’s own beliefs by attributing the beliefs of others to
various defects, either in themselves or in their environment. I believe what I believe. God is known to each of us individually and in
perfect silence – or he is not known at all.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif;">From a broader
perspective, the whole project of apologetics is something of an
enigma. Surely it is a good thing to
bring people to Christ, and to strengthen our fellow Christians in their
faith. Some are drawn to that work,
which can take a variety of forms.
Different people find different obstacles to the <i>possibility</i> of belief, and are amenable to different kinds of
argument or persuasion. Dr. Parton seeks
to influence people with rigorous, rational minds, and there is an
audience of people who will find his words helpful – myself among them. Nevertheless, with deference to the author,
all attempts at apologetics are attended by an air of pathos. What, after all, is the apologist doing? The apologist can ultimately bring <i>no one</i> to faith. According to the scripture itself, only the
Holy Spirit can do that.<span style="color: red;"> </span>Well, then the apologist can prepare
the ground – make the work of the Holy Spirit a bit easier. Without a doubt, apologists, teachers,
pastors, friends, and all manner of other people cultivate the soil of faith –
playing their deliberate or unwitting roles as the Holy Spirit’s instruments. Yet, whatever we may do, none of us has any
right to the smallest particle of pride.
God can plant faith in the heart of the hardest skeptic in the most
unlikely circumstances if he so chooses.
He can grow a rose in granite. Without
our help. Without breaking a sweat. The best apologist is no better than a child
bringing a badly made peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich to his father. God, I imagine, must smile at us and love us
– but more for the poignant sincerity of our effort than for our inevitably
inadequate assistance.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif;">For
all my criticism, I personally think Parton makes a pretty good butter-and-jelly
sandwich by the meagre measure of his human capability. What more do I have any right to ask?</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="border: none; mso-border-bottom-alt: solid windowtext .75pt; mso-padding-alt: 0in 0in 1.0pt 0in; padding: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif;">----------------------</span></div>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<sup><span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif;">1 </span></sup><span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif;">The evidence for early human evolution
presents the same sort of case in the opposite direction: To the secular naturalist the anthropological
evidence proves the theory – but to the biblically-oriented Christian it is too
much to ask to infer a human ancestor, sometimes complete with behavior, from a
mere handful of broken and badly worn bones.
The “extraordinary evidence standard” (for lack of a better term) is not
a law of nature but simply an acknowledgement of a common heuristic. Generally speaking, people prefer to live in
a world that is reasonably explicable.
If you abandon your worldview at the slightest provocation, or worse –
fill it up with contradictions, you doom yourself to a life of unending chaos
and confusion. Thus, people are
pigheaded in their own defense. By their
nature, they prefer to “know” a coherent fabric of falsehoods than to “know”
nothing at all.</span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<sup><span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif;">2 </span></sup><span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif;">Briefly, Flew’s parable is a straw
man. Christians, at least since the Crucifixion,
have not asserted the demonstrable, physical presence of a “gardener,” then
retreated by degrees as evidence was found lacking. They asserted the non-corporeal, untestable omni-presence
of God from the Church’s beginning. They
did not assert this arbitrarily, to defend their weak position, but asserted it
on the sometimes quite uncomfortable basis of immutable scripture. While this presents its own philosophical problems,
it is fundamentally different from Flew’s metaphor.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8462179374588422234.post-45354231263976865082016-03-24T12:02:00.000-04:002016-03-24T12:02:44.249-04:00Observations on a Trump Rally, Dayton Ohio<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 114%; margin-bottom: 9.95pt; mso-pagination: widow-orphan; tab-stops: 0in .5in 1.0in 1.5in 2.0in 2.5in 3.0in 3.5in 4.0in 4.5in 5.0in 5.5in 6.0in 467.9pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Georgia",serif; mso-bidi-font-family: Georgia;">These are a
few observations and personal reflections about the Trump Rally on March 12<sup>th</sup>
in Dayton Ohio – the rally at which a protester, Thomas DiMassimo, charged the
stage. While I was there, I didn’t
actually see the attack. The event was
held in a large aircraft hangar and as soon as the commotion started everyone
stood on tiptoe to see – which meant that only people very near the stage saw
anything. In any case, there is plenty
to say about the event itself.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 114%; margin-bottom: 9.95pt; mso-pagination: widow-orphan; tab-stops: 0in .5in 1.0in 1.5in 2.0in 2.5in 3.0in 3.5in 4.0in 4.5in 5.0in 5.5in 6.0in 467.9pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Georgia",serif; mso-bidi-font-family: Georgia;">Above all
else, it is more than a little notable that thousands of people would gladly
come out and stand on a hard concrete floor, crowded together waiting for hours
on end, to watch a presidential candidate who, by any objective standards, is
no great orator. Trump likes to say
there is “alot of love” at his rallies, and from his perspective he is
right. The man is a political rock
star. He doesn’t get polite applause –
ever. He gets a deafening roar of
solidarity. I saw several people who had
obviously come to disrupt his speech simply lose heart and slink back through
the crowd to quietly leave. I did not,
by the way, see one of them impeded or threatened. It is fair to say that Trump supporters are
angry, but it is unfair to say they are a mob.
Having been to many Tea Party events where the average age was probably
close to sixty, it was refreshing to see a large turnout of people in their
twenties and thirties. I’m not going to
say the crowd was a perfect mirror of the latest US census <a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="_GoBack"></a>in
racial terms, but frankly I am sick of caring.
There were Asians and Latinos here and there. There were a scattering of blacks, some of
whom had actually not come to shout the speaker down. I didn’t get any sense that anyone who
honestly came to listen was unwelcome.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Georgia",serif; mso-bidi-font-family: Georgia;">The event
really had two salient features. The
first was Trump’s own rambling, off-the-cuff, idiosyncratic stump speech. The second was the premeditated, periodic
interruptions of protesters. I can
fairly say that most of the protests were little conspiracies in themselves
because when someone either raised an inflammatory sign or shouted some
self-righteous obscenity, there were almost always two or three others in
support, ready to capture the event on their cell phone cameras. The goal, I suppose, was either to become
heroes on YouTube or to get extra credit in their <i>multicultural empowerment
studies </i>classes. These people were
not beaten or pushed, but ushered off with swift efficiency by the Secret
Service. Usually they went out peaceably
and smiling, though one young gentleman left throwing mock punches at the
crowd, and hooting like an ape. I am
sorry, but I actually witnessed this.
Most of the protesters I saw were white college-age males with furry
faces and glasses – not that I want to be accused of profiling. Without talking to them, I admit I have no
idea with what race or gender they actually identified. I retain a measure of sympathy for the blind
idealism of youth, but it is strained pretty thin when it is treading on
someone else’s freedom of speech. Trump
supporters have not performed such antics at Bernie Sanders rallies.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Georgia",serif; mso-bidi-font-family: Georgia;">The content of
Trump’s speech was an amalgam of things I’ve already heard him say, with a few
hard jabs at Governor Kasich who was, of course, Trump’s major competitor in
the state. Not very many thoughtful
people like all of Trump’s message, but there is much there to like if you give
him a fair hearing. Trump’s genius is
simply to state obvious things that all of the other candidates have been too
straitjacketed by consultants and donors to say, and he says these things over
and over again to the delight and reassurance of his supporters. We need a real border. Muslim immigration is a risky
proposition. Trade deals should be made
for economic rather than political reasons.
This makes Trump a reincarnation of Hitler – really? I looked hard, but did not see the little
mustache. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Georgia",serif; mso-bidi-font-family: Georgia;">To be honest,
I am truly bothered when Trump reaffirms his advocacy of torture. Sometimes I wonder if I am ready to vote for
a man who does such a good imitation not of Hitler – but of Tony Soprano. He thinks that we should reinstate
waterboarding <i>and worse, </i>on the argument that ISIS is unconstrained by
moral qualms and our constraints make it impossible for us to fight them
effectively. George Orwell said it with
a bit more eloquence: “People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only
because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.” There is some truth to this species of
argument – made all the more credible by the Obama administration’s anemic
suggestion that the way to defeat ISIS is to somehow raise employment levels in
the Middle East. I think that torture
will always happen in war, and in certain cases really is the lesser of two
evils, but I have a problem with introducing it as a legally sanctioned
instrument of the government of a republic.
I fear that what is done to terrorists today may be done to ordinary
criminals tomorrow, and, eventually, to people who just hold politically
unpopular views. It bothers me. I worry.
It does not end my support for Trump, however.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Georgia",serif; mso-bidi-font-family: Georgia;">It is not as
though the choice we have were Trump or Gerald Ford. We no longer live in a functioning, rational
republic – but a thoroughly degenerate kleptocracy. Apart from Trump, we have essentially two
choices. On the one hand, we have Bernie
Sanders – a comparatively honest ideologue who would have more-or-less the same
relationship to the US economy that an iceberg had to the Titanic. Hasn’t the world tried socialism often
enough? Why should we imagine that,
maybe this time, it will not lead to chronic economic lethargy at best – and
gulags and totalitarianism at worst. In
answer to my own question, most millenials simply don’t know any real
history. They believe in socialism
because they’ve been indoctrinated by a couple of generations of frustrated old
radicals. Socialism has always had a
pleasant icing of progress and idealism – it’s the rotten or iron-hard cake
underneath that always proves distasteful to digest. On the other hand, behind the other podiums
we have – everybody else. Cruz
supporters will probably fume that I would toss their perfectly-branded hero
into the same dirty basket with Hillary Clinton, but ultimately the two
associate with the same Council on Foreign Relations, the same Goldman Sachs,
and they both went to the same elitist, ultra-liberal universities. They are both surrounded by similar groups of
political consultants to craft their messages for maximum effect and minimum
culpability. They are, in short, just
members of different family branches of the same corrupt, inbred, politic class. Kasich is just an awkward uncle of the family
– out of touch and past his prime. I
have ceased to listen to what any of these people say because, frankly, their
words are empty. “Conservative,” from
the lips of a politician, means about as much as “racist” from the lips of
Melissa Harris-Perry. It’s a nonsense
word used solely for effect. Political
consultants have undoubtedly estimated the fraction of the public who will be
seduced by a particular lie, what fraction will check their facts, and if the
lie will probably net more votes from suckers than it will lose from
fact-checkers – any of these candidates will use it.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Georgia",serif; mso-bidi-font-family: Georgia;">There is every
reason to believe the mother of all monetary crises lurks just over the
horizon. Running crushing deficits year
after year is unsustainable. An elitist,
lying, kleptocratic lawyer versus Tony Soprano with some real world experience
and an economics degree? Is that really
a hard choice? Which is more unpleasant –
the human suffering caused by an unchecked economic implosion or the
waterboarding of a few terrorists? The
latter does raise risks – the former is all but a certainty. Trump’s detractors may just wish they had a
strongman when the banks collapse again.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; line-height: 114%;">The ending of
the rally was surprisingly calm and quiet.</span><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; line-height: 114%;">
</span><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; line-height: 114%;">When the news cameras were put away, the protestors disappeared.</span><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; line-height: 114%;"> </span><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; line-height: 114%;">Trump walked the edge of crowd, smiling and
shaking hands.</span><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; line-height: 114%;"> </span><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; line-height: 114%;">A small cloud of signs
bent in his direction for autographs the way that plants bend toward the
light.</span><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; line-height: 114%;"> </span><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; line-height: 114%;">He signed a few.</span><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; line-height: 114%;"> </span><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; line-height: 114%;">From the side he could barely be seen among his
federal bodyguards – standing out only because of his distinctive hair.</span><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; line-height: 114%;"> </span><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; line-height: 114%;">It is strange to witness the unlikely fulcrum
on which history appears about to pivot.</span><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; line-height: 114%;">
</span><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; line-height: 114%;">Tens of millions of people watch and pray.</span></div>
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<o:p></o:p></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8462179374588422234.post-22670018408689946312016-03-10T12:04:00.000-05:002016-03-10T12:04:53.552-05:00Backhanding the public has consequences<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 107%; margin-bottom: 7.95pt; mso-pagination: widow-orphan; tab-stops: 0in .5in 1.0in 1.5in 2.0in 2.5in 3.0in 3.5in 4.0in 4.5in 5.0in 5.5in 6.0in 467.9pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Georgia",serif; mso-bidi-font-family: Georgia;">It is bitterly
amusing to watch the two party establishments and the miscellaneous talking
heads recoil in horror over Donald Trump – as though he were some evil titan
that the public’s worst sentiments had conjured up. If there is anyone to blame for Trump’s
spectacular rise, it is the very people who now oppose him the most
desperately. Most real conservatives
would have been quite content to vote for a second term of Herman Cain or Newt
Gingrich – but we were not given that option.
We were given “Mittens” Romney because, I suppose, it was his turn. The Washington establishment is upset because
many Americans want to see <i>every </i>illegal immigrant in the United States
deported? Perhaps if both parties hadn’t
cooperated to all but erase the southern border by effectively nullifying the
immigration laws, you and I might be able to find a bit more Christian charity
in our supposedly racist little hearts.
People tend to have more compassion for others when it isn’t obvious
those others are being imported to replace them. I don’t hate Spanish-speaking countries – but
I would like at least a little say about whether or not I am going to have to
live in one. Moreover, importing 1.5
million Muslims in the wake of 9/11 has to be one of the most irrational public
policy decision ever made. It takes a
kind of cultivated blindness to see it as anything else. A virulent strain of Jihadist terrorism is
spreading across the Muslim world – and the reaction of our “best and brightest”
is to give Muslims not only admittance, but a kind of “preferred immigrant”
status. That isn’t tolerance – it is
sheer contempt for the security of ordinary American lives. When Trump says he will end these things our
enthusiasm is not so much a reflection of our trust in him as it is our
justifiable distrust of everyone else.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Georgia",serif; mso-bidi-font-family: Georgia;">I used to like
Ted Cruz – until I had a cursory look at his background. Most politicians are in bed with the big
banks and the globalists to some degree, but Cruz is the only one I know of who
is <i>literally </i>in bed with them – his wife Heidi being a former operative
at both Goldman Sachs and the shadowy Council of Foreign Relations. Neither Goldman nor the CFM are exactly known
for their conservative principles or their love for American national
sovereignty. Maybe Ted and his
campaigning wife manage, somehow, never to discuss potential public policy but,
you know, <i>“I’m just saying...”</i>
While Trump’s New York City is not particularly a bastion of
conservative thought, Ted and Heidi’s alma mater, Harvard, doesn’t exactly have
direct flights to the Reagan Ranch either.
Sure, Mark Levin gives him a 97% liberty score for his voting record,
but it doesn’t fully cover up that underlying elitist odor. Rubio, Kasich, and the others who have fallen
by the wayside hardly seem worth the trouble of mentioning.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Georgia",serif; mso-bidi-font-family: Georgia;">We have Donald
Trump, the last man standing – and the first in a very long time to actually
stand up and speak his mind. He is
everything America ever was – good and bad – all rolled up into one big,
beautiful, raucous, uncouth package.
What country but America could have made such a man? I am tired of apologizing for my country or
for him. It is true that Donald Trump
will never write the 21<sup>st</sup> century equivalent to the Gettysburg
address, but we’ve just suffered through seven years of a president who
believed he could remake the entire world with the vastly overrated power of
his words. We have nothing good to show
for either his eloquence or his ideas.
It is evident enough that behind the amazing shotgun blast of language
that comes our of Donald’s mouth there lies that formidable talent that we used
to call “American know-how” – that force that built the greatest nation on the
Earth before we all learned to be so sensitive that we’re afraid to
breathe. We need a businessman with an
economics degree more that we need another passive-aggressive elitist with a
law degree. I’m not going to waste time
voting for one more candidate whose obvious goal is to manage America’s decline
for the benefit of the current political class.
If we are to fail as a nation and as a people, then by God let us fail
standing up and being heard.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; line-height: 107%;">Yes, Donald
Trump is a big roll of the dice.</span><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; line-height: 107%;"> </span><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; line-height: 107%;">What
worthwhile president in our history has not been?</span><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; line-height: 107%;"> </span><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; line-height: 107%;">And, for better or for worse, the die is
already cast.</span><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; line-height: 107%;"> </span><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; line-height: 107%;">It is now Trump or
nothing.</span><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; line-height: 107%;"> </span><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; line-height: 107%;">Conservatives looking for the
perfect candidate in 2020 or beyond ought to consider that, if Trump fails, the
establishments of both parties will do everything possible to insure that no
genuinely popular candidate will ever rise to viability again.</span><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; line-height: 107%;"> </span><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; line-height: 107%;">In their spectacular dismissal of public
anger, the Trump phenomena has caught both parties by surprise – but the train
is leaving the station </span><i style="font-family: Georgia, serif; line-height: 107%;">now</i><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; line-height: 107%;">.</span><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; line-height: 107%;"> </span><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; line-height: 107%;">We
have to get onboard and hope for the best.</span><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; line-height: 107%;">
</span><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; line-height: 107%;">If we do not get on we may never see another train worth boarding in our
lifetimes.</span><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; line-height: 107%;"> </span><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; line-height: 107%;">We may not be living in a
country with a franchise worth the name.</span></div>
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<o:p></o:p></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8462179374588422234.post-63821539957954445342016-02-22T12:29:00.000-05:002016-02-22T12:29:33.125-05:00What any five-year-old would know was murder<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 114%; margin-bottom: 9.95pt; mso-pagination: widow-orphan; tab-stops: 0in .5in 1.0in 1.5in 2.0in 2.5in 3.0in 3.5in 4.0in 4.5in 5.0in 5.5in 6.0in 467.9pt;">
<span style="color: #999999; font-family: Georgia, serif;">[I wrote this in September of 2015, but didn't find a publisher. - emc]</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Georgia",serif; mso-bidi-font-family: Georgia;">The recent
videos of Planned Parenthood officials behaving abominably has drawn out an
abominably bad argument in Planned Parenthood’s defense. The argument is that the sale of fetal organs
is justified because the organs would only go to waste if Planned Parenthood
didn’t sell them, and that the money raised by selling them is used for good
purposes. Now, if one were to take any
of the bodies that are big enough to harvest useful organs from and lay it on a
table it would be a recognizable human being – not a mere clump of cells, but a
baby – with human arms and legs and a human face. Seeing it would make most other human beings,
even most liberals, uncomfortable and sad in the way that seeing any dead child
makes any decent person feel uncomfortable and sad. A five-year-old would recognize it as a
person.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Georgia",serif; mso-bidi-font-family: Georgia;">Generally, we
do not think of dead human beings as scrap material, or as slabs of meat. We grant them a kind of instinctive reverence
– an acknowledgment of the fact that what we see in front of us was once the
dwelling place of feelings and a mind like our own, however inexperienced or
unknowable. In other words, we see in a
dead human body a reflection of ourselves.
We would not think of our own bodies as something to be chopped up so
they could be put to some better purpose than we could achieve by our own
lives. We might be willing to donate our
organs for others to use after our deaths – but that is a moral choice we are
allowed to make as grown-up human beings.
<i>That </i>is a choice. We would
not want someone else to decide our organs mattered – but that we did not. We have a certain inner sense that our own
lives are sacred, and, if we open our hearts, we know that other peoples lives,
no matter how humble or how small, are sacred too. Our society has a new phrase to express this
inner understanding. In the language of
the left, the supreme court, and many well-educated people, this form of
compassion is simply known as <i>religious bigotry. </i>It is our fate to live in such a modern
and enlightened age.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Georgia",serif; mso-bidi-font-family: Georgia;">The argument
Planned Parenthood’s advocates make is much the same as Josef Mengele might
have made for performing unspeakable experiments on child prisoners in
Auschwitz. The children were going to
die anyway, so why let their little bodies go to waste? The answer, in both cases, is that the crime
began not with an act, but with an idea.
The idea is that a few helpless lives, more-or-less, are
unimportant. That certain people can be
arbitrarily declared <i>not persons</i>.
Normal, reasonable practices don’t get built on a foundation of the
execution of the innocent. When a
society pretends that a certain kind of murder ought to be engaged in for the
greater good, when it de-values the lives of the innocent and helpless, its
moral pretensions become an empty joke.
It sticks a knife into the very concept of morality.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Georgia",serif; mso-bidi-font-family: Georgia;">At the mere
mention of the Holocaust, I imagine the proponents of Planned Parenthood will
roll their eyes and accuse me of inflammatory name calling. I stand by the comparison. Find another instance of the taking of human
life in such a cold, systematic, institutional way. Legalized abortion is not the unfortunate
random bloodletting of war, but a cool, planned, careful implementation of
someone’s idea of what is best for society.
It is not merely killing, but premeditated, intellectualized murder.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Georgia",serif; mso-bidi-font-family: Georgia;">Nor is the
similarity between the Holocaust and Planned Parenthood’s actions a mere
coincidence. Both the Holocaust and
Planned Parenthood have their origins in the same <i>eugenics movement </i>of
the early twentieth century. <i>Eugenics</i>,
simply put, was the idea that, by the selective breeding of good human
specimens on the one hand, and the prevention of breeding by inferior human
specimens on the other, the human race might be perfected. We all know that Adolf Hitler carried this
idea to its gruesome conclusion. Fewer
know that Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, followed the same
idea to a similar conclusion. Both
believed that, to make a better society, some blameless lives would have to be
thrown out like so much garbage. While
legal abortion is no longer usually practiced for the misguided purpose of
building a better race at any cost, it is still in every way the bloody legacy
of that idea. An idea which, in the case
of the Holocaust, cost 13 million people their lives. Abortions – in the United States alone –
exceeded that death toll decades ago.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Georgia",serif; mso-bidi-font-family: Georgia;">What the film
makers from the Center for Medical Progress has done in its Planned Parenthood
videos is little different from what US Army photographers did at Buchenwald
and Dachau. They have simply exposed
reality to the light of day. In neither
case was any embellishment necessary.
The only thing surprising is our own surprise. Did we expect that people who earn their
wages by dismembering living human beings would somehow do that ghoulish work
with loving compassion and respect? Were
the people who ran Dachau a kind and gentle species of men? When a person deals, year in and year out, in
human butchery and the callous sale of body parts – can he or she retain some
moral compass worth the term? We have
only seen what has really always been there, hidden discreetly behind dignified
walls. We have only seen what we should
have expected. What any normal
five-year-old would know was murder.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
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<span style="font-family: "Georgia",serif; mso-bidi-font-family: Georgia;">If we can
tolerate such things and do nothing we are as guilty as the Germans were. Or rather we are worse, because at least the
Germans could claim they didn’t know, or didn’t know the details, of what was
happening around them. You and I have
known all along. I myself have driven
past Right-to-Life demonstrations with their terrible grizzly signs and did
nothing but shake my head and wish that they would take their awful images
away. I have quietly accepted this
ongoing atrocity as the perverse expression of a civil right, and left it go
unnoticed and unconsidered – <i>out of sight and out of mind</i>. Who am I to condemn the girl or young woman
who, desperate and confused, accepts the lies and evil advice of calm,
credentialed people in white coats? We
have all been lied to, and most of us have lied to ourselves. What appears obscene and wrong at first –
almost always truly is. The price of
that kind of error, sadly, is often paid in innocent blood.</span><o:p></o:p></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8462179374588422234.post-54922677022303569672016-02-22T12:23:00.000-05:002016-02-22T12:23:46.790-05:00The war we lack the will to fight<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 107%; margin-bottom: 7.95pt; mso-pagination: widow-orphan; tab-stops: 0in .5in 1.0in 1.5in 2.0in 2.5in 3.0in 3.5in 4.0in 4.5in 5.0in 5.5in 6.0in 467.9pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Georgia",serif; mso-bidi-font-family: Georgia;">America has
developed an unrealistic aversion to losing soldiers. I do not mean to undervalue, in any way, the
people on whom our freedom ultimately depends.
I am saying that, as a nation, we’ve forgotten what a real war is. On an average day in World War II, America
suffered the deaths of 302 combatants.
Not on D-Day or during the battle of Iwo Jima, but on an average day
during the conflict. The current general
conflict with Islamic fundamentalism has cost the US about 1.5 combatants on an
average day. If you consider the difference
between these two wars on a per capita basis, the ratio is not 200-to-1, but
closer to 500-to-1 – since we now have more than double the population. Nevertheless, the comparatively tiny number
of deaths in the current conflict (along with a somewhat more substantial
number of wounded) has left America fatigued and gun-shy. Even conservatives complain bitterly about
any hint of “more American boots on the ground.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Georgia",serif; mso-bidi-font-family: Georgia;">We are also
much more sensitive to enemy civilian deaths than we were during World War
II. The number of civilian dead the US
is responsible for is hard to determine for a variety of reasons, but the
qualitative policy differences are plain.
During World War II we heavily bombed both German and Japanese cities
with very little political backlash.
Now, we hear public outcries at the occasional smart-bomb that finds its
way – quite accidentally – onto a group of non-combatants. We bomb ISIS oil trucks with reluctance
because they might be driven by civilians.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Georgia",serif; mso-bidi-font-family: Georgia;">The origins of
these changes in the public tolerance for bloodletting would be interesting to
examine, but for my purpose it is enough to simply understand that these
changes have occurred. Together, these
two essentially sociological factors have forced us to fight our wars the way
we do – using tactical air power almost to the exclusion of other means.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Georgia",serif; mso-bidi-font-family: Georgia;">Bombing a
technologically inferior enemy from sophisticated tactical aircraft has to be
one of the safest forms of warfare ever devised. Drone attacks are even safer. Though the financial costs of these methods
are spectacular, the personnel losses are minimal. Likewise, compared to the mass, unguided
bombing campaigns in World War II, modern tactical bombing kills a minimum of
enemy civilians. The “bad-guy-to-bystander”
ratio is quite high, the obvious trade-off being, again, the astronomical cost
of smart munitions. A variable imbedded
in the equation is the use of special forces teams to locate targets for the
planes. More teams = more dead soldiers
(on both sides). Fewer teams = more dead
bystanders (and lower overall effectiveness).
The overriding consideration in employing air power this way is not the
age-old goal of military victory, but the goal of avoiding incidents that
journalists might publicize as atrocities.
War, the planners imagine, can be conducted without the mess. The lives that are wasted through the
unnecessary prolongation of the fighting do not seem to bother journalists or
politicians as much as individually bloody events. Their concern is about today’s news cycle,
not the retrospective view of history.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Georgia",serif; mso-bidi-font-family: Georgia;">Unfortunately,
our enemies are rarely either as stupid or as sensitive as our politicians or
our press corps. The experienced
jihadist knows perfectly well that the safest place to deploy a rocket launcher
is in a populated area – preferably next to a school. Hamas has used the heightened sensitivities
of the western world against Israel and ISIS uses them against us. Moreover, our enemies also know that the
second-tier anti-aircraft weapons they are stuck with don’t have much chance of
downing American aircraft. Unable to
fight American soldiers or shoot down American planes, terrorism against our
population is the only option left. It
seems to be their preferred option in any case.
I am sure that whatever fraction of our officer corps that has eluded
political castration knows all of this and more. I am equally certain that the progressive
politicians now in power consider professional officers untrustworthy and think
of warfare as a dirty subject – unworthy of study by sophisticated people like
themselves. We have only to look at the
Obama administration’s prisoner exchange policies, their unjustified faith in
their own diplomatic effectiveness, and their penchant for releasing militarily
significant information to the press, to see their cold contempt for military
considerations. Making war has always
been a tragic, wretched business – but many contemporary politicians seem to
think the new millennium has somehow made warfare an entirely optional
undertaking. It is not.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Georgia",serif; mso-bidi-font-family: Georgia;">No amount of
air power is capable of occupying even enough land for the skinniest of
diplomats to stand on. Aircraft, broadly
speaking, can only perform two operations.
They can find potential targets and they can destroy them. The cannot search houses or occupy
streets. The continual call, from
presidential candidates of both of our political parties, for a gaggle of Arab
allies to do the dirty work of dying for American national interests is a frank
admission of our national impotence.
From a foreign policy perspective, it is also desperately shortsighted. The people that do the dying have an
understandable expectation of getting victory on their terms. Their aspirations and ours are not the same. Even with our ground troops present, neither
Afghanistan nor Iraq showed much interest in rebuilding themselves as modern,
democratic, western nations. Culture has
never been that conveniently malleable.
Afghanistan and Iraq are the same tribal, corrupt, politically and
morally backward places they have been for centuries. Eliminating ISIS with a group of proxies will
not put an end to Wahhabism, but will merely disturb its focus
temporarily. History has let the
caliphate out of the bag, and the destruction of one provisional Islamist state
is not going to put it back again.
Unless we are driven to the level of public outrage necessary to either
occupy the entire Muslim world or reduce it to a depopulated smoking ruin, the
jihadists will continue to rise from their own ashes with a new name and the
same old 7<sup>th</sup> century objective.
Campaign rhetoric is unlikely to arouse that kind of public will.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Georgia",serif; mso-bidi-font-family: Georgia;">Donald Trump,
to be fair, has a different bad plan from all the others. He wants to “take the oil.” There is no way to do this without a massive
ground operation. One cannot exactly fly
off with the oil in a special forces helicopter. “Taking the oil” would mean permanently
occupying not only the oil fields themselves, but also enough secure territory
to run a pipeline to the closest defensible port – without any pretense of ever
leaving. The “Trump pipeline” would
indeed rob the enemy of considerable wealth, at the cost of a slow trickle of
dead American soldiers for a very long time.
It is militarily possible but politically unthinkable.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Georgia",serif; mso-bidi-font-family: Georgia;">Despite what
you might think, I am not a defeatist. I
believe that war and air power have a valid role, it just doesn’t happen to be
the role of playing king-maker between competing tribal nations. It is not a good thing when one tribe of
barbarians butchers another, but we have neither the public will nor the
responsibility to stop them. The role of
the American military ought to be the protection of the United States. In our time that should probably include the
suppression of nuclear weapons programs in hostile nations, and hard but
measured retaliation against the known state supporters of terrorist acts. It should not concern itself with maintaining
familiar borders on middle eastern maps.
In a sane world, nations that chant “death to America” or hold our
citizens for ransom ought to be considered enemies. If they declare themselves at war with us –
we ought to take them at their word.
They should be punished – they should not be managed. If tactical air power is the only tool the
public will let our military use, we should at least employ it effectively –
more against nuclear facilities and valuable enemy assets, and less against
illiterate fanatics with Kalashnikovs. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
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<span style="font-family: "Georgia",serif; mso-bidi-font-family: Georgia;">While we must
react forcefully in the international sphere to re-establish our credibility,
the larger problem of terrorism cannot be solved with high explosives or
American troops on foreign soil. The
idea of Jihad is simply too widespread.
The greatest supporters of terrorism against the US are not Saudi
princes or the Islamic Republic of Iran, but the weepy, hand-wringing advocates
of open borders and multiculturalism.
Neither the 9/11 bombers, Major Hasan, the Tsarnaev brothers, nor the
San Bernardino shooters lived in places one could use a Hellfire missile
against. Through the power of
self-destructive immigration policies – they all lived right here. That is where our present focus should be.</span><o:p></o:p></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8462179374588422234.post-7626285282764865672016-02-22T12:21:00.000-05:002016-02-22T12:21:12.939-05:00How progressives murdered Bat Boy<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif;"><i style="color: #666666; font-size: 13.2px; line-height: 18.24px;">Originally Published by <a href="http://www.americanthinker.com/" style="color: #666666; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">American Thinker</a></i></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif;">For those of you who
are very young, or who have spent your days so glued to your cellphones that
you haven’t noticed the trashy newspapers in supermarket checkout lanes, Bat
Boy was a monster – half boy and half bat – the creation of the <i>Weekly World News</i>. Bat Boy was supposed to have been discovered
in a West Virginia cave in 1992. He was
two feet tall at the time of his discovery, but grew – as most kids do. He did all sorts of interesting things,
including fighting terrorism with the Army on some occasions. He had what might be described as a love-hate
relationship with the US government. A perceptive
boy if ever there was one.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif;">The institution of
the supermarket tabloid goes back as far as I can personally remember. In the 1970’s their pages were about evenly
populated with fictitious monsters, UFO sightings, the wild discoveries of Soviet
scientists, and assorted celebrity gossip.
Stuck in line with your mom and the groceries, you couldn’t help but
look. Sensible people never took the
pre-Photoshop creations of these vulgar newspapers very seriously, but they
have always had a certain appeal to the high school sophomore that lives on
quietly in most of us. When I was young,
whether a kid’s family actually bought the <i>National
Inquirer</i> amounted to a kind of rough IQ test. If they not only bought it but actually <i>believed</i> it, one could assume they were
not exactly overachievers.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif;">If you are
thinking I am going to tell you how Bill and Hillary kidnapped Bat Boy, and how
he subsequently died during salacious activities on Jeffrey Epstein’s “orgy
island,” I will have to disappoint you.
Bat Boy died a more humdrum, more pedestrian death. He was simply upstaged by the increasing circus-like
condition of the real world. The
Clintons were accessories to the crime of course, but Bat Boy’s murder was
committed by progressives and their culture <i>en
masse</i> – and, as usual, no indictment has ever been filed.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif;">Even at the time
of Bat Boy’s discovery, Michael Jackson was well on the way supplanting him in
the tabloid press. Fake freaks do not
compete well against real ones. Bat
Boy’s pointy ears and pointy teeth were no match for Jackson’s pointy nose and
hideously angular face. Simply escaping
from one captor after another didn’t compare with the sensationalism of
Jackson’s real life. When faced with a
half-black, half-white celebrity pedophile wearing a single white glove, what’s
a half-boy, half-bat to do? Run like a
bat out of hell? This, I think, is why
Bat Boy abandoned his life of minor crime, turned over a new leaf, and pursued
a life of national service. Being a good
conservative Appalachian kid at heart, he believed that America would warm to a
military hero more than it would indulge its baser curiosities about a freak. Unfortunately for Bat Boy, and for ourselves,
times and sensibilities had changed. No
amount of heroism could halt his inevitable demise.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif;">The <i>Weekly World News</i> stopped printing
physical papers in 2007, following their readers into the netherworld of
cyberspace a couple of years later. Bat
Boy faded away, his final resting place unknown. Bat Boy’s less patriotic successor is the
equally bizarre but sadly less fictitious monster, “Caitlyn” Jenner. “Caitlyn,” we all know, is half-man and
half-woman. “She” was popularized on
another well-known supermarket magazine, <i>Vanity
Fair</i>. Jenner, then named Bruce, was
also a feature of my childhood grocery memories – appearing on <i>Wheaties</i> cereal boxes as the greatest of
America’s Olympic heroes. The
66-year-old self-made hermaphrodite is still a hero to some, winning the <i>Arthur Ashe Courage Award</i>. I know you already know these things. The problem is not that “you cannot make
these things up”. The problem is that
you no longer have to.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif;">Pretty soon, if we
don’t change the culture’s direction, all forms of satire from the crudest to
the most refined will follow the late Bat Boy into the abyss. As people have begun to turn their cellphone
cameras on themselves the job of freak has far more applicants than available
positions. Freakishness used to be
something I could pick up or leave in the rack like a pack of chewing gum. Now I live in a thoroughly freakish world. Open <i>YouTube</i>
and click the “Trending” button if you feel my assessment has been unduly
harsh. The shrinking list of traditional
tabloids must struggle to think of anything shocking left to print. They are now overwhelmingly populated with
pictures of celebrities turned fat and ugly – something to make supermarket customers
feel a little less bad about the eight packages of Oreos and two gallons of ice
cream nestled in their carts. If you
cannot entertain the public with the bizarre, a bit of schadenfreude will have
to do. At the bitter end, if the trend
continues, perhaps the tabloids will start showing normal people on their
covers. People with any sort of lasting standards
are rapidly becoming the monsters of tomorrow.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8462179374588422234.post-82003557511061880612016-02-22T12:17:00.000-05:002016-02-22T12:17:29.735-05:00The Academic War on Facts<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 114%;">
<i style="color: #666666; font-family: georgia, serif; font-size: 13.2px; line-height: 18.24px;">Originally Published by <a href="http://www.americanthinker.com/" style="color: #666666; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">American Thinker</a></i><br />
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 114%;">
When I was in college back in the
1980s, a couple of new degree programs, <i>Women’s Studies</i> and <i>Afro-American
Studies</i>, were starting to gain in popularity. The purpose of these programs, everyone knew
perfectly well, was to advance the cause of political activism for these two
demographic groups. Activism isn’t
necessarily a bad thing. Without a
doubt, there really had been barriers to women’s advancement, more social than
legal, but by the 1980s these were clearly fading – more as the result of the
huge number of women advancing <i>themselves </i>than as the result of the
efforts of radical feminists. Similarly,
there had also been genuinely oppressive Jim Crow laws constraining black
Americans, but those laws had been almost entirely knocked down in the 1950s
and 60s. America of the 1980s was not a
perfectly gender-blind or color-blind society, but we were clearly on the right
track. True sexism and racism were well
on the decline. But along with the real
progress there came a class of professional progressive activists. Their more courageous predecessors having all
but won the war, this new generation of reformers established permanent
institutions in academia to re-fight it.
Never mind the notable lack of sexist or racist stalwarts in authority
to oppose. If an activist runs out of
enemies, it is no great challenge to reinvent them.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 114%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 114%;">
An institution of reform has the
same core priority as any other institution.
That priority is to survive and grow.
Institutions provide good jobs for the people who make the decisions,
promote the cause, and shuffle the paper.
I have often suspected that if a scientist arrived in the lobby of the
American Cancer Society with a cure for all forms of cancer, the managing
director’s first impulse would be to jump for joy – but a moment’s reflection
would reveal the need to take the wretched troublemaker to the basement and
beat him to death. What’s the American
Cancer Society without Cancer? And what’s
an activist without a cause?<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 114%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 114%;">
Not wanting to be called either
racist or sexist (the postmodernist equivalent to being accused of witchcraft)
university administrations were not inclined to hold their new activist
programs to any sort of standards.
Whatever inflammatory theories emerged from them might have been greeted
with an inward cringe – but this absolutely had to be accompanied with an
outward nod of approval. The phrases “moral
courage” and “university administration” rarely come together in a single
sentence.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 114%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 114%;">
One of the early products of this
new activism was the feminist Susan Brownmiller’s concept of a <i>culture of
rape</i>. In Brownmiller’s view, rape is
not primarily a crime of an unrestrained sexual impulse, but is instead an
assertion of power. It is not the
personal violation of one individual by another, but is instead a political act
– an expression of all men’s collective desire to oppress all women. This strange idea annoyed me from the
start. To begin with, I had never been
invited to the secret meeting in which all of the planet’s men had voted to
embark on such a brutish plan. More to
the point, it was simply counter to the obvious facts. Real rapists are morally deficient, either
for uniquely individual reasons, or because they are members of some nameable
degenerate or barbaric culture. The
barbaric culture that is currently overrunning Europe leaps to mind. Does any sane person really think that what
is going through a rapist’s mind is: “I feel an overwhelming urge to assert
collective male dominance over women”?
Decent men are quite resentful at being lumped into the collective “men”
so that they can be held jointly accountable with genuine predators with whom
they have little in common, and over whom they have no control. But preposterous ideas like this one suite
the activist’s purposes. Brownmiller’s
theory has two characteristics we have now seen repeated as a kind of
formula. First, any critique of the
theory brands you as part of the problem – a unfeeling and reactionary
troglodyte whose views only offer proof of the theory’s correctness. Second, the theory singles out no actionable
causes, but simply drives an ugly wedge between two, largely artificial,
classes. True, there really were men and
women in 1975 when Brownmiller published her book (now, even the basic division
of humanity into two simple genders is considered oppression) – but there never
was a polity of “all men” as distinct from a polity of “all women.” Whether Brownmiller or some more
straightforwardly political radical like Alinsky made this blueprint is a
matter of academic interest – if you’ll forgive the play on words. Either way, the pattern was set.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 114%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 114%;">
Academia has a special place in
society as one of very few institutions expected to define and promulgate
truth. The more secular a society
becomes, the more academia holds that power alone. That is why the decline in standards of
evidence within any branch of academia is so damaging. Politics has always been the domain of liars
and demagogues. It has been the twin
bulwarks of religious moral principle and hard, substantiated facts that have
held politics in check in modern times.
We now live in a society where truths are no longer buttressed by
either. If tenured professors are not
interested in facts, we should not be too surprised that no one else is.<i> </i>Contemporary academic standards are not
those of the hard sciences. Instead,
they are the soft standards of liberal arts – not of physics and chemistry, but
of literature and narrative. The
question is no longer “Is it true?,” but “Does it make a compelling story?” “Does it stir the audience’s feelings?” “Does it have clear-cut heroes and clear-cut
villains?” This shift explains not only
the weird synthesis of news with entertainment, but the equally bizarre
prevalence of celebrity activism. Why
would anyone, thinking rationally, care what a sadism-obsessed deviant like
Quentin Tarantino has to say about political or social issues? People care because we live in a society
without rational standards. We do not
have “credible authorities” – we only have “opinion makers.”<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 114%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 114%;">
The government we are currently
saddled with is saturated with officials from my generation. We were taught, however subtly, that the
standards of truth to which people should be held accountable depend on who
they are and what they happen to be saying.
The grievances of minority groups, for example, can simply not be
questioned. The grievances of
non-minority groups (white southerners are a perennial favorite) can be
immediately reviled and dismissed.
Racism is back with a vengeance – the difference is that now you will be
<i>called </i>racist if you attempt to point it out. Relevant objective facts, like the prevalence
of black-on-black crime, are excluded from consideration. Politically acceptable “truth” isn’t to be
found in facts, but simply in the recitation of the narrative.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 114%;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 114%;">
If the current state of things is
terrible, the possibilities for the future are nearly unimaginable. What would happen if the self-indulgent,
sexually ambiguous thumb-suckers that inhabit university safe-spaces today,
demanding trigger warnings so that their hypersensitive feeling aren’t
scratched by anything factual, find their way into positions of real
authority? These monsters scare even the
liberal Professor Frankensteins who created them. Mercifully, we may never know
what a world run by student cry-bullies would be like – but only because it
will either collapse or change before they manage to ascend to the throne. In times of real scarcity, the people who put
up the front money for university educations (parents, banks, or the Federal
government) will figure out that investing money merely to produce unproductive
narcissists is not only unprofitable, but redundant work. Even the worst middle school in the poorest
inner-city ghetto can make losers out of any human raw material provided, bad
or good. Indeed, contemporary culture
probably produces losers without any educational assistance at all. Even now, the actual demand for
educationally-induced political activism is minuscule. One elite school was all we needed to produce
the narcissistic loser that occupies the White House now – and one of him has
been quite enough to nearly bring the country to its knees.<o:p></o:p></div>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 114%;">
<o:p></o:p></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8462179374588422234.post-33411996303607185762016-01-04T12:28:00.000-05:002016-01-05T11:38:16.666-05:00It has come to this<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 114%;">
<i style="color: #666666; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 13.2px; line-height: 18.24px;">Originally Published by <a href="http://www.americanthinker.com/" style="color: #666666; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">American Thinker</a></i></div>
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<i><span style="color: #76a5af;">[Author's note. This is the original version of my article, and differs slightly from the text published in AT. I am, frankly, astonished at how well this article was received and how widely it has been distributed. I seem to have hit a nerve. To address a few points I have seen in comments elsewhere:<br />1. Yes, it is perfectly possible I have underestimated Trump.<br />2. My support for Cruz is contingent on him getting within the margin of error of a tie.<br />3. Yes, electing a strongman is indeed a dangerous thing. And the alternative is not?<br />4. To persons making the common progressive counterarguments (Whaaa, boo hoo, etc.): I wish you luck! Graduating from the 7th grade will be quite a challenge -- but I know that you can do it!<br />5. To those who have praised the article in various ways: You have my heartfelt thanks. You give me courage and renew my hope. -emc ]</span></i></div>
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The United States of America that
we grew up in, and in some cases fought for it – no longer exists. I would like to write something stirring in
defense of our Constitution, but it isn’t under attack. It is simply ignored. Some have proposed that we have a
Constitutional convention to add new amendments. What would that accomplish? Would our present Federal government respect
a set of new amendments when they don’t respect the old ones? What good does it do to insist on one’s
rights as a citizen, when in fact mere citizenship has lost its meaning? Americans have no rights officials in
Washington feel bound to recognize. Both
Republicans and Democrats overrule majority opinion as a matter of course. They do not doubt for a moment that they are
the best and brightest, and that our voting franchise is merely an antiquated
inconvenience. My elected representatives
represent no one but themselves. They
make war on my culture, my faith, and my security – then they insult me in
front of the elitist media on TV. The
executive branch, the congress, and most of the judiciary have no more respect
for me as a human being than the government of the British Empire had for the
most backward and primitive of its subjects.
The elites that live inside the beltway and in the bubble of academia
should try living in Ohio or Missouri for a few years. “White privilege” isn’t doing all that well
in rural West Virginia. We are here,
now, in this country at this time. We
are real people with real lives. We are
not statistics in a sociologist’s model, nor are we third and fourth generation
perpetrators from some politically reconstituted version of history. It is all too obvious that our most unrepresentative
of representative governments neither knows us nor respects us. They despise us. It is too much to ask us not to despise them
in return.<o:p></o:p></div>
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I am tired of being told by Barack
Obama on the one hand, and Bill O’Reilly on the other, what my American values
are or ought to be. I can work those out
for myself. I am tired of living in the
dumping ground for whatever group of hostile immigrants the social engineers in
Washington import to ease their guilty consciences. Let them move their Mexican underclass and
angry Syrian colonists to Martha’s Vineyard or Marin County north of San
Francisco. Maybe this would help our
legislators and “opinion makers” alleviate a bit of their never-ending
narcissistic angst. I am tired of
nameless, self-righteous bureaucrats levering open the restrooms of my local
schools to the confused transvestites that a liberal education churns out, then
lecturing me about tolerance and individual rights. Where is their tolerance of <i>my </i>culture? Where is their respect for <i>my </i>rights? Where is the brotherly concern shown to <i>my
</i>neighbors? I am tired of living in
an ill-planned social experiment. Of
taboo words and taboo ideas. I am tired
of being called a racist by people who are, themselves, the worst of racists –
and who have denuded the word itself of any meaning.<o:p></o:p></div>
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To be quite honest, I have no
particular love for Donald Trump – but he is what we have. He doesn’t speak well. I don’t think he has any idea what a republic
is. Then again, his last two
predecessors didn’t really understand the concept of a republic either. No doubt it’s not a word they use at
Harvard. Although I may not especially
like the erratic, often juvenile Mr. Trump, it isn’t lost on me that he at
least doesn’t hold me in contempt. He
may make war on illegal immigration and Muslim fundamentalism, but most of the
alternatives are making war on me.
Twenty years ago I would have worried about a man who scares resident
aliens, and even a few citizens, to death.
You will forgive me if I have come to the epiphany that protecting
absolutely every minority’s <i>feelings </i>is not a rational government’s
primary purpose. You will forgive me,
too, if I stop ignoring fourteen centuries of Islamic history, the stark
brutality of Islamic scripture, and the barbarism of contemporary Islamic
states. Give me a gated, crime-free community to live in, and maybe I can have
the luxury of worrying about the planet’s weather.<o:p></o:p></div>
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I would prefer to have a genuine
conservative candidate to vote for, and will probably vote for Cruz if he looks
viable enough. But if Donald Trump is
what it has come to – I will happily take the risk and check the box next to
his name. Republican, independent, or
Bull Moose party – I could not care less.
Conservatives don’t have a party.
We cannot be choosy. Better Trump
than the Democrat’s mad rush to national harikari. And better Trump than the Republican
establishment’s facilitation of the same national harikari, plus the now
intolerable old lie that “it’s the best that we could do.” It has never been impossible to build 700
miles of security fence. Eisenhower
built most of the interstate highway system in under a decade. It has never been impossible to balance the
budget. Over the course of American
history balanced budgets have actually been the norm. Moral cowardice has never been an attractive
trait, and no amount of clever advertising really makes it so. Ivy leaguers like Hillary who fail, then get
congratulated for their failures by the ivy league talking heads, do not
impress me more than Trump. Frankly,
George W. Bush set the bar pretty low for ivy leaguers and Barack Obama took
the bar down altogether. It is sad to
say that Trump would not be our first celebrity president. Yet for all of his ratings appeal and
flamboyance, he did at least accomplish something in his lifetime other than
being popular and being famous. He is,
at least, a competent businessman. That’s
better than having such credentials as “I made a great speech at the ‘04
convention,” or “I married Bill Clinton,” or, the perennial favorite, “I waited
my turn.”</div>
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<span style="line-height: 114%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 114%;">
<span style="line-height: 114%;">We have nearly died of the disease
of too much compromise.</span><span style="line-height: 114%;"> </span><span style="line-height: 114%;">Of “reaching
across the aisle.”</span><span style="line-height: 114%;"> </span><span style="line-height: 114%;">Of “building a
coalition of our Muslim allies.”</span><span style="line-height: 114%;"> </span><span style="line-height: 114%;">We have
no real friends in either quarter.</span><span style="line-height: 114%;"> </span><span style="line-height: 114%;">How
can a free people compromise with totalitarian ideologies, either socialist or
Islamic?</span><span style="line-height: 114%;"> </span><span style="line-height: 114%;">Let’s not fool ourselves.</span><span style="line-height: 114%;"> </span><span style="line-height: 114%;">America has bitter enemies – both foreign and
domestic.</span><span style="line-height: 114%;"> </span><span style="line-height: 114%;">Donald Trump, for all of his
flaws, must do.</span><span style="line-height: 114%;"> </span><span style="line-height: 114%;">He speaks his mind.</span><span style="line-height: 114%;"> </span><span style="line-height: 114%;">He understands and acknowledges at least the
plainly obvious.</span><span style="line-height: 114%;"> </span><span style="line-height: 114%;">Most of all, so far, he
doesn’t scare.</span></div>
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<o:p></o:p></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8462179374588422234.post-82991945439088736682015-11-25T14:14:00.000-05:002015-12-18T16:21:28.459-05:00By grace alone<div class="MsoNormal">
As a child I felt the power that imbued all things <br />
(I did not know your name<br />
but felt your breath in
the March wind<br />
Smelled and saw and knew you in the rotation of the seasons<br />
In the crisp light of the stars<br />
and in eerie light of fireflies<br />
In the clatter of dry leaves<br />
and in the cool<br />
soft<br />
silence
of the snow<br />
)<br />
Everywhere<br />
In all things<br />
Illuminating to me in the magical intensity of sundown<br />
High cloud spread across heaven<br />
and insect singing down
below<br />
All alive<br />
From the moon<br />
to the smallest young
green leaf<br />
(When was it that I lost
you<br />
and forgot?<br />
)<br />
<br />
When was it I that I lost that light within me<br />
Trading it for a mixture<br />
of intractable hungers<br />
and withered<br />
shrunken facts?<br />
(When I began to think
myself the center of the universe <br />
and ceased
to breathe?<br />
(When I
became an island<br />
in
a cold sea far from home)<br />
).<br />
<br />
Into that darkness I have gone unknowingly and quietly<br />
With the approval of my peers<br />
(but I have gone nonetheless)<br />
Little by little<br />
in the way that all things
freeze in your absence<br />
(I have
lived the long decades as a fitful corpse<br />
lost in my
dark thoughts <br />
gnawed by
demons seen and unseen<br />
(I
have moved restlessly<br />
and
stood still restlessly<br />
eaten and slept
and dreamed restlessly<br />
<br />
A thoughtless animal on the fringes of a thoughtless herd<br />
arrogant<br />
insufferable<br />
)<br />
(As they have groaned<br />
I have groaned <br />
<br />
As they have feared and
shivered and despised<br />
I too have feared<br />
and
shivered<br />
and
despised<br />
)<br />
I have been as nothing<br />
as a hungry mole among the
roots of giant trees<br />
consuming the days I could
not see<br />
and as certainly consumed
by them<br />
)<br />
.<br />
<br />
For this is the fallen world in all of its spectacle<br />
The world of art<br />
The world of haughty institutions<br />
(Dead are the minds that
murder with ideas and words<br />
Dead are the tongues that lust
for recognition<br />
Here the
murderer<br />
and there
the murder’s handiwork<br />
Here
the liar<br />
and there the lie<br />
<br />
We call it
social progress<br />
(It
is death)<br />
<br />
We call it
wisdom<br />
(It
is death)<br />
).<br />
<br />
Here the years have rotted<br />
There the days<br />
thrown onto the age-old heap
of vanities and hatreds<br />
(<br />
Have you not been with me all along<br />
Following in silence like my shadow<br />
Waiting<br />
watching<br />
whispering?<br />
(When in fact you are the
Man<br />
and I the shadow<br />
You are the
light<br />
and I the
darkness<br />
I
the illusion<br />
and
you the truth<br />
)).<br />
<br />
Have I not called out to you from the very bottom of my fears<br />
(in the worst of my moments<br />
with the most abject of
prayers<br />
<br />
only to be lifted up on
unseen hands<br />
which I
then<br />
in
turn<br />
denied<br />
)?<br />
<br />
Here<br />
Blown in to this corner of a disinterested world<br />
My heart still beating desperately<br />
wanting to live<br />
Superficially sufficient<br />
but a nervous<br />
hollow
shell<br />
(<br />
Here you have bought and
paid for my remains<br />
stood me
up<br />
on
wavering legs<br />
uncertain<br />
with
a flickering new sight<br />
dimly
seeing what I have always seen<br />
and
never seen<br />
(what
I have long despised<br />
<br />
and
always loved)<br />
).<br />
<br />
How can I ask for anything at all of my accord?<br />
(I bend as a willow in the
wind<br />
You beat me with storms<br />
and suffuse
me with light<br />
<br />
I am enough as I am<br />
in all my
weakness<br />
(I have asked enough<br />
for I am no more than dust<br />
)<br />
<br />
Are you not the eye that sees into my inmost self?<br />
Am I not as you have made me<br />
All that is wretched and all that is good<br />
All that strives<br />
and all that fears?<br />
(Do not the seasons spin around me<br />
day in<br />
and day
out<br />
While I watch and feel and
breathe<br />
<br />
My heart open<br />
My debts<br />
made good<br />
?)<br />
)<br />
<br />
Do I not praise you as all dust must praise the rain<br />
(From its nature<br />
from its smallness<br />
as a child<br />
reaches up impossibly toward
the sky<br />
?)<o:p></o:p></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8462179374588422234.post-17326515383045299382015-11-06T12:31:00.000-05:002015-11-06T12:31:05.794-05:00How can God condemn good people?<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 110%; margin-bottom: 9.9pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Georgia",serif; mso-bidi-font-family: Georgia;">Two friends of
mine have, quite independently, made the same argument against a strict
scriptural understanding of Christianity. Both asked essentially this:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: "Georgia",serif; mso-bidi-font-family: Georgia;">How can a
loving, merciful God condemn non-believing but good people to eternal torment
in hell?<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 110%; margin-bottom: 9.9pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Georgia",serif; mso-bidi-font-family: Georgia;">To begin with,
the question itself contains two assumptions that are worth noting. First,
it assumes that scripture actually says that God condemns non-believers of all
sorts to everlasting punishment. A great deal of effort has been put into
humanizing scripture with new interpretations, but we will put that problem
aside. I believe scripture does support quite widespread condemnation, and
if a person confidently believed that scripture says otherwise that person
really wouldn’t be worried about this issue in the first place.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 110%; margin-bottom: 9.9pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Georgia",serif; mso-bidi-font-family: Georgia;">The second and
more revealing assumption the question makes is that there is a standard of
goodness over and above God’s purposes, to which we can fairly expect God to
conform. In other words, the question takes for granted that it is <i>our </i>notions
of goodness and justice that the universe really should obey, and that God
should be a sort of divine executive authority, whose purpose is to manipulate
the universe so that it conforms to our ideals. Whether God exists or not,
that is obviously not the universe we’re living in. Is cancer just by
human standards? Are earthquakes? More to the point, any
interpretation of the Holy scriptures that involves <i>actually reading them</i>
will show that it is not God who is here to serve <i>our </i>purposes<i> </i>–
but we who are here to serve <i>God</i>’s. To even ask the question is
more than to overlook some minor aspect of Christianity – it is to admit to an
utter ignorance of who and what the scripture says God is. Atheists have
long smugly assumed that man invented God, and to the extent that men have been
willing to reinterpret (or abridge) the Holy scriptures to justify their own
desires the atheists have been quite right. An average Christian of a
hundred years ago would probably not have doubted the fate that waits for
non-believers after death – but then their ultimate religious authority was the
scriptures themselves. Our current standard is all too often the popular
culture. Sadly, this is even frequently true of those who have authority
over churches. Where, in scripture, does it say that the duty of God is to
follow the standards of the secular society?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 110%; margin-bottom: 9.9pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Georgia",serif; mso-bidi-font-family: Georgia;">The God of the
Bible is not without mercy – but he is not a grand entitlement administrator in
the sky. He has expectations of us. Christ himself was quite
straightforward about the conditions of salvation:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 110%; margin-bottom: 9.9pt;">
<i><span style="font-family: "Georgia",serif; mso-bidi-font-family: Georgia;">“For God so
loved the world, that He gave his only Son, that whoever believes in Him should
not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the
world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through
Him. Whoever believes in Him is not condemned, but whoever does not
believe is condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the
only Son of God.” John 3:16-18<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 110%; margin-bottom: 9.9pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Georgia",serif; mso-bidi-font-family: Georgia;">In other
words, we are saved by our faith that Jesus Christ suffered death in our place.
He rose again that we might also rise. When we begin to think that Hindus and
atheists, who lack this faith, might also go to heaven so long as they are
“good people,” we only show ourselves to be either ignorant of scripture – or
willing to twist it into whatever platitudes happen to suit our feelings.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 110%; margin-bottom: 9.9pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Georgia",serif; mso-bidi-font-family: Georgia;">God the
father’s ultimate purposes are not easy to comprehend (they are perhaps not
comprehensible at all) but he is not without consistency. Throughout the
Old Testament he shows himself quite willing to condemn whole nations of
non-believers in the course of his plans. To “save the world” does not
appear, in God’s eyes, to necessarily mean saving the majority of the
individuals. Nor does God’s position toward those who fall short of his
purposes alter fundamentally in the New Testament:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 110%; margin-bottom: 9.9pt;">
<i><span style="font-family: "Georgia",serif; mso-bidi-font-family: Georgia;">“Enter by the
narrow gate. For the gate is wide and the way is easy</span></i> <i><span style="font-family: "Georgia",serif; mso-bidi-font-family: Georgia;">that leads to
destruction, and those who enter by it are many. For the gate is narrow and the
way is hard that leads to life, and those who find it are few.</span></i><span style="font-family: "Georgia",serif; mso-bidi-font-family: Georgia;">” <i>Matthew
7:13-14</i><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 110%;">
<span style="font-family: "Georgia",serif; mso-bidi-font-family: Georgia;">The salvation offered by Christ is not a giveaway
to all but the most repugnant. If almost everyone, including
non-believers, were to be saved then what would be the point of even teaching
the Gospel? What difference would it
make? While our sins were indeed paid for by Christ’s suffering, this
gift of forgiveness and eternal life is received only through faith in Him.
Any other interpretation renders the text incoherent.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 110%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 110%;">
<span style="font-family: "Georgia",serif; mso-bidi-font-family: Georgia;">No one likes to think of good people being
condemned, especially the people that we know and love. But we don’t get
to vote on God’s purposes or his judgements. Those that we recognize as
“good” people are usually those who are friendly to us or to whom we have some
personal attachment. To be “good” in God’s eyes is to strive to obey his commandments
– including the commandment which acknowledges his sovereignty. If the
scriptures are understood courageously and honestly, God must be recognized an
awesome and terrible being – a jealous God, wrathful on the one hand, but
merciful and gracious on the other:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 110%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 110%;">
<i><span style="font-family: "Georgia",serif; mso-bidi-font-family: Georgia;">“The Lord is merciful and gracious, slow to anger
and abounding in steadfast love.<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 110%;">
<i><span style="font-family: "Georgia",serif; mso-bidi-font-family: Georgia;">He will not always chide, nor will he keep his
anger forever.<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 110%;">
<i><span style="font-family: "Georgia",serif; mso-bidi-font-family: Georgia;">He does not deal with us according to our sins,
nor repay us according to our iniquities.<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 110%;">
<i><span style="font-family: "Georgia",serif; mso-bidi-font-family: Georgia;">For as high as the heavens are above the earth,
so great is his steadfast love toward those who fear him;<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 110%;">
<i><span style="font-family: "Georgia",serif; mso-bidi-font-family: Georgia;">as far as the east is from the west, so far does
he remove our transgressions from us.<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 110%;">
<i><span style="font-family: "Georgia",serif; mso-bidi-font-family: Georgia;">As a father shows compassion to his children, so
the Lord shows compassion to those who fear him.<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 110%;">
<i><span style="font-family: "Georgia",serif; mso-bidi-font-family: Georgia;">For he knows our frame; he remembers that we are
dust.”<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 110%;">
<i><span style="font-family: "Georgia",serif; mso-bidi-font-family: Georgia;">Psalm 103:8-14</span></i><span style="font-family: "Georgia",serif; mso-bidi-font-family: Georgia;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 110%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 110%;">
<span style="font-family: "Georgia",serif; mso-bidi-font-family: Georgia;">But one must note here – <i>“</i>the Lord shows
compassion<i> to those who fear him.</i>” He is merciful to those who believe.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 110%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 110%;">
<span style="font-family: "Georgia",serif; mso-bidi-font-family: Georgia;">While on Earth, there is much that we can do to
help the non-believer. We are not, for the most part, called to be the
instruments of God’s wrath. Scripture exhorts us to love our neighbor –
repentant and unrepentant alike. That, and loving God, are the tasks set firmly
and plainly before us in the Holy scriptures. Who are we to second guess
God’s judgements?</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 110%;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /><span style="line-height: 17.6px;"><i>“For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, declares the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.” Isaiah 55:8-9</i></span></span></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8462179374588422234.post-75121893065219817142015-11-06T12:25:00.000-05:002015-11-06T12:25:49.733-05:00Some thoughts about Barack Obama’s faith<div class="WordSection1">
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 114%; margin-bottom: 9.95pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Georgia",serif; mso-bidi-font-family: Georgia;">Donald Trump’s
recent refusal to slap down a questioner’s statement that Obama is a Muslim
seems to have kicked that wasp’s nest yet again. Though Trump himself appears to be
sting-proof, the incident is still interesting because it highlights the
ongoing uncertainty over Obama’s true beliefs.
While none of us can see into the man’s heart (and we will assume, for
sake of argument, that Obama has such an organ) we can make reasonable
assumptions based on his behavior. When
you take that look, it really does appear that most people have gotten it
wrong.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 114%; margin-bottom: 9.95pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Georgia",serif; mso-bidi-font-family: Georgia;">Let’s begin
with the question “Is Barack Obama a Muslim?”
It is true that his father and grandfather were Muslims, that he went to
a Muslim school as a child, and that he shows some obvious Muslim
sympathies. Plenty of people in the
Muslim world believe Obama is a Muslim, based on the reasons I’ve just
outlined. There is a difference, though,
between being a <i>Muslim </i>and being a <i>Muslim sympathizer</i>. While I don’t have very much praise to offer
for Islam, one must acknowledge that it’s a rigorous religion with a clearly
defined doctrine. The word “Muslim”
itself means “one who submits (to Allah)”.
If I were listing the attributes of our 44<span style="font-size: 13.3333px;">th</span> president, the
phrase “one who submits (to Allah)” would not appear anywhere on the list. He may bow pathetically in front of foreign
leaders, but there is little indication he “submits” to anything in a religious
sense. Muslims are required to declare
their faith, and claiming to be a Christian infidel for political expedience is
something serious Muslims seldom do. The
requirement to pray, on your knees, five times a day is not a duty real Muslims
shrug off lightly either. Can anyone
honestly imagine Obama getting reverently down on his knees to worship anything
– other than an awkwardly placed mirror?
Muslims are strictly opposed to intoxicants of any kind. This does not sound like the religion for a
man who talks casually about using marijuana and cocaine. Muslims are not even supposed to smoke, but
Obama certainly does. Religious
doctrines, right or wrong, produces a certain kind of man. Bin Laden, for all his genocidal fanaticism,
has to be given credit for the qualities of patience and bodily
discipline. Whatever Barack Obama might
imagine about himself, he just doesn’t pass muster as a Muslim – at least not
in a religious sense.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 114%; margin-bottom: 9.95pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Georgia",serif; mso-bidi-font-family: Georgia;">Obama’s claim
to Christianity falls apart for similar reasons. What is there that is <i>Christian </i>about
him? He does not refer to his supposed
Christian faith except when it’s politically useful. He criticizes Christians at almost every
opportunity, displaying not only a contempt for the faith, but a spectacular
sense of egotism that is out of character with the faith. I grant that his election to two terms does
seem like a terrible miracle, but he <i>was </i>elected <i>president</i> – he
was not anointed a new <i>Christ</i>. It
is not for him to lecture real Christians about the shortcomings of their
religion, and if he were a Christian he would know that. Those who look to Obama for either salvation
or moral guidance would be better off praying to the tooth fairy. Of course, the claim that he’s the Antichrist
is entirely laughable too. For one
thing, why would the puppet of Satan, whose evil powers are beyond estimation,
need to resort to such a clumsy apparatus as a teleprompter? I’m not here to play the devil’s advocate –
but let’s give the devil his due! Of all
the possible emissaries in the world, he could find no better servant than
Barack Hussein Obama? The 20<sup>th</sup>
century produced many more likely candidates for the job of Antichrist – none
of them so petulant and disengaged.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 114%;">
<span style="font-family: "Georgia",serif; mso-bidi-font-family: Georgia;">The best evidence that Obama is not a Christian
really isn’t his obvious lack of piety, but the fact that most people on the
atheist left take it for granted that he’s an atheist like themselves. When he is accused of being Muslim they will
shout indignantly that Obama has declared himself a Christian – but they
protest with a wink and a nod. Anyone
can see that Obama joined reverend Jeremiah Wright’s <i>Trinity United Church
of Christ </i>primarily to convince the local voters that a Harvard-educated
lawyer from Hawaii was, somehow, a real black man. And Wright, in any case, doesn’t add much to
anybody’s Christian credentials. He’s
not a “love thy neighbor” sort of pastor.
He’s the sort of pastor a liberal anti-traditionalist might well find
entertaining – on those Sundays when the weather is either a little too wet or
windy for golf.</span><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 114%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 114%;">
<span style="font-family: "Georgia",serif; mso-bidi-font-family: Georgia;">While Obama isn’t disciplined enough to be a
Muslim, or sincere enough to be a Christian, he doesn’t seem to quite pass
muster as an atheist either. Atheists
believe there is no god. They believe we
are all the products of nature, and that there is nothing divine, or mystical,
or truly special about any of us. Obama
writes and speaks with an air of destiny any hardheaded atheist ought to find
disturbing. He may not believe in <i>American
exceptionalism</i>, but he clearly believes in <i>his own exceptionalism</i>. I’m not just being vicious to the president
here. I <i>am </i>being vicious – but I’m
not <i>just </i>being vicious. There is
a point at which vanity becomes more than an unpleasant personal trait, and
crosses into the realm of a pathology. <i>Narcissistic
Personality Disorder </i>is a recognized form of mental illness, and Barack
Obama embodies every one of its symptoms:</span></div>
</div>
<br />
<div class="Level1" style="line-height: 114%; margin-left: .75in; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: -60.45pt -.5in 0in .25in .5in 1.5in 2.0in 2.5in 3.0in 3.5in 4.0in 4.5in 5.0in 5.5in 6.0in 467.9pt; text-indent: -.5in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><i><span style="font-family: "Georgia",serif; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 114%; mso-bidi-font-family: Georgia; mso-fareast-font-family: Georgia;">1.<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 7pt; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; line-height: normal;">
</span></span></i><!--[endif]--><i><span style="font-family: "Georgia",serif; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 114%; mso-bidi-font-family: Georgia;">An exaggerated
sense of self-importance (e.g., exaggerates achievements and talents, expects
to be recognized as superior without commensurate achievements).<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="Level1" style="line-height: 114%; margin-left: .75in; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: -60.45pt -.5in 0in .25in .5in 1.5in 2.0in 2.5in 3.0in 3.5in 4.0in 4.5in 5.0in 5.5in 6.0in 467.9pt; text-indent: -.5in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><i><span style="font-family: "Georgia",serif; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 114%; mso-bidi-font-family: Georgia; mso-fareast-font-family: Georgia;">2.<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 7pt; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; line-height: normal;">
</span></span></i><!--[endif]--><i><span style="font-family: "Georgia",serif; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 114%; mso-bidi-font-family: Georgia;">Preoccupation
with fantasies of unlimited success, power, brilliance, beauty, or ideal love.<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="Level1" style="line-height: 114%; margin-left: .75in; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: -60.45pt -.5in 0in .25in .5in 1.5in 2.0in 2.5in 3.0in 3.5in 4.0in 4.5in 5.0in 5.5in 6.0in 467.9pt; text-indent: -.5in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><i><span style="font-family: "Georgia",serif; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 114%; mso-bidi-font-family: Georgia; mso-fareast-font-family: Georgia;">3.<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 7pt; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; line-height: normal;">
</span></span></i><!--[endif]--><i><span style="font-family: "Georgia",serif; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 114%; mso-bidi-font-family: Georgia;">Believes he is
"special" and can only be understood by, or should associate with,
other special or high-status people (or institutions).<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="Level1" style="line-height: 114%; margin-left: .75in; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: -60.45pt -.5in 0in .25in .5in 1.5in 2.0in 2.5in 3.0in 3.5in 4.0in 4.5in 5.0in 5.5in 6.0in 467.9pt; text-indent: -.5in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><i><span style="font-family: "Georgia",serif; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 114%; mso-bidi-font-family: Georgia; mso-fareast-font-family: Georgia;">4.<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 7pt; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; line-height: normal;">
</span></span></i><!--[endif]--><i><span style="font-family: "Georgia",serif; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 114%; mso-bidi-font-family: Georgia;">Requires
excessive admiration.<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="Level1" style="line-height: 114%; margin-left: .75in; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: -60.45pt -.5in 0in .25in .5in 1.5in 2.0in 2.5in 3.0in 3.5in 4.0in 4.5in 5.0in 5.5in 6.0in 467.9pt; text-indent: -.5in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><i><span style="font-family: "Georgia",serif; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 114%; mso-bidi-font-family: Georgia; mso-fareast-font-family: Georgia;">5.<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 7pt; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; line-height: normal;">
</span></span></i><!--[endif]--><i><span style="font-family: "Georgia",serif; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 114%; mso-bidi-font-family: Georgia;">Has a sense of
entitlement.<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="Level1" style="line-height: 114%; margin-left: .75in; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: -60.45pt -.5in 0in .25in .5in 1.5in 2.0in 2.5in 3.0in 3.5in 4.0in 4.5in 5.0in 5.5in 6.0in 467.9pt; text-indent: -.5in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><i><span style="font-family: "Georgia",serif; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 114%; mso-bidi-font-family: Georgia; mso-fareast-font-family: Georgia;">6.<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 7pt; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; line-height: normal;">
</span></span></i><!--[endif]--><i><span style="font-family: "Georgia",serif; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 114%; mso-bidi-font-family: Georgia;">Selfishly takes
advantage of others to achieve his own ends.<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="Level1" style="line-height: 114%; margin-left: .75in; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: -60.45pt -.5in 0in .25in .5in 1.5in 2.0in 2.5in 3.0in 3.5in 4.0in 4.5in 5.0in 5.5in 6.0in 467.9pt; text-indent: -.5in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><i><span style="font-family: "Georgia",serif; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 114%; mso-bidi-font-family: Georgia; mso-fareast-font-family: Georgia;">7.<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 7pt; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; line-height: normal;">
</span></span></i><!--[endif]--><i><span style="font-family: "Georgia",serif; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 114%; mso-bidi-font-family: Georgia;">Lacks empathy.<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="Level1" style="line-height: 114%; margin-left: .75in; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: -60.45pt -.5in 0in .25in .5in 1.5in 2.0in 2.5in 3.0in 3.5in 4.0in 4.5in 5.0in 5.5in 6.0in 467.9pt; text-indent: -.5in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><i><span style="font-family: "Georgia",serif; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 114%; mso-bidi-font-family: Georgia; mso-fareast-font-family: Georgia;">8.<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 7pt; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; line-height: normal;">
</span></span></i><!--[endif]--><i><span style="font-family: "Georgia",serif; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 114%; mso-bidi-font-family: Georgia;">Is often envious
of others or believes that others are envious of him.<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="Level1" style="line-height: 114%; margin-bottom: 9.95pt; margin-left: .75in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: -60.45pt -.5in 0in .25in .5in 1.5in 2.0in 2.5in 3.0in 3.5in 4.0in 4.5in 5.0in 5.5in 6.0in 467.9pt; text-indent: -.5in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 114%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">9.<span style="font-size: 7pt; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">
</span></span><!--[endif]--><i><span style="font-family: "Georgia",serif; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 114%; mso-bidi-font-family: Georgia;">Shows arrogant,
haughty, patronizing, or contemptuous behaviors or attitudes.</span></i><span style="font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 114%;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 114%; margin-bottom: 9.95pt; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; mso-list: skip; tab-stops: -60.45pt -.5in 0in .25in .5in 1.5in 2.0in 2.5in 3.0in 3.5in 4.0in 4.5in 5.0in 5.5in 6.0in 467.9pt; text-indent: -.5in;">
<i>- Diagnostic and Statistical
Manual of Mental Disorders IV , American Psychiatric Association</i><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 114%; margin-bottom: 9.95pt; mso-list: skip; tab-stops: -60.45pt -.5in 0in .25in .5in 1.5in 2.0in 2.5in 3.0in 3.5in 4.0in 4.5in 5.0in 5.5in 6.0in 467.9pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Georgia",serif; mso-bidi-font-family: Georgia;">It is only
necessary, by the way, to show five out of the nine symptoms.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 114%; margin-bottom: 9.95pt; mso-list: skip; tab-stops: -60.45pt -.5in 0in .25in .5in 1.5in 2.0in 2.5in 3.0in 3.5in 4.0in 4.5in 5.0in 5.5in 6.0in 467.9pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; line-height: 114%;">While there
has never been a clinical diagnosis of the president, for obvious reasons, let’s
not be blind.</span><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; line-height: 114%;"> </span><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; line-height: 114%;">Even some liberal
journalists have pointed out that our president seems disappointed with the
world – as though the world were failing him, rather than him failing to cope
successfully with it.</span><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; line-height: 114%;"> </span><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; line-height: 114%;">All presidents
have hefty egos, but this is something more than simply ego.</span><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; line-height: 114%;"> </span><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; line-height: 114%;">Barack Obama’s favoritism toward Muslims has
nothing to do with actual religious beliefs – of which he may well be
incapable.</span><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; line-height: 114%;"> </span><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; line-height: 114%;">His fondness for Islam is
nothing more than a mystical preoccupation with his own personal heritage.</span><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; line-height: 114%;"> </span><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; line-height: 114%;">His lukewarm Christianity is a mere
expedience.</span><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; line-height: 114%;"> </span><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; line-height: 114%;">Even his atheism is no more
than the casual adoption of the formless, open-ended pseudo-religion of his
benefactors.</span><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; line-height: 114%;"> </span><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; line-height: 114%;">His true god is, and probably
always will be, himself.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 114%; margin-bottom: 9.95pt; mso-list: skip; tab-stops: -60.45pt -.5in 0in .25in .5in 1.5in 2.0in 2.5in 3.0in 3.5in 4.0in 4.5in 5.0in 5.5in 6.0in 467.9pt;">
<o:p></o:p></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8462179374588422234.post-12931655719291248132015-09-24T12:07:00.000-04:002015-09-24T12:07:39.030-04:00Indecency by administrative decree<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 114%; margin-bottom: 9.95pt; mso-pagination: widow-orphan;">
<i style="color: #666666; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 13.2px; line-height: 18.24px;">Originally Published by <a href="http://www.americanthinker.com/" style="color: #666666; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">American Thinker</a></i><br />
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 114%; margin-bottom: 9.95pt; mso-pagination: widow-orphan;">
<span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Georgia;">Once upon a time, in a small town in Ohio, there was a little girl who
was very confused. She decided she was a
boy one day, and later she used the boy’s bathroom in her local public
school. You must forgive me for the
fairytale beginning, but we have departed from the adult world of reason and
standards, so this way of beginning is now as good as any other. “Oh my ears and whiskers!” said the large white
rabbit of a school superintendent, “what will we do!?” What indeed.
Just a few decades ago the answer would have been an easy one. A mental health professional would have been
summoned. The troubled girl would have
been sat down and asked many questions very quietly and nicely. Her unfortunate mental state being diagnosed,
she would have been ushered off to treatment.
A social worker, perhaps, would have had an earnest conversation with
the girl’s parents. In short, society
would have conspired to return the child to a state of <i>normalcy</i>. Normalcy.
You know. Try hard – it is still
just possible to remember. Now, of
course, things are different:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 114%; margin-bottom: 9.95pt; mso-pagination: widow-orphan;">
<i><span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Georgia;">“Title IX’s sex discrimination prohibition extends to claims of
discrimination based on gender identity or failure to conform to stereotypical
notions of masculinity or femininity and OCR accepts such complaints for
investigation. Similarly, the actual or
perceived sexual orientation or gender identity of the parties does not change
a school’s obligations.” – US Dept of
Education, 4-29-2014<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 114%; margin-bottom: 9.95pt; mso-pagination: widow-orphan;">
<span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Georgia;">The large white rabbit of a school superintendent can actually do very
little. Basically, he can quiver at the
awesome might of the Federal government – a small pretty bureaucrat laid
prostrate before his deity. In my little
town he caved almost at once. The
girl... er, BOY... can use whatever restroom she... er, HE... sees fit to. Gender identity is now a holy of holies. If a child draws a picture of a gun you can
expel the little deviant from school, but if she – or he – or it – declares a
different gender than anatomy would indicate we are now obligated to pretend
the child is making an adult decision.
Really. Scout’s honor – I would
not lie to you.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 114%; margin-bottom: 9.95pt; mso-pagination: widow-orphan;">
<span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Georgia;">Instead of the angels of normalcy, my town got a bevy of gay and
lesbian activists from GLSEN (Gay, Lesbian and Straight Educational Network) to
usher our backward hearts into this brave new liberal world. Their love and kindness surpasseth all
understanding. Personally, I would have
preferred a Mongol horde. If one is
going to have one’s civilization crushed, it is better to have it crushed by
enemies one can respect – rather than by a self-appointed committee of flaccid,
weepy, crusaders of the rainbow flag.
But here I only show my ignorance, and my need for thorough liberal
re-education. A lobotomy, in other
words.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 114%; margin-bottom: 9.95pt; mso-pagination: widow-orphan;">
<span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Georgia;">My town stands transfixed. A
few parents protest at the expense of the hapless rabbit – who doesn’t have the
power to act or the fortitude to do much if he did. Some parents buy home schooling books. Most just look the other way and pretend that
this peculiarity will be a one-off, and everything will soon get back to
normal. But of course it won’t. In addition to title IX, there are title VII
(employment) cases in the works. In the
eyes of the Federal bureaucracy, the genders are not only equal – but a matter
of personal choice. You are what you say
you are. If you insist that a
six-foot-four, hairy-chested man with all the genitalia God gave him is, in
fact, a male – you’re a bigot. The left
sneer at conservatives who are uncomfortable with Darwinian evolution – and yet
they have declared the recognition of the most basic fact of biology a
crime. The only question left in
Wonderland is – what’s next?</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 114%; margin-bottom: 9.95pt; mso-pagination: widow-orphan;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; line-height: 114%;">I don’t have kids in school and, for the record, I don’t have any
special dislike for homosexuals.</span><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; line-height: 114%;"> </span><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; line-height: 114%;">I
consider them people with a form of mental illness – but it is neither
charitable nor very pleasant to despise the sick. I do not like, however, to
have my culture flattened to accommodate a small minority’s disease. What is
most infuriating about the whole process is that the vast majority of us have
been pushed into this social experiment without so much as a whisper of
consent.</span><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; line-height: 114%;"> </span><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; line-height: 114%;">No one asked us at the local,
state, or even national level.</span><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; line-height: 114%;"> </span><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; line-height: 114%;">Our
legislators did not vote on this.</span><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; line-height: 114%;"> </span><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; line-height: 114%;">It was
not even imposed on us by black-robed justices whose names, at least, we
know.</span><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; line-height: 114%;"> </span><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; line-height: 114%;">The new regulation was signed into
existence by some nameless uber-liberal in the Dept of Ed – and we have no more
say about it than a laboratory rat in a cage.</span><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; line-height: 114%;">
</span><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; line-height: 114%;">We are seen as merely nameless members of the ignorant herd.</span><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; line-height: 114%;"> </span><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; line-height: 114%;">People in the flyover country, to be remade
in someone else’s image.</span></div>
</div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8462179374588422234.post-62790061021857557472015-09-09T12:06:00.001-04:002015-09-09T12:06:03.318-04:00It’s not about equality anymore<div style="line-height: 114%; margin-bottom: 9.95pt; mso-pagination: widow-orphan; tab-stops: 0in .5in 1.0in 1.5in 2.0in 2.5in 3.0in 3.5in 4.0in 4.5in 5.0in 5.5in 6.0in 467.9pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Georgia;">Unlike some
other social issues, the matter of racial inequality is one in which the
optimum situation can be easily understood – assuming that equality is the
actual goal.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 114%; margin-bottom: 9.95pt; mso-pagination: widow-orphan; tab-stops: 0in .5in 1.0in 1.5in 2.0in 2.5in 3.0in 3.5in 4.0in 4.5in 5.0in 5.5in 6.0in 467.9pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Georgia;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Georgia;">Imagine a
continuum, a simple scale from left to right – or right to left if that is your
preference. The scale represents the
legal and social status of members of one race relative to members of another. We will call our two imaginary races <i>K</i>
and <i>G</i>. At one end of the spectrum
(it does not matter <i>which </i>end) <i>K </i>has total ascendancy. At the <i>K-</i>ascendant end, members of
race <i>G</i> are not considered human.
They have no rights recognized by the <i>K</i>-dominated society. Moving toward the center, members of race <i>G</i>
gradually acquire human recognition and rights, while remaining still at least
somewhat legally and socially inferior to members of race <i>K</i>. By <i>socially inferior</i>, I mean
unashamedly recognized as inferior by the social standards that dominate the
society – by the media, common sentiment, and popular custom. Arriving at the center, we reach a point of
essential legal and social equality.
Allowing for the peculiar biases of individuals in both directions, the
midpoint is that place at which race alone ceases to be either an advantage or
a disadvantage to an individual. For all
intents and purposes, the distinction between members of race <i>K</i> and race
<i>G</i> ceases to exist. To use Martin
Luther King’s eloquent formulation, it is the point at which individuals are “not
judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.” We have arrived at the optimum situation –
again, assuming we take for granted that the ideal condition really is racial
equality. But there is, of course, the
opposite side to this continuum. Beyond
the center point, race <i>G</i> begins to dominate legally and socially, while
race <i>K</i> assumes more and more the inferior position. Finally, at the other extreme end of the
spectrum, members of race <i>K</i> are not considered human beings, and have no
rights members of race <i>G</i> feel compelled to recognize. The symmetry of our abstract continuum is
perfect.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Georgia;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Georgia;">It should be
obvious that advocating a position at any point on the continuum, other than
the midpoint, entails recognizing race as a relevant characteristic for the
benefit of one side or the other. After
all, one cannot discriminate, however slightly, without at least recognizing
the criterion one intends to use as the basis for discrimination. Note, too, that the arrival of society at the
midpoint, at King’s ideal, is not a guarantor that <i>individual </i>members of
the two races will be equal in every respect.
Nor is it a guarantor that the two groups considered <i>as collectives </i>will
be equal in every respect. Arrival at
the midpoint only confirms that, everything else being equal, individual
members of the two races will be treated more-or-less alike. The society may well discriminate, justly or
unjustly, between people for other reasons.
In a color-blind society, an ax murderer of race <i>K</i> and an ax
murder of race <i>G</i> will be about equally unloved, while talented and
charismatic liars of both races will be free to aspire to public office.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Georgia;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Georgia;">Honest
people can have rational debates about whether Dr. King’s ideal was ever
reached, or even approximated, in American society. President Obama correctly pointed out, with
something a bit less than King’s beautiful language, that “It’s not just a
matter of it not being polite to say nigger in public.” While this is true, it’s not just a matter of
raising anecdotal incidents of personal offense either. My own (admittedly non-conclusive) experience
is that the remaining legal obstacles faced by black Americans were overthrown
in my infancy, and the social barriers against them were steadily withering
until about 2009. Since the 1960s,
however, a small but influential group of activists have crossed the midpoint
of the continuum and kept going.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Georgia;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif;"><span style="line-height: 114%;">The first
overreach of the midpoint came in the form of certain </span></span><i style="font-family: Georgia, serif; line-height: 114%;">affirmative action </i><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif;"><span style="line-height: 114%;">policies,
which offered preferential treatment to some black citizens on the
justification that, as a group, blacks were (and undeniably still are)
considerably poorer than whites and are under-represented in many
professions. A policy designed to elevate
a race must recognize race as a criterion for discrimination. This simply cannot be otherwise. So much for not judging people by the color
of their skin. Moreover, </span></span><i style="font-family: Georgia, serif; line-height: 114%;">affirmative
action</i><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif;"><span style="line-height: 114%;"> takes one out of the realm of individual merit, in which we evaluate
each person by his or her own unique worth, and leaves us with the dangerous
habit of framing justice in terms of the interaction between groups. The problem with imagining justice that way
is that it pretends that racial groups are </span><span style="line-height: 18.24px;">homogeneous</span><span style="line-height: 114%;"> monoliths with collective
feelings – each individual sharing in all the joys and sufferings of his or her
particular race. This idea does not hold
up to scrutiny. White investment bankers
share no mystical common bonds with white Appalachian coal miners. Their racial similarity is irrelevant. If you are poor and white, the spectacular
success of other white people really doesn’t make your star shine any
brighter. Likewise, if you are
successful and black, you are not really dragged into the abyss by the millions
of other black people living in poverty.
We’ve had plenty of black officials, both elected and appointed, at all
levels of government. There are black
millionaires and billionaires. Despite
these facts, </span></span><i style="font-family: Georgia, serif; line-height: 114%;">affirmative action</i><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif;"><span style="line-height: 114%;"> policies ensure that two individuals of
different races who happen to be economically equal will often</span></span><i style="font-family: Georgia, serif; line-height: 114%;"> not </i><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif;"><span style="line-height: 114%;">be
entirely equal in the eyes of the government – which is to say, they will not
be equal </span></span><i style="font-family: Georgia, serif; line-height: 114%;">before the law.</i><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif;"><span style="line-height: 114%;"> Whether
such policies are put in place with explicitly racist intentions or not, they
inevitably have the effect of enshrining a form of racism in the concealing
neutrality of statistics. Whichever side
of the midpoint one is on, a racist policy remains a racist policy.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif;"><span style="line-height: 114%;"><br /><o:p></o:p></span></span><span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Georgia;">I am not
arguing for a moment that the generational poverty rampant among black
Americans is irrelevant or illusory. I
have lived on the fringes of enough ghettos to know otherwise. Rather, I am arguing that poverty and other
problems common among black Americans cannot accurately be attributed to white
prejudice as a matter of course. To name
one popular example, the incidence of out-of-wedlock births (a circumstance
that reliably correlates to a child’s likelihood of ending up in poverty) has
increased among blacks from less than 20% in 1950 to over 70% now. Over the same period, the legal and social
sources of discrimination have not gotten worse – but substantially <i>diminished</i>. Moreover, regardless of what the legal and
social trends have been, it is hard to imagine a causal connection between
racism and out-of-wedlock births. The
same can be said of the prevalence of crime in urban black communities. How exactly could racism on the part of
whites foster black-on-black violence?
And why, if racism is the cause, didn’t it foster violence to a much
higher degree during the era of Jim Crow?
If the incidence of black poverty is ever going to be reduced, it is
essential that we make a serious search for its genuine causes. A knee-jerk response of compensating for the
imagined effects of racism with even more truly racist policies in the opposite
direction effectively precludes that search.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Georgia;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Georgia;">Another
argument has emerged in the last couple of decades that pushes us even further
from Dr. King’s high ideal. This is the
idea of cumulative inherited responsibility.
This has been expressed in both the demand for slavery reparations
(taken quite seriously by many politicians and academics) and in the more
general rhetorical references to 300 (or 500) years of slavery, black
oppression, etc. Where many <i>affirmative
action</i> policies moved the concept of justice out of the realm of
individuals and into the realm of collectives, this historical attack moves
justice even beyond the realm of groups of living persons and into the realm of
the collectivized dead. By the terms of
slavery reparations, white persons not even descendant from slave holders –
indeed not even descendant from people living in America when slavery was
practiced – would be taxed to reward people who have never, themselves, been
enslaved. It takes a vivid imagination
to put this idea into the same sentence with the word “justice”. To the best of my knowledge, there really is
no way to compensate the dead. No amount
of new suffering will make them feel any better. Nor is there much hope for reconciliation in
a world where one may still make claims on one’s great great great great great
great great great great great great great great great great great great
grandparents’ grievances – <i>great</i> though those grievances may have
been. Of course, cumulative inherited
responsibility is not a new idea. It has
served as the justification for wars and atrocities throughout recorded
history. It is the eternal battle of
“us” and “them.” It is an obscene idea
to introduce under the banner of social progress.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Georgia;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Georgia;">A typical
argument in favor of reparations is that, while living black Americans were
never slaves themselves, they continue to suffer from the lasting social
consequences of that institution. This
is true in some collectivized sense, but we have passed the point at which
merely having dark skin creates an insurmountable barrier. To say that President Obama hasn’t lived up
to his full potential due to the historical existence of slavery would be
absurd. What greater position could he
have aspired to had <i>the man </i>not held him down? No doubt someone, somewhere, has looked down
on him for something – but who among us, of any race, hasn’t suffered <i>some </i>humiliation? Most of us would be better off if our
ancestors had not been peasants. We
might be richer if we had been born to different parents, or been born in
different places, or had better teachers, or been luckier in any of a million
other ways. It is irrational to imagine <i>that
kind </i>of inequality will ever be eliminated – at any time, in any country,
or under any form of government.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Georgia;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Georgia;">The reason
we, as a society, lost interest in King’s ideal is that equality itself is a
lofty but difficult goal. Most human
beings pursue their own self interests, or sometimes the interest of groups
that they identify with. To pursue King’s
goal, one cannot think of oneself as a black American or a white American. To give that up requires both a high level of
trust and the ability to surrender a part of one’s identity. Beyond that, having built a political
apparatus to achieve legal equality, it would have been quite difficult not to
turn it loose on other tasks – especially when the political will to use it as
a weapon was loud and ever-present.
Historically, most revolutions start with grand ideas, end up in corrupt
and cynical policies, and die in an eventual backlash. The grand ideas are dead; the cynical policies
are here; backlash is coming.</span></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8462179374588422234.post-73620556576573774392015-09-03T12:18:00.000-04:002015-09-03T12:18:04.175-04:00The logic of elitism<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 114%; tab-stops: 0in .5in 1.0in 1.5in 2.0in 2.5in 3.0in 3.5in 4.0in 4.5in 5.0in 5.5in 6.0in 467.9pt;">
<i style="color: #666666; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 13.1999998092651px; line-height: 18.2399997711182px;">Originally Published by <a href="http://www.americanthinker.com/" style="color: #666666; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">American Thinker</a></i></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Georgia;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Georgia;">The things
that ordinary citizens do politically tend to revolve around the idea of
winning elections. In real terms, we
vote, assist in campaigns, and donate money to get people who will represent
our will into office. When we seek to
educate other people politically, it is usually with the unspoken intent that
they will see things – and vote – our way.
Even when we sign petitions or protest we are, in effect, threatening
our representatives with electoral consequences. The efficacy of all of this, unfortunately,
depends on the democratic institutions of our Republic functioning as designed.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Georgia;">While the
framers of the US Constitution didn’t give much forethought to the development
of political parties, a political party need not be anathema to our Constitution
so long as it abides by what one might call the <i>representative model</i>. A representative party is one in which
elected officials carry out some close approximation of the desires of the
people they claim to represent. The
party serves to aggregate the most articulate individuals from a group of
people who share some common interests.
Those individuals may be innovative to some degree, but they should not
drag their constituents in directions that they would not naturally go. Representative are just that – <i>representatives</i>. They are not, in principle, the public’s
masters. While the framers did set up a
system that allowed considerable scope for the talents of individual office
holders, such people were either directly elected by the people or appointed by
legislators who were, in turn, subject to elections. Thus, in principle, all decisions made by
government were made with the consent of the governed. Of course, the system never quite lived up to
this ideal, but as long as the public understood and jealously guarded the
broad outlines of the framers’ intent, at least a majority of the people
enjoyed some meaningful state of control over the nation’s course. As long as the system itself was seen as
sacred, there were limits to the amount of mischief any narrow elite could
accomplish.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Georgia;">The
representative model is now defunct, destroyed in somewhat different ways by
the two political parties. We will start
with the inappropriately named Democrats.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Georgia;">The
Democratic party of today is not a representative party, but a top-down
political machine organized around a reformulation of traditional socialist
ideology. They are not a party of the
popular will, but a party of a particular set of ideas. The people who adapt these ideas to current
needs are not the Democratic base, but a small group of intellectuals drawn
almost exclusively from a handful of elite universities. Trusting the public will is a laughable
proposition for academics, who consider themselves a superior breed – like the
philosopher kings of Plato’s Republic.
They may adapt their rhetoric as required for the sake of harvesting
votes from the lowly herd, but the core concept of public sovereignty was
dropped from leftist thought long ago – about the time it passed from the hard
hands of embittered revolutionaries into the soft hands of tenured
professors. At a practical rather than
an ideal level, socialism has never has been particularly democratic. The socialist state has always been the
instrument of one or another narrow group of planners, not answerable to the
public’s will.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Georgia;">Moreover,
the actual Democratic Party of today is actually a <i>degenerate </i>socialist
party, often mixing crony capitalist practice uncomfortably with socialist
rhetoric. Obama’s speeches, and perhaps
his self image, aren’t all that different from Fidel Castro’s – but he does
have a far wealthier circle of friends.
While incompatible ideologically, socialism and crony capitalism do
share in common the centralization of real power – so perhaps they are not all
that different in actual practice.
Neither bodes well for what little political sovereignty you and I still
have.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Georgia;">The
Republican party, as embodied in its establishment core – people like Karl Rove
and Reince Priebus – is a different sort of animal from its dingy,
pseudo-leftist counterpart, but not really a more attractive or more
encouraging one. It has become painfully
obvious in the last few election cycles that the Republican establishment
despises its conservative base. Most of
us have grown tired of watching the GOP bluster and promise to stop Obamacare,
executive amnesty, etc. – only to fold for no apparent reason after a few weeks
or months, vowing “this isn’t over!” once again. The truth is that it was over before it
started. At the risk of being called a
racist, the Republican Party seems to function more-or-less like the nameless
team that plays against the <i>Harlem Globetrotters</i>. They provide the illusion of a contest to
events that have been carefully choreographed in advance. Their current strategy, assuming for the sake
of argument that they are even interested in electoral success, appears to be
to trade their traditional base for those lost souls in the political center –
those people who only engaged in politics by tottering into a voting booth once
every four years. Perhaps such
chronically distracted souls will be charmed by uncle Jeb’s endearing smile –
but that hardly seems to capture the notion of a government of, by, and for the
people. New Republican voters ought to
take note of how dismissive the party has been toward the old ones. Most Republican politicians, in short, have
come to represent no one but themselves.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; line-height: 114%;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; line-height: 114%;">If the core
principle of representative democracy is not restored soon, by whatever methods
are required, all of the awareness-raising efforts of forums like this one will
count for nothing.</span><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; line-height: 114%;"> </span><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; line-height: 114%;">When our government
becomes powerful enough to ignore the public, it becomes something
fundamentally different from what it was.</span><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; line-height: 114%;">
</span><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; line-height: 114%;">When the law is made up on the fly, the very concept of the law is
rendered meaningless.</span><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; line-height: 114%;"> </span><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; line-height: 114%;">No amount of
outrage, or satisfyingly rational arguments, will let us vote our way out of an
oligarchy.</span></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8462179374588422234.post-43264078054037521392015-06-29T12:08:00.000-04:002015-06-29T12:09:07.995-04:00Notes on the death of my father<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 114%; margin-bottom: 9.95pt; mso-pagination: widow-orphan; tab-stops: 0in .5in 1.0in 1.5in 2.0in 2.5in 3.0in 3.5in 4.0in 4.5in 5.0in 5.5in 6.0in 467.9pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 114%; mso-bidi-font-family: Georgia;">Most of us live as though our lives were
permanent. They are not. We are really only here for a brief stay,
which we can extend only a little by our actions. Our stay is subject to cancellation at any
time. The door opens and we are
born. The sun shines warmly on our
faces. We stand in the light, or in the
shadow. We make the most, or the least,
of our stay here – but either way the final day approaches, quietly,
unseen. The door closes behind us and is
locked forever by disinterested hands.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 114%; mso-bidi-font-family: Georgia;">When I was a child my father answered almost
every question I could ask. He seemed to
know everything that anybody <i>could </i>know.
I owe him much. He taught me how
to think, how to question, and how to listen.
He was as steady and predictable as the sun. Five days a week he worked, and many
evenings. Saturdays, and sometimes
Sundays, he spent with the family.
Sometimes we went to a shopping mall.
Sometimes we went to a museum.
And such was the routine – more-or-less, week in, week out. Year after year. When you’re young, of course, the days are
long and rich; the seasons are epochs; the years – eternities. But time deceives us. To the child, life is a long, slow, circus
parade – mixing the familiar with the new, the comfortable with the
terrifying. But always, father held fast
to his comfortable routine. If my life
was a parade, it was he who beat the quiet cadence. He was not a great man as the world saw him,
but he was an intelligent and purposeful one.
Kind but distant. Patient but
dark. But the calendar pages
turned. I grew up – and he grew
old. Aging is the most predictable of
all surprises.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 114%; mso-bidi-font-family: Georgia;">What am I now but a fleeting disturbance on the
surface of events that aren’t worth mentioning?
A human being – scratching out words as the current of days and
relevance erases them. Anonymous, one
lost among lost millions, all plodding unthinkingly, inevitably, toward our own
final moments – all alone, amid the days, the small talk, and the innumerable
obligations – all infinitely, unspeakably alone. Dust we are indeed. We rise from nothing and return to nothing.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 114%; mso-bidi-font-family: Georgia;">My father ebbs from the world I know. He lies in an unfamiliar nursing home bed,
pestered by well-intentioned nurses who do not grasp his sense of humor. He is a curious wreck on an empty beach. The seagulls do not know what to make of
him. He has grown tired of the sea and
will not be moved again. He shuns his
food. Little by little, the unforgiving
logic of starvation breaks down his flesh.
The forms of the bones are made visible under the muscle. The skull looks out from under his face. To lift an arm is a kind of work now – his working
life long done. His words chase after
his thoughts but don’t always catch them.
He dies in front of me, slowly, visit by visit, as though he were
unraveling his days one sentence at a time.
I try, when I remember to, to avoid self-pity and pay attention – even
as the conversation slowly loses its coherence.
When I ask, not for an answer, but simply for the reassurance of a
response.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 114%; mso-bidi-font-family: Georgia;">I now have my own answers to almost every
question I could ask. Almost. But almost no one asks me questions. I live alternately in light and shadow – but
I fear the dark. The current of days and
relevance erases my footsteps also – as rapidly as I make them. Yet I must learn to walk with grace
regardless, even if no one in the universe sees. Especially – if no one sees.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 114%; mso-bidi-font-family: Georgia;">Even the circus parade has a beginning and an
end. It begins with a clown. And it ends with a clown. It is crass.
It is beautiful. It is what you
make it, one illusion to the next.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 114%; mso-bidi-font-family: Georgia;">The eyes ease open. His last lights have retreated there. Where the mouth fails, breathing out almost
silent words that smell of gathering decay, his eyes still peer at me from the
bottom of their wells. They still say
much. They ask much – all of it beyond
my means. How does one answer the
enormous question put so eloquently by those eyes? The old skin pulls them closed, for now,
though they remain alive and questioning – underneath. The breath rises and falls, not by will, but
by mere habit. How can I merely promise
to return tomorrow when I know that his tomorrows are in short supply? And yet I promise, merely. The clock ticks off the seconds and the days.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 114%; mso-bidi-font-family: Georgia;">What he may experience in my absence I don’t
know. Does the room grow dim? Is it suffused with light? Do stars swirl above him like the sky in Van
Gogh’s painting? The wreck lies on the
beach in the moonlight. The sand and sea
wear holes in its paint; rust spreads stealthily across the skin and the bones
of the broken hull. Nature takes apart
what man has made – wave by wave, and day by day. When I am visible to him, do I pass overhead,
as steady and predictable as the son? Or
am I a ghost from another world? His
memory still grasps at me with the strength of desperation. His hand grips mine with unexpected
strength. Does he not know that I too am
helpless? I have nothing to say, except –
“I’ll be back.” Pushed about by the tide
– he rots uncomfortably and sleeps.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 114%; mso-bidi-font-family: Georgia;">I make the long drive to and from the home. Day after day. The green corn, dark under the rain – the
sky, a suffocating blanket of grey cloud.
The cadence of the windshield wipers, hypnotic, coaxing me towards
sleep. But I cannot sleep. The parade is not yet done.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 114%; mso-bidi-font-family: Georgia;">Today his words are gone. He thrashes like a fish left in a tide
pool. Restless, no more in contact with
the world – and yet stubbornly, wretchedly still in it – until the medication
pulls him under, down, down, down, leaving only the breath behind – a sigh more
like the wind than like the psyche of a man.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 114%; mso-bidi-font-family: Georgia;">I might as well be a ghost. I sit in the darkened room. I wait for awhile, then, like the tides of
breath, I go.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 114%; mso-bidi-font-family: Georgia;">Human beings are not the best of creatures, but
it is not for want of trying. We stand
before the insults of nature, clothed mainly in lies – defiant in the face of
unthinkable infinities, shaking and scared beneath the skin. Life and death are impersonal – that is
really what is frightening about them.
There is no wrath to be placated in heaven – nor is there any pity there
to answer our appeals. The grand
machinery of the cosmos holds us fast in our appointed places and appointed
times. The wheel turns – beautifully and
horribly. We live. We die.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 114%; mso-bidi-font-family: Georgia;">Amid the glare of pain and the haze of opiate
comfort, he has stumbled upon a word perched by itself in a gentle patch of
sunlight. He reaches down to pick it up
with trembling fingers, pinching the wings together carefully to protect their
powdery surfaces. Having made his
capture he looks skyward, waiting for someone to release the word to. Anyone.
Anyone. A face looms out of the
fog. The astonished word flutters upward
– but he does not know what it means anymore.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 114%; mso-bidi-font-family: Georgia;">“Yes!” “Yes!” His dry voice tries to shout. The nurse looks at me for an answer, but I
know nothing. A skyrocket has leapt
expectantly upward, only to arc to earth again – a dud. The eyes close quietly, alone – infinitely,
unspeakably alone. In such a moment the
entire universe seems to weep – but only seems.
In truth, it doesn’t notice. A
breath or two, and this also is forgotten.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 114%; mso-bidi-font-family: Georgia;">The tan face of the nurse now hovers above him
like the moon. The strength of its pull
draws from his dry lips a dry smile. The
smile is reflected. The moon tells sweet
and pretty lies. Whether or not he knows
that they are lies – I cannot tell. If
he believes – who am I to correct him, and for what purpose?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 114%; mso-bidi-font-family: Georgia;">Even the eyes grow dull near the end. They look at nothing. Unearthly guttural sounds exit the aperture
that was once his mouth. He is, himself,
like a portal into another world. I
speak to him, but largely for the benefit of the hospice nurse. And yet I do not know for sure. Is he there – or has he gone? If he has gone – where is he? The only things I say now are “I am here” and
“I’ll be back.” I tick like the clock on
the wall, saying little more than it does.
All is calm, apart from the quiet agony of the minutes going by. I am pulled back by the world to return
another day.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 114%; mso-bidi-font-family: Georgia;">In my absence, the last moment comes. The door closes. I miss the actual event by 20 minutes,
speeding to get there, the last clown running after the parade – useless, but
inevitable. The first clown comes with a
raucous laugh, the final one – brings solemn pathos. Nighttime.
Darkness. The crickets
chirp. My brother-in-law and a nurse I
haven’t seen say the appropriate things to me and one another. The last remnants of the wreck lies still,
eyes closed, without a man inside.
Disinterested dark hands wash the empty vessel clean.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 114%;">Most of us live as though our lives were
permanent.</span><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 114%;"> </span><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 114%;">They are not.</span></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8462179374588422234.post-77339091006514574522015-03-17T12:09:00.000-04:002015-03-17T12:09:07.740-04:00Who the hell is Chelsea Manning?<i style="font-family: Georgia, serif; line-height: 18.2399997711182px;">Originally Published by <a href="http://www.americanthinker.com/" target="_blank">American Thinker</a></i><br />
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Recently, a friend sent me an <u><a href="http://www.myfoxdc.com/story/28098727/hormone-treatment-approved-for-chelsea-manning" target="_blank">article</a></u> he was furious about. The title was: <i>Homone treatment approved for Chelsea Manning.</i> The innocent question that popped into my head was: “Who the hell is Chelsea Manning?” Chelsea, it turns out, is none other than Bradley Manning, the Army intelligence analyst who turned over classified information to WikiLeaks in 2010. Well – at least I think that Chelsea is just Bradley in a stupid-looking wig; others apparently hold some different views. The article’s title pretty well summarized the rest of the pathetic story. A more apt title would have been: <i>US Army caves to the awesome power of political correctness – again. </i> I am not sure how this particular bit of early 21st century surrealism had, up to that point, escaped my attention. I’m not sure, either, what the grocery store tabloids have to print these days – not when there is “real” news like this. Predictably, my friend was incensed that taxpayers’ money was being used to fund Manning’s desire to be female, and I entirely sympathize with his outrage. However, what struck me about the story was not the federal funding aspect, but the fact that the AP reporter was happy to call Manning “she”. I think I know what “she” means – though I have come to have serious doubts about the very concept of “news”. Sadly, the majority of web stories I have subsequently skimmed are happy to call Manning “she”. Bradley Manning has not had surgery to change his sex – so the message here is that you are “she” if you just say so.<br />
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If gay marriage was one concession that many of us were not willing to accept, the Manning story is something even more disturbing – an assault on objective standards of reality. If one can reassign one’s gender just on one’s own say so, then the whole gay marriage thing is pretty much moot anyway. One partner could just swap out genders for the ceremony. DOMA be damned. In short, if Manning is a female in the eyes of liberal society, then for them the whole concept of gender has effectively ceased to have consistent meaning. That’s a step beyond the short term gay and lesbian agenda into a state of social incoherence.<br />
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Manning is a hero to the left, first because he thumbed his nose at the Army and second because he has transformed himself into one of the left’s favorite things – a victim. That is really the key. I have long suspected that a fair proportion of homosexuals and “transgender” creatures of various kinds are just a product of the status modern liberalism accords to victims. When the educational system indoctrinates children to believe that every evil in the world has heterosexual white men as its cause – and that being a victim of such evil absolves one of all sin – it is hardly surprising that quite a few young white men want to identify with some other group. Try as they may, playing all the gangsta rap ever produced will still never make a white boy black. However, if one’s gender identity is in any way weak, becoming gay, bisexual, or “transgender” is a way for any ordinary white suburbanite to attain the coveted status of <i>victim</i>. The liberal culture helps at every turn, providing heroes and role models for the chronically confused. As if by magic, what was once an unfortunate individual defect becomes not only normal – but laudable and off limits to critique. I identify myself as a narrow-minded pig even for framing gender identity in these terms. An unsophisticated conservative knuckle-dragger.<br />
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When this plague of gender incoherence creeps into the lives of ordinary people, it’s a serious concern. When it creeps into the military it becomes a national crisis. Who the hell is Chelsea Manning? <i>Chelsea </i>Manning doesn’t exist. <i>Bradley </i>Manning is a dangerous piece of neurotic flotsam, the product of a world in which having definite standards about anything is considered backward and “judgmental”. Bradley is dangerous precisely because the rot of political correctness has spread deeply enough into the US Army that they deem it more important to be sensitive to one individual’s neurosis than to consider the needs of the Army as a whole. A military institution, more than any other, relies on strict internal standards to maintain cohesion under the violent and chaotic conditions of war. The most comforting thing that any soldier has is the knowledge that fellow soldiers are predictable – bound to definite standards of behavior. People like Manning, who is ambivalent not only about his own body but also about the institution he swore to serve, weaken that foothold of predictability that the binds the Army together. Standards matter. Incoherence and ambiguity never help you in a war.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8462179374588422234.post-28626807814333613562015-03-17T11:59:00.000-04:002015-03-17T11:59:46.904-04:00The left’s Achilles’ heelThough conservatives view militant Islam with alarm, they have, at least, the intellectual and cultural tools to arrest and even reverse its spread. Progressives, on the other hand, may well find militant Islam a fatal disease.<br />
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If one considers a nation as a human body, the modus operandi of the left has long been to weaken that body’s immunity to certain alien threats. For many decades, western socialists have championed massive immigration while burdening Americans and Europeans with narratives of self-reproach and guilt. In effect, such policies undermine the conservative forces of tradition and open up society for radical reform. In place of the “unfair” traditional institutions and standards that make a society at least uniform enough to be stable, we are given an eternal struggle for unobtainable conditions of equality, and calls for tolerance without the reciprocal caveat of social responsibility. To use a topical example, the default assumption progressives make is that any black man killed by a white police officer is a victim of racism, oppression, and murder. Such an occurrence is not about the facts of an individual case, but is merely an instance of their accepted narrative. Even the existence of police authority evokes a feeling of outrage in the properly indoctrinated. Simply put, the status quo is wrong. Barack Obama’s promise to “fundamentally transform America” assumes the country not only has problems, but that its present institutions should be destroyed. Long live the revolution. For the progressive, the battle for control of society is waged between conservatives and a ragged coalition of everybody else – led conveniently by good hearted socialists, of course. The problem with this worldview, from a purely functional perspective, is that not everybody who hates America, the UK, or even France, hates these countries because they aren’t yet liberal enough. Some non-western peoples have their own agendas – and actually hate western liberals even more than they hate western conservatives.<br />
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What is a good liberal to do when confronted with terrorists that shoot up a room full of cartoonists who have made a career of assaulting tradition? On the one hand, a liberal is inclined to support the terrorists for both their third-world origins and their revolutionary zeal, and it can hardly hurt that they knocked off a few minority-oppressing cops in the exchange. On the other hand, the cartoonists of Charlie Hebdo also provided sterling service for the cause by bashing Catholics, and, let’s face it – merely being French gave them a mystique all of their own. So what’s to do? It is an awkward moment. The liberal mind is forced to race from one implausible scenario to the other – casting first the terrorists as disguised agents of the Tea Party, and then the cartoonists as reactionary bigots who invited their own fate. The global village has had another drive-by massacre, but it has to be conservatives who caused it – somehow. What the liberal cannot entertain is the idea that such violence is largely the product of his (or her) misguided and naive ideology. A culture like Islam, based on unbending 7th century xenophobic dogma, is pretty unlikely to work and play well with others. It will not defer to Jews, gays, Christians, atheists or women no matter how artfully you construct your narrative. It will simply do its best to replicate itself until its host civilization ceases to exist.<br />
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Are there moderate Muslims? Yes – and no. There are moderate Muslims in more-or-less the same way there are Unitarian Christians. Both terms are oxymorons. There are plenty of people from Muslim countries who like the relative freedom of the west, who don’t like to think about the consequences of their own scriptures, and who wish the fundamentalists would simply go away. They perform the rituals of their faith. They call themselves Muslims. They do so because they are not quite willing to cut their ties with their religious relatives back home, and perhaps because they’re nervous about leaving a faith whose penalty for leaving is death. Theirs is the disease of perfectly ordinary human moral cowardice. Most of them are indeed harmless, decent, and pitiable human beings. It is, however, nonsense to portray Islam itself as a religion of peace. Though many politicians of both parties would like us to believe otherwise, religions are not defined by their least enthusiastic members. Scripturally and historically, Islam is a religion of conquest.<br />
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For progressives to make even modest efforts to purge the west of Islamic militants they would have to essentially become conservatives. They would have to accept that the traditions and institutions of our society are worth preserving, thereby repudiating decades of systematically undermining them. They would have to admit, too, that not all persons or religions of color are innocent victims of western bias. The very idea of doing that would give many progressives seizures. They have the same kind of irrational reverence for Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn that the militants have for Mohammad. It would take a personal disaster – a beheading at their favorite Starbucks or a bombing at their children’s Montessori school – to shake most progressives from the self-righteous comfort of their dream. Given time and opportunity the jihadists may oblige.<br />
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If progressive politicians do not change their tune, however, they will find themselves in a political death spiral of enabling the declared enemies of western civilization. The inevitable tipping point must come sooner or later when protecting non-citizen minorities against feeling offended doesn’t trump the safety interests of everyone else. On that day, the public will clamor for whatever leader they can find that promises to make their streets safe – or worse, they will set out in vigilante groups to solve the problems themselves. As often as not, ethnic cleansing isn’t orchestrated from the top, but from an angry public with some score to settle. Social engineers tend to think about the public as so much passive clay for them to mold to suit their tastes – but the reality is that ignoring human nature has always been a dangerous and often a disastrous business.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8462179374588422234.post-43379312838648901212015-03-17T11:51:00.001-04:002015-03-17T11:52:19.073-04:00Why borders are a good thing<div>
It is obvious that even the notion of borders doesn’t do much for the Left. They turn their nose up at the idea of any sort of hostile looking barrier stretched along our southern frontier. They are historically disdainful toward state’s rights, which is a border issue at heart. Socialism, with occasional exceptions, has been an internationalist movement from the beginning. <i>Anti-nationalist</i> might be a better word, since, in the leftist ideal, a worker is a worker is a worker. Borders are a reactionary artifact in the leftist’s perception. Well-off liberals love the fact that they can travel around Europe without the annoyance of passport checks, and they look forward to a world where they can go wherever they want, whenever they want. “The global village” is the somewhat tarnished phrase. So what is wrong with this ideal? Why wouldn’t we all be better off in one gigantic multicultural playground?</div>
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Consider what a border really is. A border is the geographical embodiment of a polity. It is a region in which a certain set of laws or other social constraints apply. Everyone within the border must abide by the rules of a certain system, good or bad, or suffer whatever consequences the system prescribes. Eliminating the border between two countries does not eliminate the possibility of oppressive government – it just assures that whatever government one ends up with presides over a larger area of land and a greater number of people. It achieves exactly the same ends as military conquest – minus the immediate carnage and the war memorials. Globalists on the left have essentially the same concept of universal government as Stalin, Napoleon or Alexander the Great – they just want to achieve the old ambition by a different set of means. Tourists who think that Europe is nice don’t have to live with unelected European Union technocrats running roughshod over their lives. The elimination of a border is a centralization of power, and the centralization of power has one consequence without exception – it reduces the political relevance of the average citizen. For all the weaknesses of smaller, more local governments, they have the virtue that their authorities are at least familiar with local cultures and conditions. A distant, centralized authority cannot be. Ask Tibetans what they think about the elimination of their border with China. Ask the Greeks how well the European Union is working out for them.</div>
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The Left has tended to sneer at nationalism in recent decades, and, to be fair, nationalism really does entail some obvious risks – war being both the most obvious and the most serious. At the heart of their revulsion, however, is not the fear of war. The Left’s revulsion for nationalism is due to its <i>popular</i> character. The technocratic thesis of contemporary socialism is that governmental experts know better what the public needs than members of the public do themselves. The Left does not believe in expressions of the public will that do not conform to the particular prejudices of their elites. While progressives pay lip service to multi-culturalism, ultimately they consider national cultures, or patriotism of any kind, an impediment to their internationalist plans. Borderless multi-culturalism is just an expedient interim phase on the way to a single global mono-culture shepherded by central planners. It doesn’t really matter whether individual progressives are consciously aiming at this end condition or not – this is the end condition that their program implies.</div>
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Conservatives are the usual targets for accusations of xenophobia, but I have met very few conservatives who wish to interfere in the affairs of other countries. Most are more than happy, for example, to let Mexicans work out their own national destiny – provided they don’t interfere unduly with ours. The weak border we currently have has actually been a menace to both countries. Mexico wouldn’t be plagued with brutal drug cartels if the border were strong enough to cut the traffic to a trickle. Mexico isn’t better for the flow of American drug money into their society, any more than American workers are better for the flow of underpaid foreign workers into theirs. The destabilization of Mexican society is not the product of conservative xenophobia, but of a progressive preoccupation – the idea that an ugly fence with concertina wire decorations might hurt someone’s feelings. The irony is that the bleeding heart of the leftist leadership actually cares no more about the porous border killing Mexicans in Mexico than he cares about the lack of effective law enforcement killing black kids in Chicago.</div>
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Within the United States, the expansion of Federal authority represents a similar assault on our internal borders – a reduction of the sovereign powers of the states. Today, if an American wants to smoke pot legally, he can move to Colorado. If he’s inclined to hire prostitutes, Nevada is the state for him. If he likes to show his religious devotion by handling poisonous snakes, West Virginia is the place he ought to be. None of us is enthusiastic about everything that goes on everywhere in the country, but as of now the country still abounds in choices. That is freedom. That is the power of regional and local government. The thing about Federal laws, on the other hand, is that they eliminate things from the sphere of local choice. While there are a few things that we all must agree on for the sake of national coherence, they are far fewer in number than the range of subjects bound up in the morass of current Federal laws and regulations. Laws made by distant officials are, in effect, the rule book of an official state culture. When Massachusetts and Kansas are both governed primarily from Washington they are both a good deal less free. Borders, in short, preserve our freedom.</div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8462179374588422234.post-13135148378623361392015-01-09T12:05:00.001-05:002015-01-09T12:11:51.650-05:00Bread, circuses and the appearance of good will<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 114%; margin-bottom: 9.95pt; mso-pagination: widow-orphan; tab-stops: 0in .5in 1.0in 1.5in 2.0in 2.5in 3.0in 3.5in 4.0in 4.5in 5.0in 5.5in 6.0in 467.9pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; line-height: 114%;"><i>Originally Published by <a href="http://www.americanthinker.com/" target="_blank">American Thinker</a></i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Georgia;">The greatest
threat to individual freedom is not the machinations of political parties –
noxious though those machinations may be – but the attitude toward authority
which pervades the populace itself. When
people no longer feel threatened by a centralization of power – demagogues can
do as they like.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Georgia;">I had a
brief exchange with a friend recently which perfectly illustrates my
point. We were discussing what was, at
that time, the president’s threat to suspended the deportation of additional
categories of illegal aliens. My friend’s
stance was all too typical: <i>Obama
only wants to do the right thing, and he has to do it because congress won’t. </i>While this position is basically an echo
of the president’s own public rationale, it is still worth examining what it
means when it is repeated by an ordinary mortal. The first thing that it means, unarguably, is
that the person speaking has no fear of living under an oppressive
government. He lacks the conviction,
universal among our founders and common among many generations of immigrants,
that the concentration of political power in too few hands is a moral evil and an
obvious threat to civil liberties. Believing
the president is justified in ruling by decree rejects two and a half centuries
of American history with little more than a casual shrug. Moreover, such an attitude just assumes that
what matters about a political system is that it produces immediate desirable
effects – not that it preserves the rights of citizens. A belief in <i>doing the right thing </i>tends
to be minimally concerned with repercussions and maximally concerned with
feelings. Obama, like any other
demagogue, is quite savvy enough to understand this. When he actually made his decree, he didn’t
trot out any evidence that current and future immigrants would not displace
American workers – which they probably will – he trotted out Astrid Silva, her
family, and their expediently pitiable story.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Georgia;">The hard
lesson of history is that life has been dangerous and unforgiving for the vast
majority of people who have walked the earth.
For a variety of reasons, some of which involve the wisdom of our
founders and the diligence of our ancestors, Americans now live in remarkably
comfortable times. Despite what some
would have you believe, no one starves in the United States for want of cheap
(or free) food. Many of our poor have
automobiles, and almost all of them have televisions. Our middle class, though in decline, are
still quite rich by world standards. We
have lived under these conditions for generations now, and most of us have lost
all appreciation for both their historic peculiarity and for the policies and
institutions which brought them about.
Millions of Americans take their lifestyles as a given, almost as a
bequest of nature – so the idea of denying any number of foreigners access to
those same conditions doesn’t seem like an act of self preservation, but simply
like an act of cruelty. A knee-jerk
public policy of <i>doing the right thing </i>assumes the well of resources is
bottomless, and that technology and sheer goodness will rescue us from hunger,
labor, and poverty if we only let it.
Believers in such a worldview can only see conservatives as
pathologically backward, bigoted, or simply stupid. If a person is enthusiastically acclimated to
the current pace of technological and social change, it is unlikely he will
venerate a constitutional framework that is now more than two centuries old. Checks and balances are inefficient. Dictatorship, on the other hand, is
efficient, simple, and attractive – especially when it comes clothed in all the
trappings of modernity and fairness.
What could fit our celebrity culture better than a popular dictator?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Georgia;">The
political elites can only get by with the continued centralization of their
power because most of the public either tacitly approves or doesn’t care. While the market crash of 2008 did damage to
the economy, most people didn’t lose their jobs and have only felt the erosion
of their standard of living slightly and gradually. Likewise, though nearly 3000 Americans died
in the 9/11 attacks, it is a plain fact that over 300 million didn’t. It takes brutal and sudden events, far
reaching enough to impact almost everyone directly, to impress upon the public
imagination that something isn’t just a media event – a narrative they can weep
about appropriately for a few minutes before switching channels and getting
back to their still comparatively comfortable lives. Like it or not, however, there is no law of
nature that ensures that the awful things that have happened to other great
nations cannot happen to America. That kind
of exceptionalism we do <i>not </i>have.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
It is
impossible to say with any certainty just what fraction of the public has to
become outraged to overcome the dead weight of their complacent brethren. The power of any minority depends on many
factors. Frankly, if the current
political elites were as competent as they believe they are, our civil
liberties would be doomed. Almost two
millennia ago, the Romans figured out that bread and circuses were all that the
average Roman wanted. The ancient elites
kept up their end of that bargain successfully for hundreds of years. The average American is now little more
concerned with political rights than his Roman counterpart was. Bread and circuses have simply taken on more
modern forms. The only hope left to
those of us who want to retain some meaningful degree of freedom is the fact
that our political elites have grown so insulated from the rest of us that they
now hold us in complete contempt. The
political class think little better of American citizens than 19<sup>th</sup>
century European elites thought of their African or Asian subjects. How else could one explain their attempts to
replace even the bread and circuses with cheap and indigestible lies? It may not take much to keep the public happy
– but it does take something.</div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8462179374588422234.post-19669653986641780582014-12-01T12:11:00.000-05:002014-12-01T12:16:35.092-05:00What does an election mean?<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 114%; margin-bottom: 9.95pt; mso-pagination: widow-orphan; tab-stops: 0in .5in 1.0in 1.5in 2.0in 2.5in 3.0in 3.5in 4.0in 4.5in 5.0in 5.5in 6.0in 467.9pt;">
<span style="color: #666666; font-family: inherit;">In America
today, there are basically two competing notions of what an election
means. The first idea we inherit from
the framers of the US Constitution. The
purpose of an election is to let the people choose individuals from their own
ranks to represent their local interests in a wider sphere of government. “Government of the people, by the people, and
for the people,” to use Abraham Lincoln’s phrase. The framers were not radical democrats. They recognized the considerable talents of
elites by creating the US Senate, a body not elected by the public until the 17<sup>th</sup>
Amendment was passed in 1913. However, the
framers put the powers of taxation and spending firmly in the hands of the
House of Representatives – as a protection against concentrating too much power
in too few hands. Under such a system,
the elites still did the greater share of the planning – but the people’s
direct representatives had the final say.</span><br />
<span style="color: #666666; font-family: inherit;"><br />
The elites
that now govern practically every aspect of our lives have an entirely
different idea of what an election means.
For them, an election is a cumbersome process in which they must trick a
majority of the electorate into voting against their own interests. An election is an annoying anachronism they
must suffer through to attain their rightful station of power. It grows more and more apparent that neither the president, his
advisors, nor most of the members of congress – from either party – have much
respect for the people or their interests.
Jonathan Gruber’s videos are a stark example of the contempt the elites
have for the citizens of this country, but he is only one of many. It wasn’t very long ago that Mitt Romney’s
senior campaign manager, Eric Fehrnstrom, made the following famous remark when
asked if Romney had appeared too conservative during the primary to win in the
general election: “I think you hit the reset button for the fall campaign. Everything changes. It’s almost like an Etch A Sketch. You can kind of shake it up, and we start all
over again.” This is not the comment of
a person who wants to help guide you to a candidate that represents your
interests. This is the comment of a
person who considers you a rube.</span><br />
<span style="color: #666666; font-family: inherit;"><br />Many
Americans have been largely indifferent to politics all of their lives. When the country was prosperous and secure,
the culture fairly stable, and the standard of living on a gradual rise this
indifference was understandable. But
those days are gone. We can no longer
assume our elected legislators will do anything but fundraise and lie. Meanwhile, the real power of government has
shifted to the President and the vast bureaucracy at his disposal. It was not the congress who used the IRS to
suppress the Tea Party before the 2012 election – and after 2 years of hearings
the congress hasn’t really done anything about it but grandstand for the
cameras. If elections are an annoyance
to the elites, then congress itself, with its roots in the protective
restrictions of the US Constitution, has become an even bigger annoyance. Obama’s executive order granting functional
amnesty to five million illegal aliens is not merely an expression of the
president’s internationalist ideology – it is a test case to determine how the
public and the pathetic Republican opposition will react to a complete
repudiation of the rule of law. If we
the people do not react, swiftly and loudly, then we will be a Republic <i>in
name only.</i></span><br />
<span style="color: #666666; font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="color: #999999;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span></span></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8462179374588422234.post-76164233206402467952014-11-14T11:54:00.000-05:002014-11-14T11:54:09.869-05:00The liberal foreign policy game<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 9.95pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="line-height: 18.2399997711182px;">As Vladimir Putin has marched troops into various parts of the Ukraine, we’ve watched several Obama administration officials, including the president himself, all say more-or-less what John Kerry said:<i> "You just don’t, in the 21st century, behave in a 19th century fashion by invading another country on [a] completely trumped up pretext.”</i> Such statements, frankly, take my breath away. It is one thing to have weak foreign policy – it’s another thing altogether to be in denial about how reality works. Military might doesn’t just go away because the liberal intelligentsia have agreed that it’s old-fashioned and distasteful. Putin is a realist. He knows that Europe and America will wag their fingers at him, but nothing more. In the end, Putin can do pretty much as he likes. How much does he have to fear from a bunch of anti-militarist ideologues that don’t even believe that countries should have borders? What’s the worst they might do? Have a bunch of political science professors at UC Berkeley threaten to withhold an honorary degree? Arrange a mild tongue lashing on NPR? You and I have taken worse abuse than that from Democrats and lived – Putin probably figures he will too. The Russian president is no brilliant statesman by historical standards – it’s just that his opposition has conceded in advance.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="line-height: 18.2399997711182px;">The administration’s response to militant Islam has been equally bizarre – more about the preservation of the Western liberal worldview than about the world itself. If Putin is playing by 19th century rules, the Islamists draw their rules from the 7th. The grizzly practice of cutting people’s heads off still works perfectly well. The knives don’t fail to penetrate because it happens to be the 21st century. To be fair, I haven’t actually heard the <i>“You just don’t do that in the 21st century”</i> phrase used in connection with militant Islam – but only because liberals can barely bring themselves to acknowledge that militant Islam even exists. It is an assumption of the average liberal mind that any non-white person in the world ought to know instinctively that liberals are their friends. If forced to acknowledge that some of them don’t know this, supremely egalitarian liberals show themselves capable of the most outrageous sort of ethnocentric arrogance. They believe the liberal culture of the West is so perfect and so inherently invincible that no backward radical of color can possibly pose it any threat. They close their eyes and launch a few missiles to appease a fearful public, just hoping that it will all, eventually, fade away so they can get back to the business of perfecting the world. Liberals would like to censor conservatives – but no one even talks about the possibility of censoring the web sites of jihadists. That, you know, would be intolerant.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="line-height: 18.2399997711182px;">Iran, I think, is a different matter than the rest of militant Islam. In the first place, it’s Shiite – in the second place, it’s nuclear. Even if you consider the position of the Iranians objectively, forgetting that they are a warped theocracy that might actually want to use the bomb, it is obvious that they would be crazy <i>not to build it.</i> George Bush’s <i>Axis of evil</i> consisted of Iran, Iraq and North Korea. The Iranian leaders only have to look at what happened to Iraq (which didn’t have the bomb) and at what <i>didn’t</i> happen to North Korea (which does have the bomb). Does any sane person really think we are going to <i>talk</i> them out of that particular piece of national life insurance? During the Iran-Iraq war, the Iranian regime was willing to throw a generation of young Iranians into battle untrained and practically unarmed. Does any sane person really think the Iranian regime is going to be particularly sensitive to economic sanctions? The bitter clerics that run Iran don’t seem to be starving, and neither do they seem very concerned about being a politically correct feature of the 21st century. They may be theocratic despots – but they know how power works. They know it isn’t all about “the messaging.”</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="line-height: 18.2399997711182px;">Liberals in general, and the Obama administration in particular, find the nasty, competitive, unforgiving realm of international politics distasteful. Their revulsion toward the military only underlines this. The liberal model of international affairs is contemporary Europe, in which a small elite of unelected technocrats have worked steadily to make nation states – and elections – irrelevant. The goal of the left is not world peace, but eventual world government. They love that particular game so much, they are incapable of accepting that not everybody in the world wants to play. Putin isn’t interested in being the European Union’s overgrown awkward cousin, and the Islamists aren’t interested in any game in which they cannot crush the decadent, satanic West.</span></span></div>
<div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8462179374588422234.post-26806891014859155422014-11-04T12:12:00.000-05:002014-11-04T12:15:29.875-05:00Why liberals love to hate us<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Strange as it may seen, conservatives are absolutely essential to liberals. We provide them with something that their ideology otherwise lacks: standards. Think about it. There is hardly anything that any non-conservative can do that a liberal is not obliged to express a feeling of high-minded tolerance toward. A few decades ago, the phrase “I don’t want to be judgmental” was so common it sounded like an echo. “I don’t want to be judgmental” just means – “I don’t want to have standards.” I have seen high-minded liberals entertain the idea that black-on-black violence is just a normal feature of black culture. One mustn’t be judgmental. The same people who advocated for women’s rights forty years ago now turn a blind eye toward the treatment of women in Muslim countries. One mustn’t be judgmental. In the next few decades, if the trend continues, bestiality and pedophilia will probably past the one-mustn’t-be-judgmental anti-standard. We conservatives, of all the human beings on earth, are the only ones that liberals can hate with gusto – without shame. What we believe, they can freely despise. What we are for, they can oppose with righteous rage. We are, in fact, the only thing that gives their gelatinous anti-culture any shape.<br /><br />Liberals aren’t necessarily anti-Christian. If your Christian church ordains gay clergy, it will probably pass the non-judgmental standard. Likewise, liberals are not opposed to conspicuous wealth. The Kennedy’s were certainly not poor, and neither is Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, or Oprah for that matter. It is all about what you say with liberals, not about what you do. It’s about getting the narrative right. However, if you’re Christian – and your belief includes the idea that certain things might actually be wrong, you will be branded a religious bigot and a hater. If you’re wealthy, and you don’t publically align yourself with the usual liberal slogans, you will be vilified as a member of the evil 1%. Liberalism, which was once, at least in theory, an enlightened movement of reform, has long ago accomplished those reforms and now lives on as a kind of mass institution for the destruction of any sort of social stability. You and I, who believe that certain things are right and certain things are wrong, are impediments in the path of that juggernaut.<br /><br />The whole liberal obsession with racism is fascinating in itself. I’ve been to quite a few Tea Party events and have yet to hear even one racist remark. Somehow though, the liberal media managed to find a couple of racist signs at one big rally in Washington DC. Practically at the snap of their fingers, forty years of improving race relations were thrown out the window to stir up the base. The fictitious “Republican War on Women” reflects pretty much the same strategy. Essentially, they are taking a generation of young people, raised on a steady diet of ideology in our public schools, and re-running the 1960’s and 70’s for them. We don’t always even get the privilege of being hated for what we believe – sometimes we are just blank canvases for them to paint incriminating symbols on. It is frustrating, heartbreaking, and usually pointless to try to reason with people who have condemned you before you even open your mouth. I personally have gotten tired of trying. Being called a racist, sexist, homophobe or islamophobe doesn’t really hurt me when I’m being called those things by people whose goal amounts to the destruction of my country.<br /><br />I don’t really worry about the left eventually having things entirely their way. What I do worry about is what will happen in the wake of their inevitable failure. A country populated by people who hate their own heritage, their own traditions, and their own symbols is something rather new in the world – but it isn’t an experiment whose outcome is very difficult to predict. Consider ISIS. The America of the 1940's or 50's would have crushed ISIS in the time it took the Obama administration to compose a dishonest press release. We live in a society paralyzed by political correctness, bureaucratic inertia, and a smothering blanket of liberal self-loathing. In the 1950's, we built most of the interstate highway system in under a decade. Now, the environmental impact study for a single pipeline can take longer than that. I was disgusted, a few years ago, that our leaders were reluctant to deploy troops along the Mexican border on the grounds that it might cause Latinos on both sides of the border offense. They now apparently feel that even having a border is an offense. A country that hates its history, its defenders, and believes that its founding institutions aren’t worth protecting cannot long exist. I do not worry about living in a liberal utopia. I worry about living in just another petty third world state – a peon, without freedom, and without a meaningful say in my own future. An alien in the country I was born in.<br /><br />Liberals have no country. They define themselves solely by despising ours. If every conservative in America were to vanish without a trace tomorrow, liberals would have to re-invent us out of the most conservative members of their own ranks. All reform movements need someone to oppose. A movement which sets itself the task of reforming every aspect of people’s lives is a monster that can never be satiated. It will, sooner or later, leave the public yearning for someone, even a dictator, to end the chaos. That is what I fear.</span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8462179374588422234.post-27831992160753272702014-11-04T12:07:00.000-05:002014-11-04T12:16:41.637-05:00Ebola and the liberal mind<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">I work and live among conservatives. Broadly speaking, I am a conservative, though personally I try to avoid labels. It is obvious to me, in speaking to conservative coworkers and friends, that they often find the liberal mind incomprehensible. They watch some snippet from a White House press conference, or see some liberal talking head on a news show – and they simply can’t believe what they are hearing. Having spent more than half of my life on the left, I am less confused – though sometimes no less amazed. Let me see if I can throw a little light upon the darkness of their response to the ebola crisis for my new brethren.<br /><br />Conservatives and liberals see the ebola epidemic very differently. Most conservatives believe that the first duty of government is to protect its citizens from external threats, so either an executive order or an act of congress should stop airline flights from the afflicted areas of west Africa immediately. Or, alternatively, people whose flights originated in west Africa should be quarantined for the incubation period of the disease – about three weeks. Liberals, on the other hand, are generally opposed to stopping the flights and some are even nervous about the idea of passenger quarantine. Considering that we are talking about an extremely lethal disease that has never reached pandemic levels before, against which we have no immunity and no available vaccine or treatment, their position seems reckless – to say the least. I believe it is reckless, but it is not random, and it is not inconsistent with major aspects of the liberal worldview.<br /><br />The first thing one needs to understand is that the liberal worldview is an internationalist one. Where a conservative loves his or her country, the leftist tends to consider national self-interest a dirty, backward idea. We are all just people in one big potentially happy global village, as the liberal sees it. If a liberal is committed to the idea that patriotism and borders are backward notions we need to discard, then the person dying in Liberia has as much right to access American healthcare as any US citizen. The idea of citizenship itself is rather suspect for the liberal mind. To be a citizen of the United States is to be granted special rights and privileges. To the liberal, special rights and privileges are things that should be apportioned to minorities to redress the injustices of history, but should not be granted on the basis of mere citizenship. Their ideal is a sort of global equality of all persons under an enlightened leadership of experts with appropriate credentials. To spare the US its share of a plague seems unfair to a liberal, at least at this stage – when none of his neighbors have actually died from the disease.<br /><br />A second reason liberals tend to oppose a stoppage of travel or a quarantine is that both measures, in this case, would burden non-whites almost exclusively. True racism is a pretty ugly thing, but the bar required to raise a charge of racism these days is basically to make any non-white person feel bad. At this moment of our history, making a non-white person feel bad is the worst thing that a government could conceivably do. It preempts discussion. It cannot be submitted to any sort of benefit-risk analysis. Functionally, we have reached the point where risking the lives of 300 million Americans (including the 80 million non-whites) is more acceptable to many than inconveniencing a few thousand west African travelers. We aren’t talking about genocide here, or even about something as harsh as Japanese internment in WW2. We are talking about a 3-week quarantine for a few thousand people. But, for the left, it runs against a core belief. It’s just unthinkable.<br /><br />The problem of the left has never been a shortage of high and noble aspirations. Their problem has usually been one of measuring their ideals against the realities of the world. If it sounds nice – it is nice. Unfortunately, when principle preempts reality, the path to their utopian vision detours headlong into the abyss. With ebola, we have the starkest of all possible examples. It is stunning to watch White House and CDC spokesmen tell us not to worry – ebola will never come here. And then when it arrived – don’t worry, it will never spread. And now, as we have more cases – brace yourselves, we are going to have to consider our strategy. They do not seem to grasp that the disease will not be diverted by getting the messaging just right.<br /><br />In the end, conservatives have a notion of what the world they would like to hold on to looks like. That notion involves, among other things, keeping a set of national borders around a fairly varied group of people who share enough common values to be called “citizens”. At an even more basic level, it involves themselves and their children remaining alive. Liberals, on the other hand, are wedded to the idea that change will almost always make things better. They believe that the prosperity and relative safety they have enjoyed is a condition of nature – not a hard-won product of vigilance and difficult decisions. They cannot really conceive of a threat that cannot be placated with a nice apology or suppressed with a new law.</span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1