Category Archives: Philosophy
Liberal Utopia is a Very Dangerous (Imaginary) Place
Jihad Blows Up The Liberal Utopia (Jeffrey Lord)
Jihad Blows Up The Liberal Utopia – Jeffrey Lord
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Jihad has blown up The Liberal Utopia.
The visionary liberal land of political and social perfection.
President Obama is not happy – and he isn’t alone.
You know the place.
• The Liberal Utopia is a land where gun background checks prevent mass murder.
• The Liberal Utopia is a land where Islamic fundamentalists have changed their perception of America because the President travels to Muslim nations to give lovely speeches, believes that the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and elsewhere is a wonderful sign of an Arab Spring, and refuses to use the word “terrorist” whether his administration is investigating Ft. Hood, Boston, or Benghazi.
• The Liberal Utopia is a land where a 2009 presidential videoproclaiming a “new beginning” in American relations with Iran will halt the effort to build a nuclear bomb.
• The Liberal Utopia is a land where the good intentions of Social Security will never bankrupt the Social Security Trust Fund.
• The Liberal Utopia is a land where the good intentions of Medicare could not possibility result in trillions of unfunded liability.
• The Liberal Utopia is a land where the War on Poverty was supposed to end poverty – and instead winds up sending violent crime skyrocketing, and, in the words of Thomas Sowell, setting up the American black family for rapid disintegration in the liberal welfare state “that subsidized unwed pregnancy and changed welfare from an emergency rescue to a way of life.”
One could go on… and on and on… spotting those will-o-the-wisp glimpses of The Liberal Utopia (Obamacare here, the Obama stimulus over there, the promise to close Guantanamo way back there) with example after example of this miserably failed attempt to find or create a Liberal Utopia.
Or what our friend Mark Levin deftly calls Ameritopia.
The search for this Liberal Utopia has been going on in this country since at least 1932 and in fact before that when one keeps going on back to Woodrow Wilson’s progressives and beyond to the late 19th century when the progressive movement began to gain political steam with the likes of William Jennings Bryan and a whole host of other if lesser known figures.
The idea is always the same. To quote Levin: “Utopianism is the ideological and doctrinal foundation for statism.”
Or, to simplify: if only Americans are made to do X, The Perfect Society will manifest.
What is X? The above list suffices: background checks, a video sending nice words to Iran, opening up to the Muslim Brotherhood, setting up a government-run Social Security or Medicare or Obamacare, declaring a government-run War on Poverty. The Obama stimulus.
And let’s not forget the Philadelphia abortion scandal where live human babies outside the womb were repeatedly killed – a direct contradiction of the entire Roe.v. Wade sacrament.
Etc. Etc. Etc.
Let’s start with two stories that have dominated the news in the last week: gun control and the Boston Marathon murders.
Recall that after the Senate defeated the Toomey-Manchin background amendment, President Obama, outraged, took to the White House Rose Garden to say this:
“The gun lobby and its allies willfully lied about the bill. They claimed that it would create some sort of ‘big brother’ gun registry, even though the bill did the opposite. This legislation, in fact, outlawed any registry.”
Next up was former Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, who took to the Op-Ed page of the New York Times to say “I’m furious.” Giffords accused the Senate of being in the “grip of the gun lobby” fearful of political consequences.
Gifford’s statement was filled with irony. There are people aplenty out there who have also discussed issues other than guns as being a problem in this area of violence in America. Indeed just this last Sunday Boston’s Cardinal Sean O’Malley not only talked about guns but the role of abortion in what O’Malley called a “Culture of Death.” But did Gabby Giffords want to talk about abortion as a contributing factor? Did the president? Of course not – and for exactly the reason they attributed to those who oppose background checks. Which is to say, pro-choice politicians both, neither Giffords nor Obama have the guts to take on the abortion lobby.
But let’s stay focused on background checks and its role in the liberal Utopia.
Remember the Brady law? So named for President Reagan’s press secretary Jim Brady who was seriously and permanently wounded during the assassination attempt on Reagan.
The Brady law mandated background checks across the country. Challenged in the Supreme Court, the law was mostly upheld in 1997, with the exception of the mandate. States however, were free to do background checks. One of the states that picked up on this – as did most states – was, yes, Massachusetts. In 1998 Massachusetts, headed on that endless journey to The Liberal Utopia, passing what has been called “the toughest gun control legislation in the country.” Reported Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby – just two months ago on February 17, 2013 – the “toughest gun control legislation in the country” was signed into law by the-then Republican governor and praised to the hilt by the Democratic Attorney General, as well as a leading anti-gun activist. Jacoby quoted from the Globe story of 1998 that trumpeted the bill’s signing:
“Today, Massachusetts leads the way in cracking down on gun violence,” said Republican Governor Paul Cellucci as he signed the bill into law. “It will save lives and help fight crime in our communities.” Scott Harshbarger, the state’s Democratic attorney general, agreed: “This vote is a victory for common sense and for the protection of our children and our neighborhoods.” One of the state’s leading anti-gun activists, John Rosenthal of Stop Handgun Violence, joined the applause. “The new gun law,” he predicted, “will certainly prevent future gun violence and countless grief.”
Catch all that? Massachusetts was “cracking down on gun violence.” This “will save lives and help fight crime” in the state’s communities. The new law was a “victory for common sense” that was a “victory for common sense” and “the protection of our children and our neighborhoods.” The law “will certainly prevent future gun violence and countless grief.”
Now let’s leave aside the point of Jacoby’s column – that in fact the law did none of that and that indeed, in Jacoby’s words:
…the law that was so tough on law-abiding gun owners had quite a different impact on criminals.
Since 1998, gun crime in Massachusetts has gotten worse, not better. In 2011, Massachusetts recorded 122 murders committed with firearms, the Globereported this month – “a striking increase from the 65 in 1998.” Other crimes rose too. Between 1998 and 2011, robbery with firearms climbed 20.7 percent. Aggravated assaults jumped 26.7 percent.
Let’s stay focused on the fact that the Boston bombers did in fact have guns.
That’s right, in addition to bombs, the brothers Tsarnaev had guns. And surprise surprise, in spite of all that “toughest” gun law in the country business – you guessed it.
The brothers didn’t apply for a license.
That’s right. As the Huffington Post has noted here:
WASHINGTON – The Boston bombing suspects engaged in a deadly firefight with police last week, possessing six bombs, handguns, a rifle and more than 250 rounds of ammunition. But the Tsarnaev brothers did not have proper licenses to possess the firearms, according to the Cambridge Police Department – a revelation that comes just days after the Senate voted against strengthening and expanding background checks for gun sales.
Cambridge Police Department spokesman Dan Riviello told The Huffington Post that neither Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 19, nor Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, appeared to have a license to own a handgun.
“The younger brother could not have applied as he is not 21 years of age and the older brother did not have a license to carry and we have no record of him ever applying,” Riviello said.
Got all that?
So in spite of the Brady law, which subjects law-abiding gun owners to all manner of rules and regulations, and in spite of the Massachusetts law, which was “the toughest” gun control law in the country, and in spite of the hundreds (thousands) of other gun control laws that bind the country, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, hell bent on murder and mayhem, never bothered to get a “proper license.” Brother Dzhokhar, of course, wasn’t permitted to have a license because he was just too young.
Yet somehow, without being licensed, the two managed to have “handguns, a rifle and more than 250 rounds of ammunition.” With which the unlicensed brothers shot MIT policeman Sean Collier to death – and came close to killing Boston Transit policeman, Richard Donohue.
Shocker, isn’t it?
Yet there is no more shock in listening to the reasoning of liberals on gun control than there is in listening to their reasoning on Islamic fundamentalists. The subjects may be different – although they happened to become two stories in one this last week – but the reasoning is always the same.
Let’s hear from Andrew McCarthy, who was the Clinton-era prosecutor of the Blind Sheikh, the brains behind the first attack on the World Trade Center in 1993. Andy later wrote the more than aptly titled book Willful Blindness: A Memoir of the Jihad and nowwrites this from National Review in an article headed:
Jihad Will Not Be Wished Away: But willful blindness remains the order of the day.
“Outlook: Islam.” So reads the personal webpage of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who ravaged Boston this week, along with his now-deceased brother and fellow jihadist, Tamerlan – namesake of a 14th-century Muslim warrior whose campaigns through Asia Minor are legendary for their brutalization of non-Muslims.
Brutalizing our own non-Muslim country has been the principal objective of jihadists for the last 20 years. This week marks a new and chilling chapter: the introduction on our shores of the tactics the self-styled mujahideen have used to great, gory effect for the past decade in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Willful blindness remains the order of the day, as it has since the World Trade Center was bombed in 1993. It is freely conceded that, when the identities and thus the motivation of the Marathon terrorists were not known, it would have been irresponsible to dismiss any radical ideology as, potentially, the instigator. But in our politically correct, up-is-down culture, to suggest “Outlook: Islam” was unthinkable. So the most likely scenario – namely, that jihadists who have been at war with us for two decades had, yet again, attacked innocent civilians – became the least likely scenario in the minds of media pundits. Instead, they brazenly prayed (to Gaia, I’m sure) for white conservative culprits with Tea Party hats and Rush 24/7 subscriptions.
To borrow from the gun control debate, closing one’s eyes to Islamic fundamentalism is not just displaying a lack of common sense (to borrow a phrase from the gun control debate) – it is indeed, as Andy McCarthy accurately calls it, willful blindness.
And this particular willful blindness on jihadists is lethal.
It is exactly the same as the willful blindness that kept the State Department from understanding that there was a reason for the repeated pleas from the now murdered Benghazi diplomats for security assistance. When the attack came on those diplomats last September, the U.S. government had been willfully blinded – right from the top – that such a thing could be the result of Islamic fundamentalism
Ditto with the attack on Ft. Hood by the Islamic fundamentalist Nidal Malik Hasan, a U.S. Army major. Shouting “Allahu Akbar!” – God is Great – as he opened fire, Hasan killed 13 and wounding more than 30. The response from the US government? To declare yet another mass murder in the name of Islam to be “work place violence” – and then have the then-Army Chief of Staff murmur aloud that to treat this as anything else would somehow hurt the military’s diversity push.
And so it goes.
From the promises of Obamacare that you can keep your own doctor to the massive indebtedness of Social Security and Medicare to the War on Poverty that wasn’t and the Obama stimulus that wasn’t either – and on and on and on – liberalism’s Achilles’ heel is that it isn’t about serious, common sense ideas that display an understanding of everyday human reality.
What liberalism is about is creating Utopia.
A Utopian world where gun control stops criminals, being politically correct with jihadists means they won’t attack, the value of helping the aging means Social Security and Medicare cannot possibly be in debt to the tune of trillions, that Obamacare will work just as the War on Poverty worked, and that forcing banks to give millions of Americans the money to buy homes they can’t afford can’t possibly crash the economy.
And on goes the endless parade.
Substituting sentiment for common sense, then watching the results crash and burn in a hurricane of dead Americans, impoverished Americans, massively indebted Americans or continually impoverished, jobless and hopeless Americans.
Does anyone really wonder why so many Americans listen to President Obama say that “the gun lobby and its allies willfully lied about the bill” – and believe it’s the President who lies? And that they believe this for the simple reason that all the other liberal Utopian promises haven’t been kept? With a lie just this last week about the results of Massachusetts gun control being all too painfully obvious? Who, based on hard real-life experience with these Liberal Utopians, would ever believe that the Toomey-Manchin bill will never result in what Obama calls “some sort of ‘big brother’ gun registry”? If you believe this, you believe the Boston bombers simply forgot to apply for a license to carry a gun.
The response by liberals to these repeated liberal disasters is to simply ignore the results and walk away. Then finding yet another “problem” on which to visit this same disastrous pattern of emotionally charged non-common sense.
Promising once again that if Americans just do this next X, Utopia will finally arrive.
The question here is whether a majority of Americans will ever come to understand the game.
To know that the real meaning of Utopia is not some visionary system of political or social perfection, as the dictionary says.
Utopianism is, precisely as Mark Levin documents, the ideological and doctrinal foundation for statism.
It is dumb. It is wrong. It is a call to mindless emotion instead of careful, logical thought. It can and will bankrupt. It can and will – and as we have seen this last week it does – kill.
Which makes the ideas of a Liberal Utopia not just wrongheaded.
It makes them dangerous.
Which makes it time to say enough is enough.
From The Daley Gator: http://thedaleygator.wordpress.com/page/3/
Truth – Philosophical Food for The Mind and Soul. Refuting Postmodern Bullshit.
The Bee and the Lamb, Part 10
“While Reality’s thorough thrashing of socialism sent many Left intellectuals into terminal despair, for others the crisis meant only that a more radical assault on capitalism was needed. Instead of accepting that Reality had proved them wrong, determined academic socialists declared Reality itself null and void, along with reason and even the possibility of telling true from false and right from wrong.”
The essay below is the tenth in a series by Takuan Seiyo. See the list at the bottom of this post for links to the previous installments.
Left: Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Dance at Le Moulin de la Galette, 1876
Right: George Grosz, Metropolis, 1916/17
The Bee and the Lamb
Part 10
By Takuan Seiyo
In the bog of Demonic Mendacity
The undead zombies of the academy
The academic creators of postmodernism, most of them PhDs in philosophy of the German kind, were all far-left socialists around the time that their creed showed its decisive failure as theory and as morality. The booming prosperity and relative freedom of the West and of its working class, particularly in super-capitalist America of the 50’s, belied Karl Marx’s dialectics. The Western proletariat, instead of rising against its capitalist masters, was busy buying homes, cars and TVs, and enjoying the good life. Meanwhile, the communist Valhalla, the Soviet Union, revealed itself after Stalin’s death to have been a machine of mass murder of the malnourished, run by a megalomaniac monster.
“Postmodernism,” wrote the philosopher Stephen Hicks in Explaining Postmodernism, “is the academic far Left’s epistemological strategy for responding to the crisis caused by the failures of socialism in theory and in practice. Confronted by harsh evidence and ruthless logic the far Left had a reply: That is only logic and evidence; logic and evidence are subjective; you cannot really prove anything; feelings are deeper than logic; and our feelings say socialism.” [1]
Conveniently, by the middle of the twentieth century, epistemology and linguistics had already turned into gibberish, not the least due to earlier efforts by illustrious names such as Russell and Wittgenstein. Hicks quotes the German philosopher-scientist Moritz Schlick whose prolific output in the 1920’s revolved around issues such as the meaninglessness of the proposition: “Does the external world exist?” and the corollary issue of the null connection between cause and effect, belabored by Wittgenstein.
Of course any Zen adept would react to the question “Does the external world exist?” by whacking the questioner with a staff, thereby proving the existence and, later, when the blue-red welts formed on the budding philosopher’s backside, the causality as well. But the peculiar perversions of 19th century German philosophy and the great catastrophe of World War I have somehow leeched the vital sap of life from European culture. Instead of climbing or hewing or just classifying rocks, the philosophes preferred being chained to them in Plato’s cave, arguing endlessly about the flickering images.
While Reality’s thorough thrashing of socialism sent many Left intellectuals into terminal despair, for others the crisis meant only that a more radical assault on capitalism was needed. Instead of accepting that Reality had proved them wrong, determined academic socialists declared Reality itself null and void, along with reason and even the possibility of telling true from false and right from wrong. Consequently, as Hicks puts it, postmodernism has recast the nature of rhetoric into “persuasion in the absence of cognition” — a sheer political weapon with which to swat aside and overpower any opposition to socialism in any form.
“The regular deployments of ad hominem, the setting up of straw men, and the regular attempts to silence opposing voices are all logical consequences of the postmodern epistemology of language. Stanley Fish [snip] calls all opponents of racial preferences bigots and lumps them in with the Ku Klux Klan. Andrea Dworkin calls all heterosexual males rapists and repeatedly labels ‘Amerika’ a fascist state. With such rhetoric, truth or falsity is not the issue: what matters primarily is the language’s effectiveness.” [2]
Postmodern (“PoMo”) ideology explicitly rejects truth and logic. In such a framework, it’s easier to understand the curious mixture of presentism and relativism we visited earlier. Hicks summarizes this perverse phenomenon as: “On the one hand, all cultures are equally deserving of respect; on the other, Western culture is uniquely destructive and bad.” He adduces enduring examples of postmodernist theory blatantly at odds with historical facts:
Postmodernists: The West is deeply racist.
Fact: The West ended slavery for the first time ever, and racist ideas are on the defensive only in places where Western ideas have made inroads.
Postmodernists: The West is deeply sexist.
Fact: Western women were the first to get the vote, contractual rights, and the opportunities that most women in the world are still without.
Postmodernists: Western capitalist countries are cruel and exploitive of their poorer citizens.
Fact: The poor in the West are far richer than the poor anywhere else, both in terms of material assets and the opportunities to improve their condition.
The place of honor in the postmodernist Pantheon belongs probably to Jacques Derrida (1930-2004). Derrida’s main task in life was to help advance Marxism by deconstruction of the rational foundations of the West. An academic superstar, the list of universities where he coughed the infecting mist into the brains of adoring tens of thousands included, among others, France’s three most prestigious universities: Sorbonne, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) and École Normale Supérieure (ENS), Johns Hopkins, Yale, New York University, The New School for Social Research, Stony Brook University and the University of California at Irvine.
The Australian mathematician and architectural critic Nikos Salingaros summed up Derrida’s “contribution” to Western Civilization as a lethal virus absolutizing subjectivity, motivated by the will to destroy [3]:
“Deconstruction asserts that texts have no ultimate meaning, and that their interpretation is up to readers. Deconstruction [snip] erases associations that form coherent thoughts. It acts like a computer virus that erases information in a hard disk. The Derrida virus seeks to undermine any original meaning via a complex and entirely self-referential play of words.
Deconstruction devalues common sense and rejects customary wisdom. [snip] As a virus, it has invaded civilization, erasing collective common sense while spreading with astonishing rapidity.
Deconstruction is not simply a worldview among others. A method to erase knowledge, masquerading as a new philosophical movement, cannot be quarantined within academia. Indoctrinated students eventually enter the real world threatening to create havoc. [snip]
Deconstruction has been remarkably successful in dismantling traditional literature, art, and architecture. Like a biological virus [snip], it only partially destroys its host, because total destruction would stop further transmission. It breaks up coherent sets of ideas by separating natural modules into submodules. Some of these submodules are then selectively destroyed in order to subsequently reattach their components randomly into an incoherent construct.[snip]
Once formed, worldviews are unlikely to change and are trusted more than any direct sensory evidence. These internal worldviews become so much a part of oneself that they are unlikely to undergo any modification, unless one is forced to do so. For this reason, those who have adopted a cult philosophy deny all evidence that threatens the cult’s vision of reality. Rational arguments make no difference.”
Salingaros quotes Derrida himself:
“All I have done … is dominated by the thought of a virus, what could be called a parasitology, a virology, the virus being many things … The virus is in part a parasite that destroys, that introduces disorder into communication. [snip] This is what happens with a virus; it derails a mechanism of the communicational type, its coding and decoding … is neither alive nor dead … [this is] all that I have done since I began writing.” [4]
If Derrida infected the culture with an intellectual virus, Michel Foucault (1926-1984) carried this one step further by sparing no efforts to infect himself, eventually dying of AIDS after a promiscuous sweep of the homo bathhouses of San Francisco.
A graduate of the two aforementioned citadels of French learning, Foucault is acknowledge as perhaps the preeminent social theorist and historian of ideas of mid-20th century, though he was, to be blunt, simply a malevolent intellectual masturbator in the solipsistic German tradition (e.g. Hegel, Heidegger). A prolific one, though, with a recondite vocabulary and soporifically impenetrable style, which, along with his membership in the French Communist Party, later supplanted by Maoist idolatry, qualified him for admission to France’s most august intellectual body, Collège de France, as — this bears reflection — Professor of the History of Systems of Thought.
Like Derrida, Foucault spread his intellectual HIV over much of the world in person. In addition to his teaching positions in several French universities, he held academic posts in Sweden, Germany, Poland, Tunisia and, in the United States, at the University of Buffalo and at UC Berkeley.
We will not waste time perusing his books, though various dystopian afflictions plaguing the West now are the result of eager university students absorbing their postmodernist teaching and then inflicting it upon their lessers after assuming responsible positions in society.
Among others, we owe the pervasive odor of urine and the pitiful shrieking hobos in our center cities, and not a few small genocides by obvious madmen left to live among the sane, to Foucault’s 1961 book, Madness and Civilization and its critique of domineering Reason suppressing the truth of madness. Those who wonder how Europe could have possibly committed the prima facie insanity of importing millions of sharia pollinators might peruse Foucault’s panegyrics to the new form of “political spirituality” he perceived in Muslim turmoil during the 1979 Iranian mullahs’ revolution [5].
How vast and demented Foucault’s influence has been might be inferred from a peek into Journal of Research in Nursing that, one might assume, exists in order to publish learned articles about the swabbing of wounds and intravenous nutrition. The abstract of “On the constitution and status of ‘evidence’ in the health sciences” reads:
“Drawing on the philosophy of Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze, this paper interrogates the constitution of ‘evidence’ that defines the evidence-based movement in the health sciences. What are the current social and political conditions under which scientific knowledge appears to be ‘true’? Foucault describes these conditions as state ‘science’, a regime that privileges economic modes of governance and efficiency. Today, the Cochrane taxonomy and research database is increasingly endorsed by government and public health policy makers. Although this ‘evidence-based’ paradigm ostensibly promotes the noble ideal of ‘true knowledge’ free from political bias, in reality, this apparent neutrality is dangerous because it masks the methods by which power silently operates to inscribe rigid norms and to ensure political dominance. Through the practice of critique, this paper begins to expose and to politicise the workings of this power, ultimately suggesting that scholars are in a privileged position to oppose such regimes and foremost have the duty to politicize what hides behind the distortion and misrepresentation of ‘evidence’.” [6]
Professor Hicks summarizes Foucault in these words:
“In his ‘Introduction’ to The Archaeology of Knowledge, Foucault [snip] speaks of his desire to erase himself. [snip] Foucault extends his desire for effacement to the entire human species. At the end of The Order of Things, for example, he speaks almost longingly about the coming erasure of mankind: Man is ‘an invention of recent date that will soon be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea.’”
What civilization, then, could possibly enshrine a death-craving, babble-spouting sodomite nymphomaniac, but one that has been similarly infected? Except it’s not the civilization that has been infected but just its official custodians and their acolytes whom another Frenchman, Julien Benda, accused of treason already in 1927. The simpler folks had just been seduced to turn away. They inhaled in increasing doses and came to like a compound of dumb digital diversions, sex, porn and pop, uppers and downers, slavery to credit and status shopping, and news and entertainment programs programmed by programmers with hidden agendas and degrees conferred by the same loci of treason and insanity as had enshrined Messrs. Derrida and Foucault. And Herbert Marcuse (1898-1979) too, the guru of the 60’s and the most influential peddler of the Frankfurt School’s tainted goods in the United States.
The Institut für Sozialforschung had been established at the University of Frankfurt in 1923 by an endowment from German expat Felix Weil and his father, a prominent grain merchant in Argentina. It was a particularly German concoction, heavily influenced by Hegel and Heidegger, and imbued with the notion that Western Civilization, having mortally injured itself in Word War I, was fit for the trash heap and had to be replaced. Mutating a new form of Marxism, the Frankfurt School taught that power lay with the institutions of culture, rather than with those who controlled the means of production. Thus was “Critical Theory” born, by which all Western cultural precepts and institutions could be taken down one by one, so that Revolution might finally succeed.
The raison d’être for this work being to plow through where there is too much beating around the bush, let us redefine “German” as “German-Jewish.” Practically all the big names of the Frankfurt School were Jews: Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Herbert Marcuse, Friedrich Pollock, Leo Lowenthal, Kurt Lewin, Adolph Lowe, Erich Fromm, David Riazanov (Russian) [7]. The gentiles were a small and less distinguished minority: Karl Korsch, Karl August Wittfogel, the fabled Soviet spy Richard Sorge.
Why would the wealthiest (and Jewish [8]) grain merchant in the world want to fund a Marxist institute is as much an enigma as why the wealthy (and non-Jewish) industrialist Friedrich Engels would finance Karl Marx or why hundreds of the wealthiest Americans, many from old American families and, again, with a disproportionate Jewish participation, would actively, passionately, devote so much energy and money toward the destruction of their own country and their own ethny. The American evolutionary psychologist Kevin MacDonald who reconstructed the previously semi-taboo Jewish components of major Leftist calamities like the Bolshevik Revolution, Communism, and the Frankfurt School, has built a theory around that. Alas, the theory he laid out in his The Culture of Critique trilogy and other writings is little more than a medieval blood libel: the Joos have a genetic evolutionary strategy to dominate and feed off their “white” host [9].
A credible theory, instead of sieving out all the contradictory data and making unwarranted generalizations based on the hand-picked remainder, would account for and integrate the counter-indicators; for instance, that the Jews were among the most patriotic segments of the German population: from a community of under 600,000, an estimated 90,000 Jews served in the German Army during World War 1 and 12,000 lost their lives. Likewise, whereas the most consequential proponents of Marxism in all its forms have been Jews, the most consequential proponents of libertarian freedom were also Jews: the important ones include Mises, Hayek (1/4 Jewish), Rothbard, Ayn Rand, Friedman.
In logic and social phenomena, the proposition “Many X are Y” or even “Most X are Y” does not allow for reversibility into “Most Y are X.” Moreover, much has already been written to explain Jewish Leftism (e.g. in the Jewish neoconservative monthly Commentary), and the issue is of current relevance only with respect to the United States and, arguably, Great Britain. Europeans should rather ask themselves what propels the rabid German and French Leftism.
How come the “Frankfurt School” is still strong and thriving in Frankfurt, its old Jewish pillars now feted as German intellectual giants, and its newer all-German issue Jürgen Habermas the country’s No. 1 public intellectual? Why is there a party in Germany that proposes to tax income above €500,000 at 100%, and a party is actually ruling in France that passed a 75% income tax? Why are French icons Bardot and Depardieu seeking freedom in Russia, and Germany is a fiscal and religious police state searching cars on the Swiss border more rigorously than the Nazis did and jailing resistors to Islamization? Why is the money confiscated from German and French citizens used to subsidize Muslim minorities that in turn beat up, rape and burn [10] the people whose money was so confiscated, with the people severely punished by the state when they draw the logical conclusions? Not nearly enough Europeans have been asking those questions.
When the Nazis came to power, the Frankfurt School was disbanded and its denizens had to flee Germany. Between 1933 and 1939, the most important of those neue-Marxisten, including Marcuse, found their way to the United States and obtained academic posts there, mainly in New York (Columbia, New School of Social Research) and California. And so the infection spread, under the commie-friendly Franklin Roosevelt government.
Marcuse’s unique genius in adapting Marxism to the self-regenerating resilience of American capitalism was in marrying the old concepts to Freudian psychology — oppression plus repression. Since the proletariat was content in acquiring wealth and the comforts that go with it, wealth per se had to be demonized as the purveyor of goods and comforts that were “enslaving” the working class.
Productive work diverted one from pleasure — hence the call for “polymorphous perversity,” “Make love not war,” and other Marcusean mottoes plastered all over the West’s 1960s — in Europe as “Marx, Marcuse, and Mao,” and in the United States as Timothy Leary’s “Turn on, tune in, drop out.” Marcuse even managed to transform laziness and rejection of personal hygiene into positive cultural values, thereby spiking, as far the 60s generation was concerned, the Protestant work ethic and body deodorant.
To demonize capitalism and its wealth creation further, it was necessary to link it in a zero sum formula to the destruction of nature, as an inevitable consequence. Thus was modern environmental socialism born, with the farce of “environmental justice” serving now as a bludgeon with which to take from those who have the ability (Whitey), and transfer it to those who do not (i.e. not-Whitey). Seeing the importance of this new New Marxist ju-jitsu throw, Marcuse played a pivotal part in the “Ecology and Revolution” symposium in Paris in 1972, and devoted his last essay to it: “Ecology and the Critique of Modern Society” (1979). [11]
Marcuse’s famous essays “Repressive Tolerance” (1965) and “An Essay on Liberation” (1969) even recast the West’s tolerance as repression. In his book Intellectual Morons Daniel Flynn laid bare Marcuse’s trick as converting reality into its opposite, i.e. “freedom is totalitarianism, democracy is dictatorship, education is indoctrination, violence is nonviolence, and fiction is truth.” To this could be added Marcuse’s other fraudulent memes transplanted straight from the Frankfurt School, i.e. that Nazism was a consequence of capitalism, Communist Parties are the sole anti-fascist power in the world, fascism is an extreme right-wing ideology, and God-Family-Country conservatives are fascists who are not just wrong but mentally deranged.
From that, directly, was born the political culture of bold lying, smearing political opponents, oppressive political correctness and the persecution of political dissent by Marcuse’s children at the helm of all power in the West today. But Marcuse raised not just one but the two most noxious plagues decimating the West today. He proposed “Archimedean points for a larger emancipation” through which a revolutionary minority could apply leverage in order to topple the large edifice of capitalist society.
These points would be the “marginalized and outcast elements” deemed irrational, immoral, or criminal by capitalist definition: women, teens, sexual deviants, psychos, felons, immigrants, the black and the brown and the handicapped. It’s their activism, Marcuse prophesied, that would topple capitalist society where workers’ activism had failed. Moreover, only such minority groups legitimately deserved tolerance, relabeled as “liberating tolerance”. The erstwhile stakeholders, i.e. the autochthon, the male, the Christian, the sane, the family-oriented, the patriotic and the striving (i.e. “capitalist”) ought to be restrained in their liberty so that the balance of power could shift to the Left. This would be, and is today, nothing but redistribution of political, social and cultural capital, on top of the redistribution of financial capital which is already one of the primary activities of the modern Western-Socialist (they are all Socialist) state.
The notion of “liberating tolerance” that is in fact oppressive intolerance is now played out daily in the life of the West. The view of numerous Black “intellectuals” that no Black can be a racist is now the accepted view in America’s Progressive circles, and the American Muslim provocateur, Zaid Shakir, says that no Muslim can be a terrorist. What’s worse, quite a few once-normal Whites believe all that. Thus is the Inversion of Reality, attained.
The pre-eminent historian of Marxism, Leszek Kolakowski, named Chapter 11 in his seminal Main Currents of Marxism: “Herbert Marcuse: Marxism as a Totalitarian Utopia of the New Left.” You who are reading this are already living in the completed rough design of that construction, a couple of years before the painted Styrofoam beams give way.
Marcuse’s superstar status allowed him to spread the infecting spores throughout the West, just as Derrida and Foucault were able to do. He taught at the University of Frankfurt, at Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Brandeis, UC San Diego, and in hundreds of speaking engagements around the world. It’s remarkable that the résumé of the fourth major pillar of postmodernism, Jean-François Lyotard, includes teaching high school in Algeria, then University of Paris, Derrida’s American beachheads at UC Irvine, Johns Hopkins and Yale, Foucault’s nest UC Berkeley, Marcuse’s UC San Diego, and then Emory University in Atlanta, University of Montreal and University of São Paulo in Brazil.
From those hubs of viral transmission, the plague spread. First, thousands of Western academics and intellectual opinion makers and, by now, tens of millions of university graduates who run all government and all cultural and educational institutions in every country of the Euro-peoples between Berlin and Brisbane.
The two most salient of the intermediary disseminators were celebrated American academics Edward Said (1933-2003) and Howard Zinn (1922-2010). Both excelled at the obsessive picking at the West’s motes, and suffered from major blindness relative to all the Eastern and Southern beams-in-the-eye — i.e. the classic case of what we defined earlier as double cognitive exotropia.
According to his 26 September 2003 obituary in The Guardian, Edward Said was “widely regarded as the outstanding representative of the post-structuralist left in America. Above all, he was the most articulate and visible advocate of the Palestinian cause in the United States.” Said is also revered in the cultural establishment as one of the leading literary critics of the second half of the 20th century, a revolutionary reformist of the field of Oriental Studies, a sage, a philosopher, and what is known among French sophisticates as homme d’action culturelle — though those bumpkin Anglos may use an easier French term, saboteur.
All this and Said’s professorship of English and comparative literature at Columbia University could not have been attained had he not produced his celebrated books by perverting the history he knew and inventing the history he didn’t know — particularly the history of Western Civilization and the Middle East, his major subject. He also tampered with quotations, falsified translations, constructed incoherent arguments based on faulty methodology, ignored anthropology, sociology and psychology, ignored the bulk of Orientalism’s important literature because he didn’t know German, misrepresented the work of many scholars, and flung willy-nilly pejoratives, hyperbole, hysterical exaggerations and false imputations of racism and other guilt [12] — all in the holy cause of postmodernism’s jihad against whitey and his civilization, bolstered by his personal bile as a torch-bearing Arab living in an Israel-supporting Anglo country.
Said credited his politics to his reading of Antonio Gramsci, Adorno, Foucault and Raymond Williams. Gramsci had been the inventor of the Cultural Marxism idea later perfected by the Frankfurt School; Adorno was a main pillar of the Frankfurt School alongside Marcuse; Foucault has been our subject here, and Williams was a Welsh New-Leftist communist. Said’s Orientalism (1978) was an application of the Gramscian concept of controlling hegemony in combination with the Foucauldian bla-bla of discourse and knowledge in the service of power.
Said used that mélange to deconstruct and malign the West’s attitudes and interactions with the Arab or otherwise Muslim East. His particularly bizarre charge was that the academic study of Islam in the West has served as a tool of imperialist domination
One of the most influential books of the last 50 years, ever since its publication Orientalism has been obligatory reading in every field of the arts and humanities where the Frankfurt School’s Critical Theory has any sway — which means all of them. Above all, it has fueled the field of postcolonial studies — one of those academic disciplines that grow in a society of spiritless capitalist surplus like mold does on leftovers from a sumptuous picnic. But the book is just an exercise of a misshapen pot calling a big, sturdy kettle black, though the pot be the blacker one by a factor of three [13].
One could hardly deconstruct the Palestinian deconstructor’s famous book better than the erudite Ibn Warraq has done in his Defending the West [14]:
“What makes self-examination for Arabs and Muslims , and particularly criticism of Islam in the West very difficult is the totally pernicious influence of Edward Said’s Orientalism. The latter work taught an entire generation of Arabs the art of self-pity — “were it not for the wicked imperialists, racists and Zionists, we would be great once more”- encouraged the Islamic fundamentalist generation of the 1980s, and bludgeoned into silence any criticism of Islam. [snip] The aggressive tone of Orientalism is what I have called ‘intellectual terrorism’, since it does not seek to convince by arguments or historical analysis but by spraying charges of racism, imperialism, Eurocentrism [snip]; anyone who disagrees with Said has insult heaped upon him.”
A longtime contributor to the communist magazine The Nation, in 2001 Said published there an attack on old-school Harvard professor Samuel Huntington, whose “Clash of Civilizations” we reviewed earlier. Said titled it, “Clash of Ignorance”. What he writes there is beside the point; it’s a waste of time like anything this and other poststructuralists have written. More cogent and closer to the core of Reality is what Ross Douthat wrote about Said writing about Huntington:
“There is something sad, truth be told, and a little desperate about Said’s essay: It reads like the flailings of an intellectual who realizes, too late, that history is passing him by. He lashes out indecorously, calling Huntington “a clumsy writer and inelegant thinker” — an odd accusation from a essayist [sic] whose prose often reads like something badly translated from an obscure Eastern European tongue.”
Again, that desperate flailing of failed Marxism, in Said’s case channeled to power the threshing of a failed culture, Islam.
Edward Said was Barry-Barack’s professor at Columbia and later, a pal. Dinesh D’Souza credits him as one of now-President Obama’s three “Founding Fathers,” the other two being the black America-haters Frank Marshall Davis and Jeremiah Wright. Nor is his impact confined to America alone. The Saidian brain-disabling mutation is now manifest in the daily life of all the subject peoples of the West’s Progressive Ruling Oligarchy. To apprehend Said’s ghost conducting The Fools’ Symphytic Orchestra of Norway [15], one need only read “Spreading a Romantic View of Islam” at Gates of Vienna.
The historian Richard Landes has argued that Said had deliberately misconstrued Islamic culture by ignoring its unique honor-and-shame aspects, demonizing studies of that culture that showed its “otherness” and cowing the entire Oriental Studies field into a position of academic fraud and politically correct disconnect from Reality. I would rephrase that as weaving a massive net of deception — indeed taqiyyah — that has undone not merely the field of Oriental Studies but the entire standing of the West in the Muslim Orient, with incalculable consequences with respect to the aiding and abetting of the most fanatical strains of Islamic activism everywhere, and sharia-importing at home. All this due to a Saidesque projection of Western rationality and humanistic values onto a tribal, emotions-driven, savagely sanguinary, intensely ethnocentric and religiously fanatical Muslim culture that can buy and deploy the West’s technology, but not its 2500 years of cultural, moral and intellectual development.
The affairs of the West are now managed by people who had their brains exchanged in school and now believe that given the voting ballot and a daily bowl of Western foreign aid rice, Mahmoud from Aswan will soon sit with Larry from Sheboygan to discuss over a non-alcoholic beer how jointly to contribute to world Peace, Justice and Equity. Incidentally, Sheboygan, Wisconsin, is a small city (pop. 49,000) founded in 1846 by German immigrants. It is now home to an estimated 6000 Hmong, 100+ imported Muslim families that have now graced the community with a mosque, and an indeterminable further number of decidedly non-Germanic refugees whose origin may only be guessed from info releases of Wisconsin welfare and church refugee aid programs. According to those, Sheboygan will be further enriched in 2013 with hundreds more arrivals from East Africa, Iraq, Afghanistan, Burma and Nepal. As they say in the American vernacular, Sheboygan rocks; its Strength-in-Diversity will grow by leaps and bounds onto a glorious future.
Wikipedia has an 11,164 word hagiographic article on Edward Said; in comparison, Aristotle gets 10,795 words of much more lukewarm prose. Let that fact sink.
As there are so many Said/ Zinn parallels in output and impact, let us get started with Howard Zinn as we did with his dear friend, Edward Said: in a eulogy — by another dear friend, Noam Chomsky. It was published, significantly, in Al Jazeera.
“Zinn was an award-winning social activist, writer and historian,” reads the editorial intro. “His best-selling A People’s History of the United States spawned a new field of historical study: People’s Histories”. The link to Zinn’s most famous book leads to a website named “History Is a Weapon.” Much to think about, right there.
The Chomsky text that follows defines the message of A People’s History as “the crucial role of the people who remain unknown in carrying forward the endless struggle for peace and justice, and about the victims of the systems of power that create their own versions of history and seek to impose it.” Of course, had Zinn and his ilk been really interested in giving a voice to the oppressed, they would have given it to the non-brainwashed white autochthon, the white ethnocentric, the generic white male, the traditional Christian, the American constitutionalist, the European traditionalist, the patriot, the heteronormative, the successful small entrepreneur and the middle class as a whole — the “bourgeoisie” that has been the backbone of the West and is now squeezed out of existence by a pincer envelopment of the rich globalists and the poor tribalists: a Davos-Detroit-Damascus triple tap.
Howard Zinn was indeed the most influential American historian of the last 100 years, though he was a lifelong Communist propagandist and perhaps the most successful saboteur America has ever experienced. By the time he died, A People’s History had sold over 2 million copies. Though published in 1980, it still sells over 100,000 copies a year. The book is required reading in thousands of American high schools and colleges, and not only in history studies but in fields ranging from economics to literature.
A People’s History strings together the black spots from American history, omitting the rest. It’s Columbus from the point of view of Caribbean Indians, then the American Indian tribes’ ‘Trail of Tears,’ the slave trade, the indentured poor exported from the British Isles, the paternalistic “tyranny” of the American Revolution, oppression of women and of “people of color,” American conquest of Mexican territory in 1848, the class struggles of the 19th century, the slaves’ emancipation that was no emancipation, the robber barons etc,.—and that’s before we get to the 20th century [16]. The effect is as though a psychopath has taken a walk in a mountain meadow and brought back home not the wildflowers, wild strawberries and shapely leaves but all the cow pies, poison mushrooms and broken twigs he could find.
A celebrated example of postmodernism’s Critical Pedagogy, A People’s History is a Marxist Trojan virus whose RNA consisting of “class, race, and gender discourses” dribbles in school and via mass media at home into the brain cells of the young, stupid and impressionable. When they have grown up and now teach, judge, “inform” or “entertain” others, the virus does what it’s programmed to do: multiply itself and jam the host society’s immune system.
Tellingly, Zinn penned a “Progressive Manifesto,” clearly echoing the lineage of the Communist one in a May 2009 column that he wrote for The Progressive:
“Yes, we’re dreamers. We want it all. We want a peaceful world. We want an egalitarian world. We don’t want war. We don’t want capitalism. We want a decent society.”
One could find no better substantiation of Leszek Kolakowski’s “Marxism as a Totalitarian Utopia.” Why such mendacity is demonic we will see later through the prism of the originator of this term, Eric Voegelin. But to assess the scope of the damage that Zinn’s and Said’s postmodernist rewriting of history and cultural anthropology has wrought, we have to turn again to that part of the world where, under a Marxist jackboot, truth could grow in hard crevices that it has not found under the Marxist velvet slipper in the soft West.
Upon receiving the Kluge Prize in 2003, Professor Kolakowski gave a speech entitled What the Past Is For. He said:
“We must defend and support traditional research methods, elaborated over centuries, to establish the factual course of history and separate it from fantasies, however nourishing those fantasies might be. [snip] And we must preserve our traditional belief that the history of mankind, the history of things that really happened, woven of innumerable unique accidents, is the history of each of us, human subjects; whereas the belief in historical laws is a figment of the imagination. Historical knowledge is crucial to each of us: to schoolchildren and students, to young and old. We must absorb history as our own, with all its horrors and monstrosities, as well as its beauty and splendor, its cruelties and persecutions as well as all the magnificent works of the human mind and hand; we must do this if we are to know our proper place in the universe, to know who we are and how we should act. [snip] It is important to keep on repeating [these points] again and again, because [snip] if we forget them, and they fall into oblivion, we will be condemning our culture, that is to say ourselves, to ultimate and irrevocable ruin.”
To which must be added a phrase from the Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz’s 1980 Nobel Prize acceptance speech: “Those who are alive receive a mandate from those who are silent forever.”
We have been spectacularly derelict with respect to fulfilling this mandate. Remembering those who are silent forever, truthfully, is perhaps the most vital emergency rescue a tottering civilization needs. But “remembering truthfully” is as Kolakowski defined it: it does not consist of advancing a bleached out version to counter the selective Communist blackening. To find a path out of the bog of Demonic Mendacity, we have to remember the path that brought us into it, with no convenient memory blackouts.
Those who blame the Reformation or the Enlightenment for the waning of Christianity, must open to perceive the rot in the Catholic Church that caused the Reformation, and the obscurantist rigidities in Christianity that called inexorably for a beam of light [17]. Returning to the cause of failure, obscurantist rigidity, cannot produce a different effect the second time.
Those who invent racist theories to explain the involvement of Jews in socialist movements, or who deny the Holocaust, are offending history too. In the first case, socialist parties since the 1870s were an innovation in Europe partly on account of their welcoming of Jews. But all Nationalist parties were strongly Antisemitic [18]. And the Holocaust is among the best documented event in history; those who deny it are not helping their cause but engaging in what Rudyard Kipling called “the Fool’s bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire.” If there are new roads to chart for the Western peoples, it’s better to avoid those that can only result in more bandage.
Those who want to defeat the current swelling of socialism must first reckon with the precedent outrage of global financial capitalism. Those who rage at Obama must first rage at Bush. Those who decry Muslim depredations in the West must praise Muslim immunity to the West’s diseases. Those who rail at feminists must remember that when the world was last run entirely by males, the males-in-charge cooked up World War I and World War II.
Conservatives who want to conserve must first know what to conserve, and why. Trying to reform the present by restoring a bleached past that never was seeds the inevitable failure of the future. The false and the wrong have to be accounted for; only then an endurable alternative to the Left’s malfeasant cures of past diseases may take hold.
History is where the DNA code of the West is to be found, and from which a therapeutic salve may be distilled. But history as relayed by its mendacious Left or Right manipulators is useless, for it obscures the causality of things. America’s history as relayed by Zinn can no more explain America than MacDonald’s history can explain the Jews or Said’s the Arabs. But honest history reveals the Yin-become-Yang-become-Yin eternal wheel of polar delusion and mendacity. Only when that arc is perceived in our time will it be possible to get out of the PoMo drowning bog onto solid ground.
Or else, it’s back to Sisyphus’s fate, with one variation: each time the boulder of history rolls downhill, it rolls over us.
Still frame from the 1974 animated short Sisyphus, by Marcell Jankovics
Notes:
| 1. | Stephen R. C. Hicks, Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault, Ockham’s Razor, August 2011. My references and quotes come from an earlier 2004 edition by Scholarly Publishing, available online. This quote, p. 90 | |
| 2. | Ibid., 178 | |
| 3. | Nikos Salingaros, “The Derrida Virus,” Telos, No.126, Winter 2003, pp. 66-82; reprinted in Anti-Architecture and Deconstruction, Umbau-Verlag, Solingen, Germany, 2008. | |
| 4. | Jacques Derrida, Positions, Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 1981, pp. 95—6. | |
| 5. | Foucaultiana being one of the best naturally composted fields of Western academia, the interested reader may find a whole book devoted to just one narrow angle of this issue: Janet Afary and Kevin B. Anderson, Foucault and the Iranian Revolution: Gender and the Seductions of Islamism, University of Chicago Press, 2005. | |
| 6. | Journal of Research in Nursing, vol. 13 no. 4 July 2008 pp. 272-280, abstract. | |
| 7. | In addition to Marcuse, two more major postmodernists of the five discussed in this chapter were Jewish: Jacques Derrida and Howard Zinn. It’s regrettable that this ethnic angle has received attention only from Nazis and ideological Antisemites, but not from traditionalist conservatives trying to rebuild the West. It ensures that the subject won’t be discussed truthfully, and without identifying the truth a true antidote cannot be devised either. | |
| 8. | The Jewish ethnicity of Weil is practically undiscoverable in any encyclopedic source in English. It’s easy to get a fuller background from Argentine sources, e.g. here. | |
| 9. | Full disclosure: I have criticized Dr. MacDonald’s work before. His response to my critique was that I was attempting “to draw boundaries of acceptable political discourse in a way that is acceptable to Jewish interests.” Mark Steyn once addressed such infantilisms in a column for National Review entitled “Espying the Jew”. | |
| 10. | The same principle of logic applies to Muslims as applies to other minority groups: “Most X are Y” does not convert into “Most Y are X.” However, when the X is such a big subset of Y — i.e. Western Muslims’ terrorism, violence, rape, “grooming,” massive welfare mooching, racial hatred, religious fanaticism, subversive agendas etc. — and when the whole group Y has been imported to the West only in the past 50 years, and without the people’s consent at that, it’s legitimate to weigh the aggregate value of the entire set Y, i.e. the Muslim community, including those who are peaceful and self-supporting, in light of the terrible and growing damage wrought by the X subset. | |
| 11. | To realize how many dragon teeth Marcuse has sown, see this essay by UCLA Professor of Philosophy Douglas Kellner, “Marcuse, Liberation, and Radical Ecology”. What’s important now is not what Marcuse wrote in 1979 but how destructive solipsists like Kellner get to occupy in 2013 endowed chairs of philosophy at major American universities. | |
| 12. | All these statements are either direct quotes or synthesis of quotes from two books about Said, Daniel Varisco’s Reading Orientalism: Said and the Unsaid and Ibn Warraq’s Defending the West: A Critique of Edward Said’s Orientalism — both reviewed in Robert Irwin’s “Edward Said’s Shadowy Legacy”. | |
| 13. | This is in some ways a poetic exaggeration and, in others, an understatement. It’s difficult to allege Occidentalism bias to Muslims’ study of Western civilization, because Muslim societies have no Occidentalism studies. Indeed, they have no fields of study at all, except those in which Western knowledge is recycled in areas Muslim states deem useful. On the other hand, the infidel dog Islam-domination concepts and the anti-crusader, anti-colonialist, anti-Zionist and Arab-supremacist concepts have been strong and ubiquitous, and supported by nothing more than hot emotion-driven, shame-honor impulses with not even a notion that they have to correlate somehow to an objective reality. | |
| 14. | Ibn Warraq, Defending the West: A Critique of Edward Said’s Orientalism, Prometheus Books, 2007, p.18. This quote served the Norwegian “Orientalist” Fjordman well in his “The Failure of Western Universities”. | |
| 15. | Symphytic, in pathology, indicates an abnormal adhesion of two or more parts of a structure. In the case of Norway and the rest of Eurabia, a forced imposition of one of the parts, and a forced and spectacularly failing adhesion. | |
| 16. | A good resource for more Zinnology is in Discover-the-Networks. | |
| 17. | Stephen Hicks calls Postmodernism the Counter-Enlightenment. The Enlightenment was all about reason, individualism and liberalism (i.e. what I call freedomianism). Postmodernism is all about raging negative emotions, collectivism and restraints of freedom, e.g. Marcuse’s “liberating tolerance.” | |
| 18. | For example, in France, the leftist Human Rights League, founded in 1898 to defend Capt. Alfred Dreyfus against the Antisemitic plot that had destroyed him, was open to and friendly to Jews. The French Mouvement Fasciste, on the other hand, was little different from the Nazis’ Brown Shirts. |
Takuan Seiyo is a European-born American writer living in exile in Japan. For his previous essays, see the Takuan Seiyo Archives.
From Gates of Vienna: http://gatesofvienna.net/2013/02/the-bee-and-the-lamb-part-10/#more-27052
Ayn Rand – A Champion of The American Experiment
Happy 98th Birthday, O Great One
The blog is named for her opus and I am a big fan. Ayn Rand is the most brilliant philosopher. Period. Her contribution to philosophy and the nature of knowledge is as significant as that of Einstein to science, Edison to technology, or any of the titans of progress.
It took centuries of intellectual, philosophical development to achieve political freedom. It was a long struggle, stretching from Aristotle to John Locke to the Founding Fathers. The system they established was not based on unlimited majority rule, but on its opposite: on individual rights, which were not to be alienated by majority vote or minority plotting. The individual was not left at the mercy of his neighbors or his leaders: the Constitutional system of checks and balances was scientifically devised to protect him from both. This was the great American achievement—and if concern for the actual welfare of other nations were our present leaders’ motive, this is what we should have been teaching the world. Ayn Rand
3 crucial lessons Ayn Rand can teach us today Yaron Brooks, Don Watkins, FOX News, Published February 02, 2013
Today is the birthday of Ayn Rand, author of the 1957 classic “Atlas Shrugged,” and one of history’s most celebrated champions of capitalism. Here are three of the crucial lessons Rand offers those of us who want to fight for a freer, more prosperous America.
1. Celebrate Business
Today business is the scapegoat for virtually every evil. Whatever the problem or crisis, “greedy” businessmen take the blame, and the solution is always held to be more controls, more regulations, more taxes. When the financial crisis hit in 2008, for instance, Republican leaders raced to blame “greedy” bankers, not government policy. President Obama has intensified this outlook.
According to Rand, this is one of history’s worst injustices. Businessmen are the ones who create the medicines, food preservatives, sanitation systems, irrigation systems, and millions of other innovations and labor-saving devices that have nearly tripled our lifespans and provided us with a standard of living unimaginable by our forefathers. As she explained in 1961, the businessman is the great liberator who, in the short span of a century and a half, has released men from bondage to their physical needs, has released them from the terrible drudgery of an eighteen-hour workday of manual labor for their barest subsistence, has released them from famines, from pestilences, from the stagnant hopelessness and terror in which most of mankind had lived in all the pre-capitalist centuries.
Capitalism is good, said Rand, because it protects each man’s ability to make the most of his own life—and government intervention, which strips such men of their wealth and their freedom, is morally wrong.
If we want to limit government, Rand warned, this is something we need to celebrate. To slam business is to attack a core part of what makes America great.
2. Don’t Apologize for the Profit Motive
Underneath the attack on business is an attack on the motive that drives businessmen: the desire for profits. The profit motive, we’re constantly told, leads businessmen to lie, cheat, and steal their way to a buck—or at minimum taints them morally.
Just recall the criticisms of Mitt Romney. Even his Republican challengers criticized him, not for passing RomneyCare, but for having been a profit-seeking businessman. But if the profit motive is dangerous and immoral, how can we tolerate the profit system?
Rand sets the record straight. A profit, she notes, is the insignia of production: you make a profit when you produce something of value, something that others want to buy because it makes human life better, longer, easier, more enjoyable.
Capitalism is fueled, not by the Al Capones or the Bernie Madoffs of this world who seek to get money by hook or by crook. It is fueled by individuals who make money by creating wealth. This is the actual nature of the profit motive: it is the desire to earn rewards through productive achievement.
That, says Rand, is the kind of attitude toward one’s work, toward one’s wealth, and toward other people that pervades a free market. Free markets drive out of business the short-sighted, unproductive moochers who don’t create value—and a capitalist government locks up predators such as Madoff when they try to defraud others.
Capitalism is good, said Rand, because it protects each man’s ability to make the most of his own life—and government intervention, which strips such men of their wealth and their freedom, is morally wrong.
3. Run from Anyone Trumpeting “The Public Good”
Today government grows at the expense of individuals: at the expense of their rights, their freedom, their wealth. The supporters of Big Government have always justified this by appealing to “the public good.” How have defenders of capitalism responded? Not by challenging the notion of “the public good.” Instead, we have accepted that notion and tried to persuade people that only capitalism can achieve it.
But the justification for capitalism, Rand stresses, is not that it serves “the public good” or “the public interest” or “the common welfare.” All of those slogans are dangerously vague: they can mean anything, and so they can be used to “justify” everything. The justification for capitalism is that it is the only system based on the individual’s inalienable right to pursue his own life, liberty, and happiness.
Society, Rand observes, is not an entity but a collection of sovereign individuals, and the essential political value they have in common is freedom.
Freedom, Rand stresses, means that individuals can exercise their rights free from coercion and compulsion. They can work to make a successful life for themselves, acting on their own independent judgment, keeping the fruits of their labor, and dealing with others through voluntary exchange to mutual advantage. The government’s role is to protect their freedom by barring the initiation of physical force. The economic system that emerges when government is limited and individual rights are secured is capitalism.
If you want to stop the growth of the state, you have to get rid of any ounce of the idea that individuals exist to serve some social purpose or goal. Capitalism is the system rooted in the conviction that each individual is an end in himself and has a right to exist for his own sake.
Ayn Rand’s Winning Formula: Capture the Moral High Ground
If you wanted to boil down what makes Rand so successful and what she can teach us today, it would be that she teaches the free market side to take the moral high ground.
We “must fight for capitalism,” Rand says, “not as a ‘practical’ issue, not as an economic issue, but, with the most righteous pride, as a moral issue. That is what capitalism deserves, and nothing less will save it.”
But how can a system driven by self-interest and the pursuit of personal profit be moral? That is the question Rand answers in her works, and it is the question we address in our book, the national bestseller “Free Market Revolution: How Ayn Rand’s Ideas Can End Big Government
.”
We can limit today’s unlimited government. But to do so we will need to mount an unapologetic moral defense of freedom. The first step is to arm ourselves with Ayn Rand’s unsurpassed stockpile of intellectual ammunition, and then to speak out for freedom.
From Atlas Shrugs: http://atlasshrugs2000.typepad.com/
A Brief Lesson in Philosophy and Theology
Collectivization Of The Churches
A guest post by The Reverend David R. Graham, A.M.D.G.
“What kills a skunk is the publicity it gives itself.”
—Abraham Lincoln
The Church and the churches are not the same. The churches more or less express the Church, which is the Spiritual Community, Bride of Christ, Pure and Elegant, but they are not the Church, as their more or less impurity demonstrates.
During the late 19th Century, the Germanic movement called Liberal Protestantism sought to remake Christianity as palatable to Erasmus’, Rousseau’s and Voltaire’s heirs in scientific humanism, aka, Marxism, which is historiography and planning on the horizontal (male) axis alone, ignoring or bending horizontal the vertical (female) axis.
To accomplish which, Liberal Protestants had to collectivize the thinking of theologians, clergy and laymen: turn Christianity into an expression of Marxism. Charging and converting scientists and humanists into Christians was not their goal. Liberal Protestants wanted to be wanted. Scientific humanism then was ascendant, where still it is, at least as a beneficiary of public and private finance and esteem.
Today no difference exists between thinking in the churches and thinking in, say, the university, media and government. All are collectivist, none is independent. All follow talking points handed down from a leftist political party, none swerves into private investigation of assertions. All believe what they see and hear in media, none suspects media as mouthpiece of university and government.
That is collectivization. Once it was called group think. Now it is called news you can use. Facts. Truth. Choices. For your benefit, no less. Fair and balanced.
There was a brief rebellion against Liberal Protestantism towards the middle of the 20th Century. It was called Neo-Orthodoxy. Barth, Brunner and lesser lights led it. They sought to restore the vertical (female) axis to usage and succeeded, partially and briefly.
When Neo-Orthodoxy reached America from its Germanic roots, it was taken up by Reinhold Niebuhr at The Union Theological Seminary in New York City, an affiliate of Columbia University. Niebuhr was a communist clergyman and labor union agitator with a huge, dominating personality and a wonderful, nimble gift of gab. Niebuhr turned the vertical (female) axis reintroduced by Barth and Brunner on its side so that it paralleled and then merged with the horizontal (male) axis.
(Remarkably, he criticized Liberal Protestants for doing exactly that. Niebuhr was not a self-critical or self-correcting man.)
Niebuhr considered this an accomplishment. His colleague at Union, Paul Tillich, did not. Tillich pointed out that Niebuhr never learned his theology and Niebuhr acknowledge that perhaps, indeed, he had not.
Barth’s and Brunner’s Neo-Orthodoxy was, in any case, top-heavy with Mohammedan-like, inscrutable and intractable “transcendent” dicta and diktats. And so, unsustainable.
With prominent politicians, including Hubert Humphrey, Niebuhr helped found Americans for Democratic Action. It was – still is – a vehicle for running the vertical axis of life as if it was horizontal and bringing American education, media and government into aggressive, messianic, collective conformity with scientific humanism, aka Marxism. Holding those three entities together was seen as the way to control the population and the course of events totally. Collectivism is the method of totalism (aka absolutism, totalitarianism).
Niebuhr anticipated in North America so-called “Liberation Theology” in South America. Both were collectivist, one from Liberal Protestantism (Niebuhr was German Reformed [Calvinist]) and one from Roman Catholicism. Both were generated in academe, which, post-Marx, is almost uniformly leftist.
Liberal Protestant collectivism (aka scientific humanism/Marxism) first made large-scale political force in the United States through Woodrow Wilson, a moral and intellectual superior, in his own mind, of the “common man” – and therefore the empowered director of affairs – if ever one breathed.
Marx was a theologian and a student of Hegel, as was Kierkegaard. The two successfully criticized Hegel’s totalistic system, despite its realistic elegance, but from different directions and with different results. Kierkegaard identified the vertical axis of the unexpected (paradox), which nullifies total systems. Marx identified the vertical axis of free (from historical determinism) intentional purpose (telos), which, also, nullifies total systems.
However, whereas Kierkegaard maintained paradox as an expression of the vertical (female) axis, Marx bent over telos to conform with the horizontal (male) axis. This made Marxism evil and predicts the genocide and misogyny of Marxists in education, media and government.
What Marx did earlier, Niebuhr did later. What Niebuhr did later, James Cone, at Union since 1969, continues through disciples such as Jeremiah Wright and “Barack Obama”: genocide and misogyny.
Collectivism is not a Christian idea or doing. It belongs to Marxism, not Christianity. Yet, the churches have been in its thrall since the middle years of the 20th Century. Since the later years of the 20th Century, the churches are indistinguishable from academe, media and government. The three sectors think alike, promoting government (collectivism/communism) as the universal answer to and refuge from VUCA.
The churches now are willing auxiliaries of government social engineering agencies, media/government propaganda technicians and academic troublemakers. They are secular organizations standing profanum, outside the door to the Sanctuary of the Holy.
No vertical axis. No femininity. No self-correction. No Church, only churches.
The parable of the good Samaritan is not a demand for forced charity. It does not promote collectivism by government edict, income redistribution at the muzzle of a gun. The nature of government is, essentially and rightly, penal. That is not the subject of the parable of the good Samaritan. Nor is its subject smug moralizing about charity.
The parable of the good Samaritan describes personal, voluntary and anonymous charity as desirable. Repeat: PERSONAL, VOLUNTARY, ANONYMOUS. The parable is descriptive, not prescriptive. Nor does it demand charity.
In fact, the parable of the good Samaritan is not about charity. The parable answers the question of who is the brother, that is, who is one’s equal in God’s eyes. It is not about charity. It is about living in gated “communities” and having armed personal security details. The parable condemns those activities. It’s about rich acting smug, superior to and separate from ordinaries.
The parable of the ten talents, on the other hand, does promote, directly and unequivocally, the Pauline, Christian principle, “No work, no eat.”
The voice of Hebrew and Christian Prophetism does not exist in the churches since at least the 1930s. It has been driven out by collectivists. Or, one may say, perhaps more accurately, it has seen historical developments transcend the churches in the direction of universal prayer and concrete Spirit. Religionless, omni-local, agile, unpredictable (as always), definite, practical and moral.
Two Avatars of the Lord have stridden the earth during the last two hundred years – one the x axis, one the x and y axes – and a third is coming – the y axis – I guess (!) in or before the next decade of the 21st Century:
Bear All And Do Nothing;
Hear All And Say Nothing;
Give All And Take Nothing;
Serve All And Be Nothing.
A.M.D.G.
From Camp of The Saints: http://thecampofthesaints.org/
Bill Whittle Expains the Problems at the Bastion of Liberalism: Oberlin College
Found at Blazing Cat Fur
Two Pieces of Steel Have a Crazy Affect on Atheists…Wow…Who Knew…
Militant Atheists Declare War on Ground Zero Cross
In a country run by moonbats, to impose your will on others you have to present yourself as a victim, even if you are the one doing the victimizing. For example:
A lawsuit that challenges the placement of the cross at the site of the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center alleges atheist plaintiffs have suffered serious physical and mental illness because the religious symbol has made them feel excluded. …
American Atheists … contends the placement of the 17-foot-tall symbol at the National September 11 Memorial and Museum is making some atheists unbearably sick.
“The plaintiffs, and each of them, are suffering, and will continue to suffer damages, both physical and emotional, from the existence of the challenged cross,” the lawsuit American Atheists v. Port Authority of New York and New Jersey states. “Named plaintiffs have suffered … dyspepsia, symptoms of depression, headaches, anxiety, and mental pain and anguish from the knowledge that they are made to feel officially excluded from the ranks of citizens who were directly injured by the 9/11 attack.”
If you don’t believe that the site of the Holy Cross can have this effect on moonbats, just watch what happens when Peter Cushing presents one to Christopher Lee in old Hammer movies.
Militant moonbats don’t need to see the cross in person to be affected:
The suit explains the named plaintiffs “have seen the cross, either in person or on television, are being subjected to, and injured in consequence.”
They want the cross removed completely, but there is a fallback demand in case they don’t get their way: erecting something next to the cross to cancel it out. Reports Jay Sekulow of the American Center for Law and Justice:
“They even make a bizarre suggestion about erecting a ‘17-foot-high A for Atheists’ to promote their non-beliefs at the site.”
Or is that A for A-holes?
The group has been filing harassment suits against everyone in sight over the cross, including Friar Brian Jordan, who is being sued for having blessed it.
David Silverman explains his group’s behavior:
“As president of the American Atheists organization, I promise to make sure that everyone, even those who are indifferent to our cause … will hate us.”
If that’s his goal, Silverman knows what he’s doing.
On a tip from Jimbo.
By Dave Blount at Moonbattery: http://moonbattery.com/
This Chaos in America is What Happens When You Remove God – There is No Longer any Restraint
“To remove God is to eliminate the final restraint on human brutality” – Alister McGrath
This quotation from McGrath is a variant of the Dostoevsky quote translated as “Without God all things are permitted”. The evidence that McGrath and Dostoevsky are correct is quite simple: The Twentieth Century. — Bruce Charlton’s Miscellany
from American Digest: http://americandigest.org/
Reason and Christianity
Edward Feser from THE LAST SUPERSTITION:
“The mainstream Western religious tradition itself very firmly rests on and embraces reason and science.
“That tradition also insists that religious conviction and moral virtue must be adopted of one’s own free will, not imposed by force; and while it holds that some of the things people choose to do are morally unacceptable, secularists who also profess to believe that there is a difference between right and wrong, hold the same thing. The Protestant John Locke and the Catholic Second Vatican Council (to take just two examples) endorsed religious toleration and democracy, and on theological grounds at that, while secularists are none too happy with democracy when, say, it results in school boards that mandate the teaching of ‘Intelligent Design’ theory alongside evolution.
“So what, pray tell, is distinctively ‘secularist’ about reason, science, free choice, toleration, democracy, and the like? Nothing at all, as it happens. The fact is that secularists are ‘for’ reason and science only to the extent that they don’t lead to religious conclusions; they celebrate free choice only insofar as one chooses against traditional or religiously oriented morality; and they are for democracy and tolerance only to the extent that these might lead to a less religiously oriented social and political order. Again, the animus against religion is not merely a feature of the secularist mindset; it is the only feature.”
David Bentley Hart from ATHEIST DELUSIONS:
“I suspect that our contemporary ‘age of reason’ is in many ways an age of almost perfect unreason, one always precariously poised upon the edge of – and occasionally slipping over into – the purest barbarism.
“I suspect that, to a far greater degree than we typically might imagine, we have forsaken reason for magic: whether the magic of occult fantasy or the magic of an amoral idolatry of our own power over material reality. Reason, in the classical and Christian sense, is a whole way of life, not the simple and narrow mastery of certain techniques of material manipulation, and certainly not the childish certitude that such mastery proves that only material realities exist.
“A rational life is one that integrates knowledge into a larger choreography of virtue, imagination, patience, prudence, humility, and restraint. Reason is not only knowledge, but knowledge perfected in wisdom. In Christian tradition, reason was praised as a high and precious thing, primarily because it belonged intrinsically to the dignity of beings created in the divine image; and, this being so, it was assumed that reason is also always morality, and that charity is required for any mind to be fully rational.
“Even if one does not believe any of this, however, a rational life involves at least the ability to grasp what it is one does not know, and to recognize that what one does know may not be the only kind of genuine knowledge there is.”
For those of you unfamiliar with the name, Edward Feder is that most rare of rarae aves an atheist philosopher who talked himself into the Catholic faith merely by the power of philosophical argumentation.
He was dissatisfied with the naturalist account of certain philosophical problems (cf. if it were true that the cosmos is nothing but matter in motion, how could we ever be certain that this were so?) and slowly came to the conclusion that naturalism has no sound philosophical foundation.
Upon a second and more thorough examination of Aristotle and Aquinas during his maturity, he came to the conclusion that modern philosophy dismisses much of the classical tradition without understanding it (I can attest that this is true — someone on my blog recently dismissed Anselm’s ontological argument on the grounds that Hume had disproved it). Then he began to realize the arguments were stronger and sounder, once understood in context, than they are first appeared, and finally was shocked to find that the arguments were sound.
On the one hand, I am mildly surprised, because my own conversion was not through philosophical argumentation but by divine intervention; but on the other hand, I am not surprised at all, because the Catholic Church holds and teaches as a matter of doctrine that man can reason his way to believing those truths about God which do not require revelation to reveal, such as His benevolence, immaterial nature, unity and simplicity, providence, omniscience, omnipotence, and necessity.
I came across Mr Feser’s account of his road away from atheism here:
http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2012/07/road-from-atheism.html
From John C. Wright: http://www.scifiwright.com/2012/07/quote-of-the-day-4/#more-6059
Time To Take Back The Good and War Against Evil
Through the demand of nonjudgmentalism
the authorities of Western Civilizationhave taken away your sources of morale:
God, true religion, objective morality, knowledge of philosophically first things, beauty, higher culture, family, nation, honor, and so on. Because the existence of any of these goods requires one to make a judgment that some things are better than others, these goods are not allowed. Our leaders have therefore taken all these goods from you, and replaced them with the false god of nondiscrimination. — Why You are Demoralized and What You Must do About it ｫ The Orthosphere
From American Digest: http://americandigest.org/
The Man Who Dared to Stand With Rush Limbaugh
Mark Stevens: A Profile in Courage
By Jeffrey Lord on 4.5.12
Threatened for sticking with Rush, defiant advertiser declares “Battle for America.”
Excerpts from article:
“Mark Stevens is a smart guy — and he quickly realized he was being targeted by somebody using a highly skilled, highly organized campaign that was deliberately designed to make the target feel besieged. When in fact marketing expert Stevens understood he was on the receiving end of a campaign involving a tiny handful of people extremely skilled in making others think dozens were tens of thousands.”
“He had received tens of thousands of e-mails. The bullies — the terrorists –had ramped up. Now they were threatening to send busloads of people to his house, threatening that his personal safety was in danger. “This is crazy,” he said to Kelly. Does this cause you concern, she asked? Replied Mark: “Absolutely no concern. Let them come. Let them come!”
“Something is going on here that has to be, you know, addressed. Because the country is at risk,” he added.”
Mark told me that he was “not a Pollyanna or naïve.” But what really bothered him was that in the flood of tens of thousands of e-mails he had received, overwhelming in support of him, what stood out “was the concern people had for my well-being.” He drafted a response to answer his fellow citizens who had written him with such passion. He sent it to me, and it deserves an audience, so it is reprinted here in full:
Subject line: The Battle for America
Ever since I appeared on the Stuart Varney show in response to the “terrorism” — Rush Limbaugh advertising boycott — directed at me and my company, my team and my clients, it has set off a chain reaction of emails being sent to me from citizens across the country:
* Seals have volunteered to protect our offices.
* Retired police officers are asking if they can help in anyway.
* Citizens want to play a role, join the stand and contribute to the cause. They are thanking me for having the courage to stand up for free speech and for the American Dream.
Thousands upon thousands are writing, calling –frightened that their nation is slipping away.
Sad, angry, suffocated, they no longer feel as if they live in a democracy.
They are tired of the talking heads. Of the politically correct. Of the minority rule. Of the loss of the meaning of the Constitution. Of the weakening of our armed forces. Of the war on business. Of the ass-kissing of America haters.
They are the real Americans. They work. They send their children to war. They pay taxes. They want nothing for free. They are tired of being ignored.
My message helped them see that “they” have the real power. Peaceful but over whelming power. They will use it. We will do so together. We will prevail.
The battle for American values is beginning and we will win.
Mark Stevens
CEO
MSCO | The Art and Science of Growing Businesseswww.MSCO.com
www.YourMarketingSucks.co
www.twitter.com/mark_msco
www.linkedin.com/in/markstevensmscoRead the entire article at The American Spectator: http://spectator.org/archives/2012/04/05/mark-stevens-a-profile-in-cour/3
A Quote Worth Quoting
“Governments are not always overthrown by direct and open assaults. They are not always battered down by the arms of conquerors, or the successful daring of usurpers. There is often concealed the dry rot, which eats into the vitals, when all is fair and stately on the outside. And to republics this has been the more common fatal disease. The continual drippings of corruption may wear away the solid rock, when the tempest has failed to overturn it…”
Joseph Story – Supreme Court Justice – 1829
Found in the intro of the book – Ameritopia – by Mark Levin
The Last Days of Western Civilization – Takuan Seiyo Speaks Truth to Those Who Will Hear It.
The essay below is the fourth chapter in a series by Takuan Seiyo. The author was unable to publish it in the same venue that hosted the first three chapters, so Gates of Vienna is privileged to offer him a slot for it, and possibly also for the final installment.
The text that follows is the fourth chapter of a long five-part essay that’s my answer to Oswald Spengler’s Der Untergang des Abendlandes. What I lack in comparison to the brilliant German, I tried to compensate for by offering not only an analysis of our decline, but also a suggestion of a peaceful ascent road out of what appears (except to progressing Progressives) as a bottomless pit. The genesis of this essay lies in my continuous puzzlement why the particular post-modern, post-Christian virus decimates only the Western West, but not the Eastern West of Iron Curtain scars, or the Far East. I was born behind the Iron Curtain but have lived in the West since I was ten, and in the East for the past six years. This is therefore insider’s praxis rather than outsider’s musings. The subject is so wide that its treatment must be equally eclectic. One who ventures here must be ready to travel with me to Washington and Mount Vernon, Estonia, Saxony, Judea, Rome, Greece, Babylon and China, with a commensurate range of subjects and periods. For that reason, it’s not fair either to the reader or to the writer to start with the text below, but rather one must go to the previous three, as well as have patience for the publication of the fifth one in the near future. The reader is going to wonder why the fourth chapter is at Gates of Vienna and the previous three are at New English Review. Different publications have different risk tolerances. NER was brave enough to publish the first three parts, but found the fourth one too hot. No one should condemn it who hasn’t published the kind of “Islamophobic” and other taboo-busting content as NER has. Especially after what happened to Giordano Bruno and Fjordman. — Takuan Seiyo |
The Bee and the Lamb
Part 4
By Takuan Seiyo
On the edge
The only way to restore vitality to Western Civilization is to recalibrate its yin-yang balance. Just as in Oriental medicine a patient suffering from acidosis (yin) is treated with alkali (yang) foods, so American and European societies must regress to nullify much of the Progressive “progress” that the Long March of the last 100 years has wrought. Not to erase it altogether, for the “progress” itself has been a correcting mechanism to the yang eruptions of two world wars and centuries of harsh religious fanaticism, but to rewind the reel 50 years back, just before excess yin started overflowing.
Jim Crow was wrong, and the WASP ruling elite committed various errors of direction and also of degeneration into a caste of Bertie Wooster sybarites, light on the brain content, or brooding Nick Carraways (of The Great Gatsby). But the antithesis, Black Run America[1], is much worse: a dystopian disaster, a banana republic without the bananas, a Detroit writ large, a Philadelphia turned Killadelphia.
The WASPs at least had a code of honor and a spirit of noblesse oblige inherited from Roman patricians. The people who rule us now are a multiracial collection of plebeian Looters, Loons and Fools, with the WASPs and Jews there either doing penance for past “unearned privilege” or further repairing the world by carrying water for the loudest looters in the black and brown communities.
Strict meritocracy and race-blind equal rights are just and great, and America did not have them even 60 years ago. But it did, at last, 45 years ago. Very briefly, for it continued hurtling toward the opposite pole. Now it is mired in the suicidal insanity of quotas for minorities and women, engineered equal outcomes, and the disparate impact doctrine proclaiming, essentially, that proper societal measures to promote lawful conduct, civic culture, work ethic, competent workforce etc. are “racism” requiring the federal government’s intervention, if racial minorities fall short of such standards. Showing that a yin-poisoned culture will use any available tool with which to self-eviscerate, in Scandinavia, where there are no indigenous People of Color, the ruling elite has been importing them to fill that vital need. Meanwhile, they mandate 40%-50% quotas for women in politics and corporate governance.
The bipolar amplitude currently in the far zone of yin may be observed in every area of postmodern, post-Reality Western society, with only superficial differences between countries.
The past ostracism of homosexuals and criminalization of homosexuality were wrong. But the current courting of “gays,” “gay” marriage, “gay” Marines, pedophile politicians, deviant promiscuity flaunted before a disgusted but cowed population — they are a cesspool of dissolution. Prudery and sexual repression were a terrible drag too, but seeing 13-year-old girls dressed like whores and Tweeting tales of their latest hookups from a perch at Jamba Juice is a civilizational tragedy.
Back-alley abortions were horrible, but the sanctioned and taxpayer-financed annual murder of 1.2 million fetuses in each of the United States and Europe[2] must inevitably unleash God’s wrath — even if God is just a homeostatic cosmic loop of information sub-particles, not at all like the Bible’s booming Jhvh or Michelangelo’s hirsute old man. If the sheeple just looked away from their brain-macerating LED screens, they could see that God’s wrath is already manifesting as the mathematically verifiable demographic atrophy of Euro-origin peoples.
The restrictive-oppressive educational systems in Europe’s and America’s schools a hundred years ago were stultifying. But the current educational regime of self-esteem, dumbed-down curriculum, non-competitiveness, “inclusiveness,” constant guilt inculcation for the sins of whitey, and the horrors of (White only) testosterone — they all form a path to the trash can of history. We have gone much too far, expanding sixfold what was before contracted twofold.
The same heedless yin expansion is evident in America’s geopolitics. Amazon.com’s editorial review of Robert Kaplan’s Monsoon: The Indian Ocean and the Future of American Power states: “The Indian Ocean area will be the true nexus of world power [snip]. It is here that the fight for democracy, energy independence, and religious freedom will be lost or won, and it is here that American foreign policy must concentrate.”
This leaves me puzzled. Is there a shortage of democracy or religious freedom in the United States? There is an egregious surfeit of both, and both ought to be trimmed for the American people’s own good. Voting rights should be constricted and tied to a positive net worth, proof of English literacy, clean criminal record, and maturity defined as the age of 21. Religious freedom too ought to be curtailed to exclude Islam and voodoo — the one, a blueprint for subjugation of the host population by fanatical practitioners of a hostile ideology; the other, a barbarian cult unfit for a modern country firmly planted in the Christian civilization.
But it’s likely that the reviewer of Kaplan’s book expressed the Neocon — Christian Lamb creed that it’s America’s divine mission to fight for democracy and religious freedom the world over. After all, that’s the standard opiate of America’s ruling Republicrat Party. One might ask with whose taxpayers’ gold ducats and soldiers’ lives such a global fight will be waged, America’s dollar and sovereign debt now forged into manacles of penury due to this kind of madness, and her flyover people tired of the bleeding.
These observations seem outrageous to people relentlessly indoctrinated in the age of gushing yin that has “progressed” to the point of drowning every area of life in the West. However, the age of blowback yang contraction will come, either eased gently by enlightened leaders or slammed painfully on the countries of progressive lemmings by the intractable force of cosmic homeostasis.
The current travails of the West already spell the end of yin madness. Democracy as a governing system is self-terminating, having devolved into kakistocracy: a scorpion catching a river ride on the back of Aesop’s gullible frog.
“Quantitatively eased” fiat paper money and the welfare state are self-terminating, having run out of our peoples’ trust and other people’s money. Financial capitalism is self terminating, having degenerated into the larceny of global leveraged three-card Monte. Ten thousand bright and eloquent Naomi Kleins are waiting in the wings, flogging their competing brand of malignant idiocy, ruinous but tight and coercive for a change, at a dazed populace.
America’s overreaching Empire is ending, the dollar too hollow to support it and the American-built Beijing Frankenstein eager and able to step into the breach. The global troops of jihad are surging, thanking Allah for the fool giant’s last gigantic works on behalf of “democracy” that paved the way for Muhammad pbuh.
Christianity, having taken a radical but wrong turn from its past errors, is wading in pools of irrelevance or deep weirdness, its mainstream just a holding pen for Eloi lambs. The Jews, having forgotten their cosmic destiny as canaries in the coalmine, are self-terminating by supporting and even leading “progressive” ideologies that will blow back at them first, devastatingly[3].
The sexual revolution and the GLBT foolishness are ending, for the West’s young are ending and their Afghan and Somali replacements have different plans in this matter.
Culture is ending, the polite, old white crowd that savors Bach at the Frauenkirche or Velasquez at the Prado having neither the courage nor the vigor to stop the barbarization of its former domains. The future is writ as the torture of the children of Grieg with the barbarians’ Dika Down Booboo! or their mega-decibel Adhan; the Booboo-Muslim-Morlock crowd multiplying and living off white Eloi’s taxes under Leviathan’s special care[4].
Education in the West has already ended. It had evolved into a progressive indoctrination Kumbaya Socialist Youth Camp for unemployable Occupiers of Wall Street: their noses full of cow jewelry, egos full of self-esteem, and brains stuffed with Rosa Luxemburg and Rosa Parks, Howard Zinn and Malcolm X, Mumia and Che, Obama and OutKast — but not the multiplication tables.
Nature is slowly being devoured, turning into concrete and particle board beehives built with zero-interest loans from Ponzi socialist rulers to no-risk banksters; its displaced animal kingdom now in zoos, or eating from suburban garbage bins, or being eaten in China’s better restaurants.
All this should give rise to leaders who would ask Lenin’s question, What is to be done? — though answer differently. But there are no such leaders. The leaders the West does have only know how to pour more yin onto flooding yin. More credit expansion to cure the ills of credit expansion. More loans to nations and banksters who can’t repay existing loans. More technological capacity transferred to China. More subsidized college for imbeciles who can’t calculate 24% of 87 or pinpoint Moscow on the map. More retreat before advancing Islam. More appeasement of the barbarians within. More “minorities” in privileged positions in the ruling apparatus of Leviathan. More police facing Mecca. More women in combat, and toy soldiers confiscated from little boys. More gayness in gay Paree. More persecution of the flyover serfs who notice all that.
The question therefore is not what is to be done, but what will be rebuilt on the ruins, some day. For future archeologists will sift through the rubble, and some will rise strong enough to rebuild with the found pieces.
To Read the rest of this great essay go to Gates of Vienna at: http://gatesofvienna.blogspot.com/2012/02/bee-and-lamb-part-4.html#more
“Racism is about many things but it isn’t about Race” says the Sultan
The placement of racial politics at the center of liberal advocacy coincided with a growing national prosperity that seemed to be on the way to making class warfare of the old kind irrelevant. Previous liberal civil rights activity had been a subset of class, but class now became a subset of race. And both were a means of liberal self-definition as the people concerned with the plight of the downtrodden.
A Pile of Shoes
Futurism and Shoepiles
Posted on 06 February 2012
Too often we Catholics have been criticized, nay, have been savaged, for being mere medievalists, disloyal to the modernism; the Christianity we confess has been dismissed as an anachronism promoting a moral code past its sell-by date.
I confess I am always amused when those who denounce eternal truths as old-fashioned seem not to realize this denunciation was fashionable in the days when Marx and Hegel, bastardizing Darwin, took pen to paper. The idea that truth is relative to its time period belongs to the optimistic Victorian Age. It is an idea long past its sell-by date.
The argument about anachronism is itself anachronistic: the last gasp of grayhaired and dying conformity in no sense fitted for life in the future. It is not an accusation one needs soberly to answer, since it is not a sober accusation.
But I was reminded of this recently. Crisis Magazine has an essay written by Jason Jones that you would do well to read. It is from last month, the dread date of January 22. (Hat tip to Frank Weathers at Why I am Catholic). Allow me to recite some telling paragraphs:
For most of you this weekend contains a date you’ll never forget, along the lines of September 11, or December 7 — anniversaries of profound wounds to our country as a whole, even if we didn’t lose a relative in those surprise attacks or the wars that ensued. For millions of Americans, however, January 22 portends a loss that is much more rawly personal. One woman in three who came of age after Roe v. Wade has exercised the “right” the judges discovered in 1973 to terminate a pregnancy; millions of men took part in those decisions; too often forgotten are men who (like me at 17) were bereaved of our unborn children against our wishes. All those Americans lost a family member in the events of January 22, and so this day will never slip by unnoticed, much as most of us wish it would. We’d rather not “go there,” not dredge up the guilt of many flavors—participant’s, bystander’s, survivor’s. It all feels much the same. If I can speak for the many, let me tell you we’d rather think about almost anything else, be it baseball, stock prices, or shoes.
So let’s talk about shoes.
One of the authors to whom I owe the most intellectually is the political philosopher Hadley Arkes, of Amherst College. Arkes is the world’s leading advocate of a deeply unfashionable theory called Natural Law. You never hear about that notion any more, but it played a major role in certain historic events: the American Declaration of Independence, the Abolitionist movement, the U.N.’s post-war assertion of human rights that transcend the laws of nations, and the U.S. Civil Rights movement. It’s almost stunning to think that an idea with such a pedigree could simply be dropped by the world’s intellectuals, like a toy that a child grew bored with, but that is what has happened. People will still assert human rights, or insist that our government act with justice, plucking fruit from the branches of a tree they pretend isn’t there. (I won’t speculate for the moment why they do this. Just take it from me that “Natural Law” is a term you shouldn’t use in academia, law, or politics. It will brand you as an extremist.) Anyway, in one of my favorite books by my favorite thinker, Natural Rights and the Right to Choose, Arkes starts by talking not about abstract right and wrong but a particular pile of shoes. That has a better philosophical precedent than you might think: One of Heidegger’s most famous essays concerns the making of shoes.
But Arkes isn’t interested in what Germans have thought about crafting shoes, as in the careful way they protected them, kept shoes safe from heedless destruction in time of war, gathered them carefully and avoided wherever they could the needless waste of a single shoe—almost as if each pair had a unique and irreplaceable destiny, a dignity no man could rightly ignore.
The Pile of Shoes at Dachau
You have probably guessed by now where the shoes that interest Arkes were found: piled neatly, outside the gas chamber at an extermination camp. Those shoes, and other personal items like gold teeth, were extracted from the items of human waste those plants efficiently processed into smoke. They remain with us as a testimony to modern economy and thrift. Really, I can think of no other single thing (not a skyscraper or a space ship) that sums up the essence of what it means to be modern as that pile of Jewish shoes.
…
The age we mark as modernity began with grand, exhilarating gestures: discourses on method that would set us free from the dead hand of tradition (Descartes); declarations of the rights of man (the French Revolutionary Assembly); manifestos rejecting the tyranny of mere economic laws over the lives and labor of men (Karl Marx). The grand progression of the movement Henri de Lubac dubbed “heroic humanism” was full of such golden moments, which moved through the dark night of history like torches leading us forward, ever forward, to a glittering future that would make life at long last worthy of man. At the end of all the struggles, after the next (surely final!) conflict, or the next, we were promised without any irony a brave new world, an earthly paradise. Descartes had no doubt that science would end disease and aging, so men could live forever. Robespierre offered public safety and a reign of absolute virtue. Marx fought to eliminate war, inequality, and even boring jobs: in the stateless, classless Communist endpoint of history, no one would even have to specialize in anything. We could move from one career to another from day to day, and have ample time in the evening to philosophize or write poetry. As Thomas Paine said, “We have it in our power to begin the world over again.”
And we did. That’s what we spent the 19th and 20th centuries doing, energetically. We broke up historic empires into nation-states, where men forgot their loyalty to tiny village or global Church, and learned to think as members of ethnic tribes or aggrieved social classes. After these collectives had done their work, and proved themselves too dangerous (in 1945, and 1989, respectively) we set about smashing them, too. We broke down the ramshackle, inefficient structure of the old extended family to its minimal, nuclear core—and then when that didn’t prove as economically useful, we split that into atoms. When we learned that families have no economic use or political import, we redefined them at last as consensual, temporary alliances of adults—to whom the State contracts the duty of caring for children overnight, in the hours when schools and daycare facilities aren’t open. We have very thoroughly accomplished the job modernity’s founders set us: liquidating every barrier to the assertion of the Self, short of the laws of physics. We have killed all the fathers. We are free to make of ourselves exactly what we will, no less and no more. And here we sit with the treasure we’ve won: this pile of shoes.
From John C. Wright’s Journal at: http://www.scifiwright.com/2012/02/futurism-and-shoepiles/
Via American Digest at: http://americandigest.org/
Are You Ready To Choose? The Time Is Coming.
Jefferson, and the rest of the Founders, knew that they had a choice laid out before them. They could either revolt against tyranny or surrender to it. We are facing exactly the same choice right now, except that the tyranny that we are now facing is far, far worse than anything Jefferson and the Founders were facing. King George never tried to tax the Colonists on their mere existence, as ObamaCare does. King George never tried to force the Colonists to embrace and celebrate sexual perversion. King George never tried to force the Colonists to pay for and even participate in abortion. King George never attempted to import and establish the satanic scourge of islam in the Colonies.
We are so far past and beyond the “long train of abuses and usurpations” that the Colonists and Founders experienced and which necessitated the Revolutionary War that they aren’t even visible in the rear-view mirror. I dare say that being a Colonist in 1775 did not, by definition, break eight of the Ten Commandments or put a person is a probable state of mortal sin.
And so back to the core premise: the government can’t make you do anything. There is always an alternative, and at a certain point, the alternative of non-compliance is not only available, it is REQUIRED. Read the Declaration:
“But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.”
It is our right and our DUTY to throw off this government. It is not legitimate and does not possess the consent of the governed, and thus has NO AUTHORITY. This is not to say that this government does not have power – yes it still does have power, but it has NO AUTHORITY. At this point, the only way it can continue to operate is by means of violent coercion, namely property confiscation, imprisonment and execution. This is YOUR country: thieving, murdering criminals running utterly amok, holding their power only through violent coercion and the threat of violent coercion. And it could all be brought to a screeching halt tomorrow if We The People would just turn that intellectual corner and realize that the unjust laws of an illegitimate government need not and should not be followed. They have no power over us. We have power over them, because they derive their JUST powers from the consent of the governed. Withdraw the consent, and the power is gone. Anything remaining is therefore, by definition, UNJUST, and thus must be “abolished” and “thrown off”, to use Jefferson’s words.
Of course you can own and carry a gun. You have the God-given right to your life, and the right to protect yourself, your family and your property. No one can ever, ever take that right away from you except YOU. The state can pass as many laws as it wants banning gun ownership and bearing, but every single one of those laws is illegitimate, and thus should not be followed.
How can the government force you to accept Sharia law, or any evil satanic system? Only YOU decide what you do or do not accept. Obama could write an Executive Order tomorrow declaring that the musloid screech to prayer be blasted from loudspeakers in every city and town five times per day, and the only true use or value that Executive Order would have is as toilet paper. Obama can’t make you accept Sharia law any more than he can make you fly like Superman.
ObamaCare can only force you out of business if you COMPLY with it. The government can only force you into mortal sin if you COMPLY and CONSENT. Obama can mandate that we all buy health insurance, and that all insurance policies cover abortion and contraception. And we can all laugh in his face. His fat wife can further mandate that we all eat celery sticks and tofu on Mondays and Thursdays, and we can likewise laugh in her painted-up-thicker-than-a-tranny face. These people have no power over us. They are slack-jawed, carney-trash gutter filth, and nothing more. Any power they have over us is power that we must specifically consent to give to them. I withdraw my consent. You got a problem with that, Barry? Molon labe.
Finally, back to the theological aspect of all of this, because that’s how I roll up in here. Look at a Crucifix. What you are seeing in a Crucifix is the stark horror of your own freedom and personal sovereignty. You are free to choose, as is every single being made in the image of God. We are so free that God consents to allowing us to choose to torture and kill Him. Oh, yes, we always, always have a choice. And now, because we have allowed it, the choice now stands as this: Either choose to spare yourself the wrath of an evil, illegitimate government or choose to scourge and crucify Christ. Pick up the flagellum and lean into Him. Skin Him. Make Him bleed and shake in pain. Then pick up that hammer and those nails and drive them in. Feel the bones in His feet and ankles crunch as you pound that nail in. And as you’re doing this, look Him in the eye with a big sh**-eating grin on your face. Tell Him how you have no choice, because it’s either this, or you might lose your job, or your 4000 square foot house. And that’s not even a contest, right? I mean, who WOULDN’T torture and kill their best friend, brother, father, spouse, creator and savior in order to stay in the good graces of the IRS and keep a job or a pension income?
The choice is yours. It always has been and always will be. This life will only last for a few more decades at most. What comes after that is eternal. Choose wisely.
From Ann Barnhardt at:
If The Federal Government Can Make It Mandatory For You To Buy Anything…We Will Be Living Under Tyranny and A Dictator
Health Law Puts Focus on Limits of Federal Power
WASHINGTON — If the federal government can require people to purchase health insurance, what else can it force them to do? More to the point, what can’t the government compel citizens to do?
Those questions have been the toughest ones for the Obama administration’s lawyers to answer in court appearances around the country over the past six months. And they are likely to emerge again if, as expected, the Supreme Court, as early as Monday, agrees to be the final arbiter of the challenge to President Obama’s signature health care initiative.
The case focuses on whether Congress overstepped its constitutional authority in enacting parts of the law. Lower courts have reached divergent conclusions.
Even judges in lower courts who ultimately voted to uphold the law have homed in on the question of the limits of government power, at times flummoxing Justice Department lawyers.
“Let’s go right to what is your most difficult problem,” Judge Laurence H. Silberman, who later voted to uphold the law, told a lawyer at an argument in September before the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. “What limiting principle do you articulate?” If Congress may require people to purchase health insurance, he asked, what else can it force them to buy? Where do you draw the line?
Would it be unconstitutional, he asked, to require people to buy broccoli?
“No,” said the lawyer, Beth S. Brinkmann. “It depends.”
Could people making more than $500,000 be required to buy cars from General Motors to keep it in business?
“I would have to know much more about the empirical findings,” she replied.
Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh, who ended up in dissent, then jumped in. “How about mandatory retirement accounts replacing Social Security?” he asked.
“It would depend,” Ms. Brinkmann replied.
Ms. Brinkmann was cut off before she could elaborate on her answers. In other settings, she and other administration lawyers have described what they see as the constitutional limits to government power, though not typically using concrete examples.
It’s a great piece.
Are there limits to federal power? The question is now before the Court.
See, “Supreme Court to Hear Case Challenging Health Law” (via Memeorandum).
Also at Althouse, “Supreme Court takes the Obamacare case“:
If the Court takes down the entire Act, it would do Obama a great favor, which is why I’m predicting the Court will do just that. That was my prediction a few weeks ago, reading, not the the existing doctrine, but “the political forces at play and assessing the Court’s vulnerability to those forces.”
But would John Roberts really want to do Obama a favor? Interesting…
Does The Occupy Wall Street Crowd Speak for You? Does Not For Me.
Does the #Occupy Movement Speak for You?
October 25th, 2011 — “Occupy” movement, “The Great Recession”, 1389 (blog admin), CAIR, Canada, communism, economy, Florida, George Soros, leftist-jihadist convergence, mainstream media, Muslim Brotherhood, Nazism, NYC, Obama, the left, tuition bubble, unemployment
Lech Walesa rejects OWS
Some of the #Occupy movement signs and slogans seem to resonate with many onlookers. Maybe it’s because they’ve stolen a few talking points (but very little else) from the Tea Party. Maybe it’s because the sympathetic mainstream media carefully edits out what they don’t want you to see.
Let’s take a closer look.
Is this you?
Are you frustrated and angry about unemployment, inflation, the decreasing economic opportunities, the burden of debt, and the declining standard of living in North America, much of Europe, and elsewhere? Are you worried about the sovereign debt problems that bedevil the international financial system?
So am I.
Do you empathize with those struggling to make ends meet in low-paid, part-time jobs? Do you consider bailouts to be unconstitutional, politically and economically unwise, and morally wrong? Do you believe that the Federal Reserve system puts too much power into the hands of too few people who are not accountable to the voters and taxpayers?
So do I.
The Occupy movement blames our predicament on “billionaires”, “rich corporations”, and “Wall Street bankers”. They offer no basis for their accusations, but merely pander to the temptations of envy, sloth, and greed to which all of us are prone.
I agree with Herman Cain in placing most of the blame on Barack Obama and his failed policies. I also blame other public officials in the US and elsewhere whose policies brought about our financial downfall.
Whose side are they on?
Let’s see…the Occubaggers have got the commies, the socialists, the anarchists, the American Nazi Party, the George Soros front groups including the Open Society Institute, the Tides Foundation, and MoveOn.org, along with Code Pink and Michael Moore, the Muslim Brotherhood and its front group CAIR (more about CAIR and its connections here and here), the SEIU, the AFL-CIO, the leftist establishment media including the New York Times and the Washington Post, Frances Fox Piven, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Ayatollah Khamenei, Hugo Chavez, David Duke, and, of course, that architect of failure and scapegoater-in-chief, Barack Hussein Obama himself.
Along for the ride are the aging drugged-out hippies reliving Woodstock, the young drugged-out prep school and college kids looking for a place to fornicate al fresco, the paid shills, the student loan debtors with useless degrees, the trust-fund babies, the anti-Semites, the LGBT nudists, the race-card players, the outdoor urinators and defecators, the pro-abort feminazis, the tree-huggers, the vegans, and the mentally ill. (Many of these categories overlap.) Rounding out the rogue’s gallery are various drug dealers, crackheads, junkies, thieves, rapists, street bums and other lumpenproletariat, and felons hiding out from the law.
None of them speak for me.
Nor do they speak for Lech Walesa.
Former Polish President Won’t Attend #OccupyWallStreet After Citizen Journalists Expose Its Radical Roots
Lech Walesa, former president of Poland, champion in the fight against communism, and winner of the Liberty Medal and Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1989, has decided to not make a trip to New York in support of the Occupy Wall Street protests.
Last week the AP reported that Walesa was backing the Occupy “movement” and considered traveling to New York in support of the growing nationwide mob activity that currently plagues the United States. However, when former Illinois gubernatorial candidate Adam Andrzejewski, (For the Good of Illinois) found out about this, he quickly reached out to his contacts in Poland to alert the former president to the truth behind this radical movement.
“We made the point that the political themes of Occupy Wall Street may have started out with some of the principles that we share, but OWS themes were rapidly being morphed into anti-freedom and anti-liberty messages. At the core is the want for a big, powerful central government to dominate the lives of individual citizens.” -Andrzejewski
In his write-up last night at BigGovernment.com, Andrzejewski stated that with the help of BigGoverment and other sources, he was able to convey an accurate picture of the Occupy movement, particularly that it is “…organized by anarchists, Code Pink, the American Communist movement, jihadists, anti-Israel, socialist, and anti- free enterprise interests.” After reviewing this information about the true nature of the demonstrations, Walesa and his team withdrew their support and will not be attending any Occupy protests.
We were overjoyed to learn that recent Rebel Pundit investigative reports and footage were able to play an an important role in Walesa’s decision. According to Andrzejewski:
“They appreciated the inside info- they weren’t getting that in Poland from the European media.”
From 1389 Blof at: http://1389blog.com/
Islam is a Poison That is Killing The West. Western Civilization is Worth Fighting For – Will We?
Excellent article by Daniel Greenfield at Sultan Knish Blog
Note: Highlighted sections by ZTW
“Fight back? But then we’d be no better than them?” If we waterboard then we are no better than the headchoppers and mutilators. If we profile then we are no better than the genocidal jihadists. If we treat our friendly Pakistani and Saudi visitors the way they would have been treated a century ago– then we would be guilty of being un-American.
Connections don’t just store information, they define priorities by reminding us which thing is dependent on the other. They remind us that governments sre instituted to keep laws and laws are implemented to keep the people. Governments serve the law, but the law serves the people. And the people are not some random mass, they are not defined by passports and identity cards or place of birth– the people are the keepers of the flame of their culture. This need not be a matter of birth, immigrants can be among the greatest heroes and natives among the greatest traitors. But no one who is committed to the destruction of the culture, in concrete or abstract terms, in the immediate present or the indefinite future, can enjoy the protection of legal codes that exist to protect the freedom of the individual within the integrity of a free culture.
In the face of such reasoning it is important to remember that we are not better than our enemies because we represent ideals, but because we create ideals along with skyscrapers, paintings, high powered microscopes, novels, better mousetraps, systems of philosophy, muscle cars, musical styles, theorems, charities and sandwiches. We are makers and shapers, movers and thinkers, seers and doers. We reach for the stars and find ways to keep premature babies alive. We are imperfect, dynamic and changing– and the world would be a much poorer place without us in it.
Today’s Youth Do Not Know Good From Evil
Why Young Americans Can’t Think Morally
By Dennis Prager
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | Last week, David Brooks of The New York Times wrote a column on an academic study concerning the nearly complete lack of a moral vocabulary among most American young people. Below are some excerpts from Brooks’ summary of the study of Americans aged 18 to 23. (It was led by “the eminent Notre Dame sociologist Christian Smith.”)
“Smith and company asked about the young people’s moral lives, and the results are depressing …
“When asked to describe a moral dilemma they had faced, two-thirds of the young people either couldn’t answer the question or described problems that are not moral at all …
“Moral thinking didn’t enter the picture, even when considering things like drunken driving, cheating in school or cheating on a partner …
“The default position, which most of them came back to again and again, is that moral choices are just a matter of individual taste …
“As one put it, ‘I mean, I guess what makes something right is how I feel about it. But different people feel different ways, so I couldn’t speak on behalf of anyone else as to what’s right and wrong …
“Morality was once revealed, inherited and shared, but now it’s thought of as something that emerges in the privacy of your own heart.”
Continued at Jewish World Review at: http://www.jewishworldreview.com/0911/prager092011.php3
Atheist Wants Christians Eradicated – OMG!
Leading US Atheist Calls for “Eradication” of Christians
…The growing ranks of fundamental Christians and radical Muslims should be of concern to everyone who is not part of these two groups. Everyone. Again, bigotry, discrimination, hatred, coercion, terrorism, slavery, misogyny and everything else that is part and parcel of fundamental Christianity and radical Islam should not be tolerated and anyone who agrees with this needs to adopt extremist points of view that includes the intolerance of their very existence. The only reason these groups exist is because they are allowed to, and we, as a society, are allowing them to…
But the underbelly of fundamentalist Christianity and radical Islam does not operate in the legal system. They don’t respond to lawsuits, letters, amicus briefs or other grass-roots campaigns and they must, must, must be eradicated. As long as they are allowed to exist, we will continue to be inundated with accounts of buses, buildings, markets and abortion clinics being blown up, rape victims being murdered for adultery, wives being beaten (sometimes to death), airplanes being flown into buildings, people being tortured and sometimes beheaded for blasphemy, people being burned for witchcraft and sorcery and all the other horrific, inhumane and insane practices that are part of fundamental Christianity and Radical Islam.
Always ironic for proponents of dismembering babies while conscious lecture about the inhumane, no?
If we don’t take a stand and, as a society, insist that these doctrines and beliefs are treated just the same as they would be if religion were not part of the equation, we will become extinct not due to natural selection, but at the hands of those who believe that the supernatural has made the selection.
Ergo, the atheists want themselves to override natural selection and simply, what – abort Christians beyond the 3rd trimester? If they are successful, there will only be one result many years later – an atheist civil war.
Get Your Lazy Ass In Gear – This Country Is Worth Saving
Powers, Principalities, Prayer & ’78 Chryslers:
I am NOT in a state of superior grace from you. In fact, I am almost certain that I am a complete wreck compared to you. I’m the ’78 Cordoba. You are the Firehawk. Here, I contend, is the difference. As much of a piece of de-tuned MOPAR crap with a bad carburetor as I am, I actually put the tranny in gear and GO. Most Christian folks in the U.S. have the SLP Ram-Air 5.7 liter V-8, but never take it out of park. Hmmm. So if what I did, and what I’m doing, constitutes sputtering, crippling along, dying at every light and having to throw it in neutral and get out and push a 4000 pound, 18 foot long monstrosity through the streets . . . just imagine what y’all Firehawks could do if you would JUST. PUT. IT. IN. GEAR. — Ann Barnhardt
Taken From American Digest at: http://americandigest.org/
10 Shocking Things in Ann Coulter’s New Book – “Demonic”
Top 10 shocking things in Ann Coulter’s book ‘Demonic’ that will drive liberals crazy
Ann Coulter’s books are never tame.
Her latest book, “Demonic: How the Liberal Mob is Endangering America,” will start enraging liberals with its very title – which is par for the course for the author of such liberal-bashing classics as “Godless” and “Treason.”
The Daily Caller has put together the top 10 quotes and arguments from her latest tome that are most likely to make Chris Matthews’s head explode – and possibly even disturb some on the right.
10.) Democrats are anti-science
Reversing the Democratic mantra that Republicans are “anti-science,” Coulter says it is really the Democratic mob that abhors science and technological innovation.
“The Left’s abject terror of technological development is yet another mob attribute,” she writes.
Quoting Gustave Le Bon, whose theory on mobs is the main intellectual foundation of her book, Coulter writes, “Thus, according to Le Bon, if ‘democracies possessed the power they wield today at the time of the invention of mechanical looms or of the introduction of steam-power and of railways, the realization of these inventions would have been impossible.”
But, Coulter argues, “Our liberals are even worse than Le Bon imagined. Democrats don’t merely want to block scientific progress, they want to stop scientific progress, they want to role it back.”
She then cites, as examples, Al Gore’s call in his “global warming fantasy book Earth in the Balance” for the elimination of the internal combustion engine within 25 years, the Democrat’s 2007 bill to eliminate the incandescent light bulb by 2014, Obamacare, which she says will hamper medical innovation, and the Democrats’ incessant hectoring of the oil and pharmaceutical industries – industries, Coulter writes, that “are two of the most innovative.”
She goes on: “Indeed, the only way to get liberals interested in novel scientific research is to propose going after human embryos,” citing liberals love of embryonic stem cell research over adult stem cell research when the science on the latter is more promising according to her.
9.) Liberals are not apart of the American tradition
“The men behind the American Revolution – the militias, the Minutemen, and the signers of the Declaration of Independence, as well as the framers of the Constitution – were the very opposite of the mob. Today we would call them ‘Republicans,’” she writes at one point in the book
“Liberals’ history is not this country’s history – theirs is the history of the mob,” she writes in another.
8.) Liberal social consciousness manifests itself in the killing of American soldiers
Though a joke, this one will still enrage:
“If the Weatherman had succeeded in transporting their bombs to the Fort Dix dance, instead of blowing themselves up, they would have murdered lots of U.S. serviceman and their dates. For liberals, that’s social consciousness,” she writes.
7.) Republican “Southern Strategy” was not racist
“The entire basis of the liberals’ ‘Southern Strategy’ myth is the sophisticated belief that anyone who votes Republican must be a racist,” Coulter writes.
“If Nixon had planned to appeal to white racists, speeding up desegregation was not an effective strategy. But he turned around and won an even bigger landslide in 1972, running against George McGovern and the party of acid, abortion, and amnesty,” she argues.
6.) The left (and crazy people) are responsible for all political violence in the United States
“Somewhat astoundingly, in the entire nation’s history, there’s never been a presidential assassination attempt by a right-winger. There have been more than a dozen by left-wingers,” she writes.
“Conservatives, we’re endlessly told, create ‘an atmosphere of hatred and fear.’ This is as opposed to liberals who just go around shooting elected officials.”
After spending an entire chapter – entitled “Imaginary Violence From the Right Vs. Actual Violence From The Left” – documenting her case, Coulter concludes,
“What’s confusing is that liberal historians keep telling us that those angry, contorted faces screaming at black people are ‘Southerners’ – probably someone like Phyllis Schlafly. Only when you realize they are all Democrats – usually liberal, progressive Democrats, in the mold of Wilson, Faubus, and Ervin – do the pictures make sense.
“It’s always liberals: Like Robespierre, they commit violence for the greater good.”
5.) Democrats’ schemes are similar to the schemes of history’s worst regimes
In a chapter detailing the 20th century’s most brutal regimes, from Stalin’s Soviet Union to Hitler’s Germany to Mao’s China to Pol Pot’s Cambodia, Coulter writes, “You will note the similarities in all these totalitarian plans to many of the Democrats’ schemes.”
4.) The GOP has always been the party supporting civil rights, not the Democratic Party
“Angry violent mobs are always Democratic: Code Pink, SDS, The Weathermen, Earth First!, anti-war protesters, and union protesters in Wisconsin,” Coulter writes.
“Like them, the Ku Klux Klan was, of course, another Democratic undertaking, originally formed to terrorize Republicans, but later switching to terrorize blacks. It was Democratic juries that acquitted Klansman after Klansman. It was Democratic politicians who supported segregation, Democratic governors who called out the National Guard to stop desegregation, Democratic commissioners of public safety who turned police dogs and water hoses on civil rights protesters.”
Also: “Democrats only came around on civil rights when blacks were voting in high enough numbers to make a difference at the ballot box – and then they claimed credit for everything their party had ferociously blocked since the Civil War.”
3.) Coulter stands up for the killings at Kent State
“On May 4, National Guard officers were trying to disperse thousands of violent protesters in the middle of the campus. According to the recent reporting of James Rosen, the guardsman were fired upon first, leading twenty-nine guardsman to shoot back at the protesters, killing four students in thirteen seconds,” Coulter writes.
“If Louis XVI had been that decisive, 600,000 Frenchmen might not have had to die. As his grandfather, Louis XIV, had said: When war is necessary, it is a ‘grave error to think that one can reach the same aims by weaker means.’ Though decried throughout the land – and in a Neil Young song! – the shooting at Kent State soon put an end to the student riots.”
This fits nicely with a major theme of Coulter’s book, which is encapsulated in its very last words.
“This nation’s heroes knew what Louis XVI did not: A mob cannot be calmly reasoned with: it can only be smashed,” Coulter writes. “When faced with a move, civilized society’s motto should be: Overreact!”
2.) Coulter takes on the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr.
“Martin Luther King Jr. was the heir to Rousseau. He used images in order to win publicity and goodwill for his cause, deploying children in the streets for a pointless, violent confrontation with a lame-duck lunatic: Theophilus Eugene ‘Bull’ Connor,” she writes.
In attacking King’s legacy, Coulter uses the words of liberal icon Thurgood Marshall, who became the first black justice of the Supreme Court, to aid her in tarnishing King’s reputation. “Thurgood Marshall had always disdained King’s methods, calling him an ‘opportunist’ and ‘first rate rabble-rouser,’” Coulter writes. “Indeed, when asked about King’s suggestion that street protests could help advance desegregation, Marshall replied that school desegregation was men’s work and should not be entrusted to children. King, he said, was ‘a boy on a man’s errand.’”
Coulter concludes, “The civil rights movement had made mobs respectable, to the great misfortune of the nation. In no time, liberals began engaging in what I believe Gandhi called ‘active resistance’ every time they didn’t get their way through legitimate legal processes.”
In a later chapter, she says, “If Nixon had been elected in 1960, instead of Kennedy, we could have skipped the bloodshed of the civil rights marches and today we’d be celebrating Thurgood Marshall Day, rather than Martin Luther King Day.”
1.) Expressing understanding of anti-abortion violence
“But more important, abortion clinic violence should not be filed under ‘Political Violence’ at all. It should be filed under ‘Things Liberals Won’t Let Americans Vote On.’…When there is no legal process for pro-lifers to pursue to outlaw abortion – unlike every policy liberals violently protest – some pro-lifers will inevitably respond to lawlessness with lawlessness,” Coulter writes. “In the first few years after [Planned Parenthood v. Casey], about six more people were killed in attacks on abortion clinics. Most of the abortionists were shot or, depending upon your point of view, had a procedure performed on them with a rifle.”
“There were no more constitutional options left to fight judicial tyranny on the little matter of mass murder,” she concludes. “Thus, abortion clinic violence is more akin to the Tiananmen Square protests in Communist China than any liberal riot in America. Want to stop violence at abortion clinics? Repeal Roe and let Americans vote.”
Thanks to Daily Caller at:http://dailycaller.com/
America Needs To Save Itself – Not The World
The USA: Last Stop in Western Civilization
“[America] goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.” These are the words of former President John Quincy Adams.
How far we have strayed from that sound maxim? Intervention has become the hallmark of American foreign policy. As indicated by nascent American intervention in Libya, America has made spreading the ballot box to distant lands and less fortunate peoples its raison d’être, often with disastrous results and in every case damaging America’s ability to project military and economic power when vital to our own national security.
It can even be argued that our efforts to advance democracy have had the exact opposite effect, as demonstrated by the Muslim Brotherhood’s rise to power in Egypt. That worked so well that we’re now “helping” Libya and Syria.
At the heart of this new presumption of global responsibility is a fundamental misunderstanding of what makes democracy or republican government possible.
Americans have replaced democratic values with the worship of the democratic process. It is within this paradigm that policy wonks think that imposition of our democratic system on ancient civilizations with a long history of attitudes contrary to democratic culture, will result in democratic values analogous to our own.
This widely shared view is flawed, for this one simple reason: It is the underlying values that make democracy work, not the process itself, e.g. the Palestinian election of Hamas. The success of the American democratic republic is rooted in the peculiar nature of its founding, conditions particular to America, such as an Anglo-Saxon legal tradition, common culture, religious beliefs, and the moral fortitude of the framers.
As people living in the most powerful nation on Earth, Americans are constantly saturated by a barrage of media proclaiming it the inherent responsibility of the United States to police the world. After all, “With great power comes great responsibility.” But while helping those who cannot help themselves is a noble goal, it is not rational to drown our military in endless conflicts and wars which only bring our own people suffering and loss.
What about our own people? Does being American disqualify us from the same protection we so lavishly afford other nations?
Whatever is said about the Bush Administration, one thing is certain: the policies pursued under his Administration saddled the United States with burdens greater than any empire in history. The Roman Empire collapsed with less strain. This is not to ignore the successes of the Bush years: Not one more terrorist attack on American soil since 9/11, al Qaeda’s base of operations destroyed, and an unprecedented economic recovery following a traumatic national shock culminating in a 4 percent unemployment rate.
But, in his 2002 West Point Address, just one year after 9/11, the President made a startling pledge:
All nations that decide for aggression and terror will pay a price. We will not leave…the peace of the planet at the mercy of a few mad terrorists and tyrants. We will lift this dark threat from our country and our world.
Since when is the US responsible for the “peace of the planet”? Also, when did our enemy become every “tyrant” and “terrorist” on earth? As any thinking person can see, our enemies are not “terrorists,” which are simply employers of a method, but Islamic radicals. This proclamation was a stunning departure from historical US policy. President Bush had just placed America under the weight of empire. And for what was America now laboring?
According to Bush, the men and women of the US Armed Forces would now die, not so that Americans could remain free, but so that the world could become democratic. This is the crux of the now infamous Paul Wolfowitz memorandum, announcing that the US would now act to address “those wrongs which threaten not only our interests, but those of our allies or friends, or which could seriously unsettle international relations.” The desire to blow things up could also be theoretical justification under this broad construction of American power.
In essence, our leaders have signaled the world that America will intervene in anything and everything that might “unsettle” some arbitrary notion of international balance. We have just made the world our enemies, and for no reason. Take President Bush’s arrogant and potentially suicidal statement at his second inaugural:
So it is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world. [1]
It is not wrong to acknowledge that democracy, when adopted under the right conditions, and in the right cultural setting, can be a very beautiful thing for its participants. But, the United States simply does not have the strength to coerce democratic governance the world over, and to believe that we can is folly.
And yet, this is the mindset of former President George Bush, who once said, “We will persistently clarify the choice before every ruler and nation. The moral choice between oppression, which is always wrong, and freedom, which is eternally right … We will encourage reform in other governments by making clear that success in our relations will require the decent treatment of their own people.” [2] But since when does Saudi Arabia’s brutal regime affect our security, or Burma’s bloodbath?
It is President Bush’s philosophically problematic view that, “Islam … is consistent with democratic rule.” Islamic Sharia, the legal code followed by many Muslim countries, commands death for those who convert to another religion, such as Christianity. Under such a model, fifty-one percent of an electorate can pursue genocide against the political minority. Democratic institutions must be supported with democratic values.
More importantly, while spreading democracy is a noble goal, America cannot sustain the level of economic and military commitment required to achieve such a goal. Are we really to believe that America can coerce democratic reform in every regime, in every nation, when we can’t even eliminate the enemy in a cakewalk scenario like Iraq? Before America puts an end to the genocide in the Sudan, we have to make sure our own people are safe. We can’t help anybody if we’re dead. And with an army with half its former strength after a decade of cuts, American readiness to face asymmetric threats, e.g. Chinese ascendancy, has diminished considerably.
Despite the vast reduction in military power, America is asked to take on even more commitments, exposing Americans to attack. But who else will answer the call of oppressed peoples? Will the European Union, a gaggle of weak and emasculated states more concerned with gender equality and homosexual rights in the military than military lethality? America is the last stop in Western Civilization. Looking out for number one is not selfish; it is essential.
It is not the responsibility of the US to settle the squabbles in Bosnia or the Sudan. It is the constitutional responsibility of our government to defend our people. The world should be thankful that there is an America to liberate distant peoples from oppression. But American patronage is not a “right.” It is a privilege, one that could easily evaporate in the event America takes on too much. Suicide is not a righteous act; it’s suicide. Nobody benefits in the event America collapses from overstretch.
Notes
[1] Bush Second Inaugural, Jan. 20, 2005, transcript, p. 2
[2] Ibid., pp. 2-3
From: http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/../2011/06/the_usa_last_stop_in_western_civilization.html
Agorism: It’s Time to Get Our Minds Right
Agorist Philosophy Overview
by “FSK”
As originally posted on: FSK’s Guide to Reality
September 13, 2007
I’ve been reading a bit about the philosophy of agorism, and it seems attractive to me.
The philosophy can be summarized in one sentence: “I want to do useful work, get paid, and not have to report it for taxation, confiscation, and regulation.”
Let’s start with a specific example. Suppose you don’t like the US government’s policy of aggressive wars in Iraq and other countries. You can vote, but voting is ineffective due to various corruptions in the system. The income tax means that the government confiscates 50%-95% or more of everything I produce. Productive work supports the government, even if I disapprove of its activities. I am unable to do any useful economic activity without supporting things I find objectionable.
The government’s policy is completely ridiculous. Citizens may not perform work without reporting it for taxation, confiscation, and regulation. I object to that requirement.
The fundamental goal of an agorist revolution is the creation of wealth that the red market can’t confiscate. This is the only type of revolution that has a legitimate chance of succeeding, because the participants would be profiting and undermining the government at the same time. The red market derives its power by leeching wealth. Creating unconfiscatable wealth undermines the red market’s power.
Currently, the only type of grey market work available is low-paid unskilled labor. The agorist wants to create a grey market for highly-skilled, high-paid labor.
The agorist says that all governments are inherently illegitimate. A government is merely a group of people conspiring to take away my property and my rights. Government employees benefit handsomely from this arrangement, because the salaries and pensions they receive are higher than they would get in the private sector. The people who control large corporations benefit from this arrangement, because their market position is frequently endorsed by the government and its regulations. Wealthy campaign donors love the government-granted perks they get. The Federal Reserve’s policy of inflation benefits the financial industry at the expense of everyone else. Government is merely a group of people conspiring to confiscate the wealth of the productive part of society.
The agorist says that all the functions of government could be more effectively performed by the free market. You can have a private justice system. You can have a private police force. Everyone knows that government is up for sale, manipulated by the wealthy. Why not do away with the pretense completely? Let’s privatize everything.
Why should the government have a monopoly on violence and justice?
For example, instead of paying a 50% income tax, maybe I can pay 2%, or even a fixed fee, to a private police force who will insure my property is protected. The police force would utilize a private justice system, to make sure that they don’t use force needlessly. If two people have a conflict and are subscribing to different police forces, then the incentive is for the businesses to resolve the dispute peacefully rather than violently. If a private police force was misbehaving, then it would be perfectly acceptable for people to start seeking alternate vendors. Some people might pay for protection by several police forces simultaneously, to prevent monopolies from forming.
Suppose there’s no intrinsic legitimacy given to the government. It’s perfectly legitimate to use force to defend yourself, if someone attempts to confiscate your property. Imagine what would happen if tax collectors were met with armed resistance from everyone? What would happen if everyone ceased voluntary compliance with the taxation system?
Right now, the vast majority of people are compliant with the taxation system. That means that red market workers can afford to expend vast resources tracking down violators. It needs to make sure that violators are caught so that the penalty for tax avoidance makes the risk unattractive. However, with taxation rates of 50%-95% or more, tax avoidance starts to be attractive, if it can be done with relatively low risk. I’m not just counting direct noticeable taxes. There are hidden taxes and regulations, which also cost money.
What’s the real risk of getting caught? It’s hard to say. You only hear about the people who got caught. The people who get away with it don’t come forward and admit it, do they? There’s no source of reliable statistics, so you can’t quantify the risk.
How would you make the transition to an agorist economy? There is a problem, because people aren’t going to want to give up their government-granted perks. They are going to resist change as much as they can. People are reluctant to avoid paying taxes and following government rules. However, if there’s a profit to be made, people might be convinced.
The key is to develop a system that allows people to perform productive economic activity without reporting it for taxation and confiscation. The Internet is a useful tool for this, because it would allow people to share information efficiently. It wouldn’t be too hard to write software that would facilitate an agorist economy.
The standard financial system is designed to frustrate attempts to perform economic activity without reporting it for confiscation. Transactions larger than $10,000 must be reported to the government. Repeated small transactions are also reportable. Besides, who wants to trade with worthless paper money? An alternate financial system would need to be developed. This way, transactions can be performed without reporting them to the government. People could still settle transactions with paper money or silver or gold, if they really wanted to. I think the Social Credit Monetary System is the best solution.
Whatever system is developed would need to be as decentralized as possible. As much as possible, information should NOT be stored on a centralized server. A centralized server represents an attack point. As much as possible, communications should be encrypted.
Actually, some information needs to be public. A database listing who trusted whom would need to be public and shared to be useful. On the other hand, maybe a trust database should be private, because it would represent a list of people for red market agents to harass. All transaction records should be private. Ideally, transaction records should be destroyed when completed, so red market agents can’t confiscate them.
There would be an important check that ensures people follow the rules. Just like in the BitTorrent economy, any user who misbehaves would be banned and denied a valuable resource. New users would be admitted only if another user vouched for their trustworthiness. The distributed nature would make it hard to shut it down, even if spies did infiltrate it.
Suppose there was an effective system for facilitating productive work without reporting it for taxation. With such high confiscatory taxation rates, there would be a huge incentive for people to work under such a system. The goal would be to avoid government detection as much as possible. As more productive people started working in this grey market economy, the power of government would decrease.
If the system was sufficiently distributed, there would be low risk even if you got caught. Red market agents might find out about some of your transactions, but not all of them. You could pay back taxes and fines on some of the transactions, and still come out ahead overall.
An agorist grey-market economy would also benefit because it could avoid compliance with all government regulations. It would not need to spend productive effort on regulation compliance. Its only wasted effort would be that spent avoiding detection by red market enforcers.
Ideally, an agorist economy could offer lower prices and higher wages, compared to the white market or pink market. The ability to avoid taxation and regulation should cut expenses by 50% to 95% or more.
Some pink market practitioners have their salaries artificially raised by the red market. For example, doctors need to waste a lot of money on education and spend years training. The supply of doctors is restricted by the red market. A license is required to practice medicine. A grey market doctor would not need the licensing requirement. He would only need to spend a year or two learning what is really needed to help his patients. An agorist doctor would not earn as much as a pink market doctor, but he would save the hassle of years of medical school and a residency. An agorist doctor would not have to deal with HMOs, Medicare, and insurance companies. The free market would help people decide which doctors are good and which are no good; people will share information about their experiences. Currently, the supply of doctors is artificially restricted, so there’s no mechanism for incompetent doctors to be removed from the market. The agorist doctor won’t get busted for “practicing medicine without a license” if his customers don’t turn him in to the red market. Besides, patients can always go to a pink market hospital if they have a problem their agorist doctor can’t handle. Eventually, the agorist hospitals would be better than the pink market hospitals.
Switching to a grey market agorist economy might be necessary for survival. A hyperinflationary crash of the dollar could happen at any time. A substantial amount of untaxed economic activity would facilitate such a collapse.
It probably is not possible for a person to satisfy all their needs in the grey market. However, the larger percentage of their economic activity that they can hide, the more they will benefit. If someone operated both a white-market business and a grey-market business, that would facilitate concealing their grey-market activities. On the other hand, you might be better off not having any official business at all. The IRS frequently cracks down on small business owners; registering yourself as a business owner might just be making yourself a target.
The red market derives its power solely by leeching off the productive members of society. Without them to push around, its power would rapidly collapse.
An agorist revolution has a legitimate chance of succeeding. The agorist market participants would be profiting from their activity. They would be undermining the government and making a profit at the same time. They would profit more than white market participants, because they would be unencumbered by taxes, inflation, and regulations. In that sense, once an agorist movement gets started, it would be self-sustaining. With a leaderless organization structure, it could not be easily shut down by infiltration or force. The agorist needs tools for effective operation, plus a certain number of participants.
An agorist revolution would probably be a peaceful one. Agorist market participants can hide their activity. They would appear to be normal, productive, nonviolent citizens. Agorist market participants would tend to resolve their differences peacefully, both to avoid the attention of red market enforcers, and because non-initiation of violence is part of the philosophy. By the time the agorist economy is large enough to be noticed by red market enforcers, it would have viable systems for competing and replacing government institutions. The agorist market would step in smoothly as the government loses power. The violence would come from red market participants, trying to crack down to preserve their position. However, a large number of red market workers might simultaneously be employed by agorist protection agencies. Typically, corporations infiltrate government by subverting Congress and the President. An agorist movement would infiltrate government by subverting the low-level line workers.
An agorist revolution, once started, would be self-sustaining. The participants would be profiting from their actions.
A lot of websites I read are philosophizing and speculating. I am ready to start writing tools and start using them. I would like to be a participant in an agorist economy, if only I knew other people to trade with! My primary skill is writing software. That’s the skill I’d be offering in trade. Initially, I’ll just write the code I think is needed and release it into the public domain.
Summarizing, I want to do productive work, get paid for it, and not have to report it for taxation and confiscation.