Wednesday, July 28, A.D. 2010

Why Liberalism Is Dangerous

William Voegeli has an interesting article in the National Review, “Why Liberalism Is Dangerous.” The beginning is a somewhat obscure as Voegeli responds to criticism of his book by Michael Lind, which itself is based on a review of Voegeli’s book by George Will. However, Voegeli’s article becomes much more readable as he explains his book’s arguments. His second point explores how Roosevelt cloaked his social democratic endeavors in the language of the founders and how such a broadening of rights actually erodes constitutional rights:

Lind’s insistence on the New Deal’s adaptive fealty to the natural rights of the American Founding rests on the perception of a guileless Franklin Roosevelt, a quality undetected by the overwhelming majority of FDR’s critics and admirers. This willed credulity allows Lind to declare that if FDR said his purpose was to preserve the freedoms that animated the Founding, it’s simply not possible that he had anything else up his sleeve. This argument leaves no room for the possibility, advanced by Sidney Milkis of the University of Virginia, that FDR gave “legitimacy to progressive principles by embedding them in the language of constitutionalism and interpreting them as an expansion rather than a subversion of the natural rights tradition.” Roosevelt agreed with Jefferson and Madison, but only in the sense that Roosevelt insisted Jefferson and Madison agreed with him, that the Founding was a proto–New Deal.

In 1932, FDR stated that under the social contract laid out in the Declaration of Independence, “rulers were accorded power, and the people consented to that power on consideration that they be accorded certain rights. The task of statesmanship has always been the re-definition of these rights in terms of a changing and growing social order.” Unlike the rights described in the Declaration, however, there is nothing natural or inalienable about the ones described by FDR: They’re not yours to begin with, and statesmen and historical changes can always alter, augment, or rescind them.

By 1944, the social order had changed and grown enough for the statesman Roosevelt to explicitly redefine Americans’ rights to include jobs, housing, medical care, education — in short, a “Second Bill of Rights,” all of which “spell security.” That can’t be the last word, however; the prospect of future changes in the social order causes FDR to urge the recognition of “these and similar rights.” The governmental right to discover new rights could, for instance, someday lead to the development endorsed by FDR’s National Public Resources Board in 1943, when it called for recognizing the right to “rest, recreation and adventure.”

Who among us would disdain citizenship in that Club Med polity where safaris and sea cruises are guaranteed as a matter of right, where we might awaken any day to find that the changing social order has left us yet another shiny new entitlement in the driveway? The problem is that it turns out to be impossible to elevate every social-policy goal to a right without reducing every right to just one more policy goal. In 1994, the Clinton Department of Housing and Urban Development’s (HUD) enforcement of the Fair Housing Act was so zealous that it demanded that groups opposed to new homeless shelters or drug-treatment facilities in their neighborhoods turn over to federal investigators (who were seeking evidence of discriminatory motives or attitudes) every article, flier, or letter to the editor their leaders had written, as well as the minutes of every public meeting they addressed. The HUD assistant secretary called upon to defend this thuggery compressed six decades of liberal rhetoric into a single op-ed, which explained how the department had to “walk a tightrope between free speech and fair housing. We are ever mindful of the need to maintain the proper balance between these rights.”

The HUD quotation exemplifies the danger of elevating public policy to the level of constitutional rights—it flattens out our legal landscape. The American regime benefits immensely from having a hierarchical system of law, with the constitution as the supreme written law of the land, but such annoys leftists who treasure other goals much more than the classical liberal values found in a document of a less socialist age.

Posted by Joseph on Wednesday, July 28, A.D. 2010
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Friday, June 25, A.D. 2010

Another Evil in Micromanaging Children

I wonder what relations exist between utopian socialists and micromanaging parents. Both sets exhibit many similar tendencies, including being busy bodies, believing that nature can be perfected (or at least conform to our wishes) with the appropriate techniques, and pretending to have a special wisdom to make all the right decisions.

Now, the New York Times tells us that some institutions have policies that discourage the development of best friends: “A Best Friend? You Must Be Kidding.” Evidently, best friends are exclusionary and may lead to social problems.

This is wrong on so many levels. It is bad enough to suffocate children with so much adult control, but it is evil to subject them to social engineering based on idiotic ideals that robs them of the treasure of their own humanity. The Puritans and their heretical peers banned Christmas and festival celebrations because such merrymaking endangered their antinatural regime. Now, egalitarians and socialist pedagogues wish to ban intimate friendships because such relationships are obstacles to the Borg like humanity that these twisted souls envision?

I ought not to be surprised when I learn of new evils that leftist principles spawn. A sick tree bears diseased fruit. Yet, the ceaseless generation of madness angers me. This modernist folly leads to so much ruin. Tyrannical leftists are not content to destroy the state as a whole. They wish to infect with their perversion every family, every neighborhood, and every child’s experience with the world. May hellfire consume their wickedness!

Yet, how has it come to this? How can illogic, misplaced principles, and an unwillingness to accept the world as it is go so far in transforming a civilization?

My misogynistic streak suspects that the “empowerment” of women has been quite beneficial to the Left, in that useful idiot sort of way. Female suffrage tends to force the state to act like a nanny, and politicians under female pressure transform the commonwealth into a tyrannical mother who both suckles and scolds a populace that used to be free and self reliant. Women seem less able to appreciate the differences in personal and public morality, and they are not well constituted to recognize the distinctions between private interest and the common good. It seems as if women collapse the various political levels of life into one horizon, like the Marxists who manipulate them, “for the children.” Women are made by nature to steer the private ship. They wreck the ship of state.

That said, women should know better than to buy into the perverse micromanaging infantilizing that render their own children perennially immature and bewildered when they have to face life on their own. After all, women have been raising generations for millennia, and only recently has a small minority of Western women decided to indulge their own maternal version of the Pygmalion complex. How have these women been duped—and in such a way that goes against their own self interest in that they do not have enough time to sculpt the perfect life for their children and that goes against their children’s interest as one can see by the sorry results of such parenting? Do women wish to conform more to the standards that leftist “authorities” have established? Are they more Mandarin and obedient by nature? Is their herd instinct stronger, so that Dr. Spock, Oprah, and daytime television have managed to rewrite their parental instincts in a matter of decades? Shouldn’t the stubborn, recalcitrant horse sense of the average woman have thwarted the micromanagers of the state from rendering women micromanagers of their children?

Is it simply that women have fewer children today and therefore are more anxious over their small broods to such an extant that they will turn, in their unnatural situation so perilously close to genetic extinction, to “wiser authorities”? Is it the mass culture that subjects women to a gossip circle, not of their neighbors, but of an artificial culture created and controlled by counter cultural idealogues? Or is it simply that women have gone it alone without—or have been abandoned by—their men and thus attempt to steer the domestic boat with oars only on one side?

I do not know. However, I do know that the new pedagogy is forming ill trained youth, and our civilization will be overrun by the barbarians from within if not from without.

No close friendships? May mothers resist such perverse encroachment upon their parenting, and may they not allow such evil to touch their children! Indeed, may they overthrow the leftist institutions that seek to mold their children to be inhuman little shades of watered down Kantian morality!

Posted by Joseph on Friday, June 25, A.D. 2010
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Thursday, June 24, A.D. 2010

Waters Wants to Socialize

You have likely seen this precious clip, but here it is anyway:

Should anyone be surprised? The Democrats are chock full of pinkos.

Posted by Joseph on Thursday, June 24, A.D. 2010
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Monday, June 21, A.D. 2010

Coulter on Greene

Ann Coulter has a delightful section in her latest article about the Democratic Senate candidate from South Carolina, “Alvin Greene: The Most Qualified Democrat I’ve Ever Seen”:

Obama senior adviser David Axelrod said Greene was not a “legitimate” candidate and called his victory “a mysterious deal.” (Yes, how could a young African-American man with strange origins, suspicious funding, shady associations, no experience, no qualifications, and no demonstrable work history come out of nowhere and win an election?)

Oh, Ann, how I love you.

Posted by Joseph on Monday, June 21, A.D. 2010
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Wednesday, June 2, A.D. 2010

If Only They Had Sunk the Bastards

The state of Israel has few friends, indeed. Well, make that no friends, thanks to Obama Hussein bin Barack. I am horrified but not at all surprised that the current American administration has forsaken our only ally in the Levant. The United States has not yet fully joined the League of Everyone in holding the Israelis in contempt of self preservation. However, there will be an international investigation into the “flotilla” incident. White House Press Secretary Gibbs explained the Security Council declaration, which is evidently the position of the White House, as well:

The Security Council deeply regrets the loss of life and injuries resulting from the use of force during the Israeli military operation in international waters against the convoy sailing to Gaza. The council in this context condemns those acts which resulted in the loss of at least 10 civilians and many wounded, and expresses its condolences to their families. The Security Council requests the immediate release of the ships, as well as civilians held by Israel.

So, for following the normal rules of a military blockade in a war zone, the state of Israel faces condemnation, and internationalist bureaucrats will intrude upon the state sustaining actions of the Israelis. Do we expect the “international community” to busy itself with every difficult decision that nations must make to secure themselves? Victor Hanson Davis states the issue plainly on the Corner of the National Review Online:

The Turkish Government as Global Arbiter of Ethnic Violence

The virulent worldwide reaction to Israeli’s handling of the Gaza flotilla has been quite instructive. The bankrupt Greeks, for example, are taking a holiday from railing at the Germans to demonstrate in solidarity with the Turkish-organized Gaza effort, which puts them on the same side as those whose government supports the occupation of much of Greek-speaking Cyprus and its divided capital.

No one in Europe worried much about the constant shower of missiles from Gaza in the past. No one in Europe said a word when North Korea torpedoed and slaughtered South Koreans on the high seas. No one objected when the Iranians hijacked a British ship and humiliated the hostages.

We ourselves seem to be getting a sort of novel pass for executing scores of suspected terrorists — and anyone in their vicinity — in our new, stepped-up Predator drone assassinations.

But the Western and Islamic worlds have a preexisting furor at the Jewish state that can be tapped at will by almost any pro-radical-Palestinian group clever enough to do proper P.R. after a desired asymmetrical confrontation. The fallout from Sharon’s visit to the Temple Mount, the distortions around the 2002 terrorist storming of the Church of Nativity, the 2006 Lebanon war — over time, these incidents do their part, in weird fashion, to incur hatred for a liberal democracy while creating sympathy for a theocratic thugocracy like Hamas.

What explains this preexisting hatred, which ensures denunciation of Israel in the most rabid — or, to use the politically correct parlance, “disproportionate” — terms? It is not about “occupied land,” given the millions of square miles worldwide that are presently occupied, from Georgia to Cyprus to Tibet. It is not a divided capital — Nicosia is walled off. It is not an overreaction in the use of force per se — the Russians flattened Grozny and killed tens of thousands while the world snoozed. And it cannot be the scale of violence, given what we see hourly in Pakistan, Darfur, and the Congo. And, given the Armenian, Greek, and Kurdish histories (and reactions to them), the currently outraged Turkish government is surely not a credible referent on the topic of disproportionate violence.

Perhaps the outrage reflects simple realpolitik — 350 million Arab Muslims versus 7 million Israelis. Perhaps it is oil: half the world’s reserves versus Israel’s nada. Perhaps it is the fear of terror: Draw a cartoon or write a novel offending Islam, and you must go into hiding; defame Jews and earn accolades. Perhaps it is anti-Semitism, which is as fashionable on the academic Left as it used to be among the neanderthal Right.

Perhaps there is also a new sense that the United States at last has fallen into line with the Western consensus, and so is hardly likely to play the old lone-wolf supporter of Israel in the press or at the U.N.

At this point, it doesn’t much matter — as this latest hysterical reaction reminds us, much of the world not only sides with Israel’s enemies but sides with them to such a degree as to suggest that, in any existential moment to come, the world either will be indifferent or will be on the side of Israeli’s enemies.

Quite frightening, when you think of it.

Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon has demanded that Israel raise its Gaza blockade, though the United States will hopefully veto any such Security Council measures. The Democratic Party still depends on Jewish donors; political self preservation, for now, keeps American Leftists’ Israel hatred in check. For how long, though? If Obama finds it difficult to support Israel when it has done nothing remarkable, we cannot rely on his support for Israel when the Israelis have to resort to truly controversial military decisions for their defense. I think that the Obama administration has finally decisively answered, by its lukewarm defense of Israel’s actions this week, that the United States will not stand by Israel if the Israelis take preventive strikes against the Iranian nuclear program.

I am no neoconservative, but I have no reservations in supporting the Israelis for doing what every nation must do—defend itself from aggressors and ensure the preservation of its society.

About ten years ago, I had a conversation with a Jewish American girl whose parents had immigrated from Iran. She horrified me when she said that Israel should just annihilate the Arab population in the occupied territories. A decade later, I am much less troubled by her genocidal program. I still find the mass slaughter of innocent human beings repulsive, but I wonder now if such dismal choices may ever force themselves upon people. Are the Mohammedans capable of peaceful coexistence with the Dar al Harb? If not, then what measures can morally be taken for self preservation? These are not theoretical musings. The Israelis must ponder them every day that they refuse to distract themselves from the looming terror.

Israel is like Gondor in Tolkien’s Middle Earth—it sits on the border of a belligerent menace, the principle aim of which is Israel’s utter destruction. Are we in the West going to allow the city to fall, or shall we ride like the Rohirrim to their defense? Our current leaders certainly bear no resemblance to Théoden. The master class of the modern West is comprised of legions of Wormtongues. They care for nothing of their people or their tradition. They are cowards and traitors, ready to submit themselves as dhimmis to the barbarians. The shadow has truly come upon the West.

Posted by Joseph on Wednesday, June 2, A.D. 2010
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Tuesday, June 1, A.D. 2010

Bierce’s Definitions

Andrew sent me the following quotation by Ambrose Bierce, another Ohioan who moved to D.C., from The Devil’s Dictionary:

CONSERVATIVE, n.  A statesman who is enamored of existing evils, as distinguished from the Liberal, who wishes to replace them with others.

I found a digital copy of the dictionary online: The Devil’s Dictionary, which has many other amusing entries, including:

ADMIRATION, n. Our polite recognition of another’s resemblance to ourselves.

AFRICAN, n. A nigger that votes our way.

ALIEN, n. An American sovereign in his probationary state.

ALLIANCE, n. In international politics, the union of two thieves who have their hands so deeply inserted in each other’s pockets that they cannot separately plunder a third.

AMNESTY, n. The state’s magnanimity to those offenders whom it would be too expensive to punish.

APOLOGIZE, v.i. To lay the foundation for a future offence.

ARISTOCRACY, n. Government by the best men. (In this sense the word is obsolete; so is that kind of government.) Fellows that wear downy hats and clean shirts—guilty of education and suspected of bank accounts.

BACCHUS, n. A convenient deity invented by the ancients as an excuse for getting drunk.

BELLADONNA, n. In Italian a beautiful lady; in English a deadly poison. A striking example of the essential identity of the two tongues.

BRIDE, n. A woman with a fine prospect of happiness behind her.

CANNIBAL, n. A gastronome of the old school who preserves the simple tastes and adheres to the natural diet of the pre-pork period.

CAT, n. A soft, indestructible automaton provided by nature to be kicked when things go wrong in the domestic circle.

CHRISTIAN, n. One who believes that the New Testament is a divinely inspired book admirably suited to the spiritual needs of his neighbor. One who follows the teachings of Christ in so far as they are not inconsistent with a life of sin.

CIRCUS, n. A place where horses, ponies and elephants are permitted to see men, women and children acting the fool.

COMMONWEALTH, n. An administrative entity operated by an incalculable multitude of political parasites, logically active but fortuitously efficient.

CORPORATION, n. An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility.

DIPLOMACY, n. The patriotic art of lying for one’s country.

DOG, n. A kind of additional or subsidiary Deity designed to catch the overflow and surplus of the world’s worship. This Divine Being in some of his smaller and silkier incarnations takes, in the affection of Woman, the place to which there is no human male aspirant. The Dog is a survival—an anachronism. He toils not, neither does he spin, yet Solomon in all his glory never lay upon a door-mat all day long, sun-soaked and fly-fed and fat, while his master worked for the means wherewith to purchase the idle wag of the Solomonic tail, seasoned with a look of tolerant recognition.

EDUCATION, n. That which discloses to the wise and disguises from the foolish their lack of understanding.

EXILE, n. One who serves his country by residing abroad, yet is not an ambassador.

HEBREW, n. A male Jew, as distinguished from the Shebrew, an altogether superior creation.

HERMIT, n. A person whose vices and follies are not sociable.

HERS, pron.  His.

HOSPITALITY, n. The virtue which induces us to feed and lodge certain persons who are not in need of food and lodging.

IDIOT, n. A member of a large and powerful tribe whose influence in human affairs has always been dominant and controlling. The Idiot’s activity is not confined to any special field of thought or action, but “pervades and regulates the whole.” He has the last word in everything; his decision is unappealable. He sets the fashions and
opinion of taste, dictates the limitations of speech and circumscribes conduct with a dead-line.

INSURRECTION, n. An unsuccessful revolution. Disaffection’s failure to substitute misrule for bad government.

LAWFUL, adj. Compatible with the will of a judge having jurisdiction.

LAWYER, n. One skilled in circumvention of the law.

MAMMON, n. The god of the world’s leading religion. The chief temple is in the holy city of New York.

MANICHEISM, n. The ancient Persian doctrine of an incessant warfare between Good and Evil. When Good gave up the fight the Persians joined the victorious Opposition.

NEGRO, n. The piece de resistance in the American political problem. Representing him by the letter n, the Republicans begin to build their equation thus: “Let n = the white man.” This, however, appears to give an unsatisfactory solution.

NEIGHBOR, n. One whom we are commanded to love as ourselves, and who does all he knows how to make us disobedient.

NEWTONIAN, adj. Pertaining to a philosophy of the universe invented by Newton, who discovered that an apple will fall to the ground, but was unable to say why. His successors and disciples have advanced so far as to be able to say when.

NIHILIST, n. A Russian who denies the existence of anything but Tolstoi. The leader of the school is Tolstoi.

NOMINEE, n. A modest gentleman shrinking from the distinction of private life and diligently seeking the honorable obscurity of public office.

NON-COMBATANT, n. A dead Quaker.

OBSTINATE, adj. Inaccessible to the truth as it is manifest in the splendor and stress of our advocacy.

PEACE, n. In international affairs, a period of cheating between two periods of fighting.

PLEBEIAN, n. An ancient Roman who in the blood of his country stained nothing but his hands. Distinguished from the Patrician, who was a saturated solution.

PLEONASM, n. An army of words escorting a corporal of thought.

POLITENESS, n. The most acceptable hypocrisy.

POLITICS, n. A strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles. The conduct of public affairs for private advantage.

POLITICIAN, n. An eel in the fundamental mud upon which the superstructure of organized society is reared. When we wriggles he mistakes the agitation of his tail for the trembling of the edifice. As compared with the statesman, he suffers the disadvantage of being alive.

POLYGAMY, n. A house of atonement, or expiatory chapel, fitted with several stools of repentance, as distinguished from monogamy, which has but one.

PRAY, v. To ask that the laws of the universe be annulled in behalf of a single petitioner confessedly unworthy.

PRESBYTERIAN, n. One who holds the conviction that the government authorities of the Church should be called presbyters.

PRESIDENCY, n. The greased pig in the field game of American politics.

PRESIDENT, n. The leading figure in a small group of men of whom—and of whom only—it is positively known that immense numbers of their countrymen did not want any of them for President.

RABBLE, n. In a republic, those who exercise a supreme authority tempered by fraudulent elections. The rabble is like the sacred Simurgh, of Arabian fable—omnipotent on condition that it do nothing. (The word is Aristocratese, and has no exact equivalent in our tongue, but means, as nearly as may be, “soaring swine.”)

REFERENDUM, n. A law for submission of proposed legislation to a popular vote to learn the nonsensus of public opinion.

REPRESENTATIVE, n. In national politics, a member of the Lower House in this world, and without discernible hope of promotion in the next.

RESPONSIBILITY, n. A detachable burden easily shifted to the shoulders of God, Fate, Fortune, Luck or one’s neighbor. In the days of astrology it was customary to unload it upon a star.

RUSSIAN, n. A person with a Caucasian body and a Mongolian soul. A Tartar Emetic.

SELF-ESTEEM, n. An erroneous appraisement.

SELF-EVIDENT, adj. Evident to one’s self and to nobody else.

SELFISH, adj. Devoid of consideration for the selfishness of others.

SENATE, n. A body of elderly gentlemen charged with high duties and misdemeanors.

UGLINESS, n. A gift of the gods to certain women, entailing virtue without humility.

VOTE, n. The instrument and symbol of a freeman’s power to make a fool of himself and a wreck of his country.

WAR, n. A by-product of the arts of peace. The most menacing political condition is a period of international amity. The student of history who has not been taught to expect the unexpected may justly boast himself inaccessible to the light. “In time of peace prepare for war” has a deeper meaning than is commonly discerned; it means, not merely that all things earthly have an end—that change is the one immutable and eternal law—but that the soil of peace is thickly sown with the seeds of war and singularly suited to their germination and growth. It was when Kubla Khan had decreed his “stately pleasure dome”—when, that is to say, there were peace and fat feasting in Xanadu—that he

heard from afar
Ancestral voices prophesying war.

One of the greatest of poets, Coleridge was one of the wisest of men, and it was not for nothing that he read us this parable. Let us have a little less of “hands across the sea,” and a little more of that elemental distrust that is the security of nations.  War loves to come like a thief in the night; professions of eternal amity provide
the night.

WASHINGTONIAN, n. A Potomac tribesman who exchanged the privilege of governing himself for the advantage of good government. In justice to him it should be said that he did not want to.

YANKEE, n. In Europe, an American. In the Northern States of our Union, a New Englander. In the Southern States the word is unknown. (See DAMNYANK.)

YEAR, n. A period of three hundred and sixty-five disappointments.

It seems as if Bierce was his era’s Dave Barry, only far wittier and more learned. Social decay is evident even among our nihilistic humorists.

Posted by Joseph on Tuesday, June 1, A.D. 2010
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Saturday, May 1, A.D. 2010

The Paradox of Democracy

On this fine May Day, allow me to share the following quotation from Walter Lippman that my friend Andrew sent me:

This is one of the paradoxes of the democratic movement—that it loves a crowd and fears the individuals who compose it—that the religion of humanity should have no faith in human beings.

The democrats dream in contradictions and fail to think much at all.

Such reminds me of the intellectual’s love of humanity but hatred for human beings; men are rather odd creatures.

Posted by Joseph on Saturday, May 1, A.D. 2010
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Saturday, April 17, A.D. 2010

Cummings on Politicians

In his recent radio spot, John Derbyshire quotes a delightful aphorism by E.E. Cummings:

a politician is an arse upon
which everyone has sat except a man

How perennial.

Posted by Joseph on Saturday, April 17, A.D. 2010
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Wednesday, March 17, A.D. 2010

Words That Hurt

A few months ago, I read the following article about a Washington state legislator who wishes to remove “negative language” from state law: “Wash. lawmaker wants to banish negative language.”

Decades ago, poor children became known as “disadvantaged” to soften the stigma of poverty. Then they were “at-risk.” Now, a Washington lawmaker wants to replace those euphemisms with a new one, “at hope.” . . . Positive labeling is more than a gimmick or political correctness, Franklin says. She believes her idea could lead to a paradigm shift in state government and to changes in classrooms across the state.

Of course, the politician is a Democratic woman, Rosa Franklin. I suspected that Franklin was black from the level of unseriousness that she exudes in the article, and I was correct.

By stating such, I am not referring to population disparities in the intelligence bell curve. Rather, and perhaps relatedly, there is far less quality control in the Democratic Party for their black politicians. Leftists harbor many stupid ideas based on foolish principles and the consequent unwillingness to consider reality when the world contradicts their cherished values. However, despite their perplexing adherence to stupid ideas, most Leftists in positions of power are not stupid themselves. Yet, Democrats’ white guilt and noblesse oblige curdle together to mollify any criticism of the leaders that poor, dysfunctional black communities elect. Occasionally, after much long suffering, the Democratic establishment may attempt to hoodwink the masses with back room political coups, but the diversity tooting Democrats are content to allow clowns to run around the circus as long as their antics do not generate too much bad press. As we know from experience, it takes a lot of bad press to tarnish a black Democrat politician—that soft bigotry of low expectations is rather widespread.

Yet, does Franklin fit that mold? My guess was that she was a public school teacher before politics. However, it turns out that she was a nurse who entered politics after being involved in community charities. According to an online biography, she has been married for almost sixty years and she is likely a pious Protestant. So, maybe we can simply attribute her silly ideas to classic, well intentioned, Christian Leftism.

My friend Andrew used to remark that Leftists locate power and meaning in words rather than the ideas and experiences behind words. Perhaps, this is logical for nominalist, postmodernist, deconstructionist folks who reduce insight and thought to word play and confusion. For many of them, there is no nature—only descriptions of our imagined objectivity that seem to originate in the will rather than the intellect. For the consistent (well, as consistent as such people can be), discourse can never be a joint labor with the ascent to the truth as its goal. Argument is simply a battle for domination. As such, propaganda replaces philosophy; he who frames the debate wins (and thus imposes his will on others). Have you ever wondered why the Left loves George Lakoff so much? He speaks their truth to them, insofar as they can use the word truth.

I do not deny that word choice is very important, and “framing the debate” matters immensely in persuasion. However, true thinking ought to rise above rhetoric. It must strive to overcome the limitations of convention and of the routine, well worn paths of the herd. Yet, it is this possibility that Leftist nihilists deny. For the honest ones, it is all about the will to power.

I certainly do not think that low level left wing politicians consciously entertain decadent Nietzschean or even Derridean theories, but I do think that the general world view and assortment of values and commitments of the political Left have been fully colonized by anti-rational philosophical theories (“philosophical” taken quite liberally). The judgmental non-judgmentalism, the intolerant cult of tolerance, the dogmatic hatred of dogma, and the (pseudo-)rational undermining of reason that pervade Leftist thinking all seep from the same murky waters. Dear Rosa Franklin may not realize the ideological genealogy of her proposal to help children through newspeak, but she has been compromised. She may genuinely wish to help “at hope” youth, but her understanding of the world has been distorted to think that words—and systems in general—are more primary than ideas and minds.

By the way, happy Saint Patrick’s Day to the Micks on the new calendar!

Posted by Joseph on Wednesday, March 17, A.D. 2010
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Saturday, March 6, A.D. 2010

American Mandarins

I read yesterday that the Transportation Security Administration was installing more full body scanners at eleven additional airports, including Cincinnati, Columbus, Reagan National, and Baltimore Washington International—the very airports I most frequently use (and I bet that they will arrive in Dayton soon enough). Each scanner costs $250,000, but no price is too steep for a federal government that spends like a sailor in port and that cares as much for the dignity and privacy of its citizens as any crass Politbüro managerial overlord.

In protest, I wrote the following to my Congressional representative and senators:

I read today that the Transportation Security Administration is installing body scanners in more airports, including DCA, BWI, and our own CVG. If one refuses to submit to this invasive and humiliating “security measure,” then one has to be pat down like a criminal by T.S.A. employees. For how long and to what degree are Americans willing to act like an enslaved people? These regulations are not fitting for a free people, and yet Americans are being reduced to non-questioning, eagerly nodding lemmings that willfully suffer in an increasingly oppressive Big Brother society.

Please work in Congress to uphold Americans’ individual dignity. Are we to sacrifice everything for some phantom “security” that the all watching state keeps on promising? I would rather the government take a more direct approach to save us from terrorism—such as not promoting American hating radical Muslims in the military, increasingly cracking down on jihadist organizations in the U.S. as well as on Saudi funded institutions whose aim is the imposition of sharia law on our Western society, and restricting immigration from countries with populations that hate the traditional American way of life and seek to replace it with an alien political ideology.

We expect our people to submit to strip searches in order to visit grandma on Thanksgiving, but we open the doors to folks whose own religion commands them to kill Jews. This is madness. As an elected official, you have the responsibility to work against such policies that harm Americans and empower people who wish our destruction.

Of course, my little bit of civic participation will not amount to much, but if everyone complained about these bastards’ attempts to control our lives, the fiends would back off. Liberty is not secured by papers in the National Archives but by the conviction of a people to maintain it. Learned Hand spoke to the heart of every true liberal when he addressed his countrymen in Central Park during the Second World War:

We have gathered here to affirm a faith, a faith in a common purpose, a common conviction, a common devotion. Some of us have chosen America as the land of our adoption; the rest have come from those who did the same. For this reason we have some right to consider ourselves a picked group, a group of those who had the courage to break from the past and brave the dangers and the loneliness of a strange land. What was the object that nerved us, or those who went before us, to this choice? We sought liberty; freedom from oppression, freedom from want, freedom to be ourselves. This we then sought; this we now believe that we are by way of winning. What do we mean when we say that first of all we seek liberty? I often wonder whether we do not rest our hopes too much upon constitutions, upon laws and upon courts. These are false hopes; believe me, these are false hopes. Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can even do much to help it. While it lies there it needs no constitution, no law, no court to save it. And what is this liberty which must lie in the hearts of men and women? It is not the ruthless, the unbridled will; it is not freedom to do as one likes. That is the denial of liberty, and leads straight to its overthrow. A society in which men recognize no check upon their freedom soon becomes a society where freedom is the possession of only a savage few; as we have learned to our sorrow.

What then is the spirit of liberty? I cannot define it; I can only tell you my own faith. The spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure that it is right; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which seeks to understand the mind of other men and women; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which weighs their interests alongside its own without bias; the spirit of liberty remembers that not even a sparrow falls to earth unheeded; the spirit of liberty is the spirit of Him who, near two thousand years ago, taught mankind that lesson it has never learned but never quite forgotten; that there may be a kingdom where the least shall be heard and considered side by side with the greatest. And now in that spirit, that spirit of an America which has never been, and which may never be; nay, which never will be except as the conscience and courage of Americans create it; yet in the spirit of that America which lies hidden in some form in the aspirations of us all; in the spirit of that America for which our young men are at this moment fighting and dying; in that spirit of liberty and of America I ask you to rise and with me pledge our faith in the glorious destiny of our beloved country.

“Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can even do much to help it” is so true. We Americans are losing this spirit; we are becoming a nation of Mandarins.

It is interesting that the forces eager to cripple American liberty originate on the Left and on the Right, both of which are willing to sacrifice American freedom to their other pet projects (such as socialist leveling or police state law and order). Similarly, we find that the American Civil Liberties Union and traditionalist American institutions (those old paleocons) oppose the slide to an increasingly Orwellian society. Shall we say that totalitarianism and opposition thereto are bipartisan endeavors?

Posted by Joseph on Saturday, March 6, A.D. 2010
Politics • (0) Comments • Permalink