0 comment Friday, October 31, 2014 | admin
I noticed that all day, the news channels were covering Iran nonstop, with shaky video footage of the street disturbances. FoxNews seems to be covering it with the most urgency, with CNN slightly less so.
I've also checked in on the FReepers to see what the consensus over there is, and the original poster of this thread
challenges those FReepers who say 'it's none of our business' and asks "...how can we watch this brutality with good conscious [sic] and do nothing to stop it?"
Answers?
I am one of those the poster denounces, who say 'it's none of our business' and 'we can't be the world's policeman.'
Many Republicans argue that as Americans, we are the ones whose job it is to speak out for 'freedom' and 'democracy' in every country, and that when necessary, we have to be ready to intervene directly so that others can also have 'freedom' and 'liberty'. If not, we are hypocrites. Some are saying that Reagan was our exemplar, and he would surely intervene to 'free' the Iranians.
I can't help cynically wondering if some of those who decry our country's lack of action (so far) on behalf of the Iranians simply enjoy being able to criticize a Democrat President for his inaction. Mind you, I am not saying he is wise in his refraining from action; I think he is simply trying to stay above it and not ''take sides'' since he has aspirations to being some kind of world leader.
However, I don't know whether America will perhaps intervene and do something at some point.
And to be honest, I don't follow the internal politics of Iran to be able to judge their situation. I don't see it as a pressing need. We have our own worries right here in our country as to our own liberty.
For me, it all comes down to the question of whether every people is 'entitled' to freedom, or fit for it, or capable of it. Are all people meant to live under some kind of 'free' republican government, or representative system? And if so, should they not also be capable of establishing it themselves eventually? If freedom is obtained for someone without their having done so themselves, will they appreciate it, or more importantly, will they have what it takes to sustain it and preserve it, once having gotten it?
To me, it seems that this idea that we have to go around bestowing freedom and democracy around the world, and be the world's guarantor of what are vaguely designated as 'human rights', is an extension of colonialism in a way. Why should we have to be 'daddy' to the world, whether sugar daddy for immigrants, or Big-Stick Carrying Daddy for the world outside?
Benjamin Harrison spoke truly when he said "We Americans have no commission from God to police the world."
And Kipling said, accurately, that what we get in return for our troubles, when we try to shoulder others' burdens is "The blame of those ye better,
The hate of those ye guard".
I've also checked in on the FReepers to see what the consensus over there is, and the original poster of this thread
challenges those FReepers who say 'it's none of our business' and asks "...how can we watch this brutality with good conscious [sic] and do nothing to stop it?"
Answers?
I am one of those the poster denounces, who say 'it's none of our business' and 'we can't be the world's policeman.'
Many Republicans argue that as Americans, we are the ones whose job it is to speak out for 'freedom' and 'democracy' in every country, and that when necessary, we have to be ready to intervene directly so that others can also have 'freedom' and 'liberty'. If not, we are hypocrites. Some are saying that Reagan was our exemplar, and he would surely intervene to 'free' the Iranians.
I can't help cynically wondering if some of those who decry our country's lack of action (so far) on behalf of the Iranians simply enjoy being able to criticize a Democrat President for his inaction. Mind you, I am not saying he is wise in his refraining from action; I think he is simply trying to stay above it and not ''take sides'' since he has aspirations to being some kind of world leader.
However, I don't know whether America will perhaps intervene and do something at some point.
And to be honest, I don't follow the internal politics of Iran to be able to judge their situation. I don't see it as a pressing need. We have our own worries right here in our country as to our own liberty.
For me, it all comes down to the question of whether every people is 'entitled' to freedom, or fit for it, or capable of it. Are all people meant to live under some kind of 'free' republican government, or representative system? And if so, should they not also be capable of establishing it themselves eventually? If freedom is obtained for someone without their having done so themselves, will they appreciate it, or more importantly, will they have what it takes to sustain it and preserve it, once having gotten it?
To me, it seems that this idea that we have to go around bestowing freedom and democracy around the world, and be the world's guarantor of what are vaguely designated as 'human rights', is an extension of colonialism in a way. Why should we have to be 'daddy' to the world, whether sugar daddy for immigrants, or Big-Stick Carrying Daddy for the world outside?
Benjamin Harrison spoke truly when he said "We Americans have no commission from God to police the world."
And Kipling said, accurately, that what we get in return for our troubles, when we try to shoulder others' burdens is "The blame of those ye better,
The hate of those ye guard".
Labels: Democracy, Interventionism, Liberty, Middle East, Non-Interventionism
0 comment Saturday, September 20, 2014 | admin
These Are Not Negotiable
''...it is incumbent upon us to very seriously and thoughtfully examine those principles that we absolutely will never cede or surrender. We have already surrendered much of the freedom that was bequeathed to us by our forefathers. We are now to the point that we must define those principles that form our "line in the sand" and that we will not surrender under any circumstance. Either that, or we must admit to ourselves that there is nothing�no principle, no freedom, no matter how sacred�that we will not surrender to Big Government.
Here, then, are those principles that, to me, must never be surrendered. To surrender these liberties to Big Government would mean to commit idolatry. It would be sacrilege. It would reduce us to slavery. It would destroy our humanity. To surrender these freedoms would mean "absolute Despotism" and would provide moral justification to the proposition that such tyranny be "thrown off."
[...]
God separated the Nations (Genesis 11). Therefore, it is absolutely necessary that we Americans maintain our independence and national sovereignty. We simply cannot (and will not) allow ourselves to become part of any hemispheric or global union.''
Many of you may have read this piece already, or discussed it elsewhere. It's by Chuck Baldwin.
He lists what he considers the absolutely essential principles, the ones we would never compromise or give up, as free people.
He starts out, wisely I think, with the right to bear arms. I think many of our Founding Fathers considered this right basic, and the only sure means of guaranteeing our other freedoms.
Please read the whole piece, and the list of Pastor Baldwin's essential principles.
On further considering the list, I think the last right, that of living as an independent and sovereign people, is central.
Pastor Baldwin mentions, importantly, that in the Christian view, the nations are and must remain separate, not blended together as in the arrogant attempt to unify the world at the Tower of Babel. The nations are meant, at least in part, as God's checks and balances. If the world were unified under one system, and that system were, or became, corrupt and tyrannical -- which would be likely -- there would be no alternative, no escape, no haven of refuge.
This is the way things are shaping up in our time: as this proposed 'global governance' takes on the air of inevitability, where will any dissenter go to opt out of such a regime? My ancestors were able to flee to this continent and build a new society here. And even now, where can we go to flee the global multiculturalist regime? Its tentacles are everywhere. There is nowhere to go.
One more reason why our sovereignty, or any people's sovereignty and independence are important to freedom: it is only by means of a kindred population of equally freedom-loving people that you and I can hope to enjoy any degree of liberty. Our Founding Fathers stated that only a people who were essentially moral, sharing common ideas of God-given rights and freedoms, could even establish, much less maintain a free republic like our original America.
Introducing a mixed multitude of people from drastically different stocks, people with differing priorities and different proclivities, disparate ideas of how to live together, guarantees the failure of liberty and freedom.
Only by having a closely-connected group of people with a common store of traditions, and agreed-upon beliefs about rights and freedoms and morals, can we have a free and peaceful home. We cannot have a mixed-multitude nation (otherwise known as ''diversity'') and have our sovereignty and independence.
On my list, if I were to make one, I think I would put Pastor Baldwin's last item as the first.
What about you?
''...it is incumbent upon us to very seriously and thoughtfully examine those principles that we absolutely will never cede or surrender. We have already surrendered much of the freedom that was bequeathed to us by our forefathers. We are now to the point that we must define those principles that form our "line in the sand" and that we will not surrender under any circumstance. Either that, or we must admit to ourselves that there is nothing�no principle, no freedom, no matter how sacred�that we will not surrender to Big Government.
Here, then, are those principles that, to me, must never be surrendered. To surrender these liberties to Big Government would mean to commit idolatry. It would be sacrilege. It would reduce us to slavery. It would destroy our humanity. To surrender these freedoms would mean "absolute Despotism" and would provide moral justification to the proposition that such tyranny be "thrown off."
[...]
God separated the Nations (Genesis 11). Therefore, it is absolutely necessary that we Americans maintain our independence and national sovereignty. We simply cannot (and will not) allow ourselves to become part of any hemispheric or global union.''
Many of you may have read this piece already, or discussed it elsewhere. It's by Chuck Baldwin.
He lists what he considers the absolutely essential principles, the ones we would never compromise or give up, as free people.
He starts out, wisely I think, with the right to bear arms. I think many of our Founding Fathers considered this right basic, and the only sure means of guaranteeing our other freedoms.
Please read the whole piece, and the list of Pastor Baldwin's essential principles.
On further considering the list, I think the last right, that of living as an independent and sovereign people, is central.
Pastor Baldwin mentions, importantly, that in the Christian view, the nations are and must remain separate, not blended together as in the arrogant attempt to unify the world at the Tower of Babel. The nations are meant, at least in part, as God's checks and balances. If the world were unified under one system, and that system were, or became, corrupt and tyrannical -- which would be likely -- there would be no alternative, no escape, no haven of refuge.
This is the way things are shaping up in our time: as this proposed 'global governance' takes on the air of inevitability, where will any dissenter go to opt out of such a regime? My ancestors were able to flee to this continent and build a new society here. And even now, where can we go to flee the global multiculturalist regime? Its tentacles are everywhere. There is nowhere to go.
One more reason why our sovereignty, or any people's sovereignty and independence are important to freedom: it is only by means of a kindred population of equally freedom-loving people that you and I can hope to enjoy any degree of liberty. Our Founding Fathers stated that only a people who were essentially moral, sharing common ideas of God-given rights and freedoms, could even establish, much less maintain a free republic like our original America.
Introducing a mixed multitude of people from drastically different stocks, people with differing priorities and different proclivities, disparate ideas of how to live together, guarantees the failure of liberty and freedom.
Only by having a closely-connected group of people with a common store of traditions, and agreed-upon beliefs about rights and freedoms and morals, can we have a free and peaceful home. We cannot have a mixed-multitude nation (otherwise known as ''diversity'') and have our sovereignty and independence.
On my list, if I were to make one, I think I would put Pastor Baldwin's last item as the first.
What about you?
Labels: Ethnonationalism, Freedom, Globalism, Liberty, Multiculturalism, Nationalism, One World, Sovereignty
0 comment Thursday, July 31, 2014 | admin
Peter Hitchins blogs about 'Conservative liberty and left wing liberty' in Britain.
...What is the difference between conservative liberty and left-wing liberty? Does it matter? (Yes) Can they be reconciled? (Not for long.) I'm grateful to Lord Hoffmann for an interesting and clever speech last week, which made this much clearer than before. Leonard Hoffmann is no fool. He knows his stuff. A lot of the speech, which you can find on the web by Googling "Universality of Human Rights" and "Hoffmann" is perceptive and clever. I am specially grateful to him for quoting Jeremy Bentham's enjoyable savaging of the ghastly French 'Declaration of the Rights of Man', the founding scripture of several gory tyrannies.
This vicious document, a series of foggy statements of the obvious, qualified with sub-clauses making them useless when most needed, actually contained one rather clear section (article 27) which would eventually allow its own authors to have their heads sliced off by the Guillotine they had themselves set up. Should we be sorry about Robespierre and the rest of them being devoured by their own revolution? In my case, not very - though nobody ever seems to learn from these events, and the Russian Bolsheviks ended up in the same fix, devoured by their own revolution.
Otherwise the French declaration was more or less like all the other scrolls of atheistical, grandiose blethers about 'rights' which have been endorsed, acclaimed and adopted all over the world since then, culminating in the United Nations Universal Declaration and the European Convention - and now rivalled by the EU's own Charter of 'fundamental' rights, soon to be used to interfere still more in our lives. Some might also draw attention to the Soviet constitution of 1936, acclaimed by many Western leftists as the finest ever drawn up, just in time for the mass purges and the Moscow Show trials.
The problem with these declarations, with their 'rights' to private life and their 'rights' to a fair trial and their 'rights' to everything else is that it all depends what you mean by private, and fair, and so forth. And what if these 'rights' come into conflict with each other? Who decides which is supreme? ''
This ties in somewhat with my post of the other day about the different kinds of revolutions, the restorationist, the Lockean, and the Jacobin kind. What Hitchins is discussing under the heading of left wing liberty is of the Jacobin variety, which always ends in tears and bloodshed, as history has shown.
As for his questions above about the definitions of ''fair', and so on, in arbitrating these liberties, the answer, as he says, is that the answers are left intentionally vague and open -- so as to give the authors of these documents the power to interpret them.
"Human Rights" have in effect become a replacement for religion. Why is that? I think it is because their supporters see that the problem of deciding what they mean will give them power. The elite increases its power by keeping the right to interpret and enforce these vague laws. It becomes the replacement for God, which is what it has always wanted to be.
Just look at the bizarre constructions placed even on the relatively clear bits of the US Bill of Rights by the American Supreme Court, which manufactured an abortion right out of nothing, drove prayer out of the schools on spurious grounds and for a while abolished the death penalty on an equally feeble pretext, then decided the penalty was all right after all. It is really hard to see how the same document can be read to say that execution is right one year, and wrong the next. It's clear that the real power comes not from the document, but from the court - and of course from those who appoint it.
[...]
That is why left-wing rights increase the power of the state. Conservative rights, as expressed in the hard, cool, terse language of the 1689 Bill of Rights, and its Scottish Equivalent the Claim of Right, and in the grand simplicity of the 1628 Petition of Right, concentrate on saying quite clearly what government cannot do. And in the space that is left, when the ruler is restrained by such things, free men can live, write, speak and think.''
What Hitchins is saying in the above passage illustrates the difference between 'negative rights' and positive rights, which is a kind of dividing line between the left-wing and conservative views of liberty which I've touched on here before in the past.
Under the theory of positive and negative rights, a negative right is a right not to be subjected to an action of another human being, or group of people, such as a state, usually in the form of abuse or coercion. A positive right is a right to be provided with something through the action of another person or the state. In theory a negative right proscribes or forbids certain actions, while a positive right prescribes or requires certain actions.''
The idea of positive liberty is generally associated with the Jacobin-style political philosophies, and because the proponents of such thought always see themselves as being the champions of all that is good and right, and as having the blueprint for utopia, they feel constrained to impose measures on people 'for their own good' or in the service of their ideals. This is the situation we are in now in the West, wherein today's leftist ideologues believe that things like 'hate speech laws' or political correctness in general are justified, thus leading to a net loss of liberty among the population.
This piece which appeared in The Australian tells of the increase in 'thought police' activity in the UK.
''BRITAIN appears to be evolving into the first modern soft totalitarian state. As a sometime teacher of political science and international law, I do not use the term totalitarian loosely.
There are no concentration camps or gulags but there are thought police with unprecedented powers to dictate ways of thinking and sniff out heresy, and there can be harsh punishments for dissent.
Nikolai Bukharin claimed one of the Bolshevik Revolution's principal tasks was "to alter people's actual psychology". Britain is not Bolshevik, but a campaign to alter people's psychology and create a new Homo britannicus is under way without even a fig leaf of disguise.
The Government is pushing ahead with legislation that will criminalise politically incorrect jokes, with a maximum punishment of up to seven years' prison. The House of Lords tried to insert a free-speech amendment, but Justice Secretary Jack Straw knocked it out. It was Straw who previously called for a redefinition of Englishness and suggested the "global baggage of empire" was linked to soccer violence by "racist and xenophobic white males". He claimed the English "propensity for violence" was used to subjugate Ireland, Scotland and Wales, and that the English as a race were "potentially very aggressive".
In the past 10 years I have collected reports of many instances of draconian punishments, including the arrest and criminal prosecution of children, for thought-crimes and offences against political correctness.''
In this related piece by Ed West in the UK Telegraph, we read similar reports of how even private conversations are being reported to the 'thought police' by self-selected informers. This is an ominous twist to things: the government does not even have to do the monitoring; the populace have become so indoctrinated, in many cases, that they themselves will voluntarily tattle to the authorities.
On the Hitchens blog, there are some good comments, like this one:
...We must ask ourselves some searching questions about why we did this. Did we really want our country to turn into a free-loader's paradise, a place where drunks rule the streets and hospitals double up as abortion clinics? Did we want cameras on every corner, our most private details held on Government computers and to be forced to carry ID cards? Did we want to complicate our lives with regulations and red tape for everythng from selling houses to starting a business? Did we want to subsidise the pensions of millions of beaurocrats from our taxes? Did we want to take in a few million immigrants, many of whom hate our way of life and want us dead? Did we want to surrender our sovereignty to Brussels or remove Brittania from our devalued coinage?
Unfortunately, asking these questions is simple. Putting right the wrong is going to be much harder.''
We in America can ask ourselves similar questions.
Another comment from the Hitchens blog:
Contributor S. Deol writes:
"If you live in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Britain, India or the U.S.A., consider yourself lucky that you live in a nation of English liberty." adding later that " All men can think, say, write and do whatever they please with reasonable restrictions."
Aye, there's the rub, as Shakespeare might have put it. I was waiting for that "with reasonable restrictions" or some such get-out expression. It is precisely the scope and definition of that adjective "reasonable" that is the crux of the whole matter.
People must have laws and laws are there to forbid things but when a nation comes under the control of rulers determined to solve all natural inequalities by piling laws upon laws - an enterprise doomed from the outset to failure in any case, that nation soon finds that it can do very little without requesting official permission or submitting to official supervision.
[...]
A modern Briton's freedom to say or write what he pleases is -as anyone knows - nowadays severely restricted by arbitrary rules of verbal expression sanctioned by no tribunal elected for the purpose and imposed on a law-abiding populace by now cowed into submission both by threat of threat of judicial punishment and by its own intellectual inability to discern the imposture by which one of its time-honoured liberties is being quietly removed.
The extent of our people's gullibility becomes plain when realises the incredible audacity of the imposition of the so-called 'political correction'. Its authors have pulled off a trick with which it would have been impossible to hoodwink our people even a couple of decades ago.
It is well known that bad language - in some cases even obscene language - eventually suffers the fate of all metaphor and loses its power to shock and what is unspeakable in one era can become only mildly distasteful or even totally anodyne in another. However, until someone decided that the British people were so habituated to buying their opinions along with their groceries that they were were ripe, so to speak, for being PC-swindled, the semantic traffic had, as far as I know, never gone in the opposite direction.
Bad words had sometimes become good but I can think of no good words which had before PC gone bad. And most of our gullible, tele-spoon-fed fellow-citizens have bought it hook, line and sinker.
And you talk about English liberty, sir! Don't make me laugh!''
English liberty is in fact the idea on which our American ideas of liberty are based; our Founding Fathers said that they desired 'only the rights of Englishmen.' We Americans too often imagine that we invented our idea of liberty from whole cloth, and that it is based on no antecedents, when in fact it draws from longstanding English traditions, going back at least to Magna Carta and English common law.
So it is especially sad to me to see that in Britain, the fount of many of our ideas and traditions, freedom and liberty and 'the rights of Englishmen' are under attack, if not moribund.
And as the first comment above says, 'putting right the wrong is going to be much harder', and that applies to us as well as to our cousins in the UK.
Milton! thou shouldst be living at this hour:
England hath need of thee: she is a fen
Of stagnant waters: altar, sword, and pen,
Fireside, the heroic wealth of hall and bower,
Have forfeited their ancient English dower
Of inward happiness. We are selfish men;
Oh! raise us up, return to us again;
And give us manners, virtue, freedom, power.
William Wordsworth, 'London 1802'
...What is the difference between conservative liberty and left-wing liberty? Does it matter? (Yes) Can they be reconciled? (Not for long.) I'm grateful to Lord Hoffmann for an interesting and clever speech last week, which made this much clearer than before. Leonard Hoffmann is no fool. He knows his stuff. A lot of the speech, which you can find on the web by Googling "Universality of Human Rights" and "Hoffmann" is perceptive and clever. I am specially grateful to him for quoting Jeremy Bentham's enjoyable savaging of the ghastly French 'Declaration of the Rights of Man', the founding scripture of several gory tyrannies.
This vicious document, a series of foggy statements of the obvious, qualified with sub-clauses making them useless when most needed, actually contained one rather clear section (article 27) which would eventually allow its own authors to have their heads sliced off by the Guillotine they had themselves set up. Should we be sorry about Robespierre and the rest of them being devoured by their own revolution? In my case, not very - though nobody ever seems to learn from these events, and the Russian Bolsheviks ended up in the same fix, devoured by their own revolution.
Otherwise the French declaration was more or less like all the other scrolls of atheistical, grandiose blethers about 'rights' which have been endorsed, acclaimed and adopted all over the world since then, culminating in the United Nations Universal Declaration and the European Convention - and now rivalled by the EU's own Charter of 'fundamental' rights, soon to be used to interfere still more in our lives. Some might also draw attention to the Soviet constitution of 1936, acclaimed by many Western leftists as the finest ever drawn up, just in time for the mass purges and the Moscow Show trials.
The problem with these declarations, with their 'rights' to private life and their 'rights' to a fair trial and their 'rights' to everything else is that it all depends what you mean by private, and fair, and so forth. And what if these 'rights' come into conflict with each other? Who decides which is supreme? ''
This ties in somewhat with my post of the other day about the different kinds of revolutions, the restorationist, the Lockean, and the Jacobin kind. What Hitchins is discussing under the heading of left wing liberty is of the Jacobin variety, which always ends in tears and bloodshed, as history has shown.
As for his questions above about the definitions of ''fair', and so on, in arbitrating these liberties, the answer, as he says, is that the answers are left intentionally vague and open -- so as to give the authors of these documents the power to interpret them.
"Human Rights" have in effect become a replacement for religion. Why is that? I think it is because their supporters see that the problem of deciding what they mean will give them power. The elite increases its power by keeping the right to interpret and enforce these vague laws. It becomes the replacement for God, which is what it has always wanted to be.
Just look at the bizarre constructions placed even on the relatively clear bits of the US Bill of Rights by the American Supreme Court, which manufactured an abortion right out of nothing, drove prayer out of the schools on spurious grounds and for a while abolished the death penalty on an equally feeble pretext, then decided the penalty was all right after all. It is really hard to see how the same document can be read to say that execution is right one year, and wrong the next. It's clear that the real power comes not from the document, but from the court - and of course from those who appoint it.
[...]
That is why left-wing rights increase the power of the state. Conservative rights, as expressed in the hard, cool, terse language of the 1689 Bill of Rights, and its Scottish Equivalent the Claim of Right, and in the grand simplicity of the 1628 Petition of Right, concentrate on saying quite clearly what government cannot do. And in the space that is left, when the ruler is restrained by such things, free men can live, write, speak and think.''
What Hitchins is saying in the above passage illustrates the difference between 'negative rights' and positive rights, which is a kind of dividing line between the left-wing and conservative views of liberty which I've touched on here before in the past.
Under the theory of positive and negative rights, a negative right is a right not to be subjected to an action of another human being, or group of people, such as a state, usually in the form of abuse or coercion. A positive right is a right to be provided with something through the action of another person or the state. In theory a negative right proscribes or forbids certain actions, while a positive right prescribes or requires certain actions.''
The idea of positive liberty is generally associated with the Jacobin-style political philosophies, and because the proponents of such thought always see themselves as being the champions of all that is good and right, and as having the blueprint for utopia, they feel constrained to impose measures on people 'for their own good' or in the service of their ideals. This is the situation we are in now in the West, wherein today's leftist ideologues believe that things like 'hate speech laws' or political correctness in general are justified, thus leading to a net loss of liberty among the population.
This piece which appeared in The Australian tells of the increase in 'thought police' activity in the UK.
''BRITAIN appears to be evolving into the first modern soft totalitarian state. As a sometime teacher of political science and international law, I do not use the term totalitarian loosely.
There are no concentration camps or gulags but there are thought police with unprecedented powers to dictate ways of thinking and sniff out heresy, and there can be harsh punishments for dissent.
Nikolai Bukharin claimed one of the Bolshevik Revolution's principal tasks was "to alter people's actual psychology". Britain is not Bolshevik, but a campaign to alter people's psychology and create a new Homo britannicus is under way without even a fig leaf of disguise.
The Government is pushing ahead with legislation that will criminalise politically incorrect jokes, with a maximum punishment of up to seven years' prison. The House of Lords tried to insert a free-speech amendment, but Justice Secretary Jack Straw knocked it out. It was Straw who previously called for a redefinition of Englishness and suggested the "global baggage of empire" was linked to soccer violence by "racist and xenophobic white males". He claimed the English "propensity for violence" was used to subjugate Ireland, Scotland and Wales, and that the English as a race were "potentially very aggressive".
In the past 10 years I have collected reports of many instances of draconian punishments, including the arrest and criminal prosecution of children, for thought-crimes and offences against political correctness.''
In this related piece by Ed West in the UK Telegraph, we read similar reports of how even private conversations are being reported to the 'thought police' by self-selected informers. This is an ominous twist to things: the government does not even have to do the monitoring; the populace have become so indoctrinated, in many cases, that they themselves will voluntarily tattle to the authorities.
On the Hitchens blog, there are some good comments, like this one:
...We must ask ourselves some searching questions about why we did this. Did we really want our country to turn into a free-loader's paradise, a place where drunks rule the streets and hospitals double up as abortion clinics? Did we want cameras on every corner, our most private details held on Government computers and to be forced to carry ID cards? Did we want to complicate our lives with regulations and red tape for everythng from selling houses to starting a business? Did we want to subsidise the pensions of millions of beaurocrats from our taxes? Did we want to take in a few million immigrants, many of whom hate our way of life and want us dead? Did we want to surrender our sovereignty to Brussels or remove Brittania from our devalued coinage?
Unfortunately, asking these questions is simple. Putting right the wrong is going to be much harder.''
We in America can ask ourselves similar questions.
Another comment from the Hitchens blog:
Contributor S. Deol writes:
"If you live in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Britain, India or the U.S.A., consider yourself lucky that you live in a nation of English liberty." adding later that " All men can think, say, write and do whatever they please with reasonable restrictions."
Aye, there's the rub, as Shakespeare might have put it. I was waiting for that "with reasonable restrictions" or some such get-out expression. It is precisely the scope and definition of that adjective "reasonable" that is the crux of the whole matter.
People must have laws and laws are there to forbid things but when a nation comes under the control of rulers determined to solve all natural inequalities by piling laws upon laws - an enterprise doomed from the outset to failure in any case, that nation soon finds that it can do very little without requesting official permission or submitting to official supervision.
[...]
A modern Briton's freedom to say or write what he pleases is -as anyone knows - nowadays severely restricted by arbitrary rules of verbal expression sanctioned by no tribunal elected for the purpose and imposed on a law-abiding populace by now cowed into submission both by threat of threat of judicial punishment and by its own intellectual inability to discern the imposture by which one of its time-honoured liberties is being quietly removed.
The extent of our people's gullibility becomes plain when realises the incredible audacity of the imposition of the so-called 'political correction'. Its authors have pulled off a trick with which it would have been impossible to hoodwink our people even a couple of decades ago.
It is well known that bad language - in some cases even obscene language - eventually suffers the fate of all metaphor and loses its power to shock and what is unspeakable in one era can become only mildly distasteful or even totally anodyne in another. However, until someone decided that the British people were so habituated to buying their opinions along with their groceries that they were were ripe, so to speak, for being PC-swindled, the semantic traffic had, as far as I know, never gone in the opposite direction.
Bad words had sometimes become good but I can think of no good words which had before PC gone bad. And most of our gullible, tele-spoon-fed fellow-citizens have bought it hook, line and sinker.
And you talk about English liberty, sir! Don't make me laugh!''
English liberty is in fact the idea on which our American ideas of liberty are based; our Founding Fathers said that they desired 'only the rights of Englishmen.' We Americans too often imagine that we invented our idea of liberty from whole cloth, and that it is based on no antecedents, when in fact it draws from longstanding English traditions, going back at least to Magna Carta and English common law.
So it is especially sad to me to see that in Britain, the fount of many of our ideas and traditions, freedom and liberty and 'the rights of Englishmen' are under attack, if not moribund.
And as the first comment above says, 'putting right the wrong is going to be much harder', and that applies to us as well as to our cousins in the UK.
Milton! thou shouldst be living at this hour:
England hath need of thee: she is a fen
Of stagnant waters: altar, sword, and pen,
Fireside, the heroic wealth of hall and bower,
Have forfeited their ancient English dower
Of inward happiness. We are selfish men;
Oh! raise us up, return to us again;
And give us manners, virtue, freedom, power.
William Wordsworth, 'London 1802'
Labels: Free Speech, Freedom, Jacobinism, Leftism, Liberty, Political Correctness, Rights, Totalitarianism, United Kingdom
0 comment Sunday, July 20, 2014 | admin
On October 27, 1886, 120 years ago, President Grover Cleveland dedicated the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor.
As President Cleveland accepted the statue on behalf of American citizens, he declared "we will not forget that liberty here made her home; nor shall her chosen altar be neglected." The statue quickly became a symbol of America's humanitarianism and willingness to take in the world's "tired, poor and huddled masses"-- in the words of the poem by Emma Lazarus inscribed on the monument's pedestal -- who yearned for freedom and a better life.''
Forgive my cynicism, but the Statue and especially the maudlin poem by Emma Lazarus, which was tacked onto the pedestal only in 1903, is the source of much of the current multiculti open-borders rhetoric. If only I had a dollar for every time some open-borders zealot quoted Lazarus's poem as an argument for a 'let-em-all-in' policy.
Given the propaganda value of the statue and its overwrought poem, I wonder if this country might not have taken its unfortunate course towards Babel if the French had kept their unwanted statue, rather than giving it to us.
Think about it: the French sculptor Frederic-Auguste Bartholdi created the statue, intending it to function as a lighthouse at Suez, to be given to the Egyptian viceroy. But the viceroy was not interested. Bartholdi had to get rid of his white elephant somewhere, so, instead of an Egyptian goddess (said to be Isis), it morphed into 'Liberty Enlightening the World.'
Now I can accept the idea of a statue of Liberty giving light to the world, but how did the statue and her torch become a big advertisement saying 'Y'all come' to the whole world?
How did Liberty's torch become a flashlight showing the 'tired and the poor' the way to all the goodies?
Emma Lazarus's poem, 'The New Colossus' seems to have been a big part of the new myth of Lady Liberty, the emblem of the new polyglot, diverse America, an America which exists not as the home of Americans, but as a hostel or social service agency for whatever 'huddled masses' arrive on our shores.
If this sounds cynical, so be it. I once used to have great respect for all our national icons, but it seems the meaning of those symbols has been perverted and sold out to an agenda not of the American people's choosing.
And in point of fact, the statue was not even made by Americans, but was created in Europe for Egyptians, who rejected it. So lucky us, we got it.
Maybe in that sense it is an apt symbol for multiculturalism, with its crazyquilt motif.
But if I were to choose a national symbol, other than our flag, I would choose something like the Liberty Bell or Independence Hall, rather than Lady Liberty, who has of late become a 'lady' of easy virtue, you know: the kind who never says no to anybody.
As President Cleveland accepted the statue on behalf of American citizens, he declared "we will not forget that liberty here made her home; nor shall her chosen altar be neglected." The statue quickly became a symbol of America's humanitarianism and willingness to take in the world's "tired, poor and huddled masses"-- in the words of the poem by Emma Lazarus inscribed on the monument's pedestal -- who yearned for freedom and a better life.''
Forgive my cynicism, but the Statue and especially the maudlin poem by Emma Lazarus, which was tacked onto the pedestal only in 1903, is the source of much of the current multiculti open-borders rhetoric. If only I had a dollar for every time some open-borders zealot quoted Lazarus's poem as an argument for a 'let-em-all-in' policy.
Given the propaganda value of the statue and its overwrought poem, I wonder if this country might not have taken its unfortunate course towards Babel if the French had kept their unwanted statue, rather than giving it to us.
Think about it: the French sculptor Frederic-Auguste Bartholdi created the statue, intending it to function as a lighthouse at Suez, to be given to the Egyptian viceroy. But the viceroy was not interested. Bartholdi had to get rid of his white elephant somewhere, so, instead of an Egyptian goddess (said to be Isis), it morphed into 'Liberty Enlightening the World.'
Now I can accept the idea of a statue of Liberty giving light to the world, but how did the statue and her torch become a big advertisement saying 'Y'all come' to the whole world?
How did Liberty's torch become a flashlight showing the 'tired and the poor' the way to all the goodies?
Emma Lazarus's poem, 'The New Colossus' seems to have been a big part of the new myth of Lady Liberty, the emblem of the new polyglot, diverse America, an America which exists not as the home of Americans, but as a hostel or social service agency for whatever 'huddled masses' arrive on our shores.
If this sounds cynical, so be it. I once used to have great respect for all our national icons, but it seems the meaning of those symbols has been perverted and sold out to an agenda not of the American people's choosing.
And in point of fact, the statue was not even made by Americans, but was created in Europe for Egyptians, who rejected it. So lucky us, we got it.
Maybe in that sense it is an apt symbol for multiculturalism, with its crazyquilt motif.
But if I were to choose a national symbol, other than our flag, I would choose something like the Liberty Bell or Independence Hall, rather than Lady Liberty, who has of late become a 'lady' of easy virtue, you know: the kind who never says no to anybody.
0 comment Monday, July 14, 2014 | admin
As this Memorial Day closes, as we commemorate our fallen soldiers, it's fitting to reflect on the state of our Republic. And in so doing, it's hard not to question whether we are still the great and free country that generations of our forefathers fought to establish and defend, and for which many of them gave their lives.
As I write this, it seems to me that our country is in dire peril. Our traditions, our way of life, which are uniquely American, are now being undermined and eroded. Our sovereignty is under attack. I could go on enumerating the challenges we are up against, but we know them all too well, those of us who care deeply about our country and our people.
But the biggest danger sign to me is that we seem to have lost our representative form of government. It appears as though 'we, the people' are no longer the repositories of power in our country. 'Our' leaders apparently no longer answer to us; they seem not only to be operating outside the will of the American people, but in open and brazen defiance of the will of the people.
There is no better evidence of this than the current borders crisis, in which 'our' leaders defiantly refuse to control our borders and enforce the laws of the land. The fact that they have forced this 'amnesty' atrocity on us, and our seeming helplessness in trying to stop the open borders juggernaut, suggests that our elected officials have gone rogue. We no longer seem to have representation, except for a few isolated voices in Congress. And one wonders if even these voices in the wilderness will eventually 'compromise' away what is left of our sovereignty. There is less faith in our system and our 'leadership' than at any time in my memory.
Since we, the people, seem no longer relevant to our electeds, who exactly are they beholden to? Whose bidding are they doing, since they are obviously not doing ours? There are many possible answers to that question. Without wandering into 'tinfoil hat' territory and indulging in conspiracy-theory-mongering, it's hard to explain the behavior of our electeds.
The great Thomas Jefferson said, in 1787, 'The people are the only sure reliance for the preservation of our liberty.'
It is so important to remember this; we can't expect the government to solve the problem when it seems that our leaders are compromised, and they are part of the problem.
But if Jefferson was right (and he usually was), then it's up to us, you and me, America.
And the good news is that more and more of us are awakening to the crisis the Republic is facing. The bad news, however, is that many of our people are so afflicted by this dread disease called 'Political Correctness' that they are debilitated and rendered helpless by it.
Unfortunately these are the very people who are the only real hope for America.
Read any commentary by a patriotic American: most of them are sounding the alarm about the borders and sovereignty crisis, but they are hindered by their obvious compulsion to heed the rules of Political Correct discourse, and they render their words useless by injecting all kinds of PC disclaimers, protestations about their motives. An example is the popular requirement that the commentator say 'I'm all in favor of any and all legal immigration' or 'I'm no racist; Mexicans are hard-working, good-hearted people' and so on. The air of defensiveness is palpable. The same mealy-mouthed discourse is heard on TV discussions, even on such hard-line shows such as Lou Dobbs. Someone, usually the conservative present, will mouth these formulas, as a kind of incantation to ward off the accusations of 'xenophobia' or 'racism'.
Visit any message board or forum where illegal immigration is discussed: you will find a lot of tough-talking people saying the same apologetic statements, which nullify all their bluster and tough talk. Everyone, even the 'hard-line' conservatives and patriots, seems hypnotized by the PC spell. Everyone is intimidated, and afraid to utter the wrong words.
On some patriotic forums, even slang words like 'wetback' (which hardly seems to me worthy of such censure) are forbidden, and their use will cause great consternation and probable banning of the offender. On such forums there are people who claim to be of Hispanic ancestry who will race-bait anyone who veers too close to the line, as in criticizing legal immigration (only illegal immigration may be criticized, because someone somewhere has decreed that to criticize legal immigration is prima facie proof of 'racism'). Criticizing Mexican culture or behavior is also proof of 'racism' according to the rule-makers. In essence, these 'conservatives' who participate are being compelled to accept one of the main premises of multiculturalism: the idea that all cultures are equal, and that to prefer one's own culture is 'racist'. Also implicit is the leftist idea that all peoples are interchangeable, and that it doesn't matter who immigrates to a given country; all peoples are the same, with the same potential for compatibility with other peoples. Of course this all flies in the face of common sense, and real life experience, and even more, it is at odds with what our Founding Fathers believed and stated when they founded this country.
It's creepily similar, this constricting of our discourse, this enforcing of arbitrary limits, to the system that prevailed in the old Communist countries, where people denounced neighbors, co-workers, even family members for deviating from the accepted party line. Offenders were publicly castigated, and at worst, packed off to a re-education camp. So far, we don't have 're-education camps' but we do have mandatory 'sensitivity training' and 'diversity education.' It's all the same, and it's all wrong. Yet most of us meekly acquiesce to this curtailing of our freedom of thought and speech.
As long as we do so, what hope is there that we can defend our country, if we are afraid to offend with mere words? We are in essence putting manacles on ourselves, and leaving ourselves vulnerable. We would sooner give up our country and our way of life, it seems, than be called 'xenophobic' or 'racist' or 'nativist' or whatever other schoolyard taunts resorted to by our intellectually-impoverished enemies. If we perish as a country, and become just a province of Mexico -- or perhaps a part of some soulless 'North American Community' we will have allowed it because we have become a timid, PC-whipped people.
The late, great Balint Vazsonyi, who was a writer and concert pianist who immigrated from Communist Hungary many years ago, wrote in 'America's Thirty Years' War' about the encroachment of Cultural Marxism, or Political Correctness, and about how this was weakening America. He warned against this creeping leftism and its crippling effects. But did anyone take his warnings to heart? He knew totalitarianism when he saw it, coming from a Communist regime. And he valued American freedoms, having known their lack in his country of birth. He knew what he was talking about, and I hope Americans will wake up from the PC trance and stand up for our freedoms and our sovereignty, before it is too late.
To do less is to dishonor the brave soldiers we are remembering on Memorial Day.
As I write this, it seems to me that our country is in dire peril. Our traditions, our way of life, which are uniquely American, are now being undermined and eroded. Our sovereignty is under attack. I could go on enumerating the challenges we are up against, but we know them all too well, those of us who care deeply about our country and our people.
But the biggest danger sign to me is that we seem to have lost our representative form of government. It appears as though 'we, the people' are no longer the repositories of power in our country. 'Our' leaders apparently no longer answer to us; they seem not only to be operating outside the will of the American people, but in open and brazen defiance of the will of the people.
There is no better evidence of this than the current borders crisis, in which 'our' leaders defiantly refuse to control our borders and enforce the laws of the land. The fact that they have forced this 'amnesty' atrocity on us, and our seeming helplessness in trying to stop the open borders juggernaut, suggests that our elected officials have gone rogue. We no longer seem to have representation, except for a few isolated voices in Congress. And one wonders if even these voices in the wilderness will eventually 'compromise' away what is left of our sovereignty. There is less faith in our system and our 'leadership' than at any time in my memory.
Since we, the people, seem no longer relevant to our electeds, who exactly are they beholden to? Whose bidding are they doing, since they are obviously not doing ours? There are many possible answers to that question. Without wandering into 'tinfoil hat' territory and indulging in conspiracy-theory-mongering, it's hard to explain the behavior of our electeds.
The great Thomas Jefferson said, in 1787, 'The people are the only sure reliance for the preservation of our liberty.'
It is so important to remember this; we can't expect the government to solve the problem when it seems that our leaders are compromised, and they are part of the problem.
But if Jefferson was right (and he usually was), then it's up to us, you and me, America.
And the good news is that more and more of us are awakening to the crisis the Republic is facing. The bad news, however, is that many of our people are so afflicted by this dread disease called 'Political Correctness' that they are debilitated and rendered helpless by it.
Unfortunately these are the very people who are the only real hope for America.
Read any commentary by a patriotic American: most of them are sounding the alarm about the borders and sovereignty crisis, but they are hindered by their obvious compulsion to heed the rules of Political Correct discourse, and they render their words useless by injecting all kinds of PC disclaimers, protestations about their motives. An example is the popular requirement that the commentator say 'I'm all in favor of any and all legal immigration' or 'I'm no racist; Mexicans are hard-working, good-hearted people' and so on. The air of defensiveness is palpable. The same mealy-mouthed discourse is heard on TV discussions, even on such hard-line shows such as Lou Dobbs. Someone, usually the conservative present, will mouth these formulas, as a kind of incantation to ward off the accusations of 'xenophobia' or 'racism'.
Visit any message board or forum where illegal immigration is discussed: you will find a lot of tough-talking people saying the same apologetic statements, which nullify all their bluster and tough talk. Everyone, even the 'hard-line' conservatives and patriots, seems hypnotized by the PC spell. Everyone is intimidated, and afraid to utter the wrong words.
On some patriotic forums, even slang words like 'wetback' (which hardly seems to me worthy of such censure) are forbidden, and their use will cause great consternation and probable banning of the offender. On such forums there are people who claim to be of Hispanic ancestry who will race-bait anyone who veers too close to the line, as in criticizing legal immigration (only illegal immigration may be criticized, because someone somewhere has decreed that to criticize legal immigration is prima facie proof of 'racism'). Criticizing Mexican culture or behavior is also proof of 'racism' according to the rule-makers. In essence, these 'conservatives' who participate are being compelled to accept one of the main premises of multiculturalism: the idea that all cultures are equal, and that to prefer one's own culture is 'racist'. Also implicit is the leftist idea that all peoples are interchangeable, and that it doesn't matter who immigrates to a given country; all peoples are the same, with the same potential for compatibility with other peoples. Of course this all flies in the face of common sense, and real life experience, and even more, it is at odds with what our Founding Fathers believed and stated when they founded this country.
It's creepily similar, this constricting of our discourse, this enforcing of arbitrary limits, to the system that prevailed in the old Communist countries, where people denounced neighbors, co-workers, even family members for deviating from the accepted party line. Offenders were publicly castigated, and at worst, packed off to a re-education camp. So far, we don't have 're-education camps' but we do have mandatory 'sensitivity training' and 'diversity education.' It's all the same, and it's all wrong. Yet most of us meekly acquiesce to this curtailing of our freedom of thought and speech.
As long as we do so, what hope is there that we can defend our country, if we are afraid to offend with mere words? We are in essence putting manacles on ourselves, and leaving ourselves vulnerable. We would sooner give up our country and our way of life, it seems, than be called 'xenophobic' or 'racist' or 'nativist' or whatever other schoolyard taunts resorted to by our intellectually-impoverished enemies. If we perish as a country, and become just a province of Mexico -- or perhaps a part of some soulless 'North American Community' we will have allowed it because we have become a timid, PC-whipped people.
The late, great Balint Vazsonyi, who was a writer and concert pianist who immigrated from Communist Hungary many years ago, wrote in 'America's Thirty Years' War' about the encroachment of Cultural Marxism, or Political Correctness, and about how this was weakening America. He warned against this creeping leftism and its crippling effects. But did anyone take his warnings to heart? He knew totalitarianism when he saw it, coming from a Communist regime. And he valued American freedoms, having known their lack in his country of birth. He knew what he was talking about, and I hope Americans will wake up from the PC trance and stand up for our freedoms and our sovereignty, before it is too late.
To do less is to dishonor the brave soldiers we are remembering on Memorial Day.
Labels: Liberty, Preservation
0 comment Sunday, June 29, 2014 | admin
I don't know about the rest of you, but I find it dizzying to keep up with the changes that are underway in this country, as seen in each day's news. And I think that the people in power now are rather giddy from the ease with which they are able to work these drastic changes. I think they are positively shocked at how easy it has been to work their will.
Look back on the last few months and ponder how quickly the promised 'change' has come, and none of this change, as far as I can see, promises good things.
James Lewis says, of the new administration, in the above-linked article from American Thinker:
These are not just rank amateurs, they are willfully ignorant amateurs, who also happen to be grandiose narcissists, and who now have free reign over the levers of power in the United States. We are all watching the Titanic steaming full speed ahead right before that diamond-hard iceberg tears off all the steel rivets from her skin. If you're not aghast, you're just not paying attention.''
And yes, I am aghast, and most of all, aghast at the recognition that many Americans are not equally aghast. That's one of the most troubling parts of the whole situation.
Still, there are some sane people still in possession of the keenness of judgment to recognize what is going on. Karen De Coster is one such person.
The speed with which the federal government intends to take over private institutions and usurp states� rights and individual autonomy is unprecedented. When the Bush-Obama regime maneuvers are compared to the Hoover-FDR New Deal era, it looks like today�s hare vs. yesterday�s turtle. The state�s various propaganda arms, from big media to institutionalized special interest forces, are being empowered to publicize and sell the agenda of the totalitarian state by painting it in glossy colors that warm the hearts of unresisting Americans. There are, however, growing pockets of dissenters who conclude that life, liberty, property, and the futures of their children are more important than the trivial things that occupy the minds of the submissive class. For that reason, the state�s militarized police force, which has been given unparalleled powers by the contrived crises following 9-11, has snowballed in size and is being fortified in expectation of confronting rebellion from those citizens who intend to resist the tyranny of an over-reaching Leviathan.''
She discusses a topic to which we keep returning lately: the state sovereignty movement, and the increasing talk of secession from various quarters. She notes that there has been, and remains, a knee-jerk resistance to the idea and a discomfort with it as being in the realm of extremism. There are, as she notes of the libertarian movement, people who scoff at talk of secession and ask for what they consider more 'practical' solutions, 'practical' meaning:
''....the code word for something that is acceptable to the majority of the Oprahized masses. This kind of thought is known as "libertarian lite," or as I call it, "car wash libertarianism." The car wash libertarians persuade others � "especially those new to libertarianism � to stay away from the radical, "crazy" stuff and hold true to the agenda of getting "our people" elected through legitimate political means. The car wash libertarians still have a voice in the modern LP, which is also known as GOP 2.0. These libertarians are in the game not for reasons of deep-rooted principles and love of liberty, but for the social, bonding aspects, with some mild libertarianism sprinkled on the side. They love attending their local meetings and dinners each month and discussing who is going to run for what local post, and when, and applying strategy.''
Yes, there are these people among 'conservatives' as well. And many of them obstinately refuse to recognize that we are running out of time for what they call 'practical', gradual options.
The rapid-fire socialization of America, I hope, will have the effect of turning many of these libertarians toward more radical plans of action.
''The Feds are engaged in a sweeping series of measures to take complete control of the financial system (which is forever destroyed) and selected business entities; ratchet up plans for perpetual war; socialize health care; further implant federalized education and criminalize homeschooling; grab guns and ammo; remove children from the homes of dissenters; commence race wars and class wars; force young adults into mandatory state service camps; send protesters to FEMA camps; and on and on and on.
At this point, none of this can be undone through time-consuming, political means. Rahm Emanuel, Eric Holder, and the other agents of Obama's unfreedom brigade were brought to Washington D.C. for one very specific purpose: to centralize every last bit of property and life and put it all under federal rule, from money to education to personal behavior. Note the condescending and arrogant behavior of King Obama on the 60 Minutes television show as he laughed at the inability of majority opinion to do a damn thing to stop his freight train of power grabs and federal takeovers.
Perhaps the most significant move on the part of the Feds, outside of crushing the free market through rapid nationalization, is the move on the part of the centralizers to extinguish the single most important characteristic of a free society � the right to bear arms. A society in which individuals cannot bear arms is a society doomed to eternal serfdom and oppression from self-serving overlords.''
Read the rest at the link.
The last sentence in the second paragraph above, about 'sending protesters to FEMA camps', is an idea that has been rumored for some time now, and the more cautious consider it to be urban legend or tinfoil-hat conspiracy theory. I am not sure what to believe on that, but there is little doubt about the accuracy of the rest of the agenda she delineates in the excerpt above; the measures mentioned are all well within the realm of fact and public record.
All of this should be enough to galvanize the 'practical' people into a realization that it is much later than we like to think, and that things are proceeding very rapidly. Maybe it's time to look for less 'practical' yet more effective solutions if we do not want to be dragged further into this new order of which we've heard so much. We may no longer have the luxury of being able to hope for 'throwing the rascals out in 2012' or even in 2010.
While we still have some freedom left, time to use it or lose it.
Look back on the last few months and ponder how quickly the promised 'change' has come, and none of this change, as far as I can see, promises good things.
James Lewis says, of the new administration, in the above-linked article from American Thinker:
These are not just rank amateurs, they are willfully ignorant amateurs, who also happen to be grandiose narcissists, and who now have free reign over the levers of power in the United States. We are all watching the Titanic steaming full speed ahead right before that diamond-hard iceberg tears off all the steel rivets from her skin. If you're not aghast, you're just not paying attention.''
And yes, I am aghast, and most of all, aghast at the recognition that many Americans are not equally aghast. That's one of the most troubling parts of the whole situation.
Still, there are some sane people still in possession of the keenness of judgment to recognize what is going on. Karen De Coster is one such person.
The speed with which the federal government intends to take over private institutions and usurp states� rights and individual autonomy is unprecedented. When the Bush-Obama regime maneuvers are compared to the Hoover-FDR New Deal era, it looks like today�s hare vs. yesterday�s turtle. The state�s various propaganda arms, from big media to institutionalized special interest forces, are being empowered to publicize and sell the agenda of the totalitarian state by painting it in glossy colors that warm the hearts of unresisting Americans. There are, however, growing pockets of dissenters who conclude that life, liberty, property, and the futures of their children are more important than the trivial things that occupy the minds of the submissive class. For that reason, the state�s militarized police force, which has been given unparalleled powers by the contrived crises following 9-11, has snowballed in size and is being fortified in expectation of confronting rebellion from those citizens who intend to resist the tyranny of an over-reaching Leviathan.''
She discusses a topic to which we keep returning lately: the state sovereignty movement, and the increasing talk of secession from various quarters. She notes that there has been, and remains, a knee-jerk resistance to the idea and a discomfort with it as being in the realm of extremism. There are, as she notes of the libertarian movement, people who scoff at talk of secession and ask for what they consider more 'practical' solutions, 'practical' meaning:
''....the code word for something that is acceptable to the majority of the Oprahized masses. This kind of thought is known as "libertarian lite," or as I call it, "car wash libertarianism." The car wash libertarians persuade others � "especially those new to libertarianism � to stay away from the radical, "crazy" stuff and hold true to the agenda of getting "our people" elected through legitimate political means. The car wash libertarians still have a voice in the modern LP, which is also known as GOP 2.0. These libertarians are in the game not for reasons of deep-rooted principles and love of liberty, but for the social, bonding aspects, with some mild libertarianism sprinkled on the side. They love attending their local meetings and dinners each month and discussing who is going to run for what local post, and when, and applying strategy.''
Yes, there are these people among 'conservatives' as well. And many of them obstinately refuse to recognize that we are running out of time for what they call 'practical', gradual options.
The rapid-fire socialization of America, I hope, will have the effect of turning many of these libertarians toward more radical plans of action.
''The Feds are engaged in a sweeping series of measures to take complete control of the financial system (which is forever destroyed) and selected business entities; ratchet up plans for perpetual war; socialize health care; further implant federalized education and criminalize homeschooling; grab guns and ammo; remove children from the homes of dissenters; commence race wars and class wars; force young adults into mandatory state service camps; send protesters to FEMA camps; and on and on and on.
At this point, none of this can be undone through time-consuming, political means. Rahm Emanuel, Eric Holder, and the other agents of Obama's unfreedom brigade were brought to Washington D.C. for one very specific purpose: to centralize every last bit of property and life and put it all under federal rule, from money to education to personal behavior. Note the condescending and arrogant behavior of King Obama on the 60 Minutes television show as he laughed at the inability of majority opinion to do a damn thing to stop his freight train of power grabs and federal takeovers.
Perhaps the most significant move on the part of the Feds, outside of crushing the free market through rapid nationalization, is the move on the part of the centralizers to extinguish the single most important characteristic of a free society � the right to bear arms. A society in which individuals cannot bear arms is a society doomed to eternal serfdom and oppression from self-serving overlords.''
Read the rest at the link.
The last sentence in the second paragraph above, about 'sending protesters to FEMA camps', is an idea that has been rumored for some time now, and the more cautious consider it to be urban legend or tinfoil-hat conspiracy theory. I am not sure what to believe on that, but there is little doubt about the accuracy of the rest of the agenda she delineates in the excerpt above; the measures mentioned are all well within the realm of fact and public record.
All of this should be enough to galvanize the 'practical' people into a realization that it is much later than we like to think, and that things are proceeding very rapidly. Maybe it's time to look for less 'practical' yet more effective solutions if we do not want to be dragged further into this new order of which we've heard so much. We may no longer have the luxury of being able to hope for 'throwing the rascals out in 2012' or even in 2010.
While we still have some freedom left, time to use it or lose it.
Labels: Jeffersonian Principles, Liberty, Secession, Socialism, Sovereignty Movement, State Sovereignty, Tenth Amendment
0 comment Friday, June 13, 2014 | admin
Here/s a rather interesting post at What's Wrong With the World, having to do with today's 'conservatism' and its relation to the dominant liberalism of our time.
"Conservatism" is in our time not conservatism but right-liberalism: political liberalism with a few 'conservative' unprincipled exceptions. The exceptions are unprincipled in the sense that they are not founded in our liberalism, and we for the most part don't recognize their incompatibility with our own liberalism. For a while that meant that 'conservatism' was classical liberalism; now it means, for the most part, culturally 'big tent' neoconservatism. In general it means 'whatever liberalism was about 30 or 50 years ago'.
So looking beyond the election of this very moment, the way to beat the Left politically, and (among other things) effectively save the children being massacred by the acolytes of Moloch -- the only way to beat the Left politically, as an eminently practical concern -- is to stop becoming the Left, through a quasi-Hegelian process which seems to take about two generations.''
In this post, Zippy Catholic decries the lack of an ''anchor political conservatism" which would be an effective counter to the dominant core worldview of the liberal.
The first commenter on the thread asks for a definition of liberalism, and then asks ''What is the antithesis of liberalism?"
I've read the existing comments, and there are several, but it seems no one has come up with a solid definition as requested.
We've covered similar territory on this blog, as my longtime readers will remember. So I won't attempt to re-plow that same ground, but any of you who can offer a good definition of liberalism are welcome to do so.
The whole discussion also brings into play the idea of liberty vs. equality, which has also been a recurring discussion on this blog, and it is an important idea that is not discussed or considered as it should be today. It is very much at the heart of what distinguishes liberals and 'conservatives', though of course I will reiterate that even 'conservatives' these days are imbued with the core ideas of liberalism. And the idea of liberty and freedom are constant themes on both ends of the political spectrum, though each side has differing ideas on what actually constitutes 'liberty' or freedom. Both sides constantly evoke 'liberty' and 'freedom' and yet they are not saying the same things when they use those words.
Do liberals, for example, support freedom of association? Their support of anti-discrimination laws, which deny freedom of association, show that they ultimately don't believe we have freedom of association.
Do they support our freedom to arm ourselves? .
Or our right to freedom of speech and freedom of thought? Only if we use that 'freedom' to say politically correct things, or to think the correct liberal thoughts.
And on it goes.
But the liberal worldview is terribly flawed in that it believes that 'equality' can coexist with freedom or liberty.
The discussion makes me think of this statement by Alexander Hamilton:
Inequality will exist as long as liberty exists. It unavoidably results from that very liberty itself. ''
Liberals don't see, or refuse to see, that we cannot ever have equality without some kind of strong hand to enforce it, which inevitably restricts freedom and liberty.
'Equal housing opportunity' means that landlords lose their right to rent to people of their choosing. And landlords are allowed to discriminate based on credit ratings, income, employment and various other things, but they are forbidden to discriminate on racial/ethnic/religious grounds, because ''all men are created equal.''
(Jefferson obviously lacked prescience when he insisted on that phrase; he obviously didn't foresee the perverted uses to which that phrase has been put.)
Equal opportunity in employment has come to mean affirmative action requirements, filling slots with people of the requisite color or ethnicity, or gender.
The illusory goal of equal outcomes in education has meant the dumbing-down of the schools nationwide, as well as the denial of the right of the majority students to get a good education. The many are being sacrificed in the name of the self-esteem of the few -- all for the sake of preserving this fallacy that we are all equal, if we only 'level the playing field' and rig the system to help the less able to 'excel'.
The recent sub-prime mortgage debacle (which is still playing out) was in large part likely traceable to the misguided effort to create 'equality' in home ownership and to bring minorities into more 'exclusive' neighborhoods previously dominated by Whites.
The effort to stamp out all vestiges of 'discrimination' has meant the stamping-out of standards in every area of life -- so as to try to establish an unnatural 'equality' which can only be maintained, if it is ever achieved, with more coercive government action and more propaganda to keep people from thinking inappropriate thoughts or holding politically incorrect ideas which question 'equality,'
Lord Acton said, many years ago, ''The deepest cause which made the French Revolution so disastrous to liberty was its theory of equality."
It seems obvious that if the utopian idea of creating absolute equality between peoples is paramount, as it is in liberalism, liberty will suffer, as in fact it is suffering.
And it follows that if Obama is elected, this obsession with enforcing 'equality' will be carried to even greater extremes than it is at present.
The consequences for liberty and for our American freedoms will be considerable, especially when we now live in a society in which ethnic/racial groups contend fiercely to further their own interests only, without regard to the general welfare.
Kinsman John Randolph long ago said:
"The principle of liberty and equality, if coupled only with mere selfishness, will make men only devils, each trying to be independent that he may fight only for his own interest."
And to return to the subject of 'core beliefs' of conservatism, one of the ways in which today's conservatives have been subverted by liberalism is the embrace of a kind of faux-populism or egalitarianism. Just wander over to any of the big Republican forums and notice the great number of comments disparaging any kind of social hierarchy; everybody professes to be a hard-core egalitarian and (small-d) democrat and disparages the idea of social ranks. Because our forefathers rejected British royal rule, we tend to jeer the whole idea of aristocracy or royalty. However, the idea of a monarchy in this country was considered, and we've probably all heard that George Washington was offered the crown, though he declined it.
But it seems that most American conservatives embrace the idea of 'democracy' although our forefathers rightly disdained that idea, and they embrace 'equality' as an abstract idea, often without really considering what that ideal implies if followed to its extreme, as with the liberals and leftists.
As to some kind of conservative credo or set of core principles, it seems that every now and then, even here on this blog, somebody calls for a 'conservative credo' or manifesto, and decries our lack of an ideology. But it seems to me that 'ideology' as such implies a set of abstract principles, which, by their abstract nature, tend to become disembodied and lacking a grounding in real human experience. Liberals are very ideological, which is the reason for their disconnect with human nature, and for their perpetual attempt to re-make human nature after their ideological pipe-dreams.
Russell Kirk was adamant that conservatism and ideology don't go together.
His 'Ten Conservative Principles' can be found at the link.
The cry of the Obamanistas is 'Change' and transformation. This is typically liberal: change for its own sake, seeking change without regard for the consequences to the larger society, the rush to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
Kirk says, of 'progress' and permanence:
Therefore the intelligent conservative endeavors to reconcile the claims of Permanence and the claims of Progression. He thinks that the liberal and the radical, blind to the just claims of Permanence, would endanger the heritage bequeathed to us, in an endeavor to hurry us into some dubious Terrestrial Paradise. The conservative, in short, favors reasoned and temperate progress; he is opposed to the cult of Progress, whose votaries believe that everything new necessarily is superior to everything old.
Change is essential to the body social, the conservative reasons, just as it is essential to the human body. A body that has ceased to renew itself has begun to die. But if that body is to be vigorous, the change must occur in a regular manner, harmonizing with the form and nature of that body; otherwise change produces a monstrous growth, a cancer, which devours its host. The conservative takes care that nothing in a society should ever be wholly old, and that nothing should ever be wholly new. This is the means of the conservation of a nation, quite as it is the means of conservation of a living organism. Just how much change a society requires, and what sort of change, depend upon the circumstances of an age and a nation.''
As to a manifesto or a plan which we need to counter the left, or as to a plan for restoring what has been lost to liberalism's manic quest for utopia, we have an adequate blueprint in the traditional society that existed in America over the last few centuries. Look to the past for the core values and principles on which we sustained this country. Our ancestors were wise people; they weren't perfect, and no perfect society exists. Traditional American ways served us very well, up until the upheavals of the 50s, 60s and thereafter. What has happened since then has been a disaster; first, in rather slow motion, but now accelerating to a dangerous speed.
And there are too few ''standing athwart history, yelling 'stop'!' these days.
"Conservatism" is in our time not conservatism but right-liberalism: political liberalism with a few 'conservative' unprincipled exceptions. The exceptions are unprincipled in the sense that they are not founded in our liberalism, and we for the most part don't recognize their incompatibility with our own liberalism. For a while that meant that 'conservatism' was classical liberalism; now it means, for the most part, culturally 'big tent' neoconservatism. In general it means 'whatever liberalism was about 30 or 50 years ago'.
So looking beyond the election of this very moment, the way to beat the Left politically, and (among other things) effectively save the children being massacred by the acolytes of Moloch -- the only way to beat the Left politically, as an eminently practical concern -- is to stop becoming the Left, through a quasi-Hegelian process which seems to take about two generations.''
In this post, Zippy Catholic decries the lack of an ''anchor political conservatism" which would be an effective counter to the dominant core worldview of the liberal.
The first commenter on the thread asks for a definition of liberalism, and then asks ''What is the antithesis of liberalism?"
I've read the existing comments, and there are several, but it seems no one has come up with a solid definition as requested.
We've covered similar territory on this blog, as my longtime readers will remember. So I won't attempt to re-plow that same ground, but any of you who can offer a good definition of liberalism are welcome to do so.
The whole discussion also brings into play the idea of liberty vs. equality, which has also been a recurring discussion on this blog, and it is an important idea that is not discussed or considered as it should be today. It is very much at the heart of what distinguishes liberals and 'conservatives', though of course I will reiterate that even 'conservatives' these days are imbued with the core ideas of liberalism. And the idea of liberty and freedom are constant themes on both ends of the political spectrum, though each side has differing ideas on what actually constitutes 'liberty' or freedom. Both sides constantly evoke 'liberty' and 'freedom' and yet they are not saying the same things when they use those words.
Do liberals, for example, support freedom of association? Their support of anti-discrimination laws, which deny freedom of association, show that they ultimately don't believe we have freedom of association.
Do they support our freedom to arm ourselves? .
Or our right to freedom of speech and freedom of thought? Only if we use that 'freedom' to say politically correct things, or to think the correct liberal thoughts.
And on it goes.
But the liberal worldview is terribly flawed in that it believes that 'equality' can coexist with freedom or liberty.
The discussion makes me think of this statement by Alexander Hamilton:
Inequality will exist as long as liberty exists. It unavoidably results from that very liberty itself. ''
Liberals don't see, or refuse to see, that we cannot ever have equality without some kind of strong hand to enforce it, which inevitably restricts freedom and liberty.
'Equal housing opportunity' means that landlords lose their right to rent to people of their choosing. And landlords are allowed to discriminate based on credit ratings, income, employment and various other things, but they are forbidden to discriminate on racial/ethnic/religious grounds, because ''all men are created equal.''
(Jefferson obviously lacked prescience when he insisted on that phrase; he obviously didn't foresee the perverted uses to which that phrase has been put.)
Equal opportunity in employment has come to mean affirmative action requirements, filling slots with people of the requisite color or ethnicity, or gender.
The illusory goal of equal outcomes in education has meant the dumbing-down of the schools nationwide, as well as the denial of the right of the majority students to get a good education. The many are being sacrificed in the name of the self-esteem of the few -- all for the sake of preserving this fallacy that we are all equal, if we only 'level the playing field' and rig the system to help the less able to 'excel'.
The recent sub-prime mortgage debacle (which is still playing out) was in large part likely traceable to the misguided effort to create 'equality' in home ownership and to bring minorities into more 'exclusive' neighborhoods previously dominated by Whites.
The effort to stamp out all vestiges of 'discrimination' has meant the stamping-out of standards in every area of life -- so as to try to establish an unnatural 'equality' which can only be maintained, if it is ever achieved, with more coercive government action and more propaganda to keep people from thinking inappropriate thoughts or holding politically incorrect ideas which question 'equality,'
Lord Acton said, many years ago, ''The deepest cause which made the French Revolution so disastrous to liberty was its theory of equality."
It seems obvious that if the utopian idea of creating absolute equality between peoples is paramount, as it is in liberalism, liberty will suffer, as in fact it is suffering.
And it follows that if Obama is elected, this obsession with enforcing 'equality' will be carried to even greater extremes than it is at present.
The consequences for liberty and for our American freedoms will be considerable, especially when we now live in a society in which ethnic/racial groups contend fiercely to further their own interests only, without regard to the general welfare.
Kinsman John Randolph long ago said:
"The principle of liberty and equality, if coupled only with mere selfishness, will make men only devils, each trying to be independent that he may fight only for his own interest."
And to return to the subject of 'core beliefs' of conservatism, one of the ways in which today's conservatives have been subverted by liberalism is the embrace of a kind of faux-populism or egalitarianism. Just wander over to any of the big Republican forums and notice the great number of comments disparaging any kind of social hierarchy; everybody professes to be a hard-core egalitarian and (small-d) democrat and disparages the idea of social ranks. Because our forefathers rejected British royal rule, we tend to jeer the whole idea of aristocracy or royalty. However, the idea of a monarchy in this country was considered, and we've probably all heard that George Washington was offered the crown, though he declined it.
But it seems that most American conservatives embrace the idea of 'democracy' although our forefathers rightly disdained that idea, and they embrace 'equality' as an abstract idea, often without really considering what that ideal implies if followed to its extreme, as with the liberals and leftists.
As to some kind of conservative credo or set of core principles, it seems that every now and then, even here on this blog, somebody calls for a 'conservative credo' or manifesto, and decries our lack of an ideology. But it seems to me that 'ideology' as such implies a set of abstract principles, which, by their abstract nature, tend to become disembodied and lacking a grounding in real human experience. Liberals are very ideological, which is the reason for their disconnect with human nature, and for their perpetual attempt to re-make human nature after their ideological pipe-dreams.
Russell Kirk was adamant that conservatism and ideology don't go together.
His 'Ten Conservative Principles' can be found at the link.
The cry of the Obamanistas is 'Change' and transformation. This is typically liberal: change for its own sake, seeking change without regard for the consequences to the larger society, the rush to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
Kirk says, of 'progress' and permanence:
Therefore the intelligent conservative endeavors to reconcile the claims of Permanence and the claims of Progression. He thinks that the liberal and the radical, blind to the just claims of Permanence, would endanger the heritage bequeathed to us, in an endeavor to hurry us into some dubious Terrestrial Paradise. The conservative, in short, favors reasoned and temperate progress; he is opposed to the cult of Progress, whose votaries believe that everything new necessarily is superior to everything old.
Change is essential to the body social, the conservative reasons, just as it is essential to the human body. A body that has ceased to renew itself has begun to die. But if that body is to be vigorous, the change must occur in a regular manner, harmonizing with the form and nature of that body; otherwise change produces a monstrous growth, a cancer, which devours its host. The conservative takes care that nothing in a society should ever be wholly old, and that nothing should ever be wholly new. This is the means of the conservation of a nation, quite as it is the means of conservation of a living organism. Just how much change a society requires, and what sort of change, depend upon the circumstances of an age and a nation.''
As to a manifesto or a plan which we need to counter the left, or as to a plan for restoring what has been lost to liberalism's manic quest for utopia, we have an adequate blueprint in the traditional society that existed in America over the last few centuries. Look to the past for the core values and principles on which we sustained this country. Our ancestors were wise people; they weren't perfect, and no perfect society exists. Traditional American ways served us very well, up until the upheavals of the 50s, 60s and thereafter. What has happened since then has been a disaster; first, in rather slow motion, but now accelerating to a dangerous speed.
And there are too few ''standing athwart history, yelling 'stop'!' these days.
Labels: Conservative Principles, Creeping Liberalism, Egalitarianism, Equality, Faux Conservatism, Liberty
0 comment Sunday, June 1, 2014 | admin
An American blogger says she was sexually assaulted during the airport ''security'' screening.
The article, posted on an Australian news site, drew many comments, some of them very stupid and some more reasonable. I am always dumbfounded by people of whatever nationality who think there is absolutely nothing wrong with being subjected to intimate body searches or ''naked scanners'' just to board a plane.
One comment says if we get to our destinations safely, then it's worth it. I surely hope Americans won't be so ovine and passive as to simply shrug their shoulders and acquiesce to this. I hear a lot of people saying they just won't fly (which has been my resolve for a while now) but I wonder if they'll get over that and decide they 'need' to fly after all.
One cliche that we have heard ever since 9/12/2001 is that ''if we change our lives and habits just because of terrorists, then they will have won. So let's just do everything we did before 9/11 and defy the terrorists.''
That kind of thinking exasperates me. Who started that silly meme, anyway? As far as I can discern, the terrorists are not just looking to 'change our way of life' or 'destroy our freedom', they are trying to kill people, specifically Americans and infidels. If we are wise enough not to take chances, and avoid high-risk situations, the enemy will not have won; we will have won by eluding the traps set for us. We win by staying alive and foiling their designs, not by "defiantly" dying in an avoidable attack.
I don't believe they ''hate us for our freedom''. They hate us just because of who and what we are and what we represent.
So if we 'defy' them by taking risks that are usually avoidable, and we end up dead because of it, I would think that THEN, they would have won.
So why take unnecessary risks?
I don't believe these intrusive and probably unconstitutional measures make us one bit safer. They are not really intended to make us safer. If our government wanted to protect us, it would have closed the borders on 9/11 and radically tightened our immigration laws, excluding people from terrorist-producing nations. Profile. That's the best way of making us safer. And fix our wide-open borders and our lax visa regulations.
Some have declared that these new security regulations are 'theater' to make the gullible public believe that our government is protecting us. I doubt that; I think most people are past believing that our government has our interests at heart, or that they are really serious about actually performing the main duty of government -- to protect our lives and safety, particularly from foreign invasion or attack. No, I think it's simply a show of power, and an attempt to get us more accustomed to just shuffling along obediently, and giving up more of our rights and liberties in the name of 'security.'
Personally, when I have to travel, I will choose some other method than flying.
The article, posted on an Australian news site, drew many comments, some of them very stupid and some more reasonable. I am always dumbfounded by people of whatever nationality who think there is absolutely nothing wrong with being subjected to intimate body searches or ''naked scanners'' just to board a plane.
One comment says if we get to our destinations safely, then it's worth it. I surely hope Americans won't be so ovine and passive as to simply shrug their shoulders and acquiesce to this. I hear a lot of people saying they just won't fly (which has been my resolve for a while now) but I wonder if they'll get over that and decide they 'need' to fly after all.
One cliche that we have heard ever since 9/12/2001 is that ''if we change our lives and habits just because of terrorists, then they will have won. So let's just do everything we did before 9/11 and defy the terrorists.''
That kind of thinking exasperates me. Who started that silly meme, anyway? As far as I can discern, the terrorists are not just looking to 'change our way of life' or 'destroy our freedom', they are trying to kill people, specifically Americans and infidels. If we are wise enough not to take chances, and avoid high-risk situations, the enemy will not have won; we will have won by eluding the traps set for us. We win by staying alive and foiling their designs, not by "defiantly" dying in an avoidable attack.
I don't believe they ''hate us for our freedom''. They hate us just because of who and what we are and what we represent.
So if we 'defy' them by taking risks that are usually avoidable, and we end up dead because of it, I would think that THEN, they would have won.
So why take unnecessary risks?
I don't believe these intrusive and probably unconstitutional measures make us one bit safer. They are not really intended to make us safer. If our government wanted to protect us, it would have closed the borders on 9/11 and radically tightened our immigration laws, excluding people from terrorist-producing nations. Profile. That's the best way of making us safer. And fix our wide-open borders and our lax visa regulations.
Some have declared that these new security regulations are 'theater' to make the gullible public believe that our government is protecting us. I doubt that; I think most people are past believing that our government has our interests at heart, or that they are really serious about actually performing the main duty of government -- to protect our lives and safety, particularly from foreign invasion or attack. No, I think it's simply a show of power, and an attempt to get us more accustomed to just shuffling along obediently, and giving up more of our rights and liberties in the name of 'security.'
Personally, when I have to travel, I will choose some other method than flying.
Labels: Big Government, Liberty, Privacy, Terrorism, War On Terror