Freedom – Everywhere in Chains

January 31, 2021 Leave a comment

Are you less free now than a year ago?

Are you currently free to flourish as a human?

Are you currently told to wear a mask, stay home and wait for release from house arrest?

Are you being told how you can gather with your family and your church?

Are you being told that you will need a vaccine passport so that you can travel and participate in society once again?

Has your business license become a noose around your neck?

Do you feel free to make choices about dealing with COVID-19?

Do you feel free from coercion? From arbitrary power?

Are you being told how to live your life by those who do not know you?

Do you agree with the following?

“It is true that the virtues which are less esteemed and practiced now–independence, self-reliance, and the willingness to bear risks, the readiness to back one’s own conviction against a majority, and the willingness to voluntary cooperation with one’s neighbors–are essentially those on which the of an individualist society rests. Collectivism has nothing to put in their place, and in so far as it already has destroyed then it has left a void filled by nothing but the demand for obedience and the compulsion of the individual to what is collectively decided to be good.” (emphasis mine)

― Friedrich August von Hayek, The Road to Serfdom

Collectively decided to be good is principle the 18th century Swiss philosopher and French Revolution muse Jean Jacques Rousseau was after: the “general will”, as penned in his 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen.

Some equated Rousseau’s “general will” with an agreed upon rule of law that would ensure freedom and equal treatment in society. This, at first glance, appears to be beneficial for society. Yet, freedom can be quickly disposed of when the “general will” becomes a demand for obedience and conformity to its rules and laws. Dictators and totalitarian leaders – Democrats, specifically – and their media amplifiers have no problem creating a “general will” and dispensing with your freedom.

As you have witnessed, the Democrats/Left define and perpetrate “general will” in their own ideological (and theological – “social justice”) terms. The Left has no desire for input from anyone else.

The Left’s concocted “general will” is hawked by the predominately Leftist corporate media as the generally accepted will of the people. And, since the lie is in the NYT and on MSNBC, CNN and now on Fox News, people get the impression that what they are being sold is the real deal. The critical race theory based “1619 project” is just one example of what is being peddled. Mask wearing is another. Salvation from COVID-19 by vaccine is another

Those who do not abide by the “general will” Groupthink are rubes, “bitter clingers”, “deplorables”, “racists”, and not worthy of a social media voice in the controlled “general will” narrative.

Does any of this sound familiar in light of this past year of politics playing medicine, of mandates, lockdowns, the stolen election, and the stolen “general will”? Freedom – everywhere in chains because of the imposition of “general will”.

Collectivist’s lies may make you feel like you are in sync with the “general will.” Therein, you may feel safe. Collectivism talks of multiculturalism, of humanism, of a “better world for everyone.” Individual freedom is of no importance to collectivists.

If you care about your freedom, then throw off any attachment to the collectivist “void”. Put to death the collectivist impulse once and for all. Resurrect the human that is you. I return you to the words of Friedrich Hayek.:

“Freedom to order our own conduct in the sphere where material circumstances force a choice upon us, and responsibility for the arrangement of our own life according to our own conscience, is the air in which alone moral sense grows and in which moral values are daily recreated in the free decision of the individual. Responsibility, not to a superior, but to one’s own conscience, the awareness of a duty not exacted by compulsion, the necessity to decide which of the things one values are to be sacrificed to others, and to bear the consequences of one’s own decision, are the very essence of any morals which deserve the name.”


And

“Probably it is true enough that the great majority are rarely capable of thinking independently, that on most questions they accept views which they find ready-made, and that they will be equally content if born or coaxed into one set of beliefs or another. In any society freedom of thought will probably be of direct significance only for a small minority. But this does not mean that anyone is competent, or ought to have power, to select those to whom this freedom is to be reserved. It certainly does not justify the presumption of any group of people to claim the right to determine what people ought to think or believe.”

******

The opening sentence to Rousseau’s The Social Contract:

“Man is born free and everywhere he is in chains.”

Rousseau, like many since, assumed that man is by nature a free and innocent being. He would tell you that man is not the problem. In The Social Contract he stated “Men are not naturally enemies”. He pointed to social institutions as the problem. Fast forward. Remember Barack Obama talking about the “fundamental transformation of America?”

Such a distorted vision of man is behind the ruinous ideology, i.e., Marxism, which has devasted and destroyed the lives of millions. In the effort to produce equality of results, the only equal result has been death by ideology.

Such a distorted vision of mankind is also behind the ad hoc justice being dispensed to today as “social justice.” Accordingly, people are not to be held accountable for crimes against another because of their social situation – environment is the problem, not the man. Yet, as anyone can see under ad hoc justice, a socially “just result” for the criminal does not produce an equally socially “just result” for the victim. The Left cares for one result but not the other.

As I write this, more and more of American institutions are becoming corrupted to serve the coming globalist collective. Man, who is “born free”, is willingly taking on the “chains” supplied by the institutions of the globalist collective.

To learn more about the “unconstrained vision” and before you read anything else this year, read …

A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggle by Thomas Sowell

*****

Here are two men who have shown “readiness to back one’s own conviction against a majority” (“general will” majority):

Economist Thomas Sowell:

A word about the COVID-19 hysteria from Pathologist Dr. Roger Hodkinson

Added 2-1-2021. The truth about COVID-19, masks and the lies we are being fed …

This informative video is found at the following link:

Unmasking The Truth – Dr. Lee Merritt -Omaha, Nebraska

Filed under 2021 current events, cultural Marxism, pandemic, Political Commentary, Politics, social commentary, social justice Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

“the right to be unhappy”

January 24, 2021 Leave a comment

“But I don’t want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness, I want sin.’

‘In fact,’ said Mustapha Mond, ‘you’re claiming the right to be unhappy.’

‘All right then,’ said the Savage defiantly, ‘I’m claiming the right to be unhappy.’

‘Not to mention the right to grow old and ugly and impotent; the right to have syphilis and cancer; the right to have too little to eat; the right to be lousy; the right to live in constant apprehension of what may happen tomorrow; the right to catch typhoid; the right to be tortured by unspeakable pains of every kind.’ There was a long silence.

‘I claim them all,’ said the Savage at last.

Mustapha Mond shrugged his shoulders. ‘You’re welcome,” he said.”

This conversation between John the “savage” and Mustapha Mond, Resident World Controller of Western Europe, takes place in Aldous Huxley’s dystopian science fiction novel Brave New World.

Mond had explained to John the World State’s system of castes, control and consumerism established to create order, stability and happiness. Under the World State the world’s population, economy, technology and culture are made to serve the mission statement: “Community, Identity, Stability”.

John, reared on the Savage reservation and raised on Shakespeare, rejects Mond’s world as described here:

Everyone in Mond’s society belongs: nobody experiences the pain, loneliness, and rejection that has been part of John’s character formation. Nobody in the World State ever suffers any material want, such as hunger or overcrowding. Everyone lives in a clean, new, sterile, sanitary, and bright world with lots of things to buy. Everybody is conditioned or drugged to be happy…

To John, those elements of life Mond has jettisoned are exactly what make us human. Life for John is not worth living without the possibility of deep relationships and intellectual exploration and discovery.

What brought this novel to mind is the Left’s concerted effort to produce a similar globalist World State via the Great Reset. The “public health crisis” and the (illegitimate) 2020 election are the Left’s “gain of function” mutation of our rights and laws to bring about a World State.

Leftist professors, politicians, media provoking agents, Progressives, and even the Pope would have us believe that differences of class, race, income or XYZ can be resolved  and that equality and freedom can be won by “A system of government in which the state plans and controls the economy and a single, often authoritarian party holds power, claiming to make progress toward a higher social order in which all goods are equally shared by the people.”

The Pope after the 2016 election:

“It it has been said many times and my response has always been that, if anything, it is the communists who think like Christians. Christ spoke of a society where the poor, the weak and the marginalized have the right to decide. Not demagogues, not Barabbas, but the people, the poor, whether they have faith in a transcendent God or not. It is they who must help to achieve equality and freedom”. [emphasis added]

So, are we to believe that communists think like Christians (based on the communist seizure of Acts 4:32)?

Are we to choose to live under a flag of “Community, Identity, Stability”, where the people, the poor … achieve equality and freedom, and then (theoretically) be free of worry, material want, hate, isolation, disease, and would then be happy!?

I have tried to understand the heuristic behind those choosing freedom and those choosing to be free of freedom and desirous of living in a communist state. The Brave New World suggests to me that there are those who choose fail-prone freedom over happiness and those who choose fail-safe happiness over freedom. These two views are at odds. I see the difference going to the very nature of what it means to be human.

As we heard in John’s response above and from your own experience, you know that freedom involves choice.  And, being able to choose goes to the very essence of being human, does it not?

A material object cannot choose. Artificial Intelligence cannot know the sense of adventure and surprise inherent in the act of choosing. Objects and AI cannot know a sense of failure or of happiness or of worry or of hope that a choice may bring about.  

For those who choose fail-prone freedom, life is tragic, romantic and the sum of all human potentialities. Value is created through freedom and choice: love, goodness, charity, etc. These, taking the initiative freely, will say, “I see what needs to be changed, and it starts with me.”

(Now, you don’t want to make the same choices John “the savage” did. You’ll end up in a very dark place. But you get the gist of what I am saying.)

Those who choose fail-safe happiness over fail-prone freedom, it seems to me, trade their freedom and choices for a doled-out life of (theoretical) material security and certainty. These lay the burden of responsibility for their happiness on the World State. You can see this in the growing welfare state.

These seek to avoid pain and suffering and any effort that might bring about pain and suffering inherent in a choice. These seek the material comfort and surety promised by socialism’s “workers’ paradise.” These, lacking the initiative to choose, will say “I see what needs to be changed and it starts with you.”

For, those who choose fail-safe happiness over freedom, in order to obtain fail-safe happiness, go on to coerce, cancel and control the lives of those who do not conform to the manifesto of the World State of Happiness.

Tragically, fail-prone freedom outliers are considered less than human by the World Staters and are sent to internment camps. You either live in the ‘civilized’ World State of the ‘enlightened’ ‘real’ people or you live as barely human on the Savage Reservation.

There are no families and no religion in the World State. Babies are engineered and hatched in the World State. Babies occur naturally within families on the Reservation. There is a syncretic religiosity on the Reservation. Those of the World State voyeuristically watch the savages and worship the assembly line developer Henry Ford.

When the World State requires you to give up your freedom along with your rights and your property so that it can mete out happiness in the form of physical well-being and solidarity with others in similar chains, what will happen to you? Years ago, I wanted to understand the World State of Happiness, aka, communism, and the threat it imposed on humanity.

During the early eighties I read the three volumes of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s’ The Gulag Archipelago and One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. (I doubt that Pope Francis has ever read these accounts of the devastation to human beings under communism. He prefers messaging that affirms his Marxist World State religion.)

As I learned from my reading, communism dehumanizes. And, as humans are wont to do, Solzhenitsyn rebelled against the imposition of inhumanity – a communist rule.  The rule had begun as an ideology to put things right and ended as an institution of purges, mass murders and gulag camps.

“Communism is as crude an attempt to explain society and the individual as if a surgeon were to perform his delicate operations with a meat ax. All that is subtle in human psychology and in the structure of society (which is even more complex), all of this is reduced to crude economic processes. The whole created being—man—is reduced to matter. It is characteristic that Communism is so devoid of arguments that it has none to advance against its opponents in our Communist countries. It lacks arguments and hence there is the club, the prison, the concentration camp, and insane asylums with forced confinement.”

― Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Warning to the West

What is certain if you choose fail-prone freedom over happiness is that you are “claiming the right to be unhappy.”

What is certain if you choose fail-safe happiness over freedom: your claiming the right to be happy will not be heard. For, you will have been “reduced to matter”.  Your human nature will be eradicated in your quest for security and stability, aka, happiness.

Further reading:

George Orwell’s 1984, Animal Farm

C.S. Lewis’ That Hideous Strength

Theodore Dalrymple’s The Wilder Shores of Marx: Journeys in a Vanishing World

Trump’s Top-10 Triumphs: A Last Look At A Remarkable Presidency – Issues & Insights

Added 1-25-2021:

Filed under 2021 current events, cultural Marxism, Political Commentary, Politics, social commentary, socialism, Solzhenitsyn Tagged with , , , , , , , ,

Let’s Talk Turkey

November 25, 2020 Leave a comment

Let’s Talk Turkey

But first, a word from our sponsors ….

Map of the New World 1600s
Sam Adams

“If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better than the animating contest of freedom, go home from us in peace….We ask not your counsels or your arms. Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains set lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that you were our countrymen.” ― Samuel Adams

“Democracy extends the sphere of individual freedom, socialism restricts it. Democracy attaches all possible value to each man; socialism makes each man a mere agent, a mere number. Democracy and socialism have nothing in common but one word: equality. But notice the difference: while democracy seeks equality in liberty, socialism seeks equality in restraint and servitude.”
― Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

Alexis de Tocqueville

“The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public’s money.” ― Alexis de Tocqueville

While I was on Twitter, a few years ago, I would jump in on threads where socialism and capitalism were discussed (Better, the terms were tossed about.). The anti-capitalists would denounce capitalism as “unfair” and the rich as “greedy” while insinuating “equality” and “fairness” occurred naturally within the materialist realm of socialism. As an example, they pointed to Scandinavian countries (where, amazingly, none of them had the gumption to take up residence. That would take initiative and responsibility and money on their part.)

The anti-capitalists, assuming a superior moral position, never talked in-depth about the mechanics of socialism other than it being a redistribution of wealth from “rich” to “poor” via confiscatory taxation. And, whether they were oblivious to or welcoming of the growing soft despotism in America that gives people the illusion that they are in control, I could not determine.

On Twitter there were also those who proclaimed Jesus to be a “Progressive”. They offered a litany of “Progressive” attributes assigned to Jesus, among them “anti-rich”, their presumed antithesis to “Blessed are the poor” [“…in spirit”]. There were those, too, who said that the early church was an example of socialism because the early Christian shared everything in common. Apparently, these folks had never read that Jesus warned about the dangers of the love of riches and not that someone who was rich shouldn’t be. Did these folks also not comprehend that the early church did what they did out of love and not out of coercion?

In the current hopped-up milieu of socialism as social justice*, what is the mystique and lure of socialism, central planning, and top-down government when …

Above this race of men stands an immense and tutelary power, which takes upon itself alone to secure their gratifications, and to watch over their fate. That power is absolute, minute, regular, provident, and mild. It would be like the authority of a parent, if, like that authority, its object was to prepare men for manhood; but it seeks on the contrary to keep them in perpetual childhood: it is well content that the people should rejoice, provided they think of nothing but rejoicing.

For their happiness such a government willingly labors, but it chooses to be the sole agent and the only arbiter of that happiness: it provides for their security, foresees and supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principal concerns, directs their industry, regulates the descent of property, and subdivides their inheritances – what remains, but to spare them all the care of thinking and all the trouble of living? Thus it every day renders the exercise of the free agency of man less useful and less frequent; it circumscribes the will within a narrower range, and gradually robs a man of all the uses of himself.

-from “Democracy In America” by Alexis De Tocqueville, Chapter VI: “What Sort Of Despotism Democratic Nations Have To Fear”

Long before social media came around fostering populist socialism, I inured myself against the idea of a free lunch. In the 80s I watched Milton and Rose Friedman’s Free to Choose Series on TV. The following video is part of that series.

Plain-spoken Milton Friedman, economist of the Chicago School of Economics, addresses the issue of social responsibility that seems to be the motivation behind a rejection of capitalism and the attraction of socialism. He also presents the fundamental difference between capitalism and socialism: capitalism – an economic market operating under the incentive of profit; socialism – the government market under the incentive of power. Included are his thoughts on collectivism, social justice, moral values, individual responsibility, the doctrine of social responsibility, and philanthropy.

For the many of you around the world who live in disparate circumstances and who read my blog, I pray that you will benefit greatly from this video.

A final word from our sponsors ….

It’s not an endlessly expanding list of rights — the ‘right’ to education, the ‘right’ to health care, the ‘right’ to food and housing. That’s not freedom, that’s dependency. Those aren’t rights, those are the rations of slavery — hay and a barn for human cattle.
― Alexis de Tocqueville

What good does it do me, after all, if an ever-watchful authority keeps an eye out to ensure that my pleasures will be tranquil and races ahead of me to ward off all danger, sparing me the need even to think about such things, if that authority, even as it removes the smallest thorns from my path, is also absolute master of my liberty and my life; if it monopolizes vitality and existence to such a degree that when it languishes, everything around it must also languish; when it sleeps, everything must also sleep; and when it dies, everything must also perish? ― Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

When I refuse to obey an unjust law, I do not contest the right of the majority to command, but I simply appeal from the sovereignty of the people to the sovereignty of mankind.
― Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

The liberties of our country, the freedoms of our civil Constitution are worth defending at all hazards; it is our duty to defend them against all attacks. We have received them as a fair inheritance from our worthy ancestors. They purchased them for us with toil and danger and expense of treasure and blood. It will bring a mark of everlasting infamy on the present generation – enlightened as it is – if we should suffer them to be wrested from us by violence without a struggle, or to be cheated out of them by the artifices of designing men. ― Samuel Adams

Let each citizen remember at the moment he is offering his vote…that he is executing one of the most solemn trusts in human society for which he is accountable to God and his country. ― Samuel Adams

The utopian schemes of leveling and a community of goods, are as visionary and impractical as those which vest all property in the crown. These ideas are arbitrary, despotic, and, in our government unconstitutional. ― Samuel Adams

* Pope Francis is Envisaging and Engendering an Open World:

“On the other hand, if we accept the great principle that there are rights born of our inalienable human dignity, we can rise to the challenge of envisaging a new humanity,” he proposes. “We can aspire to a world that provides land, housing and work for all.”

As one can surmise, Francis welcomes the populism of socialism and “for the good of all” envisages a communist version of Catholicism. For example, if you are a Catholic in China, (or the world for that matter) in his vision you’ll be provided land, housing and work provided that you are the Chinese Communist Party’s version of a “good citizen”.

The above helps explain why Pope Francis deplores the populism that elected Trump. A movement of “free people” is hostile to coercive top down rule and to non-democratic central planning and to the liberty-annihilating communism the Pope dreams of and so desires so as to reshape the world into his Let Us Dream image. The Pope/CCP desires the Ring of Power to conform all men to its will.

The Trump movement seeks to take back life, liberty, and country –identity – from the Ruling Class Obama-Clinton-Biden-Cuomo types who talk down to Americans, considering them “bitter clingers” and “deplorables” and rubes. The Trump movement detests the privileged elites (including Francis), and the unelected bureaucrats, and, essentially, those who are “more equal than others” and deign to tell them who they are and what they are to think and what they are to do. The Trump movement fights to keep America from becoming a third world country, as Democrat mayors prove it is possible with their “Open World” policies.

The Trump movement deplores the overreach and suffocating control of globalism. The movement seeks to remove the tentacles of the “Open World” beast that wants to devour the U.S. – our individual rights, our liberty, our Constitution and our identity  – to feed its One World Fratelli tutti chimera. “We the people” reject the Great Reset.

  The One World forces and the purple and scarlet dressed Whore of Babylon are gathering to fight against the Lord, as foretold.

“The board is set, the pieces are moving. We come to it at last…
The great battle of our time.”

Gandalf, The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King

Added 11-26-2020:

Podcast:

Totalitarian Democracy Roger Kimball in conversation with Mark Bauerlein

Roger Kimball is Editor and Publisher of The New Criterion

Mark Bauerlein is a professor of English at Emory University.

Filed under 2020 current events, capitalism, cultural Marxism, Culture, Current Events 2010, Economics, Political Commentary, Politics, Progressivism, social commentary, social justice, socialism, Thanksgiving Tagged with , , , , , , , , , ,

The Way They’ll Do Your Life

July 14, 2019 Leave a comment

 

May 1 – the Day of Solidarity of workers around the world

 

 

The Left’s dalliance with Socialism, redolent with wooing – “Money is in the wrong hands”, “You show me a capitalist, and I’ll show you a bloodsucker”, “Workers of the world unite! A future to believe in!” – is not a relationship with socialism’s destructive life-wrecking persona as history accords. Rather, the Left speaks in highly charged (and romanticized) words of a life-saving relationship with socialism using the likes of the moral sounding “From each according to his ability; To each according to his needs”. The match-makers of the Left hype the ‘good-side’ of socialism to their ‘clients’ as one of REVOLUTION! CHANGE! EQUALITY! These beguiling words and many more are enticements for a marriage to politicized envy. They are words of an appeal to dance with the devil (and his details). Millennials who court socialism don’t realize the monster they are dating.

The reality: “From each to the State. Your needs are subject to the State.” Democratic socialism: Pull a lever and vote for socialism; Pull the lever and vote your will; Pull the lever and your needs and your will are submitted to the State.

Personal histories, as in the podcast below, expose “for the people” ideologies and economic systems. As you will learn, socialism dehumanizes the people… “for the people”. Here’s the intro to the podcast from the post She Survived China’s Forced Labor Camp. Now She’s Urging Americans to Reject Socialism.

Jennifer Zeng grew up admiring the Communist Party of China and adhering to its stringent rules. But her life changed forever when she embraced religion and was swept up in a government crackdown on Falun Gong. Arrested four times as a young adult and held in as a prisoner in a labor camp, she quickly woke up to the horrors of living in a socialist state. After being subject to brutal torture, Zeng managed to escape China and now tells about the evils of socialism and communism.

At a time when more Americans are embracing Karl Marx’s teachings, Chris Wright has helped Zeng share her story as part of a network called the Anticommunism Action Team. They recently spoke to The Daily Signal along with Darian Diachok, who escaped from Soviet-era Ukraine as an infant and has helped former Soviet satellite states democratize and overcome their failed communist systems.

 

 

The goal of socialism is communism. Vladimir Lenin 

The legacy of socialism is one of devastation “for the people”.  Beside the accounts in the podcast, personal stories via literature recount the actual eye-witness history. They have the greatest impact on the reader and certainly over myriads of facts. (I will write about the Left’s selective memory in a future post The Mau-Mauing of History.)

The sole substitute for an experience which we have not ourselves lived through is art and literature.

-Aleksander Solzhenitsyn

Required reading w/quotes. These are first-hand personal accounts of life under the heavy fist of socialism:

“Apart from the massacres, deaths and famines for which communism was responsible, the worst thing about the system was the official lying: that is to say the lying in which everyone was forced to take part, by repetition, assent or failure to contradict. I came to the conclusion that the purpose of propaganda in communist countries was not to persuade, much less to inform, but to humiliate and emasculate.”

― Anthony Daniels, The Wilder Shores Of Marx: Journeys In A Vanishing World

Three books by Alexzander Solzhenitsyn reveal the grizzly details of Life under Communism via his experience. (I read the complete volumes of Gulag and the The Life…  in the 80’s. I just finished reading the stories of Apricot Jam:

The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956 (Abridged version)

“My life is over, a little early to be sure; but there’s nothing to be done about it. I shall never return to freedom. I am condemned to die – now or a little later. But later on, in truth, it will be even harder, an so the sooner the better. I no longer have any property whatsoever. For me those I love have died, and for them I have died. From today on, my body is useless and alien to me. Only my spirit and my conscience remain precious and important to me.”

~~~~~

“The separation of church and state was so construed by the [Soviet] state that the churches themselves and everything that hung in them, was installed in them and painted in them, belonged to the state, and the only church remaining was that which … lay within the heart.”

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich

“A tub was brought in to melt snow for mortar. They heard somebody saying it was twelve o’clock already.
“It’s sure to be twelve,” Shukhov announced. “The sun’s over the top already.”
“If it is,” the captain retorted, “it’s one o’clock, not twelve.”
“How do you make that out?” Shukhov asked in surprise. “The old folk say the sun is highest at dinnertime.”
“Maybe it was in their day!” the captain snapped back. “Since then it’s been decreed that the sun is highest at one o’clock.”
“Who decreed that?”
“The Soviet government.”
The captain took off with the handbarrow, but Shukhov wasn’t going to argue anyway. As if the sun would obey their decrees!”

~~~~~

“He ate his supper without bread. A double helping and bread–that was going too far. The bread would do for tomorrow. The belly is a demon. It doesn’t remember how well you treated it yesterday; it’ll cry out for more tomorrow.”

Apricot Jam: And Other Stories

 

Added 7/15/2019:
Here’s Democratic Socialism in action – mandatory action on your part. You must submit your will:
Venezuela calls for mandatory labor in farm sector

“Trying to tackle Venezuela’s severe food shortages by forcing people to work the fields is like trying to fix a broken leg with a band aid,” said Erika Guevara Rosas, Americas director at Amnesty International, in a statement.

 

Filed under Economics, Liberalism, Political Commentary, Politics, socialism Tagged with , , , , ,

The Bill of Rumored Rights

March 21, 2019 Leave a comment

 

Retired prison psychiatrist Anthony Daniels (Theodore Dalrymple) speaks and writes with keen insight gathered from his experience of the human condition and of its surrounding culture. Here is a short introduction of Daniels from the website Goodreads:

Anthony Malcolm Daniels, who generally uses the pen name Theodore Dalrymple, is an English writer and retired prison doctor and psychiatrist. He worked in a number of Sub-Saharan African countries as well as in the east end of London. Before his retirement in 2005, he worked in City Hospital, Birmingham and Winson Green Prison in inner-city Birmingham, England.

Daniels is a contributing editor to City Journal, published by the Manhattan Institute, where he is the Dietrich Weismann Fellow. In addition to City Journal, his work has appeared in The British Medical Journal, The Times, The Observer, The Daily Telegraph, The Spectator, The Salisbury Review, National Review, and Axess magasin.

In 2011, Dalrymple received the 2011 Freedom Prize from the Flemish think tank Libera!.

Not only is Anthony Daniels a prolific writer and well-read, as you’ll discover, he is also well-traveled. His accounts of staying in five countries (North Korea, Albania, Romania, Vietnam and Cuba), all five of which operate under leftist-ideology based regimes, is recorded in The Wilder Shores of Marx: Journeys in a Vanishing World. Would-be fellow travelers in the long march of cultural Marxism, both young and old, would do well to read about life in the totalitarian state under centralized government. Daniel’s accounts would be especially revelatory for the would-be fellow travelers promoting ‘democratic’ socialism, the ‘gateway drug’ to full-blown addiction to life under top down government. Democratic socialism is currently being promoted as the means to secure peace of mind (aka happiness) by coercively and exhaustively taxing the wealthy and then having unelected central planners redistribute the take. The uninformed traveler could also read about the state of Venezuela.

I first encountered Anthony Daniels via his essays in The New Criterion, a monthly literary magazine I subscribe to. His extensive bibliography is listed in the Wikipedia entry Theodore Dalrymple.

Having read several of his books, I recommend, for starters, the book noted above and the two books shown below.

Life at the Bottom: The Worldview That Makes the Underclass (start with this book)

Admirable Evasions: How Psychology Undermines Morality

Numerous articles written by Anthony Daniels appear in the Law and Liberty blog.

Below is a video of Anthony Daniels speaking at the Property and Freedom Society Annual Meeting last year (2018). His talk on multiculturalism begins with the subject of rights as misunderstood and misapplied today. My take: rights-gatherers employ victim status leveraged with inalienability to secure advantages in society. With their Bill of Rumored Rights they seek to bypass “the pursuit of happiness” and go directly to happiness.

 

How did our culture get turned on its head? “German Marxists”…”Marx and Freud”…”the Frankfurt school… left-wing academics… Columbia University”…

[Italian communist Antonio] Gramsci also looked to culture. If the Left truly wanted to win, it needed to first seize the “cultural means of production”: the culture-forming institutions such as the media and universities and even churches. He saw societal transformation coming about by a “march through the institutions.”…

Gramsci insisted that leftist intellectuals needed to question everything, including moral absolutes and the Judeo-Christian basis of Western civilization. They needed to frame seemingly benign conventions as systematic injustices that must be exposed. This is where we got professors fulminating against everything from “the patriarchy” to “white imperialism” to “transphobia.”

Marx at 200: Cultural Marxism’s Long Happy March Through the Institutions

 

How is the Cultural Revolution brought to bear on others? Enforceable Subjectivity (article by Theodore Dalrymple):

According to the Metropolitan Police, “evidence of the hate element is not a requirement. You do not need to personally perceive the incident to be hate related. It would be enough if another person, a witness or even a police officer thought that the incident was hate related.”

Example given:

Had a message from Guildford police tonight about my tweets following an appearance on @GMB with Susie Green and Piers Morgan. Susie Green has reported me for misgendering her daughter.

https://twitter.com/CF_Farrow/status/1107779340723515392

“A British police force is investigating @CF_Farrow, a journalist, because of words that she published,” writes @jameskirkup

https://twitter.com/SpectatorUSA/status/1108144367716302848

Filed under cultural Marxism, Culture, Human Rights, Liberalism, Politics, Progressivism Tagged with , , , , , , ,

One Nation Under a Bed of Roses

July 22, 2018 Leave a comment

 

Our current notion of cultural diversity — trumpeted as the repudiation of racism and biological essentialism — in fact grew out of and perpetuates the very concepts it congratulates itself on having escaped. The American love affair with race — especially when you can dress race up as culture — has continued and even intensified. Almost everything we say about culture (that the significant differences between us are cultural, that such differences should be respected, that our cultural heritages should be perpetuated, that there’s a value in making sure that different cultures survive) seems to me mistaken. We must shift our focus from cultural diversity to economic equality to help alter the political terrain of contemporary American intellectual life.

–The Trouble With Diversity by Walter Benn Michaels, August 13, 2006

 

 What do you make of the above quote from the web article? What do you make of “We must shift our focus from cultural diversity to economic equality to help alter the political terrain of contemporary American intellectual life.”?

 

 

I thought of how everything the Left offers as societal ‘fix’ is off-kilter. I thought of how the Left seeks to alter the political and cultural terrain so as to espouse the “For the people” narrative for their own Ruling Class benefit.

Has dictator literature a future? If the absence of a sense of humor in public life is anything to go by, it very well might. Indeed, dictator-like literature seems to be increasingly common in academe, as a genre to be imitated rather than eschewed. It is either self-imposed or a manifestation of ideological conformism in the face of social pressure. – Author Authoritarians: The literary talent (or lack thereof) of tyrants at the typewriter by Anthony Daniels

I also was reminded of some of the clarion words of Thomas Sowell, economist:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Regarding the initial quote, there are certainly cultural differences and they are certainly not of equal worth to humans. A culture of cannibalism or animism or Voodoism or a culture of abortion where human life is deemed an inconvenience or a culture of hedonism where self-pleasure is god or a culture of enforced slavery to a socialist political state or a culture of ‘red in tooth and claw’ materialism…none of these are worthy of humans.

We must maintain what is worthy of humans. That would include the cultural heritages that have sustained and benefitted humans down through time: mother and father families, transcendent art, music, and literature, the rule of law, and Christianity. There are without doubt differences between us that are more significant than cultural. These differences come down to whether one believes in the one True God and His kingdom way of life. One cannot equalize light and dark

Regarding the income inequality narrative, promoted as “For the people”: the benefit is solely for those pushing it – the ruling class who want to maintain control of their narrative and of you to flesh out their narrative. But, income inequality should not be an impetus driving anyone to do anything. Income inequities like cultural inequities should be resolved by the free individual and not by coercion.

People, though born equally human, are not equal in ability, desire or will. What should happen: each inequity should be the impetus for us to assess our personal values and goals in the light of loving God and our neighbor. Coercive income redistribution, whether via taxation or increased minimum wages, does not enable human flourishing. Rather, coercion supports further dependence, class animosity and the intellectual’s narrative that goes toward tenure consideration in the ivory tower.

 

The Left’s focus on materialism under the guise of ‘righting’ the Left’s storied wrong (“income inequality”) will have the same devastating effects as defining our culture down to the lowest common denominator for equality’s sake: humans acting as irrational animals to survive.

By seeing every human being as a soulless captive to impersonal economic forces, socialism kills human dignity. After that, as we have witnessed too vividly and too frequently, killing the human body becomes inevitable. – Socialism Disregards Human Dignity, Eugénio Lopes

  In its attempts to “alter the political terrain”, the Left demands that there should be no work effort without income equality. Red clenched fists (an ersatz bed of roses) is the Left’s social justice poster.

 As a follower of Jesus in his kingdom on earth, I have no doubt whatsoever that the Evil One wants a social justice where people ‘love their neighbor’ vicariously through an impersonal government program. The Evil One does not want anyone to give directly to their neighbor. That is what Jesus wants – agape love. The Evil One would rather you move your mouse to virtue signal than do any heavy lifting for your neighbor. On the receiving end, the Evil One would rather you be one of the nine lepers would did not return to Jesus and give thanks to him for what he did for ten neighbors. The Evil One would rather you get what you want and not be grateful.

If the Left’s income equality narrative ever becomes reality you can be sure that we will become one nation under a bed of red-fisted roses.

 

 

 

Added 7-23-2018:

 

Filed under Christianity, Current events 2018, Economics, socialism Tagged with , , , ,

Michael Novak – Catholic Scholar and “celestial philosopher”

May 21, 2017 Leave a comment

 

“Capitalism forms morally better people than socialism does,” Mr. Novak said in a 2007 interview with Crisis, a magazine he and the scholar Ralph McInerny founded in 1982. “Capitalism teaches people to show initiative and imagination, to work cooperatively in teams, to love and to cherish the law; what is more, it forces persons not only to rely on themselves and their own moral qualities, but also to recognize those moral qualities in others and to cooperate with others freely.”- Michael Novak, Catholic Scholar Who Championed Capitalism, Dies at 83

“At the heart of the Novakian vision is freedom—free people, free markets, free institutions. But Novak’s vision of freedom, like [Irving] Kristol’s, is not the doctrinaire libertarianism that the word evokes for many today. Much less is it the “me generation” liberal counterfeit of freedom that licenses people to do whatever they want, wherever they want, whenever they want, with whomever they want, so long as there is no immediate palpable harm to others.

Rather, it is the idea of unleashing the human spirit for the creative pursuit of excellence.”

” –Michael Novak, 1933–2017, by Robert P. George, On the life and influence of the prolific Catholic philosopher

 

~~~

On February 17, 2017, we lost a great Catholic intellectual and “celestial philosopher.”

This Acton Institute video introduces Ambassador Novak and offers a conversational look at his life and work. Novak’s valuable experience and his wealth of wisdom makes this video well worth viewing.

Novak’s masterpiece:  The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

Pope John Paul II was one of many admirers of Michael Novak. It would be worth your while to read this entire encyclical written in 1991. It addresses social issues, Marxism, socialism and capitalism.

CENTESIMUS ANNUS, JOHN PAUL II

42. Returning now to the initial question: can it perhaps be said that, after the failure of Communism, capitalism is the victorious social system, and that capitalism should be the goal of the countries now making efforts to rebuild their economy and society? Is this the model which ought to be proposed to the countries of the Third World which are searching for the path to true economic and civil progress?

The answer is obviously complex. If by “capitalism” is meant an economic system which recognizes the fundamental and positive role of business, the market, private property and the resulting responsibility for the means of production, as well as free human creativity in the economic sector, then the answer is certainly in the affirmative, even though it would perhaps be more appropriate to speak of a “business economy”, “market economy” or simply “free economy”. But if by “capitalism” is meant a system in which freedom in the economic sector is not circumscribed within a strong juridical framework which places it at the service of human freedom in its totality, and which sees it as a particular aspect of that freedom, the core of which is ethical and religious, then the reply is certainly negative.

 

“New Things”:

43.…Man fulfils himself by using his intelligence and freedom. In so doing he utilizes the things of this world as objects and instruments and makes them his own. The foundation of the right to private initiative and ownership is to be found in this activity. By means of his work man commits himself, not only for his own sake but also for others and with others. Each person collaborates in the work of others and for their good. Man works in order to provide for the needs of his family, his community, his nation, and ultimately all humanity.

 

Centesimus annus

Filed under Christian Intellects Tagged with , , , , ,

Marx the Merciless and the Deadly Socialist Ray

April 24, 2016 Leave a comment

 

…Kulaks to conquer, Kulaks to enslave in Clay, property to plunder…

flash gordons trip to mars 1

THIS JUST IN!!

A mysterious beam has been focused on Earth’s citizens. It is sucking the wealth out of people!  The ray is said to be coming from the dead planet Marx. But wait. Professor Zharkov had miscalculated.  The deadly beam is coming from the planet Ruling Class.

It seems that there is a new emperor in town:  Marx the Ideologically Merciless!  And he is using a powerful integrated Collectivist Ray against the people of earth.  The deadly Supreme Socialist Ray or SSR is focused directly on Earth’s citizenry and right on their property. The citizens of earth are fleeing, taking their possessions and hoping not to feel the burn.

I am being told that the wicked Queen Hillary Azura has formed a partnership with the evil emperor Marx the Merciless on planet Ruling Class.  This witch’s powers include the ability to transmute people into figures of living clay, condemning them to live in darkened caves.  She employs the incense of forgetfulness to subdue her enemies.  She is hated and feared by the country class.

Marx the Merciless has also allied himself with other nefarious characters and groups:  the Red Hammer of Sanders organization, the unscrupulous Queen Rubia E. Warren, BHO the shape shifter and the Carnage Corporation. With his life altering ray focused directly on you, Marx the Merciless hopes that “individual economic actions and individual property, rights will be altered and abridged” forever.

 

dale arden 1—Reporting for the Daily Altoid, this is Happy Hapgood’s daughter Snappy Hapgood.

(Snappy has video of the Ruling Class Planet’s attack on the Country Class Planet and the valiant efforts being made to stop Marx the Merciless in his tracks…) Flashs_Ship_movie

 

<<<>>>

 

“In any event the Commission is convinced by its interpretation of available empirical data that the actually integrating economy of the present day is the forerunner of a consciously integrated society, in which individual economic actions and individual property, rights will be altered and abridged.”

“Conclusions and Recommendations for the Social Studies, Carnegie Corporation, 1934.”

The Supreme Socialist Ray’s unearthly effects are being directed at your children in the classroom…

From Investigation of the Social Studies in the Schools

“8. Under the molding influence of socialized processes of living, drives of technology and science, pressures of changing thought and policy, and disrupting impacts of economic disaster, there is a notable waning of the once widespread popular faith in economic individualism; and leaders in public affairs, supported by a growing mass of the population, are demanding the introduction into economy of ever wider measures of planning and control.

9. Cumulative evidence supports the conclusion that, in the United States as in other countries, the age of individualism and laissez faire in economy and government is closing and that a new age of collectivism is emerging. “

 

Earth must find a way to destroy Marx’s Socialist ray before the Earth is doomed!!!

Caution: A Faraday shield will only protect your electronic gadgets from Electromagnetic Pulses (EMPs). It won’t protect you from Egregious Redistribution Impulses (ERIs)!!!

Filed under Economics Tagged with , , , , , ,

Guess Who Came to Dine on You?

April 9, 2016 Leave a comment

The Ruling Class Cannibals!

Who are these Kulakovores?  They are Ruling Class America and the minions who do their hunter-gatherer bidding.  They are the Democrats and Republicans who accrue power unto themselves.  They are the bureaucrats, the administrative state, the regulators, the social engineers, the ones whose careers are dependent on the government, the ones with secret servers, the “saviors of the planet”, those in the “know”, Progressives, the entitled, the “living Constitutionalists”, the “settled science” purveyors, the “green agenda” evangelists, the #SJW, #BlackLivesMatter, the gerrymandering, the eminent domain Dishonest Johns, the union bosses, the public school educators, the “It takes a village” people…the Hannibal Lecturers.hannibal

Obama finger gun

The power-hungry…

They came for your family:

“The ruling class is keener to reform the American people’s family and spiritual lives than their economic and civic ones. In no other areas is the ruling class’s self-definition so definite, its contempt for opposition so patent, its Kulturkampf so open. It believes that the Christian family (and the Orthodox Jewish one too) is rooted in and perpetuates the ignorance commonly called religion, divisive social prejudices, and repressive gender roles, that it is the greatest barrier to human progress because it looks to its very particular interest — often defined as mere coherence against outsiders who most often know better. Thus the family prevents its members from playing their proper roles in social reform. Worst of all, it reproduces itself.

Since marriage is the family’s fertile seed, government at all levels, along with “mainstream” academics and media, have waged war on it. They legislate, regulate, and exhort in support not of “the family” — meaning married parents raising children — but rather of “families,” meaning mostly households based on something other than marriage. The institution of no-fault divorce diminished the distinction between cohabitation and marriage — except that husbands are held financially responsible for the children they father, while out-of-wedlock fathers are not. The tax code penalizes marriage and forces those married couples who raise their own children to subsidize “child care” for those who do not. Top Republicans and Democrats have also led society away from the very notion of marital fidelity by precept as well as by parading their affairs. For example, in 1997 the Democratic administration’s secretary of defense and the Republican Senate’s majority leader (joined by the New York Times et al.) condemned the military’s practice of punishing officers who had extramarital affairs. While the military had assumed that honoring marital vows is as fundamental to the integrity of its units as it is to that of society, consensus at the top declared that insistence on fidelity is “contrary to societal norms.” Not surprisingly, rates of marriage in America have decreased as out-of-wedlock births have increased. The biggest demographic consequence has been that about one in five of all households are women alone or with children, in which case they have about a four in 10 chance of living in poverty. Since unmarried mothers often are or expect to be clients of government services, it is not surprising that they are among the Democratic Party’s most faithful voters.

While our ruling class teaches that relationships among men, women, and children are contingent, it also insists that the relationship between each of them and the state is fundamental. That is why such as Hillary Clinton have written law review articles and books advocating a direct relationship between the government and children, effectively abolishing the presumption of parental authority. Hence whereas within living memory school nurses could not administer an aspirin to a child without the parents’ consent, the people who run America’s schools nowadays administer pregnancy tests and ship girls off to abortion clinics without the parents’ knowledge. Parents are not allowed to object to what their children are taught. But the government may and often does object to how parents raise children. The ruling class’s assumption is that what it mandates for children is correct ipso facto, while what parents do is potentially abusive. It only takes an anonymous accusation of abuse for parents to be taken away in handcuffs until they prove their innocence. Only sheer political weight (and in California, just barely) has preserved parents’ right to homeschool their children against the ruling class’s desire to accomplish what Woodrow Wilson so yearned: “to make young gentlemen as unlike their fathers as possible.” — The Ruling Class — And the Perils of Revolution by Angelo M. Codevilla

They came for your children and their “privilege. They came to put them on the menu:

Here is what is going on in social engineering social studies.

Privilege Quiz

Hey kids, how much privilege do you have? Quiz riles Florida parents

They came for your wealth:

Ruling Class Cannibals (RBC) Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump et al, all have a taste for power. And that means that your hard-earned tilled-the-earth money is on the menu so as to whet the appetites of would be RBC voters.

Oh sure, these social warriors will tell you that they want to make things “fair and equal and right”.  But, these Kulakovores are bibbed up and ready to devour you and yours at a power lunch trough feeding.  Their mere mention of “Wall St.” has already marinated your tender #Occupywallstreet minds.  Hannibal Lecter power lunch

Raising the minimum wage by coercive law is an injustice done to business owners and stockholders.  Such increases steal the owner/investor’s income. Period.

It is immoral for someone to take my wealth and give it to someone else.  Only when there is an injustice between two parties should there be restitution. (Being born black is not an injustice unless you are deemed unworthy of being born by the Ruling Class. Welfare and Domination are the perverted restitutions offered by Democrats).

The Ruling Class Cannibals are at the gate!

They came for your…  Hold on!  Don’t do me like that! Time for a bit of truth telling. The following will give the Ruling Class indigestion!

This New York Daily News interview was pretty close to a disaster for Bernie Sanders

GE CEO: Bernie Sanders says we’re ‘destroying the moral fabric’ of America. He’s wrong.

Swedish Economist Schools Sanders On the Ravages of Socialism

And now for the Big Gulp!

Filed under Culture Tagged with , , , , , , ,

Your Thoughts Will Be Narrated by Groupthink

March 12, 2016 Leave a comment

 

“it is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence but their social existence that determines their consciousness” ―Karl Marx

~~~

Your personal property, including your thoughts, must be submitted to the Narrative…

Filed under Culture Tagged with , , , , , , ,

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