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 , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Perspectives on Race Relations

September 6, 2020 Leave a comment

 

“…this country, despite its sins, also is a country for the last sixty years has truly transformed itself morally. And, Americans today are a different people in regard to all these issues [discrimination, oppression] …” Shelby Steele, How America’s Past Sins Have Polarized Our Country

 

Parallel Perspective

April 1968. I was sixteen when I heard of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination. I read the Chicago newspapers and watched the local news.

In the days after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., in more than 130 cities, hundreds of thousands of black Americans let their anger and grief boil over into collective rage. In Chicago, more than 48 hours of rioting left 11 Chicagoans dead, 48 wounded by police gunfire, 90 policemen injured, and 2,150 people arrested. Some two miles of the commercial heart of Lawndale on West Madison were little more than charred rubble.

West Madison Street, 1968, Encyclopedia of Chicago

 

Chicago is my home. I have lived here during the 60 years of fundamental transformation that Shelby Steele describes in the epigraph. Prior to that tragic day in 1968, I was aware of strife in the country. The civil rights movement began during my childhood as did the Vietnam war. I watched the nightly news reports with my father. Both were covered.

In high school social studies class, I read Black Like Me and Cry, the Beloved Country. Civil War history was also taught. I was given excerpts of the Lincoln-Douglas debates to read (Essentially, Douglas, a Democrat, wanted states to be allowed chose slavery if they so desired. Lincoln, a Republican, wanted a nation without pockets of slavery. I would later learn that a higher percentage of Republicans than Democrats voted for the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and for the Voting Rights Act of 1965.) Later, in the 1980s, I read Stephen B. Oates’ Let The Trumpet Sound: The Life Of Martin Luther King, Jr. after the book came out. I wanted to gain insight into MLK’s life.

From my various readings I understood why Martin Luther King and black Americans were protesting. I also understood, from my visits with my grandparents, that there was something in the human heart that was prejudicial and could act to discriminate against another human being.

My father and mother would take my brother and me to see his Dutch parents. My grandparents lived in a small house in Bellwood on Chicago’s west side. They prided themselves on their perfectly manicured landscape which included a rose garden in the backyard. The frontroom’s (a Chicagoism) sofa and chairs were covered with plastic slipcovers. Having lived through the depression, everything they owned was protected and meant to last.

On the drive over to their house, my father warned us kids that grandpa (definitely an Archie Bunker archetype) had issues with black people (and other ethnic groups). We would hear grandpa talk about the “niggers” moving into the neighborhood. Grandma would try to shoosh him with “little ears!” I heard my dad trying to move grandpa beyond prejudice, but grandpa, a gruff truck driver, was set in his ways.

My Dutch father was like my Dutch grandparents in that he loved order and cleanliness. But he was not like them in his attitude toward black folk. From what I could gather from my visits, the antipathy that my grandparents held toward blacks seemed to circulate in the attitudes of those who attended their local Dutch Christian Reformed Church. I listened to the conversations when the members gathered outside the church after the service. As a young man, my father attended a different church, dated my mother, discovered Jesus and rejected his father’s ways in the process. That fundamental transformation made the difference for his children’s understanding of race relations.

Now, I don’t pretend to know what it is like to be black. But over 67 years I did gain perspective on black American life. I empathized with the black American’s anger over Jim Crow laws. I empathized with their loss of MLK who called out the injustice. But I did not then and do not now sympathize with the rioting, looting and violence of protestors. These acts are the antithesis of MLK’s non-violent approach to protesting. Such “mindless mimicry of anger and resentment” (Shelby Steel) and destruction only sets back the cause of race relations. Such behavior comes from a very dark place. MLK exemplified Proverbs 16:32:

He who is slow to anger is better than the mighty,
    and he who rules his spirit than he who takes a city.

 

Progressive Perspective

Anyone who has watched Monty Python’s Flying Circus will remember the Dead Parrot sketch. Mr. Praline comes into the pet shop to complain that his recently purchased parrot is dead. The owner of the shop denies any of Mr. Praline’s claims with exasperating excuses.

Mr. Praline: Look, I took the liberty of examining that parrot when I got it home, and I discovered the only reason that it had been sitting on its perch in the first place was that it had been NAILED there.

(pause)

Owner: Well, o’course it was nailed there! If I hadn’t nailed that bird down, it would have nuzzled up to those bars, bent ’em apart with its beak, and VOOM! Feeweeweewee!

Mr. Praline: “VOOM”?!? Mate, this bird wouldn’t “voom” if you put four million volts through it! ‘E’s bleedin’ demised!

Owner: No no! ‘E’s pining!

Mr. Praline: ‘E’s not pinin’! ‘E’s passed on! This parrot is no more! He has ceased to be! ‘E’s expired and gone to meet ‘is maker! ‘E’s a stiff! Bereft of life, ‘e rests in peace! If you hadn’t nailed ‘im to the perch ‘e’d be pushing up the daisies! ‘Is metabolic processes are now ‘istory! ‘E’s off the twig! ‘E’s kicked the bucket, ‘e’s shuffled off ‘is mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the bleedin’ choir invisible!! THIS IS AN EX-PARROT!!

This hilarious satire of customer service works because of the two opposing perspectives: the real versus the absurd. Bring these two perspectives into any serious discussion of societal or economic matters and it becomes glaringly obvious that there can be no resolution or reconciliation. (In the sketch, the shopkeeper, after repeatedly responding to Mr. Praline’s protests with nonsense, goes off on an absurd tangent, declares that he always wanted to be a lumberjack and begins singing the lumberjack song.) I have had similar back-and-forths when I was on Twitter.

Engaging activists and their Progressive followers on a Twitter thread, I would ask “What is racist about America?” These ‘shopkeepers’ of racism would respond that “America is racist” or “there is injustice” or “there is unfairness”. I would ask again and again for examples – proof of life that racism was alive in America. I would receive the same blanket replies: “America is racist”, “there is injustice”, “there is unfairness”. They were trying to justify what they thought by parroting the same things over and over again. Emotions flared and words were written, but nothing was said to prove that America was a racist country.

(The latest generation of Americans seem to have come out of “How do you feel about that?” therapy. They are hot-wired for emotional response. Hence, the “safe space” mentality that is meant to protect them from emotional overload when confronted with realities beyond the existential.)

Thomas Sowell, like Shelby Steele, has consistently contended against the race narrative posited by the Left. And, like many other blacks who disagree with the Left, is labeled “Uncle Tom”. Sowell is a ninety-year old black American economist and social theorist who is currently a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. Here are just a couple of his rejoinders to the Left’s hype of racism:

Racism does not have a good track record. It’s been tried out for a long time and you’d think by now we’d want to put an end to it instead of putting it under new management.

The word ‘racism’ is like ketchup. It can be put on practically anything – and demanding evidence makes you a ‘racist.’

It’s been my experience on social media, with its “safe space” anonymity, that there is more than just stonewalling buzzwords repeatedly being stacked up. The ad hominems also pile up. The pejoratives “racist” and “bigot” are used on social media and in print for anyone who does not comport with the narrative proffered by the ‘shopkeepers’ of race. Saul Alinsky’s Rule #5 in his Rules for Radicals handbook is put to use:

“Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon. There is no defense. It’s irrational. It’s infuriating. It also works as a key pressure point to force the enemy into concessions.”

(What makes any discussion about race relations (or any relationship) even more bizarre and destructive is Progressivism’s identarian politics: dividing people into boxes with labels to pit “victims” against the “oppressors”. This dissection of society is the opposite of reconciliation. And it is rank Marxism.)

“Black votes matter to many politicians — more so than black lives. That is why such politicians must try to keep black voters fearful, angry and resentful. Racial harmony would be a political disaster for such politicians”. Thomas Sowell

Despite what is parroted on social media and in the ‘news’ media, things have changed with regard to race relations in the last 60 years. But the Black Lives Matter cabal denies the reality of that change as do those who buy the BLM propaganda and bring it home.

I see “woke” Americans placing a “Black Lives Matter” sign on the well-manicured lawn of their far-west suburban Chicago homes. Apparently, they want to signal to others that they are down with the manufactured cause. I do not share their token empathy for dead parrot racism, no matter how many times agitators and rioters rattle cages to make it appear to be alive.

We laugh at the Dead Parrot Sketch. It makes perfect sense to us that Mr. Praline is exasperated to no end with the shopkeeper. Likewise, we are exasperated when anyone or a group maintains fixed false beliefs (2 + 2 = 5, 50+ genders, people are poor because of the rich, Progressive Woodrow Wilson was not a racist, “Defund the Police”, white privilege, critical race theory, America is inherently racist, etc.)  even when confronted with facts. We become even more exasperated when we learn that a person or a group grapples for political power to establish fixed false beliefs as truth. The inordinate craving for power comes from a dark place, as philosopher Leszek Kolakowski notes in his essay Politics and the Devil:

“To the extent that politics is the sheer struggle for power, it is bound, in Christian terms, to be the realm of the devil by definition; it then simply releases our libido dominandi as a drive that expands, as it were, for the sake of its own expansion and has no objective beyond itself. As in all other areas of human life, however, the devil distorts and poisons the good natural order.” [i]

Progressivism’s delusional perspective can be summed up as ”Dead Parrots Matter”. It can be applied to any cause it raises, including racism and socialism, as both these ‘causes’ have been dealt with definitively in the past.

Racism is not dead, but it is on life support — kept alive by politicians, race hustlers and people who get a sense of superiority by denouncing others as ‘racists’. -Thomas Sowell

 

Professor’s Perspective

In the 80s I came across Thomas Sowell in a series of Free to Choose videos, including Frances Fox Piven vs. Milton Friedman and Thomas Sowell and Milton Friedman  and Thomas Sowell on the Welfare System. Today, one does not come across the discussion and debates shown in these videos. (See Delusional Perspective above for the reason why.)

I have always enjoyed Professor Sowell’s down-to-earth perspective regarding economics, social issues and government. He provides great insight into the problems affecting blacks. Sowell deals in reality and not in the fallacies, myopia or the jejune foot-stomping responses of the Left. The video below, Myths of Economic Inequality affirms this. Therein, his perspective and some of the wealth of his comprehensive understanding of the matters that affect society. The video presents Sowell’s background and his early bent toward Marxism. You will also hear about his book A Conflict of Visions. This was the first book of his that I read. I consider it a primer to understanding the “unconstrained vision” and the “constrained visions” so prominent and at odds in America today.

 

Here are just a few of the videos offering Professor Sowell’s perspectives:

The Real History of Slavery

Intellectuals and Society

The Ethnic Flaw – Economics and Race, culture as a variable in success and failure

Discrimination and Disparities

 

Penetrating Perspective

With this post and my previous post, I am offering counterpoints to the delusional thinking of the race shopkeepers. I presented Shelby Steele’s and Thomas Sowell’s perspective and my own which parallels theirs of the last sixty years. These perspectives run counter to the populist notion that America is inherently racist and whites should be guilt-ridden about it. Yet, along with Steele and Sowell and many others, I have witnessed the fundamental transformation of America. And it happened long before Barack Obama came along with his Marxist Liberation theology/Jeremiah Wright version of “fundamental transformation”.

I would advise staying clear of broadcast media and op-eds with their myopic flash-point inducing ‘journalism’. Their version of racism is not worth your time. Rather, read to gain a new perspective and a comprehensive understanding of the issues facing America today and how they can be resolved. Below is a recommended list of books, an article and a link to begin with.

 

A Conflict of Visions by Thomas Sowell

The Thomas Sowell Reader by Thomas Sowell

The Courthouse Ring: Atticus Finch and the limits of Southern liberalism, by Malcolm Gladwell

Exclusion and Embrace: A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness and, Reconciliation, by Miroslav Volf

Watershed at the Well    -A short story of Jesus meeting the Samaritan woman at the well. The Jews and the Samaritans are at odds. Jesus challenges their ethno-centric understanding of God and worship that provokes hostilities between the two groups.

Added 9-18-20:

“Go to the website for the Black Futures Lab, a venture of Black Lives Matter founder Alicia Garza, and click on the “Donate” button. It will ask you to send your money to an obscure organization, the Chinese Progressive Association, explaining that “Black Futures Lab is a fiscally sponsored project of the Chinese Progressive Association.”

This BLM Co-founder and Pro-Communist China Group are Partnering up

Added 9-29-20:

[i] Leszek Kolakowski, Modernity on Endless Trial (University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1990, 175-176

Filed under 2020 current events, Culture, Current Events 2020, Political Commentary, Progressivism, Race Relations Tagged with , , , , , , ,

Utopia Has No Room for You… in the Inn

April 2, 2016 Leave a comment

 

Utopia comes from the Greek: οὐ (“not”) and τόπος (“place”) and means “no-place“, a non-existent place.

…..

And now a few clarion words from Claremont Institute Senior Fellow Angelo M. Codevilla:

 

“This dismissal of the American people’s intellectual, spiritual, and moral substance is the very heart of what our ruling class is about. Its principal article of faith, its claim to the right to decide for others, is precisely that it knows things and operates by standards beyond others’ comprehension.

While the unenlightened ones believe that man is created in the image and likeness of God and that we are subject to His and to His nature’s laws, the enlightened ones know that we are products of evolution, driven by chance, the environment, and the will to primacy. While the un-enlightened are stuck with the antiquated notion that ordinary human minds can reach objective judgments about good and evil, better and worse through reason, the enlightened ones know that all such judgments are subjective and that ordinary people can no more be trusted with reason than they can with guns. Because ordinary people will pervert reason with ideology, religion, or interest, science is “science” only in the “right” hands. Consensus among the right people is the only standard of truth. Facts and logic matter only insofar as proper authority acknowledges them.

That is why the ruling class is united and adamant about nothing so much as its right to pronounce definitive, “scientific” judgment on whatever it chooses. When the government declares, and its associated press echoes that “scientists say” this or that, ordinary people — or for that matter scientists who “don’t say,” or are not part of the ruling class — lose any right to see the information that went into what “scientists say.” Thus when Virginia’s attorney general subpoenaed the data by which Professor Michael Mann had concluded, while paid by the state of Virginia, that the earth’s temperatures are rising “like a hockey stick” from millennial stability — a conclusion on which billions of dollars’ worth of decisions were made — to investigate the possibility of fraud, the University of Virginia’s faculty senate condemned any inquiry into “scientific endeavor that has satisfied peer review standards” claiming that demands for data “send a chilling message to scientists…and indeed scholars in any discipline.” The Washington Post editorialized that the attorney general’s demands for data amounted to “an assault on reason.” The fact that the “hockey stick” conclusion stands discredited and Mann and associates are on record manipulating peer review, the fact that science-by-secret-data is an oxymoron, the very distinction between truth and error, all matter far less to the ruling class than the distinction between itself and those they rule.

By identifying science and reason with themselves, our rulers delegitimize opposition. Though they cannot prevent Americans from worshiping God, they can make it as socially disabling as smoking — to be done furtively and with a bad social conscience. Though they cannot make Americans wish they were Europeans, they continue to press upon this nation of refugees from the rest of the world the notion that Americans ought to live by “world standards.” Each day, the ruling class produces new “studies” that show that one or another of Americans’ habits is in need of reform, and that those Americans most resistant to reform are pitiably, perhaps criminally, wrong. Thus does it go about disaggregating and dispiriting the ruled.” (emphasis added)

Beyond the excerpt:  I commend Codevilla’s entire article to you.  In fact, I urge you to click on the link and print out the article.  Sit and read it and be forever changed by its content. I pray that the article opens your eyes and that moral courage arises in your heart.

America’s Ruling Class — And the Perils of Revolution by Claremont Institute Senior Fellow Angelo Codevillano_room_at_the_inn_postcard

 

Now, perhaps, you know these culprits,  the Unconstrained Visionaries, by their characteristics:  snobbish, name-calling bullies; cliquish; desiring kinship w/other like-minded people; seeking power by government association; demanding rule by ‘right’; believing themselves morally and intellectually right; saying “You must obey us because we know better”; blinded to their  ‘well-intentioned’ actions leading to horrible unintended consequences; believing they know better than you; applying a “living constitution” template to every legal decision; using science as leverage without any depth of scientific knowledge; posturing “settled science” to quash dissent;  believing they “have the one true faith”; deeming that intentions and not results matter most; obtaining snobbery wielding government power;… combining attitude with government power, coercive.

…

Utopia Has No Room for You (and Swaddled Truth) in the Inn.

Us Christians, we abide in Christ wherever we are.  We’ll leave the Light on.

…

Background on the Constrained and Unconstrained Visions, the intuitive assumptions that shape our worldview:

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

Nightmare on Envy St.

February 21, 2016 Leave a comment

Nightmare on Elm st 1Envy St. has been the road most travelled from the start. Covetousness and self-deception have been the vehicles of choice. The serpent promised the first couple that they could become like God – their projected 1%.

“You will not surely die,” the serpent said to the woman. “For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good from evil.” Genesis 3: 4, 5

And so they believed the lie that having the same quality as God would create equality with God. They believed they could transcend their humanity and become Singularity.  They democratically voted “Yes,” and bit off more than mankind could chew.
~~~
Man as Singularity – Freddie Kruger voters:  freddy_krueger
“Since the end of the second world war…a new ethic has, astonishingly, come into being, according to which envious man is altogether acceptable. Progressively fewer individuals and groups are ashamed of their envy, but instead make out that its existence in their temperament proves the existence of “social injustice,” which must be eliminated for their benefit. Suddenly it has become possible to say, without loss of public credibility and trust, “I envy you. Give me what you’ve got.”  (emphasis added) Helmut Schoeck, sociologist
~~~
The Day Democratic Socialism Died:

In his final semester, Trevor had earned enough credits to graduate.  Trevor had worked long and hard.  He would graduate in the top 1% of his class. And, as expected, Trevor’s school loan would come due a year from graduation. Trevor would need to find work. But.

 Trevor, a student of required Karl Marx readings, was told that 90% of his credits now must be redistributed to other classmates who were lacking credits. Trevor was taught that socialism is the way of the future and that he must submit.

Trevor, now, would need to apply for another student loan to earn more credits to graduate. And though tenured professors did not have to redistribute their years of teaching to create tenure for other teachers (some people being more equal than others), Trevor accepted his plight….by saying, “Hell no!”
~~~ Bernie Sanders bernie a true socialist
The push for equality through Democracy, equality tied to a certain feature of your neighbor’s life, is not unlike an out of control spender charging every purchase to a credit card to keep up with the Joneses or the Kardashians or the Real House Wives of Orange County and then paying the minimum due every month.
~~~  Frederic Bastiat Quote
“And it is a good thing that many ideas have a relatively short shelf-life. Some because they are bad, even pernicious ideas: the Master Race, the class struggle, the Oedipus complex, and Socialism are four bad ideas with wretched consequences that come immediately to mind.”
bernie sanders unicorn
“Being an anti-capitalist and hence being able to blame capitalism—often known more simply as “the system”—for any failure I might encounter through my own lack of talent or absence of energy not only provided me with a fine fallback position, but permitted me to view anyone who labored at a workaday job in the system with a rather lofty contempt.”  bernie sanders unicorn 1.gif
― Joseph Epstein, A Literary Education and Other Essays
~~~
More required reading. Credit applies to graduating with honors in saying “No” to socialism:

“This Presidential election looks more like an election in Europe than one from America. On the Democratic side you have a 74 year old self-avowed socialist and a 68 year old progressive. On the GOP side you have forgotten the message of Reagan where Government was the problem, now it’s just badly managed. At the GOP debate last week you had a debate over whether Obama is incompetent or an ideologue.”

Karl Marx’s 10 Point Checklist to Communism – Where Does America Rank?

“What Keynes succeeded in doing was to provide a rationale for what governments always like to do: spend other people’s money and pander to special interests.”

The Follies and Fallacies of Keynesian Economics

Thomas Sowell – Common sense economist

Socialism: The Force Is Not With You

Added, #FeeltheBern of socialism in Sweden:

“When leftists fantasize about Northern Europe, the first thing they think of is the region’s enormous public spending and its overly generous welfare state. However, as with all dreams, the time is coming to wake up. Along with several other social services, Sweden’s iconic “free” healthcare system’s days are numbered.”

Socialist Paradise of Sweden Reportedly Moving TO PRIVATE HEALTHCARE

This Is How Bad It’s Got In Latin America’s Socialist Utopia

Filed under Economics Tagged with , , , , , , ,

The Invasion of the Wealth Snatchers

November 1, 2015 Leave a comment

“The history of the 20th century is full of examples of countries that set out to redistribute wealth and ended up redistributing poverty. The communist nations were a classic example, but by no means the only example.”

– Thomas Sowell, economist

~~~

On the heels of a previous post, Resident Evil: Redistribution, I now dispatch a warning about recent alien attacks on human flourishing. And in this brief post, I will also present you with some initial understanding of wealth disparity so that you will be able to withstand the alien invasion.

First, the humanity invading spores of socialism:

Run for your lives! Wealth snatchers are coming!

Run for your lives! Wealth snatchers are coming!

The socialist spores, planted next to you while you sleep in the twilight of Progressive thoughts, will make you into “pod people.”

As explained by the alien Democratic Socialists, after the takeover of your mind, body and soul by the socialist spores “life loses its frustrating complexity, because all emotions and sense of individuality vanish.”

Spores en route to your home.

Spores en route to your home.

 

Marxism, the origin of leftist thought, and its Progressive offshoot Democratic Socialism will require the means ultimately to abolish the individual and their private property along with the elimination of truth and religion. This will be done to accomplish the ends of redistribution of wealth and the creation of proletarian banality.

In its negation of the individual to further collective materialism, Marxism must necessarily denigrate humanity down to the lowest common statistic. Marxism does so through exacting means: you are forced to live within the lie once you allow the lie to overtake you. It is your vote to elect a Democratic Socialist that makes you complicit with the lie. In so doing it would appear that…

Pod hatcing

Pods hatching

“Each person somehow succumbs to a profane trivialization of his or her inherent humanity…In everyone there is some willingness to merge with the anonymous crowd and to flow comfortably along with it down the river of pseudo-life. This is much more than a simple conflict between two identities. It is something far worse: it is a challenge to the very notion of identity itself.” –Vaclav Havel

The tearing down of your sacred humanity begins after socialism spores have attached themselves to you:

“When the [revolutionary] political state…comes violently into being…[it] can and must proceed to the abolition of religion, to the destruction of religion.” -Karl Marx

Because…

“…”to abolish religion as the illusory happiness of the people is to demand their real happiness; the demand to give up illusions about the existing state of affairs is the demand to give up a state of affairs that needs illusions.” –Karl Marx

What is the “illusion” of religion being replaced with in Marx’s scheme and in neo-Marxist Bernie Sander’s scheme? The “un-masking” of collectivized materialism. Nothing more, nothing less.

Oh, and this, too…

“The historian of ideas Leszek Kołakowski said that Marxism (the philosophy) and Karl Marx (the man) had become fetishized and rendered into commodities; that such a form of intellectual reductionism could be construed as a secular, materialist faith that substituted for supernatural religion.” (emphasis mine)

Self enserfment: your vote for and your surrender to Democratic Socialism will, as history has shown, evolve into acquiescence to totalitarian rule. Then you will live hand to mouth:

“Totalitarian regimes created a debilitating psychology of complicity. Because they owned and controlled everything, and recognized no limits to their own power, every mouthful of food, every moment of rest, every item of consumption, was enjoyed solely by their grace and favor, which could be withdrawn at a whim.” -Theodrore Dalrymple, The Wilder Shores of Marx: Journeys in a Vanishing World.

Enter the neo-apparatchik: the contemporary followers of Marxism, the beguiling ideological sycophants called Democratic Socialists, will destroy the growth of wealth and prevent human flourishing for the sake of centralization and the commodification of one’s life. Under them, truth becomes what is commanded to be believed by State – unsalable things becoming salable.

The Democratic Socialism political ads are enticing commercials promoting a prescription of socialism spores. They are, of course, presented without contraindications.

Uncle Sanders wants...your wealth!

Uncle Sanders wants…your wealth!

~~~

Sadly, as I quoted in my previous post (linked above) regarding the Me Generation…

“What do students value, and are those values any different from those of previous generations? … [studies of] students…reveal further characteristics that distinguish Generation Me from prior cohorts. A consistent trend in these data is the decline in interest in abstract and intellectual concerns and the increase in practical and materialistic ones.” –Jean M. Twenge, The Rise of Self and the Decline of Intellectual and Civic Interest, The State of the American Mind by Mark Bauerlein and Adam Belllow, copyright 2015 Templeton press (emphasis mine)

I prescribe the following:

Read history. Read The Wilder Shores of Marx: Journeys in a Vanishing World.

Do this in order to find out what the socialist world becomes via a personal eyewitness account provided by Theodore Dalrymple.

If you can care about your sacred humanity over and above collectivized material concerns then maybe there is hope for you and this generation.

Your Dead Meat Under Democratic Socialism!

You’re Dead Meat Under Democratic Socialism!

Most important, if you carry an attitude of thanksgiving with you wherever you go and use it in every situation, then envy won’t fester into “income inequality” obsession. Thanksgiving EveryDay is the best immunization against envy and materialism and the pursuit of other’s money.

If you can keep from taking in the poisonous alien banter about “income inequality” then you will be better able to flourish in a healthy and natural way, as opposed to allowing another life form to take over your pocket-book and leaving you dependent and devoid of humanity.

The videos below provide some intellectually organic safeguards against socialism’s spores. To further inoculate yourself you will need to read the accessible Basic Economics and Wealth, Poverty and Politics. Both books are by economist Thomas Sowell. In doing so you will gain a basic understanding of economics, an understanding that is currently deficit in the general public’s intellect. You will also then be able to comprehend the dire warnings I have presented here and will be able to guard yourself against the soul-encroaching socialist spores and The Invasion of the Wealth Snatchers.

Ahhh...

Ahhh…

~~~

Before I turn you over to the videos I must not leave this out: The earmark of socialism is shortages. First and foremost, socialism must unsettle you with a shortage of certainty:

Added 11-3-2015, no shortage of common sense:

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Living in a Material world, The Impoverished Thinking of “Income Inequality”

July 11, 2015 Leave a comment

It’s a mystery to me

We have a greed with which we have agreed

You think you have to want more than you need

Until you have it all you won’t be free

Society, you’re a crazy breed

I hope you’re not lonely without

 

Though the message of the above song resonates within me throughout and though I have seen others on the same road as Alexander Supertramp I do not recommend walking away…

~~~

Two recent events reveal the impoverished thinking of populist economics and “society’s crazy breed”: A mandated minimum wage increase in Chicago (Chicago-Minimum-Wage-Notice) and Op-Ed columnist Paul Krugman’s macro-hypocrisy increase.

Let’s start with the subliminal wage increase.

It feels so “Oprah-kind” to know that the minimum pay for your effort will be set at a fixed rate by Big Brother. Big Brother, of course, is not paying for the increase but he is certainly gaining political capital and tax revenue from your increased paycheck.

The media abets the ravenous pols by constantly bombarding us with income deltas as if materialism is the bread of life. Karl Marx did care about how much someone else made, he dined out on it.

On a daily basis I find some financial webpages and articles written about comparative CEO salaries. OMG! Reporter, get the socialist’s dirty needle out of your arm! Are you reporting these numbers so as to invoke class-ic envy?

“There is some ill a-brewing towards my rest, For I did dream of money-bags to-night.” William Shakespeare

~~~

Thomas Sowell, economist

Thomas Sowell, economist

“Minimum wage laws make it illegal to pay less than the government specified price for labor. By the simplest and most basic economics, a price artificially raised tends to cause more to be supplied and less to be demanded than when prices are left to be determined by supply and demand in a free market. The result is a surplus, whether the price that is set artificially high is that of farm produce and labor.

Making it illegal to pay less than a given amount does not make a worker’s productivity worth that amount….” Quote from Thomas Sowell, economist, “The Thomas Sowell Reader”.

~~~

Nothing happens in isolation. Consider also that the Obamacare/health “coverage” is also mandated. So, a worker’s hours are restricted to ensure that a business remains profitable to ensure employee jobs. And, a worker who doesn’t fulfill the Obamacare mandated-Justice Ruth Ginsburg-and-Justice John Roberts-mandated requirements is fined or taxed-actually, both. Big Brother has the gun law of coercion to your back.

~~~

Under the “People should and do trust me” department…

Hillary Clinton and Income Reality Inequality! Hillary Clinton Broke?

Why “income inequality”? Because good money is thrown after bad. 

Paul Krugman, pop economist

Paul Krugman, pop economist

Paul Krugman Sticks It To Poor People With $225,000 Salary To Study Income Inequality

By Eric Owens, Education Editor:

“This week, trustees of the cash-strapped, taxpayer-funded City University of New York (CUNY) system approved a hefty annual salary as well as the fancypants title of “distinguished professor” for Paul Krugman.

New York City’s public college system pays Krugman $225,000 each year to analyze the vexing problem of income inequality at the CUNY Graduate Center’s Luxembourg Income Study Center, Gawker notes.

Krugman’s $225,000 salary — which is $18,750 per month — does not include his undisclosed earnings from other ventures, the sum of which could be substantial.”

 

Why “income inequality”? (You don’t have to pay me!)

A Fool and his money are soon parted. Duh!

A Fool and his money are soon parted. Duh!

-Folly:  A fool and his money are soon parted.” That’s what state lotteries and casinos count on.

-Government and Progressive Income tax: I made a few dollars as a store clerk at age thirteen. Now I make a whole lot more money closer to retirement. And this is because I have worked a lifetime to obtain skills that have been of value to my employers. Should I be taxed more because I make more money due to the manifest effort on my part to take care of my family and to pay my bills, just to satisfy the ‘social justice” gnosis?

–Time and experience: Over the course of decades I have had “income inequality” every year of my life. Should I demand equal pay because someone is making more at some point in time? No way! I need to make myself of more value to my employer and then ask for an increase in pay or find a better paying job. This brings me to my next point…

-Denial: Degreed Millennials, as an observation, think that their academic credentials buy them a ticket to ride without much effort on their part. Some even think that blue-collar labor is beneath them. This denial of reality of their situation and a lack of healthy self-awareness is the result, in part I believe, of the effects of psychotherapy’s delusional self-awareness pharmacopeia on our culture. Psychotherapy provides the illusion that you can live an existence free of any tension over time, through endless sessions of… therapy. An analysand’s every thought must be reviewed, be given equal doses of “hmmm” and then before the open-ended session’s time is done, be given equal value. “You are not to blame yourself. XYZ is responsible. Look, our time is up. See you next week. Pay up front.” And, psychotherapy’s moral deficit is not a cure for a person’s lack of awareness of the obvious-many a Millennial thinks he is entitled. And, of no value is the politician’s “Hope and Change” pharmacopeia. A Minimum wage is not a cure at all. It is a placebo that generates no economic health whatsoever. In fact it denies the existence of bad economic choices an individual has made. Yet, perverse politicians say “it’s not you. You didn’t build that problem. The institution of big business is the problem. It must take our ‘medicine’ for your cure.

-Misdirected Self-awareness:  Millennials tend to think of only what they need and not what an employer needs. Naiveté.

Money Well Spent?!? sodahead.com

Money Well Spent?!?
sodahead.com

-Some people have a spending problem: Some people reinvest their money and create jobs. Others will spend their money and ask “Why am I ‘poor’ when others are rich?” The makeshift poor will demand the doctors of politics to up their dosage of cornucopian wealth.

-Lack of wisdom: “He that wants money, means, and content, is without three good friends.” William Shakespeare

-Lack of wisdom: “It is senseless to pay tuition to educate a fool, since he has no heart for learning.” Proverbs 17:16

-Lack of wisdom: “Lazy people want much but get little, but those who work hard will prosper.” Proverbs 13:4

-Lack of wisdom: “Work brings profit, but mere talk leads to poverty!” Proverbs 14:23

~~~

In a twist of a Thomas Sowell quote, ”It is amazing how many people seem to think that the government exists to turn their prejudices into law.” I say, ”It is amazing how many people seem to think that the government exists to insure them against their bad decisions.”

~~~

Added 7-15-2015:

Thomas Sowell – Minimum Wage Exploitation (Economics 101)

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Immigration Fiat Meet Multiculturalism or Don’t Pass the Fiat Fondue Melting Pot

November 22, 2014 Leave a comment

Remember when your parents said, “Eat your supper, eat your peas or go to your room without supper.”?  no peas

 That is the Eat-Your-Supper-Fiat. Whether you liked the food or not your were required to eat whatever was set before you because, “I said so.” You were offered two choices:  “accept what I am demanding of you or face the consequences of not obeying me.”

 As adults, as voting adults, as voting adults with representatives we are now told by Dear Leader Obama that we must swallow his Executive Fiat without representation. And, we must also accept the consequences of not loving him with supine obedience:  a renunciation of the U.S. Constitution and a negation of our elected representatives.

 And here’s the excuse for just such a demand: there are “poor little children from other countries torn from their families, who do not have a regular meal to eat.” Sob. Sob. Sniffle. Sniffle. “Shame on you, taxpayers! You did not obey my commands!”

 How these children were torn from their families and became hungry is another story involving crossing our sovereign border and avoiding immigration authorities. They snuck into our country illegally in hopes of demanding to be fed and taken care of by U.S. taxpayer money as in “Illegal immigrants to be eligible for Social Security, Medicare”  BTW: They are illegal immigrants and not ‘undocumented” travelers on the road of life.

 Now that the ‘dinner’ has been served sitting in front of us is a smorgasbord multinational characters, some who may be Jihadists, felons, drug dealers, gang members, diseased and most certainly impoverished. Yet, we are informed by IL-Rep Luis Gutierrez that we the voters are uninformed children in need of Dear Leader’s guidance. Remember, we are the “stupid voters” ala Jon Gruber. We are not supposed to care what we are fed as long as “Change” is on the menu.

The Dear Reverend Hussein Obama has also blessed the meal. He used Holy Scripture to endorse his lawlessness and to promote his legacy of “Me, Myself and I”. The spirit of anti-Christ is crouching, ready to devour.

The Gospel-according-to-Progressive George Soros funded Illinois Voices For Immigration Deformity has also blessed the meal with their alliterative babble” “Bibles, Badges, Business.” They forgot to add “and Balkanization to boot.” Their “Call to Action” is the new Evangelical Gospel of antinomianism.

 Now that Dear Leader has served us his self made whipped up fiat fondue we are told to eat and like it: “If you don’t eat what I am serving, you can’t have any pudding, how can you have any pudding if you don’t eat what I am serving!” But there is more to this fiat force feeding than meets the throat.

Multiculturalism and Immigration Fiat now meet face to face-a few million times over.

 Forced multiculturalism, whether as found in England or Germany or France hasn’t worked out well. Many immigrants do not share the same values as their host country. In fact, the immigrants often isolate themselves into their own cultural collectives. And, the radical Islamists currently crossing our border make no distinction between church and state. They want us to be under their Sharia law. They will kill us to make this happen.

In The New Criterion article by Roger Kimball titled “Institutionalizing our demise: America vs. multiculturalism”, Kimball mentions a book by the Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington

“Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity” (2004), Kimball writes:

“Does it,” Huntington asks, “take an Osama bin Laden … to make us realize that we are Americans? If we do not experience recurring destructive attacks, will we return to the fragmentation and eroded Americanism before September 11?”…

Multiculturalism is a moral intoxicant; its thrill centers around the emotion of superior virtue; its hangover subsists on a diet of nescience and blighted “good intentions.”

Wherever the imperatives of multiculturalism have touched the curriculum, they have left broad swaths of anti-Western attitudinizing competing for attention with quite astonishing historical blindness. Courses on minorities, women’s issues, the Third World proliferate; the teaching of mainstream history slides into oblivion. “The mood,” Arthur Schlesinger wrote in The Disuniting of America (1992), his excellent book on the depredations of multiculturalism, “is one of divesting Americans of the sinful European inheritance and seeking redemptive infusions from non-Western cultures.”

A profound ignorance of the milestones of American culture is one predictable result of this mood.”

 

Let it be known that Our Dear Leader, Supreme Professor of Cultural-Legal-Social-Economic-Self-Aggrandizement Studies, has enslaved us to Multiculturalism. His doting bureaucrats will feed his new slaves from the fiat fondue melting pot, a pot laced with every form of human depravity known to man. 

Dear Leader, in his great wisdom, has purposely created this ad hoc toxic milieu so as to dilute America’s melting pot with third world values. Progressive dictatorships feed off of this pot.

Equally as important to Dear Leader is creating millions of worshippers of Progressivism’s cult combine of language, morally relative values, lowest common denominator culture, Gaia-incensed global-warming and the rule of ad hoc law.

Dear Leader wants to amass voters who are submissive, “stupid” and obedient. And, like him, they must not care that there are laws to obey or boundaries to be wary of, or red lines to never cross. The illegal immigrants are to be his hapless ‘victims,’ Dear Leader is to be their Savior and America (always the oppressor in his anti-colonialism zeitgeist) will now submit to him. We are to be his colony of worker bees.

For the ‘victims’ there is to be the 1%’s pot of gold to be had and a third world free-for-all party to attend. “Go ahead. Break the law. Just don’t get caught. But if you do, we have liberal–minded judges who will ‘figure’ it out for you at the time. Remember, laws are meaningless under ‘social justice.”

How else can the Democrat/Progressive party survive? Only by mandating desperate, “stupid” and lawless voters out from shadowy existence and thrusting them into ‘daylight’ of the voting booth. That is how the Progressive Party survives. That is how illegal immigrants will be used. And, that is why Hillary Clinton nods her approval while awaiting her throne.

 

Here, the Rev. Robert A. Sirico speaks to the issue of Multiculturalism and the fact that all cultures are not equal:

 

 

And, Thomas Sowell, as well, about multiculturalism, affirmative action and the minimum wage, all of which comes into play with millions more people entering the country willy-nilly:

 

 

~~~~

Lest anyone think that I am not being Christian enough, insensitive to the plight of others and a bigot in my opinion post above, let me summarize my own situation and realign your thinking.

  I am a Christian woman who lives in an apartment building, not an ivory tower. Above me lives a Hispanic family. Below me lives another Hispanic family. Across the hall from me is a single black woman with her son. 

 The apartment buildings surrounding me are filled with a majority of Hispanics, some black Americans and some white Americans.

 The apartment building complex south of me is occupied mostly with Hispanics, with some black Americans and some white Americans.

Reader, can you say that about where you live?

 Mi amiga, Veronica, works in the food service cafeteria where I work.

 I have no problema with Hispanics or with legal immigrants. I do have a big problem with Obama’s edict and the illegal process he used and coercive multiculturalism.

~~~~~

SNL spoofing the executive fiat:

 Obama Shoves Legislative Process Down Capitol Steps

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The Vision of the Anointed is Our Nightmare; Ivy League Progressives and Creeping Racism

August 23, 2014 Leave a comment

Ferguson, Missouri; Michael Brown; the race industry’s huckster’s ‘Reverends’ Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson; “No Justice, No Peace”.

 Should we listen to and embrace the inflammatory NeveReverending racial rhetoric that bellows out from under a sheep skin, rhetoric that leads to societal schism? OR, should we listen to and follow the wise words of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr’s niece Dr. Alveda King as she says: “Know peace and you’ll know justice”? You tell me.

 And, should Obama be just as arrogant as President Lyndon Johnson?

 Since the earliest days of my youth I have been seeking wisdom, knowledge and a good understanding. This pervasive endeavor was birthed in me as my mother read from the book of Proverbs at the dinner table each night after dinner.

 Please, please, please sit down with your coffee and listen to the wisdom, clarity and common sense that Thomas Sowell brings to the issues of race, affirmative action, minimum wage, the negative effects of today’s intellectualism, multiculteralism, social justice, environmentalism, political correctness, diversity and a host of other hot-button cultural and economic topics. You will be doing yourself a favor – wisdom is like that. 

 

Wisdom’s, Rebuke (Proverbs Chapter One)

 

Out in the open wisdom calls aloud
she raises her voice in the public square;
on top of the wall she cries out,
at the city gate she makes her speech:

 

“How long will you who are simple love your simple ways?
How long will mockers delight in mockery
and fools hate knowledge?
Repent at my rebuke!
Then I will pour out my thoughts to you,
will make known to you my teachings.
But since you refuse to listen when I call
and no one pays attention when I stretch out my hand,
since you disregard all my advice
and do not accept my rebuke,
I in turn will laugh when disaster strikes you;
I will mock when calamity overtakes you—
when calamity overtakes you like a storm,
when disaster sweeps over you like a whirlwind,
when distress and trouble overwhelm you.

 

“Then they will call to me but I will not answer;
they will look for me but will not find me,
since they hated knowledge
and did not choose to fear the Lord.
Since they would not accept my advice
and spurned my rebuke,
they will eat the fruit of their ways
and be filled with the fruit of their schemes.
For the waywardness of the simple will kill them,
and the complacency of fools will destroy them;
but whoever listens to me will live in safety
and be at ease, without fear of harm.”

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Egalitarianism. Is It Equal To The Task?

February 5, 2014 Leave a comment

The 2014 Olympics is fast approaching… starting-line

 Should Olympians ‘race’ when everyone gets the same prize at the finish line?

 Egalitarianism = equal outcomes.  And equal outcomes are what Progressives want to have happen within our legal system, within our education system ~ within society as a whole.

 Egalitarianism is posited as a means to create the unspoken Utopian bureaucratic island where near-perfect socio-politico-legal systems exist and where no one has advantage over another except for the so-called elite who have been ‘blessed’ with “superior intellect.” Only they know enough to define life for you. (e.g., Cass Sunstein’s recent Nudge book).

 In my younger days I was a sprinter.  I would run many heats and then the final events.  To do so I had to prepare for the weekly track meet. I will use my own ‘summer event’ experience to help you to consider whether egalitarianism is equal to the hard work and discipline required for life’s trials and to decide whether the rise of “egalitarianism” will benefit or hurt our society.

 I wrote the following as a ‘real-life’ depiction of my understanding of the “Constrained Vision” and the “Unconstrained Vision” as delineated by Thomas Sowell in his own favorite book A Conflict of Visions:

A Tale of Two Foot Races

Race Number One:

Eight men enter a race.  They are roughly about the same height and weight but come from very different backgrounds. The eight men enter the race knowing that there will only be one winner.  It was for this outcome that they had prepared themselves with rigorous discipline during the past four years.

Months prior to the track meet the eight men are told of the rules:  A runner must run in qualifying heats. If the runner is successful in those heats the runner will then be allowed to compete in the final race with the other qualifying runners;  a runner who jumps the gun twice at the starting line will be disqualified as having a “false start”;  the commands “Ready”, “Set” and a gun shot will be used by a track official to start the race fairly;  each runner must stay in his lane or he will be disqualified;  runners will be timed and the first runner to cross the finish line will be the winner of the race.

The runners all agree and sign off on the rules before the race.

On the day of the race and after qualifying in the heats eight runners come to the starting line.  They know that they must run straight ahead in their own lane to reach the one-hundred meter line. They know that if they jump the gun twice they will be disqualified from running. They know that they must sprint as hard as they can to cross the finish line first. They are knowingly competing for first place. The race before them has now become the culmination of years of exhausting training and dedication to finishing the race and receiving first prize.

When the race is announced the runners shed their sweats and come to the starting line. The track official then announces, “Ready”. The runners will then carefully position their legs into the starting blocks and place their open hands stretched behind the starting line.  

Once the runners have settled the track official then snaps “Set”.  The runners immediately come up to a “set position”, coiled in their starting block. With the burst of the starting pistol eight men bolt from their starting blocks and run down the track as fast as their disciplined bodies will carry them.

The winner of the race is the one who breaks the tape. There is also a second, a third and fourth place finisher. The runners-up each congratulate the winner for his speed and, implicitly, for his fidelity to the rules and his commitment to the sport of racing.

The first three finishers receive medals, adulation and wreaths of honor from the thousands who have come to watch a fair race between those who have so vigorously prepared themselves. The experience of the race has bolstered each runner’s self-esteem. The cheering crowd is also moved by each runner’s self-sacrifice, dedication and self-discipline. This spectacle has confirmed the crowd’s understanding of athlete’s playing by the rules and aspiring to excel within those rules. Those who witnessed the race that day are stirred, encouraged to excel at what they do.

All eight racers later return home.  The runners-up are now more dedicated than ever to prepare for another day of racing and to receiving their own crown of victory. Ciltius, altius, fortius.

Race Number Two:

Eight men enter a race.  They are roughly about the same height, weight but come from very different backgrounds. The eight men entered the race knowing that everyone will be a winner.  It was for this outcome that they saw no need to prepare themselves with rigorous discipline during the past four years. They just had to show up.

Months prior to the race the eight men are told the rules.  They are told the rules are subject to change at the time of the race based on the current ad hoc articulated reasoning of one superior intellectual with unquestionable virtue.  A runner must run in qualifying heats but this will not be a constraint. Whether or not a runner is successful in those heats he will be allowed to compete in the final race with other ‘qualifying’ runners. The heats are basically events created to satisfy the need for more equality.

More rules: a runner who jumps the gun twice at the starting line will not be disqualified from running. Instead he will be given another chance; the commands “Ready” and “Set” and a gun shot will be used by a track official to start the race fairly, though any sincere attempt to cooperate with the official will be accepted; each runner must stay in his lane or he will be disqualified unless, of course, their background is such that they have never stayed within the lines; runners will not be timed because such keeping of minutes would be discrimination against slower runners.  The first runner to cross the finish line will wait at the finish line so that everyone will be considered a winner of the race. This must be done at any personal cost to the first one crossing the finish line.

The runners agree and sign off on the rules before the race.

On the day of the race all of the runners come to the starting line.  They know that they are supposed to run down to the finish line before the outcome-determining patrons. They know that there will be equal prizes and the egalitarian appreciation of well-wishers to look forward to. They are going to run for this reason. This race is now the culmination of years of knowing that the battle is just showing up and doing what you are told.

When all the runners are in their starting blocks and their hands are behind the starting line the track official then says, “Ready”.  After a long moment of reasoned judgment the official says “Set”.  The runners come up to set position.  Then the race official shoots the starting gun. The eight men come out of their starting blocks and run down the track as fast as their unfocused discipline has trained them.

At the finish line everyone is a Finisher, even those who left the race due to being out of breath. There are hand-shakes and kudos all around for having shown up for such an event.

At the awards ceremony all the runners receive medals and congratulations. Thousands have come to watch a race between runners who have shown up for a race where the outcome was predetermined to be fair ~ fair as defined by the few judges of superior intellect and of unquestioned virtue.

Later, all the runners return home and rest for another day of showing up.

*****

A Tale of Two Foot Races:  Equal Opportunities vs. Equal Outcomes by Sally Paradise © Sally Paradise, 2013, All Rights Reserved

Added 2/7/2014:

Communism Leads to Slavery Not To Equality

Filed under Egalitarianism, Political Commentary, Politics, social commentary Tagged with , , , , , , , ,

Three Atheists I Listen To

January 5, 2014 1 Comment

Becoming a follower of Jesus Christ and an heir of the King and a fellow servant in the Kingdom of God began when I first believed that God existed. What followed was the understanding that God not only existed but that He is an Infinite-Personal God who, though having created the vast universe ex nihilo using the Big Bang and evolution, loves me.

 Beyond my own personal encounters with God through my reason and through the testimony of others, there are the historical facts supporting the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. There is also astounding supporting evidence in nature. God exists.

But there are some who say otherwise: “Atheism exists, this I know, for my reason tells me so.” These would be the angry atheists Richard Dawkins, the former Christopher Hitchens (Hitch) and others.

 I have at one time or another heard these atheists give their arguments of disbelief and I have found their words wanting for any real substance. They often come across as superior and snobbish.  And, their arguments are certainly unfettered by the factual account of the resurrection or of the fine tuning of the universe that makes life and thought and argument possible at all. Their anger exists.

 There are three atheists I pay attention to.  I tune in to them because what they often say through words or music reveals the truth about God in a way they may not even realize. The three atheists are Thomas Sowell, Dr. Theodore Dalrymple and Frederick Delius

Thomas SowellFirst, Thomas Sowell.  Start at his web page Thomas Sowell. And, here is a short bio from the Townhall.com web page: http://townhall.com/columnists/thomassowell/

“…writing for the general public enables him to address the heart of issues without the smoke and mirrors that so often accompany academic writing.”

  Sowell is an economist, a common sense economist.  You will get that sense as you read his books and articles.  Of late, I have read The Thomas Sowell Reader (start with this book for short articles addressing current issues both economic and social) and A Conflict of Visions.

  The Thomas Sowell Reader, a compilation of articles and essays written by Thomas Sowell, economist:

 “From an early age, I have been convinced with trying to understand the social problems that abound in any society.  First and foremost, this was an attempt to try to grasp some explanation of the puzzling and disturbing things going on around me.  This was all for my own personal clarification, since I neither had political ambitions nor the political talents required for either elective or appointed office.  But, one having achieved some sense of understanding of particular issues ~ a process that sometimes took years – I wanted to share that understanding with others.  That is the reason for the things that appear in this book.”

 A Conflict of Visions, also written by Thomas Sowell:

 “What are the underlying assumptions behind the very different ideological visions of the world being contested in modern times?  The purpose here will not be to determine which of these visions is more valid but rather to reveal the inherent logic behind each of these sets of views and the ramifications of the assumptions which lead not only to different conclusions on particular issues but also to wholly different meanings to such fundamental words as “justice,” “equality,” and “power.”

 A sample article by Thomas Sowell:  The Fallacy of Redistribution

 519px-TheodoredalrympleRegarding Dr. Theodore Dalrymple and some of his recurring themes from books and articles note the following from his Wikipedia entry.  I confirm these themes having read his book Life at the bottom. The Worldview that makes the Underclass:

 -The cause of much contemporary misery in Western countries ~ criminality, domestic violence, drug addiction, aggressive youths, hooliganism, broken families ~ is the nihilistic, decadent, and/or self-destructive behavior of people who do not know how to live. Both the smoothing over of this behavior, and the lexicalization of the problems that emerge as a corollary of this behavior, are forms of indifference. Someone has to tell those people, patiently and with understanding for the particulars of the case, that they have to live differently. (Life at the bottom. The Worldview that makes the Underclass)

-Moral relativism can easily be a trick of an egotistical mind to silence the voice of conscience. (‘The Uses of Metaphysical Skepticism’, in: In Praise of Prejudice. The Necessity of Preconceived Ideas, p. 6 (chapter 2).

-Multiculturalism and cultural relativism are at odds with common sense. (“Multiculturalism Starts Losing Its Luster”. City Journal. Retrieved 12 July 2009)

-The decline of civilized behavior ~ self-restraint, modesty, zeal, humility, irony, detachment – ruins social and personal life. (Not with a Bang but a Whimper)

-The root cause of our contemporary cultural poverty is intellectual dishonesty. First, the intellectuals (more specifically, left-wing ones) have destroyed the foundation of culture, and second, they refuse to acknowledge it by resorting to the caves of political correctness.

deliusLastly, Frederick Delius.  I don’t recall when I first heard his compositions. It may have been in my thirties at a Chicago Symphony concert.  The first piece I remember is the symphonic poem The Song Of Summer.  I was overwhelmed by its simple beauty.

 From The Delius Collection, Vol. 2 CD liner notes:

 “Many have written of Delius’ ‘moods’ or ‘feelings’, views which reflect only the ‘impression’ his music has made on the writers (read music critics).

Such Romantic or rather Impressionistic ~ notions of his art are only concerned with its surface appeal, as if that is all that is valuable in it, and ignore wholly his unique technical and structural mastery.  In such ways, Delius is more of an anti-Romantic, for the sentimentality or self-projection of Romanticism are alien to his music.  Delius hymned Nature, not himself as did Sebelius; such sentimentality as may condemn his art stems from a performing style wherein expressive beauty is stressed at the cost of his music’s intellectual power.” Robert Matthew-Walker

 For starters I would recommend listening to Irmelin Prelude, Song of Summer, A Late Lark, the orchestral interlude A Walk to Paradise Garden from his opera A Village Romeo and Juliet and On Hearing the First Cuckoo in Spring.

 An avowed atheist, Delius embraced nature for his inspiration.  He also embraced Nietzsche’s philosophy which produced Delius’ loud and unattractive A Mass of Life.

 “A Mass of Life is an attack upon Christian doctrine and the Christian way of life as Nietzsche and Delius saw it. They both wanted to correct what they called the “slave morality” of Christianity.  Their great emphasis was upon the will, not bowing to anyone, and living and dying fearlessly though death be total extinction.

Death, when it came to Delius, was terrible, and within a few months his steadfast wife was dead too.

In speaking about Delius, Eric Fenby (Delius’ composition scribe after Delius became blind) observes, “Given those great natural musical gifts and that nature of his, so full of feeling, and which at its finest inclined to that exalted end of man which is contemplation, there is no knowing to what sublime heights he would have risen had he chosen to look upwards to God instead of downward to man!”  From the Gift of Music by Jane Stuart Smith and Betty Carlson, Crossway Books

 What the first two atheists have in common is their ability to speak truth, wisdom and common sense ~ God’s law within each of us – simply. As Richard Feynman, Nobel laureate of physics said, “You can recognize truth by its beauty and simplicity.”

 Both men, from their lifetime of experiences, have seen reality and tell us that there are values that a man must embrace to be civilized, to be ‘right side up’, so to speak.  They tell us that Man must draw the line somewhere. 

Now, I believe that it is the God of Creation who has created the line ~ the natural law written on our hearts ~ and He has exposed our crossing it. But, He did not leave us on our own, to remake ourselves as Nietzsche’s ideal human, the Übermensch, who would be able to channel passions creatively (but to what end?). He gave us the only way possible, through His Son, to regain our humanity.

 Frederick Delius revealed truth through his music’s contemplative moments of rhapsodic beauty as inspired by God’s creation.

 All three have seen things (even the eventually blind Delius) that others often willfully ignore. They are honest with themselves about what they see and they repeat it back.  And, there is knowledge of reality in their words and works that can only find its genesis in God’s created order and His law written on our hearts.

 “He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the human heart; yet no one can fathom what God has done from beginning to end.” Ecclesiastes 3:11

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