Being wrong
I first started reading blogs some time around 2002. I immediately liked them, although I no longer remember the first blogs I found and I suspect most of them are now defunct. I liked the bluntness, the honesty, the humor, and the comments sections, all so different from the newspapers that had been my major news sources previously.
I remember one of those original blogs had a joke that amused me mightily at the time. It went something like this: Hey, I think I know what’s wrong. We thought it was 9/11/2001, but actually we got the year backwards; it was really 1002.
The idea was that progress was an illusion, and that somehow through some terrible time warp or wormhole we’d been catapulted to the Middle Ages, or what used to be called the Dark Ages.
That was a joke, but not really a joke either. I’ve had occasion to think of it many times since. It seems to be a common thought among people who live in times of jarring transition.
For example, there’s this quote from a letter by Henry James, written the day after World War I (or “The Great War” as it was known prior to #II) began:
The plunge of civilization into this abyss of blood and darkness… is a thing that so gives away the whole long age during which we have supposed the world to be, with whatever abatement, gradually bettering, that to have to take it all now for what the treacherous years were all the while really making for and meaning is too tragic for any words.
You can feel James thinking how could I, how could we, have been so stupid, so wrong, about what we were living through and where the whole thing was going?
The style of the following excerpt is as different as different can be from that of Henry James. It’s more telegraphic and journalistic. But the sentiment is the same, although this time it’s from Victor Klemperer, diarist of the Third Reich, a converted Jew married to an Aryan woman and living in Dresden during the Hitler era. A scant two months after Hitler became Chancellor, Klemperer wrote:
Mood as before a pogrom in the depths of the Middle Ages…We are hostages. The dominant feeling…is that this reign of terror can hardly last long, but that its fall will bury us…In fact I feel shame more than fear, shame for Germany. I have truly always felt a German. I have always imagined: The twentieth century and Mitteleurope was different from the fourteenth century and Romania. Mistake.
It’s that one short word that overwhelms me and creates that sock-in-the-gut feeling: “mistake.” I was wrong; wrong about something hugely important. Klemperer has no false pride—he realizes immediately the enormity of his error, and the error is hardly his alone. He was, after all, a professor (a position of particular prestige in Germany) who specialized in the literature of the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment, that “whole long age during which we have supposed the world to be, with whatever abatement, gradually bettering…”
Klemperer, and the Reich’s, “abyss of blood and darkness” was just beginning, but Klemperer could clearly see where it was ultimately heading. He was wrong about the duration—he was underestimating the human capacity for both evil and for endurance (including his own endurance and that of his wife who, though sickly and depressed, survived the war and an astounding amount of suffering both petty and profound). But he was right that its fall “will bury us”—the Jews of Germany, and Germany itself as a bastion of culture and learning.
I have also known that feeling of “I was wrong about something extremely important.” My political change was based on a realization that I’d been wrong. More recently I’ve been wrong about what the American people will tolerate and accept in a president.
I wonder what else I’m wrong about.
[ADDENDUM: I just remembered another case of someone realizing they’d been wrong about something political and very, very important. It involves author Azar Nafisi, who originally supported the 1979 Iranian revolution and lived to regret it. The quote is from her book Reading Lolita in Tehran:
In later months and years, every once in a while Bijan [the author’s husband] and I would be shocked to see the show trials of our old comrades in the U.S. on television. They eagerly denounced their past actions, their old comrades, their old selves, and confessed that they were indeed the enemies of Islam. We would watch these scenes in silence”¦I turned and asked Bijan, Did you ever dream that this could happen to us? He said, No, I didn’t, but I should have.]
We could be in abyss of blood and darkness in a second and it is coming from Iran or a jihadi group.
I’m an starting to worry that I am wrong about our basic “goodness” and sense of fairness marking us as American. My husband seems to think it’s gone, no longer there. That all we care about is ourselves and what we can get away with and how something benefits us. There is no more “We, the people.” I have been thinking he is wrong about that — but I am sorry to worry that maybe he is right, and I am wrong.
I too have been wrong about the zeitgeist, the sea changes, the political tsunamis, fundamental tranformationism, etc. It is sometimes witheringly despairing to take the measure of human fortes and foibles — the scale seems always to tip violently to stupid, or arrogant, or manically hubristic or whatever the antithesis of common sense might be. One could of course pray, hope, that something’s to be learned by our mistakes but… first things first, know this above all:
“God has set limits on man’s intelligence, none on his stupidity.” – Alice von Hildebrand
Absent a commitment to the obvious, to which humans have, daily it seems, less and less capacity, we might at least make a small concession to a soupé§on of judgmentalism:
“I am patient with stupidity but not with those who are proud of it.” – Edith Sitwell
One of my mistakes: pacifism. In response to the death of a childhood friend in a gun accident with his older brother, I decided that killing someone in war time would cause me to suffer as had the unfortunate elder brother for killing his younger brother, albeit accidentally. I accordingly got a 1-O [C.O.] classification in the draft.
The genocide in Cambodia showed me that no one has clean hands. One cannot stand on the sidelines while such killings are going on and have clean hands. As long as murderous thugs roam the earth, no one has clean hands. I changed from a Peace Democrat to a Jacksonian.
What I was completely wrong about was how quickly the federal judiciary abandoned the rule of law for the same sex marriage cases.
Like you, neo, when considering the incongruity &
dismissive – ness we see all around us, my husband and I
console ourselves by saying “Well, if that’s the kind of world they want…” Future generations will bear the consequences more that us.
Watching the horrifying events in Paris this week, I have found Churchill’s great speech of November 12, 1936, coming to mind. It is one of Churchill’s prophetic speeches – I believe in the Prophet Churchill – decrying the complacency of the government in the face of the gathering storm in Germany.
“So they go on in strange paradox,” Churchill asserted in Parliament of those responsible for the defense of the land, “decided only to be undecided, resolved to be irresolute, adamant for drift, solid for fluidity, all powerful to be impotent. So we go on preparing more months and years — precious, perhaps, vital, to the greatness of Britain, for the locusts to eat.”
Toward the end of his speech, Churchill rendered this judgment: “The era of procrastination, of half-measures, of soothing and baffling expedients, of delays, is coming to its close. In its place we are entering a period of consequences.”…
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2015/01/a-period-of-consequences.php
Elsewhere in the news:
Arrested for quoting Winston Churchill:
European election candidate accused of religious and racial harassment
after he repeats wartime prime minister’s words on Islam during campaign speech
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2614834/Arrested-quoting-Winston-Churchill-European-election-candidate-accused-religious-racial-harassment-repeats-wartime-prime-ministers-words-Islam-campaign-speech.html
I blame the voters …
The calendar is still not omnipotent
Hmmm…I wonder whether George Soros will ever pen (with honesty) his thoughts on his energies, those driven forces, the reasons why he’s engaged in the radical directions he’s followed through these past couple of decades?
_______________________________________
My bad. Why would I think any Leftist, Progressive, loony Liberal would ever be honest? Mistake.
I’ve been reading blogs since the late 1990’s. However, I was not motivated nor moved to engage in one until coming across the one Hugh Hewitt created.
As a matter of fact, I think I met NeoConScum there. Or, was that on Townhall? That was a decade ago.
Hewitt’s site was worthwhile. Some rousing and robust exchanges took place. Until the trolls and the pervasively pedantic Progressives infested it. Making every effort to derail threads. Shameless liars, the whole lot. Particularly one known as ‘PatrioticLiberal’. He changed his moniker more than I changed my underwear. His latest manifestation was always uncovered.
Hugh Hewitt decided that it was better to jettison that part of it.
c’est dommage…
Frequently being wrong in both small and large ways is part of the human condition. We all have “feet of clay”. The trick is to set aside the ego long enough to learn what we may from being wrong.
dialog from the movie, “The Wild Bunch”
Pike Bishop: A hell of a lot of people, Dutch, just can’t stand to be wrong.
Dutch Engstrom: Pride.
Pike Bishop: And they can’t forget it… that pride… being wrong. Or learn by it
“The genocide in Cambodia showed me that no one has clean hands.” Gringo
Only those responsible for the genocide in Cambodia have unclean hands. To the degree that we can affect events and do not, to that degree do we share responsibility. To accept responsibility for what is not our doing is as mistaken as it is to deny our responsibility to act as we have the ability.
“Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof”
What will Americans accept, I fear the depths to that question are soon to be answered. Just prior to reading your posting Neo I came across this item from a typical ‘conspiracy’ site:
“The Obama administration has a new partner in crime and it is the American Psychiatric Association (APA). The APA created the new Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (5th Edition) which was recently adopted. DSM 5 is highly controversial and has sparked outrage from the mental health practitioners. As many of these practitioners point out, the new DSM-V makes a pathology out of simple and normal behaviors such as grieving for the loss of a loved one.
This constitutes a new subjective approach in diagnosing of mental illness in that it promises to end free speech and any form of political dissent. The federal government has already declared anyone who opposes its unconstitutional policies as having “political paranoia,” which is now diagnosed as a type of mental illness.
Particularly disturbing is that the new manual targets internet users and conspiracy theorists. If someone is judged, by some vague set of criteria, to spend too much time on the internet, they could be judged to be mentally ill and ineligible to own a gun. How are you receiving this information? The chances are that you are, at least according to Obama and Biden, giving in to your internet addiction and reading this article. Under the new Obama guidelines this would be grounds for gun confiscation. The alternative media is predicated on internet readership and listenership. These groups would be among the first groups to oppose a martial law crackdown, and now they are the first to be targeted.”
New Psychiatric Diagnosis Targets “Internet Conspiracy Theorists” – http://bit.ly/1BXK1Y3
Well, as such there are conspiracies galore these days and that’s no theory …
I was wrong when I was a leftist, but at least I saw the error of my ways.
I haven’t been wrong about much lately, except that I thought an uprising would begin in 2009 or 2010. The fact that it still hasn’t in 2015 is very worrisome. It suggests that the American people will submit to tyranny without any meaningful resistance.
This has been a day for good blog posts. See this outstanding one by Weirddave at Ace’s, and the comments too, of course.
See the film The Serpent’s Egg. It covers the late Weimar period in Germany from a personal view lower in society. The title comes from the observation that you can see the outline of a serpent through its semi-transparent egg, well before it is hatched.
Thanks, Bill. Was unaware of that film.
I suppose I could admit that I was wrong in not having known of it. I will correct that and put it on the list of things to see.
What’s wrong is to believe that we no longer live in a world where the scarcity of resources predominates, and that humans self-declared “civilization” have evolved beyond reliance upon the aggressive use of force to acquire and preserve those scarce resources.
Agree, good post by WeirDave…
Neoneocon is not the only one anxious. That is the angst of the eve of battle …
We’ll be facing True Believers as defined by Eric Hoffer. There is nothing rational about what drives these people, it is primal.
And, there is no victimhood at large [except for little children] otherwise it is all about commission or omission.
There are perpetrators, “victims”, bystanders and, the worse of all, enablers.
No one around me wants to discuss the situation and they’re all turning into scaredy cats … they have it coming.
It’s happened before. Three percent will rise and they’ll make all the difference.
For now it is land of the sheep, home of the docile …
Neo: ” More recently I’ve been wrong about what the American people will tolerate and accept in a president.
I wonder what else I’m wrong about.”
Same here. I find it very frightening to think that so much of what is happening I was sure most folks would wake up and vote a certain way to stop it. But, they haven’t – they just haven’t.
And that so scares me.
The American polity is simply being REPLACED.
This is topped off by monumental guilt tripping upon a population that is not guilty.
The end game must be the destruction of morality, via the gross violations of public versus private spheres.
This is Digital Tyranny.
I don’t worry about the American people waking up. Socialism always fails. ALWAYS.
If the people can’t see the failure, then they haven’t experienced enough pain yet. That’s a problem that fixes itself.
All we have to do is keep the flame of the enlightenment alive and wait.
Isn’t this where we cite Heinlein re: that progress is vulnerable because it is the result of a very small but gifted percentage of the population? I think there is some truth in this and also that the “city on the hill” comes out of a kind of “serendipity”, like when certain factors come together that create an end product the is greater than the sum of its parts. My business (manufacturing) requires the rigorous and strict adherence to detail: materials, processes, testing to achieve a valid and reliable end product. When it fails, we call it…… losing the recipe.
I don’t remember where I heard this quote, probably college, decades ago.
“The upfront culture is always changing but the outback culture changes only very slowly. ” I don’t think this is as true as it may have been in the past, due to primarily biological “advances”, since the biological nuclear family is no longer an imperative.
Exasperated:
they’re now trying to do something about the outback culture:
http://galliawatch.blogspot.com/2015/01/forcing-diversity-on-rural-france.html
Exasperating!
This inspires many thoughts (“lights are going out all over Europe,” etc.); the Christian belief that Christ’s kingdom is “not of this world,” fighting the principalities and powers of darkness. . . .
More pragmatically, the Leftists and their collaborators are working hard to overwhelm the population of Americans (in spirit, not just by birth) by shoveling in millions of legal and illegal aliens.
Fact: America allows more legal immigrants (thanks the the diseased, loathsome Ted Kennedy) than all the other countries of the world combined
Fact: There is no border enforcement on our southern border, and this is deliberate policy
Fact: Obama, the Left, and their collaborators (RINOs) are going to force amnesty on America against our will.
Americans voted in a landslide in November to stand astride the road and yell “Stop!!!” So we have to be outnumbered in our own country, by hook or by crook.
Dennis Michael Lynch has done a sobering documentary (“They Come to America”) on this. Worth seeing for his interview with the retired ICE agent alone. https://www.youtube.com/user/TheyComeToAmerica
Lynch is sympathetic to the illegals; he befriends one fellow and his family, but there are Just Too Many of them, and they are, for the most part, not interested in becoming Americans in the full sense of the word.
They are, however, very cheap labor. And that’s the other huge reason why they’re being imported. Leftists look right into the camera, claiming they’re all for the Little Guy, while they bring in, in effect, millions of SCABS.
Anyone remember the concept of scab labor? How long has it been since you’ve heard that term from the Usual Suspects?
Civil War II in 50 years, at 2007. Civil War II in 25 years if Hussein was re-elected in 2012. If Civil War II is not resolved in a short amount of time, Islamic Jihad, the Left’s allies, will utilize European nukes to end things their way.
Nothing that has happened so far has changed that future. Time was running out a long time ago.The strategic options have been narrowed to a only a few options, none of them good.
Things would not normally get to the point of a war if the differences could be resolved politically. That is why there can be no political solution, because if there is one, then the future changes. But the Left’s political solutions don’t really solve what people think it solves. The Left is already at war, but pretends they are organizing a community. If America had been more aware of the dangers, they might have done something about it. But as time went on, it was obvious that even if America did understand even 10% of what the Left has been doing, America wouldn’t really care or would refuse to believe. Thus the future had a fate all on its own.
Without the success of Iraq and Afghanistan, certain things would trap American and Islamic actions to a single time end.
Matt_SE Says:
January 24th, 2015 at 7:02 pm
You’re right that socialism always fails. But it will take the whole country down with it. We will all experience the pain, including those of us who saw what was coming and tried to stop it.
And I don’t know that a country ever really recovers from socialism. I think it irrevocably changes the culture. People who were formerly self-reliant get used to being taken care of. Such a recovery would take decades if not longer.
Socialism always fails, but it never dies. Marx’s evil ingenuity taps directly into the basest of human emotions, envy. It doesn’t go away, it has to be repressed.
I was wrong in believing “it” a fascist takeover lead by a charismatic man on a white horse, could not happen here because of the American education in freedom. Whatever psycho-social traits that allowed a Peron, Mussolini or Hitler to come to power are not restricted to countries without a democratic heritage. Huey Long had it right when he stated that if fascism comes to the US it will be called anti-fascism.
At least the next president is going to be better than the current “President Milk and Fruit Loops in a Bathtub.”
Assuming there is a next US President.
In 2007, the ME was in turmoil and it was hard to predict. Most of it would have been bad too, given the relative stability of Iraq in 2007.
I was able to capture a few trends and operational facts about the Left, however.
The Left had conducted a field trial of mind control and weaponized it, so they could use it again. Few people were talking about this in the US, at the time.
The fanatic loyalty of blacks above 90% and 60-70% for Jews in the US, to the Leftist alliance, was problematic. Problematic in the sense that Islamic Jihad also functions on a minority controlling the majority. If black leaders ordered the blacks to riot, instead of voting 90% for their Messiah, there would be no reason to disobey. Race war and the Left’s army incoming.
Police had been becoming corrupt for quite some time, partially due to DHS and partially due to other reasons like the Leftist unions controlling PDs in Democrat cities. Without law and order, politics was going to have trouble suppressing internal rebellions.
The above was around 1-2%, I estimated, of what the Left had been up to. This was before Fast and Furious, Benghazi, etc. Before even the Ft. Hood shootings, first or second. Before the school massacres. Before the targeted cop killings. Before the new black race riots.
Without knowledge of what the Leftist alliance for perfect human utopia has been up to, how were people going to defeat? The answer was obvious… they weren’t. They were going to lose.
Bob From Virginia Says:
January 24th, 2015 at 10:26 pm
You’re right. It couldn’t happen here when generations of schoolchildren were taught American history, civics, and to revere the Founding Fathers and what they created.
Today, when they’re taught that American history was a sorry trail of slavery and repression, and that the Founding Fathers were evil rich white slaveowners whose Constitution was fatally flawed because it didn’t mandate free healthcare for all, well, anything goes.
g6loq,
Elsewhere in the news also:
How Winston Churchill’s future sister-in-law had to plead with him not to convert to Islam after time spent in India
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2889137/How-Churchill-s-future-sister-law-pleaded-not-convert-Islam.html
So which one truthful?
On “Being Wrong”:
Being Liberal means never having to say, “I’m sorry”.
Japan,
Me not sharpest knife in drawer, but, what’s that have to do with the price of tea in Zimbabwe?
Even if Mr. Churchill was attracted to Islam, so what? How that for “truthful”?
I know a couple of people who happen to be muslims. They are not radical.
I know, I know, too hard for you to comprehend.
Now, much bigger question for you:
Why Japan still denying that the, “Rape of Nanking” never happen?
Why that?
Japan,
Much proof about delusion Japan suffers from:
https://www.princeton.edu/~achaney/tmve/wiki100k/docs/Nanking_Massacre.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanking_Massacre_denial
http://thediplomat.com/2014/02/nhk-governor-nanjing-massacre-never-happened/
http://humanum.arts.cuhk.edu.hk/NanjingMassacre/NMNJ.html
http://www2.biglobe.ne.jp/remnant/nankingm.htm
http://vimeo.com/21218528
Xenophobic country, Japan.
So glad that American, W. Edwards Deming was able to show them how to emerge from the reputation of building only junk and crap:
https://books.google.com/books?id=834YItvV9CIC&printsec=frontcover&dq=W.+Edwards+Deming+Japan&hl=en&sa=X&ei=iXfEVLvJFY-nyATMsIKACA&ved=0CB0Q6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=W.%20Edwards%20Deming%20Japan&f=false
The founders through the Constitution took their conception of a free society and a free country and put it into place. It’s something we admire and enjoy (and we lament its demise by a thousand cuts). But it was written and engineered into place by the elite of the day, the haves, the 1%. What if instead the Constitution were written to the specifications of the bottom half of society’s socio-economic scale as it then was? The laborers, fishermen, indentured servants, let alone slaves. What would that constitution have looked like?
Japan:
Ha ha! Churchill probably had a few too many and we all have embarrassing relatives.
Sorry but it doesn’t fit the track record and the voluminous body of writing.
Daily News had space to fill that day?
Although, the there is a strange attraction to Islam from the upper classes.
More noticeable is the deafening silence of the womyn … they should be infuriated by the camel jockey’s religious practices and by now them womyn have the methods and practices to let it known.
After all, women need men like fish need bicycles … yet, crickets …
Then again, there is no victimhood at large, only commission or omission…
G Joubert:
Please live the “1%” alone. They create the wealth for all the other.
That 1% concept come from a complete misunderstanding of the wealth creation process …
G Joubert spews,
“…But it was written and engineered into place by the elite of the day, the haves, the 1%.”
_______________________________________
So what?
The Founders of the Constitution fashioned the document while establishing a framework for opportunity for everyone. Everyone.
That’s why there are millions of stories of rags-to-riches throughout American history.
I understand, this does not resonate with those like yourself. Fortunately, there are enough Americans who do. Those who reach into their pockets, pull out a coin and witness three things UNIQUELY American:
1.) IN GOD WE TRUST
2.) E PLURIBUS UNUM (you would not understand the concept of, “from many, one”)
3.) LIBERTY
Liberty to Americans is vastly different from the French idea of liberty. Hardly even related.
The French? They interpret liberty as an ideal where everyone ends up equal. (Hahahahaha….truth is, the “haves” in France are not allowing the “have not’s” those opportunities to excel in their society. HIGH Unemployment among the young reflects that)
America’s idea of liberty?
Everyone is considered equal at the outset. From there on out, it’s up to the individual; hard work, ingenuity, and yes, some good luck, success is achievable by everyone. FACT.
Only “haters” and myopic whiners fail to acknowledge this.
If we are honest we admit that we all (or most) have been wrong in “grading” our moral superiority. I have been shocked at how easily I have abandoned under stress, principles that I thought that I held sacrosanct.
So, what if the multitude do the same?
The role of society is to prevent such mass failure. Society has evolved and become more civilized for the purpose of self protection, through a fairly elaborate mechanism of constraints and inducements. Many of these are codified in laws and as religious practices. If they are allowed to erode, then civilization will surely deteriorate.
Despite G. Jourbet’s very cynical statements about our Founders, those learned men constructed a wonderful framework for the preservation and advancement of a civil society. We may tinker with it, but we deconstruct it at our peril. By the way, the lower end of the Colonial society did not fashion our government because they were unable to do so. It is foolish to believe, even now, that those who do not educate themselves to a higher level are capable of functioning at such a level. (Note I used the term “educate themselves”; a path that is open to anyone. Nor do I mean to disparage the humanity of such folks, or denigrate them as contributors to society. They, I should say we, have our roles)
Clarity operates under this misconception that 1% or 3% of the people lack authority or value. In fact, the top 1 or 3% of humanity is what leads people from darkness into the light of freedom. Nobody else will do it and nobody else has.
Too many modern Americans think equality is the name of the game and that anything unequal is “bad” or lacking in virtue. Equality is a myth, one engineered by the have nots to steal from the haves.
Democracy is the myth of equality, when in reality it’s just 1% of the people ruling over the rest of the 99%. That doesn’t mean the 1% is wrong or evil, it just means hypocrisy is bad. If a regime needs hypocrisy to maintain power, there’s probably something worse going on.
For good or bad, the highest values of humanity are only shown in a handful of people per thousand, hundred thousand, or million sample population. They’re not the majority. They’re not even close. The great majority of humanity prefers to obey orders in return for their bread, water, and circus. The people in France that decided to save some refugees from the Nazis, they weren’t the majority. They few and far between.
When it comes to excellence, the first requirement is that it be rare. If every country on this planet is considered “exceptional” like the US is, then no country is exceptional. What makes an entity hold a superior position over others is that the others are inferior.
You all need to spend some time in flyover country, at least 6 months in order to realize your hopes are alive and well, and witness your fears are dispelled by salt of the earth people who still till the earth and keep their shoulders to the grindstone. Come here, flock here, and make your stand. We ‘simple’ troglodytes will surprise you with our work ethic, adaptibiliy, skills, and our refusal to kowtow to the pressures of the whores and thieves of DC.
Might as well fight the 2nd civil war in the last bastion where people value life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Its west of the Mississippi, north to the border, south to the Gulf of Mexico, the spine of the Rockies, and westward into Idaho, eastern Washington, Oregon, all of Utah, and much of New Mexico, Arizona, and of course Texas. Plus, much of the southeast will rise up in support.
What are you waiting for, go where you are welcome and shun the rest. Stay cocked and locked and locked and loaded. We have our own backs, no need to ask.
Its typical seamers of hatred selfish ones here.
Hay your knives And Xenophobic mouth keep them handy
While understandable, James’ opinion (and, seemingly, the opinion of so many others) is also strange. Why should he (and they) not view the coming of the war as something external to Civilization? It’s as if James (by extension) thinks himself responsible for Hitler and Stalin, instead of thinking of them as his (and Civilization’s) enemies.
His belief, that all these ills are the natural consequence of his Civilization has destroyed that civilization.
The Obama administration has a new partner in crime and it is the American Psychiatric Association (APA).
The Sovietization of the APA.
What Parker said reminded me of this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=2kw2Xst5d5k
You can’t look at this man and think there’s no hope. Not now anyway.
“You all need to spend some time in flyover country, at least 6 months in order to realize your hopes are alive and well, and witness your fears are dispelled by salt of the earth people who still till the earth and keep their shoulders to the grindstone. ”
Parker is dispensing some wisdom here. I grew up in the West (yes, capital W), but my life’s course ended me up in New England and working in academia. The psychological stress of working in an extreme liberal environment and in a deep blue state has been tough. The end is near however..once my younger daughter starts her life in about 3 years, my wife and I retire and head south. Over the years my wife has converted me from my “mountain man” upbringing to appreciate the beauty and relaxation of the warm southern Atlantic waters. It won’t be Texas, but it will be a long ways from this disaster called Connecticut.
Attending elementary school in the middle 50’s we were
taught in our US History studies that the US Constitution was for ALL PEOPLE including women & future citizens. That the founders were well aware of the incongruity of saying “all men were created equal”
while slavery existed but their intention was to let the
future Americans address that, they were laying down a framework & their biggest concern was to get GOVERNMENT/Monarchy off the backs of the citizenry.
having THIS written document is crucial !!!!
The Left wants to gut the Constitution so THEY (of course) can craft a NEW one. So under that scenario
everything the LEFT deems unsuitable will vanish.
No 2nd amendment, no free speech with out some restrictions (they want bloggers *licensed*, of course the Left issues the licenses) Ditto getting Rush off the radio. Practicing your religious tenets will end where demands of the *victim class*, there will surely be one, begin. Representative Gov will become mob rule since there will be extra senators apportioned to Calif, NY, NJ, thats because the victim
heavy states need a bigger voice. And the individual
becomes less & less & less.
But YOU need to be quiet & shut up about it because as Pelosi said, “we ve given you free health care so you can pursue your dream now,” have fun !
I think I may have missed the mark on this thread, since I thought we were addressing Western culture as opposed to government. This may be off topic, maybe I’m a social Darwinist, but I was thinking about adaptive behaviors and maladaptive behaviors. I would expect successful adaptive behaviors to persist and prevail, due to attrition, as maladaptive behaviors fade away over time. But our culture, in the guise of government, supports and even incentivizes maladaptive behavior, a real paradox and venal. This exists, despite the fact that our elites, who eschew antisocial and self destructive behaviors, for themselves, lead the cheer for the their adoption by the less privileged.
“This exists, despite the fact that our elites, who eschew antisocial and self destructive behaviors, for themselves, lead the cheer for the their adoption by the less privileged.”
I meant to qualify the term “elites”; I mean the clerisy. I consider celebs, actors, and sports figures to be performers and not of the elites, though they can overlap.
parker,
Well said, chap.
I heartily agree. The middle part of our country is well grounded and largely maintains those values which were etched into this country hundreds of years ago. After having spent the lion’s share of my life on both coasts, we picked up and headed, inland.
Ten years now smack dab in the middle of the USA.
parker, yours are sage words. The very ones which drove our decision to move here. And it has been a glorious decade, despite the incredible damage we’ve witnessed emanating from Washington.
parker——-let’s raise our glasses and toast your mantra.
Ymarsaker just above this post puts words in my mouth.
This dope lays down her chicken scratch while having nary the proof at all to her emotive chatter about me.
What a buffoon…
Japan,
I did not think you’d be able to defend your myopic and meaningless chatter. Seen it countless times and the result is always the same; flap-doodle.
brinster,
Watched it. Thanks.
“…that day I lost two kids…”
Further up this thread I mentioned, “In God We Trust”. Tim Vetere speaks to this as well as any American.
physicsguy: “The psychological stress of working in an extreme liberal environment and in a deep blue state has been tough.”
Partial antidote suggestion. Seek out your school’s ROTC program and see if you can cook up a seminar or whatever in your area of expertise with the PMS so you can spend some meaningful time with cadets teaching them something that might make a difference for when they’ll be leading soldiers in meaningful endeavor. Use your imagination. In today’s and tomorrow’s changing world, officers especially may be called on to adapt to anything on the fly. If nothing else, you become a personal friendly, trusted resource in the future for a former student who’s become an officer to contact when confronted with an urgent problem on the job that related to your area.
I don’t know the admin logistics, but if you can make it work, the experience should be an oasis for you and potentially useful – even life or mission saving – for your students.
Clarityseeker,
Being Wrong here not to say this for you borrowing Pro Joffe’s words:
“The people were…had very little knowledge….or experience…they were quite childish… This shows ignorance… They way politics work”
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/iraq-invasion-2003-the-bloody-warnings-six-wise-men-gave-to-tony-blair-as-he-prepared-to-launch-poorly-planned-campaign-10000839.html
Eric,
No ROTC at this college…. in fact the idea that you think such would exist is beyond funny. No offense, but the idea of ROTC at the college I’m at, had me laughing for at least a minute.
However, we have done something like you suggest. I don’t like to give away my exact location to the web in general on such a blog, but we have about 10 years worth of our “proteges” now serving around the world. Great role models for our daughters growing up.
Being from Chicago, I was born knowing that government is a form of racketeering, albeit sanctioned and necessary. It always has been, from the time that the first prehistoric elders cajoled/coerced the first chumps to build the first stick stockade to keep the live stock in and the two legged and four legged predators out. Add graft, nepotism, protection rackets, featherbedding, and voila, you have Chicago, but, of course corruption is not at all unique to Chicago; it’s part of the human condition. In the US, we managed to keep corruption down to a dull roar, at least enough as to not crush the commercial private sector, which depends, on stable currency and enforcement of contracts, a somewhat level playing field, some agreement on standards and measurements, financial infrastructure, and some relief from the significant criminal class ……. I recall the names and faces of the Chicago pols of my childhood, and though they were cynical, sneaky and greedy, they were not nearly as perverse, malignant or stupid, as today’s coiffed, and credentialed suits. They mostly knew better than to kill the golden goose, or eat the seed corn, or kr@p in their own nest; survival imperatives, No? Certainly, they weren’t taken in by silly, fantastical, utopianist malarkey, like running a complex economy on unicorn farts; though they might use it to con the saps.
We are in the 6th year of a president who believes equating EVIL with the Dark Age Butchers of Radical Islam(and their supporters/admirers)is…ya know.. JUDGEMENTAL and INTOLERANT. That not calling the Evil Slime what they are, they’ll be more Engaging and Inclusive in their mass murdering ISH-SHOES.
To speak plain, easy-to-understand-honest English has become outlawed by the Cultural Thought Police. Obama stood there next to PM David Cameron a few days ago and called this world threatening Islamist Evil: “Violent Extremism”.
Bibi will be in front of a joint session of congress and will do what’s now forbade by Progressives and all members of the Cultural Thought Police: He’ll speak real plain, honest, easy-to-understand old-school ENGLISH. Thank God somebody on the world stage is willing.
Clarityseeker, there’s a followup video of Nutnfancy returning to give Tim Vertere numerous letters and donations from people who saw the first video. Tim’s brought to tears more than once, and I can’t deny that I did either.
brinster,
How can I donate, and/or send words of encouragement to Tim?
Does he have company address?
In video he says he does not even know how to turn computer on.
I’ll bet his wife and daughter do.
Thanks…
Actually, I’ve always believed in this one indication of human progress: a government desiring legitimacy has to at least *claim* not to torture its political enemies. In the past, a government would boast of the horrors it would inflict on its prisoners and opponents.
Yes, ISIS celebrates its atrocities. Isn’t this a sufficient indication of its primitiveness, its retreat from civilization and what Keats called “the grand march of intellect”?
I don’t think humans are improved morally today compared to seventy years ago, or a millenium. The fact that one can’t wrap ones mind around the existence of the genocidal Nazis and Communists should tell you something about human nature. If the ovens are cool at the moment, they will be fired up again as we turn the world into an abattoir.
At what point will lefty multiculturalism types admit open borders cannot work? “Muslim immigrants in Palma de Mallorca, the capital of the Balearic Islands in Spain, have succeeded in forcing the expulsion of all female parking meter enforcement officers from a city neighborhood that is home to a growing Muslim population.” http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/3341/spain-meter-maids
Heads up, everyone: Huge blizzard “of historic proportions” forecast for Monday afternoon and overnight, NYC to Boston and points north.
Get your mukluks out and your larder stocked!
I once thought I was wrong about something, but as it turned out I wasn’t.
Clarityseeker, the best thing to do is send it to TNP (The Nutnfancy Project), and earmark it for Tim. Nutnfancy (don’t know his real name) is a heckuva guy. He’s helped people out numerous times. One time he was riding with his son, and ran across a group of motorcyclists who were dead broke. He gave them a few bucks, which they were very thankful for.
I have a feeling that Japan, and perhaps others, has no understanding at all of the “idea” of America.
Yancey Ward touches on the point I tried to make earlier. Human nature has not changed, but societal progress is achieved when laws and mores are established and respected. When Nihilists (some call them Progressives) succeed in tearing down those pillars, then no good will result. In my opinion, our Founders designed the near perfect construct; now, smaller persons are chipping at the foundations.
Physicsguy, I tried hard, but belatedly, to interest my grandson in the Coast Guard Academy. His mother, Navy Brat that she was, resisted any talk of the other service academies, but the CG would be a great fit for any kid who truly wants to serve in the purest sense. I wonder if he would have made your acquaintance in Connecticut.
Oldflyer,
You could have stopped at the end of your first sentence.
Well said…
brinster,
Hat tip…
(I’ll look up that source, thanks)
Clarityseeker, yer very welcome!
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As Oldflyer stated, and as I have said here many times (as others), human nature has not changed. I cannot foresee it ever happening.
Christianity and Judaism are really the only things that can advance civilization beyond the glories of the Paganism of ancient Greece, Rome, Egypt, China, etc. – and even they were “barbaric” by modern standards.
But when Christianity and Judaism are set aside or persecuted (as they often will be), Civilization and advance begin to die. By the time the death is felt, it always too late.
The Good News is that Christianity comes back to life again. It dies…and then lives again.
That’s it.
The rest is whistling past the graveyard.
Oldflyer, quite possibly. 😉
Our most recent “adopted daughter” is doing her flight training in Pensacola.
Having spent the last few years involved in a 12 point program, I fear the American people will only unload this trend toward socialism and this administration when “the pain of the problem becomes worse than the pain of the solution”. I don’t know if the people as a whole have reached this point yet. As individuals many of us are ready for mighty change but as a group, not so much.
We do not live long enough for it to really matter much, except to our personal selves which want the best of times, over the worst of times, and whatever times we get is a lottery…
I wonder if they would ever admit they were wrong:
Top Communist Admits: Communist Party ‘Utilizes’ the Democratic Party
New national chair of the Communist Party USA, Chicago man John Bachtell, has admitted that his Party “utilizes” the Democratic Party “to advance its agenda.”
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
As an experienced Communist, John Bachtell understands that in spite of difficulties and disappointments, the Communist Party agenda is far better served by infiltrating the Democrats than by marching in the streets yelling revolutionary slogans.
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
The Communists did that to Senator Joe Lieberman from Connecticut. Now, virtually no senior Democrats will buck the Communist line. They know the price.
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Less than a thousand hardcore Communist Party activists and their few thousand Democratic Socialists of America allies effectively dictate Democratic Party policy.
Joe Mc was right!
Progress has a set of prerequisite conditions:
1. You have to be watching the right variables — in the usual case, outputs rather than inputs;
2. You have to be willing to admit your mistakes.
Note that those two conditions depend upon one another, inseparably. You cannot know you’ve made a mistake unless you’re watching the right variables. Neither will you watch the right variables if you’re determined not to admit a mistake.
Contemporary politics, even in the U.S., averts its eyes from the right variables; it usually watches inputs (e.g., education expenditures) and claims progress when they increase. Worse, under no circumstances does it ever admit to a mistake, even when the attention of the political class is forcibly drawn to the unmistakable evidence thereof.
This does not fill me with confidence in our future.
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Red China Blues; written by a now grown up woman who in her salad days fully supported Mao’s revolution in China.
Most people have so much invested in being right they cannot afford to be wrong.
There has only been one answer ever, and that is the God of the Bible and his son Jesus Christ. I didn’t always realize this, but as I now approach my fifth decade of adulthood it has become crystal clear to me. Collectivism and Islam are both evil, and only Jesus can deliver us from evil.
I first had that feeling in 1992 as the Gennifer Flowers tapes and the Clinton staffer who blurted into an open mic that her job was to prevent “bimbo eruptions”. It grew deeper when Clinton’s childish “but I didn’t inhale” excuse for misleading the public about his past drug use and oh-so-cunning draft dodging with his “I loathe the military” letters came to light. People kept voting for the guy in the primaries anyway!
I had it again when most of the public excused Clinton’s perjury and impeachment with “It’s only about sex”.
Then came 2008 and the insanity of so many fainting and/or worshipful Obama fanatics. And so many people voted for the guy anyway despite his dodgy past and record of running away from responsibility!
By 2012, the majority of US voters simply confirmed what I already knew. I am now a stranger in the land of my birth.
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Hey, everybody’s wrong about some things. My mistakes weren’t political, they were worse. Now I begin to wonder if I’m crazy. I wonder because I can openly hold the thought the Obama administration is the world’s most influential sleeper cell for Islamofascism.
Fortunately I am old and Divine Providence will intervene before I learn if my fear is true and witness the lives of hundreds of millions destroyed.
beagleboy:
You’re in good company with that sleeper cell idea.
I’ve been wrong to assume a basic goodwill and decency on the part of the majority of humanity and its leaders, especially those in the West, and certainly regarding us Americans.
After personal horrible experience of the unspeakable done to my family by a large organized underground group and subsequently forced to start reading between the lines and realize what’s going on behind the scenes, I now viscerally know there is a hideous spreading evil among the global self-styled elites and pop-political/ cultural devotees.
Too many people, even those with solid good public personae, have sold their souls to Lucifer, Satan, magik, paganism, deviancy, sadism, slavery, and transhumanism for money, malice, and to bring about an oppressive new world order and dark illumination.
Now is the time for scales to drop from our eyes for important revelation. Now is a time to pray for humanity, as if the world, our free future, and all of God’s goodness conferred upon us depended upon it.
Ymarsaker just above this post puts words in my mouth.
I wasn’t commenting primarily on what Clarity said, since it’s not important. But rather the mistake Clarity made in reacting to G Joubert.
You’re expecting way too much from me, if you think I need to put words in your mouth. It’s full enough already that it doesn’t require free service on the internet, these days.
Read Ecclesiastes. Could have been written today. Read Gods of the Copybook Headings. Kipling saw it. Lefties can’t admit it because it contradicts their foundational belief that all of human nature is a social construct. Nothing could be further from the truth. All the bad stuff that’s happened in human history can happen again. Modern civilization is but a very thin veneer covering over things we don’t like to think about.
I wonder because I can openly hold the thought the Obama administration is the world’s most influential sleeper cell for Islamofascism.
beagleboy
That’s actually one of the more moderate and less crazy world views. I have the more comprehensive one, however.
Empress
Evil has two general fundamental weaknesses as I assess it.
1. They cannot create, because that’s a divine level gift, they can only hijack other people’s work, suck off the lifeblood of civilizations, etc. Destruction is easier than creation.
2. Evil doesn’t work well together so they often waste their energy on each other.
Now the Leftist alliance has so much power these days because they have made 1 and 2 into virtues, not weaknesses. They have done as Sun Tzu once wrote, and made their greatest weaknesses into their greatest strengths. The Left doesn’t work well together? They don’t have to, blacks can hate homosexuals and homosexuals can be afraid of blacks, but they are all fighting under one banner against one common enemy (humanity). Once conscience is dead, cognitive dissonance isn’t going to be enough to keep them fragmented.
The Left waits for an organization to get mainstream approval by the founding members, like MLKing or Malcom X or the 1st wave feminists, then they hijack that organization and use it for evil. So they can’t create, so they will destroy good using good’s own forces.
The Leftist alliance for perfect human utopia cannot resolve any differences in humanity, so they don’t intend to resolve the differences, they just need all evil to work together momentarily to kill the rest of us. Or to enslave the world. That’s good enough.
John C Wright accurately describes why Leftists have no heart, no conscience, and apparently no brains too.
http://www.scifiwright.com/2015/01/word-fetishes/
They’re like zombies. Why do people think I call Leftists zombies, cannonfodder, drones, myrmidons, and various other names? I’m attempting to describe their true nature.
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“I wonder what else I’m wrong about.”
“The fundamental realization of the Dark Enlightenment is that all men are not created equal, not individual men, nor the various groups and categories of men, nor are women equal to men, that these beliefs and others like them are religious beliefs, that society is just as religious as ever it was, with an official state religion of progressivism, but this is a new religion, an evil religion, and, if you are a Christian, a demonic religion.
The Dark Enlightenment does not propose that leftism went wrong four years ago, or ten years ago, but that it was fundamentally and terribly wrong a couple of centuries ago, and we have been heading to hell in a handbasket ever since at a rapidly increasing rate – that the enlightenment was dangerously optimistic about humans, human nature, and the state, that it is another good news religion, telling us what we wish to hear, but about this world instead of the next.”
– Jim MacDonald
I came across this recently. I deeply regret I can’t credit the writer but, I think, it was a post from the Althouse blog. Just food for thought.
That’s how you can tell that Peter Jackson never really understood ‘The Lord of the Rings’ – because to him, the only important people in the story, the only people who DID things, were the heroes. Where Tolkien could devote time to describing the common soldiers, the boys, the old women of Gondor, all contributing their bit to the defense of Minas Tirith, all impressed with the importance of the struggle, Jackson turned everyone into a crowd of panic-stricken men and blubbering women and children, saved at the last moment by the arrival of a Hero.
Not only did he leave out the Scouring of the Shire (too anticlimactic after all the pyrotechnics) he inverted the ending to a bittersweet reflection on the ingratitude of the dull, parochial Stay-At-Homers towards the valiant heroes who left home and had important adventures. Tolkien never thought that the Shire was an unimportant backwater; it was the heart of the whole story. Jackson couldn’t get beyond “How can you keep them down in the Shire/Now that they’ve seen Minas Tirith?”
As Wretchard says, it’s the ordinary people with their ordinary lives who fight evil too. We don’t all have to carry the Ring to Mordor, but we find the same bad weeds growing in our gardens too, and fight them off in our own way.
Agree or Disagree?
NeoCon: 4 cups of coffee read…
Churchill
http://www.theblaze.com/blog/2015/01/27/is-the-world-reliving-churchills-history-of-the-run-up-to-wwii-these-12-passages-suggest-we-might-be/
#3:
“As Fascism sprang from Communism, so Nazism developed from Fascism. Thus were set on foot kindred movements which were destined soon to plunge the world into even more hideous strife, which none can say has ended their destruction.”
and, #11:
“Delight in smooth-sound platitudes, refusal to face unpleasant facts, desire for popularity and electoral success irrespective of the vital interests of the State, genuine love of peace and pathetic belief that love can be its sole foundation, obviously lack of intellectual vigour…strong and violent pacifism…played a definite part in the unleashing on the world of horrors and miseries…”
The wretched masses fall for style over substance?
looking for noopept online? Try http://noopept.org
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