Trying times
It keeps hitting me that this coming election is the last one that matters.
Actually, I felt that way last time. But this time the hour has gotten even later.
But maybe it was always too late. When we play the game of “when did it all go irreparably wrong?” it’s hard to know how far to go back. Was it the 60s? Perhaps; I was around then, and I remember it as a watershed. Or was it the FDR years? Maybe. Or Wilson’s presidency? Could be.
Then again, maybe it was the passage of the 17th Amendment which established the direct election of senators, allowing more tyranny of the majority. That deserves some consideration as a turning point, I think, as does the 16th (income tax, anyone?).
We can go on. There are other possibilities. But I’ll stop there, because maybe such a trajectory is always inevitable. Maybe it’s baked into the cake of human nature to veer towards tyranny one way or another.
These desperate, last-ditch-effort feelings of mine are shared by a lot of people these days. It’s the impulse that drives a great many to Donald Trump. It doesn’t drive me in that direction, not at all; the direction it drives me in is toward several of the other candidates. At the moment, for me the leaders are Cruz and Rubio, but Carson and Fiorina are in there too.
But the feeling of urgency is not confined to this election or even to this country. The issue is nothing less than the future of Western Civilization, and the possible (probable?) revenge of Gods of the Copybook Headings; Kipling’s poem bears repeating. You’ll notice if you read it that Kipling believes that it is inevitable that people will ignore the lessons of the past, and will repeat the same mistakes again and again (“the burnt Fool’s bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire”). The result? “As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn,
The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!”
But who wants that return to happen on their watch?
[NOTE: In researching that Kipling poem, I came across this, which mentions that Pierre F. Goodrich used to give out a copy of the poem to associates, along with the following notes:
History has built the civilization we enjoy by accumulating small pebbles of wisdom based upon experience. Every once in a while, some misguided action tears down years or centuries of progress by ignoring or misunderstanding the basic truths that underlie all that has gone before.
I’d never heard of Goodrich before. But looking him up I discovered he was a conservative businessman of the mid-20th century who established two foundations and a think tank dedicated to promoting liberty. He also published a pamphlet about education in a free society, which promoted the idea that what was required was a dialogue centered in the great ideas of civilization.]
I have many friends who think it’s too late to save America. But when I look at the U.S. map showing red states vs. blue states, I have hope. I’d like to see the States just ignore the Feds. If that doesn’t work, then maybe it’s time for an Article V convention.
Sen. Ben Sasse, I learned to my pleasure just a few days ago, went to St. John’s College to obtain a Master of Liberal Arts degree after having attended Harvard for his baccalaureate degree. The great ideas, see, are to be found in the great books.
“But for my children, I would have them keep their distance from the thickening center; corruption
Never has been compulsory, when the cities lie at the monster’s feet there are left the mountains.”
–(Robinson Jeffers, “Shine, Perishing Republic”)
Saddle up!
A couple of points:
America will always be here, physically at least. Only something like a meteor strike or the Yellowstone volcano could physically eliminate it. Very low probability.
People have survived the Soviet Union and Mao’s China. So if it doesn’t get that bad you have a pretty good chance of living out your full life.
That should cheer everyone up 🙂
I just read an op-ed (stupid, Politico) about why Jeb, Kasich, Christie et al aren’t gaining any traction with the base.
The premise was the voters [conservative] beliefs and values have changed.
So the usurpers are ravaging through the traditionalists.
…Politico totally missing the elephant in the room.
The Internet has made it impossible for even the complaisant to NOT understand that the GOP talks a good game, but delivers nothing. Ever.
Nothing but broken promises. Always and ever.
Not working this time. Probably won’t work again.
Times change.
So …we want them gone. And seemingly we will have them gone.
I guess I’m more optimistic about this than I’ve been in a while neo.
Change is coming.
Fresh wind blowin’.
The game has changed.
…whatever lol.
There’s this slight fragrance in the air of …hope.
___________
…no matter who we end up with from the more likeliest choices (as unlikely as they at first appeared) on the ticket: hope.
Yeah, maybe I’d like Cruz best too at this point, in honorable acknowledgement of my own tendentious conservative history …comfortably remaining doctrinally traditional in my druthers …since I’m now old and relatively inflexible lol.
Doesn’t work for everyone tho’. Don’t mind a bit.
So I’ll support Carson, Trump, Fiorina …anyone who isn’t GOPe.
Against Hil’, I’ll do the right thing (sigh) …but this primary seems likely to be a watershed moment in history where we might actually change the course these pathetically sclerotic political buffoons have been acquiescing to for decades.
The rotten core of the Left is increasingly exposed. I see the signs every where I look. I think they’re done. For a season. For a season.
don t let them steal your joy !
They admire a controlled society like China & strive for it but they will never achieve it.
Too much can be undermined now that we can communicate with one another, it will not be as easy as they think.
‘Progress’ has built into it that all things move for the better. How it got the benefit of so great a shameless audacity, I don’t know. I suppose no God dies without something taking His place. And it puts me in mind of something so despairing I hate being reminded of it.
“So the final conclusion would seem to be that whereas other civilizations had been brought down by attacks of barbarians from without, ours had the unique distinction of training its own destroyers at its own educational institutions and providing them with facilities for propagating their destructive ideology far and wide, all at the public expense. Thus did Western man decide to abolish himself, creating his own boredom out of his own affluence, his own vulnerability out of his own strength, his own impotence out of his own erotomania; himself blowing the trumpet that brought the walls of his own city tumbling down. And having convinced himself that he was too numerous, labored with pill and scalpel and syringe to make himself fewer, until at last, having educated himself into imbecility and polluted and drugged himself into stupefaction, he keeled over, a weary, battered old brontosaurus, and became extinct.”
– Malcolm Muggeridge
There will be found no sanctuary in science, politics, democracy, the elections, the candidates. One always sought sanctuary in the house of God. It’s still the only place to find it. That which never changes is otherwise known as Truth.
Gore hated their foundation that enid gave to in the 90s… he said “These groups are not providing unbiased judicial education. They are giving multithousand-dollar vacations to federal judges to promote their radical right-wing agenda at the expense of the public interest.”
when did it all fall apart? duh… thats EASY… but you cant argue facts against opinion, and so you cant win the discussion. besides, it would take me a lot of space to make a case.
but there is a clue… it was AFTER the civil war..
and when several famous incidents happen we all are not able to bring up or even remember from history books…
the real time was after the first men who made huge fortunes in the US where some of them decided to fund odd organizations that would coordinate and bring about the end of all this. they leapfrogged from place to place flitting and funding…
lots of people have revealed lots of what they do and did, and who they worked with and funded. a a heck of a lot more will never be known
but the stuff you see in terms of wilson, taxes, constituitiona changes are the outcome of their work, not the actual work to judge.
after marx, after the war, and around the first world ware there are some events we dont discuss, and trying to gets procrustes to cut down things. too much information to share when people dont know things…
i will give ONE of many incidents.
The 1910 “duck hunt” on Jekyll Island included Senator Nelson Aldrich, his personal secretary Arthur Shelton, former Harvard University professor of economics Dr. A. Piatt Andrew, J.P. Morgan & Co. partner Henry P. Davison, National City Bank president Frank A. Vanderlip and Kuhn, Loeb, and Co. partner Paul M. Warburg.
notice the names, and track down where they are or rather their children and such are.
the house of Morgan, Getty, davison, Warburg, Rothschilds, Ford, Vanderbuilts, etc etc etc. [not all these were at that meeting]
what we live now is the outcome of their using their forces against a government that sought to control them, to their response was to take control of it.
out of that came a company with a name that sounded like it was part of the government, that all these special families have ownership of and you cant get into that investment. once that was done, well, everything else was downhill
They began by shunning the use of their last names and met quietly at Aldrich’s private railway car in New Jersey. In 1916, B. C. Forbes discussed the Jekyll conference in his book Men Who Are Making America and illuminates, “To this day these financiers are Frank and Harry and Paul [and Piatt] to one another and the late Senator remained ‘Nelson’ to them until his death. Later [, following the Jekyll conference,] Benjamin Strong, Jr., was called into frequent consultation and he joined the ‘First-Name Club’ as ‘Ben.'” This book as well as a magazine article by Forbes is the only public mention to the conference until around 1930, when Paul Warburg’s book The Federal Reserve System: Its Origin and Growth and Nathaniel Wright Stephenson’s book Nelson W. Aldrich: A Leader in American Politics were published.
it sealed their power and ownership of the united states and most of the world and all policy came from that, and still does… [among other things]
but who cares? nothing you can do about any of it any more, once 1968 came and the womens movement took up feminism, the control of the population through women and so forth was done. this included paying for papers and all manner of things. or dont you remember that this womens army was mostly created by the wives of the men who are mentioned above? as well as cousins and so on..
after all if it was family that gave them this power, destroying family was how to keep it from every one else forever.
try reading about aby warburg and feminism, or many of the others who mostly came from wealthy families and bank trust families (betty friedans husband was a wall street biggie)
they knew that men would never cooperate with them, but that women could and that women would turn the head that is the men who act.
a lot of the work was like frankfurt school.. many of them or most of them are still around and still doing their part in the culture war they created
but thats that.. i rather would not be cut down after working so hard on gathering together the information. but there is TONS of it… all protected as the forbidden zone…
another famous meeting is what caused the ny times to do its part, as well as others, but that was the sulzbergs..
good luck with this gordian knot whose information is HUGE and obfuscated with a lot of trash – think of it as hiding in the trash of conspiracy wackos.
This election IS the one that matters most. If Hillary wins we will never see a conservative President. The borders will stay open, the penalties for illegal status will disappear, and there will forever be a majority dependent on the Democrats. I’ve never before participated in a political campaign but probably will now.
On a very personal and distressing note, I find that I am (in my heart of hearts) becoming increasingly depressed about the future of America. The dream is in jeopardy of being utterly lost—forever. We desperately need some people of courage and conviction to straighten it all out. Sadly, as I see it, there is no “fire in the belly” in sufficient people to make that happen. We seem to be destined to expire in a whimper and will be taken over by evil if we are not sufficiently diligent.
My ancestors came to this country in 1650 (on my father’s side) and in 1912 (on my mother’s side), searching for a better life. They were pioneers and believers in a better life, and they found it here, then. God bless them. They made this country. Times have somehow changed (who was watching?) and we have let them down. Damn. Now I am really more depressed.
What snopercod said…. The hard left is concentrated in the metro regions of the map and the 24/7 department of propaganda hives are mostly in NYC, DC, LA, and Chicago.
“when did it all go irreparably wrong?” it’s hard to know how far to go back. Was it the 60s? Perhaps; I was around then, and I remember it as a watershed. Or was it the FDR years? Maybe. Or Wilson’s presidency?
All of the above with the progression reversed.
This coming election is the last one that matters, if we are to avoid another civil war. Though given the Left’s fanatical obsession with attacking Western Civilization, avoiding civil war is almost certainly inescapable.
“maybe such a trajectory is always inevitable. Maybe it’s baked into the cake of human nature to veer towards tyranny one way or another.”
History has yet to provide an example of a civilization that survived and escaped that fate. Yet history also demonstrates a cyclical, upward progression in ever more morally advanced civilizations.
If western civilization falls, after another dark age, another enlightenment will arise. This is because evil always sows the seeds of its own downfall. Evil can destroy the good but it cannot survive its own dysfunctional nature.
The inestimable Richard Fernandez here lends perspective; “Try as it might, even the Communist Party of China could not make one plus zero add up to two. This is an important factor to bear in mind for those conditioned to think Progressives will inevitably triumph, or worse, that the Republicans will stop them. It is the sheer power of reality which wins in the end. What stands in Gramsci’s way are consequences, not John Boehner.”
It’s certainly true that history has shown that societies, empires, or nations don’t last. If you look at a timeline of the rise and fall of various empires/nations, you will see that many empires or great nations existed at the same time in different parts of the world, but they always failed at some point in time. Look at Spain. At one time (About 1469 – 1588) this small country was the most powerful nation in the world. They had colonies all over the Americas, in Africa, and in the Far East. They didn’t collapse suddenly. After the defeat of the Spanish Armada by the English in 1588, Spain gradually declined over the period from 1588 until 1898 losing colonies, wealth, and power. Today, without a knowledge of their history, no one would believe that Spain was at one time the most powerful, wealthy nation in the world. Their decline was long and slow.
The British Empire was growing before the defeat of the Spanish Armada but grew inexorably toward its zenith just before WWI. WWI and WWII exhausted Great Britain and they turned towards socialism losing the vigor necessary to be the great nation they once were. Their descent from an Empire where the sun never set to a small, somewhat-important country took just 75 years.
So, the out look is not good for the U.S. The question is whether our descent will be slow or relatively rapid. Given the blessings of our natural resources and a decent infrastructure, my guess is that the decline will be relatively slow and interrupted by occasional upturns. (Returns to conservative policies.) Eventually the reality of our deficit spending will bring us up short. But as long as the U.S. dollar remains the world’s reserve currency, that will slow the reckoning that’s coming.
Looking back on history, I am encouraged by the fact that China, a large country with many the same resources that we have, has gone through multiple periods of greatness followed by decline to poverty and weakness. The U.S maybe a similar case.
Maybe the example of families is pertinent here. Before the advent of the family foundation it was fairly common for a family to rise to great wealth and power, only to have it all be dissipated away by future generations. Wealth and power often led not to wisdom, but to tom foolery. Sure glad I was never rich and powerful. 🙂
Could not agree more with neo about how critical this election is.
I imagine readers get tired of my mantra but it is true.
Hillary Clinton must be defeated.
Carthage must be destroyed.
I largely agree with the cynics who conclude it is too late. The county is already “fundamentally transformed”. No electoral victory, no matter how large, can undo the damage the last 50 years (accelerated markedly in the last seven) has brought.
I will, of course vote for whomever the GOP nominates (even an absurdity such as Trump or Carson). But I will do so fully aware that such is simply an exercise in delay and deceleration, not reversal.
I’d loosely pinpoint the late 60’s as the turning point; once the Gramscians seized the educational and cultural institutions, and (this is the crucial point) did so largely surreptitiously, reversal became largely impossible. The Reagan years followed by the collapse of the Soviet empire should be seen as a nostalgic twilight.
I am not sure exactly where we are heading. Violent civil war or full fledged tyranny are both unlikely but no longer implausible. But whatever the exact circumstances of our future, I have no doubt by the time I reach an old age (I am currently just shy of 40) I will live in a society (I hesitate to label it a “country”) that is poorer, less free, far less civil and exponentially more dependant on some sort of “state” (be it a sovereign federal government or a global type of EU-UN hybrid)
Agree with you 100% neo about this election being critical for the future of our nation.
Every four years we have a revolution in the form of an election. I think the founders knew we needed to fight to maintain what this country is and could be. I think the founding fathers knew we needed to keep and cultivate a spirit of resistance.
“. . . The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions, that I wish it to be always kept alive. It will often be exercised when wrong, but better so than not to be exercised at all. I like a little rebellion now and then. It is like a storm in the atmosphere.” Thomas Jefferson
It frightens me that so many people in this country are willing to give up their freedoms for an illusion of security that the socialist are pushing. It frightens me that so many people have given up or lost the dream that is America.
Some posters above have mentioned another civil war. I’ve also been thinking that could be closer than many would think. Seeing how Obama and his administration has pushed their agenda and almost thumbing their noses at the constitution. It’s easy to see why so many people have bought firearms over the past six years. Obama has been good for the gun makers hasn’t he. Add to that that Hillary is even more shrill about gun control and confiscation. But even if she won I don’t think there would be a groundswell to give the democrats majorities in the senate and house.
Sorry to ramble.
Sorry Neo, I think it’s too late. Obamacare was the key (which Obama knew from the start). The left had to have a new entitlement to tie the middle class to the political process. Social security no longer worked like it did previously due to alternative retirement income e.g. IRAs, 401Ks, better pensions.
Unless the next President repeals, not replaces Obamacare, it’s game,set,match for 50 years.
The key to whats going on with our politics can be found in the basic differences between how men and women face the world. the world in the past was mostly a male view, good and bad was more delineated, proper and improper, enemy and friend
a foe can hurt us, and we defended ourselves, and did things to insure safety…
but something has changed, we now try to make friends with enemies, but they remain enemies, and society is not safe, and so on and so on
here is why
we are now feminine, and so, want to make friends with the bad guys and feel if we put out our hands they will too, and the feminine fantasy is fulfilled… while the other view sits there saying, your nuts, they are going to destroy things.
the reasons for this bias is simple, women are the inner world which is insulated from the full world, and where not making friends with your enemies leads to a dysfunctional community that needs to work together.
the world of men is the border that faces outwards to the world, its dangerous, and of course, the others facing outward towards you, looking at the space you take up the resources you have, etc.
the west has used feminism to invert this model claiming that it leads to peace and so on, but if you take a step back, what you end up seeing is a sheep staring out at the world in which all the wolves around it are staring in at what the sheep has, etc.
even when in society and a criminal acts the women usually dont take a position of opposition but of giving up and compliance, as they cant stand up and win against the force (usually). so the point i make is dominant in how each faces the wolves.
this should give a clue as to why western civ is behaving the way it is… it cant even chase the stronger out, and can only chatter about it. but note that other states that are still male like can put up walls that work, etc.
the feeling that neo and others have is tied to all this, and this is why matriarchies dont survive, they do not have the proper mindset to defend against a hostile world, but the mindset of the internal society, of which the world is outside that and so does not have the limits that come from being part of it.
go far enough and the rest of the world will just walk in and take what it wants brushing the armed aside as arms do not protect without the will behind them, and the desire that its worth protecting.
Both citizens and non-citizens are included in the census and thus affect apportionment counts. Counting illegals in the census undermines one of the fundamental principles of representative democracy – namely, that every citizen-voter has an equal voice. Through the decennial census-based process of apportionment, states with large numbers of illegal immigrants, such as California and Texas, unconstitutionally gain additional members in the U.S. House of Representatives thereby robbing the citizen-voters in other states of their rightful representation.
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
the purpose for dems to keep borders open is that sanctuary cities get to pump up their states power in washington.
These are trying times. It goes back to the 1840s when the intelligentsia turned against [classical] liberalism. It was a slow infection and we now live in an anti-liberalism time. It is endemic to our world and none of use alive have ever known different even as our English-speaking nature yearns for the ancient liberties. That is one of the upsides, even many of the misguided Leftists feel those liberties in their bones, they just want credit for giving them to the poor victims rather then honoring a man or woman as having them as a part of their being.
The other thing to remember as many seem to see the end of America is America is just the latest in a millennia of resurgences of the ancient liberties of individual liberties. If this experiment fails, we just need to try yet again to rein in the government. As related below, a written constitution was the new invention at America’s founding. What is the next attempt? Most likely a more precise Constitution with more restraint on the Judiciary’s “interpretations”.
The study of Anglo-American constitutional law is that of the liberties of the people. Neither a body of dry technicalities, as the demagogue is prone to consider it, nor an instrument new created in the year 1787 and now but an inconvenient impediment to the national destiny, our own Constitution registers the totality of those principles which, in eight hundred and forty years of struggle, the Saxon peoples have won back again from Norman kings, the common law from Roman conceptions of a Sovereign State; each rising wave of freedom leaving its record in some historic document, then perhaps to recede again until the next flood left a higher record still. And if to the Mother Country is due the invention of the Constitution as a bulwark of “the people against the Executive, to our forefathers belongs the glory of protecting the people against the Legislative as well; and against the usurpations of any Government or law, even of their own making, on that irreducible minimum which time has shown to be necessary to the English-American people for freedom as they understand it. Give them less than this and they will fight.
–THE CONSTITUTION AND THE PEOPLE’S LIBERTIES, F. J. STIMSON. (1907)
http://www.jstor.org/stable/25105808
Neo, for what it’s worth you have hundreds perhaps thousands of like minded people who read your insightful essays daily. Imagine we are sitting around a large kitchen table in your house, sipping coffee or tea, and having a great, rowdy conversation. No matter how dark the horizon, you have friends. You have us.
Neo,
You can’t win as long as your prescriptions are limited to electoral politics.
Even if a GOP candidate wins in 2016, it will take a generation or more to fix the damage President Obama has done. Doubling the national debt to no good cause and for no good reason may not rank high in the list of his crimes against America, but it will have devastating consequences as the world teeters on the edge of financial collapse.
The GOP itself is a cause for despair. Despite massive victories, they roll over and play dead instead of fighting Obama.
But, the rise of Carson and Trump over all the regular GOP types, and especially Jeb “will fix it” Bush”, gives a glimmer of hope. The people don’t like that Christians get fined for refusing to bake wedding cakes for gay couples, yet Muslim truck drivers get awarded millions for refusing to deliver alcohol. The people don’t like Muslims beheading and crucifying Christians while President Obama golfs. The people have had it up to there necks with all this gay this and trans-gender that crap that spews forth from the MSM and the left. The list could go on… The point I’m trying to make is that the pendulum has been pushed too far to the left, and will come swinging back hard.
I think we just saw that in Kentucky where two Tea Party types destroyed the Democrat Governor and Lt. Governor. It doesn’t help the left’s narrative that the Lt. Governor elect is black. The polls missed that victory big time.
But, as President Obama has so ably demonstrated, if you don’t have the White House, you are powerless. A Hillary victory will sink the good ship USA. I’m just glad we have a ticket out of here by virtue of my NZ citizenship.
Whether it can be qualified as negative or positive, there is always progress or monotonic change, and rarely stasis or even chaos.
Don’t worry, this election (as others in recent history) does not matter at all.
There is no urgency.
Tyranny proceeds apace.
Lots of time to increase your (and your progeny’s) degree of servitude.
A thousand years, give or take.
All over the world.
Relax. Have a beer (while you can). Watch t.v. (and have it watch you).
“But what more oft,
In Nations grown corrupt
and by their vices brought to servitude,
Than to love Bondage more than Liberty,
Bondage with ease than strenuous Liberty.”
— John Milton, 1671
Some financial people are saying that the unexpectedly wonderful jobs report has made it almost certain that the Fed will raise interest rates in December. I’ll believe it when I see it, but it explains why the stock market went down in response:
They are anticipating the end of the gravy train. I’ve heard nobody say that rising rates will be good for the economy. Everyone says the opposite. So if rates go up in December, hold on to your hats. THAT could be the death knell for the Obama/Hillary agenda.
Neo writes:”We can go on. There are other possibilities. But…Maybe it’s baked into the cake of human nature to veer towards tyranny one way or another.”
According to the “numbers,” the best single explanation is this: the 19th Amendment and giving women the right to vote themselves goodies by force of government.
According to spending from states adopting universal suffrage earlier, social welfare spending began to surge with it. As states went, so did the federal government.
Women are the enemies of liberty if given full and equal voting rights. History has proved it here and abroad.
Corbin, Parks: The Capacity for Self-Government
The main problem of moral rot in USA is the false feeling of safety and robustness of civilized society, the same is for EU. The only country of Western civilization which does not entertain herself by this illusion is Israel: they all know they have their back to the wall, no room for retreat. That is why Israel society is permanently moving in the opposing direction to all other Western societies: to the right, not to the left. When I visited my friends in Israel last spring, the first time in the last decade I regain hope seeing a nation with common sense prevailing over leftist ideological nonsense, overcoming all their many divisions over time in one mighty will for survival. May be, when USA would completely loose their historical role as beacon of freedom, Israel will take the torch and lead the Remnant to salvation.
ArtFul: I congratulate you on your brevity.
I, too, picked up on the fact that apportionment of votes in the Electoral College is based upon the number of Representatives + 2. The apportionment of Representatives is based upon the census, and the census counts people, not voters. Thus, states with large numbers of illegal aliens (many of whom undoubtedly hide in some Democrat’s basement when the census taker knocks on the door) wind up being over-represented in the House of Representatives and in the choice of the President.
I ran some numbers, using figures from NBER, which gave the population of the US as 305,526,00, illegals at 11,400,000, and allocated the number of illegals per state. (I have no idea of how that allocation was done, nor can I vouch for the accuracy of the numbers.)
I created a spreadsheet listing the population of each state, then divided each state’s population by 305,526,000, to yield the number of Representatives. The resulting figures coincided with the actual representation.
Then I subtracted the estimated number of illegals from each state’s population, and from the total population of the US. I was hoping that California would really suffer.
Not so much.
My results (YMMV) show California losing two and Texas losing one. Massachusetts, South Carolina and Ohio each gain one.
Macht es nichts (or, as they say in Oklahoma “It don’t make no never mind.”)
Sergey:
Nice seeing you here again. It’s been awhile.
Orson:
Tyranny happens whether women vote or not (I could argue that not allowing women to vote is a form of tyranny, as well, but that’s not the point I’m making here).
Women could not vote or hold office in ancient Rome, for example. And yet—same old same old happened.
I would say that a bigger turning point here was the giving of the vote to non-property-holders. But universal suffrage is a populist trend in democracy that cannot be turned back.
That said, it is true that women tend on the whole to be more liberal than men, at least in this country. Not sure what’s true worldwide.
In Russia women are sure more conservative than men in their values and social norms because this is expected from them: to be guardians of these values and norms is their traditional social role. In politics, though, they are often the most fierce revolutionaries, but very few people in Russia actually are involved in politics.
Plato witnessed how quickly Athenian democracy devolved into tyranny, and most of his political philosophy devoted to finding ways to avoid such decline. His prescription was “educated tyranny”, or oligarchy of philosophers imposing authoritarian rule on the larger society. Modern liberal thought both in USA and Europe looks increasingly like parody of Plato republic. In absence of Judeo-Christian moral, this seems to be inevitable final of evolution of any pagan society. So when asked what was turning point to decline, I feel that it was secularization, the scourge of 19 and 20 centuries.
People are beginning to understand the Emotions I felt back in 2007 then. Which is nice, but they are rather late, on the emotional level, and intellectual level too.
What does that matter? In War, time is not something you can just sacrifice and still pull a utopian victory out at the end. It doesn’t work like that.
Ymarsakar:
I’ve felt this way since 2008. I think a lot of people have. The feeling has increased of late, but it’s been pretty strong since then, and particularly since the 2012 election.
I’ve felt this way since 2008.
About elections, yes. But did you feel and comprehend the emotion related to recognizing the Leftist alliance as an enemy of humanity that must be wiped from the face of existence or else some things become inevitable?
Emotions are not as simplistic as the Left wanted their zombies to believe. There are some things which cannot be seen nor understand without Hate and Love. Logick is not enough.
Also, those emotions undergo transformation when combined with logick or intuitive thought processes. That takes time. Time, which people do not necessarily have.
I think the demographic and multi cultural change coupled with technology and the complete submission of the press has been the most damaging.
The press wouldn’t be an issue if they could be replaced. They like to claim that they are irreplaceable, however, the 4th estate and all that. Why, without them, even the Constitution might fall… as if.
The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.
Ever wonder why he said patriots along with tyrants?
There’s no war in human existence where you can sit safely killing the enemy, but not get killed yourself. Not even for drone pilots in asymmetrical wars.
If you live by the sword, you can expect to die by the sword. Which is actually a lot better than how people could die in those times.
But this goes all around. It applies to them. It applies to you. So what matters is who does it first.