Month: October 2011

Conservatives are up in arms about attempted leftist take-overs of the nation, which have been underway in earnest since AT LEAST the 1960’s, and in my view the 1930’s (Hell: 1920’s, since Hoover started the New Deal). This is all to the good. It’s good to be awake and not asleep.

At the same time, I think we need to begin reframing this conflict from opposing leftists, to restoring sanity and recovering a free 21st century from those who would oppose it. We need to be thinking not just about winning, but WINNING.

We need to remember that these academics who support the wholesale murder of women and children without using those images: they are lunatics, driven mad by inaccurate abstractions and simple COWARDICE. They can’t figure out a way forward, so they assume the rest of us can’t. Let me ask you this, though: if I pitted a group of academics against a group of people selected at random from a phone book and asked them to build a home, who would finish it first? In my view, there would be no contest. Academics simply do not, as a rule, have practical intelligence. They claim to speak for workers, but they sure as hell do not hang out at their bars.

What people of good will need to remember is that most of the suffering of the last century was completely unnecessary. Given the actual use of reason, good instead of bad decisions would have been made. We would have won the Vietnam War, and frankly Kennedy should have, in my view, invaded Cuba after they tried to install the SS-whatever missiles. It would have saved a great deal of suffering, and Americans would have a great alternative to Las Vegas.

When you ponder, really ponder, how most of the people spouting the most idiotic ideas are in fact intelligent, IQ-wise, capable of reading and understanding books, and possessed of reasonably developed moral sentiments, it becomes clear that if actual facts are allowed to intrude on their sacred narrativess, the change will be quick and complete.

Obviously, this is hard to do: the door is locked. But “persistence prevails when all else fails”. Our task is one requiring patience, but nothing beyond this but understanding. Everyone–EVERYONE–who is currrently espousing ideas which damage the poor and hopeless most, can be shown, over time, to see that better ideas are possible; that most conservatives actually care as much or more about people hurting in this world as they do, and merely differ in their approaches to fixing that suffering.

As it seems to me, the conservative ideal is individual perfectability. The Leftist ideal is SOCIAL perfectability; but if they really analyze what is being proposed, it is the rule by an oligarchy of some sort, which itself will be composed of individuals not required to answer for their actions. This is not perfection at all: it is tyranny.

Give hope; Do hope; Perform hope: all through the filter of a better understanding that can be communicated.

We live in interesting times. Everything we have hoped for remains possible.

I would get a soapbox, and read my ideas on the reform of the financial system. What is striking about these protests is the apparently universal mediocrity and lack of coherent ideas which typify it. Where in the French revolution you had philosophes declaiming their (often idiotic) ideas in every cafe, here you have nothing.

I have called these the Ubu Roi protests, and the squirrel tamer protests (I watched the video–Monty Python’s Lion Tamer skit–and it was actually an ant-eater, but the principle is the same). Now I would like to call it SpongeBob goes to Wall Street. Sponges soak up everything, they have little weight, and the float around easily. Perhaps the “occupy” idea is reaction to an intrinsic sense of rootlessness. Worth considering.

We see this word “inhumanity”, but as I have seen noted by many people, can we really call “inhuman” acts which have been common throughout recorded history, and which presumably preceded it? If they opposed them, the Assyrians would tie conquered peoples to the ground and skin them alive, or cook them over slow fires.

The Mongols put entire cities to the sword, creating a massive pile of heads when they conquered Baghdad.

The Romans enjoyed watching people kill one another in duels, and loved watching people being fed to wild animals. How long did they watch, one wonders? Did they watch the lions literally eat their victims? Why not?

I was listening to Steven Pinker on the radio the other day. He has written a book discussing how violence in general has actually declined in the last half century, maybe more (I have not read the book). I do not normally agree with him on much of anything, but this thesis seems to me to have merit.

As he mentioned, torture used to be something that spectators observed. Western Europe was tremendously creative in the development of implements of torture both because it was useful as an instrument of State repression, but also because PEOPLE LIKED IT. According to Pinker, whole families, children included, would watch people get their intestines wound around a spool, or watch their arms broken with large hammers. As he commented, it was something that initially was abhorrent, but for which a taste could be cultivated.

In point of fact, my interest in the French Revolution began with Terry Gilliams movie “The Brothers Grimm”. In that movie, Jonathan Pryce, as an effete French aristocrat (or revolutionary equivalent), has classical music playing and his wife and others in attendance, as a woman is getting ready to be torn apart by a new implement of torture. Instead, the woman’s poodle somehow gets into the machine, and is shredded.

This left an effect on me. I wondered if it was really like that. I want you to imagine what it MUST have been like on what I recall being called the Place de la Revolution. Thousands were beheaded in front of enthusiastic crowds, sometimes for crimes as minor as not wearing the right colors, or simply having offended someone with the power to get them condemned. How much blood must have spilled? Did they clean it up? They are French; I think not. How it must have stunk in the summer!!! And who gathered the heads and bodies? If you have 20 bodies and 20 heads, that is a lot of cleaning up.

Please watch this video, once. It is horrible, but I think most Americans lack the capacity to imagine a world where people are truly indifferent to human life. We agonize over dogs. We spend fortunes on their health, and many people bury them when they die.

Yet much of the world is not like this. They do not have empathy. They do not care about anyone who is not immediate kin to them.

Watch it.

Having watched this, I want you to realize that this is what human life is worth in Communist nations. I don’t read Chinese, and cannot say for certain this is not Singapore or Hong Kong, or Macau, or elsewhere, but please just IMAGINE for a moment the mindset it takes to contemplate the deaths by starvation of tens of millions of innocent, working men, women and childran, as Anita Dunn’s hero Mao did.

To be a Communist is to be morally equal to the man who, having once run over the child, decides it is easier to run over her again; or the second van, which could easily have avoided her, but ran her over anyway, like roadkill.

I want to be clear: Bill Ayers, on reliable testimony, calculated that tens of millions of “unreeducatable” Americans would have to die in Nazi-like camps they planned to build in the Southwest. There is credible evidence that this man was the actual author of Obama’s books, and that they were in fact friends, which would seem to be implied by the fact that Ayers got Obama on some committees he controlled.

Pinker is right that violence has decreased. Yet, it is not gone. Many of the people who SHOULD be protecting our Enlightenment heritage of reason, which has enabled the decrease in violence (not least through the success of the free market economic system), are in fact rejecting it, and by so doing, issuing de facto calls for returns to much more brutal, less kind, less empathetic, less GOOD times in human history. They are calling for retrogression, under the very thin guise of supposed progress.

NONE of this is necessary. We have people who don’t eat animals on principle effectively supporting people who want a return to their personal version of the Third Reich. They don’t see this, because they don’t THINK. They don’t reason. They feel, which is what they have been taught. They have been taught to feel because it is easier to manipulate.

If these OWS demonstrations were happending 200 years ago, there would already have been many murders. All you need to get an unorganized mob moving is a call to violence. It is as old as time.

Please do not underestimate the accomplishment implied by a nation that weeps for dogs. Please do not underestimate how uniquely kind in human history the modern WEST is. History is filled to overflowing with horrors.

Please do not take what we have built here for granted. It can all end, and it can end quickly. No more Starbucks. No more Ben and Jerry’s. No more kindness. This is nothing to desire, and nothing to work for, but for the most wicked.

We can keep building, or we can tear down. In my view, if we choose the latter, both those who did it, and those who did nothing to stop it, will face a judgement that has been long in coming.

Just watched, again, the John Wayne treatment of the Green Berets. One thing stands out: the cowardice of our retreat. That was not American, and it IS not American failing to realize how horrific the results were of our failure to the South Vietnamese people.

In our Starbuck’s age, people forget that torture was a commonly applied instrument of governance the world over, and when tempered, ONLY tempered as a result of our insistence.

How many of you would want to be placed on a starvation diet, worked 16 hours a day, and forced to spend an added four hours a day admitting what an awful person you are, and chanting pro-Obama or pro-Bush slogans?

Ay: there is so little understanding out there. Why do intelligent, educated people defend torture? I honestly don’t know.

We need a name for structural anti-Fabianism. I propose it be called the Anaconda Strategy.

As those with a decent familiarity with history will readily recognize, this was the strategy Winfield Scott–the most brilliant American General nobody has heard of–came up with to win the Civil War. He knew that the South would not fall easily. Amateurs, looking at maps, assumed that Richmond–less than a 100 miles or so from Washington–could just be marched to, conquered, and the war would be over within a month.

Scott knew that they were too strong there, and that the action would have to begin in the West, by controlling the Mississipi, then the ports, like Mobile Bay. That’s where Grant cut his teeth as a General, and it was only relatively late in the conflict that he got involved in the Eastern theater, I guess I can call it.

The movement was one of constriction: of supplies, of movement, of men. The goal was to make the effective South smaller and smaller and smaller, and finally, at the very end, to complete that short march from Washington to Richmond. It was a non-obvious strategy, but it worked.

Here is an interesting thought: the Leftists in our midst have in effect seceded from the Union. What they want is not a strong and unified America, but one riven by SECTARIAN conflict, of precisely the sort they continuously engender. They no longer want to be part of a larger whole, but rather to attack anyone unlike them, in the hope of ending the defense of our national traditions outright, to be followed by a post-Constitutional world.

We need to be clear that with an intact Constitution, the stakes for winning national political contests would be greatly muted. If the Supreme Court had not arrogated to itself the power to impose unanswerable legislation, it would not matter as much who sat on it. If the Executive had not metastasized to include hundreds of bureaus and–over the course of a Presidency–TRILLIONS of dollars in largely discretionary spending, the Presidential election would not matter as much. If Congress were not needed to counter the power of such an Imperial Presidency, then it, too, would be much less important.

That is neither here nor there, though at this moment. What I want to propose is that the advance of Leftism in the dark has been checked. It is now in the open. Large numbers of people–larger in my view than ever before–are wide awake and largely immune to the smoke and mirrors that have worked so well before. It was not that hard to argue that the Vietnam War was in process of being lost in 1970, even though that was not the case. It was not so hard to argue that an arms race with the Soviet Union was dangerous, even though it manifestly wasn’t. It was not so hard, even recently, to argue that America contained large resevoirs of residual racism. Yet, we just elected a black President, and one with no qualifications and many figurative and literal red flags at that. Even that case is not going to be easy to make going forward.

All the things that leftists have used to distract people from their failures are gone. They have spend their ammunition. They got their Keynesian Stimulus. It did nothing. They claimed their health insurance mandate would decrease costs; it is increasing them, predictably, for clearly definable reasons. Where, in their political landscape, is there room to hide from the truth?

Certainly, the media will continue failing to cover important stories, and failing to provide historical context for current events. The universities will continue to spew out poorly educated, but nonetheless overly self confident graduates.

But they won’t have jobs. And as they ponder, they will slowly realize, if they have any intelligence at all, that small businesses create jobs, and that Democrats in general put pressure, unnecessary pressure, on small businesses, often to the benefit of the very transnational megacorporations they have been bred to hate.

Sunlight is the cure for infections of this sort. The Anaconda Strategy is very simple: educate, educate, educate. Most college graduates have literally NEVER BEEN EXPOSED to coherent conservatism. They literally DO NOT KNOW why nice people could even consider voting Republican.

The task is to shrink the base of ideologically faithful continually over time, such that in 5 or 10 years, Communism is once again the universally evil word it should have been these last 50 years and more.

Look at Occupy Wall Street: these are the sybarites I talk about. They are soft and weak. They believe nothing and know nothing. They don’t even know why they are there, and are incapable of articulating credible reasons why their presence will make the slightest difference to the businesses of the men who drive by them every day in their limousines. I doubt any even bother to look up from the pages of their paper as they drive by.

These people talk about “revolution”, but none of them have the capacity to really grasp what the sort of thing they are calling for would mean. They think they will still get their Starbucks, and video games, and Dave Matthews concerts, their Free Trade Granola (but from local shops), but that instead of having to pay their bills, their bills will be paid for them. And if they just want to sleep in, well the fantastically compassionate State will let them. Basically, all the responsibilities of their lives will be gone, and all that will be left is the stuff they like, absent the evil corporations.

To call this magical thinking is perhaps generous. It is really a form of functional psychosis, that is entirely divorced from the realm of the possible or historical. An analogy I would use is this Monty Python Skit. Our Chartered Accountant dreams of a life of adventure as a lion tamer, but shrinks back when he finds out what lions actually are.

All of these children–and they are all children, regardless of their apparent biological age–are either imagining squirrels, or possessed of such abundant rage that they would qualify as clinical sadists of the Bill Ayers sort.

In both cases, the simple fact is that they can be marginalized, and this process has already begun. Our task now is to continue it. Every copy of a book by Hayek, or Friedman, or Sowell, or Hazlitt, or Paul Johnson, or Jacques Barzun,or of course Ann Coulter, Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly, Mona Charen, or many others, that sells, shrinks a little the space they occupy.

Of course the left will continue putting out their books. But we have a basic advantage over time: we are right, and when our policies are implemented–real conservative policies, not RINO policies–they will work. If Perry or Cain get the nod, they will make an immediate difference for the better in our economy, in my view. Same for everyone else in the field but Romney. Make that O an Obama symbol.

Now, given the level of indoctrination out there, it is not inconceivable Obama could win a second term. We need to be clear that this will almost CERTAINLY come with a Republican Senate. Between the two houses, Congress can vitiate almost every Socialist initiative coming out of the White House, and put a cap on much of his spending.

This would not be good, of course, but please think back to the Civil War. 600,000 Americans DIED in that war, which convulsed our nation for 4 long years. We survived that period. We can survive the next 5 years too, one way or another.

Americans are not bred for pessimism, and the simple ineluctable fact is that ALL OUR PROBLEMS HAVE SOLUTIONS IF WE CAN GET THE IDIOTS OUT OF THE WAY. This again will only be possible with education, education, education.

As one good example of the sort of thing I’m talking about, Hillsdale College has apparently put together a set of lectures on the Constitution.

Two more reasons I like the Anaconda analogy:

1) It recollects the encirclement that enabled the complete destruction of the Roman Army by Hannibal at Cannae, after they abandoned the strategy of Fabius Maximus, as the left indeed did by nominating Obama.

2) Don’t tread on me. Different snake: same idea.

Look to this day:
For it is life, the very life of life.
In its brief course
Lie all the verities and realities of your existence.
The bliss of growth,
The glory of action,
The splendour of achievement
Are but experiences of time.

For yesterday is but a dream
And tomorrow is only a vision;
And today well-lived, makes
Yesterday a dream of happiness
And every tomorrow a vision of hope.
Look well therefore to this day;
Such is the salutation to the ever-new dawn!

Kalidasa

You know, if you are positioned to benefit from inflation, you are virtually guaranteed it if you can either start a war or get a socialist elected. In both cases, the impulse to print money is overwhelming.

Keynes made his money predicting alterations in the value of national currencies. In his own way, George Soros does the same. If you are a predator, you want to weaken your prey, and idiotic fiscal policies–both of which are just about guaranteed in both war and socialism, but which are permanent in socialism–are just the way to do this.

Where is our inflation today, though? It was low under Bush and remains relatively low, right? Our own situation is more complicated than, say, Weimar Germany. The bulk of our inflation comes from borrowing using the fractional reserve system, whereas then it was the result of the government printing money to pay off enormous war debts. As things improve economically, I expect inflation to increase considerably. The Fed will pursue deflationary policies, and only God knows what will happen.

The main point I wanted to make here, though, is that when entities like the IMF push for currency devaluation to “boost exports”, they are simultaneously asking that country to discount itself. This is of course enormously helpful for predators. This process is facilitated by expansions of welfare programs which cannot be paid for in any way BUT inflation.

Net: socialism creates inflation which creates economic weakness. For this reason alone one would expect non-socialists to call for socialism.

I like to watch flowing water. What you will notice from time to time is an unexpected “bump” of water. This is a feature of a chaotic system: the periodic outlier. The system itself, however, is defined by the arithmetic average, the statistical behavior, over time. The system may never for a moment hit these abstractions perfectly, but will hit them approximately all day long.

People are defined by what they do most of the time, over time, and why. A single sin does not alter a personality, necessarily, except to the extent that either guilt or the rationalization implemented to ease guilt affect qualitative change in how that person moves through the world. This would be the equivalent of permanently redirecting the water.

It seems to me too that guilt becomes “stuck” when you fail to achieve the growth being asked of you. When you do something you feel really bad about, you do not have a choice of returning to the status quo ante. You either grow or you diminish. You either permanently internalize a new personality gestalt, or you downgrade to the sort of person who can make the incongruities evoked go away by simply ignoring previously dear principles; by in effect rejecting who you were and had to that point chosen to be.

I was in a library today, looking at all the ideas, and it occurred to me that the ENTIRETY of the knowledge contained in there arose from the simple idea that progress was possible. Prior to that, there were perhaps a few hundred books in existence, and only the Bible–in most of Europe–mattered. The “library” would have consisted in one book. Everything you needed to know was in there.

Would there be a need for a scientific method, if there were no idea that new insights and relationships could be teased from the cosmos?

This sort of idea I call qualitative; paradigmatic would work as well, although it is so big that I might academicize and call it metaparadigmatic.

Movement begins with the idea that movement is possible. This is so obvious that very few people truly grasp it. Very few of us ever come even CLOSE to seeing what is possible, and there is no reason for me to think I am one of them. As far as that goes, one would need to be outside the system to even begin to comment on this from a position of knowledge.

What we can see, however, is frequent stupidity across the ages. If one were to posit that it is slowly fading, one would not do so without evidence. Most of the fratricidal instincts of past ages have muted in recent decades, to the point where one wonders if global peace might not in the end actually be possible, and that within a genuinely Liberal framework.

Let’s work to that end.