Transformation is really most obviously an adaptation to a new reality. If you want to transform your life, then transform the external conditions in a way you HAVE to adapt to, then allow it to happen.
This is an hypothesis I am trying out. In some respects it is obvious, but it’s all in the meaning and implementation of the words, both the how, and the how consistently.
You know, as I think about it, it would have made vastly more sense for people to be told to limit the amount of time they spent talking face to face–at least inside–than to try and pretend 6′ EVER made any sense.
As I understand it, the best understanding is that you need a face to face conversation, close enough to have a face to face conversation, up to and past 6′, for at least 5 minutes to transmit the virus. If all contacts had been kept to under a minute, offices with good ventilation could and should have remained open.
That may have actually done something. Masks and those idiotic “stand here” marks on the floor didn’t do a fucking thing.
I continue to hope the truth outs. The truth is horrible.
Asking what is THE perfect form of reason is like asking what the perfect form of corn is. We have the technology to make all corn exactly the same, but we would have to decide what form that might be.
Likewise, we seemingly have the technology to make the world say and do the same things, but would that make the world more perfect? How? Why?
Some emotionally disconnected people seem to feel, in what appears to them as thoughts, that if something is reasonable everyone should think it, and CONVERSELY that if everyone is thinking something, it must be reasonable. The Bandwagon Effect. The “consensus”. This is obviously a propaganda tool, but many seem to take it seriously nonetheless even among those who are manipulating us.
Here is the thing: the biological NEED for diversity in the ecosystem is really proven and indisputable. Diverse, complex systems are inherently more stable, less prone to lasting major disruption, and more resilient and healthy in all respects. One species of corn would wreak all sorts of havoc the world over.
And I would argue that just as there are and should be as many moralities as people on the planet–related moralities, speaking the same languages, but forming different conclusions, and all of which include negotiation and compromise as core values–so too should there be as many ways of reasoning and as many conclusions formed.
The core critique of “Western Culture”–which ironically is a construct using Western ideas, which is then critiqued using Western ideas, making the whole process functionally solipsistic and expressive mainly of self loathing emotionally–is that our notions of Big Ideas, like God, Religion, Human Rights, Reason, etc., were used to dominate and oppress and rob people innocent relative to crimes committed against us (although rarely against each other, with war being endemic the planet over for all of recorded history and no doubt before). Yes, the Nigerians may have enslaved competing tribes to sell into slavery to US (or more likely Arab slavers, to sell to us), but we bought the slaves, and we are supposed to regard Nigerians otherwise as culturally uniform and innocent.
Now, this whole thing uses the techniques it condemns to reach its conclusions. If we abused language to delude ourselves about the humanity of the Other, so too we abuse language NOW to delude ourselves about the capacity for EVIL of the Other, and also to denigrate what was and is GOOD in us.
CRT, rather than denigrating the process of Essentializing, actually simply shifts the target, from everyone else, to themselves (most of them are white), but not REALLY to themselves, but to all competing whites who are not them, and not on their team. All of THEM are evil, as a result both of crimes their ancestors may or may not have committed (all my ancestors came over after the Civil War, and almost nobodies ancestors ANYWHERE in America owned slaves EVER), and of abstract linguistic crimes cooked up in the Faculty Lounge over cocktails. They are guilty of “White Supremacy”, which calls deeply for a hero like Wittgenstein to come riding up on a white horse and remind them that “whereof we cannot speak, we must remain silent”.
There is no such thing as white supremacy. There may be white people who won’t hire black people, but they are few and far between. There may be shitty schools in black neighborhoods, but nobody wants to talk about them as long as the discussion is conducted by white people in what amounts to a gossip session to condemn other white people. The people everyone hated in Grade and High School are now trying to get their revenge. I literally think that is the emotional reality. Most of these people can’t dance, possess zero charm or charisma, have no sense of humor, and are unlikeable in every possible way.
Literally everything CRT does is tear down existing social bonds, while making real solutions to real problems less likely.
And obviously the words good and evil, likewise, are deconstructed in ways which are logically indefensible, and to ends which make coherent morality of any sort outright impossible. You lose in the process all the true benefits of reason, while amplifying all the horrors and cruelties to which human unhappiness has always made us prone.
And again, before long, you have the same emotionally disconnected, morally superior abusiveness being directed at people innocent of any crimes. We have teachers in our classrooms TODAY, in 2021, making innocent white kids cry over crimes they DID NOT COMMIT, and not only that, making very general claims that they are inferior, in precisely the same way white people used to call black people inferior by birth. This is clinical racism, but if you denude language of the accuracy needed to perform useful reasoning, all that is left is all the meanness, pettiness, sadism, and violence in the soul of any particular abuser. And there is OBVIOUSLY a lot of cruelty still out there.
And I will append a comment that could perhaps properly go in another post.
BDSM is Bondage, Domination, Sadism, Masochism. (It is also the acronym, by the way, of the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions Movement, which I continue to argue constitutes a sick inside joke).
Within this world there is apparently something called a “Sub”, for Submissive. I watched one video on PornHub (I actually find just about everything on there gross, with a high percentage of it incestuous in storyline; maybe I clicked on some link long ago because I liked the look of the woman and they decided that was my thing, or maybe that is something a lot of people are interested in. Personally, I find my imagination much more satisfying, so that is by far my default), and this woman came over after an ad on some social media thing (is it Tinder? I think?) and was telling these two guys they could do anything they wanted, that they were in charge, and there were like “no, we’re not, just so we are clear”, and she insisted no they could make her do ANYTHING.
Here is what I will suggest: the people wearing masks NOW, that don’t have to, that wear them in cars, while walking outside, and that wore double masks, are political Subs. They have some emotional need to be manipulated and told what to do. Something is missing in them, some dignity and some love of freedom from coercion.
And I think it goes without saying that in the right context Subs will become Doms. They are two sides of the same coin.
One of the key goals in power seeking is captive narcissistic supply.
Should we wonder that our media is gaslighting us? They are narcissists. A very large number of Americans now are narcissists. They lack true empathy, so they can condemn a supposed lack of empathy in others without themselves feeling it, or recognizing that, in their violence, they are being cruel to innocent people.
As I think I wrote here, Christopher Lasch–who I don’t recollect as a conservative at all–was commenting on this 40 years ago. Here is a summary of the key book: https://www.supersummary.com/the-culture-of-narcissism/summary/
If this was a problem then, has anything mitigated it since? Of course not. And of course I am on board with criticisms of how business done ruthlessly and selfishly destroys traditional communities, and how a world without loyalty is not worth the gains in material wealth.
But Fidel Castro, in his six hour harangues no one felt they could discontinue listening to even to go to the bathroom, was using his audiences for narcissistic supply. He himself was CLEARLY a psychopath, as no doubt is most of the leadership in Cuba.
All of this is pathological. And the true and deep problem with attachment disorders, with Developmental Trauma, is that it is largely unconscious. It manifests not as what people feel–at least not without a LOT of work which in my own case continues–but as what the DON’T feel. There are empty hearts and empty minds there, which do not possess the capacity for recognizing the lack.
It occurred to me another way to put these lockdowns and following hunger, privation, other death and other disease, in the poor world, is that Medical Faucism has damaged the lives of a large proportion of HUMANITY. All of it. All living people on the planet Earth. A very large chunk of 7 BILLION people. No single person has ever been ABLE to be that destructive, and certainly NEVER outside of war time. Fauci is a front man, obviously, and an enabler with many hidden sponsors and employers, but he was the guy who said the words that led to so much pain and misery that the Cubans are in the streets KNOWING they will most likely be tortured and if need be killed. They know this. They grew up there.
But when you have nothing left, you have nothing left to lose. These protests are abject desperation brought on by hunger and incipient death in any event.
And I was enumerating the ways in which these lockdowns have harmed the world. I started with families. These lockdowns have clearly caused many divorces, child abuse, and trauma in countless individuals that will get expressed as family tension.
Then it hit me: the Left wants to DESTROY families anyway. Families are one more intermediate institution. They are one more screen from the gaze of the All Seeing Eye.
And you know this is REALLY what they want: they want the power and relative omniscience of Sauron. The light they want is the inability for any of us have personal lives, personal thoughts, deviations from their psychopathic demands. That is all Big Brother was in 1984: a continual reminder to everyone that they were alone, and the All Seeing Eye alone mattered.
Animal rage, horrendous wounds, horror, and profound dissociation underlie all this emotionally. Obviously, it is sick. Obviously, it is evil. Obviously, we have to fight it.
But we need to recognize that in the hearts of those pushing all this there is no more connection or caring than a lion feels for an antelope when hungry. It is all latent, all rage couched in socially connected sounding words.
It is plague. It comes and goes. I have tried to understand why, but of course parts of this may always be a mystery.
We do need to develop inoculations, though, against this evil. We are at present doing the opposite, which is spread it consciously, in a manner not dissimilar to that of the smallpox blankets supposedly given to the Indians (which most likely never happened, or at least not intentionally).
Put another way the plague warriors are Plague Warriors. They are pushing demonism, pain, misery, lies and death, using a not-very-dangerous disease and an absolutely and sickeningly corrupt “scientific” establishment willing to lie, cheat and steal in the service of this wicked anti-humanism.
It’s hard to believe now, but the modern Democrats really got their start with the Labor movement. There was a time when they ACTUALLY tried to help workers in their negotiations with, and not infrequent battles with, large and often highly abusive corporations.
But I would say the peak of actual PROGRESS for Labor was reached some time between perhaps 1965 and 1985. Big Labor has been in decline since. There is a parabolic arc, going up, up up, then down down. It of course is nowhere near, now, where it was in say 1890, so much of the progress has been retained, but the reality is that union greed and stupidity in the 1980’s, particularly, cost many millions of good workers their jobs, and permanently (to this point at least) ruined the economies of many northeast states.
Feminism peaked around 2016, with MeToo movement, and has since been forced into the back seat by the LGB movement; and that movement, in turn, has in actuality, in my view, been also relegated to second status by the Trans movement, which is nothing short of an organized propaganda offensive directed first and foremost at our children.
And of course “Progressivism” itself also peaks and declines. The United States is currently targeted for economic decline. All the workers, all the women, all the homosexuals, and all the transgenders in Venezuela are suffering now. That misery does not discriminate. All are equal, other than the more equal pigs running the place.
People of good will and sincerity, as I (obviously) think cannot be said often enough, PAY ATTENTION. If you care about people, you look after them, and that means looking AT them and understanding where they are and where they are most likely going, and doing what helps, and stopping doing what hurts.
We live in a world of hallucinatory multicolored balloons, floating everywhere, spewing words and slogans and hate and distraction, and facilitating misery and regression they call progress and felicity.
I can say that in the 1890’s I would have supported both the Labor movement and sound money. They understood the importance of sound money back then, making them smarter than us. Now, of course, what I mostly seek and fail to find are honest men and women. We need a Party of Truth, but of course in reality it would fill nearly instantly with liars. What we need are simply sincere, good natured and reasonably intelligent people governing us, but that is not what we have.
I continue to listen to, and profit by the listening to, Tom Jones. I believe this is my favorite novel of all time. He is as shrewd a psychologist as story teller, and I am tempted to add it to my short list of books I think all high school students should read (Certainly: The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, and the Black Book of Communism).
I have reached the point where Blifil the younger has just sprung his trap on Jones. I can’t see any way out but Jones being sent off to make his fortune. It’s a long novel, and I have a long way to go. I assume Sophia will marry Blifil, but survive emotionally somehow.
Both Sophia and Jones are, in my view–and most likely in the more or less explicit intent of Fielding–examples of natural goodness. It is ironic that Jones IS the bastard, but Blifil acts like one. He is the Loki to Jones Thor.
And Fielding is attentive enough to note the Jones was loved while young, whereas Blifil was not. Blifil has what may reasonably be termed Developmental Trauma. He did not get the affection and love and attuned attention he needed, and so turned into a little and later big Shit.
Both Jones and Sophia are good hearted, and open and honest. This leads to emotions they did not plan, and which are not to their benefit. Everyone ELSE around them is manipulative, self-seeking, and, to the extent of their ability, cunning. They are cold hearted, self absorbed, and largely uninterested in doing the right thing BECAUSE it is the right thing.
And obviously Square–I think that is the spelling, but I am listening to this, which with this book is immensely more entertaining, since the reader himself is a talented actor and seeming character himself, as he himself emotes in the telling, as no doubt Fielding would have done (what a joy it must have been to have him at dinner!!)–is better than Thwackham (also a guess), because at least he feels SOMETHING. Better to be a whore monger than someone who feels entitled to beat and humiliate people responding to normal sexual urges (although that scene with Molly made me laugh so hard I had to stop listening for minute). Actually, it makes me laugh NOW, thinking about it. That book is damned funny.
[Another scene I had to stop was when the Aunt, after going on and on about her worldly guile, got the object of affection completely wrong. That was story telling genius. That dialogue was priceless too, about how women already rule the genteel class, and would rule everyone if they were physically stronger.]
But here is the point I logged on to make: Allworthy himself, although a genuinely good man, has one fatal flaw: he is naive. Because he is good, he cannot see the operations of villainy in others. Being too trusting CAN be something of a virtue, but I will ALWAYS always always argue that all good comes FIRST from extremely accurate perception, both of ones own internal states and those of others.
Goodness, within broad limits, is a natural virtue, but relies entirely on you not being stupid. Camus made this point too.
And as Fielding says more than once, you can’t see in others what you don’t possess in yourself. If you have not the slightest ability to lie or cheat or steal–expressed or latent–then you are slow to notice it in others. You are partially blinded.
But as Fielding says, Jones and Sophia are the heroes. They are the ones to admire and emulate.
It reminds me of the Bible verse: “I send you forth as sheep in the midst of wolves; be ye wise as serpents, and harmless as doves.”
Allworthy was not as wise as serpents. And Rumi said this too. He said something like “no one who does not have both good and evil in them belongs with us.”
Life is flow. Emotions are flow. You cannot be PERFECTLY good without constricting that flow, without setting out a pattern which is inflexible, and not dancing with the world and life itself.
You cannot, in other words, be PERFECTLY good without dissociating yourself from the world and from the human community. It is a static position. It is a citadel, not a river. You have locked yourself off from the Cosmos, for an idea. You have given much, and received almost nothing but a temporary cessation of doubt and the fear of being wrong.
Yes, of course you need principles. I discuss this in my first couple paragraphs in my piece on Goodness (naively, I submitted that as a book proposal to the Dean of former Graduate School. He never answered, no doubt not least because that is not a book proposal at all. He was, by the way, one of the few people I have ever encountered in my life who made me feel dumb. He was genuinely smarter than me. I could feel it. As far as I know, he is still out there being smart somewhere. And I will add, he was not arrogant to me. Far from it. He was friendly and helpful.) But the principles have to be flexible. “you have to send whores to Newgate” is not a flexible principle. It is a means of a power elite punishing “normals”. It is a means, in other words, of punishing the powerless for crimes the powerful could commit with impunity in most places.
Those principles I use for myself are, again: 1) reject self pity; 2) persist; 3) be curious and open. I’m quite good with 2 and 3. 1 I still work on.
I will add, too, that the principle of wisdom he extols, “never buy anything at too dear a price” is really good too. As he says, a wise man can enjoy all the pleasures of life, if he doesn’t subjugate everything else to one or two.
And even in spirituality, even in religious devotion–where excesses are common–the goal is to pay the right price for something you actually achieve. Manias and obsessions are normally paying much too much for much too little. Gradualism is the path of the reasonable and sober, and in most cases the eventually successful.
But I am truly loving his commentaries on the relationship of sex and love, and of the naturalness of generosity and kindness. They are simultaneously trenchant and absurdly funny. This guy makes me laugh A LOT.
Most people are liars. Most people are hypocrites. Most people are, much of the time, ridiculous, even in their most severe and serious moments. Take the Aunt, swearing she is Sophias friend. I KNEW she shouldn’t trust her, but her abusiveness went beyond what I expected.
Or the father, the Squire, swearing he would die for his daughter one moment, then telling her in the next he wants her poverty stricken in the streets, where he would not throw her a scrap of bread to save her life.
This really is how life works, for many people. And I will point out this novel was published in 1749.
Is there really any difference in the emotional callousness of Politically Correct pseudo-culture today and the obtuse horrendousness of the Aunt when she was torturing Sophia with her abuse? I don’t think so.
We have simply had an outbreak of a very old disease. This is still the plague. It still hides in cupboards and basements, and comes out when the time is right.
Liberalism, and Liberal Education, was supposed to serve as an inoculation, as a preventative, as a means of protecting and preserving peace, freedom, tolerance, and justice. But Plague is winning right now, isn’t it? Almost everywhere.
Oh, I have some posts I will make in the next day or two, which attempt to sort all this out. I have worked out a theodicy that makes sense to me, and answers all the obvious problems even with Spiritualism.
If you are reading this, thank you for sharing in my hobby. It hit me today that I am engaged in a long game and long bet, that focusing on this sort of thing might, after some decades, bear fruit. I HAVE bet my life on it. That is the sort of thing you need to do, if you want to be an authentic human being (I wanted to say Man, but, uh, no, and not because I am obsequious to political considerations. Men have much to contribute, women likely more.)
You roll the dice. No matter what happens, if you are alert, you learn something. This world does not answer to me. I myself don’t answer to me. But the latter can be improved with the sort of work I have been undertaking for some time.
Edit: the heading is, I hope with little justice, an obvious reference to Chuang Tzu, as well, much less obviously, as Lao Tzu’s comment that we should “renounce sainthood; it will be a thousand times better for everyone.”
OK. I’m drinking beer, and am not going to resist the urge to append one more comment on a meme I saw today. It had a picture of Mount Everest that said, approximately “All the dead bodies on Mount Everest were highly motivated, too; it won’t hurt if you park it for a minute now and then.”
Apparently there is a dead person–I think a women, although it doesn’t really matter–who wore a bright jacket–orange I think–that climbers have used for some years now as a navigational aid. You go to the orange jacket, then right or left or up or down.
She had a life. She had parents. Now she is a navigational aid. There is no doubt some lesson there I won’t attempt to inflict on you tonight.
Fielding may yet help me become a full fledged human being after all, and at that, after his own decease oh so long ago. This is why culture matters. This is why preserving what is good matters so much. He has much to say to black people. To Latinos. To Asians. To homosexuals. To anyone with a heart and a dependence on oxygen. There are no human beings who could not benefit from his psychology and humanity. That is my view. And if folks want to take the best of all cultures, fantastic. Do it. We can all use wisdom and intelligence. Just don’t use racism as a means of denigrating anyone, including patrician whites from several centuries ago.
And to be clear: do you think I have a the faintest fucking clue what it is like to be born to landed gentry? Do you think I know what it is like to be tutored at home by full time teachers, or what the prospect of inheriting a fortune might feel like? I don’t. Let’s make that clear.
People are people. Rich people are people. Poor people are people, but with more stress, and in most cases more excuse. No, I think great novels written by Africans and Chinese and Arabs and others apply to ME. And I think great novels written by white people apply to them. Sex, jealousy, intrigue, greed: these are universal human emotions. As Fielding might have said, anyone who doubts this must not have felt much of anything, anywhere, at any time. You people need to stop reading, and stop commenting.
I was sitting at an oil change place the other day, and a police car pulled up the next bay over. We were both sitting outside the garage doors, waiting to pull in.
I then heard what sounded like a gunshot. I was not particularly antsy, so I didn’t really jump. It felt safe to me. I thought maybe a line had blown, or even a tire, since one of the guys was inflating tires, but nothing. I couldn’t see anything. The sound seemed to have come from a place about ten feet in front of the cop car.
I looked over at the cop and decided instantly I didn’t like him. I meet a lot of people in a typical week, and usually am able to form a reasonably accurate impression in a split second. Sometimes I am wrong; and usually if I am wrong, it is because I was too harsh on someone, who turns out to be smarter and better than I supposed. But most of the time I’m in the neighborhood. Sometimes I will talk myself out of my initial impression, only to be talked back into it by circumstances.
Later I heard one of the guys speculating that it might have been a bottle rocket, so apparently they didn’t know what it was either.
Here is an idea which has likely not occurred to you, and just occurred to me: if a police car could project something sounding like a shot, they could justify shooting back. I have watched a lot of these police videos where they wind up shooting the suspect. Most of the time when you hear the actual shot, the body cam is pointing anywhere but straight. So you would hear a shot, and the officer could claim they were fired at.
I don’t have any particular axe to grind on this. By and large I am a supporter of law enforcement. They frustrate me when they circle the wagons around cops they KNOW are bad cops, but most of the time the events that get politicized, like happened in Minneapolis, are just bad luck and usually stem mainly from a long series of lies told by the media and repeated by politicians.
But what did I witness? Was that cop just playing a practical joke on those guys, using the extraordinarily bad judgement of a psychopath? WAS it a bottle rocket? That seems unlikely, since I know perfectly well what bottle rockets look and sound like. I don’t know. Something happened I can’t explain. It would be easier to just pretend it didn’t happen, but that is the path to imbecility and I don’t want to be a imbecile, if I can help it.
Maybe there is a black market add-on that is invisible unless you know where to look, that certain dirty cops add and their supervisors don’t even know about.
As a general vibe I like the cops around here. But every department has a bad egg or two, people with unresolved trauma, who are hypervigilant and often cruel, and who do their jobs because they like the feeling of power they get, and of the fear and pain they can inflict on the innocent and guilty alike.
I here add this possibility to the stratosphere, to circulate as it will.
Thinking about this, I really think the contemporary Democrats have roughly the same relationship with Big Business now as Republicans did from perhaps the 1880’s through perhaps the 1920’s.
They protect Big Business, and really don’t give a flying fuck about Mom and Pop. Why? Big Business protects Big Government, with the added condition now that Big Tech with their Big Journalism (handful of media companies) partners also condition and “purify” the information allowed out to the masses.
Words are not magical. They do not refer to real realities simply because we say them. If I call white black, it does not become black unless we redefine white, in which case we then need to redefine black.
Saying your side is the good guys does not make them the good guys. It doesn’t matter what sort of person you are: if you are willfully ignorant, you are complicit in all the problems your decision to be stupid creates.
Woke means woke. It does not mean ideologically compliant. As with most things Left, the word has been perverted into its inverse. “Woke”, on the Left, means dully, duly, and dismally grayly compliant, which inherently means the principled rejection of reason, the rejection of the search for consistency reason demands, and the rejection of the duty to think independently which moral coherence and accountability demands..
The phrase Conservative Syndicalism popped in my mind. I looked up Syndicalism, and found this: Syndicalism is a current in the labor movement to establish local, worker-based organizations and advance the demands and rights of workers through strikes.
Here is my point: a local union, working with a local company, working for specific objectives, is ABSOLUTELY something which is consistent both with conservative economic and political ideas.
Conservatism is about small-ness. It is about combatting the large with the small in aggregate. Conservatism is Main Street. It is keeping your town weird. It is small businesses, and police officers you know and who know you. It is the crowded ice cream shop on Saturday night.
What it is NOT is Amazon buying newspapers to advance their political agenda, which means more rights for corporations and less for people.
Obviously, this is why most small towns are conservative, and most big cities are Big Government. You vote what you know.
But back when Republicans were partnering, say, with Standard Oil to crush workers, that was NOT conservatism. That is Fascism, which is a bastard hybrid between free markets for the large, and authoritarianism for everyone else.
And today, what Amazon and Big Tech–through censorship and buying press and buying elections–has done to crush Main Street is not all that different from what John D. did or tried to do (I remember small details about small skirmishes, but am not fully up to speed on that era) to protect his own obscene profits.
Planned or not, the RESPONSE to COVID wrecked Main Street. Qui Bono? Among others, the owner of the Washington Post. And Amazon recently deplatformed America’s Frontline Doctors, who have been fighting to get honest information out into a world largely denuded of it. OBVIOUSLY, this pandemic has been GREAT for Jeff Bezos bottom line and market position. If you simply subtract the merest whiff of human decency, and why wouldn’t he be among the front line ranks of the plague pushers?
You have to be a Republican in 2021 if you want any chance at all of reigning in the corporate power elite. They know this: that is why they are all staunch Democrats. They are buying what they need, with as much money as it takes.
And as I keep saying, the Constitution is all about distributing power. That was the whole point. They wanted enough potential power in the Federal Government to protect the nation from foreign aggression, but enough in the States to prevent tyranny. Government is supposed to have distributed power at all levels, from the Federal on down to small school boards, and planning committees for the 4th of July parade.
Conservatives can absolutely support welfare: we just want it provided by local governments, not national ones. And this makes more sense. As it works now, the Federal government takes money from one part of America and spends it somewhere else. How does that make sense? And how can any centralized bureaucracy ever spend that same amount of money more intelligently than those in direct contact with the problems at hand? They can’t. They don’t. In general, they make things worse and either don’t realize it, or feel empowered to deny it, both since they are so far from the actual people involved.
Decent people need to wake up and realize that if they don’t want people who are ugly, nasty and mean telling them from far away how to live their lives, they need to get the locus of control back into their State Houses and City Halls.
Conservatism is not about what is right, but who gets to decide. Who can decide better than small groups of people who live in the same towns, and will have to live with the results?