Leftist leaders and 'visionaries' love to take refuge in a future that’s too far off to accurately predict – slowing climate change and creating a new sustainable green economy conveniently will take decades and massive public investment before we'll even have a hint whether it's working. With the overwhelming majority of their ongoing projects it’s always too soon to tell with any accuracy how things are going plus their progress is always serendipitously too difficult to measure. How do we measure what a child is learning? Has the percentage of Americans living in poverty changed in 40 years? Are there fewer homeless per capita? Just how long will it take to achieve ‘social justice’? To succeed the Democratic agenda axiomatically seems to always require limitless money (aka 'public investment') and unspecified amounts of time. Similarly, there is no definable end nor identifiable line items that can ever be individually budgeted or checked off as ‘done’ within their agendas. Ponder just how absurd it is to ask, ’How long will it take to reduce greenhouse gases 25%, how are we going to do it ,what will it cost and can we afford it?’ Or, 'Just how much would it cost to eliminate povery once and for all and how would we do it?' Any idea how many global summits are required to achieve global nuclear disarmament? Meanwhile, all the prosaic, flat-earth, unintuitive, pragmatic (not infrequently Christian) selfish business people ( aka the mules pulling the cart ) are puting in overtime dealing with such pedestrian matters of the day as providing food to the grocery stores every morning by 6AM and gasoline that's cheaper than bottled water or developing a vaccine for the swine flu. (Though presumedly they could all do it cheaper and better if they had a little competition from the government - l.o.l.)
Is the idea of a conservative ‘visionary’ by definition an oxymoron simply due to the conservative’s inherent nature to feel compelled to supply actual constructive, measurable means to achievable ends? Wasn’t it John Kennedy that said some look at the world and say why, but I look and say why not? What if he had said, ‘But I look and say what, when and how much?' Nothing very inspiring about that now, is there! How many visionaries does it take to build a nuclear plant, a Las Vegas Casino or a new version of Windows? About the same amount as angels that can fit on the head of a pin.
Everyday necessity has a stubborn habit of consistently trimming Icarus's wings. It's a good thing too, lest the left's visionaries fly too high with our uninspired pocket books.
M.D.T.
Saturday, October 31, 2009
Friday, October 2, 2009
Slip Sliding Away
Nothing terrifies a liberal more than the prospect of having no one to blame and no one to ridicule. That would leave them alone with their own incompetence. If there weren’t greedy rich people to carry the shibboleth of ‘oppressors’ thereby absolving themselves and their purported victims of responsibility, it would be necessary for the left to invent them. At the very foundation of liberalism is a cause and effect world; a godless world where human behavior can be reduced ultimately to a combination of environmental factors; the study of human behavior, personality and outcomes perceived as a science. It’s not Ginger’s fault she’s a drug addict and a prostitute – she came from the slums, had no productive role models, was ignored in our under-funded schools, was molested as a child etc. For them it’s just simple cause and effect; poverty equals human failing. Post hoc ergo proptor hoc. ( A logical fallacy ) The left believes, by in large, there’s no free will in this world; that free will’s a Christian invention, a historical anachronism that doesn’t jibe with their scientific-materialistic world view i.e. a world without spirit. There's nothing divine or radically exceptional about mankind. We're part of the natural order. But there’s a lot more involved within the Darwin vs. Creationism argument than monkeys and men; there’s free will vs. determinism; there’s personal responsibility vs. environmental absolution. Can Man be deemed in any way truly free if he has no soul or if some part of him doesn’t stand somehow outside of nature, beyond cause and effect?
Now, with the specter of G.W. fading in the distance, it’s a virtual certainty that these impostors, these incompetents, aka, the radical elements of the Democratic party now in power, will invent ever new bugaboos at every turn to justify their lack of results and policy failures. Already they posit an institutional racism rooted intransigently within the indigenous American psyche that’s purported to be blocking health care reform. ( It’s not Obama’s fault ) Cries of racism wail siren-like over the media airwaves as the economic downturn and current malaise resists the antiquated fix-its of the old left; those tired and historically discredited fix-its such as leveling the playing field by disincentivising economic outcomes and ‘stimulating’ the economy with massive Keynesian deficit spending supplemented by yet ever greater environmental and financial regulation. When the pillorying of the powerless Republican Party as obstructionist no longer holds water with the American public, then the blame will shift to other countries, the Chinese, Israelis, Indians, Mexicans with their alleged unfair trade practices coupled with illegal immigration. The dark harbinger of protectionism looms. Finally, at last, only the people themselves and democracy itself* are left to blame; those sad, demented souls twisted by over 200 years of capitalist greed and ethnocentric religious dogma – so ethically contorted that they no longer even know what’s good for themselves. Ultimately the more vocal individualistic political opposition is criminalized, barred from the public forum, their opinion banned as ‘hate speech’ and key nonconforming industries are quasi-collectivized to insure their forwarding of ‘the public good’. ( Let’s tax away profitable self-sustaining industries such as coal and oil but subsidize non-competitive ones like solar and wind ).
And so can go the slow anesthetizing descent of a free society founded upon individual liberty and responsibility into one where ‘the buck never got here’; a society of faith, self-criticism, success and failure morphs into a soft totalitarian regime; a society that cherishes free speech above all else transmogrifies into one that enforces some bizarre, Kafkaesque, shape-shifting, unconstitutional nostrum of political correctness. And so we slip by one single, new, self-ordained societal victim at a time. And so the far left paves the way for a new generation of leaders; leaders cloaked in a lupine mantle of supreme compassion yet strong and ruthless enough to govern a country by imposing fairness and equality; a country that crushes wrong thinking; a country simplified to only the oppressors and the oppressed. And so our national flight away from personal responsibility and the sacrosant ideality of individual free will paves the way for America’s own Juan and Evita Chavez.
M.D.T.
Whoah God only knows, God makes his plan
The information's unavailable to the mortal man
We're workin' our jobs, collect our pay
Believe we're gliding down the highway, when in fact we're slip sliding away
Paul Simon
*I include the following excerpt from a recent, self-absolving The Guardian U.K. editorial.
“But it must be recognised that it's not just Obama's shortcomings that are causing the problem. The very structure of the American political system is at the heart of these failures. For example, thwarting Obama on a regular basis is an unrepresentative senate where "minority rule" prevails and undermines what a majority of the country may want. With two senators elected per state, regardless of population, California with more than 35 million people has the same number of senators as Wyoming with just half a million residents. This constitutional arrangement greatly favours low population states, many of which tend to be conservative, producing what one political analyst has called "a weighted vote for small-town whites in pickup trucks with gun racks."
Now, with the specter of G.W. fading in the distance, it’s a virtual certainty that these impostors, these incompetents, aka, the radical elements of the Democratic party now in power, will invent ever new bugaboos at every turn to justify their lack of results and policy failures. Already they posit an institutional racism rooted intransigently within the indigenous American psyche that’s purported to be blocking health care reform. ( It’s not Obama’s fault ) Cries of racism wail siren-like over the media airwaves as the economic downturn and current malaise resists the antiquated fix-its of the old left; those tired and historically discredited fix-its such as leveling the playing field by disincentivising economic outcomes and ‘stimulating’ the economy with massive Keynesian deficit spending supplemented by yet ever greater environmental and financial regulation. When the pillorying of the powerless Republican Party as obstructionist no longer holds water with the American public, then the blame will shift to other countries, the Chinese, Israelis, Indians, Mexicans with their alleged unfair trade practices coupled with illegal immigration. The dark harbinger of protectionism looms. Finally, at last, only the people themselves and democracy itself* are left to blame; those sad, demented souls twisted by over 200 years of capitalist greed and ethnocentric religious dogma – so ethically contorted that they no longer even know what’s good for themselves. Ultimately the more vocal individualistic political opposition is criminalized, barred from the public forum, their opinion banned as ‘hate speech’ and key nonconforming industries are quasi-collectivized to insure their forwarding of ‘the public good’. ( Let’s tax away profitable self-sustaining industries such as coal and oil but subsidize non-competitive ones like solar and wind ).
And so can go the slow anesthetizing descent of a free society founded upon individual liberty and responsibility into one where ‘the buck never got here’; a society of faith, self-criticism, success and failure morphs into a soft totalitarian regime; a society that cherishes free speech above all else transmogrifies into one that enforces some bizarre, Kafkaesque, shape-shifting, unconstitutional nostrum of political correctness. And so we slip by one single, new, self-ordained societal victim at a time. And so the far left paves the way for a new generation of leaders; leaders cloaked in a lupine mantle of supreme compassion yet strong and ruthless enough to govern a country by imposing fairness and equality; a country that crushes wrong thinking; a country simplified to only the oppressors and the oppressed. And so our national flight away from personal responsibility and the sacrosant ideality of individual free will paves the way for America’s own Juan and Evita Chavez.
M.D.T.
Whoah God only knows, God makes his plan
The information's unavailable to the mortal man
We're workin' our jobs, collect our pay
Believe we're gliding down the highway, when in fact we're slip sliding away
Paul Simon
*I include the following excerpt from a recent, self-absolving The Guardian U.K. editorial.
“But it must be recognised that it's not just Obama's shortcomings that are causing the problem. The very structure of the American political system is at the heart of these failures. For example, thwarting Obama on a regular basis is an unrepresentative senate where "minority rule" prevails and undermines what a majority of the country may want. With two senators elected per state, regardless of population, California with more than 35 million people has the same number of senators as Wyoming with just half a million residents. This constitutional arrangement greatly favours low population states, many of which tend to be conservative, producing what one political analyst has called "a weighted vote for small-town whites in pickup trucks with gun racks."
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