Tag Archives: Stalin

Culture, Education, Immigration, Race

What Direction is “Right”

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The wasteland of American politics, amongst a hundred other logical and moral perturbations, is roughly divided into a party of life and a party of death, neither perfectly, of course. But… but roughly, yes. One party is aligned more with “pro-life” and one is aligned more with abortion, or “pro-choice.” Anyone can state which is which since it’s fairly well known where the two “parties” stand.

But it’s a circle and not neatly linear. The leftists, or progressives, infatuated with victim-identity-groups, exercise their dudgeon in support of “civil rights,” regardless of the effects on the group they describe as victimized by the denial of this or that civil “right.” In the case of abortion that group – and it’s a good, big one – is every woman. Rightists, or conservatives, are opposed to abortion because they think it’s evil and bad for individuals. They see the “right to life” as somehow the opposite of the freedom to choose abortion when pregnancy occurs, seeing the unborn child… and the mother… and the father, as affected individuals protected by the constitution. Leftists see the decisions about pregnancy, both the inception and the termination, as strictly the purview of the mother – so far always a woman. And so we divide.

It is impossible to avoid hypocrisy when it comes to other positions involving life and death. For example, progressives are both pro-choice and anti-death penalty, while conservatives are anti-abortion and pro-death penalty, very generally speaking. The latter would say that the unborn have a “right” to life but that murderers and other capital offenders have relinquished that right by their actions.

Progressive argue that pregnant women have the unique right to choose abortion, a right that must be protected, while those condemned to death at the hands of the “state” deserve a right to be rehabilitated from the conditions – many of those social – that caused them to kill or brutally rape and that the state should not become a murderer, itself. Both sides defend these “rights” and views with passion. Well, okay.

War – or defense – muddles the life or death arguments of both camps. Stalin, for example, caused the horribly painful deaths of millions of peasants (and intellectuals) in order to impose purer Communism, and he is regarded as a leftist exemplar and hero, today. After all, a thousand deaths are a tragedy; a million or more is a statistic. Hitler killed many fewer millions but the left declares him “right-wing,” although it is the right, today, that defends Israel. Hitler, a different-striped socialist than Stalin, the left has decided to hate; Planned Parenthood, the largest abortion mill in the world – and most profitable – they love. It can be confusing.

Progressives also fight for the “right” of illegal entrant women to have their babies (in the United States) so the confusion of leftists and of rightists trying to comprehend them, is understandable.

Giant business conglomerates that make armaments are identified with the right, although those companies, themselves, have literally no concern for parties or even nations. Their partnerships with governments removes them from the capitalist economy, in a sense, since they have saddled taxpayers with the burden of their success, not competitive customers. Both parties like these people because they are willing to support anyone financially, who will maintain them in power. It’s no longer recognized as corruption – just business, although it has little to do with the free-enterprise engine of capitalism that pays for everything.

To function over time armaments manufacturers need conflicts and threats of conflicts. Both parties come around the circle of life and death to where they bump into war and the manufacturers of the implements of war. The unpleasant side-effect of war, unfortunately, is death – death of soldiers, men and women, who despite volunteering for the military still didn’t want to die, and death of innocent civilians, no matter how careful politicians would direct the soldiers to be. Lots of death, injury and ruin, and both parties enable war in their own ways; both run in the opposite life or death direction from their opponents and inevitably bump in to the war business that puts the lie to most other philosophies each espouses.

Rightists tend to identify with “a strong military” and they use patriotism to the fullest for their advantage. Leftists, in very recent years, have come to despise patriotism, our anthem and the flag, itself, which rightists still can’t figure out. Conservatives see militarism as protection of the nation’s “life.” Progressives seem to have grown tired of the U. S. and patriotic references to it are of no value to them and may be readily opposed if only to aggravate the right. One might infer that the “death” of the nation wouldn’t upset the left nearly as much as it would the right.

Still, very generally speaking, the “right” tends to be pro-life while the “left” is pro-death. Like other destructive (of constitutional republicanism) movements based on “rights,” the right to destroy one’s fetus is defended as superior to the historic right to life. Indeed, the distinction between the two conflicting rights is a point of battle, not just opinion. As vital and fundamental as this conflict has been for 40 years (and for hundreds of years before Roe v. Wade) Society is now being sundered by the conflicts between “rights” unheard-of 40 years… or even 20 years ago.

Of ironic interest is the intensifying effort to grant Constitutional “rights” or “protections” to illegal entrants. While a pleasant-sounding attitude, there is no logical basis for giving such hard-earned rights to non-citizens. The Constitution was formed by American citizens in an era of freedom purchased by the blood of the first Americans. Citizens in the first thirteen states approved it. It is a benefit of citizenship whether by birth or by adoption, not of illegal residence or illegal presence. Yet there are large minorities in both parties – larger in the anti-Trump party – who are evidently quite happy to damage the nation, no matter how permanently, by breaking down immigration and border-defense laws. Many of these are equally enamored of Socialism… even of Stalin, himself, not because they understand what they are doing, but because they are willing to do anything to damage the United States. Make no mistake.

Many of the “no borders” zealots preach the “right of immigration” to improve one’s living conditions. It is a broad and ill-defined right that extends to everyone who is, first and foremost, not white. Like the right to abortion, when actually contemplated, the image of an immigrant or of an aborted immigrant to life, is covered in brown skin. Whites have been defined as oppressors in any and every instance, and are therefore entitled to almost no rights and chief among those so proscribed is ownership of private property. Thank you, education systems.

A more dangerous trend, Prudence teaches us, is “rights” codified based on personal, self-declared feelings. Our culture has been turned, if not twisted, by the 30-year fight for “gay” rights. Initially it was a logical, and reasonable push back against cruelty and discriminatory rejection of professed “gays” and “lesbians.”

Appropriating the word, “gay,” apparently applied primarily to male homosexuals but is sometimes used to describe lesbians as well.

But the “gay rights movement” quickly morphed from tolerance and non-discrimination towards unusual people, into demands for total acceptance and legalization of every permutation of sexual deviance – all of it self-declared. In other words, a person can declare him- or her-self to be “gay,” and come under constitutional protections now accepted as protecting every form of “expression.” That same person, however, can also choose to live as a heterosexual, self-declaring a non-gay status, and have, in effect, fewer rights or protections than previously.

This seems like a preposterous basis for application of the 14th Amendment. We have moved into a realm where people’s feelings are made the basis for anti-discrimination protections. More diaphanous is legislative logic for “trans-genderism.” With no physical evidence, men and women… and boys and girls… are permitted, if not encouraged, to live out their fantasies of being the opposite “gender.” The argument is based on “gender” being a linguistic designation of maleness and femaleness, and therefore nothing “permanent.” The lack of permanence is based on the fluidity of feelings and not of gender, itself, necessarily. Some exercise their convictions to the point of bodily mutilation and chemical distortion of their natural hormonal beings. The legitimization of these emotional incongruities has found its way into governmental responsibility for the emotional satisfaction and even physical or chemical balance of military personnel and even of prisoners who self-declare their identification with the opposite sex from that of their birth. Again, individuals are able to gain rights and protections based upon only their declarations and not on verifiable evidence. It is a dangerous path; parents keep your children safe – society no longer will.

Finally, and simply for the length of the essay, come the new “rights” to be offended. This amorphous body of social “rule-making,” stems from the concept of “hate crime” and its bastard child, “hate speech.” For a legal and judicial system that can’t define pornography, defining “hate” as an enforceable term seems a bit of a stretch. By some sort of arcane, subjective reckoning, a murder performed by a killer who keeps his feelings to himself is LESS of a crime than if he advertised his extreme dislike of the group he thinks the victim deserved to be part of. A dope who kills a fat person and who also hates fat people is in worse trouble than a murderer who loves them. You figure it out.

Academics and others who are ostensibly intelligent, actually nurture the concept of unbridled “offense” and attempt to set rules against “hate speech” (anything traditional, conservative or Constitutional… or critical of liberalism… or of Hillary Clinton), or insensitive pronouns like “his,” hers,” “he’ and “she.” By accepting the mythical “fluidity” of gender, colleges and other self-righteous arbiters of “education” buy in to the concepts of self-selected pronouns the meaning of which is decided by their inventors, with no connection to our common language(s). It’s another dangerous path, one that leads to hatred and confrontations initiated by the supposedly offended. Social and cultural adhesion are the victims… as is freedom, itself, in a country of rules rather than laws. Those are the tools of socialist fascism.

The loss of freedom our rabid quest for “rights” engenders (speaking of “gender”), is a form of death for every free person.

Education, Guns, Right?

Poisoning America’s wells

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Students are on the march.  They have taken aim, so to speak, with a blunt political weapon, egged on by liberal, which is to say, leftist educators and a leftist press.  Interestingly, these kids’ targets are placed before them specifically for them to “shoot” (their protests) at: the National Rifle Association, conservatives, Republicans, right-leaning news outlets, writers and columnists, anyone who defends the Constitution and, of course, Donald Trump.  Left out of the group of targets are incompetent law-enforcement officers, organizations and bureaucrats who prefer to not enforce laws that already restrict guns and owners.  Left out are liberal policies of “mainstreaming” the mentally ill and the lawyers and psychiatrists who will bring Hell-fire upon anyone who presumes to restrict any psychopath who has demonstrated the will to kill or injure and who has stated a desire to do so, even when the intended target so referenced is a school.

And so they march.  Their weapons are their youth (so excessively revered in modern society), crafty signs and posters, memorable slogans and non-stop publicity through like-minded broadcasters and publishers.  What do these school-age pawns believe will be accomplished?

Well, they want “more gun control laws.”  After all, if (name the psychopath) could not have obtained his (99% ‘his’) “assault rifle,” those dead students would not be dead today.  It’s as plain as the noses on our faces.  There is a raw, unattainable truth to their simple demand.  Unfortunately, that truth cannot be realized without rewriting the Constitution (of which most people under, say, 40, know very little), and the institution of police tactics intended to confiscate virtually every gun held by legal and, one would then hope, illegal  gun-possessors in the country.  There would then need to be imposed truly draconian restrictions upon every port of entry and airport to prevent the entry of firearms into the country.  Maybe we could start with the illegal gun possessors without shredding the Constitution.

Ain’t gonna happen.

For those on the leftist spectrum, the dis-arming of the civilian population is an essential step toward creation of a more perfect nation.  For Mussolini, Hitler, Lenin and Stalin, and every current far-leftist, disarmament appears vital to their ability to maintain control of the lesser civilians who are harnessed to support their governments.  Now, being harnessed to support a domineering government is something Americans understand more than our founding fathers ever could have feared, but no dictator has ever encouraged private gun ownership.  This might be instructive, were we possessed of eyes to see, ears to hear and sufficient historical knowledge to appreciate.

Our agitated students have not been so blessed, and happily accept some hours out of school and bright publicity on weekends as they perform the blathering their leftist mentors could never do.

Let’s suppose, children, that AR-15’s and other scary-looking rifles were banned tomorrow and quickly confiscated by the New American Gestapo.  How much “safer” would you be, in your gun-free zones?  Suppose some pathological idiot wanted to solve some twisted problem he feels the victim of, by shooting some kids at his school.  He would be reduced to bringing 2 or 3 semi-automatic handguns and some extra clips – relatively easy to hide – and secreting them in strategic places where he could get to them on the fateful day.

The dark day comes, on his sick calendar, and he grabs a handgun and starts shooting.  Does the fact that he’s not employing a rifle make a damned bit of difference?  Wouldn’t you be praying for someone to shoot him?  Would you be comforted by the confiscation of millions of citizens’ lawful firearms, some of whom would have resisted, being killed or criminalized and incarcerated on your behalf?  After a few minutes of open season on students will you feel better when the police finally kill or arrest the wielder of a handgun rather than the wielder of a scary-looking “assault” rifle?

If the rifles were painted red and the handguns painted blue, would the absence of red guns make the recipients of blue guns’ bullets less dead?

To you the obvious response is to ban those kinds of guns, too. You are being raised as fools.  Your excited demonstrations make clear your incomprehension of the exceptional origins of this nation and of the freedoms you enjoy.  I hope you become more broadly educated after the public schools are done with you.

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Thought Leaders and other followers

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The evolution of politics in the U. S. is only a symptom of the collective consciousness of our people, as reactions to the much-anticipated “Nunes Memo” makes stark.  So-called “thought leaders,” who, in earlier times, might have been recognized as “leaders” by any definition worthy of follow-ship, are now best identified by a mix of shrillness and hypocrisy, the latter readily ignored by erstwhile and very temporary “followers.”

Any Gen-X’er or Millennial who stumbles across this scree is advised to watch “Saving Private Ryan” or “Apollo 13,” where he or she might get a glimpse of real adversity, dignity and bravery.  Shouting at people with whom you suddenly disagree doesn’t begin even to cast a shadow in the sunlight of true grit.  Who are the “thought leaders” of these most recent generations?  Barack Obama, may be one, although none of his great thoughts come to mind; just as much so is Colin Kaepernick, just as hard to comprehend.  And looming over Hollywood there is always Barbra Streisand.  For both Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Obama Saul Alinsky was a thought leader, as he was for a generation of radicals.  Thought leaders, all.

Universities – in the “West,” at least – no longer place much emphasis on historical thought leaders, nor much on history, itself, sadly.  It is as though their role in preserving and increasing knowledge of western civilization is no longer worth the price of admission, which is trending toward the upper half of a hundred thousand bucks a year.  For those kinds of dollars one’s sons and daughters deserve safe spaces where never is heard a discouraging word.  Real debate requires grief counseling – parents have paid enough to get some.

George Soros might be a thought leader.  He certainly has enough followers, including those he pays minimum wage to riot on call.  But, there’s the nagging question, what does he THINK?  And, the gloomy corollary, what could his followers be thinking?

Soros thinks, in part, that a system of governance in which individuals are sovereign – like that outlined by the U. S. Constitution – must not be tolerated on this planet, he being a rabid socialist.  We also know that when Nazis were actively collecting and killing Jews like himself, that renouncing his faith, family, heritage and neighbors was not too high a price to pay to preserve his own life and comfort when all one need do was cooperate with Hitler’s Fascists, perhaps helping them steal Jews’ property.  No regrets, he says, and one might suppose his followers think the same way, as do partners, colleagues, compatriots and comrades who either have or hope to benefit from Soros’ wealth, whether an influential Democrat or a $15-an-hour “antifa” thug.  We need not probe too deeply into the erstwhile meaning of “antifa,” but Soros has bought, at least, a place in the thought-leader coven.

Many other political and government types see themselves as thought leaders.  They do their damnedest to lead the news whenever possible, but there they must compete with supposed journalists  who are vying for their own places in the thought-leader cabal.  Dismayingly, thanks to Twitter, Facebook, You-Tube and the like, many of both groups do lead thousands of people’s thoughts, even if only for a few hours… or minutes.  It’s heady stuff, nevertheless.

Mr. Trump has long thought he could lead some thoughts and a good slogan and article of clothing can do that, as evidenced by Madonna, for one example, and “KISS” for another.  Still, he does lead a lot of thinking in that everyone seems to think about him, whether skeptical, neutral, favorable or downright hateful.  People are in various tizzies since Trump decided to run, never mind since being elected, including great thinkers like Nancy Pelosi and Joy Behar of NBC.  Prudence isn’t sure whether great connivance is the same as great thinking.  Maybe.

One can recall when Billy Graham and a handful of other faith leaders were also thought leaders, in that large numbers of people attuned their beliefs to theirs.  In the “old” days, one might say, Cardinals in the Catholic Church were in that same role, in the sense that the Pope was a thought leader for the faithful.  Prudence indicates that their role has diminished significantly, largely from self-inflicted, festering wounds.  Western civilization overall has an abiding stake in the success and purity  of the Roman Catholic Church.  No matter one’s own path of faith, that purity is worthy of prayer.  Indeed, the purity  of EVERY Christian path is worthy of prayer, but each of those will have to find the strength to ignore popular culture and the attractions of money.  Few have.  Still, it is only in folly that we attempt, societally, to disavow the thought leadership of our Judeo-Christian heritage and history, since it underlies our laws, our origins, our forms of economics and capitalism and our sacrificial sense of justice.  There is no single thought pattern  stronger or more pervasive than what is described in the Bible, much as we wish there were no rights or wrongs or, for their matter, conscience.

Regardless of our half-baked feelings and weird higher education “leaders,” every society with endurance requires an abiding, overarching thought or belief in its mission… or purpose… or, failing those, right to survive.  “Balkanization” became a verb for good reason.  It names and describes how and why a nation held together by force will fracture along racial, tribal, religious and cultural lines, whereupon old hatreds, temporarily shrouded, again by force, will spill out into murderous, brutal conflict.

That is a fate to which the United States is not immune… not on the path we are following now.

Why?  What do we think about that?  Do we even hold congruent opinions, or beliefs about our direction?  Our future?  Karl Marx was and lately, is, a thought-leader, who later in life had to forego many of his twisted economic thoughts, since he had not factored in freedom, economic and otherwise.  We might consider that devotees of Marxism, like Trotsky, Lenin, Stalin, Mao Tse-Dung, Pol Pot, Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, and, also of late, Hugo Chavez of Venezuela, were also thought-leaders, but their thoughts have destroyed not only dozens of economies but tens of millions of their citizens.  That isn’t easy to conceive of or even feel badly about – if you’d ever heard of the events – but one can imagine a gymnasium, let’s say with 100 people in it: it’s only 10 rows with 10 people in each row.  One might even know all 100 of them.

But to appreciate these historic thought-leaders we’d have to imagine, say, 250 such gymnasiums just in Massachusetts and with a little help from one’s phone, realize that that is only 25,000 souls.  Hmmmnnn… Various kinds of Communist and National Socialist thinking have eliminated over 100,000,000 people – friends, neighbors, mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, sons and daughters and more.  That’s at least 4,000 Massachusetts-es worth of gyms.  Is that enough murders to care about?  They make Hitler, alone, a very junior partner.  Does Marxism lead your thoughts?  How in Hell has communism gained favor among American youth?  For whom is this change a measure of success?

Somebody… some thought-leader, so called.  It makes one a little happy to be at this end of his life and a little sorry for today’s youngsters who will mature in an America where the thoughts of knuckleheads will be “leading.”

Economics

HOW MANY DIVISIONS…?

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The seeds of division in our beautiful nation were planted in the Revolutionary War. You are wondering how could that be so when we all know they sprouted in just the past 8 years? How simple would be the solution if that were so.

The intention toward one-world government was already formed in the late 18th century and it was the birth of American constitutional republicanism that reversed the momentum toward ever-greater authoritarianism. But it was a momentum, yielding Hegel’s Dialecticism, Karl Marx, Otto von Bismark, Lenin, Stalin, Mussolini, Hitler and Mao Tse Tung. Along the way authoritarianism cost nearly 200 Million lives, each belonging to a human being person.

America, founded on religious freedom in more ways than one, including the inherent freedom of will that makes right action truly right, was not immune to the desire for ever greater centralization. So-called Progressivism, particularly since the Civil War, following which social problems and care for disabled veterans, for the first time in large numbers, became Federalized.

It is often said that “power corrupts.” But it should also be noted that “power justifies…” itself. Government attracts governing types who quickly find that even soft police powers lend a sort of antiseptic clarity to their decisions. Government decisions gain an aura of purity, especially in comparison to the chaos of freedom – that messy, disorganized, self-serving and selfish jambalaya of individual sovereignty with which our Constitution saddles the nation.

As giants of industry developed their monopolies and industrial efficiencies, there developed a view of government as becoming the ultimate efficient industry, led by a college-educated priesthood of good intentions and of higher thoughts than common people. “Wilson-ism.” A classless society, indeed.

Damn the laws of economics. Socialists of all stripes seem to think that by their super-clarifying adjustment of society and the physical (non-spiritual world), they can cause humans to be more perfect, more docile, more willing to accept average uniformity, and therefore happy to allow the ruling classes to enjoy their extra rewards for having done all the needful thinking for the whole group. Whew! It never works.

Oh, it might continue for quite a while – longer with a police state that is able to weed out cancerous individualists – but it eventually goes broke. Humans will be humans. Rulers might think they can get everyone to share and to accept their share, but they can’t destroy the human spirit: the inherently human desire to perfect oneself, to grow closer to God, or to improve one’s earthly condition. Damn humans. This would be a great place to live if it weren’t for most of the humans. The rich have obviously proven their greater value.