It was pointed out to me recently that I don’t post much here anymore. That’s true. I’ve said a lot of stuff over the last nineteen+ years, generally more than once.
A lot more than once.
But it has been my style to excerpt bits and pieces from other people’s work and give them credit in my überposts. (That’s called “research.” Without credit that’s called “plagiarism.”) There are also those times that I link to something and say “RTWT.” But more rarely I will copy an entire piece to the blog to archive it because it’s that good, and I don’t want it to disappear down the bit-bucket.
There’s a gentleman over at Quora who tags himself “The most Down-voted Top Writer.” He writes GREAT pieces, written from decades of experience and study. I want to share a couple with you. Once again, not my words:
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Why isn’t American leadership focusing fully on Americans, not to make the elite rich richer, but the poorest healthier, with food, shelter and health care, and not venturing abroad continually to war and waste American tax dollars and lives?
Why isn’t American leadership focusing fully on Americans?
Unfortunately, they are!
I’ve learned over the decades that when the political class starts waxing on their grand dreams for society, it pays to pay attention.
What’s on the radar?
- A bill swiftly passed Congress to hire 87,000 more IRS auditors. It seems the first order of business for these new hires is military-grade weapons training! And the rationale is that a landscape business somewhere might not have properly explained how it financed its fleet of vehicles, not the deductions for private jets from our billionaires.
- There’s a plan that in the near future, most of us, those on the lower scale of things, will be eating cricket protein rather than beef protein.
- Since Biden took office, we have in excess of five-million new residents in this country, just random people who crossed our southern border and are now being supported and groomed to vote a certain way.
- Bill Gates, a high-tech billionaire, is buying up low-tech farmland like there’s no tomorrow.
- Klaus Schwab, George Soros, Mark Zuckerberg, Prince Charles and dozens of other billionaires are enthusing about their plans for us. Seems, not being particularly useful like the exalted ones, we are to be kept under control and milked for what labor we might be good for. We remain docile, or “no deal.”
- Our political class is not even hiding its kleptocratic ways anymore. How did Liz Cheney make $34 million during her short stay in Congress? Virtually all of them in both parties are living ludicrously large off their positions of trust!
- At the same time, they are brazenly not hiding the fact that we hoi polloi are being treated to inflation, higher taxes, rampant government spending and other growth-reducing tactics, executive decisions and legislative actions that hamper our productivity, supply lines and other critical infrastructure—we now have the worst political class EVAH!
- Not only has our standard of living been trending down since the election of Obama (the Trump years mercifully apart), our generations now coming of age, Z and A, will become the first American generations ever to enter adult life with less opportunity and a massive multi-generational debt!
I could add several more bullet points, but that’s plenty to reveal the mess we’re in. But that’s just the political mess. On the intellectual plane, we’re also in Cloud Cuckoo Land.
- From the Scientific Revolution through the Enlightenment, we greatly expanded our reasoning tools, our understanding of the world, our prosperity and our freedom. And, in much of the world the sense was that we are all in it together.
- Unfortunately, what science revealed was that we are not the center of the universe, we are not divinely created and destined to spend eternity on an exalted plane. In fact, we are not even a unique creation, just a talented species of mammal
Then we got the Counter-Enlightenment, which, instead of simply disabusing us of our vanity and superstitions, started tearing it all up.
- Romanticism replaced the increasing sterility of rationalism with the heroic as a poor-born Corsican conquered the jaded aristocracies of Europe. The premium now would be on the heroic, the original, the power of human will.
- Karl Marx would gain a huge following with a claim (proved false in his lifetime) of “something for nothing,” and in the process create a worldview featuring class strife and a return to top-down statism but non-aristocratic this time.
- Sigmund Freud would portray our one noble discovery—human reason—as lying precariously atop a seething id of perverse sexual desire, anger and other base emotions.
- Marx had not talent to get his scheme going, and so it fell prey to the likes of German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, who used Marx’s social democracy to prop up the Hohenzollern dynasty, or V. I. Lenin who forced communism on Russia and soon began filling the gulags, or Adolph Hitler, who followed other fascist thinkers (including, at the forefront, American president Woodrow Wilson) into updating Marx’s communism into an anti-Marxist totalitarian regime of murderous dimensions.
- World War II, with many tens of millions killed, became the war of fascism squaring off against communism and social democracy (even the US was social democratic by that time). With fascism crushed, the Cold War pitted communism against social democracy… only, with the death of Franklin Roosevelt just before the war’s end, Americans began massively to rethink in terms of it having been our original Enlightenment values of prosperity, freedom and equality that had won the war rather than our Rooseveltian redistribution schemes.
After generations of rot and carnage, even as the rationalist industrial revolution kept steadily producing prosperity, life in the US blossomed again. We restored the racial equality of our credo. We restored much of citizen government. Unfortunately, we also restored our progressive movement for a third try at replacing our egalitarian constitutional republican form of government with Bismarckian social democracy.
As we look around now, the elites poised to seal our fate include some who were, long ago, actual Nazis, who are actual Communists, the types of people who filled the gulags and kept the shower chambers pumping out the Zyklon B.
The last thing in the world that I want is for these people to be making plans for me and mine. My plan is not to go gentle unto the night they have planned for us. – Charles Tips
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That’s a very succinct evaluation of the current situation, and a very polite “I aim to misbehave.”
Another post to follow.
Charles Tips is top notch. Was a big fan of his before I left Quora in disgust. Amazes he hasn’t been booted.
Word for word, what I was thinking.