Tag: Philosophy

Interesting Data Point

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And Snopes says it’s true.

I received via email a copy of this letter to the AARP:

Dear Mr. Rand,

Recently you sent us a letter encouraging us to renew our lapsed membership in AARP by the requested date.

I know it is not what you were looking for, but this is the most honest response I can give you. Our gap in coverage is merely a microscopic symptom of the real problem, a deepening lack of faith.

While we have proudly maintained our membership for several years and have long admired the AARP goal and principles, regrettably we can no longer endorse its abdication of our values. Your letter specifically stated that we can count on AARP to speak up for our rights, yet the voice we hear is not ours. Your offer of being kept up to date on important issues through DIVIDED WE FAIL, presents neither an impartial view we have come to embrace. We do believe that when 2 parties agree all the time on everything presented to them, one is probably not necessary. But, when the opinions and long term goals are diametrically opposed, the divorce is imminent. This is the philosophy which spawned our 200 years of government.

Once upon a time we looked forward to being part of the senior demographic. We also looked to AARP to provide certain benefits and give our voice a power we could not possibly hope to achieve on our own. AARP gave us a sense of belonging which we no longer enjoy.

The Socialist politics practiced by the Obama administration and empowered by AARP serves only to raise the blood pressure my medical insurance strives to contain. Clearly a conflict of interest there!

We do not understand the AARP posture, feel greatly betrayed by the guiding forces that we expected to map out our senior years and leave your ranks with a great sense of regret. We mitigate that disappointment with the relief of knowing we are not contributing to the problem any more by renewing our membership. There are other organizations which offer discounts without threatening our way of life or offending our sensibilities.

This presidential administration scares the living daylights out of us. Not just for our selves, but for our proud and bloodstained heritage. Even more importantly for our children and grandchildren.

Washington has rendered Soylent Green a prophetic cautionary tale rather than a nonfiction scare tactic. I have never in my life endorsed any militant or radical groups, but now I find myself listening to them. I don’t have to agree with them to appreciate the fear which spawned their existence. Their borderline insanity presents little more than a balance to the voice of the Socialist mindset in power.

Perhaps I became American by a great stroke of luck in some cosmic uterine lottery, but in my adulthood I CHOOSE to embrace it and nurture the freedoms it represents as well as the responsibilities it requires.

Your website generously offers the opportunity to receive all communication in Spanish. ARE YOU KIDDING???? Someone has broken into our ‘house’ invaded our home without our invitation or consent.

This president has insisted we keep the perpetrator in comfort and learn the perp language so we can communicate our reluctant welcome to them.

I DON’T choose to welcome them.
I DON’T choose to support them.
I DON’T choose to educate them.
I DON’T choose to medicate them, pay for their food or clothing.

American home invaders get arrested. Please explain to me why foreign lawbreakers can enjoy privileges on American soil that Americans do not get? Why do some immigrants have to ‘play the game’ to be welcomed and others just have to break and enter to be welcomed?

We travel for a living. Walt hauls horses all over this great country averaging over 10,000 miles a month when he is out there. He meets more people than a politician on caffeine overdose. Of all the many good folks he enjoyed on this last 10,000 miles this trip yielded only ONE supporter of this current administration. One of us is out of touch with mainstream America. Since our poll is conducted without funding, I have more faith in it than one which is power driven.

We have decided to forward this to everyone on our mailing list, and will encourage them to do the same. With several hundred in my address book, I have every faith that the eventual exponential factor will make a credible statement to you.

I am disappointed as hell
I am scared as hell
I am MAD as hell, and I’m NOT gonna take it anymore!

Walt & Cyndy
Miller Farms Equine Transport

The sender is another person well past retirement age.

Interesting.

Walt Kelly Was More Right Than He Knew

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“We have met the enemy and he is us.” – Pogo
In the comments to Tam’s Thursday post, The Truest Thing On The Internet, Tam said:

I know a bunch of people who seriously believe that we are on a collision course with Destiny. Unfortunately, they’re only a plurality of the people I know.

I don’t think that the people who don’t know these things are “sheeple” or “useful idiots” (and I’ve been mulling a post on that topic, actually; I had planned to post it this morning) but I think that a large percentage of people are invested in one sector or another of the status quo.

Being too tightly focused on women’s reproductive rights or racial injustice or the defense against Muslim terrorists or the protection of America’s economy against immigrants, or whatever, can blind a smart and well-meaning person to broad and overarching trends…

To which Justthisguy asked:

“broad and overarching trends…” Oh, do you mean all those guys in positions of authority who get a charge out of minding other peoples’ business and telling them what to do?

And Tam responded:

No.

I mean all those guys who want to fix the problems their constituents beg them to fix. The problem is from the bottom up, not the top down.

Yes, exactly.

And it’s not a new problem. It’s the reason our Founders set up our Federal government as a Representative Constitutional Republic of limited and defined powers – they looked at history and knew what democracies become.  My regular readers – an admittedly tiny, self-selected group of people who are by definition paying more attention to the world around them than the ordinary person – will be familiar with this quote:

Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There is never a democracy that did not commit suicide.  —  John Adams

And possibly this one:

Tyranny naturally arises out of democracy.    — Plato

This one was new to me:

Our country’s founders cherished liberty, not democracy.  — Ron Paul

Can I get an “AMEN!”?

But here’s the key quote:

Democracy cannot succeed unless those who express their choice are prepared to choose wisely. The real safeguard of democracy, therefore, is education. — Franklin Delano Roosevelt

That’s a tall order, and one never yet met.

So our Founders designed a system to circumvent that particular weakness.

And failed.

By the time FDR ran for office, our government was essentially no longer a republic.  Passage of the Seventeenth Amendment (direct election of Senators) in 1913 destroyed the last vestiges of our republican form of government in favor of a representative democracy wherein “the people” elect representatives  to “fix the problems (their) constituents beg them to fix” in both houses.  The freedom to make “wise” (and therefore possibly unpopular) choices in the upper house of Congress had been removed by the 17th Amendment.  Now running for Senate didn’t mean you needed the respect of your peers in the House, it meant you needed to promise whatever it took to the populace to get their votes – just like every other politician.  Thus Mencken’s observation:

A professional politician is a professionally dishonorable man. In order to get anywhere near high office he has to make so many compromises and submit to so many humiliations that he becomes indistinguishable from a streetwalker.

And since then our government has been the battlefield between two completely incompatible philosophies, one of which has captured the halls of academe, and through that vector, the public education system and popular media, and through those vectors, the voting public – the “us” in Walt Kelly’s classic line.

I’ve harped on the topic of philosophy before, too.  The best explanation of the importance of philosophy remains (IMHO) Ayn Rand’s speech to the 1974 graduating class of West Point, Philosophy, Who Needs It?  Excerpt:

As a human being, you have no choice about the fact that you need a philosophy. Your only choice is whether you define your philosophy by a conscious, rational, disciplined process of thought and scrupulously logical deliberation — or let your subconscious accumulate a junk heap of unwarranted conclusions, false generalizations, undefined contradictions, undigested slogans, unidentified wishes, doubts and fears….

Philosophy is not a subject formally taught in American primary or secondary schools, it’s something one can study on one’s own or take as an elective in college.  Regardless, our system of education still teaches philosophy, producing subjects with “junk heap(s) of unwarranted conclusions, false generalizations, undefined contradictions, undigested slogans, unidentified wishes, doubts and fears” that are reinforced by the popular media that surrounds us.

And we vote.

I don’t believe that the big men, the politicians and the capitalists alone are guilty of the war. Oh, no, the little man is just as keen, otherwise the people of the world would have risen in revolt long ago! There is an urge and rage in people to destroy, to kill, to murder, and until all mankind, without exception, undergoes a great change, wars will be waged, everything that has been built up, cultivated and grown, will be destroyed and disfigured, after which mankind will have to begin all over again.  — Anne Frank

And instead of penning another 5,000 words, I invite you to (re-)read The United Federation of Planets on the topic of philosophy.

Objective reality is coming, fast. The collision isn’t going to be pretty.

Love and Self-Worth

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Back when I wrote What We Got Here is …Failure to Communicate, I quoted Thomas Sowell extensively from his magnum opus A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggle. One of the excerpts dealt with the differences in the way his two defined ideological groups deal with “new knowledge” and its effect on past decisions:

All social processes — whether economic, religious, political or other — involve costs. These costs are seen very differently by those with the constrained and the unconstrained visions, just as they see differently the kinds of attitudes needed in these processes — sincerity versus fidelity, for example. These costs may be due to time or to violence, among other sources, their corresponding benefits may be apportioned justly or unjustly, and their recipients may be free or unfree. All these aspects are assessed differently in the constrained and the unconstrained visions.

The passage of time, and its irreversibility, create special decision-making difficulties, social processes, and moral principles — all of which are seen quite differently by those with the constrained and the unconstrained visions. Both recognize that decisions made at one point in time have consequences at other points in time. But the ways of coping with this fact depend upon the capabilities of human beings and especially of human knowledge and foresight.

Accretions of knowledge over time mean that individual and social decisions made under conditions of lesser knowledge have consequences under conditions of greater knowledge. To those with the unconstrained vision, this means that being bound by past decisions represents a loss of benefits made possible by later knowledge. Being bound by past decisions, whether in constitutional law cases or in marriage for life, is seen as costly and irrational.

In the unconstrained vision, there are moral as well as practical consequences to intertemporal commitments. Gratitude, as well as loyalty and patriotism, for example, are all essentially commitments to behave differently in the future, toward individuals or societies, than one would behave on an impartial assessment of circumstances as they might exist at some future time, if those individuals and societies were encountered for the first time. Where two lives are jeopardized and only one can be saved, to save the one who is your father may be an act of loyalty but not an act of justice. Thus, in behavioral terms, gratitude and loyalty are interteporal commitments not to be impartial — not to use future knowledge and future moral assessments to produce that result which you would otherwise consider best, if confronting the same individuals for the first time. From this perspective, loyalty, promises, patriotism, gratitude, precedents, oaths of fealty, constitutions, marriage, social traditions, and international treaties are all constrictions imposed earlier, when knowledge is less, on options to be exercised later, when knowledge will be greater.

—

All of those things … loyalty, constitutions, marriage, etc. … have been lauded and revered by those with a constrained vision. The process costs entailed by intertemporal commitments depend on (1) how much more knowledge, rationality, and impartiality human beings are capable of bringing to bear as a result of the passage of time and (2) on the cost of accepting the disadvantages of moment-to-moment decision-making.

Got that?

Now, go read THIS.  (h/t Vanderleun)

There are other rewards for loyalty, promises, constitutions, marriage etc. that are honored that sometime aren’t factored in to the calculations. And costs when they are not.

Let the Howling, Wailing and Gnashing of Teeth Commence!

KevinLeave a comment

I’ve covered the Tucson Unified School District’s “Ethnic Studies” program here before, in Balkanization, from May of 2008, Balkanization Pushback the following June, Why I Keep Marxadelphia Around in February of 2010, THAT’S RACIST in May of that year, More Balkanization in January of last year, A Failure of Critical Pedagogy in May, and An Example of Critical Pedagogy just a couple of days later.

Well, now the excrement has well and truly hit the rotating air-movement device:

TUSD board shuts down Mex. American Studies

The TUSD Governing Board voted to dismantle the contentious Mexican American Studies program in an effort to avoid losing millions in state funding.
Tuesday’s 4-1 vote came amid name calling in the boardroom and an angry overflow crowd chanting outside TUSD headquarters, “We will not comply!”
Board President Mark Stegeman, board Clerk Michael Hicks and members Alexandre Sugiyama and Miguel Cuevas voted to drop the program.
All supported revamping either the program or some classes so they are more comprehensive and include the contributions of all ethnicities.
Member Adelita Grijalva voted against the decision, calling instead for the district to continue to defend the program through a court appeal and to challenge the constitutionality of the law, which she called racist.
“I feel like this community has faced such a battle over the last year and a half, it’s almost exhausting,” Grijalva said. “You see it in the tears and pleas from the students. … I feel that this board doesn’t understand the impact beyond our TUSD community.
“This is an issue that is not going to go away by this vote. When bad laws are written, they are usually picked up by other states. This is an opportunity to fight a bad law,” she said.

The comments, 284 at the time of this posting, are running overwhelmingly in favor of the vote.

Adelita Grijalva is the daughter of Rep. Raul Grijalva, co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus.

I’ve just begun reading Paul Kengor’s Dupes: How America’s Adversaries Have Manipulated Progressives for a Century. In the preface, he hammers the point that Marx and Lenin both understood and stated repeatedly that Communism and Capitalism could not co-exist, that one must inevitably defeat the other, and for Communism to win it would be necessary to actively pursue the destruction of Capitalist governments by any means possible. The preferred method was destruction from the inside by infiltration and subversion. His book is a detailed examination of that subversion.

The battle isn’t over just because the Soviet Union fell. The True Believers and their dupes are still out there working away. They fooled the American public into electing Obama, after all…

“A fábrica está fechada.”

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Wretchard riffed recently about the decline in fertility among Western nations in If Tomorrow Comes, with several references to Mark Steyn’s repeated observations about the negative population growth in Europe.  Richard, quoting Steyn, blames it on socialism,

The problem as Steyn succinctly puts it, is that socialism not only “runs out of other people’s money”, as Margaret Thatcher once put it. It simply runs out of people. Future historians, if there are any left, will puzzle over how this came about. The economists will have an easier time explaining it. Through some process, socialism has apparently increased the discount rate to the point where the future is consumed for the sake of the present. Not only is investment taxed to feed consumption, tomorrow is hocked to pay for today.

If the fiscal deficit is the direct monetary expression of this high discount rate, the collapsing population is its equivalent demographic expression. Both are saying the same thing, in different terms. In incentives terms, the future is no longer real; so people don’t save up for it nor do they have any incentive to sacrifice for it.

I don’t think it’s quite that simple.  Take, for example, Brazil.  A recent piece in National Geographic, Brazil’s Girl Power, explores how that nation’s fertility rate dropped precipitously from 6.1 in 1960 to 1.86 in 2009. In Brazil,

where the Roman Catholic Church dominates, abortion is illegal (except in rare cases), and no official government policy has ever promoted birth control

this is a pretty astonishing change over what is essentially just a bit more than two generations. In addition:

And it’s not simply wealthy and professional women who have stopped bearing multiple children in Brazil. There’s a common perception that the countryside and favelas, as Brazilians call urban slums, are still crowded with women having one baby after another—but it isn’t true.

—

In a working-class neighborhood on the outskirts of Belo Horizonte, an unmarried 18-year-old affectionately watched her toddler son one evening as he roared his toy truck toward us; she loved him very much, the young woman said, but she was finished with childbearing. The expression she used was one I’d heard from Brazilian women before: “A fábrica está fechada.” The factory is closed.

The National Geographic piece concentrates on two primary influences: Television, and culture. Specifically, the effect television has on culture.

An example of the effect:

Encountering women under 35 who’ve already had sterilization surgery is an everyday occurrence in Brazil, and they seem to have no compunctions about discussing it. “I was 18 when the first baby was born—wanted to stop there, but the second came by accident, and I am done,” a 28-year-old crafts shop worker told me in the northeastern city of Recife, as she was showing me how to dance the regional two-step called the forró. She was 26 when she had her tubal ligation, and when I asked why she’d chosen irreversible contraception at such a young age—she’s married, what if she and her husband change their minds?—she reminded me of son number two, the accident. Birth control pills made her fat and sick, she said. And in case I’d missed this part: She was done.

So why two? Why not four? Why not the eight your grandmother had? Always the same answer—”Impossible! Too expensive! Too much work!” With the facial expression, the widened eyes and the startled grin that I came to know well: It’s the 21st century, senhora, are you nuts?

It’s an interesting premise, convincingly presented.  Strongly recommended.

Wretchard concludes his piece:

Imagine there’s no countries.
It isn’t hard to do.
Nothing to kill or die for.
And no religion too.

And then the music stopped. This was the silent scene where we came in at the beginning of the screening: the churches closing at the rate of two a week; the factories closing even faster. What Lennon failed to grasp was that any society that had nothing it would sacrifice for would find nothing worth investing in. And so here we are, dragging on the end of our smokes, tipping over any bottles that still might contain some wine. Because the vineyards are barren and will stay that way. The ultimate problem with “living for today” is that tomorrow eventually comes.

With Brazil, and I suspect most, if not all of the Western world, “living for today” is pretty much the basis of the decline in birthrates. Children? “Impossible! Too expensive! Too much work!”

Not worth the investment. It’s an economic choice, not necessarily a socialist one.

OK, Christmas is Over…

KevinLeave a comment

…back to the depressing, pessimistic stuff again. 😉

First, watch this:

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wp_RHnQ-jgU?rel=0]

Trust me, if you haven’t seen it, it’s worth your time.

OK?  Now, watch this:

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZG7F9G4AEak?feature=player_embedded]

Both are examples of large numbers of people performing coordinated acts. The first is, in a word, beautiful.

The second, frankly, creeps me the hell out.

The first required literally weeks, months, and in the case of the organist, years of practice to make that performance come off. The second? Merely required a bunch of willing minions.

Human beings, for the most part, are herd creatures. We have, as a species, a need to belong to something, to be a member.

It’s something I personally don’t do well. I don’t really grasp it. I’ve been asked several times why, if I like firearms so much, didn’t I join the military? Simple – I wouldn’t fit in, and I know it. Or I would, but I’d hate every second of it, which is essentially the same thing.

I watch hundreds, perhaps a couple thousand people doing what some disembodied voice tells them to do in a public park, and I cannot understand why. Yet I can understand the group performance of the Hallelujah Chorus. One is an exercise in mind-control. The other, an act of beauty.

But at the bottom, they both make use of the human need to belong.

And I cannot help but wonder if that voice had told those “two tribes” to kill each other, if some would not have tried it without thinking…