The Smallest Minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities. – Ayn Rand
I found this today courtesy of a Facebook friend. You HAVE to watch it all the way to the end (seven minutes worth). I wish I could say “Unbelievable,” but I’d be lying.
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Our tax dollars at work.
Hey! I know! Let’s raise taxes on the wealthy! They don’t pay their fair share!
Would you hire this guy?
So earlier this week I write my post Defending the Weak, and it drew a link from my old friend James Kelly at Scot Goes Pop. Apparently I offended his sense of propriety. So, in my usual style, I left a comment which has inspired yet another post by Mr. Kelly.
As I’ve noted before, we don’t have discussions. Our worldviews are so divergent we simply talk past each other.
Now, James has commented on my emphasis on statistics and their meaning before, yet I note that this time James goes straight to statistics which, I am forced to assume, he believes proves his point. You see, in Scotland, they don’t kill each other as often as we here in Arizona do. And when they do, they hardly ever do it with firearms, whereas here firearms are the preferred method.
I think what you’re supposed to gather from this (remember, I’ve been doing this sort of thing for years now, so I have experience at it) is that, since they don’t have guns, they can’t kill each other as much.
And this is based on one year’s data – 2009.
The logic is staggering.
His source states that in 2009 there were 79 homicides in Scotland, versus 324 in Arizona. Scotland and Arizona have roughly equivalent populations. I believe we’ve danced this dance before, however.
Once again, here’s a graph of Scotland’s homicide statistics from 1945 through 1997:
And here’s a homicide rate comparison table (in deaths per 100,000 population) I worked up using that data, along with data for the entire U.S. and also England & Wales (a separate single political entity):
| Year | US | England & Wales | Scotland |
| 1946 | 6.4 | 0.81 | 0.72 |
| 1947 | 6.1 | 0.86 | 0.59 |
| 1948 | 6.1 | 0.78 | 0.66 |
| 1949 | 5.4 | 0.68 | 0.47 |
| 1950 | 5.3 | 0.79 | 0.68 |
| 1951 | 4.9 | 0.75 | 0.41 |
| 1952 | 5.2 | 0.91 | 0.53 |
| 1953 | 4.8 | 0.74 | 0.80 |
| 1954 | 4.8 | 0.70 | 0.63 |
| 1955 | 4.5 | 0.63 | 0.68 |
| 1956 | 4.6 | 0.71 | 0.57 |
| 1957 | 4.5 | 0.71 | 0.51 |
| 1958 | 4.5 | 0.58 | 0.82 |
| 1959 | 4.6 | 0.59 | 0.66 |
| 1960 | 4.7 | 0.62 | 0.68 |
| 1961 | 4.7 | 0.57 | 0.71 |
| 1962 | 4.8 | 0.64 | 1.12 |
| 1963 | 4.9 | 0.65 | 0.88 |
| 1964 | 5.1 | 0.63 | 0.98 |
| 1965 | 5.5 | 0.68 | 1.21 |
| 1966 | 5.9 | 0.76 | 1.65 |
| 1967 | 6.8 | 0.86 | 1.35 |
| 1968 | 7.3 | 0.87 | 1.40 |
| 1969 | 7.7 | 0.81 | 1.57 |
| 1970 | 8.3 | 0.81 | 1.59 |
| 1971 | 9.1 | 0.93 | 1.38 |
| 1972 | 9.4 | 0.97 | 1.62 |
| 1973 | 9.7 | 0.94 | 1.47 |
| 1974 | 10.1 | 1.21 | 1.49 |
| 1975 | 9.9 | 1.03 | 1.49 |
| 1976 | 9.0 | 1.14 | 2.03 |
| 1977 | 9.1 | 0.98 | 2.03 |
| 1978 | 9.2 | 1.08 | 1.59 |
| 1979 | 10.0 | 1.27 | 1.56 |
| 1980 | 10.7 | 1.25 | 1.73 |
| 1981 | 10.3 | 1.12 | 1.70 |
| 1982 | 9.6 | 1.25 | 1.70 |
| 1983 | 8.6 | 1.32 | 1.86 |
| 1984 | 8.4 | 1.37 | 1.77 |
| 1985 | 8.4 | 1.28 | 1.64 |
| 1986 | 9.0 | 1.24 | 1.62 |
| 1987 | 8.7 | 1.31 | 2.08 |
| 1988 | 9.0 | 1.42 | 1.73 |
| 1989 | 9.3 | 1.33 | 1.98 |
| 1990 | 10.0 | 1.31 | 1.68 |
| 1991 | 10.5 | 1.42 | 1.72 |
| 1992 | 10.0 | 1.33 | 2.68 |
| 1993 | 10.1 | 1.31 | 2.22 |
| 1994 | 9.6 | 1.41 | 2.18 |
| 1995 | 8.7 | 1.45 | 2.67 |
| 1996 | 7.9 | 1.31 | 2.30 |
| 1997 | 7.4 | 1.41 | 1.72 |
You can go to the old post and get the later data, I’m not really interested in reproducing all that here, nor in updating it, really, but the point I want to make – again, since James seems incapable of understanding it – is that as far back as 1945, when neither country had much in the way of firearms laws, the homicide rate in the U.S. was 8.8 times the rate in Scotland. As time has progressed, and the UK has instituted stricter and stricter laws against firearm possession (promoted in every case to make the UK “safer”), the homicide rate trend has been converging.
James likes to point out that the U.S. – with all of its privately possessed firearms, spreading “right to carry” laws and all – has a homicide rate that is – let me find his number, oh yes – “more than two-and-a-half times greater” than Scotland’s. But sixty-five years ago, it was eight point eight times greater. Scotland’s homicide rate in 2009 was 1.52/100,000, (down from 1.9 in 2008). The U.S. homicide rate that year was 5.0/100,000. The ratio was therefore 3.2 to 1.
Now, I ask you – what does a trend from 8.8:1 to 3.2:1 indicate to you? Especially bearing in mind that gun laws here are “lax” and in the UK are “the strictest in the world” by their own admission?
But hey! At least they’re not killing each other with GUNS! Because somehow that makes a difference.
And lastly, there’s this: Scotland has been called “the most violent country in the developed world.” The UN said it in 2005, and yes, that includes the U.S. They might not kill each other at anywhere near our rates, but they violently victimize each other far more often. In 2010 the Scottish Labour party bemoaned the fact that the violent crime rate in Scotland is “four times the rate of England and Wales.” That polity ranks #2 in the world.
And remember, the crime statistics in the UK aren’t exactly reliable.
Back when I wrote What We Got Here is … Failure to Communicate, I noted that Thomas Sowell pointed out one major difference between those who believe humans are perfectible and those like me who believe human nature doesn’t change. Those who believe in human perfectibility believe in solutions. Those like me see trade-offs. James believes the solution is to disarm everyone. I believe otherwise.
Hey, maybe he’s right. Maybe if the Scots had guns they would kill each other at astronomical rates. Given their obviously hyper-violent culture ….
Then again, there might be a few more deaths but a lot fewer Glasgow smiles. And if the potential victims are armed ….
Worth your time:
In a follow-on to Monday’s post, TL;DR comes a column from Townhall from June 24 entitled Don’t Know Much About History.
There’s a world-class understatement.
Excerpt:
First, the good news: The nation’s eighth-graders are doing better in history class. Now, the bad news: They’re not doing much better. Gains in test scores are small, made by the lowest performers, and only 17 percent of those tested are “proficient,” or competent.
It gets worse. Only 12 percent of high-school seniors, who are getting ready to vote for the first time, have a proficient knowledge of history. If you’re looking for a tinsel lining, you could point to 20 percent of fourth-graders who are described as proficient, but that means eight of 10 haven’t learned very much during their tender years in the classroom
The standardized test results known as the “nation’s report card,” issued by the National Assessment of Educational Progress, are based on tests taken by thousands of schoolchildren in both private and public schools. Such dismal percentages once sounded alarms for parents and teachers, but now mostly get a bored yawn. What else is new?
The next paragraph give us the Quote of the Day:
“We’re raising young people who are, by and large, historically illiterate,” says historian David McCullough in The Wall Street Journal. “I know how much these young people — even at the most esteemed institutions of higher learning — don’t know. It’s shocking.” McCullough, who has lectured on more than a hundred college campuses, tells of a young women who came up to him after a lecture at a renowned university in the Midwest. “Until I heard your talk this morning, I never realized the original 13 colonies were all on the East Coast.”
This, from a high school graduate – not one of those who dropped out.
And this ignorance is no accident:
McCullough has learned first-hand how formidable the obstacles have become. Emotional appeals in politically correct courses — women’s history, African history, environmental history — take the place of chronological and conceptual study across the educational arc from tiny tots to graduate students.
From the early grades, our children learn how horrible slavery was, but spend little time studying the how, why and when we righted that wrong and the wrongs that followed. Who we are comes from what we reject as much as from what we embrace.
The problems with our schools run deep, not only affecting how the next generation is learning to make reasoned choices in determining public policy, but how ignorance undercuts pride and patriotism, the sense of America’s core identity. It’s not merely academic.
Indeed not. Nor is it unintentional. Another recent story tells us that Independence Day is now a “rightwing” holiday. A July, 1 Hoover Institute column, American Amnesia expands on this:
For the past ten years or more, virtually every glimpse into American students’ views on citizenship has revealed both a lack of understanding and a lack of interest. An American Enterprise Institute study earlier this year found that most social studies teachers doubted that their students grasped core U.S. citizenship concepts such as the Bill of Rights or the separation of powers. A recent Department of Education study found that only nine percent of U.S. high school students are able to cite reasons why it is important for citizens to participate in a democracy, and only six percent are able to identify reasons why having a constitution benefits a country. The Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE) has reported a decades-long, step-wise decline in interest in political affairs among college freshmen—from over 60 percent of the population in 1966 to less than half that percentage in our current period.
Remember, it was award-winning educator John Taylor Gatto who said that the education system changed radically beginning in 1965. There was a goal:
For the past ten years, our research team at Stanford has interviewed broad cross-sections of American youth about what U. S. citizenship means to them. Here is one high school student’s reply, not atypical: “We just had (American citizenship) the other day in history. I forget what it was.” Another student told us that “being American is not really special….I don’t find being an American citizen very important.” Another replied, “I don’t want to belong to any country. It just feels like you are obligated to this country. I don’t like the whole thing of citizen…I don’t like that whole thing. It’s like, citizen, no citizen; it doesn’t make sense to me. It’s like to be a good citizen—I don’t know, I don’t want to be a citizen…it’s stupid to me.”Such statements reflect more than an ignorance of citizenship—though they may provide us with clues about the source of students’ present-day lack of knowledge. Beyond not knowing what U.S. citizenship entails, many young Americans today are not motivated to learn about how to become a fully engaged citizen of their country. They simply do not care about their status as American citizens. Notions such as civic virtue, civic duty, or devotion to their country mean little to them. This is not true of all young people today—there are exceptions in virtually every community—but it accurately describes a growing trend that encompasses a large portion of our younger generation.
And it has been going on long enough that it affects not only the current generation, but their parents. By all means, please read my April, 2006 essay, RCOB™. Salon.com contributor Nina Burleigh was shocked, shocked to discover that the Narrowsburg, NY public school she enrolled her five year-old son into taught patriotism!
I cringed as my young son recited the Pledge of Allegiance. But who was I to question his innocent trust in a nation I long ago lost faith in?
Shocked and upset to the point that she felt it necessary to indoctrinate her five year-old herself:
…to counteract any God-and-country indoctrination he received in school, we began our own informal in-home instruction about Bush, Iraq and Washington over the evening news.
Nina was relieved when she moved away from Narrowsburg:
Now it has been almost a year since my son scampered down the steps of Narrowsburg Central Rural School for the last time. We’ve since returned to the city, driven back to urban life more by adult boredom than our children’s lack of educational opportunities. Our son is enrolled in a well-rated K-5 public school on Manhattan’s Upper West Side;not surprisingly, the Pledge of Allegiance is no longer part of his morning routine. Come to think of it, and I could be wrong, I’ve never seen a flag on the premises.
No, I imagine not.
Is it any wonder that our public schools are turning out this product? They’ve been at it since 1965. In 1985 Soviet defector Yuri Bezmenov named it “ideological subversion:”
To change the perception of reality of every American to such an extent that despite of their balance of information no one is able to come to sensible conclusions in the interest of defending themselves, their families, their community and their country.
It’s a great brainwashing process which goes very slow, and it is divided in four basic stages. The first one being demoralization. It takes from 15-20 years to demoralize a nation. Why that many years? Because this is the minimum number of years it takes to educate one generation of students in the country of your enemy.
—
In other words, Marxism-Leninism is being pumped into the soft heads of at least three generations of American students, without being challenged or counterbalanced with the basic values of Americanism, America patriotism.
It’s been forty-five years since 1965, and it’s still ongoing with no end in sight. More Bezmenov, and remember this was twenty-five years ago:
The result? The result you can see. Most of the people who graduated in the sixties (drop-outs or half-baked intellectuals) are now occupying the positions of power in the government, civil service, business, mass media, [and the] educational system. You are stuck with them. You cannot get rid of them. They are contaminated; they are programmed to think and react to certain stimuli in a certain pattern. You cannot change their mind[s], even if you expose them to authentic information, even if you prove that white is white and black is black, you still cannot change the basic perception and the logic of behavior. In other words, these people… the process of demoralization is complete and irreversible. To [rid] society of these people, you need another twenty or fifteen years to educate a new generation of patriotically-minded and common sense people, who would be acting in favor and in the interests of United States society.
—
The demoralization process in [the] United States is basically completed already. For the last 25 years… actually, it’s over-fulfilled because demoralization now reaches such areas where previously not even Comrade Andropov and all his experts would even dream of such a tremendous success. Most of it is done by Americans to Americans, thanks to [a] lack of moral standards.
As I mentioned before, exposure to true information does not matter anymore. A person who was demoralized is unable to assess true information. The facts tell nothing to him. Even if I shower him with information, with authentic proof, with documents, with pictures; even if I take him by force to the Soviet Union and show him [a] concentration camp, he will refuse to believe it, until he [receives] a kick in his fat bottom. When a military boot crashes his… then he will understand. But not before that. That’s the [tragedy] of the situation of demoralization.
So basically America is stuck with demoralization and unless… even if you start right now, here, this minute, you start educating [a] new generation of American[s], it will still take you fifteen to twenty years to turn the tide of ideological perception of reality back to normalcy and patriotism.
The next stage is destabilization. This time [the] subverter does not care about your ideas and the patterns of your consumption; whether you eat junk food and get fat and flabby doesn’t matter any more. This time—and it takes only from two to five years to destabilize a nation—what matters [are] essentials: economy, foreign relations, [and] defense systems. And you can see it quite clearly that in some areas, in such sensitive areas as defense and [the] economy, the influence of Marxist-Leninist ideas in [the] United States is absolutely fantastic. I could never believe it fourteen years ago when I landed in this part of the world that the process [would have gone] that fast.
The next stage, of course, is crisis. It may take only up to six weeks to bring a country to the verge of crisis. You can see it in Central America now.
And, after crisis, with a violent change of power, structure, and economy, you have [the so-called] period of normalization. It may last indefinitely. Normalization is a cynical expression borrowed from Soviet propaganda. When the Soviet tanks moved into Czechoslovakia in ‘68, Comrade Brezhnev said, ‘Now the situation in brotherly Czechoslovakia is normalized.’
This is what will happen in [the] United States if you allow all these schmucks to bring the country to crisis, to promise people all kind[s] of goodies and the paradise on earth, to destabilize your economy, to eliminate the principle of free market competition, and to put [a] Big Brother government in Washington, D.C. with benevolent dictators like Walter Mondale, who will promise lots of thing[s], never mind whether the promises are fulfillable or not. He will go to Moscow to kiss the bottoms of [a] new generation of Soviet assassins, never mind… he will create false illusions that the situation is under control. [The] situation is not under control. [The] situation is disgustingly out of control.
Most of the American politicians, media, and educational system trains another generation of people who think they are living at the peacetime. False. [The] United States is in a state of war: undeclared, total war against the basic principles and foundations of this system. And the initiator of this war is not Comrade Andropov, of course. It’s the system. However ridiculous it may sound, [it is] the world Communist system (or the world Communist conspiracy). Whether I scare some people or not, I don’t give a hoot. If you are not scared by now, nothing can scare you.
But you don’t have to be paranoid about it. What actually happens now [is] that unlike [me], you have literally several years to live on unless [the] United States [wakes] up. The time bomb is ticking: with every second [he snaps his fingers], the disaster is coming closer and closer. Unlike [me], you will have nowhere to defect to. Unless you want to live in Antarctica with penguins. This is it. This is the last country of freedom and possibility.
It hasn’t gotten to everyone, but it’s reached enough so that now our country is more divided than any time since 1860.
That was the goal. We’re “enjoying” the results, and they’re worldwide.
Time’s up.
A few months ago, I printed what I thought was a pretty good description of the concept of “social justice”:
(J)ustice is justice, whereas “social justice” is code for one set of rules for the rich, another for the poor; one set for whites, another set for minorities; one set for straight men, another for women and gays. In short, I pointed out, it’s the opposite of actual justice. — Burt Prelutsky, Me and the Rotarians.
Wandering through the archives of YouTube the other day, I stumbled across a different definition – this one by former “Green Jobs Czar” Van Jones:
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a_-vgtYkJdA?rel=0]
Transcript:
Here’s how you know if you live in a society where there’s social justice: Would you be willing to take your life, write on a card, throw it in a big pot with everybody else, reach in at random and pull out another life with total confidence that it would be a good life?
In other words, I’m not saying that you’d wind up exactly where you were before, but that you’d be able to have a good life, that you’d be able to put it together, figure it out. If you don’t have that confidence, you don’t live in a country where there’s social justice. Because in a socially just – as opposed to a legally just – in a socially just world, since we’re all pretty much born equally ignorant, we should have roughly equal chances to have good lives.
You didn’t do anything particularly spectacular at the point of birth, such as you deserve all this. And so, that’s a high standard. What it means in a country like ours is, we will constantly be striving. We won’t ever arrive there, in all likelihood. We will have a more perfect union – we won’t have a perfect union, but it can be more perfect. And each generation has to figure out a way to move us closer to the reality of liberty and justice for all, and not just the rhetoric.
Damn, that sounds so . . . nice, doesn’t it? Throw your life in a big pot, draw out another, and be totally confident that life will be a “good” one!
Wow! Sign me up!
Not.
True, we are all “born equally ignorant,” but we don’t stay that way. Were I, an engineer, to throw my life into the pot and draw out the life of, say, a tailgunner on a Miami garbage truck, I’m fairly certain that I could go on and make a “good life.” Were I instead to draw the life of, say, a brain surgeon, my life might be “good,” but the patients of that surgeon would certainly suffer. What if I were to draw the life of someone with a degenerative disease? Would my life be “good”? By what measure?
You see, that’s the question – who defines “good”?
In my world, I define it – for me. No one else gets to do that. And I don’t get to do it for anyone else.
But Van Jones has taken it upon himself to define it for everyone else. He notes that the people he’s addressing, students at Guilford College in Greensboro, NC, don’t “deserve all of this” – that is, the college education they are getting (and, one assumes, paying for.) Apparently the society they live in gave it to them by virtue of their birth, not because they or their parents worked hard for it.
But, somehow, they do deserve “a good life.”
And it’s the job of “social” justice to ensure they get it. What is the mechanism with which this will be accomplished? Well, he doesn’t tell us, but you pretty much have to assume that it is government. And that means that someone must be put in charge of determining who should have what.
And that always leads to this:
Welcome, Comrade, to where we are all equal, but some are more equal than others!
One year prior to the signing of the Declaration of Independence, the overwhelming majority of colonists considered themselves loyal subjects of the Crown, full British citizens with all the rights and privileges that citizenship entitled them to. Yes, there were problems with the way the Colonies were being administered, but these were largely misunderstandings and could be worked out.
One year later that attitude had changed. The colonies were ripe for rebellion. In honesty, not much had really changed in the way the Crown treated the colonies, the difference was that the ideology the colonists lived under had changed.
The cause of that change was Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, a 46-page pamphlet published January 10, 1776. In the first three months, 120,000 to 150,000 copies sold at 2 shillings each, the rough equivalent of $15 today. In the first year after its initial printing, 500,000 copies sold in a nation of only about 3 million people. By July, 1776 it had had its effect, and the colonists by and large no longer considered themselves Britons, but Americans.
In 1776 it is estimated that 90% of the population was literate – and not just literate, but at a fairly high level. I’ve quoted this before, but Thomas Sowell on literacy and education:
A recently reprinted memoir by Frederick Douglass (1818-1895) has footnotes explaining what words like “arraigned,” “curried” and “exculpate” meant, and explaining who Job was. In other words, this man who was born a slave and never went to school educated himself to the point where his words now have to be explained to today’s expensively under-educated generation.
There is really nothing very mysterious about why our public schools are failures. When you select the poorest quality college students to be public school teachers, give them iron-clad tenure, a captive audience, and pay them according to seniority rather than performance, why should the results be surprising?
Ours may become the first civilization destroyed, not by the power of our enemies, but by the ignorance of our teachers and the dangerous nonsense they are teaching our children. In an age of artificial intelligence, they are creating artificial stupidity.
In a democracy, we have always had to worry about the ignorance of the uneducated. Today we have to worry about the ignorance of people with college degrees.
An excerpt from Common Sense:
Society in every state is a blessing, but Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one: for when we suffer, or are exposed to the same miseries BY A GOVERNMENT, which we might expect in a country WITHOUT GOVERNMENT, our calamity is heightened by reflecting that we furnish the means by which we suffer. Government, like dress, is the badge of lost innocence; the palaces of kings are built upon the ruins of the bowers of paradise. For were the impulses of conscience clear, uniform and irresistibly obeyed, man would need no other lawgiver; but that not being the case, he finds it necessary to surrender up a part of his property to furnish means for the protection of the rest; and this he is induced to do by the same prudence which in every other case advises him, out of two evils to choose the least. Wherefore, security being the true design and end of government, it unanswerably follows that whatever form thereof appears most likely to ensure it to us, with the least expense and greatest benefit, is preferable to all others.
THAT is the expression of the minarchist, or “small-L” libertarian.
Back when I wrote True Believers, I quoted Glen Wishard from his Canis Iratus post, A Thumbnail History of the Twentieth Century:
The rise and fall of the Marxist ideal is rather neatly contained in the Twentieth Century, and comprises its central political phenomenon. Fascism and democratic defeatism are its sun-dogs. The common theme is politics as a theology of salvation, with a heroic transformation of the human condition (nothing less) promised to those who will agitate for it. Political activity becomes the highest human vocation. The various socialisms are only the most prominent manifestation of this delusion, which our future historian calls “politicism”. In all its forms, it defines human beings as exclusively political animals, based on characteristics which are largely or entirely beyond human control: ethnicity, nationality, gender, and social class. It claims universal relevance, and so divides the entire human race into heroes and enemies. To be on the correct side of this equation is considered full moral justification in and of itself, while no courtesy or concession can be afforded to those on the other. Therefore, politicism has no conscience whatsoever, no charity, and no mercy.
(Emphasis in original.) Other than disagreeing with Glen’s contention that the end of the Twentieth Century marked the fall of the Marxist ideal, I think his observation is spot-on – and it illustrates the polar opposite of the minarchist ideal espoused by Thomas Paine in which government is a necessary evil. I think proof that Glen’s thinking was wishful is easily illustrated by former Vice-President and nearly President Albert Gore’s contention that the purpose of Rule of Law was “human redemption,” or Barack Obama’s declaration that his election meant “fundamentally transforming the United States of America,” that the rise of the oceans would slow, and the planet would begin to heal upon his ascension. There are more, but those two scream for themselves.
The Nineteenth Century was a century of struggle between the old feudal, colonialist paradigm and the new individualist, capitalist, democratic one. Feudalism and colonialism lost. At the start of the Twentieth Century “the sun never set” on the British Empire. England had colonies in India, Asia, Africa. France in Southeast Asia and North Africa. Spain, Portugal, Holland, Germany and Italy all had colonies in Africa and Asia. South and Central America were overrun with colonies. And all of these polities were monarchies.
By the middle of the Twentieth Century, colonialism was over, and England, France, Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands, Italy and Germany were representative democracies of one form or another. England may still have a reigning Queen, but she has very little actual power.
But while the Nineteenth Century was a battle between the ideologies of monarchy and democracy, the Twentieth Century was a struggle between democracy and “politicism.” The outcome of the Ninteenth Century’s conflicts were not fully felt until the end of the Twentieth. The outcome of the Twentieth Century’s struggles, I think, will be felt much sooner. As with everything else, political change moves faster as time progresses.
As others have noted, Marx predicted that the proletariat would overthrow the capitalists in the industrialized world, but it didn’t happen. The question was “why?” and the conclusion was that capitalism made too many people comfortable. In order for the revolution to succeed, it would be necessary to change the culture of the people.
To change the culture as Thomas Paine had done in a few short months in 1776.
However, the ground in which Thomas Paine sowed his seeds of rebellion was already rich and prepared for his ideas. Near universal literacy. Exposure to and understanding of the philosophy of John Locke versus that of Thomas Hobbes. A firm faith in a Higher Power. That soil is not a good one in which to plant the seeds of politicism.
Politicism requires a different fertilizer mix. Ignorance. Illiteracy. Illogic. Envy. Dependency. Despair. Apathy.
To surrender completely to the control of others – either a secular government or a religious one – control that invades every waking action, requires people unwilling to do for themselves. The first step is and must be the destruction of education. People must be prevented from thinking for themselves, from reasoning. George Orwell explained it with “Newspeak” in his novel 1984:
NEWSPEAK was the official language of Oceania and had been devised to meet the ideological needs of Ingsoc, or English Socialism. In the year 1984 there was not as yet anyone who used Newspeak as his sole means of communication, either in speech or writing. The leading articles in the Times were written in it, but this was a tour de force which could only be carried out by a specialist. It was expected that Newspeak would have finally superseded Oldspeak (or Standard English, as we should call it) by about the year 2050. Meanwhile it gained ground steadily, all Party members tending to use Newspeak words and grammatical constructions more and more in their everyday speech. The version in use in 1984, and embodied in the Ninth and Tenth Editions of the Newspeak Dictionary, was a provisional one, and contained many superfluous words and archaic formations which were due to be suppressed later. It is with the final, perfected version, as embodied in the Eleventh Edition of the Dictionary, that we are concerned here.
The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of Ingsoc, but to make all other modes of thought impossible. It was intended that when Newspeak had been adopted once and for all and Oldspeak forgotten, a heretical thought—that is, a thought diverging from the principles of Ingsoc—should be literally unthinkable, at least so far as thought is dependent on words. Its vocabulary was so constructed as to give exact and often very subtle expression to every meaning that a Party member could properly wish to express, while excluding all other meanings and also the possibility of arriving at them by indirect methods. This was done partly by the invention of new words, but chiefly by eliminating undesirable words and by stripping such words as remained of unorthodox meanings, and so far as possible of all secondary meanings whatever. To give a single example. The word free still existed in Newspeak, but it could only be used in such statements as ‘This dog is free from lice’ or ‘This field is free from weeds’. It could not be used in its old sense of ‘politically free’ or ‘intellectually free’ since political and intellectual freedom no longer existed even as concepts, and were therefore of necessity nameless. Quite apart from the suppression of definitely heretical words, reduction of vocabulary was regarded as an end in itself, and no word that could be dispensed with was allowed to survive. Newspeak was designed not to extend but to diminish the range of thought, and this purpose was indirectly assisted by cutting the choice of words down to a minimum.
That preparation started in the early years of the 20th Century. Thus today we have “politically correct” speech. With destruction of language skills comes the destruction of logic skills – if you can’t read, you can’t integrate ideas new to you. In fact, new ideas are gibberish – words that have no meaning. “Politically free” is a null value to someone planted in the fields of politicism. It’s a weed.
A free society requires an informed and virtuous citizenry.
“Free,” “informed” and “virtuous” have become null terms.
The 21st Century will be a century of struggle between freedom and politicism. Polticism has two competing versions – Marxist and Muslim. Freedom?
Null term.
When in the course of human events . . . .
Happy (In)Dependence Day.
UPDATE: Christiane Amanpour uses the word “perspicacious.” ABC has to edumacate its audience. At least the ones in the “dance of the low, sloping forehead” country.
Doubleplusundead responds to a US News report that a Harvard study finds that the celebration of Independence Day has become a rightwing holiday.
I find I can add nothing of value to Edward von Bear’s stirring retort.
I come not to praise the Constitution, but to bury it.
The evil that men do lives after them, the good is oft interred with their bones. So let it be with the Constitution. The noble Progressive hath told you that the Constitution was outdated. If it were so, it was a grievous fault, and grievously hath that document answer’d it.
Here, under leave of the Progressive and the rest – for the Progressive is an honourable man. Woman. Gender-neutral being.
So are they all, all honourable beings. Just ask them.
Come I to speak at the Constitution’s funeral.
It was my friend, faithful and just to me. But the Progressive says it was outdated, too rigid, too difficult to understand.
And the Progressive is an honourable being.
The Constitution hath brought much freedom to America, which benefits did the general coffers fill. Did this in the Constitution seem outdated?
When that the poor have cried, the Constitution hath left their succor to the Citizens, who violated that document to provide that succor.
A rigid contract should be made of sterner stuff. Yet the Progressive says it was too rigid. And the Progressive is an honourable being.
I speak not to disprove what the Progressive spoke, but here I am to speak what I do know.
You all did love it once, not without cause. What cause withholds you then, to mourn for it?
O judgment! thou art fled to brutish beasts, and men have lost their reason. Bear with me. My heart is in the coffin there with the Constitution, and I must pause till it come back to me.
Recently, the Washington Post sold its interest in Newsweek for $1.
Time must be worth all of 12¢.
(*With all apologies to the Bard.)
If you haven’t read Walter Russell Mead’s When Government Jumps the Shark, I strongly advise you to. In it, Mr. Mead divides .gov programs up into five distinct stages that I think are brilliant in their concise descriptivity:
My first exposure to Mr. Mead came from another brilliant essay, The Jacksonian Tradition, which I found via Steven Den Beste many years ago, and I’ve cited it in several pieces here. He’s not lost anything in the ensuing decade.
Like it or not, the United States is a revolutionary power. Whether our government is trying to overthrow foreign dictators is almost irrelevant; American society is the most revolutionary force on the planet. The Internet is more subversive than the CIA in its prime. The dynamism of American society is constantly creating new businesses, new technologies, new ideas and new social models. These innovations travel, and they make trouble when they do. Saudi conservatives know that whatever geopolitical arrangements the Saudi princes make with the American government, the American people are busily undermining the core principles of Saudi society. It’s not just our NGOs educating Saudi women and civil society activists; it’s not just the impact of American college life on the rising generation of the Saudi elite. We change the world even when we aren’t thinking anything about global revolution — when Hollywood and rap musicians are just trying to make a buck, they are stoking the fires of change around the world.
A revolutionary nation cannot make a conservative foreign policy work for long.— Walter Russell Mead, The Conservative Revolutionary
