Good post, doc. This explains the hysteria in the ranks of the left. They just don't want to give up on the Marxist fantasy. It hasn't worked anywhere its been tried, and the people who have to live under it remain poor and powerless. Only the leaders of these communist and socialist countries have it good.
Unodostres | Email | Homepage | 06.04.05 - 4:24 pm | #

You are dead on the mark. The left is still fighting the battle of the last century unaware that they lost. They don't even realize we are in a war right now.
anonymous | Email | Homepage | 06.04.05 - 9:16 pm | #

This post is so dense with (intriguing) ideas that I hardly know where to start. How do you hold all this in your head? (This is a question I also put to the Baron... a *lot*...you guys who do not suffer from ADD are so fortunate...)

Anwyay, just to take one tiny part: that feelings are the ultimate reference point for any decision, philosophy, point of view, etc. It is sooo annoying that we are not educating our children in logic, rhetoric, or any of the kinds of critical thinking/training that would permit them to look at information or proposals and be able to fisk* them.

This kind of debased argumentation -- ie, how things make me "feel" -- is one of my pet peeves. I recognize that at some level we do arrive at our outlook based on our emotions (or perhaps our unresolved conflicts) but we need to be able to defend that outlook and the resulting conclusions with some kind of rational structure.

The baby boomers were all about reaction rather than response. Their contempt for their parents' mores and decisions was breath-takingly narcissistic. It's hard to blame a whole generation of parents for a whole generation of whiners. And Dr. Spock really wasn't all that bad, with his practical advice for young mothers who found themselves hundreds of miles from home and family advice at 3:00 am.

Here's my take, though it hardly does justice to your presentation: the zeitgeist of the 20th century was Utopian, in the worst sense of that word. It proposed the perfectibility of Man, whether through scientism, political activism, socialism (of which Marxism is a subset)... you name it. As long as the idea of eternal progressive betterment lay at the foundation of your thinking, then you were on the right track. It was imperative that this betterment be directed from the top down. Trusting people to make their own decisions was anathema to this philosophy. Voila, Social Security...

Remember Karl Menninger's plaintive book, "Whatever Happened to Sin?" He was prophetic....

Europe is clinging to welfare socialism for all it's worth. The mandarins here would give anything, including their integrity, to force that template on the American culture.

I don't think it can be done. Deo gratias for the strong, ineradicable Scots-Irish strain in this country. The S.- I. are the hillbillies, the rednecks, the agrarian dreamers, the military visionaries, the businessmen and entrepeneurs. They've slowly infiltrated everything but the mandarin class, whom they disdain.

More from the Baron tomorrow.
Dymphna | Email | Homepage | 06.04.05 - 10:05 pm | #

> Yesterday, I heard a Democratic senator bemoaning the fact that the U.S. "attacked the wrong country." The context was that the U.S. should have gone after North Korea and Kim Jong Il, someone who really means us harm.

I would say that he should have been our primary target. He WAS clearly the greatest immediate threat in the Axis of Evil...

... but, as usual, there is this problem. NoKo has a border with the only remaining nation which really has any capacity to stand up to us and give us any kind of fight. It has legitimate interests in that region, and particularly in regards to its bordering nations. Us attacking one of those bordering nations does represent a significant problem to it. Even though our interests are clearly relevant, which side do they come in on? The one opposing us (a popular side, and one they could lose on and still win in international terms) or the sensible one (which reduces the chances of us getting majorly POed as we clearly will be if he gives anyone a weapon to use)?

In short, there are lots of sensible reasons not to be attacking NoKo unless and until it's clear we have to do so. Those same rules did not apply to Afghanistan and Iraq, and those two also allow us to put direct pressure against Iran.

The illustrious senator, of course, is presuming his consituents are ignorant fools when it comes to Real World Politik and even geography.

Unfortunately, likely he's right. If nothing else, they did elect him.
ObloodyHell | Email | Homepage | 06.05.05 - 7:35 am | #

> Welcome to the wonderful world of feelings, nothing more than feelings (cue the music), where there really is nothing more than feelings

Yes, this is no better demonstrated than by the response of teachers buying slaves.

Some years back some brightboy teacher got an idea for a class social responsibility project.

They would collect money to buy the freedom of African slaves. For a small amount of US dollars they could send the money to someone in the right markets and they could pay the price for a slave on those markets, and then manumit them, reducing the slave population of the world by 1.

Sounds good -- great, even -- until the implications of the twin bugaboos of Leftism everywhere come into play: The Law of Supply and Demand meets the Law of Unintended Consequences.

You guessed it. They did nothing to decrease the value of slaves, they attacked the result and not the problem. Hence, they simply expanded the market for slaves, by adding another buyer. The solution? More people brought into slavery, of course. They did not suffer the full ramifications, being immediately freed, but they did suffer the transport experience (a trek on foot across several hundred miles and more like fun)

When confronted with this fact, and asked if they intended to stop the practice -- I kid you not -- the teacher in charge of the whole operation said no, that, at worst, it made the kids feel good about themselves...!!!

====================================
...This woman is teaching kids about their social conscience!!!
====================================

Be afwaid. Be wewy, wewy afwaid.
ObloodyHell | Email | Homepage | 06.05.05 - 7:46 am | #

I prefer Thomas Sowell's term "the Anointed" to "mandarins"; it gives more of the flavor of religious self-righteousness that goes with their position.

But their religion is a secular one; whether Marxist or PC or feminism. Somehow they manage to retain all the zeal and self-righteousness and certainty of the truth without having a God behind it.

That's where the feelings come in -- the Word doesn't come from on High, it comes from the Hypothalamus.

Same goes for sin. As I have said before (shameless plug for The Enemy Within), the concept of sin has been discredited. But because we all feel sinful, something has to be done with that feeling. Religious people have at least a chance of expiating it through the process of confession and absolution. But a secular person has no recourse but repression, denial, and projection of that sin outwards onto those evil others (Republicans, Big Oil, theocrats, racists, homophobes, people who don't recycle, smokers, etc.).

A religion without doctrine or deity can continually reinvent its own dogma and dicta. Expect the Anointed to have a completely different agenda for us 20 or 50 years from now. However, they will still be absolutely certain that they are right, and that it is their solemn duty to hector and coerce us poor peons into correct behavior.
Baron Bodissey | Email | Homepage | 06.05.05 - 8:33 am | #

I posted something like this a while ago. The phenomenon goes a bit deeper than you describe, I think, but you're on the right track. Here's an idea:

Therir GURUs weren't exposed as false. Their GODS were.

In this, they are much like the Marxists and Fascists, with whom they are increasingly forming red-breen-brown alliances in Europe. Why? And why the eerie parallels in representations of America with older representations of the Jews?

As I wrote in Why Idotarianism? Why Now?:

Staring at their shattered idols, they all blame the same set of demons for the destruction of their gods: capitalism, modernity, the bourgeois mentality. And what do you get when you cross all 3? Symbolically, you get Jews... and you get America.

If they could but kill their god's destroyers, perhaps their gods could live again and fulfill the glorious prophecies foretold. The prophecies they were cheated out of. As I said in an April 19, 2002 exchange with MuslimPundit:

"A culture that sees nothing new in the world beyond the idols of its doctrine can only lash out in rage when those idols are cracked. For those idols carry their very identity, and the loss of identity leads inexorably to violence. This characteristic is not unique to Islam, and can just as easily be seen on any "progressive" university campus.

Which brings up an interesting point. Until now, conservatives have seen the (one way) sympathy and winking between the university's radical left and Islamist jihadists as ideological in nature: a pinch of Marxism, 2 tablespoons of reflexive anti-colonialism, a quart of victimization politics as a sop to the failure of their doctrines to create anything but brutal slums and pest-holes.

Maybe we were wrong. Maybe the real bond is not ideological, but cultural in nature. Facing their cracked idols, lashing out at the common messenger of their failure, these two movements agree only to borrow what they can from each other in order to wound the common object of their hate. America is surely the most prominent messenger. Israel, with no oil but a per capita purchasing power twice that of Saudi Arabia, is another."
Joe Katzman | Email | Homepage | 06.06.05 - 6:01 pm | #