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Deconstructing "Progressive " thought

Ironically, decades of Democrat controlled civic governments in Detroit have not only de-urbanized the city, the outlying areas are starting to become overrun by bears....
 
A great critique of "Progressiveism"

http://www.forbes.com/2009/09/14/cass-sunstein-bill-of-rights-opinions-columnists-richard-a-epstein.html

Sunstein's Second Bill Of Rights?
Richard A. Epstein, 09.15.09, 12:00 AM EDT
Why one is quite enough.
 
This past week marked the belated Senate confirmation of my former colleague, Cass R. Sunstein, as the head of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, which helps coordinate the many regulatory activities in the modern welfare state.

Sunstein is by any fair account the most prominent, versatile and influential left-of-center legal academic in the U.S. His nomination has been supported, sensibly enough, by The Wall Street Journal, which also sees him correctly as one of the more conservative players in the Obama administration. But apparently, its wise counsel did not slow down key Republican senators who held up his nomination on at least three separate occasions, in part because of their worries that his view on hunting and animal care make him an extremist on animal rights.

Regrettably, they seem more influenced by the caricature of his position on the American Conservative Union Web site and Glenn Beck's brutal hosing this past July that also denounced Sunstein for his passionate support of Franklin D. Roosevelt's Second Bill of Rights. This sad tale has been well recounted by David Weigel in the Washington Independent. Therefore, it is perhaps no surprise that Sunstein's was confirmed was by the embarrassingly narrow vote of 57-to-40.

These unseemly outbursts of ignorant incivility have ripped at our country's frayed political fabric. One oft-neglected cost of these hysterical tactics is that they discredit ordinary academics, like myself, who strongly disagree with the views that Sunstein has so consistently and elegantly defended. Quite simply, it is not nice to be drowned out by the childish arguments of my supposed allies. The correct political stance is to give President Obama wide latitude in choosing his subordinates, and then to dispute them on the key substantive issues.

Here is how I would go about that task with Roosevelt's Second Bill of Rights, which is so politically dangerous in large part because of its elegant simplicity and intuitive appeal. Let me first quote the central passage of the Second Bill of Rights, which lays out the rights "established for all--regardless of station, race or creed." Roosevelt says:

"The right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries or shops or farms or mines of the nation;

The right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation;

The right of every farmer to raise and sell his products at a return, which will give him and his family a decent living;

The right of every businessman, large and small, to trade in an atmosphere of freedom from unfair competition and domination by monopolies at home or abroad;

The right of every family to a decent home;

The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health."

What's not to like? Quite simply, it is Roosevelt's treacherous transformation of human aspirations into enforceable legal rights. There are two enormous gaps in that chain of reasoning. First, it does not specify the persons who must bear the correlative duties to this expanded set of rights. Nor can we duck this problem by imposing the obligations on the state or government, which consists, of course, of all those original right bearers in a different capacity.

So in the end we can't maintain the universality of Roosevelt's claim: We have to distinguish between those of us who count as "the people" and everyone else, those who don't really count at all. If we all have the rights to decent jobs, then workers have the right to form unions, regardless of the consequences to employers, shareholders and the public at large. If farmers have the right to a decent living, the rest of us have to suffer Roosevelt's deadly double of agricultural subsidies and state-sponsored crop cartels.

A second difficulty is as acute as the first. Who fills in the content of the right by telling us what counts as a decent price or a remunerative wage?
In a world of major uncertainty, these questions have no fixed answer. But in a political setting, we devised schemes then to assure living wages to autoworkers, only to see Roosevelt's rickety structure comes crashing down on our heads. But do we learn humility from failure? Of course not, if we think that now is the time to implement a regime of positive rights to health care--oops, to health care insurance--funded by punitive and self-destructive taxes on the rich.

In short, there is no way to translate Roosevelt's--or Sunstein's vision--into sustainable social practices. But that's just what the First Bill of Rights can do with its bloodless protection of private property and freedom of contract, speech and religion. Now we can specify the correlative duties with precision: keep off the property of others, and don't meddle in their agreements. Follow these rules and you can stimulate investment and reward hard labor. By keeping our aspirations modest, we can keep our achievements high--which is why we don't want to undermine the first Bill of Rights by adopting the second.

Richard A. Epstein is the James Parker Hall distinguished service professor of law, the University of Chicago; the Peter and Kirsten Bedford senior fellow, the Hoover Institution; and a visiting professor at New York University Law School. He writes a weekly column for Forbes.com.
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Thucydides said:
A great critique of "Progressiveism"

http://www.forbes.com/2009/09/14/cass-sunstein-bill-of-rights-opinions-columnists-richard-a-epstein.html


But it is also a devastating critique of e.g. Glenn beck and all the other cretin conservatives who now dominate the American right's new and old media.
 
E.R. Campbell said:
But it is also a devastating critique of e.g. Glenn beck and all the other cretin conservatives who now dominate the American right's new and old media.

Well that is why we have the "Conservatism needs work" thread  ;D

MEanwhile, here are some more "Progressives" right here in Canada flying into a metaphysical fog....

http://canadiancincinnatus.typepad.com/my_weblog/2009/09/so-the-national-capital-commission-doesnt-want-to-offend-communists-eh.html

So the National Capital Commission doesn’t want to offend communists, eh?

A group called Tribute to Liberty (that has the support of most ethnic communities who have fled to Canada to get away from the ravages of communism) seeks to set up a memorial in Ottawa to commemorate the 100 million people who have been purposely killed by communist governments around the world. The various Holocaust museums in world capitals are clearly their model. While Prime Minister Stephen Harper “strongly supports” such this monument, apparently a majority of the members of the National Capital Commission (NCC), which oversees such things, is a little less enthusiastic.

According to the National Post, this is what the NCC members felt:

At a public meeting last week in Ottawa, members of the NCC's board approved the plans for a monument "in principle," allowing that the submitted application for the memorial "largely meets" the commission's criteria for a public exhibit on capital land. But several members expressed concern the name was too provocative, and should be revised to eliminate any mention of communism.

"I was unsettled by this name, and other members of the committee agreed with me," Hélène Grand-Maître, one commission member, said at the public approval hearing. "We should make sure that we are politically correct in this designation.... I feel this name should be changed."

Board member Adel Ayad noted that people who identify as communists might "not like" the memorial. "It's not communism itself that we should be fighting here. It is rather totalitarianism we are against in any form."

One commissioner questioned whether Canadians could even legitimately point fingers at the brutality of Stalin or Pol Pot, given that our own federal government had put Japanese-Canadians in internment camps during the Second World War.

Perhaps, suggested another, the best route would be to be avoid specifics, strike "communism" from the proposed name altogether, and dedicate the memorial to "victims of oppressive regimes," so as not to single any particular ideologies out.

What kind of idiot reasoning is this? The point of this monument is not to bring shame to totalitarianism in “any form”, but to shine the light of day on one specific, prevalent and malevolent form – communism. And if “people who identify as communists might "not like" the memorial”, well isn’t that the whole point of the thing?

The reason we constantly remind ourselves of the Holocaust is not to constantly dredge up the past and be a downer at trendy cocktail parties, but to make damn sure that things like this don’t ever happen again.

And how do we do that?

In a society where the freedom of thought is one of the deepest founding principles, we can’t do it by locking people up simply because they have expressed sympathies for National Socialism or communism. In a free society, we are constrained to use reason and argument. One such way is to employ shame. One reason we don’t have any out-of-the-closet National Socialists in our universities, media outlets and governments is because if any are there, they are too ashamed of themselves to publicly acknowledge what they really think. Everybody knows about the Holocaust and how millions of people were murdered in death factories like Auschwitz. Who wants to be associated with that?

The problem with communism is that shockingly few people understand the scope and breadth of communist atrocities. I do, but only because I am Estonian and my homeland was under Soviet occupation for 47 years. But many Canadians do not, and that’s the problem. That’s why a comment like the one above equating Pol Pot’s Cambodia to Canada’s treatment of Japanese Canadians can be uttered with nary an eyebrow raised. Aside from being a gross insult of Canada, most Canadians simply do not understand the scope of the comparison. Pol Pot deliberately killed up to one third of his own people in a couple of years. Try and visualize what that must have been like! If most of the people in that room had been able to, they would have looked at Adel Ayad and yelled, WTF?!?

But they don’t, because they don’t know, not really. And that’s the problem. While we mercifully lack National Socialists in our intelligentsia, we do have plenty of out-and-out communists, Marxists, Trotskyists and useful idiots in Che T-shits. To see why this is a problem consider the fact that before the Cambodian Killing Fields became known, Pol Pot was somewhat of a radical chic figure in academia, so much so that I have read reports indicating that early on in Pol Pot’s career, he had been advised by academics and grad students from MIT.

And these people aren’t ashamed of themselves! Well, not yet anyway. If some communist sympathizers amongst our elite end up feeling uncomfortable with the presence of this monument, then that is not an unfortunately byproduct, but the intended result.
 
Supporting the Constitution is a conspiracy? What will the Progressives think of next?

http://reason.com/blog/show/136201.html

The "Tenther" Smear
Radley Balko | September 21, 2009, 4:39pm

The American Prospect, The New Republic, and other left-of-center outlets are pushing the "Tenther" smear, aimed at lumping those who, horrors!, still take seriously the Tenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in with the Obama birth certificate deniers and 9/11 truthers.

It's such a transparent attempt at marginalizing the other side (mostly with respect to the health care issue) it seems almost a waste of time addressing. But one might start by pointing out that unlike any convincing evidence that Obama isn't a U.S. citizen, or proof that the Bush administration orchestrated the September 11 attacks, the Tenth Amendment actually exists. You can actually go to the National Archives and read it. There's also a historical record of its drafting and ratification. Really.

There's really no consistent principle or cogent argument underlying the Tenth Amendment smearers. The smarmy sentiment seems to be little more than that "Tenthers" are silly because all serious people stopped giving a damn about the Tenth Amendment years ago. Consider this passage from The American Prospect's Ian Millhiser:

More important, there is something fundamentally authoritarian about the tenther constitution. Social Security, Medicare, and health-care reform are all wildly popular, yet the tenther constitution would shackle our democracy and forbid Congress from enacting the same policies that the American people elected them to advance.

God forbid we let the Constitution get in the way of something popular. Ken at the Popehat blog responds:

This is transcendentally silly and almost perfectly Orwellian. It’s authoritarian to believe that central government authority should be strictly limited to the enumerated powers in the Constitution? It’s authoritarian to limit the government from doing things when those things are “wildly popular”? That sounds to me like the essence of anti-authoritarian constitutional government. Millhiser sneers that conservatives pushing for courts to interpret the Tenth Amendment meaningfully are contradicting their standard rhetoric about “judicial activitsm.” Whether or not that is true (and that’s an entirely different post), Millhiser is unconsciously echoing decades of authoritarian, pro-”law-and-order”, pro-censorship rhetoric from the far right. Millhiser sounds exactly like the folks who thought it was authoritarian to, for instance, overturn extremely popular flag-burning laws under the First Amendment.

I'd add that it was the Supreme Court's five most liberal justices—plus Justice Scalia—who ruled that the federal government could impose its own drug control laws on the states, even where the states' voters had expressed a desire to allow sick people to smoke medical marijuana. They couldn't even find in the Tenth Amendment (or for that matter, the Ninth) a state power to allow a dying woman to grow a few plants in her own basement for her own use if doing so would contradict federal drug policy.

It is true (and unfortunate) that the Tenth Amendment, "states' rights" mantra (a misnomer for federalism—governments don't have rights, only powers) has over the course of U.S. history been appropriated by slavery and segregation apologists. Of course, that's why we have the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments.

The smearers are right in one respect. Tenth Amendment supporters need to harbor a sort of quaint detachment from political reality to still seriously advocate that the federal government roll back to its constitutional limitations. That cat has far outgrown its bag. And to be fair, most of the Republicans invoking the amendment on the stump today had no problem with a leviathan federal government during the Bush years.

Still, that doesn't mean they're wrong, now. Or crazy. It's a daft sort of logic: Reading an explicitly worded amendment to the Constitution as it was written puts you in company with 9/11 conspiracists, while the serious, non-crazy, mainstream position is simply picking and choosing those portions of the Constitution you find agreeable.
 
Self help evidently isn't an option:

http://reason.com/blog/show/136356.html

And Don't Let Us Catch You Being Neighborly Again
Radley Balko | September 26, 2009, 1:16pm

State bureaucrats threaten to fine, jail a Michigan woman for watching her neighbors' kids.

Lisa Snyder of Middleville says her neighborhood school bus stop is right in front of her home. It arrives after her neighbors need to be at work, so she watches three of their children for 15-40 minutes until the bus comes.

The Department of Human Services received a complaint that Snyder was operating an illegal child care home. DHS contacted Snyder and told her to get licensed, stop watching her neighbors' kids, or face the consequences.

"It's ridiculous." says Snyder. "We are friends helping friends!" She added that she accepts no money for babysitting...

A DHS spokesperson would not comment on the specifics of the case but says they have no choice but to comply with state law, which is designed...

...wait for it...

...to protect Michigan children.

Notice how the other main effect of this is to break down the bonds between neighbours. After all, someone "snitched", now everyone will probably be wondering who did it and if they will be harassed by authorities because some neibourhood busybody takes a dislike to them.
 
A great essay by Jerry Pournelle:

http://www.jerrypournelle.com/view/2009/Q3/view588.html#Tuesday

Fascism, Socialism, and Freedom

Thomas Frank's weekly "Tilting Yard" column in the Wall Street Journal is said to present the most persuasive arguments the liberal opposition can make to the Wall Street Journal's generally conservative/libertarian editorial views. Alas, the arguments are often shallow, and there is no historical perspective at all. I show you as an example, today's essay "The Left Should Reclaim 'Freedom'".

As an example, Frank quotes with approval George Wolfskill in 1962 in "The Revolt of the Conservatives" regarding conservative opinions about Franklin D. Roosevelt. "Some thought he was a fascist, others believed him a socialist or Communist, while others, to be absolutely sure, said he was both." This amusing quote demonstrates that neither Wolfskill nor Frank has the foggiest notion of what Fascism, Socialism, or Communism were or are. This ignorance is more than unfortunate, because all three of these essentially Marxist notions remain important in social debate, and have a great deal of influence over our social policies.

The Marxist view of history postulated that great social systems contained within themselves the seeds of their own destruction, and that history was the record of how a social order -- "thesis" -- was confronted by opposition movements that inevitably came forth from within it -- "antithesis" -- to produce a new social order that destroyed the old and took its place. This thesis, antithesis, synthesis was the engine of history, and its working out was considered "progress." After the turn of the century in 1900 Marxist analysis spawned a number of intellectual movements and several great social/political movements. These included (with examples):

Socialism:  Generally accepted Marx's historical analysis, but rejected violent revolution.

The British Labor Party with its roots in Fabian Socialism.

The Socialist Party of the United States which under Norman Thomas never won a national election but accomplished many of its goals through alliances with other political movements.

Communism: Marxist party that believed in the necessity of Revolution

The Bolshevik party originally led by Lenin. Believed that the only way to end class warfare was to eliminate all social classes except the proletariat. Lenin developed the idea of a temporary "Dictatorship of the Proletariat." This evolved into Stalinism and the Soviet System that came to an end after 1990.

The Menshevik party which became the "Trotskyites" and the "left deviationist" Socialist Workers Party, some of whose members evolved into Neo-Conservatism. The Mensheviks accepted the inevitability of revolution, but believed that Russia was the wrong place: the world needed revolutions in the highly industrialized states. Trotsky served Lenin and worked to implement "Socialism in one country (the USSR)" but did not accept the permanent dictatorship. Fled to Mexico where he was assassinated by Stalinist agents.

Fascism:  Accepted Marx's history but believed the State could impose class cooperation.

Originally a branch of the Socialist International movement. In 1923 Benito Mussolini, a socialist, took control of Italy and began a program of industrialization and modernization that attracted the approval of many intellectuals. Mussolini insisted to the day he died that his was the true Socialist Movement. Fascism was considered "right deviationism" in much of the Marxist International literature.

The National German Socialist Workers Party (NDSAP, commonly called Nazi) was a Marxist socialist party. Hitler  was not a founder but became an early member. It had accepted most of the principles of Italian Fascism, and Hitler was an admirer of Mussolini until Mussolini opposed the German Anschluss of Austria. Hitler's rabid anti-Semitism was not part of Fascist doctrine (there were Jewish officials of high rank in Italy prior to the German alliance) and Mussolini never personally accepted Hitler's racial views. The NDSAP won a plurality in a German national election, and Hitler became Chancellor (Prime Minister). When President Hindenburg died, the office of Chancellor and President were merged.

Progressivism

The Progressive Movement has a number of descendents. One of its early members was Theodore Roosevelt, who was originally opposed by American conservatives but is now often claimed as a conservative.

Another descendent of the Progressive Movement was Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who claimed with some justice that he was a pragmatist and had no ideology, but a strong desire to save the United States from the Depression by using anything that worked.

In Roosevelt's first two terms there were a number of intellectually respectable members of every one of those movements. As the stories of Stalin's purges and general nastiness leaked out more and more intellectuals fell away from Stalinism. Many defected to Trotskyism. Many others became Progressives. Of course many became Socialists, but fewer than one might expect. Instead, many communists and socialists became Progressives and joined the New Deal.

Note that Communism, Fascism, and Nazi's were in alliance during part of the 1930's, and this endured until the German invasion of the USSR. When Paris fell to German troops in 1940, American Communists invited their members, friends, fellow travelers, and other associates to toast the victory of the people over the bourgeois. (See Fred Pohl's highly readable and informative autobiography The Way The Future Was for details including how Fred felt about being invited to drink that toast by his communist friend. Fred Pohl, of course, has been liberal for most of his life, but has never been a communist.

Much of the story of Progressivism and its relationships with Communism and Fascism is well told with meticulous documentation in The Forgotten Man by Amity Schlaes, (available on Kindle or in print edition). Ms. Schlaes does not hide her views in this book, but this is not a polemic. It's a very good history of a time we need to know a lot more about. Roosevelt's pragmatic Progressivism caused a great deal of floundering. Many things were tried, and Roosevelt didn't care where the ideas came from. Some worked. Some didn't. It would be well to remember those we tried that didn't work.

Lack of understanding of these matters is not the only problem with Thomas Frank's essay. He has accepted without debate the Progressive notion of freedom. The traditional American view of freedom is that one will be left alone to do what one wants to do even if everyone else disapproves. (If that disapproval is because what you want to do restricts someone else's freedom then there is something to discuss: e.g. your freedom to swing your fist ends at my nose.) If you want to slaughter and cook a goat in your front yard, I have to show that this does me some real harm before I can forbid you to do it. John Adams summed this up when he said that we in America believe that each man is the best judge of his own interest. The fact that you can show that some habits -- smoking cigarettes, riding a motorcycle without a helmet, eating too much and becoming obese, swearing oaths to Odin and Thor, putting out bowls of milk for the night elves, denouncing my neighbor as a witch (but not building a bonfire to throw the neighbor in), not buying health insurance,  not wearing socks, getting drunk in my own house and staying there, taking the Name of God in vain, myriads of consenting sexual practices, buying gold, buying stocks, giving my money to Bernie Madoff to invest, using Ubuntu rather than Windows, Firefox rather than Internet Explorer -- well, you get the idea -- may be bad for the user, and you know this, doesn't give you an automatic right to prevent me from doing them. (And of course many including me might dispute the harm from the choice made.)

You have to show that my doing the above harms you. And therein lies the rub. You may think that my swearing oaths to Thor and Odin and leaving gifts for the elves will bring down the wrath of the True God on the country, and thus I must be prevented lest I kill the lot of us. Perhaps I can win that case, but if you even have the right to force a trial you have very much interfered with my freedom. The case of smoking is more complex: the argument about second hand smoke can be debated, but hardly applies to smoking outdoors. The argument that smoking damages health and we will all have to pay when you go to the Emergency Room has more merit, but leads us to wonder why we have to pay for your trip. And of course the motorcycle helmet argument has been made a settled issue now. You have to wear a helmet lest you injure yourself and we have to pay. (One solution to that one is a law that makes it legal to harvest organs of helmetless motorcycle accident victims, and boy does that one open a can of worms.)

But the traditional idea of freedom is in fact negative.

Roosevelt with his "four freedoms" speech turned that on its head. Two of his freedoms are pretty traditional and negative, but Roosevelt postulated a "Freedom from Want" that basically mandated that someone has the obligation to assuage other people's wants; while freedom from fear can mean anything you like, and certainly would justify US invasion of any country whose government terrorizes US citizens, and possibly terrorizes anyone at all.

Thomas takes this political speech seriously. He takes adoption of various statements of rights and privileges seriously, as do most liberals. This is exactly the opposite of what went on in the Convention of 1787, where a group of well educated political leaders tried to come up with a Constitution that would actually deliver what it promised. They did pretty well, and we lived with those "negative rights" for two hundred years.

All of the great ideologies promise great things. Communism and Fascism were thoroughly tried. Of course they got caught up in World War II. Stalin chose to make common cause with Hitler, but then was betrayed, so Communism ended up on the correct side of that war; while Mussolini originally opposed Hitler's designs on Austria and tried to join the Allies, but was rebuffed and ended up in alliance with Hitler. Hitler was a National Socialist and publicly espoused the Socialist view of the world, but he added his own anti-Semitic and other irrational views to the Socialist/Fascist model. Fascism ended up on the wrong side of the war, and became intellectually disrespectful. Communism remains respectable despite its results.

Communism, Socialism and Fascism all promise "positive freedoms," as opposed to the boring old notion of the right to be left alone to be our own potty little selves and leaving gifts to charity.

Over time we have accepted some of the pragmatism of Roosevelt. We have Social Security and Medicare, and these are firmly established as part of the American System. We also have the Drug Enforcement Agency, Transportation Safety Agency, and the myriad of federal regulations including minimum wages, OSHA, Americans with Disabilities, FDA, some contradictory and all expensive. Perhaps all this is just as well, and perhaps it's a healthy trend; but surely there is room in the discussion for counter arguments? That leaving many of these matters to the states so they can experiment while allowing the freedom to go elsewhere (as was intended in the Constitution) may yet be a good idea? That we are headed in the wrong direction?

What the Left says it will give us as a freedom also gives others the obligations to pay for them; and with the new "freedom" comes the requirement to submit to the inevitable regulations that those who pay insist is part of the price of the freedom. Motorcycle helmets instantly come to mind. Prohibition of smoking is another. Restrictions on obesity is yet another logical condition of the gift of health care. Perhaps a good thing. I certainly wore a helmet when I had a motorcycle, this before California adopted a helmet law.

These are matters worth discussion, but they generally aren't discussed. Instead people shout out labels without the foggiest notion of what they mean. Huey Long said long ago that Fascism would come to the United States as an anti-fascist movement. He may have been prescient.

Meanwhile the rumor is that there is now a Health Care Bill before the Senate. We don't yet know what is in it. It's unlikely to be the "plan" Obama proposed; but perhaps so.
 
The Solution
by Bertolt Brecht

After the uprising of the 17th June
The Secretary of the Writers Union
Had leaflets distributed in the Stalinallee
Stating that the people
Had forfeited the confidence of the government
And could win it back only
By redoubled efforts. Would it not be easier
In that case for the government
To dissolve the people
And elect another?

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/11/us/11calif.html?_r=1&partner=rss&emc=rss

Top Judge Calls Calif. Government ‘Dysfunctional’
By JENNIFER STEINHAUER

LOS ANGELES — In a rare public rebuke of state government and policies delivered by a sitting judge, the chief justice of the California Supreme Court scathingly criticized the state’s reliance on the referendum process, arguing that it has “rendered our state government dysfunctional.”

In a speech Saturday before the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in Cambridge, Mass., the chief justice, Ronald M. George, denounced the widespread use of the referendum process to change state laws and constitutions. And he derided California as out of control, with voters deciding on everything from how parts of the state budget are spent to how farm animals are managed.

The state is unusual, he said, because it prohibits its Legislature from amending or repealing many types of laws without voter approval, essentially hamstringing that body — and the executive branch.

Justice George’s remarks come at a time of severe budget crisis in California stemming from a variety of factors, including mandates from ballot initiatives. Several groups on the left and the right are clamoring for changes to the state’s Constitution, including reining in of the direct democracy that has defined much of how the state operates.

This week, hundreds of people will convene in Sacramento for a conference on constitutional reform. A spokesman for Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger declined to comment on the justice’s speech.

Justice George said that perhaps the “most consequential” impact of the referendum process is that it limits “how elected officials may raise and spend revenue.” He added, “California’s lawmakers, and the state itself, have been placed in a fiscal straitjacket by a steep two-thirds-vote requirement — imposed at the ballot box — for raising taxes.”

He added: “Much of this constitutional and statutory structure has been brought about not by legislative fact-gathering and deliberation, but rather by the approval of voter initiative measures, often funded by special interests. These interests are allowed under the law to pay a bounty to signature-gatherers for each signer. Frequent amendments — coupled with the implicit threat of more in the future — have rendered our state government dysfunctional, at least in times of severe economic decline.”

Beyond budget matters, Justice George, a Republican appointed by Gov. Pete Wilson in 1991, was critical of a 2008 voter initiative that ended same-sex marriage in California. In May 2008 the Supreme Court struck down the state’s statutes limiting marriage to opposite-sex couples, with an opinion written by Justice George citing a 1948 decision that reversed the state’s interracial marriages ban.

But in the November elections that year, a ballot measure known as Proposition 8 amended the constitution to override the court.

Citing a successful ballot initiative that same Election Day that regulated the confinement of fowl in coops, Justice George said, “Chickens gained valuable rights in California on the same day that gay men and lesbians lost them.”

He added, “The court over which I preside frequently is called upon to resolve legal challenges to voter initiatives. Needless to say, we incur the displeasure of the voting public when, in the course of performing our constitutional duties as judges, we are compelled to invalidate such a measure.”

He fell short of being prescriptive, and spoke warily of a constitutional convention. But he said, “At a minimum, in order to avoid such a loss, Californians may need to consider some fundamental reform of the voter initiative process. Otherwise, I am concerned, we shall continue on a course of dysfunctional state government, characterized by a lack of accountability on the part of our officeholders as well as the voting public.”

Reader William Harrington emails:

[
    In your post you comment that the judge is stating the obvious in calling California government dysfunctional. But it’s important to note that he apparently doesn’t consider the elected officials to be dysfunctional. Instead, he blames the voters. Government is dysfunctional in the judge’s eyes principally because California voters, using the referendum process, created a requirement of a supermajority to raise taxes and consequently “California’s lawmakers, and the state itself, have been placed in a fiscal straitjacket by a steep two-thirds-vote requirement — imposed at the ballot box — for raising taxes.”

    It apparently didn’t occur to the judge that Californians might not want to make it easy for their legislature to enact confiscatory taxes, or that California’s fiscal mess could be resolved through cuts to profligate spending rather than to continue to shovel ever-increasing amounts of taxpayer dollars into government’s gaping maw. Rather, he sees the voters and the referendum process as impediments to unrestrained government spending.

    It’s astonishing to see how many of our public officials appear to be firmly convinced that the people work for the government, and not the other way around.
 
Final proof that Fascism is the philosophy of the Left:

http://pajamasmedia.com/richardfernandez/2009/10/26/alone/

Alone

Shannon Love at Chicago Boyz surveys the British political scene and muses on whether the recent rise of the British National Party tells us anything about how a European society can be infatuated with the Left one year and switch over to fascism in a relatively short period.

Via Instapundit comes a disturbing report that one-fifth of the British electorate would consider voting for the British Nationalist Party (BNP), which is considered by almost everyone left or right to be a genuine fascist party.

How did Britain come to this state?

Simple, the current liberal order has proven itself ineffective in addressing many of the major problems that Britain faces. As I wrote three years ago, liberal orders don’t slowly evolve into authoritarian ones. Instead, they become less and less effective until they suddenly collapse into an authoritarian order. People simply lose faith that the liberal order can function and they throw their support behind an authoritarian order just to survive.

If fascism and Left wing socialism share most of their political DNA then this process is easy to understand. When the vital 5% — or whatever crucially differentiates them — flips then one becomes the other. The BNP is not a ‘conservative party’ in the American mold. It is essentially a racist but economically Left wing organization which accepts a large state role in managing the economy. Where it differs with the Left is for whose benefit the economy should be managed. For the Left the answer is: for the benefit of what it defines to be the historical victim — Muslims, immigrants from former colonies and people with special sexual needs. For the BNP the answer to the question is: for the benefit of the poor white; the indigene; the people who have lived in the British isles. The Left correctly accuses the BNP of dividing the nation. What it fails to recognize is that the BNP is simply paying them back in their own coin. This exchange of toxic currency has set up a zero sum game. It has cast the Left as the champions of one side and the BNP is happily casting itself as the champions of the other.

Britain faces major problems with a permanent economic underclass, low economic mobility, illegal immigration and a large, vocal and often violent unassimilated Islamic subculture. The native working class in particular feels squeezed by economic competition from low-cost immigrants. More importantly, they have seen themselves relegated in social status to the bottom of the heap. Much as in America, where the once-venerated rural poor are now despised and ignored “rednecks,” lower-income white Britons now see themselves pushed aside and spit on in favor of the left fawning over illegal immigrants and Muslims.

The BNP could scoop up a lot of support if it could slow down illegal immigration. Doing so would give an immediate economic boost to Britain’s native low-skilled workers. Even easier, they could no doubt pick up a lot of support merely by treating low-income white Britons with respect and by putting them at the center of their policy recommendations.

By smearing as racist everyone concerned with illegal immigration and the overboard tolerance for radical Islam, the British left is desensitizing everyone to the legitimate charge when it is directed at the BNP. People think, “Well, I’m concerned about illegal immigration, Islamists, the white poor, etc., and I’m not a racist so maybe the BNP isn’t either.” The overuse of the left’s catch-all denunciation deprives it of meaning and force. People may simply stop listening to the left’s warnings because they’ve so many times labeled people with legitimate concerns as racist. By their own narcissism, self-righteousness and contempt, the left is actively driving people to fascist solutions just as their more radical ideological ancestors did back in the 1920s.

Worse, entire generations of Britons have been conditioned to believe that the state has a moral obligation to care for them cradle-to-grave. It is a short step from there to the belief that the government has a moral obligation to care for native Britons first and foremost before all others. Such a longstanding belief in Germany certainly made National Socialism an easy sell to the German working class and poor.

If the mainstream parties cannot address the real concerns of many Britons, and if they cannot at least pretend to respect and value lower-income white Britons, then Britain may be only one ugly incident away from a political seismic shift. A major native Islamic terrorist attack or an immigrant riot might be all it takes to push Britain over the edge. Other European nations are at risk as well, for the same reasons.

Leaks which showed how Labour intentionally flooded Britain with immigrants in order to gain a permanent political majority and rub multiculturalism in the faces of poor whites has provoked a storm of outrage in the UK.  It plays directly into the BNP narrative of invasion abetted by leftist treason.  The Telegraph reported that “Labour threw open Britain’s borders to mass immigration to help socially engineer a ‘truly multicultural’ country, a former Government adviser has revealed.” But it was manner in which the plan was sugar-coated which rankled the most. It was, if the leaks are to be believed, an ideological conspiracy sold as a plan to bolster the economy.  It’s almost as if the Left set out to paint itself in the very same colors the BNP wanted it to don.

Writing in the Evening Standard, he revealed the “major shift” in immigration policy came after the publication of a policy paper from the Performance and Innovation Unit, a Downing Street think tank based in the Cabinet Office, in 2001.

He wrote a major speech for Barbara Roche, the then immigration minister, in 2000, which was largely based on drafts of the report.

He said the final published version of the report promoted the labour market case for immigration but unpublished versions contained additional reasons, he said.

He wrote: “Earlier drafts I saw also included a driving political purpose: that mass immigration was the way that the Government was going to make the UK truly multicultural.

“I remember coming away from some discussions with the clear sense that the policy was intended – even if this wasn’t its main purpose – to rub the Right’s nose in diversity and render their arguments out of date.”

The “deliberate policy”, from late 2000 until “at least February last year”, when the new points based system was introduced, was to open up the UK to mass migration, he said.

What the Left and Fascism share is a belief in the transformative power of the state. Both regard government as the “high ground” of society and not, as some Americans still believe, simply a necessary evil. It is a prize to be seized by main force; the castle to be stormed. In the long run there is little reason to think that Nick Griffin will allow any more freedom than Gordon Brown. What is likely to happen is the substitution of one set of sacred cows for another. When the Left and fascists contend for power, the surveillance cameras are in every case fully employed.

One of the commenters at Chicago Boyz writes, “A friend of mine is a professor of Surgery and Anatomy in London. He has told me he is very concerned about the number of young women converts to Islam who are medical students. These women, like the louts in the Dalrymple books, are not from immigrant families. Why an educated young woman would convert to Islam is a real puzzle. Maybe they are seeking structure but I expect it will come at a high price. The other side of that coin may be the BNP voters.” Maybe this infatuation with Islam should not be surprising: if the central role of the state is accepted, then the only question is what the character of that authority will be: Islamic, Communist or Fascist. When you come to it, who cares? It is the same dog with a different collar. And perhaps the young ladies are simply choosing Islam on the basis of fashion. It’s as good a reason as any.
 
Movies as a means of teaching....or not

http://reason.com/archives/2000/06/01/hollywoods-missing-movies

Hollywood's Missing Movies
Why American films have ignored life under communism.

Kenneth Lloyd Billingsley from the June 2000 issue

Every so often someone in Hollywood uses his power to break the movie colony's rules. Consider this year's Total Eclipse. Odd as it may seem, this is the first serious American film set against the background of the 1939 Nazi-Soviet Pact, the deal that allied Europe's two totalitarian powers against the West and helped plunge the world into war. With an ally on the eastern front, Hitler sent his Panzers west while Stalin helped himself to the Baltic states and invaded Finland. A film like this could easily have turned out as big a didactic dud as the Rev. Sun Myung Moon's 1982 bomb, Inchon, with Laurence Olivier as Gen. Douglas MacArthur. But this time the verisimilitude of the script, carried by some outstanding performances, is the source of the film's dramatic power.

Dustin Hoffman's persuasive portrayal of Soviet dictator Josef Stalin obviously emerges from his close study of how power and perversity converged in the dictator. Likewise, Jurgen Prochnow sparkles as Hitler's foreign minister, Joachim Von Ribbentrop, and so does Robert Duvall as Vyacheslav Molotov, his Soviet counterpart. Duvall's delivery of Molotov's line that "fascism is a matter of taste" is a key moment, and deserves at least as much admiration as Duvall's famous quip from Apocalypse Now about the smell of napalm in the morning. The Molotov speech has drawn some objections for being over the top, but it was not invented by screenwriter William Goldman (Marathon Man); it's an actual quote.

The sheer unexpectedness of the film is almost as shocking as its content. In one of the film's more chilling sequences, the Soviets hand over a number of German Communists, Jews who had taken refuge in Moscow, to the Gestapo. Modern audiences may find this surprising, but that incident too is taken from the historical record. Indeed, former KGB officials are credited as advisers on the film, whose cast also includes some of their actual victims.

There has simply been nothing like it on the screen in six decades. It has taken that long for moviegoers to see Soviet forces invading Poland and meeting their Nazi counterparts. Audiences would likely be similarly surprised by cinematic treatments of Cuban prisons, the Khmer Rouge genocide, and the bloody campaigns of Ethiopia's Stalinist Col. Mengistu, all still awaiting attention from Hollywood.

Total Eclipse is rated PG-13 for violence, particularly graphic in some of the mass murder scenes, images of starving infants from Stalin's 1932 forced famine in the Ukraine, and the torture of dissidents. Director Steven Spielberg (Schindler's List) deftly cuts from the Moscow trials to the torture chambers of the Lubyanka. More controversial are the portrayals of American communists during the period of the Pact. They are shown here picketing the White House, calling President Roosevelt a warmonger, and demanding that America stay out of the "capitalist war" in Europe. Harvey Keitel turns in a powerful performance as American Communist boss Earl Browder, and Linda Hunt brings depth to Lillian Hellman, who, when Hitler attacks the USSR in September of 1939, actually did cry out, "The motherland has been invaded."

Painstakingly accurate and filled with historical surprises, this film is so refreshing, so remarkable, that even at 162 minutes it seems too short.

Never heard of Total Eclipse? It hasn't been produced or even written. In all likelihood, such a film has never even been contemplated, at least in Hollywood. Indeed, in the decade since the Berlin Wall fell, or even the decade before that, no Hollywood film has addressed the actual history of communism, the agony of the millions whose lives were poisoned by it, and the century of international deceit that obscured communist reality. The simple but startling truth is that the major conflict of our time, democracy versus Marxist-Leninist totalitarianism--what The New York Times recently called "the holy war of the 20th century"--is almost entirely missing from American cinema. It is as though since 1945, Hollywood had produced little or nothing about the victory of the Allies and the crimes of National Socialism. This void is all the stranger since the major conflict of our time would seem to be a natural draw for Hollywood.

More on link
 
Without comment:

http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/11/the_left_and_terror.html

The left and terror
By J.R. Dunn

The Jihadis will return. We know this, in the same way that we know about death and taxes. Thanks in large part to the weakening of our defensive efforts under the new administration, there will be further attacks against this country's population, perhaps even worse than those of 9/11.  (This week's attack by Nidal Malik Hasan serves to underline the threat.)

When this attack occurs, we will see an end to all the nonsense. Our present drift regarding terror policy is occurring only because Americans have been encouraged to put unpleasant realities at a distance, to live in a dream world where all the bad stuff happens to other people. 9/11 has ceased to signify. Terrorism has become a matter of bad manners. As my grandfather might have put it, this country is in for a rude awakening.

When it comes (and sad to say, it will need to be even worse than the Hassan attack) people will want answers and action. They will get both. Few things move faster than a frightened politician, particularly a politician frightened by his own constituents. Fearful pols will see to it that current efforts to undermine American security will come to an abrupt halt. The law enforcement paradigm will be overturned. The attempts to "Mirandize" Islamist terrorists -- to turn them into esoteric versions of American street criminals, protected by the same legal constraints -- will cease. Contingent efforts to criminalize American security officials doing their best to protect the country will be curtailed. All the deeply complex questions fabricated over the past few years will be abruptly simplified.

But there is one thing that will not be addressed: the role of the American left.

The American left is unparalleled at wriggling out of deadly cul-de-sacs of its own creation. Consider how many times since the Vietnam War this country's left has involved itself in activities that in saner epochs would have resulted in lengthy jail sentences. Support for the Sandinistas and the Salvadoran FMLN, the Nuclear Freeze movement (a KGB operation from start to finish), cooperation with Palestinian and related terrorist groups. In each case, the left continued its involvement until the bitter end; and in each case skipped off with no consequences. This offhand attitude toward sedition has its roots in the excesses of the witch-hunt era. The aura of martyrdom donned by the left since the early 50s has bought them a free pass for over half a century.

The myth concerning the left and the terror conflict asserts that American leftists pulled together with the rest of the country until such Republican Saurons as Cheney, Rove, Ashcroft, and their puppet W simply went too far: persecuting innocent citizens, impugning the Constitutional rights of the poor Jihadis, and shocking the world with their viciousness and brutality. As the sole exemplars of moral purity in the millennial world, the left had no choice but to begin "speaking truth to power".

My own experience suggests otherwise. In September 2001 I had a part-time position as copy-editor for a small but well-known national magazine. Within days of 9/11 -- and I mean days; not weeks or months -- while the smoke was still rising, I began receiving copy containing pieces suggesting that the terrorists -- Moussaoui in particular -- were poor, misunderstood victims in need of therapy. That there was far more to the event than appeared -- one short piece contained the first suggestion I saw of what was to become known as the "Truther" movement. But possibly the worst was a call for the assassination of John Ashcroft by one of the magazine's regular writers. Calling the editor's attention to this, I was told that it was not necessarily Ashcroft, since the writer did not mention his full name. (It was "John A.", or something of that sort.)

I simply exploded. I've seen a lot from lefties - we all have. There's no limit to their nastiness, their vindictiveness, their callousness. It's this lack of everyday morality that truly distinguishes them from the mass of Americans. So I shouldn't have been shocked. But I was, and I was not willing to accept it. My main gig at the time was five blocks from the WTC, and hundreds of people I had known in passing were no longer of this earth. My patience for the kind of thing I was seeing was strictly limited.

I wrote a short memo outlining my objections. What I got in reply was a blast of vituperation accusing me of slander, McCarthyism, and promoting censorship. That last was quite true; that's exactly what I was doing. But wartime changes things -- certain activities that are perfectly acceptable in times of peace have to go by the board. Or did (editor's name here) really think that he'd breeze through airport security as usual on his next business trip?

In the midst of the exchange I received further copy. It contained more of the same. I sent it back with an ultimatum. I got more abuse in reply, and so I walked.

That's how it looked from my small corner. No lag time, no hesitation -- left-of-center writers knew what was required of them and produced it. There were similar signs on the wider public stage -- Michael Moore berating the Jihadis for their choice of targets, Some obtuse blurt from Susan Sontag. That nameless pol in San Francisco blaming America first. But much of the left decided the better part of valor lay in keeping their mouths shut -- courage is not a widely-displayed trait in that crowd either.

Of course, it didn't remain that way. First came the niggling over the Patriot Act, followed by Fahrenheit 911, the incisive foreign policy analyses of Ward Churchill, and Cindy Sheehan's assorted campouts. But it was Iraq that proved to be the crack through which the left wriggled back to its accustomed status. Abu Ghraib was the fulcrum by which leftists were able to turn public trust and support of the anti-terror campaign to nagging doubt. Justified shock and disgust at the Abu Ghraib photos was amplified by the media in their expert fashion. Within months, such doubts had expanded to include not only the war effort in Iraq, but the overall conduct of the war against terror. Rarely has the misbehavior of a few malcontent backwoodsmen had such heavy consequences.

Not a single aspect of the U.S. policy was left unaffected. The foreign wiretapping program ("listening in on U.S. citizens"), the bank surveillance effort, the terrorist rendition program, and of course Gitmo, all received the Abu Ghraib treatment. Those images of tormented Iraqi prisoners had a deep and extended impact: if Abu Ghraib could happen, why couldn't all the rest happen too? That quivering sense of doubt was all the left needed to put themselves back in the sedition business big time.

We know where it led to. We have reached the point where successful programs are being abandoned, where national defense has taken a back seat, and where decent men out to protect their homes and fellow citizens are being targeted for legal sanction. The left has gained a shoddy and partial triumph. Though they could not destroy the despised Bush administration or throw away Iraq, they have the consolation prize of shutting down all those evil programs and betraying the people of Afghanistan. No fall of Saigon or Watergate this time around, but they'll make do.

There is only one way this will end: people are going to die. Americans will be killed in large numbers and under the most horrifying circumstances in attacks that could very likely have been prevented. And when this occurs -- as it must -- what will the left do? The same as they did after 9/11. Grab a kid-size American flag from somebody else's hand and stand waving it frantically until the moment of potential retribution is safely past.

What motivates this kind of behavior? The answer lies in the leftist worldview, which is simplicity itself. (It has to be simple, designed as it is to be comprehended by workers, peasants, and college students.) The world is divided into oppressors and victims, with history a dialectical struggle between the two. The oppressor is anyone who holds power, the victims everyone else. By definition, the U.S., as the worlds reigning power, is an oppressor state. In fact, the greatest of all oppressor states, worse than Assyria, worse than Rome, worse than Hitler's Germany, because it has craftily convinced much of the world that it is no such thing.

As for the Jihadis, they are victims in arms -- revolutionaries acting against the imperial state, like the Viet Cong and the Sandinistas before them. Islam, reactionary politics, contempt for women -- none of that matters, as long as they are active against the common enemy. And the role of the Western leftist is to support and assist these heroes, exactly as occurred with all the revolutionary movements in the past. By "speaking out", by "defying authority", and above all by undercutting any efforts to combat the new revolutionary vanguard. But what of the real victims, you ask, all the innocents left scattered like broken, burnt dolls in New York, and Bali, and London, and Madrid? "Little Eichmanns", in the immortal words of the renowned plagiarist, Ward Churchill. Or perhaps you prefer ancient the leftist slogan: "You can't make an omelet without breaking a few eggs.

Clearly, American leftists cannot act otherwise. They can never be truly patriotic in the real sense, in the sense of sacrifice and overcoming doubts, of valuing their country as a larger expression of family and neighborhood. To ask that of them is to ask them to give up their higher allegiance, to demand that they stop being leftists, stop being progressives, stop being the world's holy fools. And that is to ask too much.

This is a historically unique situation, a product of the modern temperament. Never before would effective treason by a large minority have been tolerated, particularly involving such crucial sectors as media, academia, and education. This is not a stable condition, and it cannot be maintained for long. There is no reason why it should be.

So how do we respond? We'll pause here to allow the loud cry of "Hang ‘em all!" to roll over us and commend everyone involved for their enthusiasm, if not their prescription. But what we need, though perhaps not as final, is something effective and workable within with contemporary social norms.

The first step is not to buy their story. There is nothing wrong with the fact that we believed the left the first time around -- it involved an unprecedented event. They assured us that 9/11 was different, a good war, the war against reaction, that they could support in good conscience. We were obliged to listen -- they were fellow citizens, after all, those who had died screaming amid flames their friends and acquaintances as well. But now we know it as a lie, one that they will inevitably repeat. So we must turn away. And that can be a problem. Understanding the limitations of human nature, conservatives have a tendency to hand out second chances whether deserved or not. This is commendable under most circumstances, but not these, not when lives are at stake. We yank drunk drivers out of cars; we must also yank leftists out of the public sphere.

The second step is to identify them. Call them out by name, relentlessly and repeatedly. Note how scarcely a day goes by without some (often dozens) of disparaging references to Gov. Palin. The left knows how this is done, how to assure that the public overlooks nothing and forgets nothing. Turnabout is fair play. Again, conservatives tend to be squeamish, to hesitate before pointing fingers. There is no excuse for that here. As the old saying goes: don't bring a knife to a gun fight.

The third step is to target them, isolate them and render them harmless. The question is how we go about it. The left itself may well have put the weapon in our hands. The attacks against Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck, and Rush Limbaugh, among many others, have been so noxious and vicious as to change the way such tactics are currently received. The public has become hardened to such attacks. Much is accepted now that would not have been accepted even a few years ago. We need to take advantage of this. Ask questions, poke around, find out where the bones are buried and use the shovel. The left threw out the rulebook: now they need to pay the consequences. (This is not unprecedented. In fact, it's a historical commonplace. Few are aware that Joe McCarthy was supported by the Communist Party in his Senate run -- the CPUSA loathed his opponent, Robert LaFollette, Jr., as the son of one of their deadliest enemies during the Progressive era. The Tailgunner is supposed to have studied their tactics of bullying and humiliation with interest.)

Van Jones should act as our model. A few years ago, it wouldn't have mattered that Jones was associated with a nut cult like the Truthers. Now everything matters, and everything goes under the microscope. Jones was a critical figure to the administration, one for whom they were willing to put their reputations on the line to save. It made no difference. Once exposed, and hammered, and spotlighted, he was shown the door and wished luck with his further endeavors. For this outcome, he has no one to thank but his own comrades on the left.

Need we ask if all of them have something hidden, something they'd truly rather not see in the light of day? They all do. Consider Barney Frank. Consider Bill Ayers. Consider Ward Churchill. Under the old dispensation, he might well have been given a pass for his more vicious remarks under "freedom of expression" as understood in this fallen age. But that wasn't all -- far from it. Ward turned out to be a plagiarist, hustler, cheat, and poser of master status. When it all poured out, even as left-wing a campus as Boulder had to cut him loose.

Nobody on the planet earth quite equals the left for simple worldly corruption. The Renaissance princes might have been able to teach them a thing or two, but nobody else. Dig, and you will find. While digging, we might wish that things were different, that we could operate in as civil a manner as many of us would prefer. But we are not at the moment living in a civil epoch. No one reading these words ever has. We know of such a world once -- where decency is honored and nobility is a way of life, only because we have read about it. We are living in a different period now, a period in which our opponents feel completely at home. We cannot allow ourselves to be backed down by thugs such as these. To paraphrase Boccaccio: any tactic against such would-be tyrants is legitimate.

There is a difference between dissent and desertion, criticism and undermining. That difference has been lost amid a fog of relativism in the past few decades. But behind that fog, the hard stone of reality remains. It's no longer a game. People are going to die because of the actions taken by this country's leftists. Recognizing those differences has become a matter of life and death. 

The terror conflict is a two-front war. It always has been, as reluctant as we have been to admit it. The time to open the second front is coming.
 
A satirical(?) look:

http://www.thepeoplescube.com/red/viewtopic.php?t=4309&start=0&postdays=0&postorder=asc&highlight=

Local Man Claims Responsibility For Own Problems 
By Opiate of the People
11/7/2009, 10:42 pm

In an odd exposé that has left the worlds of politics and academia abuzz, a local homeless person revealed yesterday that he only blamed himself for his failures. The incident occurred near the dumpster behind the Shop Rite store in Brooklyn, when Willard Kookish, formerly of 435 Subprime Lane in Nutly, NJ, casually told a reporter that "my problems are my own fault." The veteran New York Times reporter Ken McLiar, who has been searching area dumpsters for a 3,785-part series on people who are homeless due to the evils of American capitalism, admits he was astonished by Mr. Kookish's bizarre confession. When asked to elaborate, Mr. Kookish went on to say, "I went through college drinking and smoking dope and never learned anything. I've had many job opportunities but didn't bother to show up. My family left me a nice house to live in but I took out home equity loans on it and spent the money on hookers and gambling. When the housing boom collapsed I lost everything. I made bad decisions and here I am bearing the consequences."
~

The startling revelation has left many in the community troubled by what it may portend for society at large. "It should be illegal to talk like that", said Marge Stumpko, an angered low-wage waitress from Lower Skunkworks, NY. "Aren't we all our brother's keepers? Is that all you're leaving for my tip, turdface?"

Floyd Grabbuck, a community organizer from Chicago, furiously described Mr. Kookish's statement as "un-American and downright traitorous," suggesting that "If that ungrateful rat-bastard doesn't like how we do things in this country, maybe he should move to a place like Russia where the government doesn't care for its subjects and see how he likes it there."

Eddie Fuppish, a mismarked ballot corrector from Franken, Minnesota, sounded more conciliatory: "The poor man needs help. Anybody that takes responsibility for his own actions is certifiably insane. Just look at all the big businesses selling you stuff for money. Don't tell me you are in control of your own spending or anything else for that matter. You're not. That's why I vote Democratic and make sure other people do the same, even if they didn't mark their ballots that way. It's the right thing to do. People need to be protected."

Experts, on whom the incompetent depend to explain the complicated world they fail to understand, are unanimous. "It's Reagan's fault," says Professor Wilton Chumpley, a consulting sociologist from the University of Twerp in Belgium. "Remember how in the 1980s that actor-president mislead people into thinking they could spend their own money and run their own lives without expert help? And then you had that crackpot economist Milton Friedman falsely claiming that the government shouldn't be responsible for directing people's existence. It made less sense than the UFO stories, at least for smart people like myself. But, tragically, some fools took it seriously; it ruined their lives."

President Obama has not commented publicly on the controversy but has privately told aides that "former President Bush is not getting off the hook for the economy, the War in Iraq, Hurricane Katrina or Willard Kookish's failures on my watch." Sources speculate that Kookish's mortgage default will be added to the list of indictable offenses against former Bush Administration officials.

Reverend Al Sharpton excoriated Kookish's "arrogant fantasy," calling it "blame the victim" rhetoric from the right and predicting that the incident would set race relations in the US back fifty years, even though Kookish is white. "It don't matter who the victim is, it's who's doing the blaming that makes it wrong," Sharpton said.

Regardless of the troubling short-term fallout from the incident, the long term trends are clear. "We need to make people understand they don't matter," stated House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. "Having become cogs in the huge state machine, they can't be allowed to think independently and control their lives; that's what we're here for." Pelosi stressed the inevitability of new taxes and government programs in order to liberate people from such delusions. "People like Willard Kookish better get this through their thick skulls: it's not their fault, it's society's. And that's why they need President Obama and the Democrat-controlled Congress to subdue this country in order to fix it."
 
Most sorry Enlightened One for I scored a paltry 610  >:D ;D
 
I am obviously mellowing for I scored 560. But that was without closing the disengaged eye.
 
345 - Do I need to increase this score in order to keep posting, or just do some sort of penance?
 
Score 380.  I liked this question:

29. If your home is invaded by a burglar, how would you most likely respond?

Of course, I chose "I would aim for the head".  :threat:
 
The lowdown on this administration's attempt to create the "Minisry of Truth". Lots of embedded links in article

http://bighollywood.breitbart.com/pcourrielche/2009/12/01/new-documents-reveal-white-house-nea-had-big-plans-in-motion-before-being-exposed/

NEW DOCUMENTS REVEAL: White House, NEA Had Big Plans In Motion Before Being Exposed
by Patrick Courrielche

Inciting is usually a telegraphed endeavor, with rhetoric yelled to an audience through a megaphone held by a coarse, weathered hand. But it can also be delivered subtly, with a soft voice and a wink, in the name of doing good.

Subtlety is necessary if a federal agency intends to incite activists to take action on the hot issues of the moment. This approach is what we see when we look at the most recent documents acquired by a Freedom of Information Act  (FOIA) request of the controversial August 10th conference call.

President Obama with Former NEA Communication Director Yosi Sergant

Readers of Big Hollywood may recall an article published in late August entitled “National Endowment for the Art of Persuasion?” that described an August 10th conference call organized by the White House, the NEA, and the Corporation for National and Community Service. As stated during the conference call, the goal was to bring together a group of pro-Obama artists to push the President and his agenda, with United We Serve as the first proposed effort. During the call, Yosi Sergant, then Communications Director for the NEA, encouraged artists to create art on the vehemently debated issues of health care, energy, and the environment.

In the newly obtained documents, Nell Abernathy, a representative of The Corporation, is shown providing the handpicked moderator a list of “concrete asks” to be emailed to the call participants following the conference call. The first concrete ask in the document [document 1] included volunteering on issues that were closely related to legislation being vehemently debated nationally:

“Serve in your community. You are probably already working to improve health care or green a neighborhood. Reach out to friends, colleagues and fans to serve with you. Ask five to pledge to serve with you.” 

Health Care Reform and Cap-and-Trade legislation were both being intensely debated in Congress in August, causing town hall meetings at the time to go nuclear over the proposed health-care legislation. Democrats were widely viewed as losing the debate. Asking a stacked group of pro-Obama art activists to address these issues could only lead to policy advocacy – and it did, as we have shown (here & here).

The new documents also show that other efforts were underway. In response [document 2] to the “concrete asks” document, an artist that participated in the call sent the following (emphasis added):

“We’ve been doing a lot of brainstorming about how we can add our skillset to this effort, and here are some of our thoughts…Making prints that subtly encourage the progressive agenda. Health care, Employee free choice, immigration, energy conservation, etc.”

This is the type of propaganda art that Big Hollywood helped stop by publishing the article. The response was sent by a talented print designer (Tugboat Printshops) prior to, but on the same day that, the article was published.

In addition to this email, other documents [documents 4] show that multiple events were in the planning phase leading up to the publication of the article – however all dialogue was abruptly halted the day after its publication. The events revealed in the FOIA documents include a Los Angeles event with hip-hop and indie-rock artists, and a film-screening event with on-air promotions led by Al Gore’s Current TV.

In addition to terminating discussions on these events, the article also halted the NEA’s involvement in another conference call scheduled for August 27th and moderated by Americans for the Arts, a NEA grant recipient. In an email [document 3] dated August 26th, Sergant stated:

“in light of the current situation…I am reviewing the current situation with my team and may or may not be able to participate in the upcoming [United We Serve] call. I will let you know shortly.”

The NEA ultimately did not participate on the conference call due to the article, a fact that was correctly guessed by Lee Rosenbaum, a participant on the August 27th call. One can only wonder how different that call may have been had the NEA participated.

Ultimately Sergant was forced to resign from his post at the NEA and the White House issued conduct guidelines to address the “appearance” issues of the call. However the White House and the NEA both claimed that no laws were violated in this effort.

The obvious question is – if the NEA, the Corporation, and the White House weren’t doing anything wrong, why did this activity abruptly stop?
 
Magical thinking guides progressives everywhere:

http://hotair.com/archives/2009/12/06/government-by-wishful-thinking/

Government by Wishful Thinking
posted at 6:00 pm on December 6, 2009 by Steven Den Beste 

Share on Facebook | printer-friendly Way back in the depths of time, Greek philosophers ended up with two basic and incompatible ways of looking at the universe. One way was materialism, which says that there is a material universe which behaves in a consistent way, and if you study it you can learn the way it works.

That’s the world view of engineers and scientists — and businessmen, for that matter. It’s the world view of people who understand and use mathematics, and statistics. It is a place where cause leads to effect. It’s the place that game theory studies. It isn’t necessarily inherently atheistic; a lot of religious people live in the materialist world.
But there are people who don’t. A different epistemological view is teleology, which says that the universe is an ideal place. More or less, it exists so that we humans can live in it. And human thought is a fundamental force in the universe. Teleology says that if a mental model is esthetically pleasing then it must be true. Teleology implies that if you truly believe in something, it’ll happen. Wikipedia says:
A teleological school of thought is one that holds all things to be designed for or directed toward a final result, that there is an inherent purpose or final cause for all that exists.
And in its modern form that final result is presumed to be creation of a world of peace and harmony, a utopia, in which all men live in peace and brotherhood, in harmony with nature.

At least, that’s the distorted form of Teleology that has come down to some of us in the modern era, mainly on the left wing. Aristotle probably wouldn’t recognize his red-headed step child as it exists today, though. Like many philosophically pure ideas adopted into popular culture, it’s gotten mutated nearly beyond recognition and almost all the mutations were negative.

One way to compare and contrast those two world views is to consider what they think about socialism. Materialists look at history since Marx and point out that socialism has been tried many times, in many nations, in various forms, and it has always failed. In places where it was fully implemented the result was decline and economic collapse. When it was only partially implemented you got slower decline. It often looks like it’s working in the early stages, but in the longer term it has never succeeded.
So to materialists, it’s apparent that socialism is a nice idea, but one that doesn’t work and shouldn’t be adopted.

To teleologists, none of that matters. What matters is the fact that it’s a beautiful idea. It’s how things should be. In a world in which socialism was implemented and which worked the way the teleologists think it should work, you really would have a utopia. The fact that it’s invariably failed when used doesn’t change any of that. (When asked to explain all the failures, usually the answer is, “They didn’t do it right.” But for teleologists, a long string of failures doesn’t matter because fundamentally teleologists don’t believe things like that make any difference.)

It’s teleologists who drive around with bumper stickers that say, “Imagine world peace.” I can imagine it just fine. I don’t expect to see it in my lifetime, though. Why would they want me to imagine it?

It’s because teleologists believe that human thought truly affects things. Of course it does; thought precedes action, and actions change history, right? Yeah, but that’s not the point. Teleologists believe that thought directly affects things. The mere act of thinking about something and wanting it a lot directly changes reality, even if the thought doesn’t get translated into action.

It was teleologists who were mainly involved in the anti-war movement about five years ago when it was at its greatest. I remember reading about how they’d have a demonstration somewhere. Lots of people would come out. They’d parade about carrying signs saying, “End the war!” Someone would burn a giant mockup of President Bush’s head. And afterwards they’d all talk about how successful the demonstration had been.
Successful how? It didn’t have any political effect that I ever noticed. The war didn’t end because of the demonstrations. So what was it that they thought was successful? Well, if you asked them they’d talk about how there was all sorts of positive vibes. How good it felt to be out there. And how so many people were feeling the same thing. Which sounds like masturbation, if you’re a materialist, but genuinely makes sense for a teleologist. They really thought that if enough of them got together and wanted the war to end strongly enough, it would spontaneously end. Not because getting enough voters on their side would have electoral consequences, but because the act of wanting it would directly bring that about.

To a materialist this sounds like insanity. It is, as Chip Morningstar memorably put it, “epistemologically challenged”. And it doesn’t survive real world test. But to teleologists, “real world tests” don’t matter. The teleological world view inherently rejects all of that stuff.

Why does teleology (in this mutated form) matter? Because right now we have a teleologist as our President.

Matthew Continetti says that we’re in “a year of magical thinking.” And to someone who has grown up with a materialist view of the universe, it could certainly seem that way. But what’s really going on is that Obama has this kind of world view. And that explains everything he’s done.

It explains his foreign policy. To a teleologists, it just makes sense that everyone should want to get along. If you unclench your fist and hold out your hand, everyone else will unclench their fists, and become your friends. So Obama is doing that, and as we know the result has been a shambles.

It explains his economic policy. Teleologists inherently don’t believe in unintended side effects when it comes to implementing their idealistic policies. Obviously it should be possible to provide free health care to everyone without wrecking the economy; it’s just how things really should be, so that’s how it will be. Where will the money come from? That’s the kind of question that materialists ask; teleologists don’t concern themselves with such trivial. It’ll happen somehow, because it’s obviously how it should turn out. To say we shouldn’t do it is to be heartless, uncaring — and those things are more important than mundane claims that it won’t work. If you just believe, it will work.

Of course, it won’t work. The materialists are right about that. But when it fails (if it gets tried) the teleologists will blame the negative vibes of all the materialist doubters for the failure. If only they’d come on board and supported it, then it would have come out OK.
It explains his dealings with Congress in general. He has been telling Congress in very general terms what he wants from them, and seems to think that this is all he really has to do. He wants the bills enough so that Congress will spontaneously create exactly the bills he wants and send them to him as soon as he says. Nothing else need be done by him except to want them.

The teleological world view on the left has been a factor in American politics to a greater or lesser extent since the 1960’s, but this is the first time it was largely in control. And the most likely outcome of it is to make most Americans understand just how deeply worthless, and outright damaging, it is. Which, in the long run, will be very good for America.

The only concern is that we can come through the remaining three years of Obama’s first (and almost certainly his only) term of office without sustaining irreparable damage. If Congress had moved at the speed Obama wanted them to, we might have suffered such damage, but now that we’ve almost made it through his first year and are moving into an election year, with public opinion polls moving strongly against Obama and his policies, I am becoming cautiously optimistic that we can survive this.

This post was promoted from GreenRoom to HotAir.com.
To see the comments on the original post, look here.
 
Here we see how the "Progressives" treat young minds:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1234906/State-schools-admit-push-gifted-pupils-dont-want-promote-elitism.html#

State schools admit they do not push gifted pupils because they don't want to promote 'elitism'

By Laura Clark
Last updated at 9:30 AM on 11th December 2009

As many as three-quarters of state schools are failing to push their brightest pupils because teachers are reluctant to promote 'elitism', an Ofsted study says today.

Many teachers are not convinced of the importance of providing more challenging tasks for their gifted and talented pupils.

Bright youngsters told inspectors they were forced to ask for harder work. Others were resentful at being dragooned into 'mentoring' weaker pupils.

Previous studies have pointed to a widespread ideological reluctance in schools and local authorities to champion academic excellence (file photo)

In nearly three-quarters of 26 schools studied, pupils designated as being academically gifted or talented in sport or the arts were 'not a priority', Ofsted found.

Teachers feared that a focus on the brightest pupils would 'undermine the school's efforts to improve the attainment and progress of all other groups of pupils'.

More...

    * School lends pupils iPhones to use as 'educational tools'... and they even get £15 to buy apps

Head teachers told inspectors that ministers had failed to give a strong enough signal that catering for gifted pupils should be central to schools' work.

Schools are meant to identify the top 5 to 10 per cent of pupils as 'gifted and talented' and ensure they are given appropriate tasks to help them achieve their potential.

By September 2010, such pupils should expect to receive written confirmation from their school of the extra activities and master-classes they will benefit from.

The schools in the study, 17 secondary and nine primary, were chosen because they had been told to improve provision for gifted pupils.

Previous studies have pointed to a widespread ideological reluctance in schools and local authorities to champion academic excellence.

A separate study has called for the introduction of academic selection at the age of 13 or 14 to identify pupils who excel at science.

The study, by Professor Alan Smithers and Dr Pamela Robinson of Buckingham University, said it was 'a nonsense' that specialist science schools were barred from selecting pupils according to their ability in science.
 
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