Archive for liberal
“…and it should be possible to design a world in which behavior likely to be punished seldom or never occurs. We try to design such a world for those who cannot solve the problem of punishment for themselves, such as babies, retardates, or psychotics, and if it could be done for everyone, much time and energy would be saved.”
-Skinner, B.F. Beyond Freedom and Dignity pg. 62.
“Can wicked rulers be allied with you, those who frame injustice by statute? They band together against the life of the righteous and condemn the innocent to death.”
-Psalm 94:20-21, English Standard Version
The great difference between freedom as a positivist understands it and freedom as a naturalist understands is quite substantial. Positivists view freedom as “…a lack of resistance or restraint (56 Skinner, Beyond Freedom and Dignity),” and they try accordingly to erect great and substantial barriers to such a concept in the form of laws to guide behavior and punishments for a failure to conform to such laws. For a positivist, freedom from freedom is the end to which he works. In short, a man must enter into a sort of voluntary bondage, what B.F. Skinner referred to as “automatic goodness,” and what T.H. Huxley did not see as objectionable: “If some great power would agree to make me always think of what is true and do what is right, on condition of being some sort of clock and wound up every morning before I got out of bed, I should close instantly with the offer.”
For the naturalist, freedom is defined more as the power to determine for oneself which action or course to undertake, with the understanding that actions and courses have consequences which must be borne as a result of their implementation. Rights and morals do not stem from codes, but codes arise as man attempts to organize into statute or screed what he has come to observe in the course of his undertakings, that which works and that which does not work being the inspiration for his prohibitions and encouragements. It is important to the naturalist that men should find their own way through personal experience, though many naturalists often surrender to the impulse of the positivist by insisting upon codified or written means of behavioral guidance and sanction.
The law is impotent depending on one’s expectation. For the naturalist, the law is quite potent in that it does two things: it identifies a particular behavior as a tort or crime and it prescribes a process to occur in such an eventuality. For the positivist, the law must produce some ideal state, some utopia. Not surprisingly, positivists are often disappointed. In the name of greater freedom from the chaos and disorder that positivists see as freedom, a positivist will establish ever more strident restraints upon human behavior until he at last arrives at totalitarianism; that theory or approach which regulates every moment of a man’s life and tells him what his course will be at every turn, much like T.H. Huxley’s above-quoted example in which he desires to be wound up by some great power like a clock every morning in order that he may be automatically and totally good.
For the positivist, the great debate is over whether or not such robotic goodness is in fact goodness at all, or whether it is some mindless behavior which, due to the removal of free will and self-determination, cannot qualify as moral behavior at all. For the naturalist, the issue is whether or not such a destination is even possible. It isn’t. The most totalitarian societies have had crime. Societies which strive to produce automatons inevitably produce deviants by provoking their sons and daughters to wrath with heavy-handedness. The positivist believes that we are always one innovation or discovery away from a breakthrough which will enable the end of man’s problems in a particular area. He speaks of Theories of Everything, Laws of Everything, and the End of History.
He is a dreamer who dreams of the end of dreams, or at least the elimination of their usefulness to man. He has but one dream: the achievement of everything in one broadstroke. The positivist is that broken man who, in his constant optimism for a better tomorrow, looks sorrowfully upon the day as being somehow worse than the days already passed, no matter how ahistorical his position might be. We have all encountered the acolytes of apocalypse who insist that the world is growing worse by the day, that immorality and disease, wars and rumors of war, the birth-pangs of a groaning Earth, are all multiplying at an alarming rate which threatens the extinction of mankind and the world as we know it. These acolytes are both religious and secular.
The truth of our history is this: it is getting better all the time. We are able to feed more people with less input, but the apocalyptic positivist notes ruefully how better “sanitation and better medicine have made the problems of population more acute,” or how “war has acquired a new horror with the invention of nuclear weapons, and the affluent pursuit of happiness is largely responsible for pollution (Skinner 1).” He is a man who find the thread of discontent in any happy news, a fatalist who believes that man must be controlled or managed according to the way that he and his peers see as optimum for human life, and he and his peers are arrogantly precocious enough to believe that they can know what that optimum standard is in its completeness and its entirety.
Drop the positivist in the Middle Ages, and she will find that wandering through the countryside unescorted as a stranger in a strange land is the first step towards an increased risk of sexual assault. To some degree this is true today, but we have our high risk areas and neighborhoods, and most of us can exercise good sense and take precautions to reduce the risk of harm to ourselves. The positivist male who is dropped into the Middle Ages will find that while better medicine and sanitation do not lead to any threat of overpopulation, the lesser medicine and sanitation of that time do threaten to lead to human extinction in the form of the plague. Either way, the positivist will be happy to note that there are crises to be noted there in much the same way as such crises can be noted here.
The greatest cause of peace in human history has been the development of nuclear weapons. The problem is not the excess of such weapons; it is the fact that all countries do not possess such weapons in abundance. Invasion and foreign aggression would be things of the past if such weapons were proliferated through every nation in the world community. Nuclear weapons are the greatest deterrent to statist aggression ever developed by man. Are they dangerous? Most certainly. Can they destroy our world? Absolutely. Their awesome destructive power for both the state that initiates their use in conflict and the state that responds in kind renders it virtually certain that neither side will use the weapons or initiate lesser forms of direct conflict.
Instead, that portion of the world which does not retain such weapons becomes a great chessboard, as the countries which possess nuclear arsenals carve up spheres of influence in indirect conflict with each other. The side effect of nuclear weapons which has been less than positive has been the denial of nuclear weapons to those states who have traditionally suffered subordinate status in the world, and such states have had to endure their territory and prerogatives being trampled in order that nuclear states might conduct their conflicts in a proxy manner. Nuclear weapons enable and even proliferate a kind of power projection by those states who possess nuclear arsenals over those states that do not possess such arsenals. The positivist is incapable of understanding that the proliferation of nuclear weapons would virtually guarantee diplomacy rather than warfare as the means of settling statist disagreements. In point of fact, universal nuclear armament would likely negate the practical need for standing armies.
In all truth, the positivist likely does realize this, but he refuses to acknowledge it. His existence depends on inequality as the basis of coercion. Those who have nuclear arsenals can dictate to those who do not. This inequality as the foundation of statist coercion is what the positivist covets. It is what he requires as a practical means of constructing the world which he desires. So long as his side has the bomb, he has no real objection to make. But the moment his lessers develop such a capacity, the positivist decries nuclear proliferation as a destabilizing force in the world, and it is no wonder: the proliferation of nuclear weapons means that formerly subordinate states gain the power to reply in the negative to positivists. The positivist can no longer dictate or decree to such states as to how matters will be. They gain their say so about such matters the moment they enter the nuclear club.
Without nuclear weapons in both the Soviet Union and the United States, the world would likely have undergone a third world war with great implications for all people. As it stands, the war that emerged was largely fought through proxy states and theaters, and casualties were greatly minimized as a result. Eventually, the excess of militarized command economics brought down the Soviet Union. Empires are difficult to maintain in perpetuity.
It never once occurs to the positivist that men must learn in the free market of behavior what works and what does not, nor does it occur to the positivist that men can or should die as a result of their wrong choices. The positivist seeks at every turn to interrupt or delay natural consequence. He is the individual who in times of economic crisis does everything to salvage the unsalvageable by pumping vast liquidity into a failed company, never once considering that the expense of intercession may outweigh the benefit of the company’s continued survival. He also fails to consider the negative precedent that such continued survival establishes: you may act in a way that is fatal repeatedly and wantonly, but someone will always interrupt on your behalf to save you from the fate of your own making.
Ironically, the positivist who has this attitude towards a large corporation lacks such an attitude towards his fellow man: if that man is suffering a mortal or terminal illness, the positivist tends to weigh the cost versus the benefit and can very often decree that is it cost negative to offer a treatment. This is of course in times of illness, but in terms of human action, the positivist seeks to rehabilitate the man who wantonly harms others and their property. He wrings his hands in agony as he considers punitive action versus rehabilitative action in penal codes. He seeks to interrupt and check consequence. A criminal can still be saved; a law abiding citizen afflicted with a terminal illness cannot be saved. The efficient allocation of resources and intervention efforts must be directed towards the salvageable: the company or individual who deserves to perish or suffer as the natural consequence of their actions is saved from the full measure of that consequence; while the individual who through no fault of their own develops some chronic medical condition or likely terminal illness has a low possibility of survival and thus can be rightly denied treatment and therefore condemned to certain death. Such is the moral calculus of the positivist and such is his idea of progress and efficiency.
The postivist is full of vim and vigor for such Devil’s calculus; indeed, he is often the individual in any room or conversation who prides himself on the ability to suspend empathy in order to maintain what he perceives as objectivity. The suspension of empathy, and the subsequent dissociation from rational relativity which such a suspension of empathy yields, often gives rise to the nonsensical realities of our world. We spend $28,000 a year on average to incarcerate career criminals and violent sociopaths in climate controlled comfort with access to healthcare and legal representation, but a law abiding individual whose doctor prescribes an expensive treatment will often run into a review board at his insurer that denies the treatment on the grounds that is experimental and unproven, when that same treatment would readily be given to inmates by a state loathe to run afoul of litigious prisoner rights advocates.
This is not freedom at all. Freedom is self determination, free of coercion or aggression, coupled with the responsibility to accept the consequences of exercising freedom. Such an understanding contains within it the natural prohibitions on excess that positivism seeks through statutes and greater regulation: individuals are subject to the implications of their own actions without exception or limitation, and thus are more likely to censor their own behavior accordingly. By removing such limitations and establishing exceptions from the consequences of one’s own actions and excesses, positivists do not prove themselves to be practitioners of some progressive notion of mercy: they are in fact advocates of allowing men to think that failing behavior is working behavior, and as such, the positivist, or as he likes to be known, the progressive, is a blind sadist whose unintentional skill at cruelty is unrivaled.
By further condemning men in no-fault situations such as the development of some chronic disease that is potentially terminal, progressives show themselves to be anything but progressive: they are in fact advocates of regression. The same man who would bristle at the denial of care to an inmate will not hesitate to conceive that medical resources are finite and therefore must be rationed to a regular individual who works hard and enjoins himself to moral or legal behavior. In this way, the good among us are culled while those who wantonly pursue lives of harm to others and their property flourish and survive under the tender mercies of positivist progressives. What a world this is, that we should be reduced to the olden days of casting the infirm, the sick, and the unwanted unfortunates outside the city gates and the protections of the laws within, so that they might perish away from us and be the problem of the savage world outside of our supposedly civilized one. In the meantime, our piteous criminals are held in climate controlled cells, afforded access to comprehensive medical care, legal representation, and three squares a day. Who says crime doesn’t pay more than law abiding indigence?
Those of us who are not misers do not hesitate to recognize that with incarceration comes the assuming of certain responsibilities like food and board, as well as clothing and medical care. We also insist that when an individual enters into a contractual agreement with an insurer, the insurer should not be able to wriggle out of honoring his end of the agreement on technicalities. We insist on something novel that positivist progressives claim as their own but rarely deliver in practice: equality before the law. Our world is the better world when we are allowed to implement it, where the lives of the lawbreaker and the law abider are both equally valuable and equally worthy of preservation. We do not ration the sanctity of life, nor do we impose conditions and exceptions upon said sanctity.
We may not aim for the unattainable world in which crime vanishes and everyone wears white with identification numbers tattooed or subcutaneously implanted on chips, but we do value human life and recognize the basic obligation we have as our brother’s keeper. We aim for what is possible; acknowledge that which is likely even when it is perhaps undesirable, and we plan for such contingencies as the likely and the possible with laws, understanding that the law doesn’t deter or prevent crime, but merely serves to identify crime and outline a process by which crimes can be tried and punished, so that each of us are equal before the law. We don’t aim for Utopia, but we do manage to avoid Dystopias.
In those bastions of progressivism and positivism and leftism, where individuals are so much more enlightened than those of us who cleave to quaint notions like the sanctity of human life as an absolute, things like voluntary euthanasia morph from self-determination over when one’s life ends into a medical professional determining your end without your consent or input. We know that this has happened.
Researchers in Belgium interviewed 248 nurses who admitted to assisting a patient in committing suicide. Of course, 120 of the 248 also admitted to the fact that there was no patient consent. That’s important, because it clearly undermines the notion that euthanasia is at the patient’s discretion under Belgium’s assisted suicide programs. The researchers also noted the likelihood that under-reporting occurred, given their desire to avoid criminal charges for overstepping the boundaries of Belgium’s euthanasia laws, which require patient consent. Of course, the medical profession being what it is, the researchers then exculpated the nurses in question with the following: “It added that many [of the nurses] were probably acting according to their patient’s wishes, ‘even if there was no explicit request (http://bit.ly/bclKZ5).’” How high is the probability that someone who didn’t request to die wanted to die in a country where asking to die is perfectly legal? What objective criterion do we have to ascertain what the wishes of the deceased were to know how probable it was that the nurses in question were acting according to the wishes of the patient rather than, say, a hospital administrator looking to clear beds for budgeting purposes?
There are good reasons why we limit government power and take a dim view of those who exercise powers that they do not legitimately possess: it’s called abuse, and we’d like to avoid abuse. We could die as a result of it. But such powers and the exemption from accountability which typically come as the result of statism are designed specifically to increase government power at the expense of self-determination. In short, these laws are specifically designed not to prevent injurious behavior to the public good, but rather to prevent what the sovereign on his own perceives as injurious to the public good.
These sorts of laws, laws against individual choices which by themselves cannot be shown to constitute any form of aggression against others, are key to the positivist goal of perfectability. Our state would gain in its quest for perfection if only we were to criminalize miscegenation and prevent the degradation of the races, or if we were to foist sterilization on the weaker individuals within our stock, or if we were to criminalize the ingestion of drugs and ban the sale or manufacture of alcohol. These conceptions are in keeping with the positivist conception outlined by T.H. Huxley; namely, that individuals can be wound up like clocks every morning with the knowledge of the various prohibitions placed upon choice by the state, and the individual thus informed will proceed to enjoin himself to whatever right behavior is prescribed by the state. This is utter poppycock.
To begin with, it is not criminal to fall in love with someone outside of your own race. It is a matter of free choice and individual preference that is laudable, for it entails individuals looking beyond appearance and race into the inner character of the individual whom they choose. Such an act is not injurious to the public interest; on the contrary, it is quite compatible to the public interest, for it demystifies race and promotes the humanization of individuals despite their racial and cultural differences. When I was a high school student, I was deeply indoctrinated in my household as to the innate evil and insidious desire of homosexuals to convert heterosexual young men such as myself to their proclivities. This homosexual conspiracy was said to be all pervasive. My own father advocated public stonings and executions of homosexuals.
I departed for college steeped in this reinforced belief. And then I encountered a homosexual, albeit a closeted one. He was a recent Army veteran attending college on the GI Bill. He taught me how to play cards, instructed me in shooting whiskey, and he was the friend I went to for counsel upon breaking up with my first girlfriend. I even roomed with him and another friend that summer in a house. Afterwards, we moved into the same apartment complex with different roommates. It became apparent that he was gay after mutual friends stumbled across the proof of it in the form of his computer diary. My friend never acted in a manner consistent with the supposed homosexual agenda. What is more, upon encountering other homosexuals, few if any of them ever had designs on forcing any issue with me or anyone else.
The point is that getting to know actual homosexuals completely changed my mind about homosexuality and gays. They were merely people. Everything that I had previously seen about them, this notion that homosexuals were cross-dressing, style and interior decor obsessed, feather boa adorned, dilettantes who cavorted around on stilts in and out of pride parades was clearly wrong. Most homosexuals I knew were not promiscuous individuals, and those who were were not any more or less promiscuous than a good many heterosexual men I knew and associated with in college.
These barriers that statism puts up to choice and behavior have little if anything to do with protecting the public from injury and everything to do with promoting stereotypes and prejudices, with inculcating an unfounded mystique on the part of the colored person, the homosexual, or the Semites amongst the perceptions of the larger population. The statist needs an enemy to blame at all times for his own failings and shortcomings, and when the economy tanks, it’s the fault of sodomites and Jews rather than a ruinous monetary policy and the fiscal profligacy of elected representatives. God is judging us for tolerating the Asiatic and homosexual; as opposed to our own accounts taking the natural turn which inevitably occurs when states overspend and over-borrow.
The sovereign decrees such states of being and the choice to associate with individuals in these states of being as criminal not because it is truly injurious to the public good, but because it is helpful to the statist ideal of preserving the state from accountability for its own failings by dissociating blame to those individuals who are colored, gay, or Jewish and the individuals who supposedly undermine the strength of the state by their voluntary association with such people. This reasoning is diseased and utterly false, and it is the codification of bigotry and hatred into statute which is truly injurious to the public good.
It inculcates within individuals a capacity to view gays, coloreds, and Jews as somehow lesser before the law and lesser before humanity, and as such, it promotes the idea that whatever we do to them is not the same as what we do to us. Whites in the early 20th century would never have conceived of lynching a white man for sleeping with a white woman out of wedlock, but they would readily mandate such punishment for an interracial couple, or at least the male or colored portion of that couple. It is dangerous, and it promotes and inculcates within a population a dangerous and insidious tendency towards vigilantism.
In the name of promoting perfectability, we arrive at barbarity and open lawlessness, where men lose their sameneness before the law, and the law loses its power to promote order and a uniform standard of decent and civil behavior. What follows are pogroms, genocides, expulsions, and medical experiments upon individuals without their consent. To say that a man is lesser before the law is to invite his mistreatment by others acting on the notion that what they are doing to the man in question is not inhumane, for he is not fully human. You might as well be experimenting or beating a horse or a dog. It is to strip a human being of his humanity, and to strip his peers of their capacity for empathy or a sense of common humanity which might prevent them from acting in barbaric and abhorrent manner towards the colored, the Jew, or the homosexual.
And what is more, this false notion of perfectability inevitably leads to the inverse, for whatever you acknowledge as the state’s power to act where others are concerned is by implication its power to act towards you as well. When the reciprocity of perfectability comes, it comes in the form of affirmative action, which does not affirm anything other than old failed notions that individuals of color cannot achieve on their own without state interference on their behalf. It comes in the notion of gender and sexual politics whereby our entire culture now portrays the women in advertisements as superior to the men, who sit indolently in their plush easy chairs and insolently reply to their wives’ superior logic. Our interests are as follows: breasts, beer, and sports. We are not the same individuals who constructed the Parthenon or the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, the Colossus at Rhodes, or who established a pantheon of literature and art which has stood the test of time to be classified as timeless. In the positivist and leftist construct which is our dominant worldview, one cannot merely acknowledge the accomplishments of both men and women as indications of their common and equal claim to humanity and greatness; one has to denigrate one in order to raise the other.
Humanity and human achievement are not mutually exclusive on the grounds of race, gender, sexuality, or any other classification. To hell with anyone who claims that they are. It is one thing to argue over whether Shakespeare or Sappho was the greater poet and author; it is abominable to argue that one was greater than the other on the grounds gender or sexuality. Men are conditioned by the pessimism of such logic to believe that our best days lie behind us, that “sanitation and better medicine have made the problems of population more acute,” as Skinner put it, rather than the reality that sanitation and better medicine have enabled more people to realize healthier families and better relationships within those families.
This is not progress; it is false cynicism. It is not unfounded optimism to suggest that our gains in productivity have enabled us to do more with less and to have more with less. It is reality and achievement, and it is cause to celebrate. Perfectability does not entail going backwards towards some optimum standard subjectively selected from the past of human history; it entails going forward to meet the future head on and improving upon the past so that more people can have more of the experiences which are so enriching to human life and human experience. We will never arrive at perfection, for such a destination entails that there is nothing more to achieve or gain. There is always room for improvement, and means to drive the benefits of advancement to people who previously lacked clean water, clean air, basic sanitation, an adequate food supply, and good medical care.
The fact that improvement is not automatic, that difficulties arise on the path to the solving of a problem, is not in and of itself evidence that we should consider destroying or culling human life in order to solve the problem. The measure of a solution is whether or not it can expand human and animal life, and not the cold efficiency with which it extinguishes one as mutually exclusive to the other. To the extent that we have regressed as a society, it has been the advancement of the positivist or the leftist (to me they are one and the same) with his false dichotomies and choices, his either/or, and his notion that the state must have the ability to restrict human action on the most intimate levels imaginable in order to limit some theoretical catastrophe. I have no problem with prophylactics being available to any individual who wants them, but let the individual choose for themselves whether or not to utilize prophylactics. Do not mandate family sizes at the state level.
If there is one thing that is to be extinguished in order to ensure the perfectability or the progress of humanity, it is the leftist and the positivist worldview which decrees such solutions and such mandated limits upon human action and human choice. We are at war, and the war is ideological. There are two ways to wage this war: with the exchange of ideas and open debate, or with the waging of one final physical and coercive conflict between the two extremes. On the one side, we have an ideal which insists upon the primacy of individuals, the sanctity of their lives, the intrinsic and innate dignity and worth they possess merely as result of their conception and birth; on the other side, we have an ideal which states that such dignity and worth is neither innate or intrinsic, but that it is negotiable according to race, gender, sexual orientation, or the subjective standards placed on the measurement of human intellect and achievement by academics who have more oft than not erred in their worldview as their programs of eugenics, alchemy, and various other pseudoscientific approaches would indicate.
These programs and agendas were given the patina of legitimacy by their origin within scientific circles, circles which have as their antecedent the notion that the Earth was flat and rectangular and the geocentric model of our universe. Science can and has been wrong, not merely in its theories, but also in its laws during given time periods within human history. The urgency with which scientists insist on the implementation of some solution ought to be viewed with skepticism given science’s historical tendency to be captured by its patrons and directed not towards factually based views and solutions, but ideologically minded preconceived notions which are bolstered with shoddy academic work and selective sampling of data sets.
Gulags and ghettoes have been built in the name of theoretical perfectability and necessity masquerading as the law of our existence, and today, we have a gulag of public perceptions constructed to denigrate, marginalize, and discredit through ad hominem anyone who challenges the positivist or leftist worldview which is taken as truth in an almost fanatically fervent and reverent way by the intelligentsia and those who view themselves as being in the know. They are the heirs to the W.E.B. Du Bois school of thought which acclaimed Nazi programs to purify the supposed lessers from the supposed betters, with the pretension that a madman who would not acknowledge an achievement by Jesse Owens at the Berlin Olympics would somehow make an exception for someone of letters like Du Bois. Seriously, how illogical can positivist leftism be?
What perverse logic is this that infects such thought processes, whereby the innocent are condemned to death and their unjust conviction and execution are legitimized through the law itself? I’ll tell you what logic infects such thought processes and the results thereof: leftism, whose perverse moral calculus denies prescribed treatment to a law abiding citizen with a contractual arrangement between himself and an insurer on the grounds that the treatment is experimental. The spirit of the contract is violated by the fine print letter of the thing.
It is one thing to deny treatment to the uninsured, and though that is still barbaric and inhumane, it is nothing compared to the bad faith contractual stipulation which enables one side to occupy an elevated position in a contract that discharges them from the obligation to execute the very purpose under which the disadvantaged party entered into the contract! These are the contracts and statutes which pervade a society given over to positivism, to leftism, and to corporatism, to any of the -isms who spring for the diseased root of such a logic which decrees that ends justify any and every means. And yet, the proponents of such logic are disposed to call their means towards an unattainable end like perfectability progress no matter how many must perish on the way to nowhere.
Contrast that with the naturalist position on the law, as postulated by Cicero: “However one defines Man, the same definition applies to us all.” Let us have this debate, and frame it once and for all for the future of humanity, so that human beings may choose between the positivist and the natural camps as to which approach works for them. Let us articulate it once and for all in these stark terms, and see what people choose as the foundation for their communities and societies going forward.
The positivist cannot sustain the glare of light upon his position. The leftist cannot withstand the scrutiny of objective measure, and neither can the corporatist. It is only by controlling the framing of the debate, by establishing straw men and employing circular logic and ad hominem that the leftist position which is at the root of all of the positivist approaches to life and law can prevail. Only by dividing us into camps of grievances and promising us redress through a reciprocal and vengeful statute which takes our perceived suffering and foists it onto those who are supposedly responsible for the injustice visited upon us and our forefathers can the leftist win the argument. Only by appealing to the lesser impulses and petty, capricious portions of a man’s soul can the leftist win an argument.
The problem has been that few if any on our side have been able to articulate the naturalist position in a way that delineates it from the positivist approach so starkly. So pronounced has our inability to articulate our position apart from leftism that leftists now masquerade around as naturalists in theory while clearly functioning as leftist positivists in action! Part of the issue has been the construction of ideas and philosophies which clearly hold effectiveness. Left Hegelianism works not by virtue of its merit, but through its identification of that which is inferior within mankind: his pettiness, his ability to be reached through demagoguery, and his overall intemperance. Thesis vs. Antithesis enables leftists to play both sides against their desired middle in order to gain the Synthesis which they covet. This is the manufactured consent which I wrote of in an earlier section, and it contains the germ of every pernicious bit of theory ever envisioned by Machiavelli, Hegel, the Left Hegelians, and the Alinskyites. These individuals do not care about being right, nor do they believe that there are standards by which a result can be judged right or wrong. They care only to win for their ideology, and they have no regard for the misery they inflict upon human beings.
They are meritorious in one way only: the identification of those weak and degraded impulses within man such as spite and hatred which can be exploited to gain his assent to surrender his own sameness before the law for the promise of gaining superiority in the law. As Orwell noted in his classic Animal Farm, some animals are indeed more equal than others in such an environment. What these individuals fail to alert their subjects to is this: reciprocity is the inevitable result. There will be extreme backlashes with grave implications for future generations. To the leftist and the positivist, this is of no concern: they are after their perfect world now, and if they can get it now, now is all that they have. They may talk of a better future, but the reality is that they seek the immediate gratification of their ideological impulses and fanatical desires. The promise of a better future is only made to gain the consent of those in the present.
The time is fast approaching when the wheat will have to be separated from the chaff to ensure that the leftist is revealed; his disguise as the conservative, the classical liberal, the Democrat, the Republican, the Libertarian, or the neo-this, that, or the other stripped away until he is at last exposed as an individual who believes only in an ideological end and will resort to any means to achieve it. He has not conviction but the end, some purported perfectability which can be achieved and implemented if only we commit to do whatever it takes, right here and now, without being sidetracked by concerns like the sanctity of human life and the legitimacy of the law, which is rooted in the nation that for the law to have meaning to free men, it must regard them as being the same. To the Leftist, these are incidental concerns to the End, and we must do whatever it takes to stifle any objection rooted in this irrelevant concerns. We must erect gulags and ghettoes, camps with ovens to dispose of the mess, and the road to Utopia is strewn with such edifices and the necessary consequences of Leftism. But at the end lies Heaven, a Heaven that is possible only if men surrender their temporal freedoms to arrive at the blessed Freedom conceived of by the Leftist.
The naturalist cannot promise Heaven, but he can promise you that you will be treated like any other man and given the opportunity to make of yourself whatever you will utilizing your own unique gifts. He can assure you that your life will be valued and preserved with the same fervent enthusiasm reserved for the preservation of the lives of others, that a society built around human rights and founded upon the notion that the state acknowledges to acknowledge and defend human liberty will respond to an attack on the life and liberty of one of its members as though it were an attack upon all of its members. I may not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it. He can promise you progress through human effort and ingenuity, where better sanitation and medicine do not lead to your family being viewed as part of the problem of overpopulation, but as evidence of the achievements of better sanitation and medicine. Life is to be celebrated and not rued. That is the end for which we contend.
“…and it should be possible to design a world in which behavior likely to be punished seldom or never occurs. We try to design such a world for those who cannot solve the problem of punishment for themselves, such as babies, retardates, or psychotics, and if it could be done for everyone, much time and energy would be saved.”
-Skinner, B.F. Beyond Freedom and Dignity pg. 62.
“Can wicked rulers be allied with you, those who frame injustice by statute? They band together against the life of the righteous and condemn the innocent to death.”
-Psalm 94:20-21, English Standard Version
The great difference between freedom as a positivist understands it and freedom as a naturalist understands is quite substantial. Positivists view freedom as “…a lack of resistance or restraint (56 Skinner, Beyond Freedom and Dignity),” and they try accordingly to erect great and substantial barriers to such a concept in the form of laws to guide behavior and punishments for a failure to conform to such laws. For a positivist, freedom from freedom is the end to which he works. In short, a man must enter into a sort of voluntary bondage, what B.F. Skinner referred to as “automatic goodness,” and what T.H. Huxley did see as objectionable: “If some great power would agree to make me always think of what is true and do what is right, on condition of being some sort of clock and wound up every morning before I got out of bed, I should close instantly with the offer.”
For the naturalist, freedom is defined more as the power to determine for oneself which action or course to undertake, with the understanding that actions and courses have consequences which must be borne as a result of their implementation. Rights and morals do not stem from codes, but codes arise as man attempts to organize into statute or screed what he has come to observe in the course of his undertakings, that which works and that which does not work being the inspiration for his prohibitions and encouragements. It is important to the naturalist that men should find their own way through personal experience, though many naturalists often surrender to the impulse of the positivist by insisting upon codified or written means of behavioral guidance and sanction.
The law is impotent depending on one’s expectation. For the naturalist, the law is quite potent in that it does two things: it identifies a particular behavior as a tort or crime and it prescribes a process to occur in such an eventuality. For the positivist, the law must produce some ideal state, some utopia. Not surprisingly, positivists are often disappointed. In the name of greater freedom from the chaos and disorder that positivists see as freedom, a positivist will establish ever more strident restraints upon human behavior until he at last arrives at totalitarianism; that theory or approach which regulates every moment of a man’s life and tells him what his course will be at every turn, much like T.H. Huxley’s above-quoted example in which he desires to be wound up by some great power like a clock every morning in order that he may be automatically and totally good.
For the positivist, the great debate is over whether or not such robotic goodness is in fact goodness at all, or whether it is some mindless behavior which, due to the removal of free will and self-determination, cannot qualify as moral behavior at all. For the naturalist, the issue is whether or not such a destination is even possible. It isn’t. The most totalitarian societies have had crime. Societies which strive to produce automatons inevitably produce deviants by provoking their sons and daughters to wrath with heavy-handedness. The positivist believes that we are always one innovation or discovery away from a breakthrough which will enable the end of man’s problems in a particular area. He speaks of Theories of Everything, Laws of Everything, and the End of History.
He is a dreamer who dreams of the end of dreams, or at least the elimination of their usefulness to man. He has but one dream: the achievement of everything in one broadstroke. The positivist is that broken man who, in his constant optimism for a better tomorrow, looks sorrowfully upon the day as being somehow worse than the days already passed, no matter how ahistorical his position might be. We have all encountered the acolytes of apocalypse who insist that the world is growing worse by the day, that immorality and disease, wars and rumors of war, the birth-pangs of a groaning Earth, are all multiplying at an alarming rate which threatens the extinction of mankind and the world as we know it. These acolytes are both religious and secular.
The truth of our history is this: it is getting better all the time. We are able to feed more people with less input, but the apocalyptic positivist notes ruefully how better “sanitation and better medicine have made the problems of population more acute,” or how “war has acquired a new horror with the invention of nuclear weapons, and the affluent pursuit of happiness is largely responsible for pollution (Skinner 1).” He is a man who find the thread of discontent in any happy news, a fatalist who believes that man must be controlled or managed according to the way that he and his peers see as optimum for human life, and he and his peers are arrogantly precocious enough to believe that they can know what that optimum standard is in its completeness and its entirety.
Drop the positivist in the Middle Ages, and she will find that wandering through the countryside unescorted as a stranger in a strange land is the first step towards an increased risk of sexual assault. To some degree this is true today, but we have our high risk areas and neighborhoods, and most of us can exercise good sense and take precautions to reduce the risk of harm to ourselves. The positivist male who is dropped into the Middle Ages will find that while better medicine and sanitation do not lead to any threat of overpopulation, the lesser medicine and sanitation of that time do threaten to lead to human extinction in the form of the plague. Either way, the positivist will be happy to note that there are crises to be noted there in much the same way as such crises can be noted here.
The greatest cause of peace in human history has been the development of nuclear weapons. The problem is not the excess of such weapons; it is the fact that all countries do not possess such weapons in abundance. Invasion and foreign aggression would be things of the past if such weapons were proliferated through every nation in the world community. Nuclear weapons are the greatest deterrent to statist aggression ever developed by man. Are they dangerous? Most certainly. Can they destroy our world? Absolutely. Their awesome destructive power for both the state that initiates their use in conflict and the state that responds in kind renders it virtually certain that neither side will use the weapons or initiate lesser forms of direct conflict.
Instead, that portion of the world which does not retain such weapons becomes a great chessboard, as the countries which possess nuclear arsenals carve up spheres of influence in indirect conflict with each other. The side effect of nuclear weapons which has been less than positive has been the denial of nuclear weapons to those states who have traditionally suffered subordinate status in the world, and such states have had to endure their territory and prerogatives being trampled in order that nuclear states might conduct their conflicts in a proxy manner. Nuclear weapons enable and even proliferate a kind of power projection by those states who possess nuclear arsenals over those states that do not possess such arsenals. The positivist is incapable of understanding that the proliferation of nuclear weapons would virtually guarantee diplomacy rather than warfare as the means of settling statist disagreements. In point of fact, universal nuclear armament would likely negate the practical need for standing armies.
In all truth, the positivist likely does realize this, but he refuses to acknowledge it. His existence depends on inequality as the basis of coercion. Those who have nuclear arsenals can dictate to those who do not. This inequality as the foundation of statist coercion is what the positivist covets. It is what he requires as a practical means of constructing the world which he desires. So long as his side has the bomb, he has no real objection to make. But the moment his lessers develop such a capacity, the positivist decries nuclear proliferation as a destabilizing force in the world, and it is no wonder: the proliferation of nuclear weapons means that formerly subordinate states gain the power to reply in the negative to positivists. The positivist can no longer dictate or decree to such states as to how matters will be. They gain their say so about such matters the moment they enter the nuclear club.
Without nuclear weapons in both the Soviet Union and the United States, the world would likely have undergone a third world war with great implications for all people. As it stands, the war that emerged was largely fought through proxy states and theaters, and casualties were greatly minimized as a result. Eventually, the excess of militarized command economics brought down the Soviet Union. Empires are difficult to maintain in perpetuity.
It never once occurs to the positivist that men must learn in the free market of behavior what works and what does not, nor does it occur to the positivist that men can or should die as a result of their wrong choices. The positivist seeks at every turn to interrupt or delay natural consequence. He is the individual who in times of economic crisis does everything to salvage the unsalvageable by pumping vast liquidity into a failed company, never once considering that the expense of intercession may outweigh the benefit of the company’s continued survival. He also fails to consider the negative precedent that such continued survival establishes: you may act in a way that is fatal repeatedly and wantonly, but someone will always interrupt on your behalf to save you from the fate of your own making.
Ironically, the positivist who has this attitude towards a large corporation lacks such an attitude towards his fellow man: if that man is suffering a mortal or terminal illness, the positivist tends to weigh the cost versus the benefit and can very often decree that is it cost negative to offer a treatment. This is of course in times of illness, but in terms of human action, the positivist seeks to rehabilitate the man who wantonly harms others and their property. He wrings his hands in agony as he considers punitive action versus rehabilitative action in penal codes. He seeks to interrupt and check consequence. A criminal can still be saved; a law abiding citizen afflicted with a terminal illness cannot be saved. The efficient allocation of resources and intervention efforts must be directed towards the salvageable: the company or individual who deserves to perish or suffer as the natural consequence of their actions is saved from the full measure of that consequence; while the individual who through no fault of their own develops some chronic medical condition or likely terminal illness has a low possibility of survival and thus can be rightly denied treatment and therefore condemned to certain death. Such is the moral calculus of the positivist and such is his idea of progress and efficiency.
The postivist is full of vim and vigor for such Devil’s calculus; indeed, he is often the individual in any room or conversation who prides himself on the ability to suspend empathy in order to maintain what he perceives as objectivity. The suspension of empathy, and the subsequent dissociation from rational relativity which such a suspension of empathy yields, often gives rise to the nonsensical realities of our world. We spend $28,000 a year on average to incarcerate career criminals and violent sociopaths in climate controlled comfort with access to healthcare and legal representation, but a law abiding individual whose doctor prescribes an expensive treatment will often run into a review board at his insurer that denies the treatment on the grounds that is experimental and unproven, when that same treatment would readily be given to inmates by a state loathe to run afoul of litigious prisoner rights advocates.
This is not freedom at all. Freedom is self determination, free of coercion or aggression, coupled with the responsibility to accept the consequences of exercising freedom. Such an understanding contains within it the natural prohibitions on excess that positivism seeks through statutes and greater regulation: individuals are subject to the implications of their own actions without exception or limitation, and thus are more likely to censor their own behavior accordingly. By removing such limitations and establishing exceptions from the consequences of one’s own actions and excesses, positivists do not prove themselves to be practitioners of some progressive notion of mercy: they are in fact advocates of allowing men to think that failing behavior is working behavior, and as such, the positivist, or as he likes to be known, the progressive, is a blind sadist whose unintentional skill at cruelty is unrivaled.
By further condemning men in no-fault situations such as the development of some chronic disease that is potentially terminal, progressives show themselves to be anything but progressive: they are in fact advocates of regression. The same man who would bristle at the denial of care to an inmate will not hesitate to conceive that medical resources are finite and therefore must be rationed to a regular individual who works hard and enjoins himself to moral or legal behavior. In this way, the good among us are culled while those who wantonly pursue lives of harm to others and their property flourish and survive under the tender mercies of positivist progressives. What a world this is, that we should be reduced to the olden days of casting the infirm, the sick, and the unwanted unfortunates outside the city gates and the protections of the laws within, so that they might perish away from us and be the problem of the savage world outside of our supposedly civilized one. In the meantime, our piteous criminals are held in climate controlled cells, afforded access to comprehensive medical care, legal representation, and three squares a day. Who says crime doesn’t pay more than law abiding indigence?
Those of us who are not misers do not hesitate to recognize that with incarceration comes the assuming of certain responsibilities like food and board, as well as clothing and medical care. We also insist that when an individual enters into a contractual agreement with an insurer, the insurer should not be able to wriggle out of honoring his end of the agreement on technicalities. We insist on something novel that positivist progressives claim as their own but rarely deliver in practice: equality before the law. Our world is the better world when we are allowed to implement it, where the lives of the lawbreaker and the law abider are both equally valuable and equally worthy of preservation. We do not ration the sanctity of life, nor do we impose conditions and exceptions upon said sanctity.
We may not aim for the unattainable world in which crime vanishes and everyone wears white with identification numbers tattooed or subcutaneously implanted on chips, but we do value human life and recognize the basic obligation we have as our brother’s keeper. We aim for what is possible; acknowledge that which is likely even when it is perhaps undesirable, and we plan for such contingencies as the likely and the possible with laws, understanding that the law doesn’t deter or prevent crime, but merely serves to identify crime and outline a process by which crimes can be tried and punished, so that each of us are equal before the law. We don’t aim for Utopia, but we do manage to avoid Dystopias.
In those bastions of progressivism and positivism and leftism, where individuals are so much more enlightened than those of us who cleave to quaint notions like the sanctity of human life as an absolute, things like voluntary euthanasia morph from self-determination over when one’s life ends into a medical professional determining your end without your consent or input. We know that this has happened.
Researchers in Belgium interviewed 248 nurses who admitted to assisting a patient in committing suicide. Of course, 120 of the 248 also admitted to the fact that there was no patient consent. That’s important, because it clearly undermines the notion that euthanasia is at the patient’s discretion under Belgium’s assisted suicide programs. The researchers also noted the likelihood that under-reporting occurred, given their desire to avoid criminal charges for overstepping the boundaries of Belgium’s euthanasia laws, which require patient consent. Of course, the medical profession being what it is, the researchers then exculpated the nurses in question with the following: “It added that many [of the nurses] were probably acting according to their patient’s wishes, ‘even if there was no explicit request (http://bit.ly/bclKZ5).’” How high is the probability that someone who didn’t request to die wanted to die in a country where asking to die is perfectly legal? What objective criterion do we have to ascertain what the wishes of the deceased were to know how probable it was that the nurses in question were acting according to the wishes of the patient rather than, say, a hospital administrator looking to clear beds for budgeting purposes?
There are good reasons why we limit government power and take a dim view of those who exercise powers that they do not legitimately possess: it’s called abuse, and we’d like to avoid abuse. We could die as a result of it. But such powers and the exemption from accountability which typically come as the result of statism are designed specifically to increase government power at the expense of self-determination. In short, these laws are specifically designed not to prevent injurious behavior to the public good, but rather to prevent what the sovereign on his own perceives as injurious to the public good.
These sorts of laws, laws against individual choices which by themselves cannot be shown to constitute any form of aggression against others, are key to the positivist goal of perfectability. Our state would gain in its quest for perfection if only we were to criminalize miscegenation and prevent the degradation of the races, or if we were to foist sterilization on the weaker individuals within our stock, or if we were to criminalize the ingestion of drugs and ban the sale or manufacture of alcohol. These conceptions are in keeping with the positivist conception outlined by T.H. Huxley; namely, that individuals can be wound up like clocks every morning with the knowledge of the various prohibitions placed upon choice by the state, and the individual thus informed will proceed to enjoin himself to whatever right behavior is prescribed by the state. This is utter poppycock.
To begin with, it is not criminal to fall in love with someone outside of your own race. It is a matter of free choice and individual preference that is laudable, for it entails individuals looking beyond appearance and race into the inner character of the individual whom they choose. Such an act is not injurious to the public interest; on the contrary, it is quite compatible to the public interest, for it demystifies race and promotes the humanization of individuals despite their racial and cultural differences. When I was a high school student, I was deeply indoctrinated in my household as to the innate evil and insidious desire of homosexuals to convert heterosexual young men such as myself to their proclivities. This homosexual conspiracy was said to be all pervasive. My own father advocated public stonings and executions of homosexuals.
I departed for college steeped in this reinforced belief. And then I encountered a homosexual, albeit a closeted one. He was a recent Army veteran attending college on the GI Bill. He taught me how to play cards, instructed me in shooting whiskey, and he was the friend I went to for counsel upon breaking up with my first girlfriend. I even roomed with him and another friend that summer in a house. Afterwards, we moved into the same apartment complex with different roommates. It became apparent that he was gay after mutual friends stumbled across the proof of it in the form of his computer diary. My friend never acted in a manner consistent with the supposed homosexual agenda. What is more, upon encountering other homosexuals, few if any of them ever had designs on forcing any issue with me or anyone else.
The point is that getting to know actual homosexuals completely changed my mind about homosexuality and gays. They were merely people. Everything that I had previously seen about them, this notion that homosexuals were cross-dressing, style and interior decor obsessed, feather boa adorned, dilettantes who cavorted around on stilts in and out of pride parades was clearly wrong. Most homosexuals I knew were not promiscuous individuals, and those who were were not any more or less promiscuous than a good many heterosexual men I knew and associated with in college.
These barriers that statism puts up to choice and behavior have little if anything to do with protecting the public from injury and everything to do with promoting stereotypes and prejudices, with inculcating an unfounded mystique on the part of the colored person, the homosexual, or the Semites amongst the perceptions of the larger population. The statist needs an enemy to blame at all times for his own failings and shortcomings, and when the economy tanks, it’s the fault of sodomites and Jews rather than a ruinous monetary policy and the fiscal profligacy of elected representatives. God is judging us for tolerating the Asiatic and homosexual; as opposed to our own accounts taking the natural turn which inevitably occurs when states overspend and over-borrow.
The sovereign decrees such states of being and the choice to associate with individuals in these states of being as criminal not because it is truly injurious to the public good, but because it is helpful to the statist ideal of preserving the state from accountability for its own failings by dissociating blame to those individuals who are colored, gay, or Jewish and the individuals who supposedly undermine the strength of the state by their voluntary association with such people. This reasoning is diseased and utterly false, and it is the codification of bigotry and hatred into statute which is truly injurious to the public good.
It inculcates within individuals a capacity to view gays, coloreds, and Jews as somehow lesser before the law and lesser before humanity, and as such, it promotes the idea that whatever we do to them is not the same as what we do to us. Whites in the early 20th century would never have conceived of lynching a white man for sleeping with a white woman out of wedlock, but they would readily mandate such punishment for an interracial couple, or at least the male or colored portion of that couple. It is dangerous, and it promotes and inculcates within a population a dangerous and insidious tendency towards vigilantism.
In the name of promoting perfectability, we arrive at barbarity and open lawlessness, where men lose their sameneness before the law, and the law loses its power to promote order and a uniform standard of decent and civil behavior. What follows are pogroms, genocides, expulsions, and medical experiments upon individuals without their consent. To say that a man is lesser before the law is to invite his mistreatment by others acting on the notion that what they are doing to the man in question is not inhumane, for he is not fully human. You might as well be experimenting or beating a horse or a dog. It is to strip a human being of his humanity, and to strip his peers of their capacity for empathy or a sense of common humanity which might prevent them from acting in barbaric and abhorrent manner towards the colored, the Jew, or the homosexual.
And what is more, this false notion of perfectability inevitably leads to the inverse, for whatever you acknowledge as the state’s power to act where others are concerned is by implication its power to act towards you as well. When the reciprocity of perfectability comes, it comes in the form of affirmative action, which does not affirm anything other than old failed notions that individuals of color cannot achieve on their own without state interference on their behalf. It comes in the notion of gender and sexual politics whereby our entire culture now portrays the women in advertisements as superior to the men, who sit indolently in their plush easy chairs and insolently reply to their wives’ superior logic. Our interests are as follows: breasts, beer, and sports. We are not the same individuals who constructed the Parthenon or the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, the Colossus at Rhodes, or who established a pantheon of literature and art which has stood the test of time to be classified as timeless. In the positivist and leftist construct which is our dominant worldview, one cannot merely acknowledge the accomplishments of both men and women as indications of their common and equal claim to humanity and greatness; one has to denigrate one in order to raise the other.
Humanity and human achievement are not mutually exclusive on the grounds of race, gender, sexuality, or any other classification. To hell with anyone who claims that they are. It is one thing to argue over whether Shakespeare or Sappho was the greater poet and author; it is abominable to argue that one was greater than the other on the grounds gender or sexuality. Men are conditioned by the pessimism of such logic to believe that our best days lie behind us, that “sanitation and better medicine have made the problems of population more acute,” as Skinner put it, rather than the reality that sanitation and better medicine have enabled more people to realize healthier families and better relationships within those families.
This is not progress; it is false cynicism. It is not unfounded optimism to suggest that our gains in productivity have enabled us to do more with less and to have more with less. It is reality and achievement, and it is cause to celebrate. Perfectability does not entail going backwards towards some optimum standard subjectively selected from the past of human history; it entails going forward to meet the future head on and improving upon the past so that more people can have more of the experiences which are so enriching to human life and human experience. We will never arrive at perfection, for such a destination entails that there is nothing more to achieve or gain. There is always room for improvement, and means to drive the benefits of advancement to people who previously lacked clean water, clean air, basic sanitation, an adequate food supply, and good medical care.
The fact that improvement is not automatic, that difficulties arise on the path to the solving of a problem, is not in and of itself evidence that we should consider destroying or culling human life in order to solve the problem. The measure of a solution is whether or not it can expand human and animal life, and not the cold efficiency with which it extinguishes one as mutually exclusive to the other. To the extent that we have regressed as a society, it has been the advancement of the positivist or the leftist (to me they are one and the same) with his false dichotomies and choices, his either/or, and his notion that the state must have the ability to restrict human action on the most intimate levels imaginable in order to limit some theoretical catastrophe. I have no problem with prophylactics being available to any individual who wants them, but let the individual choose for themselves whether or not to utilize prophylactics. Do not mandate family sizes at the state level.
If there is one thing that is to be extinguished in order to ensure the perfectability or the progress of humanity, it is the leftist and the positivist worldview which decrees such solutions and such mandated limits upon human action and human choice. We are at war, and the war is ideological. There are two ways to wage this war: with the exchange of ideas and open debate, or with the waging of one final physical and coercive conflict between the two extremes. On the one side, we have an ideal which insists upon the primacy of individuals, the sanctity of their lives, the intrinsic and innate dignity and worth they possess merely as result of their conception and birth; on the other side, we have an ideal which states that such dignity and worth is neither innate or intrinsic, but that it is negotiable according to race, gender, sexual orientation, or the subjective standards placed on the measurement of human intellect and achievement by academics who have more oft than not erred in their worldview as their programs of eugenics, alchemy, and various other pseudoscientific approaches would indicate.
These programs and agendas were given the patina of legitimacy by their origin within scientific circles, circles which have as their antecedent the notion that the Earth was flat and rectangular and the geocentric model of our universe. Science can and has been wrong, not merely in its theories, but also in its laws during given time periods within human history. The urgency with which scientists insist on the implementation of some solution ought to be viewed with skepticism given science’s historical tendency to be captured by its patrons and directed not towards factually based views and solutions, but ideologically minded preconceived notions which are bolstered with shoddy academic work and selective sampling of data sets.
Gulags and ghettoes have been built in the name of theoretical perfectability and necessity masquerading as the law of our existence, and today, we have a gulag of public perceptions constructed to denigrate, marginalize, and discredit through ad hominem anyone who challenges the positivist or leftist worldview which is taken as truth in an almost fanatically fervent and reverent way by the intelligentsia and those who view themselves as being in the know. They are the heirs to the W.E.B. Du Bois school of thought which acclaimed Nazi programs to purify the supposed lessers from the supposed betters, with the pretension that a madman who would not acknowledge an achievement by Jesse Owens at the Berlin Olympics would somehow make an exception for someone of letters like Du Bois. Seriously, how illogical can positivist leftism be?
What perverse logic is this that infects such thought processes, whereby the innocent are condemned to death and their unjust conviction and execution are legitimized through the law itself? I’ll tell you what logic infects such thought processes and the results thereof: leftism, whose perverse moral calculus denies prescribed treatment to a law abiding citizen with a contractual arrangement between himself and an insurer on the grounds that the treatment is experimental. The spirit of the contract is violated by the fine print letter of the thing.
It is one thing to deny treatment to the uninsured, and though that is still barbaric and inhumane, it is nothing compared to the bad faith contractual stipulation which enables one side to occupy an elevated position in a contract that discharges them from the obligation to execute the very purpose under which the disadvantaged party entered into the contract! These are the contracts and statutes which pervade a society given over to positivism, to leftism, and to corporatism, to any of the -isms who spring for the diseased root of such a logic which decrees that ends justify any and every means. And yet, the proponents of such logic are disposed to call their means towards an unattainable end like perfectability progress no matter how many must perish on the way to nowhere.
Contrast that with the naturalist position on the law, as postulated by Cicero: “However one defines Man, the same definition applies to us all.” Let us have this debate, and frame it once and for all for the future of humanity, so that human beings may choose between the positivist and the natural camps as to which approach works for them. Let us articulate it once and for all in these stark terms, and see what people choose as the foundation for their communities and societies going forward.
The positivist cannot sustain the glare of light upon his position. The leftist cannot withstand the scrutiny of objective measure, and neither can the corporatist. It is only by controlling the framing of the debate, by establishing straw men and employing circular logic and ad hominem that the leftist position which is at the root of all of the positivist approaches to life and law can prevail. Only by dividing us into camps of grievances and promising us redress through a reciprocal and vengeful statute which takes our perceived suffering and foists it onto those who are supposedly responsible for the injustice visited upon us and our forefathers can the leftist win the argument. Only by appealing to the lesser impulses and petty, capricious portions of a man’s soul can the leftist win an argument.
The problem has been that few if any on our side have been able to articulate the naturalist position in a way that delineates it from the positivist approach so starkly. So pronounced has our inability to articulate our position apart from leftism that leftists now masquerade around as naturalists in theory while clearly functioning as leftist positivists in action! Part of the issue has been the construction of ideas and philosophies which clearly hold effectiveness. Left Hegelianism works not by virtue of its merit, but through its identification of that which is inferior within mankind: his pettiness, his ability to be reached through demagoguery, and his overall intemperance. Thesis vs. Antithesis enables leftists to play both sides against their desired middle in order to gain the Synthesis which they covet. This is the manufactured consent which I wrote of in an earlier section, and it contains the germ of every pernicious bit of theory ever envisioned by Machiavelli, Hegel, the Left Hegelians, and the Alinskyites. These individuals do not care about being right, nor do they believe that there are standards by which a result can be judged right or wrong. They care only to win for their ideology, and they have no regard for the misery they inflict upon human beings.
They are meritorious in one way only: the identification of those weak and degraded impulses within man such as spite and hatred which can be exploited to gain his assent to surrender his own sameness before the law for the promise of gaining superiority in the law. As Orwell noted in his classic Animal Farm, some animals are indeed more equal than others in such an environment. What these individuals fail to alert their subjects to is this: reciprocity is the inevitable result. There will be extreme backlashes with grave implications for future generations. To the leftist and the positivist, this is of no concern: they are after their perfect world now, and if they can get it now, now is all that they have. They may talk of a better future, but the reality is that they seek the immediate gratification of their ideological impulses and fanatical desires. The promise of a better future is only made to gain the consent of those in the present.
The time is fast approaching when the wheat will have to be separated from the chaff to ensure that the leftist is revealed; his disguise as the conservative, the classical liberal, the Democrat, the Republican, the Libertarian, or the neo-this, that, or the other stripped away until he is at last exposed as an individual who believes only in an ideological end and will resort to any means to achieve it. He has not conviction but the end, some purported perfectability which can be achieved and implemented if only we commit to do whatever it takes, right here and now, without being sidetracked by concerns like the sanctity of human life and the legitimacy of the law, which is rooted in the nation that for the law to have meaning to free men, it must regard them as being the same. To the Leftist, these are incidental concerns to the End, and we must do whatever it takes to stifle any objection rooted in this irrelevant concerns. We must erect gulags and ghettoes, camps with ovens to dispose of the mess, and the road to Utopia is strewn with such edifices and the necessary consequences of Leftism. But at the end lies Heaven, a Heaven that is possible only if men surrender their temporal freedoms to arrive at the blessed Freedom conceived of by the Leftist.
The naturalist cannot promise Heaven, but he can promise you that you will be treated like any other man and given the opportunity to make of yourself whatever you will utilizing your own unique gifts. He can assure you that your life will be valued and preserved with the same fervent enthusiasm reserved for the preservation of the lives of others, that a society built around human rights and founded upon the notion that the state acknowledges to acknowledge and defend human liberty will respond to an attack on the life and liberty of one of its members as though it were an attack upon all of its members. I may not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it. He can promise you progress through human effort and ingenuity, where better sanitation and medicine do not lead to your family being viewed as part of the problem of overpopulation, but as evidence of the achievements of better sanitation and medicine. Life is to be celebrated and not rued. That is the end for which we contend.
Even as individualists, many of us want to group ourselves according to some larger identification or affiliation. Since my gradual transition to minarchism began as the outgrowth of my move into libertarianism some ten years ago when I supported Harry Browne, I have been perpetually amused by the insistence of many anarchists and minarchists alike that they want nothing (or at most, as little as possible) higher than the individual as a mode of organization. One has only to look at the wide spectrum of denominational affiliations within anarchism, minarchism, and agorism to see that there are higher modes of affiliation and even organization within our spectrum.
How this would result in something other than statism or at least a construct which resembles statism in at least some respects has never been explained to me. People group and cluster together naturally, being social animals. They recognize collective interests, agendas, and beliefs and they group and organize around those commonly held ideals and causes. In this natural process, what inevitably emerges resembles in every way statism on certain levels. We have the declarations and statements of belief, assertions of various rights, organizational hierarchies and the processes thereof up to and including democratic votes, and all of this resembles on a certain level statism.
The ideological purity insisted upon by some within anarchism and its affiliated movements does not ring true with me. One of the reasons I’ve been turned off by statism and political ideologies in general is the obsession with doctrinal purity despite the overwhelming evidence that the doctrine in question does not worked as claimed when applied in a real world environment. Let’s take the Drug War, the War on Poverty, the War for Morality, and any other crusades and movements of the past 50 years. Drugs, Poverty, and Immorality continue their unabated advance. If anything, the efforts to combat these ills have arguably led to the perpetuation and expansion of the problem.
On the same level, I’ve increasingly become disillusioned with government. I just don’t see that it has ever worked in the way it was ostensibly supposed to work. I don’t see that it ever even came close. Government is a sort of beast created in a laboratory, where under laboratory settings, the beast would function in a controlled environment according to its design and purpose. Unfortunately, the beast escapes the laboratory and makes it into the real world, where it wreaks unholy havoc.
I am no longer an idealist. I love animals and children, though I entertain no illusions about either. The key to managing an animal or a child is to establish dominance in the relationship, to make both understand who is in charge. Time and time again as a teacher, I had to learn and re-learn this lesson. I also witnessed the natural result which inevitably occurred when parents had not established dominance or control in their relationships with their children early on.
I feel the same way towards government. It’s an unruly beast, and in order to make it conform to your purposes and desires for it, you have to beat the living hell out of it. You may even have to kill it and get yourself a new one.
I distinguish between my government and my country. I love my country, and my love is rooted in the land and the common principles which I do honestly feel bind us. There’s a decency among most of us. We’ll help others in need. I like what we are when our fellow man is in need. I regret that we aren’t the same way when there isn’t an ongoing catastrophe.
I love our Constitution, I love our Declaration of Independence, our various charters, and our flags. I like the idea of being a part of something larger than myself. Maybe it is the traditionalist within me, but being American gives me purpose, direction, and a sense of relevance in much the same way that being a Theist does. There’s a spiritual impact I feel when I’m out and about in our country. I love the land, and I love feeling that on some level, it’s mine as an American to have and to hold, to cherish and to defend.
I love the history of our nation, good and bad. There’s as much to be gleaned from the mistakes and errors of our past as there is to be celebrated from our shining moments. For me, America is the land and the people, and the sum of their beliefs, philosophies, and the shared and individual experiences which make up our history. These are very often at odds with government, which for me, is the state. Government is the conduit for the very worst within us to be magnified and exposed in all of its ugliness. The political component brings out the absolute worst within our country.
I draw a distinction between Republicans and Democrats and what I consider to be the insidious evil within our society: the Left. I firmly believe most Republicans and Democrats aren’t that far apart on values. Your average Democrat comes from a manufacturing background, and was perhaps a member of a union. Your average Republican likely comes from a similar background, but may or may not be a member of a union. The working class tends to inherit their class and their political affiliation from the generation which came before them.
They share similar values, even as you go up the social and economic scale. I have yet to meet a Democrat in Alabama who does not abhor partial birth abortion. In fact, I have to meet a Democrat anywhere that I’ve gone who does not regard it as more suited to the laboratory of Dr. Mengele than an American physician’s office. We tend to acknowledge that teenagers will make mistakes with drugs, alcohol, and sexuality, but we don’t necessarily agree that the government ought to intervene to educate them on either of the three subjects. We tend to regard such instruction as falling with the purview of parents and elders within a child’s immediate social circle, be it their family, their church, or their neighborhood.
The Left does not regard sex education as the purview of parents for precisely the same reason it does not regard traditional family structures in high regard: it seeks to deracinate the traditional values and beliefs of any society in which Leftists exist. It seeks to challenge and overturn convention, and not to erect anything better in its place, but rather to arrive at a sort of nihilistic destination where individuals are no better than subjects in some grand scheme or experiment conducted by ideologues and academics who want to tinker with the lives and beliefs of others and their cultures.
The Left constructs some noble goal or some laudable end like the reduction of teen pregnancy or the reduction of sexuality transmitted diseases; and it proposes a program or agenda to accomplish its end. The reality of the matter is this: the stated or ostensible goal of a Leftist is never the genuine goal. Teen pregnancy goes up, not down, and the rate of transmission where venereal diseases is concerned skyrockets as well. The idea is to change normative standards, to introduce alternative modes of sexual conduct in the name of limitless individual expression.
It never once crosses the Leftist’s mind that limitless individual expression is not freedom at all, but rather an invitation to voluntary enslavement. People can die as a result of their bad habits. In point of fact, we refer to behaviors as bad for the very reason that they are a danger to human life. We construct rules within a society or point to certain behaviors as virtuous because they lead to the perpetuation and the prolonging of life. We don’t condone overconsumption or promiscuous sexual behavior because neither works to perpetuate or prolong life; rather, both are likely to shorten lives.
We can’t force individuals to choose virtue, but we can erect societies where failure isn’t incentivized in the form of endless safeguards, bailouts, and nanny state regulations. Protecting people from consequence does not result in greater survivability or happiness; it results in indolence and enslavement to whatever entity rescues individuals from themselves. The point of salvation is freedom, not bondage.
Leftists have a fatalist view or outlook on nearly everything. Their idea is never that individuals left to learn on their own in the marketplace of behaviors can over time learn for themselves what works and what doesn’t; it is instead that individuals of a certain caliber or class are incapable of learning anything. The Leftist regards the poor or the mentally disabled in the same way that they would regard a stray animal: they seek to spay, neuter, and yes, even subject them to euthanasia. History is a testament to this. Look at the so-called progressives and the various movements they have spawned, eugenics and population control especially.
Human beings are not animals, and anyone who would propose to treat them with the same management techniques and husbandry methods employed by farmers seeking to build or cull their livestock is unfit to hold power over the life of another human being. If we regard the Leftist with cold contempt and even hot hatred; it is because he is contemptible by virtue of his low esteem for the life, autonomy, and right to self-determination of his fellow man.
The reply of the Leftist is that someone must, absolutely must, provide some redress for the suffering of these poor dullards. They are overrunning the Earth, consuming beyond the capacity of the planet to replenish itself, and they must be stopped to ensure the greater good of the human race. Implicit within such logic is the fact that the Leftist does not regard whoever falls into the category of “they” as part of the human race, or at least as a part of the human race worth preserving on the same level as the class occupied by Leftists and their peers. In truth, the Leftist regards such individuals as altogether separate from himself. He may even, as history has shown, construct a classification system to relegate these others as being somehow akin to animals.
The great danger of Leftism is this: it wears virtually every mask available. Leftists have been Republicans, Democrats, Libertarians, and every other sort of partisan, religious, or ideological denomination under the sun. The measure of Leftism is its obsession with pragmatism as the basis for action against or over others.
It is from this pragmatism that many of the coercive abuses of the state spring. Leftism is the soil from which the great heresies of statism spring: security as a justification for surrender of liberties rather than the means to the end of liberty; eugenics and forced sterilization; slavery and segregation; the reduction of women to a lesser status before the law with lesser privileges where suffrage and other matters were concerned; and the reduction of embryos from human status to mere protoplasm in the event of an abortion while simultaneously preserving laws which classify the murder of a pregnant woman as the murder of a child as well. If you would have a government function within the limits prescribed by its citizens, you must keep Leftism out of elected office and out of bureaucracy. In point of fact, if you would have any sort of a society whatsoever, you must expel Leftists from your ranks the minute they reveal themselves.
The Leftist is a vampire who sucks the lifeblood out of a society, a cancer and a pox upon culture who corrupts everything from public discourse to private conversation; and he encourages the proliferation of racial bigotry and resentment, gender inequity, slavery, and the equivocation of consensual sexual relationships between adults of sound mind to that of a man or woman who molests an animal or a child, neither of whom possesses the requisite mental faculties to form consent to a sexual encounter. The Leftist must be identified, and he must be cast out and purged. He sows only endless abstraction, and all in the service of tearing down the agreed upon conventions and normative standards of the society in which he exists.
The Leftist seizes upon rights not as the end to realize his own Life, Liberty, and Pursuit of Happiness, but as a means to overturn the Life and Liberty of others with whom he disagrees. He seeks at every turn to utilize his freedom and autonomy to overturn theirs. The end result of the open society which tolerates a Leftist is the extinguishing of individual self-determination, autonomy, and eventually, the extinction of the open society itself, which is replaced with a totalitarian or autocratic regime.
The liberal or the conservative may be a Leftist. As I have said before, Leftism is malleable to any ideology or affiliation, so long as pragmatism is introduced and melded with the the ideology or affiliation in question. When a conservative transitions to a point where agreed upon absolutes like the sanctity of life or the autonomy of individuals up to and including sacrosanct rights become mere means rather than ends unto themselves, he is a Leftist, as is any liberal who takes the same position. When anyone comes to a point where they say to themselves, this is more important than life or the rights of individuals to their lives, their beliefs, and property is concerned, they have effectively removed themselves from whatever society in which they previously existed. They have committed treason. From that point forward, they can only work to overthrow the freedom, self-determination, and autonomy of others who do not align themselves with the Leftist. Everyone who does not believe as a Leftist believes become the Other, or the Enemy. The freedom of the Leftist differs from your freedom and my freedom in that it is mutually exclusive to the freedoms of others who disagree.
When Christian conservatives argue for boycotts against a sitcom on the grounds that it is immoral or promotes indecency, their position is not to make a statement of belief. It is instead to deny others the right to determine for themselves whether or not the program in question is decent or indecent. There is a fail safe method of determining merit in entertainment: ratings, and/or the money which flows from those ratings in the form of advertising dollars or sales. The Christian conservative boycotts not as an exercise of free speech, but as an attempt to intimidate and coerce advertisers and producers of entertainment so that they will not defy the standards advocated by Christian conservatives. It is the same with liberals who object to conservative programming in the same manner. They are not content to let ratings or sales serve as an arbiter of a program’s success or failure. They simply do not want anyone to be able to have the option of watching the program in question at all.
I exercise my freedom by turning the channel or putting in a DVD. The Leftist seeks to deny me the opportunity to choose for myself. His is a war on Ideas, an effort to drive all competing Opinions and Ideas from the marketplace in order to limit the options of consumers to only those which the Leftist deems appropriate or good. Politicians who cater to this tendency, who inculcate within their constituencies an entitled attitude so common to Leftists, are not politicians at all: they are demagogues.
Virtue is the foundation of any free society, and the ends of freedom is to find that behavior which works in the marketplace of conduct. That is why individuals who save their money and live within their means build wealth more quickly than individuals who do not. The Leftist seeks to dominate the marketplace of conduct to pick the winners not according to the merit of their behavior in a marketplace, but according to his own set notions of the way things ought to be. He fails every single time.
The last three of our Presidents have proven that, contrary to the myths and innuendos, drugs will not ruin your life. All three used drugs. They learned on their own that repeated, frequent, and abusive drug use was perhaps not the way to go through life. My own personal experience taught me more or less the same lesson. I see nothing wrong with recreational use; though I don’t see anything right about it either. It’s a choice individuals ought to be able to make on their own time. I firmly believe that if they were able to do so, overall drug use would decline both as a result of their epiphanies and as a result of removing some of the illicit qualities of drug use.
The Leftist believes in the efficacy of the Law above all else. He believes that the Law can prevent or deter crime. We execute more people in this country than any other nation on Earth besides China, and we have the highest homicide rate regardless. We have an abundance of laws and we incarcerate more people than any other nation on Earth besides China. Crime continues to multiply.
The Law does not prevent or deter crime. It merely identifies a behavior as criminal and prescribes a course of action for the eventual occurrence of the behavior. The Law is important in that it provides orderly processes and defined consequences for an action. It discourages vigilantism by providing a legal recourse to address violence against others, whether in their lives, persons, or property; and it provides a means for individuals to stand equally before the Law so that they may be held accountable for their crimes or their torts. At least, that’s the way it ought to work.
Just as the conservative traditionalist Leftist believes in the deterrent efficacy of the Law, his liberal counterpart believes in the rehabilitative efficacy of the law. One does not rehabilitate or deter through the law. One merely provides a consequence or redress commensurate with the crime or the tort in question.
But the Leftist seeks not correction, but rather some abstract notion of justice. Tell me, what is justice? Is it the reciprocity of consequence? Do we want that? Do we want the state raping rapists so that they may know what they’ve done to their victims? Does the acknowledgement of earlier wrongs which excuse present wrongs somehow constitute justice? Do we want the state taking into account the abuse suffered by a murderer as a child when sentencing him for his crimes? Does this somehow mitigate the free choice he made when he chose to kill his victim?
To invite this sort of nonsense into a society, to entertain it as a basis for governmental action, is to overturn absolutes and institute situation and circumstance in their place. It is to invalidate the real and the actual in order to entertain the hypothetical. It is to rob the meaning and significance from every area of our culture. It is to say that an individual may own himself and his property, and that he may be entitled to pursue his own happiness with both as he sees fit, if and only x does not occur or is not presently occurring. No individual may claim freedom based in individual rights or liberties in such an environment. His rights are dependent not upon his mere possession of humanity, but rather upon the situation or the circumstance in which he finds himself. He is at the mercy of the Fates.
It is to exchange civilization for barbarity. We arrive at a debate where an attorney working in the employ of the United States Federal Government, whose salary is drawn from your tax dollars, can argue that the President has the right to sexually mutilate the child of a suspect in order to compel that suspect to divulge information. The infant has no rights. He is a mere object to be exploited for an end. His humanity is stripped and his claim to autonomy reduced to nothing. He can make no objection to his own mutilation as the interrogator crushes his testicles in order to compel his father or his mother to divulge information that they may not even have to begin with. After all, they’re just suspects. They haven’t been tried or convicted of anything. When you look upon what Leftism has wrought, and the way in which it turns the State away from its intent of upholding, defending, preserving, and even expanding individual liberty and power, you can see where Leftism and the primacy of the individual are incompatible. You can further see how intent and result are separated and rendered awry in statism.
The problem is not statism per se; it is the appropriation of the state by Leftists of various stripes who put pragmatism before principle, results before process, ends before means, hypotheticals before what is presently real and known. They proliferate laws, regulations, and bureaucracies, all in the name of arriving at Utopia and inevitably they arrive at Dystopia instead. The problem of Leftism highlights a greater problem among those individuals who believe in sacrosanct individual rights: a lack of resolve and an obvious discomfiture on our parts to reckon with the obvious danger of allowing those who would exercise their rights in order to overthrow the rights of everyone else. At some point, we cannot continue dealing in theories and endless abstractions ourselves. We have to resolve to fight the Leftists in order to ensure our own survival.
This naturally means surrendering some of our doctrinal purity to work with those whose opinions and outlooks differ from our own, but whose foundational ideals are nearly identical: individual rights are sacrosanct, non-negotiable, and the ends to which everything else from our government to our armies serve as means. We can coexist because of this common foundation and outlook, but we cannot coexist with the Leftist. His success entails our obliteration. He builds the gulags, ghettos, and concentration camps for us. He proposes our sterilization or our lobotomization. He dreams of not only procuring nuclear weapons, but deploying them against his enemies. We are fast approaching the hour when our own abstractions and silly theoretical bifurcations will no longer matter: our survival, and indeed the survival of the world in which we live, will depend on rising to meet the threat of Leftism once and for all.
I leave you with this, the warning of German pastor and activist Friedrich Gustav Emil Martin Niemoller: “When the Nazis came for the communists, I remained silent; I was not a communist. When they locked up the social democrats, I remained silent: I was not a social democrat. When they came for the trade unionists, I did not speak out; I was not a trade unionist. When they came for the Jews, I remained silent: I wasn’t a Jew. When they came for me, there was no one left to speak out.”
Every time you hear the government assert for itself the power to hold individuals indefinitely without trial or legal counsel, or any time you hear of the President’s newfound authority to execute Americans without trial or due process, you think of your silence, and realize that it is your complicity which empowers the Left in its quest. When they do inevitably come for you, there will be no one left to speak out. These are your fellow citizens, convicted of nothing, only accused by a government whose record should give you little comfort or confidence about its motives and purposes.
“And this guilt lies heavily upon the German people and the German name, even upon Christendom. For in our world and in our name have these things been done.”
-F. Niemoller
Massachusetts Beware Liberal Democrats Wielding Unions
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Massachusetts stands ready to correct one portion (eliminating the stranglehold of the U.S. Liberal Senate majority and prevent ramming passage of “bad bills” upon the populace) of the 2008 election and set the standard for every upcoming election in 2010. It is reasonable to expect that Massachusetts is well aware that they have choices to further assist the destruction of the United States of America by Liberal Democratic candidates that are so last century, whose methods of sacking votes are arcane and archaic or move forward Conservatively.
Let’s have a cup of “Tea”, shall we, as we look into Liberal Democratic candidates wielding unions and more…..
Liberal Democratic Candidates seem to enjoy Secret Banking Issues and Sharing the Wealth, as we are reminded by William A. Jacobson,
Coakley set up a secret campaign account for her state campaign organization which she used to lay the groundwork for a U.S. Senate campaign even though campaign rules prohibited the use of state campaign funds for federal races. Coakley used the account for polling and other organizational functions, including campaign signs and paraphenalia, which she then “sold” to her federal campaign committee.
Liberal Democratic Candidates seem to enjoy Campaign Finance Issues. Just like ones found on Boston Magazine:
Coakley is calculating in other ways, too. Just look at her campaign finance forms. A candidate can’t use state funds for a federal campaign, but that’s exactly what Coakley has done. The state GOP was the first to pick up on this, saying she had paid roughly $30,000 to people on her payroll who had the ostensible job of helping with her AG run in 2010. Only problem is, these people are also helping her now with her Senate campaign. Coakley has publicly called the allegation petty politics, but she also quietly moved $35,000 from her state campaign coffers to her federal ones. The Federal Election Committee has taken the complaint from the state GOP under review.
Liberal Democratic Candidates seem to enjoy the support of Unions and keep them under their thumb, as seen on the AFL-CIO website:
The Massachusetts AFL-CIO today unanimously endorsed Martha Coakley for United States Senate in the upcoming January 19 election.
Martha Coakley enjoys Flip Flop Political Views and Legislation.
This Liberal Democratic Candidate appears to throw anyone under the bus to further their career, when they could do the right thing.
Liberal Democratic Candidates forgo “My Word is my bond” and it always changes with the wind!
This Liberal Democratic Candidates play the sympathy and first to achieve card.
Looks like someone is getting called out and my goodness…it’s a Liberal Democratic Candidate.
Could this be a skill derived under White House tutelage?
White House Resident seems to enjoy Banking Issues and Sharing the Wealth.
White House Resident seems to enjoy Campaign Finance Issues. (1 of many)
White House Resident seems to enjoy the support of Unions and keeps them under thumb. (1 great source)
White House Resident enjoys Flip Flop Political Views and Legislation.
White House Resident appears to throw anyone under the bus to further their career, when they could do the right thing (So many choices, so little time!)
White House Resident forgoes “My Word is my bond” and it always changes with the wind!
White House Resident plays the sympathy and first to achieve card.
White House Resident is viewed by the electorate as incapable of performing his sworn duties. And just for good measure the puppets are whining.
Massachusetts do the right thing in 14 days and vote smart for America with an educated vote! It’s time to put politics as usual aside!
The U.S. Senators Have Closed Off “We The People”
Posted by: | CommentsThe U.S. Senators (60 WEAK ones in particular, whose party letter directly following their names, coincidentally is a higher grade level than deserved) have decided on their own to ignore the constituents of their own states and just for good measure, each of the other 49 states’ constituents (or in Obamanese – the other 56 states).
What was heard on the floor of the Senate by the Liberal Democrats was nothing more than lie after lie with bribes sprinkled in between to get their vote on board this torpedo of a bill to sink America. Much like the first monkey, except the polar opposite of what was demanded, the Democrats continued on and on, but failed the highest calling of their Oath of Office, the Senate Prayer and the “Pledge of Allegiance” before the vote was cast… there was no truth spoken. Spoke all Evil!
The polls have shown that the U.S. Population view on the Health Care bill has consistently been trending negatively as Rasmussen Reports and following statistics validates:
| Date | Favor | Oppose |
| Dec 12-13 | 40% | 56% |
| Dec 4-5 | 41% | 51% |
| Nov 29 | 41% | 53% |
| Nov 21-22 | 38% | 56% |
| Nov 13-14 | 47% | 49% |
| Nov 7-8 | 45% | 52% |
| Oct 30-31 | 42% | 54% |
| Oct 24-25 | 45% | 51% |
| Oct 16-17 | 42% | 54% |
| Oct 10-11 | 44% | 50% |
| Oct 2-3 | 46% | 50% |
| Sep 24-25 | 41% | 56% |
| Sep 16-17 | 43% | 56% |
| Sep 15-16 | 44% | 53% |
| Sep 14-15 | 42% | 55% |
| Sep 13-14 | 45% | 52% |
| Sep 12-13 | 51% | 46% |
| Sep 11-12 | 48% | 48% |
| Sep 10-11 | 47% | 49% |
| Sep 9-10 | 46% | 51% |
| Sept 8-9 | 44% | 53% |
| Aug 25-26 | 43% | 53% |
| Aug 9-10 | 42% | 53% |
| Jul 26-27 | 47% | 49% |
| Jul 20-21 | 44% | 53% |
| Jul 10-11 | 46% | 49% |
| Jun 27-28 | 50% | 45% |
Like the monkey in the middle, the Senators don’t appear to see anything! See No Evil! (Real Facts are the Democrat’s Evil)
Last, but not least, the first monkey who hears nothing. How many town halls this past summer and fall did Senators fail to show for? How many Senators held none? How many Senators substituted a one side conference call? They wanted to Hear No Evil! (Anything that agrees with the U.S. Constitution & our original founders was not to the Democratic Senators’ likings).
I am making a commitment (feel free to grab the detailed tips linked) to continue all efforts in Arkansas to install appropriate Patriotic representation. As many are aware across the USA, Arkansas currently has an embarrassing tag team of U.S. Senators and U.S. Representatives of the House. A mistake that we intend to correct. I personally would like to apologize to America for our poor choices.
Liberal Stimulus Costs $862,498 per Job Created
Posted by: | CommentsThose who seem to think that the government provides all the answers will be really impressed with the interesting figures to come from Iowa’s Fifth District.
Congressman Steve King came out with reports, today, on the number of jobs created in his Fifth Congressional District of a whopping 157.3 jobs. If you think that is impressive, I know you are going to love the cost of $135,670,954 to create all those jobs. This figures out to be an impressive $862,498 per job created by the liberal stimulus. Now that’s government efficiency for you. I don’t know about you but I am sure glad that our children’s children will be stuck paying for so few jobs created at such great an expense.
King made the following statement on the issue:
“Perhaps the Obama Administration should award stimulus-funded prize money to any Iowan who can find the 7th, 8th, 16th, 17th, 19th, 24th and 31st Iowa Congressional Districts.
“I said it at the time this bill passed, and I will say it again: the Obama Administration’s economic philosophy is straight out of the failed Great Depression-era playbook. Increasing government spending, debt, deficits and taxes as a means to stimulate the economy has always delayed the recovery.
“This information confirms that the ‘stimulus’ bill is really a non-stimulating boondoggle of liberal pet projects and wasteful spending. Taxpayers should be outraged at what the President and liberals in this Congress have done with their money.”
You might want to focus your attention to a button located towards the top right corner of the page that states, “Report Fraud, Waste & Abuse”. I find that an interesting button to be located on a site for a program that is all about corruption, wasteful spending, and liberal government abuse.




