Monday, October 26, 2015

ISIS and Liberals: Working Toward the Same Ends

Hardly a day goes by that the news does not contain a glib reference to ISIS destroying some ancient monument or some other piece of our ancient history. This week, they managed to combine their two favorite activities, grisly executions and destruction of human cultural heritage, into one when they blew up three prisoners by tying them to historic Palmyran columns and just exploding everything all at once.

When I was younger, this might have gotten much more attention. Today, not so much. This event does not concern the modern American because he is already inured to human and historical destruction. You do not need to look very long at the comment section of any such story to see the ignorant screeds of today's liberals vilifying the killers as religious even as they ignore or even applaud the destruction of something from our common history (or ignore the destruction of a million fetuses every year in our abortion clinics).

Today's college kids secretly love this shit: History, after all, is sexist and racist.


One disturbing trait in the typical liberal today, even those who have allegedly been educated in our most respected institutions of higher learning, is the almost entire lack of any regard for the past. A columnist somewhere wrote that today's youth are basically technopeasants. They are enamored of their technology and think themselves very advanced but they basically have no knowledge of anything outside their computers and their phones. They disregard history (and most think that math is a school subject too hard to take seriously). As for great historic figures such as Agamemnon or Julius Caesar, they were probably sexists and racists (though any juicy tidbits about the pederasty of the Greeks and Romans are always enjoyed by this crowd.)

I briefly taught high school classes after many years as a Montessori teacher in the elementary grades. It sickly amused me one day when my students disparaged historical figures about whom we were reading because they were so backward and "now we're more educated and stuff." My head nearly spun. The children in front of me were barely literate and knew next to nothing about anything outside their phones and their social media accounts. Nineteenth century farmers could have told them more about the world around them in an hour than they will ever learn in life.

Political correctness has erased critical thinking from our natural skill sets. Young people are finding it more and more difficult to integrate into the working world because it is a composite of cold, hard facts. It does not matter how you feel about showing up to work on time or what your perception of your boss is.

This is not to say that you should not have concerns about the way that your work environment is arranged. What handicaps young people is the idea that their feelings are real things. They are not. Justice is a real thing. An employer may be unjust to his employees and this is a real concern. That he is simply mean is...meaningless.

Today's young, liberal youth coming out of school would be much better prepared for the world if they had ever had to take seriously the lessons of our past. Greek sculpture, Byzantine painting and medieval Catholic art should be taken seriously not because you necessarily believe in their gods but because they are beautiful and meaningful parts of our history. You do not have to believe that the world is 6,000 years old to derive meaning from the story of Noah in the opening chapters of the Old Testament or accept Jesus as your Savior to appreciate the concept of mercy demonstrated in the Gospel According to Luke.

Unfortunately, these texts, as well as many of the great Greek philosophers and Roman orators, are practically non-existent for school children today. Publicly deemed too difficult (and secretly reviled by the PC police as sexist, racist, genderist and whatever the fuck else they can think of), these texts are increasingly hard to find in modern classrooms.

The PC police are no different than the extremists in the Middle East. They see themes in the work of the ancients that do not come to the same conclusions as they have in their multi-cultural religion. Like the ancient Christians whom they ignorantly and mistakenly accuse of destroying ancient works (when, in fact, they preserved those works for us), the antifas and the PC police eagerly erase or ignore cultural jewels from our past.

Politically correct censorship is just soft Jihad.

Monday, October 19, 2015

The Democratic Debates: Clinton Uber Alles

While the Republicans have been stealing the show for months, thanks to the antics of Donald Trump, the Democrats are finally getting some limelight now that their own debates have begun. Before now, the democratic race certainly stirred interest among democrats themselves but their intrigues did not cross party lines in terms of excitement. Most republicans were entertained enough by their own party's three-ring circus.


The first democratic debate did not get nearly as much press and public attention as the republican debates but that may be due to predictability. In an interesting turn of events, it is the GOP that now holds more diverse views than the Democratic Party. With the exception of the largely-ignored Jim Webb, all democratic contenders hate guns and religion, love illegal immigration, higher taxes and homosexuality and are happy printing money for entitlement programs. Nevertheless, millions of liberal Americans tuned in to watch other people largely agree with them.

And the Winner Is...

I am sure many low-information viewers were confused as to the identities of the people on stage. The competitors really boil down to the First Two and the Other Three. While the latter group showed up, no one was really listening to anything but the presentations of Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders.

In the aftermath, opinions vary as to who won the debate, though the MSM would have you believe that everyone agrees with them in thinking that Hillary Clinton won. Some polls, such as a Facebook vote, gave the victory to Sanders before being erased. The same happened with an early CNN poll. I am not sure why the Founders bothered to put safeguards such as the US Senate in the government to protect against fickle public opinion when they could have just relied on the media to do so.

Essentially, however, I agree with Clinton's victory for one simple reason. No matter how she and Sanders may weigh in the balances, Clinton wins because Sanders is such a hopeless beta-male that he cannot promote himself effectively.

During the debate, he exclaimed how sick he was of hearing about Clinton's emails and basically turned attention away from potential criticisms of her work as Secretary of State. With that possibility eliminated, the other candidates did not have any way to distinguish themselves positively. Remember, none of them have any real distinct ideas about domestic and foreign policy unless they are able to point out Clinton's vote for the war in Iraq and her questionable work as Secretary of State.

This move was classic Sanders. Several weeks ago, he allowed himself to be pushed off the stage by two Black Lives Matters representatives who insulted him and the entire crowd. He was unable to do anything but pump his fist for Black Power like the effete 60's radical that he is. One wonders what Sanders would do on the world stage when Putin or Xi tried to push him around.

The Other Three and the Shadow of Joe

Mention should at least be made of Jim Webb, Lincoln Chafee and Martin O.Malley. They are really running for vice-president by now and their chances even for that scrap are slim. Maybe by now they are starting to get realistic and fix their sights on cabinet posts.

The real question at this point regards the possible entrance of Joe Biden. A lot of commentators think that Clinton's showing was strong enough to convince Biden to stay out. Of course, funding and Biden's proclivity for gaffes of all sorts may push him into the race anyway. Now that would make the debates worth watching!

Sunday, October 4, 2015

Two Conflicting Sentiments in American Politics

A few years ago, something occurred during a biology class that I was taking which illuminated the modern political and social landscape of America. With just one comment made by a classmate, it was as if someone just turned on the light in a dark room and, suddenly, everything was clear. I knew right where I and everybody else was in that room with regard to political ideals.

A Biology Lesson

I own much of this illumination to the identities of the people involved. I am a middle-aged man who, at the time, was taking a pre-requisite course to get into nursing school ( I graduated a few months ago). The conversation which I was witnessing took place between my instructor, perhaps 5-10 years younger than me, and a young girl taking the class. She was probably 20 years old.

The professor was explaining the nucleotides that compose the very basic elements of our genetic structure. He remarked that errors in the layouts of these nucleotides were responsible for many diseases. In fact, he said, it was known that UVA radiation could cause thymine nucleotides to bind into units called thymine dimers. These mutations were the primary cause of skin cancer.

Then he said that it always pained him to hear about people using tanning beds. They were just increasing the chances that their thymine would mutate and cause cancer.

The young girl in the class spoke up. "That's awful. If I were president, I would outlaw those places."

The professor, God bless him, replied that there was something called the US Constitution and we were all still free to make decisions for ourselves, even if those decisions were not good for us.

The girl later went on to comment that she just didn't feel safe in a country where it was permitted to endanger yourself. As I recall, the professor turned us back to the lesson and the moment was left behind, only to live in my memory.

Safety versus Freedom

It occurred to me, as I tried to comprehend why I found the girl's comments so repulsive, that she represented one side of a dichotomy in American mindsets. It also revealed to me an explanation for the differences between the general nature of American and European political divides.

This country was founded and colonized by a wide variety of people. The Puritans were not the only ones to come over from the Old World. Yet those early Americans shared one quality or drive in life. They wanted to be free to live as they pleased. Their great common desire was to be left alone to pursue their destinies. They wanted to be free to create their own worlds and manage their own protection from the elements and from their fellow human beings.

Even later immigrants, on whom descendants of the earliest Americans looked down, shared a similar drive. They were escaping poverty or limitations of some sort in Europe in order to come here and find their own way.

In the early 20th century, the much-reviled Southern European immigrants were not coming to America to be on the dole. There was no welfare system. They fully expected to be left to their own devices when they hit the shore. As long as they had a chance to fight for their own prosperity in a land that seemed to have endless real estate and resources, they were content with the opportunity.

There is another social desire active in the world. This is the desire to be safe, to be protected. The semi-mythical contract that occurred between post-Roman Empire Europeans and the feudal knights demonstrates the centrality of this desire in the human psyche.

Allegedly, the feudal transformation of Europe occurred when villages of common people agreed to provide economic support for soldiers, typically led by the horsemen we would call knights now. in exchange for protection from the increasingly chaotic environment left as Rome's influence ebbed in Europe. I doubt any such exchange occurred as cleanly as that but I am also sure that there is a kernel of truth in it all. With banditry on the rise and the roads becoming home to crime rather than commerce, I am sure many people gave up their freedom to be safe.

Sound familiar?

As time passed, the boundlessness of US resources became somewhat less boundless. While this nation still retains an immense amount of open land, times changed during the 20th century. Urbanization increased, especially after the world wars. We became a people primarily living in cities, cities in which we were protected by police forces rather than a village posse or our own arms. Also, the generations that had come here seeking freedom passed away and were replaced by descendants who did not necessarily share their desire for freedom.

Instead, they wanted what those medieval Europeans wanted: protection from crime. These new Americans were increasingly less armed than their forefathers. They wanted to enjoy urban prosperity, learn new trades and even go to school to study the liberal arts rather than forge a new life in the wilderness or build a business from scratch. In order to do these things, they wanted government to take on the job of keeping them safe while they pursued these new goals.

They were willing to give up certain things, such as the right to bear arms, in order to create a protected environment in which they could pursue these goals. In short, they valued safety more than freedom.

That doesn't sound so awful. However, I think that this new desire for safety rather than freedom has again morphed with the latest generation into something that does, in fact, sicken me,

That girl in my biology class did not simply want to make a calculated decision to sacrifice a specific freedom in exchange for another social good. She wanted to live in an environment in which she no longer had the ability to make bad choices at all. Rather, she wanted someone else making those decisions for her. In essence, she wanted to be a perpetual child and she wanted her political leaders to act as pseudo-parents. She wanted Barack Obama to be her father and simply refuse to permit unsafe things in her home environment.

Women's Suffrage and the Infantilization of America

Something else occurred in America during this last century which I believe had a huge impact on its political and social transformation. Women became full-fledged citizens with the right to vote.

Now, the move to give women the vote was ostensibly done by forces which might be characterized as conservative today. There had long been a liberal movement to give women the vote in the Anglo Saxon world. However, the granting of voting rights was really done in Western states in order to hurry the process ending in statehood. These territories suddenly had many more voters and possessed more "statelike" populations in terms of size.

I posit that this had a big effect on the increasing concern with safety in this country. Prior to this, I am sure that most American men wanted, more than anything else, the space and opportunity to live out their lives.

Women, though, come into the world with completely different mindsets. Contrary to pseudo-lesbian feminist beliefs, women are born with family on their minds. I am not one of those who believes that women are naturally more nurturing or more gentle than men. Anyone who has been married knows that this is simply not true,

However, by force of millions of years of biology, women do tend to think in terms of family and children. They are more naturally comfortable with children. To their credit, we probably owe much of our rise from the animal kingdom to women's incessant chattering with children, which helped develop those children's minds with regard to language.

I think that this sudden preponderance of women in the voting bloc (they are over 50% of the population) explains much of the recent past politically.

How much of our political conversation, especially since the onset of the Cold War, has been dedicated to the cause of protection? We wanted to be protected from the Nazis. the Soviets, the terrorists and now,increasingly, people who say "mean" things. Women have been all too happy to throw out freedom of speech in order to prevent feelings from being hurt. This reminds me of a mother forbidding her children to broach certain topics just because she doesn't want to deal with another familial eruption.

Of course, it is not just women who engage in this kind of thinking. Men do it, too. That is, they think this way until they become men. Boy children want to be protected from harm as much as girl children until they begin to develop. Then they begin to fight, explore, seek their own way in the world,

I think an additional phenomenon explaining this conflict in American politics is not just the addition of women to the voting bloc but also the pacification, feminization and infantilization of many men. Or, rather, it is that many men never really develop into men but remain in a stage of early adolescence which leaves them all too ready to seek safety rather than freedom in life.

Other Groups in America and in Europe

This thinking has helped me to understand why conservatives in Europe often have distinctly different views on social and economic issues when compared to American conservatives. Many conservatives in Europe consider a certain amount of socialism to be natural and even desirable.

This makes sense when you remember that they are the descendants of those peasants who chose to stay in the Old World and embraced the idea of being protected by government. The democratic governments have simply replaced the knights and nobility of centuries past.

It also explains to me why other groups in American politics never seem to embrace "American ideals". Africans did not immigrate to this country seeking freedom to live as they please. They were abducted, sold and transported here against their will. It makes sense that they do not have any genetic impulse to seek freedom over safety since their ancestors had no desire to cross the ocean to be here in the first place.

How this applies to Latino immigrants might be a good topic for another essay. This article is already too long.

However, in closing, I think that this concept helps to explain a lot that is going on in American politics now and even applies to the ascendancy of Donald Trump. Again, this is a topic for another article.

Friday, October 2, 2015

Donald Trump: Bullying Opponents Out of the Race

Donald Trump is looking to bully another GOP opponent out of the race. It is becoming obvious that this was and is a major technique for Trump in business. Using pure, masculine aggressiveness to improve your position and drive away weaker contenders. It probably works well for him in the business arena but it remains to be seen if it will work in the long term in politics.
You're Fired!

Trump is forecasting that Rand Paul will soon drop out of the race and takes credit for pushing him into this decision.Rand Paul generally garners about 2% of the vote in polls conducted among likely GOP voters. All this after years of hard work and a much bugger percentage gained by his father in GOP races in 2012. In fact, Ron Paul went all the way to the General Convention and still got 190 votes when Romney essentially had the thing locked up.

Trump is probably right. Rand Paul, as well as several others, look poised to bow out of the race. Though there is still a long way to go and anything can happen, with so many contenders it just makes sense for someone with roughly 1% of the vote to step out. What is remarkable about this moment in American politics is how it appears that a leading candidate is actively trying to push people out of the race.

I an not sure that this is a good idea for Donald Trump in the long-term. It may be satisfying and it may appeal to his desire for conflict, but it may also strengthen his more popular opponents. One wonders how many Paul voters are likely to come into Trump's camp rather than throw in their lot with Rubio, Cruz or Fiorina. Paul was known for his libertarian views and it is anyone's guess where his support may go.

The Chink in Trump's Armor

At the same time, Donald Trump seems to have displayed, for the first time, a weakness. He already admits that he has a fallback plan for failure. If his numbers get down to Scott Walker levels, he claims, he will just go back to running his business.

Is this an accidental slip that reveals some psychic weariness of the whole race? Is Trump already thinking about quitting and going back to his natural realm in business? Surely, the few times that his handlers have convinced him to moderate his remarks or apologize must rankle him. Perhaps Trump will make his own exit before anyone expects it.

That certainly won't happen now. Donald Trump still has a loyal core of followers giving him roughly 25% of the support available for GOP candidates. I am not sure that he will make it to the primaries due to his own quirky nature but I am sure that he will continue to entertain us for a few more weeks at least,