Alarming News: I like Morgan Freeberg. A lot.
American Digest: And I like this from "The Blog That Nobody Reads", because it is -- mostly -- about me. What can I say? I'm on an ego trip today. It won't last.
Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler: We were following a trackback and thinking "hmmm... this is a bloody excellent post!", and then we realized that it was just part III of, well, three...Damn. I wish I'd written those.
Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler: ...I just remembered that I found a new blog a short while ago, House of Eratosthenes, that I really like. I like his common sense approach and his curiosity when it comes to why people believe what they believe rather than just what they believe.
Brutally Honest: Morgan Freeberg is brilliant.
Dr. Melissa Clouthier: Morgan Freeberg at House of Eratosthenes (pftthats a mouthful) honors big boned women in skimpy clothing. The picture there is priceless--keep scrolling down.
Exile in Portales: Via Gerard: Morgan Freeberg, a guy with a lot to say. And he speaks The Truth...and it's fascinating stuff. Worth a read, or three. Or six.
Just Muttering: Two nice pieces at House of Eratosthenes, one about a perhaps unintended effect of the Enron mess, and one on the Gore-y environ-movie.
Mein Blogovault: Make "the Blog that No One Reads" one of your daily reads.
The Virginian: I know this post will offend some people, but the author makes some good points.
Poetic Justice: Cletus! Ah gots a laiv one fer yew...
Janet Daley writes in Telegraph:
Like a mythical traveller seeking truth, a think tank has asked a profound question: what is fairness? And lo, the people have answered with (almost) one voice: what “fair” means is that those who are deserving shall receive, and those who are not shall be – well, not exactly cast out, but certainly not entitled to everything that’s going.
As we report today, Policy Exchange – supposedly the Prime Minister’s favourite ideas outlet – has done a brave and unusual thing. Rather than polling the public just on policy and voting intention, it has put a far more abstract moral issue before them. It instructed the pollsters at YouGov to find out precisely what the public thought the most powerful term of approbation in the political lexicon – “fair” – actually amounted to.
The quite unequivocal reply that was received (with breathtakingly enormous majorities in some forms) came as no surprise to this column. To most voters, fairness does not mean an equal distribution of resources and wealth, or even a redistribution of these things according to need. It means, as the report’s title – “Just Deserts” – implies, that people get what they deserve. And what is deserved, the respondents made clear, refers to that which is achieved by effort, talent or dedication to duty: in other words, earned on merit.
You know, it’s awfully funny. We’re pretty good at marginalizing opinions and ridiculing them if complete strangers tell us those opinions should be marginalized and ridiculed. We marginalize and ridicule the idea that Barack Obama should have been required to prove His place of birth with some piece of evidence more authentic than a pink piece of paper fresh off the printing presses that essentially says “the people running Hawaii right now believe it.” We ridicule people who think babies might be alive before they actually breathe air. Ridicule mothers who homeschool their kids, or show some kind of affection toward their father, acting like he matters. And oh yes, we are great at ridiculing people who have found Christ. These people are minorities and minorities are there to be mocked.
But this toxic minority of people who think of “fairness” as “everyone has the same amount of stuff no matter what”…they’re allowed to live among us. They won’t keep their opinions to themselves, either. Unlike the homeschool-Moms, they can’t point to a single productive thing they’ve managed to achieve with this, uh, unique opinion they’ve got. Not one.
In fact, there isn’t a single appealing thing about it other than this phantom mirage illusion they manage to put out, that their outlook on the word “fair” represents a majority opinion or consensus. Well, it doesn’t.
People want to help other people who are in need, but there’s a big difference between helping the local widow and helping the town drunk.
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Wasn’t “fairness” the driving force behind the Bolshevik revolution in Russia back in 1917?
Yeah, that worked out well, didn’t it?
- cylarz | 04/27/2011 @ 01:09