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...
Excellent stuff. One E. M. Cadwaladr, whom I intend to research & follow now, writes at American Thinker:
The representative model is now defunct, destroyed in somewhat different ways by the two political parties. We will start with the inappropriately named Democrats.
The Democratic party of today is not a representative party, but a top-down political machine organized around a reformulation of traditional socialist ideology. They are not a party of the popular will, but a party of a particular set of ideas. The people who adapt these ideas to current needs are not the Democratic base, but a small group of intellectuals drawn almost exclusively from a handful of elite universities. Trusting the public will is a laughable proposition for academics, who consider themselves a superior breed — like the philosopher kings of Plato’s Republic. They may adapt their rhetoric as required for the sake of harvesting votes from the lowly herd, but the core concept of public sovereignty was dropped from leftist thought long ago — about the time it passed from the hard hands of embittered revolutionaries into the soft hands of tenured professors.
:
The Republican Party…is a different sort of animal from its dingy, pseudo-leftist counterpart, but not really a more attractive or more encouraging one. It has become painfully obvious in the last few election cycles that the Republican establishment despises its conservative base. Most of us have grown tired of watching the GOP bluster and promise to stop ObamaCare, executive amnesty, etc. — only to fold for no apparent reason after a few weeks or months, vowing “this isn’t over!” once again. The truth is that it was over before it started. At the risk of being called racist, the Republican Party seems to function more or less as the nameless team that plays against the Harlem Globetrotters. They provide the illusion of a contest to events that have been carefully choreographed in advance. Their current strategy, assuming for the sake of argument that they are even interested in electoral success, appears to be to trade their traditional base for those lost souls in the political center — those people who only engaged in politics by tottering into a voting booth once every four years…New Republican voters ought to take note of how dismissive the party has been toward the old ones. Most Republican politicians, in short, have come to represent no one but themselves.
It’s refreshingly honest. And he closes with a real zinger:
If the core principle of representative democracy is not restored soon, by whatever methods are required, all of the awareness-raising efforts of forums like this one will count for nothing…No amount of outrage, or satisfyingly rational arguments, will let us vote our way out of an oligarchy.
I have problems with one of those parties more than with the other one, but those problems are ideological in nature, and stacked on top of these problems with the system itself, which are non-ideological. The system is being slowly transformed in this new modern era of the Wanna-conomy, in which products and services, as well as the transactions that involve them, are tailored to fulfill the desires of the producers, while the consumers — in this case, the constituents — are made entirely inconsequential, ignored at every turn.
It is all a natural consequence of our recent societal handicap, an inability to listen to each other. Empire-building has become the order of the day. Everyone likes power and control, but education about the moods and needs of fellow countrymen, cause & effect, and anything else that would be needed to wield that power effectively, is not quite so captivating, not quite so much fun. Technology has given the power-seekers a way to choose the one without bothering with the other. It’s not a development that’s truly beneficial, for anyone, over the long term.
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I’ll definitely have to consider the new terminology. I’ve been using the term “Gimmedat’s,” but that was in reference to teens, post-teen basement troglodytes, and the vast left-wing conspiracy of entitlement moochers. It doesn’t translate as well to the entire economy as “Wanna-conomy.”
- P_Ang | 07/18/2015 @ 08:17Well, “wanna-conomy” is in reference to the producers. Whereas in previous generations they produced whatever the consumer ordered, generally for whatever reason the consumer had in mind, nowadays they seem to be producing whatever they “wanna” and there’s nothing left for the consumer to decide, just open the billfold and fork out the stated price for whatever-it-is, or step aside so the next consumer can do so.
Many of the examples one can find for this perversion are to be found in high technology industries. From which, I hypothesize, this misguided trend may have gotten its start. Although I’m not too sure about that. But, from cell phones to beer, there certainly is a sharply-definable downturn in the consumer’s influence.
- mkfreeberg | 07/18/2015 @ 09:13I see the “wanna-conomy” as a side effect of oligarchy. Everything today is a package deal, because economies of scale benefit the producers.
In consumer goods: I have never, ever, in my whole life, wanted a smartphone. I hate those fuggin’ things — you wanna know why 6 out of every 4 kids claims to have a “learning disability” these days, look no further than their front pockets. And yet, because my wife needs one for work, and because a single cell plan costs the GDP of Rwanda, we have a family plan… which comes with a smartphone. No exceptions. The poor kid at the counter had never even heard of someone not wanting the “free” smartphone. Their computer system has no option for this. So now a I can’t make a goddamn phone call without flipping through six screens, fourteen apps, twenty seven special offers….
So with politics. I care about national defense. That’s about it. But to get national defense, I have to vote for all kinds of grotesque GW Bush-style evangelism, and amnestly, and Wall Street bailouts, and every other goddamn thing. And if I don’t want the evangelical crap, I have to vote for the Dems, which means I get socialism, plus a whole different set of lifestyle issues.
In both cases, the end goal is to make sure “discrimination” in its positive sense — choice, if you prefer — is never on the menu. At all costs you must be stopped from evaluating all the pieces on their merits. Do I really need seventeen home shopping networks and sixteen networks in languages I don’t speak just so I can catch “Sportscenter”? Must I have Rick Santorum and his hideous sweaters in my face if I want a military that actually works? Is it really necessary to celebrate deviance if I want my unemployment benefits extended?
None of these have any necessary relationship with each other. Both parties’ coalitions, like a cable package, are a ridiculous mishmash of stuff that has no business being together. If we were allowed to think about the individual pieces for a few seconds, it’d all come crashing down — a couple billion-dollar industries collapse if people remember that their phones can actually be used to talk to people instead of Twitter at them, send Facebook messages to them, text them, send emails to them, send app invites with them….
…just as the GOP falls the minute people figure out Jesus and national security have no particular connection to each other, and just as the Dems explode the minute the blacks realize they’re just stalking horses for the gays. Gotta keep ’em from thinking by throwing more and more and more stuff at them…..
- Severian | 07/18/2015 @ 14:25Well Sev, with a “smartphone” or that cheap HP you can remove the bloatware. If you’re a good IT tech like myself, you might even be able to remove bloatware without bricking your device. Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be a way to remove it from politics. Personally I don’t have a problem with the evangelical crap, I take it as a side-effect of the First Amendment EULA. It seems like the other team though repeatedly finds ways to re-interpret, supersede, and subvert the EULA and never seem to suffer the legal ramifications for violating their explicit agreement to uphold their end…
- P_Ang | 07/18/2015 @ 16:45On a purely philosophical level, the softer, benign form of “don’t wanna go to church” agnosticism fits into gun rights like a hand into a glove. Provide for your own personal defense, provide your own salvation…
So if this is a conspiracy to bundle together obnoxious evangelism with the Second Amendment recognized rights, so that voters cannot choose the latter without taking the former, it should not be hard to find a secular-type gun-rights candidate who can break through it. But, where are those?
My theory is that there is cause-and-effect taking place here. The candidates who are strong on your right to defend yourself from the malevolent, are strong on faith. They appeal to the constituents who shun nihilism, who say “Yes I do give a crap about it,” to both. Also, like it or not, secularism today is not merely a lack of belief. It is its own religion, with its own catechism, which includes: Don’t use a gun, call nine one one.
- mkfreeberg | 07/18/2015 @ 17:26So if this is a conspiracy to bundle together obnoxious evangelism with the Second Amendment recognized rights, so that voters cannot choose the latter without taking the former,
The agenda isn’t “push one to get the other;” the agenda is “bind up all the not-the-other-guys by any means necessary.” Neither party has any real goal beyond getting elected, which means their platforms have to appeal to half the electorate plus one. Hence the all-at-once mishmash.
it should not be hard to find a secular-type gun-rights candidate who can break through it. But, where are those?
There aren’t any, because the party system is designed to weed those candidates out. If such a candidate got through — “vote for me if you like guns; I care about nothing else” — then the electorate would start to question why we’ve been served the whole steaming package for so long. You mean, I can have my guns and don’t have to listen to Mike fucking Huckabee?! Wish someone had told me that ten years ago!!
Since we all have skin in the game on the Right side, maybe an illustration from the other guys would help. What’s the logical connection between abortion, mollycoddling the blacks, unions, feminism, and gay marriage? It’s not “a love of big government;” abortion is between a woman and her doctor, we’re told. It’s not “hatred of western civilization;” union guys (as opposed to union bosses) tend to be flag-waving NASCAR types. Feminists hate blacks — too macho! — but won’t say it; blacks hate gays and do say it, constantly. The only way to keep that coalition together is by inventing a boogeyman, and turning the volume up way past 11. Remember how vicious the Obama/Clinton primary fight was in 2008? We almost saw their base tear itself apart, as two different strains of identity politics went at it.
And that right there is why the party system as we know it is doomed. We’re seeing the start of the endgame right now, with Donald Trump. He’s basically a central casting limousine liberal, except for the fact that he talks about illegal immigration. Where’s his support coming from? He’s a Democrat, and a leftier one at that, except for the immigration thing, so he’s running as a Republican — and so-called conservatives support him. He’s proof that once you start to break up the package — once we start to see that there’s no logical thread holding these coalitions together — the whole thing comes crashing down.
- Severian | 07/18/2015 @ 18:59If such a candidate got through — “vote for me if you like guns; I care about nothing else” — then the electorate would start to question why we’ve been served the whole steaming package for so long.
Yeah, and how does that translate into any sort of resistant force that stops it from happening?
The Trump ascendancy, all by itself, is iron-clad proof that there isn’t any effective barrier built into the system against something like this. This is not to deny the truth of what you’re speculating about the public’s reaction, should it happen. But it comes back to my original point, it hasn’t happened, and that says something.
I think the public, whether it realizes it or not, has been voting on this nihlistic philosophy, this idea of “what-the-fuck-ever.” Every candidate we can find who’s willing to protect our 2nd amendment rights, every single one, is, to coin a phrase, a Jesus Freaktm. An exception to that would, or could, conceivably, produce your “half the electorate plus one” all by himself provided there’s nothing else glaringly wrong with him.
Conclusion? I think the public has lost the capacity, assuming it ever had it, to say: “I disagree with that guy here, here, and here, but I agree with him on that other thing so I can live with that.” Everyone likes to pretend they can do this. But they/we can’t. The factional division is way too easy, so it becomes the order of the day. The candidates are merely following suit. They’re marketing their names, their wonderfulness, their “I’m worth this much money so that makes me the logical choice to be the next sultan” because the marketing of ideas just isn’t working. The supply isn’t there most of the time; and when the supply is there, the demand is lacking. Ultimately, it’s all the electorate’s fault.
- mkfreeberg | 07/18/2015 @ 21:04The Trump ascendancy, all by itself, is iron-clad proof that there isn’t any effective barrier built into the system against something like this.
On the contrary, the Trump ascendancy (starring Matt Damon!) is ironclad proof there is a built-in barrier — a huge one, called M-O-N-E-Y.
Consider that Jeb Bush, who’s part of te 1% if anyone is, has had to raise $100 M from outside backers. Trump, like Ross Perot before him, is one of a handful of guys who doesn’t have to take dollar one from donors. Think what would happen if one of the rest of us decided to run for office. Say I manage to get elected mayor of my town on a guns-not-Jesus platform.* The people respond to my message, and I start thinking of a run for state or national office. That’s gonna cost millions, so I call up party headquarters. They say “no no, you need to talk up guns and Jesus.” I refuse, they don’t send the cash, and there goes my electoral bid, over before it starts.
I think the public has lost the capacity, assuming it ever had it, to say: “I disagree with that guy here, here, and here, but I agree with him on that other thing so I can live with that.”
I don’t disagree. In fact, I’m on the same page — this “shove the whole package at you” tactic is designed to keep people from ever developing it. Because if they did, that’s it for the two-party system. We’d end up with the dreaded “parliamentary system.”
In a functioning democracy, there’s a place for Jesus Freaks and gun nuts, for Social Justice Warriors and limousine liberals. The “coalition building” that’s so often derided in European systems is what keeps the system (relatively) honest — if we see the Jesus Freak Party voting with the Limousine Liberal Party, or the SJW Party voting with the Gun Nut Party, we know something big is up… and that we should hold onto our wallets, because someone’s about to get screwed bigtime.
As Robert Mitchell never tires of pointing out, third parties inevitably give victory to the left. A third and fourth party, by contrast, would actually be a way out of this mess that doesn’t involve street battles. This is why I was briefly hopeful when I saw Bernie Sanders gaining on Hillary in the polls — emphasize their differences, and all of a sudden you’ve got protest parties running from both sides; an instant four-party system. Alas, the media is already busy slapping Bernie back into line (assuming he’s serious about running and isn’t just angling for a bigger role inside the party).
They’re marketing their names, their wonderfulness, their “I’m worth this much money so that makes me the logical choice to be the next sultan” because the marketing of ideas just isn’t working.
That’s true. Assuming there’s anything left forty years from now that isn’t radioactive rubble, and assuming anyone cares to try that whole “elected government” experiment again (a big if, considering its catastrophic failure), the only way to do it is direct democracy. A Congress full of seventeen little single-issue parties — or, better yet, no parties at all — might prevent something like what’s coming from happening again.
*Just to stick with a (probably ill-chosen) example. Guns and Jesus may naturally go quite well together.
- Severian | 07/19/2015 @ 06:48On the contrary, the Trump ascendancy (starring Matt Damon!) is ironclad proof there is a built-in barrier — a huge one, called M-O-N-E-Y.
Well yes, you have me there. Trump has proven it’s possible to make inroads, but he hasn’t proven that it can be done on a budget.
*Just to stick with a (probably ill-chosen) example. Guns and Jesus may naturally go quite well together.
Your footnote is my main point. Guns should naturally go well with the secularist viewpoint, assuming Jesus has something to do with cult-worship and centralized, religious-sect government. With the human experiment played out and the lessons learned, unless we’re determined that theory should always win out over practice, we see it is reversed from that: The cross, and also the gun, get in the way of forming a government that is our savior & salvation. They have common allies and common foes.
- mkfreeberg | 07/19/2015 @ 07:09What would Jesus say…?
- CaptDMO | 07/19/2015 @ 07:36The same thing the Continental Congress would say.
The folks intended for enlightenment threw us to the wolves.
The “ideas”, as written, were mangled beyond recognition by the self-proclaimed “elite”.
“History” is a whore.
As a Jesus-freak myself, I would be offended, but I’m not. I’m also a firm believe that an individual without religion casts about for a substitution. My offense lies not with those that deny the search for an Other or an Else, but with those who substitute religion with their own political fanaticism and then excuse or deny their worship.
- P_Ang | 07/19/2015 @ 12:01The right can gladly accept worshippers, the agnostic, and the atheist. The left opens the Book of Climatology at night, saying five Heil Gores, then searches for a non-worshipper to flagellate. Tired of the beatings, they kiss their picture of the Holy Prophet Barack Obama, and say a silent prayer of defeat for their conservative enemies as they drift off to sleep.
I’d like to say I truly believe this is an exaggeration, but fanaticism and fascism seem to be heavily…HEAVILY weighted to the left.
I’m a believer too, P_Ang, and I mean no offense to anyone. But I’d still like to emphasize that the current battle lines — guns’n’Jesus versus state-worship’n’social justice — are temporary coalitions; they have no necessary relationship to each other.
Consider that as late as the 1910s, evangelicals were what we’d call big-government liberals. They thought socialism was the best way to love their neighbors as themselves. Whenever some lefty internet troll starts blathering about how Jesus was a liberal, they’re quoting the Social Gospel movement, circa 1892.
State worship, too, dates only from the middle of the 19th century. That’s the point of Marx’s Theses on Feuerbach — traditional religion is a product of economic forces; religion supports capital; eliminate religion and you’ve gone a long way towards eliminating capitalism. Before that, the equivalent of Social Justice Warriors — the Puritans, the utopian socialists — urged withdrawal from the world into closed communities.
The problem is that the two party system mashes all of this together, so that everyone thinks that this is the only way it has ever been or could ever be. Even when it’s obvious that, say, George W Bush’s “compassionate conservatism” is just big-government liberalism, with the word “evangelical” swapped in for “social justice.”
- Severian | 07/19/2015 @ 12:15“The Logic of Elitism”
- CaptDMO | 07/24/2015 @ 07:04ENSURE that “others” are not to be afforded consideration in critical peer review.
SEE! Now you’re part of THE TOP 90% of the curve “elite”
[…] Radical Moderate is one of our more prolific and thoughtful commenters and I thought that he’d like this on the nature of the Democrats and Republicans. Angelo Codeavilla calls them the Ruling Class (or as other say, the Political Class). From the House of Eratosthenes (emphasis mine): […]
- This one is for you, Rad Mod! - GraniteGrok — GraniteGrok | 07/24/2015 @ 17:00