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...
Harrison Dietzman writing in Ricochet.com. From The News Junkie at Maggie’s Farm.
But because people in the West are not threatened by concentration camps and are free to say and write what they want, the more the fight for human rights gains in popularity, the more it loses any concrete content, becoming a kind of universal stance of everyone toward everything, a kind of energy that turns all human desires into rights. – Milan Kundera
I would like to propose a short thesis on the American Left. The primary goal of the contemporary American Left is the destruction and refocusing of human desire. The root of this project is the Left’s perennial project to remake the human.
Vulgar Marxists proposed that the human was an inherently economic animal, and, because of that, placed their hope in economic revolution. History proved them wrong; the human could not be reduced to economic motivation. The proletariat failed to unite against their oppressors, and violent revolution failed to sustain itself.
Waking up in 1968 with a bad Soviet hangover, the post-Marx Left sought to find the true site of revolution. The proletariat must be replaced by a more reliable revolutionary class, one based on something other than economics. The New Left proposed that the human, rather than a fundamentally economic animal, was a fundamentally desiring animal, and, rather than a slave to capitalist production, was a slave to capitalist desire. Capitalism monopolizes and controls human desires in order to perpetuate its existence.
:
The Left relies on human selfishness to remake desire…Human desires are frequently cited, accurately or not, as the basis for human rights. Want publically [sic] funded birth control? Then argue that it’s a human right. The same goes for SSM or assisted suicide. If you love someone, then it’s your human right to marry them; if you no longer want to live, then it’s your right to die. If you don’t want a child, then abort it. But if that same baby dies in a car accident on the way to the abortion clinic, the death becomes homicide. By making human desires indistinguishable from human rights, the Left fundamentally recreates the historic Western category of the human.
That’s a big-thought, that “I should have it because it’s my right” is an agenda-item, as opposed to a flailing-about brain fart from someone who never matured and has run out of arguments.
I have often heard of leftists insisting on as much, that their political movement is truly “progressive,” a linear-trajectory unidirectional perpetual expansion of human rights so that people could do more and more things. I’ve never thought of this as rational, since they seem to acknowledge that these rights are attached to expenses; they want the expenses to be absorbed by “The Rich,” who are uniquely capable of so absorbing; but they must understand the wealth of The Rich is still a finite resource. And rational people should understand that an infinite depletion from a finite resource must end in exhaustion, with all the devastation that would be attendant to such exhaustion, no other outcome possible. They must understand this.
Could it be that they actually get this, and figure something like “What do I care, I’ll be dead by then so let my grandkids deal with it”? What a sorry lot of sick sons-of-bitches…
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I try so hard to resist simplistic, monocausal explanations, but the left just keeps forcing me into it.
1968 was an annus mirabilis that introduced something new into the world. Up to then, the whole of history indicated that humans just naturally grow out of infantile narcissism. The “revolutions” of 1968 proved that isn’t true — minus economic necessity and the consequent firm parental hand, kids never really grow up.
I want it, therefore I deserve it. That emotional logic makes perfect sense to teenagers. All the post-Marxist left did was teach them how to dress this up in the language of pretend altruism. I want it, therefore I deserve it; I am a human, therefore it is a human! rights! violation! if I don’t get it. Give me my binky and you’re doing the whole human race a solid. Don’t give it to me and you’re a Nazi. Or at least my Dad, who’s actually probably worse, since at least Hitler banned smoking.
- Severian | 01/12/2014 @ 10:20Negative rights were not enough for the Utopians, they demanded positive rights because they did not have the discipline to slowly accrue their NEEDED things over time. And trying to determine what NEEDS are is in the personal realm which is why the wiser among us pointed it out to us as “the pursuit of happiness”. And that was pursuit, not promise. Instead they insist its for self esteem….at the expense of self respect.
- indyjonesouthere | 01/12/2014 @ 13:17