House of Eratosthenes

My hope, with the way the 2016 elections have gone, is that liberalism as we know it today has caught its last breath and seen its last ray of sunlight. Which is not the same thing as saying conservatism should reign supreme forever and ever. Rather, I’m looking for a shift. If we accept the premise that what we call “politics” is the seeking of answers to questions, and this seems only reasonable; we would have to further accept that these answers we contemplate, and the questions that inspire them, are formulated along a configuration that shifts somewhat as the generations tick on by. They’re formed according to that moment’s open Overton Window. They’re formed according to what the perceived consensus has evaluated to be reasonable vs. unreasonable, which is different from what really is reasonable vs. unreasonable. And, also different from what the consensus had to say about it before, or will have to say about it afterward.

Those are the ground rules. They affect everything decided, which necessarily means they affect lots of people whether the people understand it or not. Well, for the last five decades or so, thanks to the Hippie Movement, our Overton Window is pig-iron stupid.

It is a culture of revolt against authority. Which by itself would be fine, except for one thing. It’s so late now, that these “hippies,” without ever having let go of hippie-hood and the culture of revolt that goes with it, have become wizened, seasoned, portly, wrinkly, rather farcical, comical-looking creatures…and, unfortunately, esteemed and elected. They’ve slipped into the right age in which our society expects people to be running big things. And you’ll never get ’em to admit it, for this means that their revolt has failed. The idea that the over-fifty crowd should be in charge of things, it’s a bastion that’s never been toppled. So we’ve got these revolutionary-minded “kids” who have wasted their lives on the hippie movement, become septuagenarians, and are running things. As hippies.

The rest of us have to learn to cope with our authority figures advocating revolution. Forever. It’s not at all different from what Orwell predicted:

If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — forever.

The idea that the authority figures should be ordering us into a forever-rebellion, and against nothing, since it goes without saying we’re not to be rebelling against them, is something that makes no sense. And yet there it is.

Some campus leaders may view student activism as dreaded fires to be extinguished. However, research has shown that students engaged in activism reap educational benefits such as developing an inclination to continue their political participation well into mid-life and acquiring a greater sense of social responsibility and identity consciousness. Increasingly, studies have noted that beneath the contention and dissatisfaction that characterize campus protest, students on campuses with a culture of activism and advocacy experience gains in critical thinking civic engagement and commitment to the larger community. Scholars of campus activism characterize its great potential for teaching students about the importance of democratic participation, leadership and the ability to build coalitions amongst a wide variety of individuals on campus.

For these reasons, higher education researchers stress that activism should be viewed as a developmental component of student learning, and that campus unrest must be understood in the context of civic engagement. Campus leaders are right to recognize that in expressing dissent, students are constructing ideas and perspectives that may one day provide solutions to some of our nation’s most urgent and complex dilemmas.

Nothing says “All my learning’s been done inside ivy-covered walls and I know nothing of the outside,” like figuring out what someone just starting out in life needs to learn, by way of a blizzard of citations from “research” and “studies.” Why would an adult with any noteworthy experience need to rely on such a thing?

And when the plan is put into action, we see it has very little to do with critical or independent thinking:

A professor at Arizona State University gave her Global Politics of Human Rights class a choice for the end of the semester: Take a final exam or undertake a group project.

As you might guess, the group project option was the winner.

And what did that project entail? A protest against the policies of Republican President Donald Trump, of course, which took place Thursday on the Tempe, Arizona, campus.

“The class decided that as a group project they wanted to make their voices heard about the issues that are affecting them today, so instead of just reading about the human-rights violations, they’d speak out about the current violations that are happening,” Angeles Maldonado told the Arizona Republic, adding to the paper that she believed it was her duty as a professor to support their decision.

So about 20 of Maldonado’s students created signs and stood in a line near the library of the public university, making a human wall, the paper said, adding that other ASU students joined their ranks and picked up more signs to display the slogan, “Wall Against Hate!”

Ah…as predictable as the arrival of a season, and not nearly as inspiring. Their education is failing them, of course. They’ve been promised that with its benefits they’ll become Leaders of Tomorrow…but, never in any concrete way, nobody ever actually promised them that, although that’s the hope. That’s what makes it a bad contract. The reality is that these are the kids who will be asking me if I want ketchup with my fries, right before they get replaced by a robot. Designed by someone who dropped out of college, likely, or if s/he didn’t, then spent that time in school doing something productive instead of arranging or participating in entirely predictable, boring and mind-numbing protests.

There is a truth here being ignored; a truth about civilization. I’ve already excerpted my belief about how civilization relates to conservatism and liberalism — keeping in mind the meaning these words have as we actually use them, not the meaning the dictionary tells us those words should have:

What exactly does conservatism seek to conserve? Civilization, the blessings that come from having it, and the definitions that make civilization possible. From what does liberalism seek to liberate us? Those things — starting with the definitions.

This works because it, well…works. Go through the higher-ed-today excerpt, above, and you see it. The liberation from definitions. “However, research has shown…” what exactly is this “research”? Ordinary people read sentences like that, and there’s this implication of “Someone who wanted to know the answer, or whose job it was to find the answer, gathered some data and sat down and applied the scientific method, and you know what they found?” We see footnotes galore, but you might notice it’s been awhile since anyone said that. “Research” has been re-defined, by the political agenda of modern liberalism, to mean “Here’s a footnote; now, do as I say.” We’ve become so accustomed to “researchers” doing their research and “learning” what they wanted to learn before they started doing any research — no one bothers to question it anymore. “Greater sense of social responsibility”? What’s that?

You know what my idea of lack-of-social-responsibility is? The top slot might be something like…pushing some “climate change” scam while burning fossil fuels in one’s everyday life, and/or to participate in these “protests” and so forth to “raise awareness” or some such when the awareness has already been raised…getting called out on your hypocrisy, and coming up with a bunch of thin rationalizations to keep it all going.

Members of the Cult of Climastrology always have an excuse for their own failure to practice what they preach, for being climahypocrites. I remember one little Warmists back in the day on the NJ.com Hardball Politics forum stating that she can’t give up her fossil fueled (FF) minivan because she has to get the kids here and there and run errands and stuff. Remember the old Arianna Huffington thing when she saw no problem taking a FF private jet because it was going that way?
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From the article by Jeremiah Traeger

In the debate over climate change, an increasingly common tactic among deniers is to accuse the other side of hypocrisy if their life happens to benefit from fossil fuels in any way. Obviously, if global warming is as big of a threat as the scientific consensus claims to be, shouldn’t we be doing absolutely everything in our power to reduce our carbon footprint? Shouldn’t we stop driving our cars completely, stop using energy that [originates] from our coal-fueled power plants, and live out our days in Amish-level simplicity to avoid producing any level of emissions as we can?

Well, yeah.

Speaking for myself, I’ve definitely taken steps to reduce my carbon footprint. I bike when going somewhere local, I ride the bus going to Denver and the airport, I am a vegetarian, I use a drying rack instead of a dryer, and my household pays a little extra on our bills so that our energy comes from a nearby wind plant*. However, I still need to use my car when there’s a blizzard or my destination is more than a few miles away. My home still needs to be heated in the winter. I take flights across the country as regularly as anyone else. I am certainly not carbon-neutral. When I spread facts on social media about climate change, I inevitably get interrogated to find out if I use fossil fuels, and I cannot avoid being honest and tell them the truth.

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They always have an excuse. Because, really, this whole thing has nothing to do with the environment, nothing to do with climate. It’s all about power, and increasing the size and scope of centralized Government over citizens and private entities, taking over economies and the energy sector, while implementing all sorts of taxes and fees, redistributing Other People’s money.

So, “social responsibility” has been re-defined as its exact opposite. Do as I say not as I do, oh I got busted for it, now I’m going to play accuse-the-accuser. The mandate for “change” applies to everybody but me.

The “ability to build coalitions amongst a wide variety of individuals on campus”? What’s that? You know, liberalism pre-Age-of-Aquarius needed no such thing. It was invested in the mechanisms of organizing. The company is cutting our time-off, or freezing our wages, or requiring that we work more hours; the argument in favor of collective bargaining was that, the “workers” all knew these things sucked but lacked the bargaining advantages required to merely have a voice. So the premise was, since there are 10,000 of them, this is wrong because it’s not like one solitary copy-boy being told “I need you hear at 7 a.m. every day, if you don’t like it then turn in your key.” A greater number of people, were owed some influence in determining the terms of their own jobs, in a way the solitary copy-boy would not have been owed. Assuming for sake of argument that that is true, though: There is a problem here. The legitimacy comes, then, entirely from the idea that the ten thousand workers all know they don’t like it. They know it inwardly, without any “community organizers” having to approach them about it and get them all riled up about how wrong it is. No one needs to go “Hey Fred, we don’t get weekends off anymore. Yea or nay?”

There was voting, of course. About the process. About the strikes. That meant there had to be recruiting. The subtle shift that’s taken place, now, is that the recruiting has come to be about the suckage. “Building coalitions” has come to mean creating anger and resentment where it didn’t exist before. And, we’ve got generations of people who think that’s the whole point of civilized, rational discourse about political issues: “I don’t know why I should protest Donald Trump; please tell me why.” Sounds so reasonable. It’s lost on pretty much everyone that Fred didn’t have to say “I don’t know why I should dislike fifteen hour days.” He had to say “Tell me why I should risk my job in a strike.” That’s a different thing. Again, that’s about mechanics. It was all about a grievance that was natural, not aroused by someone else.

In that generation, we saw — although it didn’t register at the time — a horse unfastened from a cart, and put in back of it. The protest has become a solution in search of a problem. Now the colleges are teaching it, and at the expense of using that time to teach these students skills that would be useful in the marketplace of honest labor and practical ideas.

This is the dividing line between conservatism and liberalism in our age. It has to do with the “definitions,” as shown above, but it also has to do with “civilization.” This move toward teaching kids just starting out in life, a bunch of “skills” that aren’t really skills, so that they learn to be rabble-rousers and nothing else — it is advantageous to the political movement of modern liberalism. Not to people. At least, not to any people except the people who somehow profit from the rabble being roused. But, those who regard themselves as wise, reasonable centrists, not beholden to one end of the political spectrum or the other, support it. At least, they fail to oppose it. There seems to be a perception out there that yes, these kids are being shorted; they should be learning trig, or calculus, or robotics or something. But, civilization can survive this. It has up until now, hasn’t it?

Especially if it’s a fifty-year-old straight white guy, like me, doing the complaining. Be quiet you middle-age white guy. Middle age guys have been complaining about “those kids” and the impending demise of civilization, since…well, since we’ve had civilization. And I have to agree with this. It’s just true. People my grandparents’ age complained about people my parents’ age, people their parents’ age complained about them…I’m just following suit, right? And the complaints must therefore be entirely illegitimate since, well, we’re still here! It’s undeniable.

Cleopatra Well. History also provides us with verifiable events about civilizations collapsing; and, those civilizations were also loaded up with inhabitants within, who thought the good times would last forever. So we know civilizations do end, and we have yet to learn of any civilization that is immune. Again, definitions: How big does a civilization have to be before we call it “civilization,” and compare its collapse to the end of the Roman Empire, or the Egyptian Empire? What is “collapse”? Could it be that ours is collapsing already, and we’re failing to see it?

I can’t help but notice, every time there’s an election there is one angry viewpoint that prevails against all the other ones, rocketing from its first utterance to consensus status without even a break in rhythm: “These candidates all SUCK!!” One should be very careful bandying about words like “everybody” and “nobody,” since such words very rarely mean what they’re supposed to mean, once their implementation is analyzed. But if a practical application of “everybody” finds that everybody loathes all of the candidates, and “everybody” has lost confidence that the process overall is going to bring about a workable solution to the problems at hand…I’m using the word “consensus” here, and that seems to be an understatement, if anything…my point is, What is this if not the collapse of a mighty once-great civilization? Does our civilization not require certain things? Is one of those things, not consent of the governed — with some actual confidence?

I submit that we are losing this; have been losing it, steadily, this past half-century. Conservatism hasn’t succeeded in conserving civilization against this brand of liberalism. There’s no logical rebuttal to be offered against it because it doesn’t make sufficient sense to rise to the level of rebuttal. It is an argument fit for some other, nonsensical, universe: “Let us enshrine chaos as order, and invest authority in our rebels as if they were leaders.” And then, teach tomorrow’s “leaders” to be rebels too.

Civilization cannot survive generations of future-“leaders” taught to be rebels, and nothing else. It cannot survive wave after wave of “educated” fry cooks. This is a concern that cannot be adequately addressed with the idle reassurance that “We’ll still be here tomorrow, because we’re here now.” History has already taught us that’s insufficient. And we shouldn’t expect anything other, since when we talk of “civilization” we’re speaking of a living thing, filled with living people, something that has to change in order to survive. “It’ll be here tomorrow because we see it’s here now” is a reassurance about a dead thing, a static thing, a thing that does not move. Civilization is like a shark; it has to move and keep moving. It cannot survive standing still.

I remember when I was thought by some (mistakenly, in my view) to be an above-average violinist, but one who thrived overly much on natural talent, sucked at practicing. My violin teacher chided me one day, very late in the game, I think in the last year before I gave it up for good. I was wasting his time. “You don’t stand still and stay the same when you don’t practice! You lose!” It’s true. It’s true of ALL LIVING THINGS. Check that…all moving things.

Deep down I think we all realize this. This is why the Jeep resurrection in Jurassic World didn’t work.

Moving machines and living things face depletion, just through existence within time. Civilization works this way. We can’t just “freeze” it where it is, and expect it to work. Living things need to regenerate, to heal. If you’re injured within the day, you have to heal; if you aren’t, you have to sleep. That’s how it works. That’s how it works with civilization. If Guy A lives within a civilization and he does some certain thing without running into a problem, Guy B lives in the same civilization, does the same thing, runs into a problem; there has to be an implied social contract, where by B does his learning from A — A’s behavior is not altered by coming into contact with B. That is how civilization survives. That’s how it learns, by way of experience, of people who do things the right way and see their processes validated through practice, and people who do things the wrong way and learn they should have been doing it the way that other guy did them, who realized better success.

We could think of this as the fundamental rule. Where A succeeds and B fails, B should learn from A, A should not be learning from B. Well…along comes the weaponization of arrested-development, of which I wrote earlier. Because an individual is suffering from arrested development, he lacks the maturity to say “That guy is producing better results than I am, I wonder what he’s doing better than I am?” And, in fact, turns it on its head, insisting on being the teacher. “You don’t know what it’s like!” Ah, we’ve heard the refrain so many times, we seem to have stopped questioning it, assuming we ever started. He’s authentic, he grew up in the hood, he knows what it’s like. Oh, vote that guy out of office, he was born with a silver spoon in his mouth, he doesn’t know what it’s like. The arrested development becomes weaponized, for political purposes, to benefit the future prospects of whole political parties. And we have W.A.D., Weaponized Arrested Development, turning this fundamental rule upside down. B should teach A, when we see A has succeeded and B has failed. A should just shut its over-privileged mouth, sit there and listen. Or, stop existing altogether. We want failure to live on into future generations; success should be buried with the bones. So just knock it off with that mature, “He did better than me, I wonder how” stuff. He doesn’t know what it’s like!

That’s where you go, when you solve problems by feeling rather than with thought. The feelings that are most difficult to ignore, are going to win out over the other ones. And that means frustration and resentment. Of course, you have to think logically in order to figure out that’s what is going to happen.

So I’m writing here about my own hopes and fears — but, they are not simply my personal preferences. I wouldn’t dream of wasting a reader’s time on such things. These are, I submit with a wholehearted, earnest belief, requirements for civilization to continue. They are non-negotiable. This is the timeless rallying cry of this thing we call “conservatism,” throughout all the eras of civilization, at all moments whether it has prevailed or not: “We actually cannot do X. X cannot be allowed to continue. Civilization cannot survive an endless procession of X.” It is true, now, with the subject of my critique, as much as it has ever been true before. W.A.D. is a toxin, a poison, and civilization cannot survive it. It cannot survive a sustained and unchecked leitmotif of B teaching A how to do things because B failed where A succeeded, while A sits there silently waiting to be told what to do. It cannot survive unproductive people telling the producers how to do their producing. Maybe it could, if civilization was a dead thing, an inanimate thing, an unmoving thing like a statue. But that’s not what it is.

Hippie Chick I have guarded hope for a final, killing blow against this stuff we today call “liberalism.” By which I mean, the very tippy-top upper-crust of it, the topsoil, that part of it we saw rise up only in the last few decades. The Hippie stuff, the “Hey what’s wrong with communism anyway?” stuff. The community-organizing thing, the “rebel against everything forever” thing, the pink-pussy-hat thing. As a political movement, it is extremist by nature. If you watch it for awhile, you can’t help but notice this, especially if you start comparing it to other movements. If you start writing an article or a blog post, for example, the point to which is “I am a conservative and I think Barack Obama was a bad President,” of course it is de rigueur for you to spend a few sentences hung up on the proper disclaimers…you don’t mean to say all black people would make bad presidents, or that white people are somehow innately superior. Some columnists spend entire paragraphs on just this kind of thing, before they get to the meat of what they wanted to say somewhere around paragraph five. But notice: Someone writes a column advocating for a new big-government program, or in defense of an existing big-government program like the Affordable Care Act for example; there is no implied social obligation for them to spend paragraph after paragraph saying “To be clear, I am not pushing single-payer as an ultimate solution” or “There are some hard limits to what decisions I think government should be making for us.” You probably can’t remember the last time you read of such a disclaimer, and there’s a reason for that. They’re not necessary, because society-at-large does not expect them.

This represents hope, because it is something the self-proclaimed open-minded “centrists,” if they’re honest about being open-minded and honest about being centrist — could notice. It also represents work that is left to be done. After all, our prospects for having an honest-to-goodness White Supremacist as our President, like Woodrow Wilson, are quite limited. It doesn’t even rise to the level of a realistic fear to have. But, big-government running unchecked, making final decisions on the most intimate decisions of our personal lives? It’s already happened. Note that our current debate is about repeal of something that’s been passed, and is active and enforceable law.

Tyranny is a legitimate concern we have today, it was a legitimate concern at the founding of our nation; it’s been a legitimate concern every single day in between.

This Is A Coup Against Our Right To Govern Ourselves
Kurt Schlichter

The blizzard of lies and distraction blowing through Washington is not just any routine stuffstorm, but a calculated attempt to bring down a president — our president, not the establishment’s president. And more than that, it’s an attempt to ensure that we never again have the ability to disrupt the bipartisan D.C. cabal’s permanent supremacy by inserting a chief executive who refuses to kiss their collective Reid.

This is a coup against us. It’s a coordinated campaign by liberals and their allies in the bureaucracy and media to once and for all ensure their perpetual rule over us. We need to fight it, here and now, so we don’t have to fight it down at the bottom of this slippery slope.

It’s brazen. It’s bold. It’s insulting to our intelligence. They aren’t even trying to hide their lies anymore. Truth is irrelevant; this is a choreographed dance routine and everyone has his moves. Call it Breakin’ 2: Electric Leakaroo, except instead of trying to save the community center they’re trying to save their power and prestige.

If there is hope, it lies in our youth. If they see the political divide as necessarily a generational one, between the old and the new, with the old being a bad thing and the new being a good thing — then all we have to do is open their eyes. Like I said before:

These people we today call “liberals” have not had a new idea in, depending on your specific topical focus, between a half- and a full-century or more. And it is they who are clinging with bloody fingertips to a receding entrenched legacy power structure. But they remain revolutionaries, and the one thing that unites all sorts of revolutionary movements is this idea of creating a whole new kind of civilization by way of destroying the civilization they find today. They are destroyers.

This fits in naturally with the self-romanticism of youth. Young people, throughout history, have dreamed of righting wrongs, being better than the generations that came before, daring to nurture big ambitions and make them happen. I suspect this is even true of the most recent, morose, pussy-hat-wearing generation. Because you see the theme re-emerging whenever one of their representatives says or writes something to distinguish themselves. They’re essentially writing what I just wrote, above, just reaching different conclusions about it: “Hey, we’ve figured out civilization cannot work this way, something has to get re-thought here.” Their generational passion is aligned with that. They want to make civilization work. They’re not unanimously in favor of making that happen by destroying civilization and starting all over again, unlike their septuagenarian Naugahyde-skin Hippie college professors.

Drive the wedge between them, is my idea. Challenge their maturity. You want to do things throughout your life to help people? Then train to do things to help people. Start with the simple stuff: Here’s a woman stranded on the side of a road with a flat tire. Do you know how to change a tire? If the answer is no…and, it probably is…then, it’s an awkward conversation to have. But that’s a good thing. Stinging means the medicine is working.

Still got time to hold a sign and spend the day protesting, cupcake?

This is effective, I believe, because it attacks the problem at the source. This is where it all got started, was with our youth. They need to be taught what somehow didn’t get taught to their baby-boom predecessors: That all of life does not exist on a hairpin turn, that if you program yourself to live your entire life on such a turn then you just end up going in a tight circle and wasting oodles of time. And while we’re at it, the baby-boomers should be getting on-board with this. What decent person among us has made mistakes in his youth, and given the chance to help those born later to avoid the same mistakes, would take a pass on it? They should be signing on to the idea that, while holding a picket sign within a moment of change might be a noble effort if the circumstances determine this, it is always a waste as a lifelong pursuit. If being revolutionary-minded was all it took to fix all the problems, it would’ve happened a long time ago…what generation in our past, recent or distant, was not revolutionary-minded in some way? And so the baby-boomers should agree with this, and they should help us teach the youth. We should expect nothing less. They have lived this mistake, after all. They know it first-hand.

This is not foolproof. Since the new up-and-coming generations have always been revolutionary-minded, they always will be. We should keep in mind that the attraction to revolutions is natural, but the attraction to big-state governance is not. Communism is not natural; totalitarianism is not natural; a revolution that is intent on ensconcing an all-powerful despot upon a throne, while representative of mistakes that have been made repeatedly throughout history, is a perversion of logic because it is a contradiction upon itself. So logic, if implemented with diligence and honesty, favors the conservative side. Teach them that.

Also teach them about money. Our youth have been taught to think of it as privilege. You have money because you inherited it from your dad…they’ve been so thoroughly indoctrinated on this, they can see examples staring them right in the face where it isn’t true, and they’ll just keep repeating the homily. The problem is that they haven’t been taught about what money is, other than by people who nurture their own resentments against it. That’s usually some modern-communist college professor. They should be taught that money is a manifestation of something else; that we keep it around because it works at what it is supposed to do, and it works because it is both an effect and a cause. If people behave a certain way, they get money. Once they have money, they make decisions they otherwise would not be making. This is how we, as a conglomerate of lots of people with disparate interests, figure out the best and most productive way to live together; that’s the miracle at work. They should be taught about the connection between money, and helping people. Time after time we see, if someone’s having a tough time of it, going years and years without enough money, if we take out the tragedies like health care crises and divorce from a spouse who hid some disastrous financial details, what we’re left with is misspent effort. Oh look at this impressive collection of busted clocks, old candles, maybe some living things like a house full of cats…what have you done to help anyone, anywhere? This month, this year, last year? Often times, a case of enduring poverty is linked to an inability to answer that question. It sounds harsh, because it is. And, many among us are afraid to say such a thing, because we fear the ramifications of having it asked of ourselves. But, it’s true. Money is linked to helping people, and a lot of people who don’t have money, don’t help anyone. It has always been polite to leave this unmentioned, because we thought we could afford to leave it unmentioned. Well, I’m not so sure that’s true anymore.

If money is linked to helping people, then it follows that it should work the other way. Show me someone who has lots of money, there should be someone there who has helped others. Well actually, while that’s not true all of the time, it is true a great deal of the time. So this still works. And in fact, here’s something else: The people who have been helped by these rich people who are rich because they came up with a way to offer this help — a lot of the time, those people themselves are not rich. So, you say with great power comes great responsibility, and those who have should be doing something to “give back,” to help the have-nots? Turns out, with the free market being allowed to work, that’s what happens already.

What stops this from happening?

Big-state governance, bad policies that come from disrespect for honest work, disrespect for the free market, boondoggles that come from someone’s raging case of W.A.D., higher taxes, burdensome regulations — and, a lack of practical skills being taught to the new emerging generations:

“Easily the worst game I’ve ever played.” Yup. There’s your message to young people. Just get it out there.

But, that’s not the killing blow.

The jugular that really has to be sliced, the errant mindset that really has to be set right, is this.

We have somehow settled on the idea that if a persuasive argument can be built around “A great wrong is being committed, if anyone anywhere has to go without X” — which can be done with lots of things, easily and often, by way of thinking as well as by way of feeling — this somehow is synonymous with “We should put the state in charge of managing X.” Non-Sequitur: “It Does Not Follow.” It isn’t just the young people falling for this. Get the word back to your dotty old Auntie Petunia for crying out loud. History has shown us that putting government in charge of a commodity is not an effective way of ensuring everyone can get it when they need it. If anything, it’s an awesome way to restrict the supply of whatever the thing is. Others have expressed this more eloquently than I ever could. The shortage of sand quote comes to mind.

Don’t take my word for it. Live a little bit of real-life, where there’s a government that has forgotten its place. You’ll see it’s really true.

Here’s another opportunity to fix something broken: The “isms.” I noticed this nine years ago, during the election of 2008, when something particularly damaging against the campaign of Barack Obama would come to the attention of the nation at large. Probably the best example of this was the Jeremiah Wright flap, when some footage emerged of Obama’s former church pastor saying “God Damn America.” This made an impression on the electorate that was both deep and broad. People of all different walks of life could understand how this was a legitimate reason not to vote for Obama, how His ascendancy was at odds with the prosperity and well-being of the country. After all, what three words could ever be more opposed to that than “God Damn America”?

Obama responded swiftly and surely. And, did so in such a way as to fulfill my definition of what modern liberalism really is: “From what does [it] seek to liberate us? …definitions.” He delivered a speech calling for a national dialogue on race. If you can’t dazzle ’em with brilliance, baffle ’em with bullshit…I notice such a national dialogue never did actually happen, and I further notice that those who had the most emphatic opinions to offer about Obama being the most wonderful thing since sliced bread, and this speech makes everything all wonderful and okay now — have nothing to say about this national-dialogue that didn’t happen. The whole thing was a red herring. But, it did what red herrings are supposed to do. In the eight months between that week, and the actual election, people justified their planned vote for the Illinois Senator with: “There’s still some racism out there.”

Last year, we heard the same thing about Hillary, who was an awful candidate and had no actual ideas to sell: There’s still some sexism out there.

The seduction toward this lazy mindset, is the story within the story. It’s all about the pattern: Of course we all know that two and two make four…but there’s still some ism out there. So, five! It’s bad logic because the original concern isn’t actually addressed in any way. Obama still sat in a church for twenty years listening to this preacher who hates America…Hillary is still a bad candidate who has no positive accomplishments…there is no refutation to any of this, except within the “dialogue” that takes place between people who feel to address problems, rather than think. It feels like the issue was addressed. Therefore, it must be so.

But it never actually was.

And once you become aware of this pattern, you see it in a lot of other places. The real tragedy is that while it’s true there’s still some ism out there, it’s entirely irrelevant. I mean, to everything. Yes, there are all sorts of isms out there. There’s still some ageism out there, there’s still sexism and racism, there’s still able-ism and sex-preference-ism. Know what? There always will be. The biggest lie modern-day liberalism has managed to sell, is that this BadThink is like smallpox or something, and we can entirely eradicate it until there’s only one tiny sample sealed up in a test tube for observational purposes somewhere. The fallacious thinking that “since there’s ism out there, it means two and two make five for today” is just the second-biggest problem. The far bigger one is this mistaken believe that unethically discriminatory thinking is some sort of virus or bacteria and we’re in the process of making it extinct. It isn’t so. As long as people have the freedom to think for themselves, they’ll have the freedom to think badly. Liberty means liberty to be a dumbass. That’s the way it has to be.

The third-biggest problem is that we’ve been aiming too broad of a shotgun-blast at the “isms.” During the Age of Aquarius, we settled on the mistaken believe that all generalization was dangerous, and we should start busying ourselves with ridding the world of it, like The Black Plague. All generalizations, though, are not isms. We deplore the isms because they are merely the lowest level. “A Mexican is going to steal your stuff.” “Black people are lazy.” “Women don’t understand this stuff.” Further up off the ground, though, we allow some of these things because now and then we find it has something to do with testable cause-and-effect. We allow car insurance companies to discriminate by zip code. Here and there someone will try to make a race thing out of it…and this holds sway with people who lean hard-left. But centrist-America accepts it, because it accepts that if there is greater risk, for whatever reason, the insurance company should to be compensated for bearing it as long as the insurance company is not the one actually bringing the risk.

There are other generalizations that are entirely legitimate, even though they aren’t always entirely true. That’s okay. Generalizations aren’t supposed to always be true. When people think the whole point of life is just to be happy, it tends to emerge they don’t accomplish a lot. When people specialize in coming up with excuses for failure, again, they don’t accomplish much. When people say “to tell you the truth,” this is an indicator that you can’t trust them because the question naturally emerges…what about all the other times when they have something to tell you, and don’t say that? When people say “trust me,” then likewise, for the same reason, you can’t really trust them. Why the necessity to say it?

Park Like an Asshole When people stop and make a quick determination about whether someone’s watching them or not before they do the right thing…usually, you’ll find out if they think no one is watching, they’ll do something different. Good character means you don’t have to care, you just do what’s right whether someone is watching or not. Virtue-signaling, therefore, is a sign of spiritual sickness. It means people don’t think they’re worth anything, unless other people in proximity happen to agree. It’s an indicator that people are leaving up to mens’ judgment, things that should be left up to God. And, it suggests these people know something about themselves, probably something they did in the past, or failed to do in the past, that makes them unhappy. When people take the easy-out with the little things, this is a clue that they do the same thing with bigger things. That includes waking up late every morning, parking like an asshole, littering on the ground instead of putting it in a bin.

None of these generalizations are true all of the time. And of course, a lot of them I cannot prove. Well…those are out of scope for “generalizations.” We form, and act on, generalizations as a survival tool. They’re supposed to work most of the time, not all. The idea is that they’re premises; if we accept them, over the longer term of time we will end up ahead of where we would be if we did not accept them. Well during the recent generations, we have been making a point of not-accepting them, or anything that is built from the same structure, and if we find we suffer as a consequence of that then oh well…that’s just a personal cost we bear for the glorious revolution. Well, that’s wrong (via American Digest).

In my youth, the Boomer Progs preached tolerance to us. My first class in college, on the first day, I was harangued by a little French girl, telling all of us about how America was a racist and sexist society. Americans were intolerant! The Boomer Prog teacher nodded along until I foolishly pointed out that the word tolerance means to put up with something you don’t like. Therefore, the little French girl was telling me she did not like black people, but was willing to put up with them.

In my first adult job, I was sent off to what they called sensitivity training. Tolerance was now a bad-think word and sensitivity was the good-think word. My hunch was everyone figured out what I found to be obvious in college, with regards to tolerance. Even so, the implications of all the sensitivity talk was that anyone not a white male was prone to weird behavior and opinions. We had to be sensitive to this fact. It also meant treading lightly around them as they were easily offended and traumatized.

Eventually, of course, the Progs figured out that this was a loser so they moved onto celebrating diversity. Unlike tolerance or sensitivity, diversity has the benefit of putting everyone on the same level. One race is as good as another. Men and women can do all the same things. All cultures are the same. Modern life was going to be a celebration of the beauty and variety of life! Well, except the white parts. White people suck and they better keep their heads down, especially you, honky-man.

I suppose it is no surprise that the Progs are now freaking out about anyone noticing diversity…

This was not all entirely without legitimacy. After all, why invite oneself to form negative first-impressions against potentially good people, that otherwise would not be formed? The moral premise has some merit too, since a new acquaintance might be working extremely hard to make the best first-impression he can, and it seems wrong to put a turd in the punchbowl because of the observer’s anecdotal experiences that have nothing to do with him. So there is an understandable temptation to think we should do away with this, that maybe by doing so we can all learn to get along moar-better or something. Well…

Again, history has spoken. The strafe-run against generalizations has been given a fair shot, and it hasn’t worked for us. As the Z-Man’s article points out, above, what has really happened is we’ve discovered more reasons to create conflict among ourselves. It proves the generalization named above, about virtue-signaling. Ooh, lookit me! I caught you generalizing! Which I don’t do, and that makes me a better person. People have not stopped generalizing. Not even close. What’s happened is they’ve stopped generalizing in healthy ways, and found ways to displace those generalizations with unhealthy, tit-for-tat generalizations. Hey, let’s generalize against white people! They’ve got it coming! Men! Straights! Rich people!

But let’s be honest. There hasn’t been any enlightenment here. Society at large discriminates, always has, but now there’s a certain out-and-proud, in-your-face generalization. It is debased and it is too crude to work, operating at the lowest level — “Whites are lazy” just like “Mexicans are lazy” from generations ago. Not at all like something a few feet removed from off the ground, that might actually work as a generalization…”people who smoke don’t spend as much time working because they take more breaks.” Just mirror-reversed bigotry that’s meant to even a score. It’s become a textbook case of well-intentioned people having sworn to defeat something they loathed, and then becoming that very thing.

Well, it bears repeating. Civilization cannot endure this way. But, again: Here is cause for hope. “National dialogue” this. Bigotry is the target; generalizing is not. They’re different things. Political correctness is a war on noticing, and there’s nothing wrong with noticing.

Non-Conformist This all comes from the premise that we’re living in a Star Trek, secular-humanist world…there is no God, there is only genetic material, and whatever there is about us that is good has evolved that way — therefore, we can continue evolving, as happy cosmic accidents, getting better and better until we reach perfection. This is all a natural consequence of spiritual degradation. Our relationship with God, like any other living thing, or any other inanimate thing with moving parts — like my ability to play the violin, back in my youth — without sustenance and without replenishment, it doesn’t stay the same. It deteriorates. You don’t stay the same; you lose. Without maintaining conscious understanding of the Higher Power that put us here in the first place, we forget our purpose. Ultimately, we have to deny there is one. If we’re just accidental, then by definition that must mean there’s no plan, therefore no purpose. So the purpose to life must be just to be happy! But then we have to improve toward perfection…in order to do…what? There’s the contradiction. An expectation is being imposed upon us, but there’s no expecting party.

Eventually, we have to embrace the final nugget of modern liberal risibility, the fusion point of pure and perfect nonsense: Things WILL be the way we say they are going to be! It is inevitable! Nothing can stop it! And we all have to sacrifice everything important to us in order to make it happen…

Our hope is in the vision of those among us, particularly the young, that they should be the ones to reject entrenched falsehoods and put their independent thinking to a noble purpose, which is to figure out what the truth is. Civilization is counting on young people to do what young people are supposed to do. They should, at a minimum, achieve and maintain conscious focus on whether they are thinking like conformists, or not. They’re failing us lately, because they imagine themselves to be bold, critical thinkers, while they march in lock-step.

They have a good excuse for this, insofar as they’re young and aren’t supposed to have a sense of perspective yet. And that excuses most of it. The older generations should be doing their part; the younger set wants to be thought of as having critical thinking skills, to be able to stand up to challenge. So, challenge them. Starting with: How is it independent thinking, when you kids are going into class and then coming out of it again, all thinking the same thing? And one of my favorite questions: When have you gone against the majority on anything? In their case maybe refine it to: When did you ever disagree with your professor on anything? Even if you agree with him overall, an independent thinker should be able to come up with some examples…

Modern liberalism has been able to attack our civilization, because civilization made room for it. The ultimate conformist mistake is to think something that’s unexplainable, because “Everybody Knows” it is true. Well, that’s the breach that has been exploited. Too many supposedly independent thinkers, “think” by feeding off the Common Noise Cloister, or C.N.C. In a way, we’re suffering the effects of a poison we willingly drank, the chickens have been coming home to roost. We allowed people to think things “Everybody Knows” that they themselves were not able in any way to explain, or defend; our civilization has been suffering a sustained assault because it effectively said that’s alright. It isn’t alright. The C.N.C. has been killing us, but in some ways it’s been a suicide.

This is how we got into that civilization-killing configuration, where A succeeds and B fails so B does all the teaching and A does the learning because “he doesn’t know what it’s like.” As a consequence, our civilization has become dominated by unproductive people. Those who live on the dole, or charity — or, those who make a living, but not by helping anyone, just feeding ideas into the C.N.C. We have made the mistake of attaching value to this. It’s hard to recover from the tailspin, because productive people do not have time to contribute to the C.N.C.; there are other people counting on them to produce whatever it is they’re producing, and they have to get to work. So the C.N.C. will be an assembly dominated by unproductive people; they’ll always dominate it, because they have the time to dominate it. No one is counting on them.

We have three options available to us here. We can achieve dominance over the ideas going into the C.N.C., on behalf of productive people. We can cast the C.N.C. into irrelevance, or at least, into a level of significance relatively diminished from what it has enjoyed up to now. Or we can drive toward some combination of those two things.

It’s always best to see things as they truly are, I think, and that would counsel us toward the third option. This monolithic thought-spew of what “Everybody Knows,” may now & then occasionally have some good ideas in it. Overall though, it’s going to be a compendium of things that look good and right, to people who lack the experience of having ever built anything someone else could use. We learn by going through personal experiences, so the encouragement should be toward doing exactly that.

Push people toward living these productive lives, providing products and services other people can use, and it will happen naturally. “Everybody knows Apple’s stuff just plain works” is something that gets said a lot of the time, and you don’t have to work with technology too long before you realize it isn’t true…just to cite one example.

This all comes back to discouraging laziness. Laziness is a package deal; you choose it small, you get it big. Let’s face it, that’s what happened to us. America came out of World War II as a genuine superpower, with a high standard of living. And our people got lazy, in intellectual ways as well as some other ways, because they figured they could afford it. We talk today of the “Greatest Generation” that came before that, and accomplished so much. Well the truth is: They accomplished a lot because it was necessary. We’d like to think when the necessity is gone, our work ethic remains. Without a value system in place and a lot of discipline reinforcing it, it can’t happen that way.

And this is, as I said up above, the enduring message of conservatism throughout history — when it’s right, when it’s not, when it wins, when it doesn’t, the message is always the same. “Civilization cannot continue this way.” Here we see a situation where it really can’t. People reach voting age as liberals, then they become conservatives as they live out the video game embedded earlier…realize how much the policies suck. So they become conservative, but their ranks are augmented by the arrival of new, inexperienced, starry-eyed liberals. We have elections every two-to-four years, so you don’t need to wait for the previous generation of inexperienced starry-eyed liberals to have kids. The saturation of infantile impulses is constant.

ENGAGE the youth. Give them what they want. Have the dialogue. And show all the respect to them that you want them to show you. Which is not at all an easy thing to do…only one side has the experience.

The only other thing I can say is to prosecute hate crime hoaxes to the full extent of the law. We just had that thing happen with the gay church organist who was the first on the scene to see “fag church” spray painted on his church with pro-Trump remarks next to it…ah yes, turns out he did it. It is merely one part of a pattern. Society as a whole is not innocent in all this. We, as a collective, have been allowing this to happen. Enough. No more.

With all of it, the Weaponized Arrested Development, the free-market-bashing, the Common Noise Cloister, the virtue signaling, the “I’m more diverse and tolerant than you” preening…in our elected officials as well as our fellow citizens…it is time for a conservative revolution the likes of which has not yet been seen. One that surpasses everything Trump has done, everything Newt Gingrich has done, everything Ronald Reagan has done. Lift up that top-layer of American liberalism, that tree-hugging hippie crap, and toss it over the side. Sow rock salt into that field so nothing can grow there again. Dump a ton of cement on the corpse so it can’t come back as a zombie. Solve the problem once and for all. Civilization, after all, cannot endure this way.

The time has come for everyone who cares about the future, to stand athwart the silliness with a hand upraised defiantly, yelling “Stop!”

“Where A succeeds and B fails, B should learn from A, A should not be learning from B.”
Nooooooo.
A must note what B did to “lose”, and CRUSH the inevitable attempts at entryism of B in sheep’s clothing whenever it pokes it’s nose into the tent.
“Can’t we just….”
” Semi-B isn’t getting fair representation….”
“Latest studies show….”
“We NEED to accommodate, to attract membership…”
“NOW that I’ve been hired, I NEED to divert NEW hires/ cash/ perks, JUST to do the job…”
- CaptDMO | 05/22/2017 @ 04:52
That’s a good point.

Note for the manuscript: Change to something like “It is fitting for A to teach B, not B to teach A.” There is certainly great value in “learning from” failure.
- mkfreeberg | 05/22/2017 @ 06:13

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The Twilight of the Age of Aquarius… IXSunday, May 21st, 2017

The Twilight of the Age of Aquarius… IX
Sunday, May 21st, 2017