George Rebane
- Add evil to ignorant and stupid
- Weathering Anthropogenic Global Warming
The silence of the left-loving lamestream media on violence and threats coming from the unionized left is no longer a remarkable aspect of American life. Deroy Murdock of National Review Online compiles some of these in ‘Death Threats by the Dozen in Wisconsin’. For what seems like forever, many conservatives and libertarians have puzzled on the real source(s) of the sociopathic ideology and behavior of the progressives. These appear to revolve around 1) ignorance of how the world actually works, 2) inherited stupidity which precludes the ability to remediate ignorance through learning, and 3) evil that in its foundation seeks to subjugate and/or eliminate all wrong thinkers (a la Bolsheviks, Mass Execution of Kulaks, Cultural Revolution, Killing Fields. The Holocaust was national socialist genocide based on your double helix and not belief.)
I have always given the left the moral benefit of doubt and judged them to be ignorant with, perhaps, a dollop of stupidity thrown in now and then, rather than simply being evil. After seeing how the public service employee unions have behaved in Wisconsin and California, my needle is definitely starting to shift toward the inclusion of evil and its compelling explanatory power to underpin what we see in the news.
In California, that may also be the simplest explanation for the negotiating stance the Democrats are taking in the state’s budget debate. It boggles this mind to understand how those politicians can use holding back revising the compensation (including pension) packages of the unionized public employees as a bargaining chip, given the screaming record of how such policies have bankrupted the state. They are simply threatening to burn down the house to its foundation bolts if they are not allowed to keep using the wrecking bar of tax, fee, and regulation increases.
Looking at the ‘weather’ we have experienced these last years continues to explain why the left has gone silent on their attempts to explain global warming, … er, make that climate change on the basis of actual data records and scientific analysis. Now we just witness their political ferrets attempting to quietly bring about the government control measures which were and still are the prime motivation for all this AGW stuff in the first place. It appears that the stuff I wrote years ago (here) on why we should be skeptical about the early claims has now come to pass, point by point. In ‘Climate Change – A Format for Reasoned Dialogue’ I presented a check list of nested factors that advised against making public policy (like California’s AB32) on what is known, and what we can know about the behavior of earth’s climate and its response to human action. The paper was judged to be too complex for common understanding, but as we have demonstrated since then, so has climate. Sadly, not everything about the real world can be dumbed down.
[update] Like predictable clockwork the rabid left responded to my rumination on the union thugs calling for the violent overthrow of our capitalistic system, and making threats on the lives of elected officials and others who seek to limit their assaults on the public purse. In my email I received a copy of a byline by SBC president Steven Frisch that was published, where else, but on the blog of The Union’s former editor.
There in his screed against me – we note again the point of my post is never addressed – Mr Frisch demonstrates item by item what has now become known as the Alinsky Alternative. The charitable basis for the mistakes in his off-the-wall logic would be poor reading skills (adult literacy is a nationwide problem as confirmed by our Dept of Education) as abetted by a personal agenda, so I’ll keep my assessment of him in that quarter. In his conclusion he declares –
“So lets see, if you disagree with George, you are not only ignorant, you are inherently ignorant, and evil. You are the same as Pol Pot and Adolph Hitler.”
But it stretches credulity that he interprets my post as an indictment of people as evil just because they don’t agree with ME. Now the question remains, are his errors due to gross ignorance, mild stupidity, or are they intentional and thus derive from a more malevolent source.
So that no one misunderstands, yes I do consider people evil who surreptitiously threaten horrific deaths on elected officials and their families. And I here cite Mr Frisch’s attack not as a futile effort to remediate, but only as a corroboration of the continuing tactics of a bankrupt ideology that is entrenched in our land.
Shrugging Atlas is back
George Rebane
Many Americans, I among them, are witnessing our country well along its way into the dystopian nightmare Ayn Rand described in her Atlas Shrugged that came out in 1957. The book is being reprised in a three part movie, the first of which is slated to open across the country on the auspicious 15 April 2011. In the book, which she considered her summa, Rand develops and demonstrates objectivism, her contribution to philosophy.
Without giving much away, the novel's story takes place in a United States that is pretty much what we have today, and what our progressive friends are promising to deliver in spades tomorrow. The protagonist is a female railroad executive who is trying to save her railroad in the face of draconian government attack on industry, and worse, the withdrawal and disappearance of the nation’s producers. As these entrepreneurs and captains of industry literally disappear, they leave their firms to the mercies of government break-up and management. This is the ultimate strike of the wealth creators - instead of thuggery, coercion, and/or destruction, they simply leave and let the new collectivist order do what they will. These sacrifices are made as the only remaining alternative to demonstrate to the nation at large, by their absence, the blessings of individualism, capitalism, free markets, and a salutary profit motive.
According to early reviews of its premiere at the Heritage Foundation, this powerful stuff is brought off well in its modern screen version as summarized in the video. H/T to RR reader for the heads up on this.
Posted at 09:45 AM in Culture Comments, Happenings, Our Country | Permalink | Comments (12) | TrackBack (0)
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