Category: War

Those Who Unmake Civilization

Once you take over, once you deny common people their rights, the product of their efforts, the ability to earn and save for a better future, it doesn’t matter what words you use to justify it.

“In the name of the people” becomes functionally indistinguishable from “by divine right.” It becomes unchecked power. It becomes the ability to rule and do what you think is best, without restraint.

It becomes Auschwitz or Siberia. It becomes mass graves and immiseration. It becomes Venezuela and Zimbabwe, and people eating house pets, and starving children.

The only way to stop these things, crimes as old as time, the result of people being given unlimited power, is to give to the common people — the folks who aren’t born of “something” don’t have the right ideas or the right education or the right pedigree — the same rights as you give “the important people.” Even if you disagree with people’s way of conducting themselves. Even if you think their ideas are zany, you have to give them basic civil liberties: the right to property, the right to life, the right to due judicial process to include the presumption of innocence until proven guilty.

Because when you take that way, you’re reposing power in the hands of the power hungry, who will devour the world and never be satisfied. That way lies atrocities, mass graves. More importantly, that way lies the loss of “bourgeois virtues” by the common people because what’s the point of working hard, saving, and being wise, if in the end your stuff will just be taken away and given to other people?

We’re already well down the road to that insanity. Things like progressive taxation and confusing victimhood and virtue are already an ethical blot on the face of our society, and rats gnawing at the foundations of what made the West great.

This is the goal of Democrats and RINOs. Both are enemies of freedom and the Constitution.

Source: Those Who Unmake Civilization

Progressives are engaged in a “de-civilizing process” that will end badly – Bookworm Room

Everything Progressives do is part of a de-civilizing process that will plunge us back into the cruelty and murder that make up humankind’s natural state…

I’m going to interject here something that neither Pinker nor Elias address. Or at least, Pinker, who summarizes Elias (and I haven’t read Elias myself) doesn’t mention raise two issues I think also affected violence in pre-modern times. There were two constants in the pre-modern era: youthfulness and drunkenness. People were young because they didn’t live to see old age. Few people lived past their 40s. Moreover, because urban water was not potable, people in tight medieval quarters drank only beer or wine. In other words, the medieval world was a time in which most people were young and drunk. It was like perpetually living among 18-to-25-year-old junkies.

The world started “civilizing” in earnest when coffee and tea entered Western civilization, because those drinks required boiled water. Nobody understood germ theory, but they did quickly figure out that, if you drank tea or coffee, you were imbibing a non-alcoholic beverage that did not kill. Interestingly, the coffee and tea culture took off with a bang in England which — perhaps coincidentally, perhaps not — was Ground Zero for the “civilizing process.”

Now, back to Pinker’s discussion…

I find the coffee and tea theory interesting. Read the whole post.

Source: Progressives are engaged in a “de-civilizing process” that will end badly – Bookworm Room

Gramscian damage

In a previous post on Suicidalism, I identified some of the most important of the Soviet Union’s memetic weapons. Here is that list again:

  • There is no truth, only competing agendas.

  • All Western (and especially American) claims to moral superiority over Communism/Fascism/Islam are vitiated by the West’s history of racism and colonialism.

  • There are no objective standards by which we may judge one culture to be better than another. Anyone who claims that there are such standards is an evil oppressor.

  • The prosperity of the West is built on ruthless exploitation of the Third World; therefore Westerners actually deserve to be impoverished and miserable.

  • Crime is the fault of society, not the individual criminal. Poor criminals are entitled to what they take. Submitting to criminal predation is more virtuous than resisting it.

  • The poor are victims. Criminals are victims. And only victims are virtuous. Therefore only the poor and criminals are virtuous. (Rich people can borrow some virtue by identifying with poor people and criminals.)

  • For a virtuous person, violence and war are never justified. It is always better to be a victim than to fight, or even to defend oneself. But ‘oppressed’ people are allowed to use violence anyway; they are merely reflecting the evil of their oppressors.

  • When confronted with terror, the only moral course for a Westerner is to apologize for past sins, understand the terrorist’s point of view, and make concessions.

This sounds like today’s Democrats.

Source: Gramscian damage

The IPCC is still wrong on climate change. Scientists prove it.

The IPCC is a political organization, not a scientific body.  It was formed by the United Nations in 1988 for the purpose of establishing the need for a global solution to the alleged problem of anthropogenic climate change.  Note that the mission of the IPCC was never to study the causes of climate change; were that the case, it might have devoted some of its billions of dollars in revenues over the years to examining solar cycles, changes in ocean currents, the sensitivity of climate to greenhouse gases, or the planet’s carbon cycle.  The IPCC has spent trivial sums on these issues, and the authors of and contributors to its voluminous reports have few or no credentials in these fields.

Fake scientists.

Source: The IPCC is still wrong on climate change. Scientists prove it.

Our Progressive Future: Folsom Street Fair – Moonbattery

San Francisco’s Folsom Street Fair shows us what the future will look like if liberals keep winning the Culture War.

For poet Maryann Leilani Wood, 42, “the playground,” a fenced-off area for women as well as transgender and gender-nonconforming individuals, was invaluable. Everyone was welcome in the zone except cis-men, or those who were assigned the male gender at birth and still identify that way.

Inclusion is very important to moonbats, but there is no need to go overboard and be inclusive even toward men who admit they are men.

Source: Our Progressive Future: Folsom Street Fair – Moonbattery

Gramscian damage

I identified some of the most important of the Soviet Union’s memetic weapons. Here is that list again:

  • There is no truth, only competing agendas.

  • All Western (and especially American) claims to moral superiority over Communism/Fascism/Islam are vitiated by the West’s history of racism and colonialism.

  • There are no objective standards by which we may judge one culture to be better than another. Anyone who claims that there are such standards is an evil oppressor.

  • The prosperity of the West is built on ruthless exploitation of the Third World; therefore Westerners actually deserve to be impoverished and miserable.

  • Crime is the fault of society, not the individual criminal. Poor criminals are entitled to what they take. Submitting to criminal predation is more virtuous than resisting it.

  • The poor are victims. Criminals are victims. And only victims are virtuous. Therefore only the poor and criminals are virtuous. (Rich people can borrow some virtue by identifying with poor people and criminals.)

  • For a virtuous person, violence and war are never justified. It is always better to be a victim than to fight, or even to defend oneself. But ‘oppressed’ people are allowed to use violence anyway; they are merely reflecting the evil of their oppressors.

  • When confronted with terror, the only moral course for a Westerner is to apologize for past sins, understand the terrorist’s point of view, and make concessions.

Sounds ominously familiar…

Source: Gramscian damage

Freeing the Humanities from Academia

The greatest assault on Western Civilization came from the inside, and what was once the deepest reposit of that knowledge: Academia. This is nowhere seem more deeply than in the purging of the humanities of millennia of learned knowledge and the wisdom of generations to make room for its antithesis.…

Hence, we must all take it upon ourselves to learn, cherish, and teach the great humanities of Western Civilization so that some piece of us lives on rather than be relegated tot he ash heap of history.

So say we all. Amen.

A quick followup: since I posted this I discovered a website called Erenow, “one of the largest collections of online free books on history.”

Did I mention free?

Source: Freeing the Humanities from Academia

Duped by diversity: Colleges corrupt their curriculum to satisfy modern progressive sensibilities – NY Daily News

As for actual learning, our intellectual patrimony will be further eroded. Culturally illiterate students who could not name a single artist or philosopher from Periclean Athens, the Renaissance, or the Enlightenment will announce that Western civilization is racist and patriarchal. Being forced to study the West’s monumental accomplishments of imagination and reason, whether by Plato, Aeschylus, Mozart or Hume, jeopardizes their very survival, they will whine.

I’ve read Plato, Aeschylus, and Hume and my survival was never threatened. Well maybe I was in danger of laughing myself to death after reading the idiocy that is Hume.

 

Source: Duped by diversity: Colleges corrupt their curriculum to satisfy modern progressive sensibilities – NY Daily News

The Strange Career of White Privilege | National Review

One of the strangest elements of the American obsession with superficial appearance is the habit of very well connected and affluent whites faulting poor whites for their “white privilege.” It has become a sort of rite-of-passage virtue-signaling in which rich, white college students at tony universities damn white privilege and the supposedly racist, nativist, xenophobic, and sexist Trump Neanderthals. With this, they establish their spiritually pure fides or, more practically, earn a sort of insurance policy in case the all-seeing eye of the diversity tower turns its focus on them someday.

Donald Trump rode to victory in part on the furor of voters in the Midwest and rural states who were derided for their privilege (though they did not seem to have much) by those who most certainly did enjoy privilege.

I’ve been homeless for over a year. Where’s my privilege?

Source: The Strange Career of White Privilege | National Review