Tea Partiers Doing Great Things in Ferguson
If you think Ferguson is all bad news, think again. Dottie Bailey, Ben Evans, and other Tea Partiers have been…
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A Day of Hope, Prayer, and Clean-up in Ferguson
Original Post: A Day of Hope, Prayer, and Clean-up in Ferguson.
Dellena Jones’s 911 Hair Salon was attacked at about 11:15 PM by a small band of young men. The break-in and robbery occurred close to the time of the first shooting. The hair salon is less than 100 yards from the scene of the shooting. But that didn’t stop volunteers from St. Louis Tea Party…
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911 Beauty Salon Targeted by Looters. Please Help
Original Post: 911 Beauty Salon Targeted by Looters. Please Help.
Our adopted Ferguson business, the 911 Beauty Salon, appears to have been a target of looters tonight according to KTVI 2. Dellena Jones’s business was already struggling. She didn’t need this. Let’s prove that we believe in free enterprise entrepreneurship. That we can help our neighbors. You can donate to help Dellena on this GoFundMe…
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Overnight in Ferguson: “A remarkable amount of gunfire out there”
Original Post: Overnight in Ferguson: “A remarkable amount of gunfire out there”.
St. Louis County Police Chief Jon Belmar told reporters “there was a remarkable amount of gunfire out there,” describing the scene on W. Florissant last night. A shooter confronted plain-clothes officers and opened fire. Officers returned fire, striking the suspect. The suspect is in critical, unstable condition in a local hospital. One officer was treated,…
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Incredible video of shooting in Ferguson
Original Post: Incredible video of shooting in Ferguson.
Watch. You can see the shooter in a white t-shirt.
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Old Fashioned News: The fashionability of suicidal political fashions
Old Fashioned News: The fashionability of suicidal political fashions
I made the mistake this morning of turning on the radio – local talk radio & NPR, and I couldn’t help noticing – and really, I couldn’t help it, I tried not to, but I couldn’t help noticing, how much today’s ‘news’, reminded me of what I was just reading last week when researching a report for our History 6-12 HB1490 curriculum workgroup. For that report (I’ll post it later, maybe [Here it is]), I was re-reading John Adams’ “Defense of the Constitutions” vol II, where he’s commenting, mostly, upon Machiavelli’s “The Florentine History“
If your first thought is “How could NPR possibly remind you of something so old and outdated?“, well, my ahistorical virtual friend, even with names and cities you don’t recognize, you’d be surprised (though sadly, I won’t, as I’ll have to endure your repeating the lessons you never learned from history) you needn’t let those trifles worry you, after all, who it is that the names are actually naming are of little or no importance, you could even substitute at random names you are somewhat familiar with, like Clinton, Bush, Kerry, Nixon, Buckley, Democrats, Republicans, 99%, 1%, Blacks and Gays, Bakeries, Ferguson and Baltimore, and still be that much more the wiser, as I assure you, it will retain the utmost relevance to your daily news.
For those of you who can’t be bothered to steel yourselves to sit still long enough to read more than a paragraph, run along and be damned. For those of you who can… it certainly won’t cheer you up, so… maybe you ought to run along as well.
After all, this is the cheery portion. Pick it back up at the last link, and you’ll find the more fashionable death & destruction waiting for us in tomorrow’s ‘news’.
And with that, I’ll turn it over to the voice of two centuries ago, reporting live from the grave, on today and tomorrow’s Headline News, from
: John Adams, A DEFENCE OF THE CONSTITUTIONS OF GOVERNMENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. Volume II
CHAPTER FIRST.: ITALIAN REPUBLICS OF THE MIDDLE AGE. FLORENCE. (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1856). 10 volumes. Vol. 5
[Adams in standard font, the works he’s quoting from in italic]************************************************************************ “…The factions between the nobility and the commons, which ended in the utter ruin of the former, have been already related; but peace was not obtained. All authority was in one centre, the commons; and there were other orders of citizens who were not satisfied; the same contest therefore continued under a new form and new names. They now happened between the commons and plebeians, which were only new names in reality for a new nobility and commons; the commons now took the place of the nobility, and the plebeians that of the commons. Machiavel is as clear and full for a mixed government as any writer; but the noble invention of the negative of an executive upon a legislature in two branches, which is the only remedy in contests between nobles and commons, seems never to have entered his thoughts; and nothing is more entertaining than that mist which is perpetually before eyes so piercing, so capable of looking far through the hearts and deeds of men as his, for want of that thought.
“There seemed to be no seeds of future dissensions left in Florence.”
No seeds! Not one seed had been eradicated; all the seeds that ever existed remained in full vigor. The seeds were in the human heart, and were as ready to shoot in commons and plebeians as they had been in nobles.
“But the evil destiny of our city and want of good conduct occasioned a new emulation between the families of the Albizzi and the Ricci,* which produced as fatal divisions as those between the Edition: current; Page: [45] Buondelmonti and Uberti, and the other between the Cerchi and Donati had done before.”
It was no evil destiny peculiar to Florence; it is common to every city, nation, village, and club. The evil destiny is in human nature. And if the plebeians had prevailed over the commons as these had done over the nobility, some two plebeian families would have appeared upon the stage with all the emulation of the Albizzi and Ricci, to occasion divisions and dissensions, seditions and rebellions, confiscations and banishments, assassinations, conflagrations, and massacres, and all other such good things as appear forever to recommend a simple government in every form.1 When it is found in experience, and appears probable in theory, that so simple an invention as a separate executive, with power to defend itself, is a full remedy against the fatal effects of dissensions between nobles and commons, why should we still finally hope that simple governments, or mixtures of two ingredients only, will produce effects which they never did and we know never can? Why should the people be still deceived with insinuations that those evils arose from the destiny of a particular city, when we know that destiny is common to all mankind?
************************************************************************Let me interrupt Mr. Adams here with an even more relevant quote from Mr. Adams about us today, rather than us then,
“…But should the people of America once become capable of that deep simulation towards one another, and towards foreign nations, which assumes the language of justice and moderation while it is practising iniquity and extravagance, and displays [229] in the most captivating manner the charming pictures of candor, frankness, and sincerity, while it is rioting in rapine and insolence, this country will be the most miserable habitation in the world; because we have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry, would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”
And with that I’ll return you to our regularly scheduled breaking old news, still in progress:
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“Betwixt the two families of Albizzi and Ricci there was a mortal hatred, each conspiring the destruction of the other in order to engross the sole management of the commonwealth with less difficulty.* However, they had not as yet taken up Edition: current; Page: [46] arms or proceeded to open violence on either side, but only thwarted each other in council and the execution of their offices.”
A private quarrel happened in the market, and a rumor was instantly spread, nobody knew by whom, that the Ricci were going to attack the Albizzi; and by others it was said that the Albizzi were preparing to fall upon the Ricci. These stories were carried to both parties, and occasioned such an uproar throughout the whole city that the magistrates found it very difficult to keep the two families and their friends from coming to a battle in earnest, though neither side had intended any such thing as was maliciously reported. This disturbance, though accidental, inflamed the former animosities, and determined both sides to strengthen their parties and be upon their guard; and since the citizens were reduced to such a degree of equality by the suppression of the nobility that the magistrates were held in greater reverence than ever they had been before, each family resolved to avail itself rather of public and ordinary means than of private violence.”The intrigues of these two families to supplant each other are very curious; but as the detail of them is long, we shall leave the reader to amuse himself with them at his leisure, and come to a speech made to the signori by an eminent citizen, when affairs were become so critical and dangerous as to alarm all impartial men. “The common disease,” says he,
“magnificent signors, of the other cities in Italy has invaded ours, and is continually eating deeper and deeper into its vitals. All our towns for want of due restraint have run into extremes, and from liberty degenerated into downright licentiousness, making such laws and instituting such governments as were rather calculated to foment and support factions than maintain freedom. From this source are derived all the defects and disorders we labor under; no friendship or union is to be found among the citizens except betwixt such as are accomplices in some wicked design either against their neighbors or their country. All religion and fear of God are utterly extinguished; promises and oaths are no further binding than they serve to promote some private advantage, and they are resorted to not with any design to observe them, but as necessary means to facilitate the perpetration of fraud, which is even honored and applauded in proportion to its Edition: current; Page: [47] success. From hence it comes to pass that the most wicked and abandoned wretches are admired as able, enterprising men; while the innocent and conscientious are laughed at and despised as fools.
“The young men are indolent and effeminate; the old, lascivious and contemptible; without regard to age or sex every place is full of the most licentious brutality, for which the laws themselves, though good and wholesome, are yet so partially executed that they do not afford any remedy. This is the real cause of that selfish spirit which now so generally prevails, and of that ambition, not for true glory, but for places, which dishonors the possessors; hence proceed those fatal animosities, those seeds of envy, revenge, and faction, with their usual attendants, executions, banishments, depression of good men, and exaltation of the wicked.
“ The ringleaders of parties varnish over their pernicious designs with some sacred title; for, being in reality enemies to all liberty, they more effectually destroy it by pretending to defend the rights, sometimes of the nobility, sometimes of the commons; since the fruit which they expect from a victory is not the glory of having delivered their country, but the satisfaction of having conquered the opposite party and secured the government of the state to themselves; and when once they have obtained that, there is no sort of cruelty, injustice, or rapine, that they are not guilty of. From thenceforward laws are enacted, not for the common good, but for private ends. War and peace are made, and alliances concluded, not for the honor of the public, but to gratify the humors of particular men. Our laws, our statutes and civil ordinances are made to indulge the caprice or serve the ambition of the conqueror, not to promote the true interest of a free people; so that one faction is no sooner extinguished than another is lighted up.
“A city that endeavors to support itself by parties instead of laws can never be at peace; for when one prevails and is left without opposition, it necessarily divides again. When the Ghibellines were depressed, every one thought the Guelphs would then have lived in peace and security; and yet it was not long before they divided into the factions of the Neri and Bianchi. When the Bianchi were reduced, new commotions arose, sometimes in favor of the exiles, sometimes betwixt the Edition: current; Page: [48] nobility and people; and to give that away to others, which we could not or would not possess quietly ourselves, we first committed our liberties into the hands of King Robert, then of his brother, next of his son, and last of all to the mercy of the Duke of Athens, never settling or reposing under any government, as people that could neither be satisfied with being free nor submit to live in slavery. Nay, so much was our state inclined to division, that rather than acquiesce under the government of a king, it meanly prostituted itself to the tyranny of a vile and pitiful Agobbian. The Duke of Athens was no sooner expelled but we took up arms again, and fought against each other with more rancor and inveteracy than ever, till the ancient nobility were entirely subdued, and lay at the mercy of the people. It was then the general opinion there would be no more factions or troubles in Florence, since those were humbled whose insupportable pride and ambition had been the chief occasion of them; but we now see that pride and ambition, which was thought to be utterly extinguished by the fall of the nobility, now springs up again among the people, who begin to be equally impatient for authority, and aspire with the same vehemence to the first offices in the commonwealth.
“It seems the will of Heaven that certain families should spring up in all commonwealths to be the pest and ruin of them. Our city owes its miseries and distractions not merely to one or two, but to several of those families; first to the Buondelmonti and Uberti, next to the Donati and Cerchi, and now, to our shame be it spoken, to the Ricci and Albizzi. Why may not this commonwealth, in spite of former examples to the contrary, not only be united, but reformed and improved by new laws and constitutions? You must not impute the factions of our ancestors to the nature of the men, but to the iniquity of the times, which being now altered, afford this city fair hopes of better fortune; and our disorders may be corrected by the institution of wholesome laws, by a prudent restraint of ambition, by prohibiting such customs as tend to nourish and propagate faction, and by substituting others, that may conduce to maintain liberty and good civil government.”
This speech, although upon the whole it is excellent, has several essential mistakes. That certain families will spring up in every simple government, and in every injudicious mixture of Edition: current; Page: [49] aristocracy and democracy, to be the pest and ruin of them, is most certain. It is the will of Heaven that the happiness of nations, as well as that of individuals, should depend upon the use of their reason; they must therefore provide for themselves constitutions which will restrain the ambition of families. Without the restraint, the ambition cannot be prevented; nature has planted it in every human heart. The factions of their ancestors ought not to have been imputed to the iniquity of the times, for all times and places are so iniquitous. Those factions grew out of the nature of men under such forms of government; and the new form ought to have been so contrived as to produce a remedy for the evil. This might have been done; for there is a way of making the laws more powerful than any particular persons or families.
“As this advice was conformable to the sentiments of the signori, they appointed fifty-six citizens* to provide for the safety of the commonwealth; but as most people are fitter to preserve good order than to restore it when lost, these citizens took more pains to extinguish the present factions than to provide against new ones, which was the reason that they succeeded in neither; for they not only did not take away the occasion of fresh ones, but made one of those that were then subsisting so much more powerful than the other, that the commonwealth was in great danger.
“They deprived three of the family of Albizzi, and as many of the Ricci, of all share in the magistracy for three years, except in such branches of it as were particularly appropriated to the Guelph party; of which number Piero de gli Albizzi and Uguccione de’Ricci were two. These provisions bore much harder upon the Ricci than the Albizzi; for, though they were equally stigmatized, yet the Ricci were the greatest sufferers. Pietro, indeed, was excluded from the palace of the signori, but he had free admittance into that of the Guelphs, where his authority was very great; and though he and his associates were forward enough in their ‘admonitions’1 before, they became much more Edition: current; Page: [50] forward after this mark of disgrace, and new accidents occurred, which still more inflamed their resentment.
“Gregory XI. was pope at that time; and residing, as his late predecessors had done, at Avignon, he governed Italy by legates, who, being haughty and rapacious, had grievously oppressed several of the cities. One of these legates being then at Bologna, took advantage of a scarcity, and resolved to make himself master of Tuscany. This occasioned the war with the pope.* The Florentines entered into a confederacy with Galeazzo and all the other states that were at variance with the church; after which they appointed eight citizens for the management of it, whom they invested with an absolute power of proceeding, and disbursing money without control or account. This war gave fresh courage to the Ricci, who, in opposition to the Albizzi, had upon all occasions favored Galeazzo and appeared against the church, and especially because all the eight were enemies to the Guelphs; but though they made a vigorous war against the pope, they could not defend themselves against the captains and their adherents. The envy and indignation with which the Guelphs looked upon the eight, made them grow so bold and insolent, that they often affronted and abused them, as well as the rest of the principal citizens. The captains were no less arrogant; they were even more dreaded than the signori, and men went with greater awe and reverence to their houses than to the palace; so that all the ambassadors who came to Florence were instructed to address themselves to them.
“After the death of the pope, the city had no war abroad, but was in great confusion at home; for, on one hand, the Guelphs were become so audacious, that they were no longer supportable; and, on the other, there was no visible way to suppress them; it was necessary, therefore, to take up arms, and leave the event to fortune. On the side of the Guelphs were all the ancient nobility and the greater part of the more powerful citizens; on the other were all the inferior sort of people, headed by the eight, and joined by George Scali, Strozzi, the Ricci, the Alberti, and the Edition: current; Page: [51] Medici. The rest of the multitude, as it almost always happened, joined with the discontented party. The power of their adversaries seemed to the heads of the Guelphs to be formidable, and their danger great, if at any time a signory that was not on their side should attempt to depress them. They found the number of persons who had been ‘admonished’ was so great, that they had disobliged most of the citizens, and made them their enemies. They thought there was no other remedy, now they had deprived them of their honors, but to banish them out of the city, seize upon the palace of the signori, and put the government of the state wholly into the hands of their own creatures, according to the example of the Guelphs, their predecessors, whose quiet and security were entirely owing to the total expulsion of their enemies.
“But as they differed in opinion about the time of putting their project in execution, the eight, aware of the trick intended, deferred the imborsation, and Sylvestro, the son of Alamanno de’ Medici, was appointed gonfalonier.* As he was born of one of the most considerable families of the commoners, he could not bear to see the people oppressed by a few grandees. With Alberti, Strozzi, and Scali, he secretly prepared a decree, by which the laws against the nobility1 were to be revived, the authority of the captains retrenched, and those who had been admonished admitted into the magistracy. Sylvestro being president, and consequently prince of the city for a time, caused both a college and council to be called the same morning; but his decree was thrown out as an innovation. He went away to the council, and pretended to resign his office, and leave the people to choose another person, who might either have more virtue or better fortune than himself; upon this, such of the council as were in the secret, and others who wished for a Edition: current; Page: [52] change, raised a tumult in 1378,* at which the signori and the colleges immediately came together; seeing their gonfalonier retiring, they obliged him, partly by their authority, and partly by their entreaties, to return to the council, which was in great confusion. Many of the principal citizens were threatened, and treated with the utmost insolence; among the rest, Carlo Strozzi was collared by an artificer, and would have been knocked on the head, if some of the bystanders had not rescued him. But the person who made the greatest disturbance was Benedetto de gli Alberti, who got into one of the windows of the palace, and called out to the people to arm; upon which, the piazza was instantly full of armed men, and the colleges were obliged to do that by fear, which they would not come into when they were petitioned.
“But whoever intends to make any alteration in a commonwealth, and to effect it by raising the multitude, will find himself deceived, if he thinks he can stop where he will, and conduct it as he pleases. The design of Sylvestro was to quiet and secure the city, but the thing took a very different turn; for the people were in such a ferment, that the shops were shut up, the houses barricaded, and many removed their goods for security into churches and convents. All the companies of the arts assembled, and each of them appointed a syndic. The signori called the colleges together, and were a whole day in consultation with the syndies, how to compose the disorders to the satisfaction of all parties; but they could not agree. The council, then, to hold out some hopes of satisfaction to the arts and the rest of the people, gave a full power, which the Florentines called a balia, to the signori, the colleges, the eight, the captains of the party, and the syndics of the arts, to reform the state. But while they were employed in this, some of the inferior companies of the arts, at the instigation of certain persons, who wanted to revenge the late injuries they had received from the Guelphs, detached themselves from the rest, and went to plundering and burning houses. They broke open the jails, set the prisoners at liberty, and plundered the monasteries and convents.
“The next morning the balìa proceeded to requalify the ammoniti, Edition: current; Page: [53] the admonished, though with an injunction not to exercise any function in the magistracy for three years; they repealed such laws as had been made by the Guelphs to the prejudice of the other citizens, and proclaimed rebels many who had incurred the hatred of the public; after which the names of the new signori were published, and Luigi Guicciardini was declared their gonfalonier.* If those who were admonished, the ammoniti, could have been content, the city was in a fair way of being quieted; but they thought it hard to wait three years longer, before they could enjoy any share in the magistracy. The arts assembled again to obtain satisfaction for them, and demanded of the signori, that, for the good and quiet of the city, it should be decreed, that no citizen for the future should be admonished as a Ghibelline, who had ever been one of the signori, or the college, or the captains of the companies, or the consuls or syndies of any of the arts; and further, that a new imborsation should be made of the Guelph party, and the old one burnt. It seldom happens that men who covet the property of others, and long for revenge, are satisfied with a bare restitution of their own. Accordingly some, who expected to advance their fortunes by exciting commotions,† endeavored to persuade the artificers, that they could never be safe, except many of their enemies were either banished or cut off.”
The city continued in the utmost confusion between the two new parties of commons and plebeians. But waving a particular detail, the essence of several years’ miseries may be collected from two speeches. One is of Luigi Guicciardini, a standard-bearer to the plebeians:—“The more we grant,” says he,
“the more shameless and arrogant are your demands. If we speak thus to you, we do so, not to offend, but to lead you to reform; to which end we are willing that others may say to you what will please, whilst our province remains to say that which may do you good. Tell us, on your honor, what is there, that you can reasonably ask more of us? You desired to have the Edition: current; Page: [54] captains of the party deprived of their authority; they have been deprived. You insisted that the old imborsation should be burnt, and a new one made; we consented. You wanted to have those reinstated in the magistracy, that had been admonished; it has been granted. At your intercession we pardoned such as had been guilty of burning houses, and robbing churches, and we banished many of our principal citizens at your instigation. To gratify you, the grandees are bridled with new laws, and every thing done that might give you content; where, then, can we expect your demands will stop; or how long will you thus abuse your liberty? Why will ye suffer your own discords to bring the city into slavery? What else can ye expect from your divisions? what, from the goods ye have already taken, or may hereafter take from your fellow-citizens, but servitude and poverty? The persons you plunder are those whose fortunes and abilities are the defence of the state, and if they fail, how must it be supported? Whatever is got that way cannot last long; and then ye have nothing to look for but remediless famine and distress.”
“These expostulations made some impression, and they promised to be good citizens and obedient; but a fresh tumult soon arose, more dangerous than the former. The greater part of the late robberies and other mischiefs, had been committed by the rabble and dregs of the people; and those of them who had been the most audacious apprehended, that when the most material differences were composed, they should be called to an account for their crimes, and deserted, as it always happens, by those very persons at whose instigation they had committed them. Besides which, the inferior sort of people had conceived a hatred against the richer citizens and principals of the arts, upon a pretence that they had not been rewarded for their past services in proportion to what they deserved.”
To show how divisions grow wherever human nature is without a check, it is worth while to be particular here.
“When the city was first divided into arts, in the time of Charles I., there was a proper head or governor appointed over each of them, to whose jurisdiction, in civil cases, every person in the several arts was to be subject. These arts or companies, as we have said, were at first but twelve, but afterwards they were increased to twenty-one, and arrived at such power and authority, that in a Edition: current; Page: [55] few years they wholly engrossed the government of the city; and because some were more, and others less honorable among them, they came by degrees to be distinguished, and seven of them were called the greater arts, and fourteen the less. From this division proceeded the arrogance of the captains of the party; for the citizens who had formerly been Guelphs,….”
************************************************************************
(Sorry, me butting back in again, honestly, even I tire of its relevance… why not just turn on the news?)
************************************************************************ … The meaner sort of people, therefore, both of this company and the others, were, for the causes assigned, highly enraged; and being also terrified at the apprehension of being punished for their late outrages, they had frequent meetings in the night; where, considering what had happened, they represented to each other the danger they were in; and to animate and unite them all, one of the boldest and most experienced of them harangued his companions in this manner:— ************************************************************************
(Me again. Here, we’ll just cut to the chase, with Signori Sharpton:
************************************************************************““ ‘If it was now to be debated whether we should take arms to plunder and burn the houses of our fellow-citizens and rob the churches, I should be one of those who would think it worthy of great consideration, and perhaps be induced to prefer secure poverty to hazardous gain. But since arms have been already taken up and much mischief done, the first points to be considered are, in what manner we may retain them and ward off the penalties we have incurred. The whole city is full of [56] rage and complaints against us, the citizens are daily in council, and the magistrates frequently assembled. Assure yourselves they are either preparing snares for us or contriving how to raise forces to destroy us. It behoves us, therefore, to have two objects chiefly in view at these consultations,—first, how to avoid the punishment for our late actions; and, in the next place, to devise the means of living in a greater degree of liberty and with more satisfaction for the future than we have done hitherto. To come off with impunity for our past offences, it is necessary to add still more to them, to redouble our outrages, our robberies and burnings, and to do our best to associate numbers for our protection; for where many are guilty none are chastised. Small crimes are punished, great ones rewarded; and where many suffer, few seek revenge; a general calamity being always borne with more patience than a particular one. To multiply evils is the surest way to procure us a pardon for what has been already done, and to obtain the liberty we desire. Nor is there any difficulty to discourage us. The enterprise is easy, and the success not to be doubted. Those who could oppose us are opulent indeed, but divided; their disunion will give us the victory, and their riches when we have got them will maintain it. “
I’m sure you can figure it out from there. If not, simply turn on the NEWS, you surely won’t miss many details.
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Old Fashioned News: The fashionability of suicidal political fashions
Old Fashioned News: The fashionability of suicidal political fashions
I made the mistake this morning of turning on the radio – local talk radio & NPR, and I couldn’t help noticing – and really, I couldn’t help it, I tried not to, but I couldn’t help noticing, how much today’s ‘news’, reminded me of what I was just reading last week when researching a report for our History 6-12 HB1490 curriculum workgroup. For that report (I’ll post it later, maybe [Here it is]), I was re-reading John Adams’ “Defense of the Constitutions” vol II, where he’s commenting, mostly, upon Machiavelli’s “The Florentine History“
If your first thought is “How could NPR possibly remind you of something so old and outdated?“, well, my ahistorical virtual friend, even with names and cities you don’t recognize, you’d be surprised (though sadly, I won’t, as I’ll have to endure your repeating the lessons you never learned from history) you needn’t let those trifles worry you, after all, who it is that the names are actually naming are of little or no importance, you could even substitute at random names you are somewhat familiar with, like Clinton, Bush, Kerry, Nixon, Buckley, Democrats, Republicans, 99%, 1%, Blacks and Gays, Bakeries, Ferguson and Baltimore, and still be that much more the wiser, as I assure you, it will retain the utmost relevance to your daily news.
For those of you who can’t be bothered to steel yourselves to sit still long enough to read more than a paragraph, run along and be damned. For those of you who can… it certainly won’t cheer you up, so… maybe you ought to run along as well.
After all, this is the cheery portion. Pick it back up at the last link, and you’ll find the more fashionable death & destruction waiting for us in tomorrow’s ‘news’.
And with that, I’ll turn it over to the voice of two centuries ago, reporting live from the grave, on today and tomorrow’s Headline News, from
: John Adams, A DEFENCE OF THE CONSTITUTIONS OF GOVERNMENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. Volume II
CHAPTER FIRST.: ITALIAN REPUBLICS OF THE MIDDLE AGE. FLORENCE. (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1856). 10 volumes. Vol. 5
[Adams in standard font, the works he’s quoting from in italic]************************************************************************ “…The factions between the nobility and the commons, which ended in the utter ruin of the former, have been already related; but peace was not obtained. All authority was in one centre, the commons; and there were other orders of citizens who were not satisfied; the same contest therefore continued under a new form and new names. They now happened between the commons and plebeians, which were only new names in reality for a new nobility and commons; the commons now took the place of the nobility, and the plebeians that of the commons. Machiavel is as clear and full for a mixed government as any writer; but the noble invention of the negative of an executive upon a legislature in two branches, which is the only remedy in contests between nobles and commons, seems never to have entered his thoughts; and nothing is more entertaining than that mist which is perpetually before eyes so piercing, so capable of looking far through the hearts and deeds of men as his, for want of that thought.
“There seemed to be no seeds of future dissensions left in Florence.”
No seeds! Not one seed had been eradicated; all the seeds that ever existed remained in full vigor. The seeds were in the human heart, and were as ready to shoot in commons and plebeians as they had been in nobles.
“But the evil destiny of our city and want of good conduct occasioned a new emulation between the families of the Albizzi and the Ricci,* which produced as fatal divisions as those between the Edition: current; Page: [45] Buondelmonti and Uberti, and the other between the Cerchi and Donati had done before.”
It was no evil destiny peculiar to Florence; it is common to every city, nation, village, and club. The evil destiny is in human nature. And if the plebeians had prevailed over the commons as these had done over the nobility, some two plebeian families would have appeared upon the stage with all the emulation of the Albizzi and Ricci, to occasion divisions and dissensions, seditions and rebellions, confiscations and banishments, assassinations, conflagrations, and massacres, and all other such good things as appear forever to recommend a simple government in every form.1 When it is found in experience, and appears probable in theory, that so simple an invention as a separate executive, with power to defend itself, is a full remedy against the fatal effects of dissensions between nobles and commons, why should we still finally hope that simple governments, or mixtures of two ingredients only, will produce effects which they never did and we know never can? Why should the people be still deceived with insinuations that those evils arose from the destiny of a particular city, when we know that destiny is common to all mankind?
************************************************************************Let me interrupt Mr. Adams here with an even more relevant quote from Mr. Adams about us today, rather than us then,
“…But should the people of America once become capable of that deep simulation towards one another, and towards foreign nations, which assumes the language of justice and moderation while it is practising iniquity and extravagance, and displays [229] in the most captivating manner the charming pictures of candor, frankness, and sincerity, while it is rioting in rapine and insolence, this country will be the most miserable habitation in the world; because we have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry, would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”
And with that I’ll return you to our regularly scheduled breaking old news, still in progress:
************************************************************************
“Betwixt the two families of Albizzi and Ricci there was a mortal hatred, each conspiring the destruction of the other in order to engross the sole management of the commonwealth with less difficulty.* However, they had not as yet taken up Edition: current; Page: [46] arms or proceeded to open violence on either side, but only thwarted each other in council and the execution of their offices.”
A private quarrel happened in the market, and a rumor was instantly spread, nobody knew by whom, that the Ricci were going to attack the Albizzi; and by others it was said that the Albizzi were preparing to fall upon the Ricci. These stories were carried to both parties, and occasioned such an uproar throughout the whole city that the magistrates found it very difficult to keep the two families and their friends from coming to a battle in earnest, though neither side had intended any such thing as was maliciously reported. This disturbance, though accidental, inflamed the former animosities, and determined both sides to strengthen their parties and be upon their guard; and since the citizens were reduced to such a degree of equality by the suppression of the nobility that the magistrates were held in greater reverence than ever they had been before, each family resolved to avail itself rather of public and ordinary means than of private violence.”The intrigues of these two families to supplant each other are very curious; but as the detail of them is long, we shall leave the reader to amuse himself with them at his leisure, and come to a speech made to the signori by an eminent citizen, when affairs were become so critical and dangerous as to alarm all impartial men. “The common disease,” says he,
“magnificent signors, of the other cities in Italy has invaded ours, and is continually eating deeper and deeper into its vitals. All our towns for want of due restraint have run into extremes, and from liberty degenerated into downright licentiousness, making such laws and instituting such governments as were rather calculated to foment and support factions than maintain freedom. From this source are derived all the defects and disorders we labor under; no friendship or union is to be found among the citizens except betwixt such as are accomplices in some wicked design either against their neighbors or their country. All religion and fear of God are utterly extinguished; promises and oaths are no further binding than they serve to promote some private advantage, and they are resorted to not with any design to observe them, but as necessary means to facilitate the perpetration of fraud, which is even honored and applauded in proportion to its Edition: current; Page: [47] success. From hence it comes to pass that the most wicked and abandoned wretches are admired as able, enterprising men; while the innocent and conscientious are laughed at and despised as fools.
“The young men are indolent and effeminate; the old, lascivious and contemptible; without regard to age or sex every place is full of the most licentious brutality, for which the laws themselves, though good and wholesome, are yet so partially executed that they do not afford any remedy. This is the real cause of that selfish spirit which now so generally prevails, and of that ambition, not for true glory, but for places, which dishonors the possessors; hence proceed those fatal animosities, those seeds of envy, revenge, and faction, with their usual attendants, executions, banishments, depression of good men, and exaltation of the wicked.
“ The ringleaders of parties varnish over their pernicious designs with some sacred title; for, being in reality enemies to all liberty, they more effectually destroy it by pretending to defend the rights, sometimes of the nobility, sometimes of the commons; since the fruit which they expect from a victory is not the glory of having delivered their country, but the satisfaction of having conquered the opposite party and secured the government of the state to themselves; and when once they have obtained that, there is no sort of cruelty, injustice, or rapine, that they are not guilty of. From thenceforward laws are enacted, not for the common good, but for private ends. War and peace are made, and alliances concluded, not for the honor of the public, but to gratify the humors of particular men. Our laws, our statutes and civil ordinances are made to indulge the caprice or serve the ambition of the conqueror, not to promote the true interest of a free people; so that one faction is no sooner extinguished than another is lighted up.
“A city that endeavors to support itself by parties instead of laws can never be at peace; for when one prevails and is left without opposition, it necessarily divides again. When the Ghibellines were depressed, every one thought the Guelphs would then have lived in peace and security; and yet it was not long before they divided into the factions of the Neri and Bianchi. When the Bianchi were reduced, new commotions arose, sometimes in favor of the exiles, sometimes betwixt the Edition: current; Page: [48] nobility and people; and to give that away to others, which we could not or would not possess quietly ourselves, we first committed our liberties into the hands of King Robert, then of his brother, next of his son, and last of all to the mercy of the Duke of Athens, never settling or reposing under any government, as people that could neither be satisfied with being free nor submit to live in slavery. Nay, so much was our state inclined to division, that rather than acquiesce under the government of a king, it meanly prostituted itself to the tyranny of a vile and pitiful Agobbian. The Duke of Athens was no sooner expelled but we took up arms again, and fought against each other with more rancor and inveteracy than ever, till the ancient nobility were entirely subdued, and lay at the mercy of the people. It was then the general opinion there would be no more factions or troubles in Florence, since those were humbled whose insupportable pride and ambition had been the chief occasion of them; but we now see that pride and ambition, which was thought to be utterly extinguished by the fall of the nobility, now springs up again among the people, who begin to be equally impatient for authority, and aspire with the same vehemence to the first offices in the commonwealth.
“It seems the will of Heaven that certain families should spring up in all commonwealths to be the pest and ruin of them. Our city owes its miseries and distractions not merely to one or two, but to several of those families; first to the Buondelmonti and Uberti, next to the Donati and Cerchi, and now, to our shame be it spoken, to the Ricci and Albizzi. Why may not this commonwealth, in spite of former examples to the contrary, not only be united, but reformed and improved by new laws and constitutions? You must not impute the factions of our ancestors to the nature of the men, but to the iniquity of the times, which being now altered, afford this city fair hopes of better fortune; and our disorders may be corrected by the institution of wholesome laws, by a prudent restraint of ambition, by prohibiting such customs as tend to nourish and propagate faction, and by substituting others, that may conduce to maintain liberty and good civil government.”
This speech, although upon the whole it is excellent, has several essential mistakes. That certain families will spring up in every simple government, and in every injudicious mixture of Edition: current; Page: [49] aristocracy and democracy, to be the pest and ruin of them, is most certain. It is the will of Heaven that the happiness of nations, as well as that of individuals, should depend upon the use of their reason; they must therefore provide for themselves constitutions which will restrain the ambition of families. Without the restraint, the ambition cannot be prevented; nature has planted it in every human heart. The factions of their ancestors ought not to have been imputed to the iniquity of the times, for all times and places are so iniquitous. Those factions grew out of the nature of men under such forms of government; and the new form ought to have been so contrived as to produce a remedy for the evil. This might have been done; for there is a way of making the laws more powerful than any particular persons or families.
“As this advice was conformable to the sentiments of the signori, they appointed fifty-six citizens* to provide for the safety of the commonwealth; but as most people are fitter to preserve good order than to restore it when lost, these citizens took more pains to extinguish the present factions than to provide against new ones, which was the reason that they succeeded in neither; for they not only did not take away the occasion of fresh ones, but made one of those that were then subsisting so much more powerful than the other, that the commonwealth was in great danger.
“They deprived three of the family of Albizzi, and as many of the Ricci, of all share in the magistracy for three years, except in such branches of it as were particularly appropriated to the Guelph party; of which number Piero de gli Albizzi and Uguccione de’Ricci were two. These provisions bore much harder upon the Ricci than the Albizzi; for, though they were equally stigmatized, yet the Ricci were the greatest sufferers. Pietro, indeed, was excluded from the palace of the signori, but he had free admittance into that of the Guelphs, where his authority was very great; and though he and his associates were forward enough in their ‘admonitions’1 before, they became much more Edition: current; Page: [50] forward after this mark of disgrace, and new accidents occurred, which still more inflamed their resentment.
“Gregory XI. was pope at that time; and residing, as his late predecessors had done, at Avignon, he governed Italy by legates, who, being haughty and rapacious, had grievously oppressed several of the cities. One of these legates being then at Bologna, took advantage of a scarcity, and resolved to make himself master of Tuscany. This occasioned the war with the pope.* The Florentines entered into a confederacy with Galeazzo and all the other states that were at variance with the church; after which they appointed eight citizens for the management of it, whom they invested with an absolute power of proceeding, and disbursing money without control or account. This war gave fresh courage to the Ricci, who, in opposition to the Albizzi, had upon all occasions favored Galeazzo and appeared against the church, and especially because all the eight were enemies to the Guelphs; but though they made a vigorous war against the pope, they could not defend themselves against the captains and their adherents. The envy and indignation with which the Guelphs looked upon the eight, made them grow so bold and insolent, that they often affronted and abused them, as well as the rest of the principal citizens. The captains were no less arrogant; they were even more dreaded than the signori, and men went with greater awe and reverence to their houses than to the palace; so that all the ambassadors who came to Florence were instructed to address themselves to them.
“After the death of the pope, the city had no war abroad, but was in great confusion at home; for, on one hand, the Guelphs were become so audacious, that they were no longer supportable; and, on the other, there was no visible way to suppress them; it was necessary, therefore, to take up arms, and leave the event to fortune. On the side of the Guelphs were all the ancient nobility and the greater part of the more powerful citizens; on the other were all the inferior sort of people, headed by the eight, and joined by George Scali, Strozzi, the Ricci, the Alberti, and the Edition: current; Page: [51] Medici. The rest of the multitude, as it almost always happened, joined with the discontented party. The power of their adversaries seemed to the heads of the Guelphs to be formidable, and their danger great, if at any time a signory that was not on their side should attempt to depress them. They found the number of persons who had been ‘admonished’ was so great, that they had disobliged most of the citizens, and made them their enemies. They thought there was no other remedy, now they had deprived them of their honors, but to banish them out of the city, seize upon the palace of the signori, and put the government of the state wholly into the hands of their own creatures, according to the example of the Guelphs, their predecessors, whose quiet and security were entirely owing to the total expulsion of their enemies.
“But as they differed in opinion about the time of putting their project in execution, the eight, aware of the trick intended, deferred the imborsation, and Sylvestro, the son of Alamanno de’ Medici, was appointed gonfalonier.* As he was born of one of the most considerable families of the commoners, he could not bear to see the people oppressed by a few grandees. With Alberti, Strozzi, and Scali, he secretly prepared a decree, by which the laws against the nobility1 were to be revived, the authority of the captains retrenched, and those who had been admonished admitted into the magistracy. Sylvestro being president, and consequently prince of the city for a time, caused both a college and council to be called the same morning; but his decree was thrown out as an innovation. He went away to the council, and pretended to resign his office, and leave the people to choose another person, who might either have more virtue or better fortune than himself; upon this, such of the council as were in the secret, and others who wished for a Edition: current; Page: [52] change, raised a tumult in 1378,* at which the signori and the colleges immediately came together; seeing their gonfalonier retiring, they obliged him, partly by their authority, and partly by their entreaties, to return to the council, which was in great confusion. Many of the principal citizens were threatened, and treated with the utmost insolence; among the rest, Carlo Strozzi was collared by an artificer, and would have been knocked on the head, if some of the bystanders had not rescued him. But the person who made the greatest disturbance was Benedetto de gli Alberti, who got into one of the windows of the palace, and called out to the people to arm; upon which, the piazza was instantly full of armed men, and the colleges were obliged to do that by fear, which they would not come into when they were petitioned.
“But whoever intends to make any alteration in a commonwealth, and to effect it by raising the multitude, will find himself deceived, if he thinks he can stop where he will, and conduct it as he pleases. The design of Sylvestro was to quiet and secure the city, but the thing took a very different turn; for the people were in such a ferment, that the shops were shut up, the houses barricaded, and many removed their goods for security into churches and convents. All the companies of the arts assembled, and each of them appointed a syndic. The signori called the colleges together, and were a whole day in consultation with the syndies, how to compose the disorders to the satisfaction of all parties; but they could not agree. The council, then, to hold out some hopes of satisfaction to the arts and the rest of the people, gave a full power, which the Florentines called a balia, to the signori, the colleges, the eight, the captains of the party, and the syndics of the arts, to reform the state. But while they were employed in this, some of the inferior companies of the arts, at the instigation of certain persons, who wanted to revenge the late injuries they had received from the Guelphs, detached themselves from the rest, and went to plundering and burning houses. They broke open the jails, set the prisoners at liberty, and plundered the monasteries and convents.
“The next morning the balìa proceeded to requalify the ammoniti, Edition: current; Page: [53] the admonished, though with an injunction not to exercise any function in the magistracy for three years; they repealed such laws as had been made by the Guelphs to the prejudice of the other citizens, and proclaimed rebels many who had incurred the hatred of the public; after which the names of the new signori were published, and Luigi Guicciardini was declared their gonfalonier.* If those who were admonished, the ammoniti, could have been content, the city was in a fair way of being quieted; but they thought it hard to wait three years longer, before they could enjoy any share in the magistracy. The arts assembled again to obtain satisfaction for them, and demanded of the signori, that, for the good and quiet of the city, it should be decreed, that no citizen for the future should be admonished as a Ghibelline, who had ever been one of the signori, or the college, or the captains of the companies, or the consuls or syndies of any of the arts; and further, that a new imborsation should be made of the Guelph party, and the old one burnt. It seldom happens that men who covet the property of others, and long for revenge, are satisfied with a bare restitution of their own. Accordingly some, who expected to advance their fortunes by exciting commotions,† endeavored to persuade the artificers, that they could never be safe, except many of their enemies were either banished or cut off.”
The city continued in the utmost confusion between the two new parties of commons and plebeians. But waving a particular detail, the essence of several years’ miseries may be collected from two speeches. One is of Luigi Guicciardini, a standard-bearer to the plebeians:—“The more we grant,” says he,
“the more shameless and arrogant are your demands. If we speak thus to you, we do so, not to offend, but to lead you to reform; to which end we are willing that others may say to you what will please, whilst our province remains to say that which may do you good. Tell us, on your honor, what is there, that you can reasonably ask more of us? You desired to have the Edition: current; Page: [54] captains of the party deprived of their authority; they have been deprived. You insisted that the old imborsation should be burnt, and a new one made; we consented. You wanted to have those reinstated in the magistracy, that had been admonished; it has been granted. At your intercession we pardoned such as had been guilty of burning houses, and robbing churches, and we banished many of our principal citizens at your instigation. To gratify you, the grandees are bridled with new laws, and every thing done that might give you content; where, then, can we expect your demands will stop; or how long will you thus abuse your liberty? Why will ye suffer your own discords to bring the city into slavery? What else can ye expect from your divisions? what, from the goods ye have already taken, or may hereafter take from your fellow-citizens, but servitude and poverty? The persons you plunder are those whose fortunes and abilities are the defence of the state, and if they fail, how must it be supported? Whatever is got that way cannot last long; and then ye have nothing to look for but remediless famine and distress.”
“These expostulations made some impression, and they promised to be good citizens and obedient; but a fresh tumult soon arose, more dangerous than the former. The greater part of the late robberies and other mischiefs, had been committed by the rabble and dregs of the people; and those of them who had been the most audacious apprehended, that when the most material differences were composed, they should be called to an account for their crimes, and deserted, as it always happens, by those very persons at whose instigation they had committed them. Besides which, the inferior sort of people had conceived a hatred against the richer citizens and principals of the arts, upon a pretence that they had not been rewarded for their past services in proportion to what they deserved.”
To show how divisions grow wherever human nature is without a check, it is worth while to be particular here.
“When the city was first divided into arts, in the time of Charles I., there was a proper head or governor appointed over each of them, to whose jurisdiction, in civil cases, every person in the several arts was to be subject. These arts or companies, as we have said, were at first but twelve, but afterwards they were increased to twenty-one, and arrived at such power and authority, that in a Edition: current; Page: [55] few years they wholly engrossed the government of the city; and because some were more, and others less honorable among them, they came by degrees to be distinguished, and seven of them were called the greater arts, and fourteen the less. From this division proceeded the arrogance of the captains of the party; for the citizens who had formerly been Guelphs,….”
************************************************************************
(Sorry, me butting back in again, honestly, even I tire of its relevance… why not just turn on the news?)
************************************************************************ … The meaner sort of people, therefore, both of this company and the others, were, for the causes assigned, highly enraged; and being also terrified at the apprehension of being punished for their late outrages, they had frequent meetings in the night; where, considering what had happened, they represented to each other the danger they were in; and to animate and unite them all, one of the boldest and most experienced of them harangued his companions in this manner:— ************************************************************************
(Me again. Here, we’ll just cut to the chase, with Signori Sharpton:
************************************************************************““ ‘If it was now to be debated whether we should take arms to plunder and burn the houses of our fellow-citizens and rob the churches, I should be one of those who would think it worthy of great consideration, and perhaps be induced to prefer secure poverty to hazardous gain. But since arms have been already taken up and much mischief done, the first points to be considered are, in what manner we may retain them and ward off the penalties we have incurred. The whole city is full of [56] rage and complaints against us, the citizens are daily in council, and the magistrates frequently assembled. Assure yourselves they are either preparing snares for us or contriving how to raise forces to destroy us. It behoves us, therefore, to have two objects chiefly in view at these consultations,—first, how to avoid the punishment for our late actions; and, in the next place, to devise the means of living in a greater degree of liberty and with more satisfaction for the future than we have done hitherto. To come off with impunity for our past offences, it is necessary to add still more to them, to redouble our outrages, our robberies and burnings, and to do our best to associate numbers for our protection; for where many are guilty none are chastised. Small crimes are punished, great ones rewarded; and where many suffer, few seek revenge; a general calamity being always borne with more patience than a particular one. To multiply evils is the surest way to procure us a pardon for what has been already done, and to obtain the liberty we desire. Nor is there any difficulty to discourage us. The enterprise is easy, and the success not to be doubted. Those who could oppose us are opulent indeed, but divided; their disunion will give us the victory, and their riches when we have got them will maintain it. “
I’m sure you can figure it out from there. If not, simply turn on the NEWS, you surely won’t miss many details.
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If you ‘Stand with Ferguson Protesters’ please stand far, far away from me.
If you ‘Stand with Ferguson Protesters’, please stand far, far away from me. And do me another favor while you’re at it, don’t call them ‘peaceful protesters‘ when I’m around; they are anything but peaceful and it is infuriating to hear them given such undeserved cover to hide behind. Which means of course, that there are plenty of media types doing just that, prattling on about the dastardly police donning riot gear just to ‘confront peaceful protesters’:
“The shooting took place shortly after midnight following what had been a mostly peaceful protest in front of the department Wednesday night demanding more action over the report.”
Here are just a couple of the many things I’d like to say to that:
- When you have a ‘mostly peaceful‘ mob gathering in the street and making demands, if you don’t prepare for a riot you’re a f#$!$%& idiot – that or the Governor of Missouri, or, obviously, both.
- There’s nothing, nothing, peaceful about an unruly mob gathering in the streets into the night, milling and marching about, loudly chanting insults and threats, obstructing or intimidating passersby, confronting the police and calling them out, to say nothing of throwing rocks and bottles of urine at them, or setting fire to the town.
Peaceful? Really? Here’s some of the latest peaceful offerings from the protestors gathered in Ferguson:
BREAKING: TWO #FERGUSON Police Officers Shot – One in Face – OUTSIDE POLICE DEPT. http://t.co/4ETKcdz425 — OFFICER STILL BEING TREATED
— Jim Hoft (@gatewaypundit) March 12, 2015From GatewayPundit:
St. Louis County Police Chief complained about the constant pressure put on the county police by outside groups.StL County Police: Officers Were Purposely Targeted By Shooter – “We Cannot Sustain This Forever” http://t.co/JE70BUbzPH @gatewaypundit
— Jim Hoft (@gatewaypundit) March 12, 2015If you support such ‘peaceful protesters’ as these, then you are supporting the effort to bring about political goals by force and violence, and evil will follow from that – how could it not? To expect anything less, or to pretend surprise when evil makes its inevitable entrance as it did last night, is nothing less than a lie.
This entire episode has been a sustained assault upon the public peace and upon the law, and it is no surprise that it has received gushingly sympathetic support, and millions of dollars of Pro-Regressive Leftist George Soros cash infusions, and even aid from those elected to uphold the law and keep the peace.
And what was it that brought Ferguson to the boil yet again? A double dose of appeasement with the the resignation of the embattled Police Chief of Ferguson, following on the heels of Eric Holder’s shameful attempt to save face with his drummed up report against Ferguson.
This is a lesson that is lost on the Left in general, and the Obama administration in particular, don’t let yourself be drawn into thinking that appeasement is just for prime ministers and presidents – that’s the path of fools. It is folly and evil for them to practice, because appeasement is folly and evil for mankind in general – it encourages and leads to the same heart-breakingly avoidable results, an emboldened abuse if power, no matter what level it is practiced on.
Appeasement doesn’t disperse the mob, it doesn’t deliver “Peace in our time”, it doesn’t placate evil – it encourages and inflames it – and life is more than happy to teach us that lesson, again, and again, and again; and if that’s the type of lesson you want to waste your life on not learning? Please, do it way the hell away from me.
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If you ‘Stand with Ferguson Protesters’ please stand far, far away from me.
If you ‘Stand with Ferguson Protesters’, please stand far, far away from me. And do me another favor while you’re at it, don’t call them ‘peaceful protesters‘ when I’m around; they are anything but peaceful and it is infuriating to hear them given such undeserved cover to hide behind. Which means of course, that there are plenty of media types doing just that, prattling on about the dastardly police donning riot gear just to ‘confront peaceful protesters’:
“The shooting took place shortly after midnight following what had been a mostly peaceful protest in front of the department Wednesday night demanding more action over the report.”
Here are just a couple of the many things I’d like to say to that:
- When you have a ‘mostly peaceful‘ mob gathering in the street and making demands, if you don’t prepare for a riot you’re a f#$!$%& idiot – that or the Governor of Missouri, or, obviously, both.
- There’s nothing, nothing, peaceful about an unruly mob gathering in the streets into the night, milling and marching about, loudly chanting insults and threats, obstructing or intimidating passersby, confronting the police and calling them out, to say nothing of throwing rocks and bottles of urine at them, or setting fire to the town.
Peaceful? Really? Here’s some of the latest peaceful offerings from the protestors gathered in Ferguson:
BREAKING: TWO #FERGUSON Police Officers Shot – One in Face – OUTSIDE POLICE DEPT. http://t.co/4ETKcdz425 — OFFICER STILL BEING TREATED
— Jim Hoft (@gatewaypundit) March 12, 2015From GatewayPundit:
St. Louis County Police Chief complained about the constant pressure put on the county police by outside groups.StL County Police: Officers Were Purposely Targeted By Shooter – “We Cannot Sustain This Forever” http://t.co/JE70BUbzPH @gatewaypundit
— Jim Hoft (@gatewaypundit) March 12, 2015If you support such ‘peaceful protesters’ as these, then you are supporting the effort to bring about political goals by force and violence, and evil will follow from that – how could it not? To expect anything less, or to pretend surprise when evil makes its inevitable entrance as it did last night, is nothing less than a lie.
This entire episode has been a sustained assault upon the public peace and upon the law, and it is no surprise that it has received gushingly sympathetic support, and millions of dollars of Pro-Regressive Leftist George Soros cash infusions, and even aid from those elected to uphold the law and keep the peace.
And what was it that brought Ferguson to the boil yet again? A double dose of appeasement with the the resignation of the embattled Police Chief of Ferguson, following on the heels of Eric Holder’s shameful attempt to save face with his drummed up report against Ferguson.
This is a lesson that is lost on the Left in general, and the Obama administration in particular, don’t let yourself be drawn into thinking that appeasement is just for prime ministers and presidents – that’s the path of fools. It is folly and evil for them to practice, because appeasement is folly and evil for mankind in general – it encourages and leads to the same heart-breakingly avoidable results, an emboldened abuse if power, no matter what level it is practiced on.
Appeasement doesn’t disperse the mob, it doesn’t deliver “Peace in our time”, it doesn’t placate evil – it encourages and inflames it – and life is more than happy to teach us that lesson, again, and again, and again; and if that’s the type of lesson you want to waste your life on not learning? Please, do it way the hell away from me.
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The future must not be left in the care of fools who’d say such things
The last time islamists ruptured their funny bone over cartoons, President Obama said:
“The future must not belong to those that slander the prophet of Islam.“
Yearghhh!!! The future must not be left in the care of fools who’d say such things, or else it will be bloodied beyond belief by those beasts the fools set loose upon us all.
But I wonder, how aware are you of how many fools are saying the very same thing?
Look at these seemingly unrelated issues,
- President Obama appeasing those who are offended by cartoons,
- Islamic terrorists slaughtering people for publishing cartoons,
- Catholic league president Bill Donohue: Those Cartoonists Had It Coming,
- Ferguson protesters raising a banner in the Missouri Senate Gallery saying “Pledge allegiance to black people“,
- Black Panthers in Dallas saying kill the pigs,
- “Howard Dean: To Call the Charlie Hebdo Killers “Muslim Terrorists” Is Just Wrong”
- Ron Paul: French Foreign Policy Fueled Paris Terror Attack
- Sharia patrols telling British citizens how they must behave in their own land “where’s my freedom in your going unclothed!” (or for that matter, “A hungry man is not free!” – same thought).
If you think that one of these things doesn’t go with the others, well that’s the thought that just doesn’t belong – you’re being distracted by the shiny attention getters, instead of looking for the principle that unites them – and can defend you from them.
I blog on about this stuff ad nauseum, I’m gonna take the day off and give you a chance, so you tell me… what is the One in these Many foolishness’s?
Let me give you a hint, if you think it has to do with race, or religion, or politics, you’re being distracted by the shiny attention getters. And those shiny attention getters can make the fundamental issues appear to be different, but that’s only because you’re looking at them, instead of looking into them.
And that just will not do- those aren’t the ‘skills for the 21st century!’… or for any other time either.
Do these examples have wildly varying conscious motivations? Absolutely. Are they relevant?
No, not really.
Don’t allow yourself to be distracted by inconsequential particulars, look through the surface to the principles which are driving them.
If you do not want the future to belong to fools, we’d better fill it with people who choose to think, and who choose to make sure that how they think valid, or in other words, those who fill our future will need to choose whether to make Progress, or Regress.
What do you think it will be? One more hint: It has to do with what they aren’t concerned with.
The future hinges upon the choices you make today.
-
The future must not be left in the care of fools who’d say such things
The last time islamists ruptured their funny bone over cartoons, President Obama said:
“The future must not belong to those that slander the prophet of Islam.“
Yearghhh!!! The future must not be left in the care of fools who’d say such things, or else it will be bloodied beyond belief by those beasts the fools set loose upon us all.
But I wonder, how aware are you of how many fools are saying the very same thing?
Look at these seemingly unrelated issues,
- President Obama appeasing those who are offended by cartoons,
- Islamic terrorists slaughtering people for publishing cartoons,
- Catholic league president Bill Donohue: Those Cartoonists Had It Coming,
- Ferguson protesters raising a banner in the Missouri Senate Gallery saying “Pledge allegiance to black people“,
- Black Panthers in Dallas saying kill the pigs,
- “Howard Dean: To Call the Charlie Hebdo Killers “Muslim Terrorists” Is Just Wrong”
- Ron Paul: French Foreign Policy Fueled Paris Terror Attack
- Sharia patrols telling British citizens how they must behave in their own land “where’s my freedom in your going unclothed!” (or for that matter, “A hungry man is not free!” – same thought).
If you think that one of these things doesn’t go with the others, well that’s the thought that just doesn’t belong – you’re being distracted by the shiny attention getters, instead of looking for the principle that unites them – and can defend you from them.
I blog on about this stuff ad nauseum, I’m gonna take the day off and give you a chance, so you tell me… what is the One in these Many foolishness’s?
Let me give you a hint, if you think it has to do with race, or religion, or politics, you’re being distracted by the shiny attention getters. And those shiny attention getters can make the fundamental issues appear to be different, but that’s only because you’re looking at them, instead of looking into them.
And that just will not do- those aren’t the ‘skills for the 21st century!’… or for any other time either.
Do these examples have wildly varying conscious motivations? Absolutely. Are they relevant?
No, not really.
Don’t allow yourself to be distracted by inconsequential particulars, look through the surface to the principles which are driving them.
If you do not want the future to belong to fools, we’d better fill it with people who choose to think, and who choose to make sure that how they think valid, or in other words, those who fill our future will need to choose whether to make Progress, or Regress.
What do you think it will be? One more hint: It has to do with what they aren’t concerned with.
The future hinges upon the choices you make today.
-
Is the combination of Racism and Communism Newsworthy? Nyahhh!!!
Our local evening news just drove home the point of my last post, which might be summed up by the line:
“Does anyone really not realize the significance of an entire people having little or no reaction to being wronged and lied to?”
It’s cold here in St. Louis, and my wife flipped on the evening news for the weather, and then up popped a story that just stunned me to the couch. The cracker-jack Channel 2 News team announced a Ferguson story, entitled”“Black People’s Grand Jury” indicts Officer Darren Wilson“, and I looked up to see several people giving a press conference while standing behind a big banner that read: “Black People’s Grand Jury“, which all by itself was enough to drop my jaw, but on top of that, sitting on top of two of their heads, one the spokesmen, were big fur hats with a large golden emblem set with a blazing red star and a hammer & scycle on the brim.
The Death Star 
The spokesmen, identified only as Omali Yeshitela – Lead Prosecutor, Black People’s Grand Jury” (BTW, you might find Omali Yeshitela‘s history of interest), said:“We cannot trust our children, the future of our community, in the hands of this establishment that has proven to us over and over again its disregard for black life,”
What I noticed, and my friend Patch at Progressives Today (read his post!) noticed, was something that our local Fox 2 News team failed to notice. But not only did they fail to make a high school level observation (and yes, my 15 year old girl noticed it) in regards to a story that is allegedly about racism and injustice, as bad things mind you… this ‘News team’ not only failed to make any mention of the avowedly racist nature of the group (hello? Did you read their name?!), but that it had two members (not to mention the banner’s iconography) who were deliberately giving prominent display to a political ideology that is responsible for policies of gross injustice, massive human rights violations and well over 90 million deaths over the last century. Let me say that again: their local Fox 2 News Report, by virtue of their silence, helped to promote, without so much as a cautionary comment, an ideology that is responsible for well OVER NINETY MILLION DEATHS over the last century, an ideology which vowed then, and still vows now, to bury the United States of America… and this crack news team had NOTHING to say about either point.
That wasn’t worth even a mention?
Nyahhh. Why worry? Not even so much as a dorktastic anchor-to-anchor joke about the fashion faux-paux of their head wear.
But no worries, no doubt some Common Core equation (excuse me) ‘math sentence’ can be found to clearly prove to all that Racism + Communism = Justice. Socially speaking. And I’m sure that that whole problem with combining racism and fascism the last time around, ending with WWII, was a total fluke, right?
(sigh).
I haven’t had the stomach to check and see if our other local news stations ran the story.
(Note: Fox 2 News has since updated their story by tacking on a paragraph at the end which notes:
“This grand jury is an effort of activists connected to the Leadership Coalition for Justice, formerly the Justice for Mike Brown Leadership Coalition, and the African People’s Socialist Party”
)
A Weeks Worth of Perspective
To put that into perspective, last week’s ‘News!‘ treated us to blaring and lurid tales of a GOP congressional leader, Steve Scalise, who, 10 years ago mind you, gave a speech to a ‘White Supremacy‘ group (say, did they call themselves anything like “White People’s Grand Jury“? Nope, ‘Euro’), and the media burned up the wires with that ‘Story!‘ on CBS, NBC, CNN, USA Today, and all the rest.Dis-Friggin-Gusting.
How did they even get by themselves with this? Was it because the group is black? If so, then that is, by their standards, RACIST. Or is it because they don’t mind Communism? because ‘we’re all socialists now‘? Then that is gross intellectual negligence and unforgivable idiocy. And if it passed unnoticed by their attention because they did notice both points but considered them to be a ‘non-story’, then that is horrifying.
What was it again that we were supposed to ‘never forget!‘?
Was it really only to beware of one particular nasty totalitarian party whose leader sported a silly mustache?, or was there supposed to be something a bit more to it than that? Do you think it just might be possible that that particular party brought about the deaths of millions of people (only about 10% the kill rate of the Communists BTW) due to something more than their party name and leader’s mustache? Might there possibly be something worth noticing about how such a political social justice movement slowly, then swiftly, swept aside an entire people’s standards, laws and common sense resistance?
Nyahhh… why bother.
We live not only in an apathetic world, but one that is apathetic because of the dominant nature of ‘critical thinking’ (aka skepticism) that is promoted into us as education, and as such we now no longer seem to have either the ability to recognize right or wrong – without being told it is so (and who knows if it is?) – nor the ability to be outraged at an insult to those ideals (if any) we hold as true. As I noted in the previous post:
“…But someone who is skeptical of even our ability to know what is Right or Wrong? It is entirely within such a person to express either apathy, or violent indignation, at the emotional prodding of a demagogue, because there is no substance within them to resist his beguiling appeal.
The Skeptical mind, far from being mentally tough, is a mind with no substance, no form, they can be molded into either riotous frenzy, or just as easily convinced to bring their apathetic efficiency to filling out death sentences in triplicate – they are without heart. The Skeptic, via their dis-knowledgeable apathy, will be unperturbed over pits full of corpses, its evil found entirely unmoving, and unremarkable, and as invisible, to them, as the water a fish swims in….”
When those charged with bring us ‘the news!‘ show no signs of even a meager enough wisdom to draw a connection between groups that identify themselves by race, that call for ‘justice’ by pre-judging guilt and insisting upon a conviction before even a hearing was ever heard, and a political ideology that historically and avowedly uses propaganda protests to gain position and power, with the aim of eventually seizing power… when that is all missed by those who are suppose to be ready to
“…stand ready to sound the alarm when necessary, and to point out the actors in any pernicious project….”
, then we are in far more trouble than will ever make the local evening news.
Forward Pro-Regress!
-
Is the combination of Racism and Communism Newsworthy? Nyahhh!!!
Our local evening news just drove home the point of my last post, which might be summed up by the line:
“Does anyone really not realize the significance of an entire people having little or no reaction to being wronged and lied to?”
It’s cold here in St. Louis, and my wife flipped on the evening news for the weather, and then up popped a story that just stunned me to the couch. The cracker-jack Channel 2 News team announced a Ferguson story, entitled”“Black People’s Grand Jury” indicts Officer Darren Wilson“, and I looked up to see several people giving a press conference while standing behind a big banner that read: “Black People’s Grand Jury“, which all by itself was enough to drop my jaw, but on top of that, sitting on top of two of their heads, one the spokesmen, were big fur hats with a large golden emblem set with a blazing red star and a hammer & scycle on the brim.The Death Star
The spokesmen, identified only as Omali Yeshitela – Lead Prosecutor, Black People’s Grand Jury” (BTW, you might find Omali Yeshitela‘s history of interest), said:“We cannot trust our children, the future of our community, in the hands of this establishment that has proven to us over and over again its disregard for black life,”
What I noticed, and my friend Patch at Progressives Today (read his post!) noticed, was something that our local Fox 2 News team failed to notice. But not only did they fail to make a high school level observation (and yes, my 15 year old girl noticed it) in regards to a story that is allegedly about racism and injustice, as bad things mind you… this ‘News team’ not only failed to make any mention of the avowedly racist nature of the group (hello? Did you read their name?!), but that it had two members (not to mention the banner’s iconography) who were deliberately giving prominent display to a political ideology that is responsible for policies of gross injustice, massive human rights violations and well over 90 million deaths over the last century. Let me say that again: their local Fox 2 News Report, by virtue of their silence, helped to promote, without so much as a cautionary comment, an ideology that is responsible for well OVER NINETY MILLION DEATHS over the last century, an ideology which vowed then, and still vows now, to bury the United States of America… and this crack news team had NOTHING to say about either point.
That wasn’t worth even a mention?
Nyahhh. Why worry? Not even so much as a dorktastic anchor-to-anchor joke about the fashion faux-paux of their head wear.
But no worries, no doubt some Common Core equation (excuse me) ‘math sentence’ can be found to clearly prove to all that Racism + Communism = Justice. Socially speaking. And I’m sure that that whole problem with combining racism and fascism the last time around, ending with WWII, was a total fluke, right?
(sigh).
I haven’t had the stomach to check and see if our other local news stations ran the story.
(Note: Fox 2 News has since updated their story by tacking on a paragraph at the end which notes:
“This grand jury is an effort of activists connected to the Leadership Coalition for Justice, formerly the Justice for Mike Brown Leadership Coalition, and the African People’s Socialist Party”
)
A Weeks Worth of Perspective
To put that into perspective, last week’s ‘News!‘ treated us to blaring and lurid tales of a GOP congressional leader, Steve Scalise, who, 10 years ago mind you, gave a speech to a ‘White Supremacy‘ group (say, did they call themselves anything like “White People’s Grand Jury“? Nope, ‘Euro’), and the media burned up the wires with that ‘Story!‘ on CBS, NBC, CNN, USA Today, and all the rest.Dis-Friggin-Gusting.
How did they even get by themselves with this? Was it because the group is black? If so, then that is, by their standards, RACIST. Or is it because they don’t mind Communism? because ‘we’re all socialists now‘? Then that is gross intellectual negligence and unforgivable idiocy. And if it passed unnoticed by their attention because they did notice both points but considered them to be a ‘non-story’, then that is horrifying.
What was it again that we were supposed to ‘never forget!‘?
Was it really only to beware of one particular nasty totalitarian party whose leader sported a silly mustache?, or was there supposed to be something a bit more to it than that? Do you think it just might be possible that that particular party brought about the deaths of millions of people (only about 10% the kill rate of the Communists BTW) due to something more than their party name and leader’s mustache? Might there possibly be something worth noticing about how such a political social justice movement slowly, then swiftly, swept aside an entire people’s standards, laws and common sense resistance?
Nyahhh… why bother.
We live not only in an apathetic world, but one that is apathetic because of the dominant nature of ‘critical thinking’ (aka skepticism) that is promoted into us as education, and as such we now no longer seem to have either the ability to recognize right or wrong – without being told it is so (and who knows if it is?) – nor the ability to be outraged at an insult to those ideals (if any) we hold as true. As I noted in the previous post:
“…But someone who is skeptical of even our ability to know what is Right or Wrong? It is entirely within such a person to express either apathy, or violent indignation, at the emotional prodding of a demagogue, because there is no substance within them to resist his beguiling appeal.
The Skeptical mind, far from being mentally tough, is a mind with no substance, no form, they can be molded into either riotous frenzy, or just as easily convinced to bring their apathetic efficiency to filling out death sentences in triplicate – they are without heart. The Skeptic, via their dis-knowledgeable apathy, will be unperturbed over pits full of corpses, its evil found entirely unmoving, and unremarkable, and as invisible, to them, as the water a fish swims in….”
When those charged with bring us ‘the news!‘ show no signs of even a meager enough wisdom to draw a connection between groups that identify themselves by race, that call for ‘justice’ by pre-judging guilt and insisting upon a conviction before even a hearing was ever heard, and a political ideology that historically and avowedly uses propaganda protests to gain position and power, with the aim of eventually seizing power… when that is all missed by those who are suppose to be ready to
“…stand ready to sound the alarm when necessary, and to point out the actors in any pernicious project….”
, then we are in far more trouble than will ever make the local evening news.
Forward Pro-Regress!
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Goodby 2014: From Gruber to Ferguson, Evil is the new Good – The History of Progress begins with its absence, part 5 a,b, c & d
a) Evil is the new Good
I know what you’re asking, ‘Why this?‘ Right? I mean, we’ve got Ferguson exploding again, and what with all the rest of the News Cycle churning around and more, why am I continuing with this odd… sort of History-ish series of posts pursuing the nature of Progress and Regress?Let me answer that question with another question.
Why are these situations so common, rather than uncommon?
Consider that since I first began writing this post, we’ve passed through several news cycles, led by Jonathan Gruber admitting that ObamaCare was a lie to fool the ‘stupid people’, Obama has declared his intention to issue an Executive Order to let in illegal immigration, Ebola has come and (or so we hope) gone, ISIS is still beheading fast and furiously, Houston’s Mayor launched an assault on religious liberty (forgot about that one, didn’t you), Gruber is back, ongoing efforts against the 2nd Amdt, or Common Core#Ferguson has exploded with rioting against against the judicial system, and now Korea closing our movies and Taliban slaughtering a school… and that was within hardly more than a month’s time.
And we certainly don’t need to limit our time frame to just the last couple months to see a virtual parade of more of the same. I mean, it’s not as if these very same issues are really anything new, right? Ferguson/Watts? Ebola/AIDS? ISIS/Al Queda? Houston or Catholic Hospitals or forced fed healthcontrol? Marysville/Sandy Hook/Colorado? And Common Core/Race To The Top/every-educational-reform-going-back-to-1800? Don’t let the seeming kaleidoscopic events snow you, instead ask yourself if there is some sense in which these very separate events are in some sense fundamentally similar?
I’ve questioned, answered and posted on these ever recycling news cycle issues enough times already – more than enough times. The reason why these issues are so common is because having the ability to look at these situations in a more productive way, has become so uncommon. All of these seeming changes, are the result of a long ago change that has too long remained unchanged and unchallenged, and that change is central to the reason why all of the progress made in recent centuries has been transforming into the rapid regress of today. Granted, beneath the surface of the news cycle, what has not changed is difficult to see, and while the superficial distractions of the recycling are easily mistaken for real changes – the only real changes taking place have been within us – all of which serves to mask what remains unchanged… and so… here we are.
Yes, that requires a bit of explanation.
Easier done perhaps by looking at one aspect of some of the more recent changes in us as a people, one that is very much worth noting, though maybe not for the reasons you might think. The embarrassing boastings of Jonathan Gruber, and the results of the #Ferguson Grand Jury verdict, though seemingly different on the surface, have quite a lot in common, with each other, and with the recycling of the news cycle.
I’ve already ranted a bit on the #Ferguson situation here and here, and even a quick hit on Gruber, but aren’t Gruber’s lies just politics as usual?
Nope, at least not the part that I see as being worth noting. What’s easily noted is that we had a well respected MIT economics professor, Jonathan Gruber, who was a highly paid consultant to the administration precisely because of his position as a highly respected MIT economics professor (and who was previously employed by Romney, BTW, and for the same valuable ‘insights’ that the Obama administration payed him so handsomely for), who was caught on video – multiple times – cheerfully advocating for a policy of highly opaque administrative lies, so that they could take advantage of the ‘stupidity of the American voter‘ – for their own good.
Not surprisingly, the occasion of these videos being seen by the American people has brought about some rampant and hilarious denials from Administration apologists who’ve rushed out to make declarations about Gruber’s namelessness and irrelevance, before realizing that they were each already on video praising and name dropping Gruber’s name in hopes of his name’s respectability lending some credibility to their schemes – Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, John Kerry, and all the way up to Obama himself, publicly thanked him by name for his help on ObamaCare.
Hilarious.
Sadly, while their denials might have been seen as somewhat heartening, or would if it showed that they at least felt a sense of awkwardness at being caught in the lies they were telling, but there too appearances would be deceiving. Democrats weren’t backtracking because they just discovered they’d been lied to, they were backtracking because they’d feared that his boastings about their plan had given a rhetorical advantage to the Right, which they sought to prevent. Not by correcting the lie with the Truth, no, they were trying to backtrack from his lie, with new lies of their own. Or IOW, they wanted to prevent the Right from getting an advantage, NOT to correct the lie.
But there’s little surprise in that, politicians have been doing that for ages, right? Right, and liars lying isn’t what caught my attention here. Liars lie, that’s what they do. It’s a problem alright, but it’s not the problem.
You might begin to see the real problem by looking more closely at this quote from Gruber which unintentionally sets the stage and lays the situation out::
“… “There’s larger principles at stake here. When these states are turning – not just turning down covering the poor people – but turning down the federal stimulus that would come with that. So the price they are willing … They are not just not interested in covering poor people, they are willing to sacrifice billions of dollars of injections into their economy in order to punish poor people. It really is just almost awesome in its evilness.”…”
Now I grant you, it is surprising that he dares speak of ‘Principle’, after having just boasted about having purposefully written the ACA in such a convoluted manner so as to deceive the ‘stupid Americans‘ into supporting it. And on top of that, the only thing remotely identifiable as a principle in what he touted, larger or otherwise, was that apparently, in his humble opinion, the desire for goodies should trump whether or not how you go about getting the goodies, is right or wrong. But as crazy as that is, that’s a distraction, and not what I find to be new and alarming. The idea that someone failing to do what they clearly know to be wrong, could somehow be considered to be an ‘evil’ – that amounts to an assertion, by a professor from one of our top colleges mind you, that: ‘Evil is the new Good‘, an and a belief that it is perfectly acceptable to use evil means, such as lying to gain power over you, ‘for the greater good’.
Still, while that’s most definitely a problem, it’s still not the problem. The real problem has been the public’s reaction to all of this – that ‘s what has shocked me, and on two different levels, the first being the most obvious.
You see as the #Gruber hits kept coming, I was thinking that being lied to would actually matter to most people, so I made several comments to Democrat & Independent voters, such as:
You do realize that he was talking about you, right? Those of us on the Right weren’t buying any of it at all, and we spent painful amounts of time and effort pointing out the very lies he’s boasting about having told, and more, while you dismissed us. In short, to borrow a phrase:
‘You were the Stupids they’d been waiting for!’
But it turns out that Obama’s original quote came far closer to the truth:
“We are the ones we’ve been waiting for!”
For to my surprise, the public’s reaction to these lies has been a collective: ‘meh’, and that my friends, that’s the problem.
And the second aspect of the problem, is not seeing that as being a problem – that is an indication of how bad the problem really is.
Does anyone really not realize the significance of an entire people having little or no reaction to being wronged and lied to?If you don’t have a natural response to what is wrong or to being wronged, then how difficult could it be to manipulate you into either going along with what you should not, or into expressing outrage where there is no real cause for it?
Is that not what we are seeing happening all around us through all of the endlessly recycling news cycles?
Because the shocking change I see in friends, neighbors, family members and elected office holders, is that those ‘stupid folk‘ aren’t batting an eye about the lies that Gruber is on record admitting! They are non-plussed that what he has been admitting was knowingly used to form govt policy, by those who are now attempting to distance themselves from him! Ironically, the responses I’ve been getting from people, they have been precisely the ‘larger principle‘ that Gruber referred to, in inglorious action:
“Meh. More people have healthcare thanks to ObamaCare.”
IOW: They got what they wanted, and how they got it, they couldn’t care less about. Why should you find that worrisome? The reason why, is that someone who’s interested in getting something for nothing, clearly has no interest in anything to do with reality or the truth to begin with (in fact they are rooting for less of each) – what they are looking for, as every good con man knows, is an excuse to justify going along with the deception being fed to them.
And that same ‘justification’ is the same mindset that’s driving the demand for a Justice without any concern for determining what Justice should be, either in #Ferguson or Garner’s #ICan’tBreathe – or in still Other other words, in the minds of a sizable portion of the American public, for them all it seems that “The Ends justify the Means” is perfectly uncontroversial, and that should alarm you.
Here we have a situation where the leftists are looking at being lied to, not from the perspective of dupes being taken advantage of, but from the perspective of people implicitly in on the lie, people who are fully aware that what they were being told, was a lie, a lie which they were happy to look to as an excuse to justify going along with the greater deception. IOW, they were actually thankful to be lied to, so that they could look as if they had the ‘moral high ground‘ (that’s some deadly irony right there), a ground knowingly built upon lies, in order to be able to bark at conservatives for being ‘evil’… which is the most normal, natural, primitive desire a person can have – the natural desire to have what cannot be, the desire for what you want because you want it, over and above what you should want.
For a society which once prided itself as being based upon the rule of Law – of doing what is Right over what is satisfying, that is as dramatic, high level, and widespread an instance of regression, as you’ll find.
Let that sink in: The leftist, and large numbers of the enthusiastically shallower portions of the Libertarian and Right bands of the political spectrum (see the prejudged outrage over the ‘injustice’ of the #Ferguson & #Garner verdicts), are now apparently comfortable with being in the position of looking to known lies, in order to get their bearings and to take direction from them. W.T.F. is that?!
Again, not so much for what they are doing, but for the lack of any internal restraints against doing what they’re doing – they’re fine with it!
Don’t fool yourself, this is not simply a bad situation.
A bad situation is one where you find you’ve messed up, you made an error, you were inefficient or foolish in what you did, and disquieting consequences followed. But this is a case of deliberately seeking after an absence of Truth, an instance where people seek to ‘knowingly’ exclude what is True, from their awareness. That creates a vacuum which only power will find welcoming, leaving the “IN” door of evil ajar – can it be otherwise? Arguing not to convey what is true, but to intimidate others into going along with your favorite lies… and feeling no compunction or embarrassment or shame about it… who else but a power worshiper could find that welcoming?
b) The end of the road of education reform – and its ends – has been reached.
These transformations ought to remind us of a line from many moons ago, from the British historian Lord Acton, who said,“Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”
But has anyone given thought to what it actually means? Having power that is not strictly subordinated to what is right and true, having the power to bring you what you want because you want it, begins to corrupt even the best of men. If you haven’t the internal standards and restraints to order your desires, then that unchecked power will draws you down through the satisfaction of your desires, separating you further and further from what what is right, nudging you from virtue and into vice, or in other words: becoming corrupted. That absence of goodness will soon have you, as J.R.R. Tolkien had Bilbo put it, feeling like
‘“I feel thin, sort of stretched, like butter scraped over too much bread.’
, and you, as a moral being – the only true mark of Progress – really does begin to fade away.
You’d better think upon it, and for godsake don’t write ‘fairy tales’ off as worthless, because there is almost nothing else in society today that will hold such thoughts up as being serious and significant enough for you to consider them! Where else but Fairy Tales, Fantasy and Young Adult Sci-Fi will you be challenged to confront what it means to be human? Note: I did not say “Where else will you wallow in your favorite vices and examine how that empowers your relationships” which is the focus of what passes for ‘literature’ today. And I didn’t, because it isn’t worth the html to do so.
What with this being the case, we very well may have reached, or will soon be reaching, that point where significant percentages of We The People, have been corrupted absolutely, or near enough to it to be a distinction without a difference. And nothing good can follow from that.
One consequence of that corruption upon a society, is the inability to recognize or desire what is right, and the flip side is that neither will they realize when they are being wronged. Several questions about such society come to mind, but given a society which prides itself upon its ‘free public education’, surely one of the questions a person should ask, is how has their means of educating themselves have been allowed to become such an abysmal failure?
c) Three true things that were never said by Aristotle, Francis Bacon and Alexis de Tocqueville
There is a road we’ve been travelling down that we appear to have reached the end of, and it began with a change of course that might be best seen in how popular opinion has moved from one popular aphorism, to another, and I’ll pick three to illustrate it, starting from the earlier source, attributed to Aristotle:“Educating the mind without educating the heart is no education at all.” – aphorism attributed to Aristotle
, to
“Knowledge is Power – aphorism attributed to Francis Bacon *”
and of course,
“America is Great because America is Good – if it ever ceases being Good, it will cease to be Great.” – aphorism attributed to Alexis de Tocqueville.
Interestingly enough, while not technically accurate – neither Aristotle, Bacon nor de Tocqueville actually said those words, at least not in any translations I’ve ever seen (and yes, Bacon, though English, wrote in Latin) – they are accurate summaries of what they actually did say, though in many more other words. But be that as it may, that master aphorist – popular hearsay (or today aka: ‘the internet’) – has somehow, correctly, distilled and polished their thoughts into these three succinct, representative and very quotable phrases.
Inaccurate, but True.
Aristotle can be found to say much the same things in his Politics (the book I have the most issues with), and in the Nichomachean Ethics (my favorite of his), but the reason why this is true, he put into the fewest words, in his Poetics:
“Part IX
It is, moreover, evident from what has been said, that it is not the function of the poet to relate what has happened, but what may happen- what is possible according to the law of probability or necessity. The poet and the historian differ not by writing in verse or in prose. The work of Herodotus might be put into verse, and it would still be a species of history, with meter no less than without it. The true difference is that one relates what has happened, the other what may happen. Poetry, therefore, is a more philosophical and a higher thing than history: for poetry tends to express the universal, history the particular. “The heart, the imaginative, the poetic deals with higher more philosophical concepts which are necessary to give meaning to the data they refer to. And with all due respect to Aristotle (and he is due a great, great deal of it), ‘what may happen’ doesn’t cover the half of how Poetry rises above History. The poetic, the imaginative doesn’t simply state what may be, but it illustrates it, it makes its points and binds them together with your interests, your reactions and expectations, inducing in you a catharsis that secures its points not only to your brain but integrates them with all the rest of what you know, binding your heart and mind together, transforming mere data into Knowledge with a capital “K”, which you are unlikely to forget or to trifle with.
Regarding the aphorism attributed to Francis Bacon, he actually said in his essay “On Heresies“, speaking of divine power, that:
“…for knowledge itself is a power whereby he knoweth”
Bacon’s secretary, Hobbes, yep, Thomas ‘life is nasty, brutish and short‘ Hobbes, attributed to his employer/teacher, “the phrase,
“The end of knowledge is power”
All the same, taking Bacon’s essays as a total, the aphorism “Knowledge is Power” is a good summary of the thrust of his thinking, and is an excellent summary of Thomas Hobbes’ own beliefs, both of which have had huge implications on the last four hundred years of western history. How the Baconian disengaged us from the Aristotelian, can be seen via the father of Pro(Re)gressive Education, John Dewey, in Chp 2 of his “Reconstruction In Philosophy”:
“…The train of ideas represented by the Baconian Knowledge is Power thus failed in getting an emanci[Pg 52]pated and independent expression. These become hopelessly entangled in standpoints and prepossessions that embodied a social, political and scientific tradition with which they were completely incompatible. The obscurity, the confusion of modern philosophy is the product of this attempt to combine two things which cannot possibly be combined either logically or morally. Philosophic reconstruction for the present is thus the endeavor to undo the entanglement and to permit the Baconian aspirations to come to a free and unhindered expression. In succeeding lectures we shall consider the needed reconstruction as it affects certain classic philosophic antitheses, like those of experience and reason, the real and the ideal. But first we shall have to consider the modifying effect exercised upon philosophy by that changed conception of nature, animate and inanimate, which we owe to the progress of science….”
What he means is, that his Pragmatism – the abandonment of Principle for what is expediently useful (for the moment, and no more) – could not stand up beside an image of Virtue without being laughed off the stage – or out of the classroom – and so the virtuous, the imaginative, the treasured classical literature of Western Civilization, had to be given the boot, for the Bacon. And the Baconian is, in its ends, the refutation of the Aristotelian, and modernity is decidedly Baconian.
Back before them all, Socrates set us on the path of the One in the Many, the principle Truth behind the infinitude of particulars, for the same reason that Aristotle remarked that the Poetic was more important than the Historic – not because the poetic is more important, but because it is what makes it possible to comprehend the particulars. Knowledge is the organized integration of what you know to be true, and the deeper you know it, the more truly you comprehend it, and that deeper path is found through reflection and contemplation – it illuminates the principles behind the particulars, which enables you to behave more wisely, more long range, and for the first time making it possible to pursue Happiness. Contemplation is aided by well written material, one line of a philosophic or religious gem, or a phrase of poetry, can provide the means to better understand who you are and what your place in the world is, could or should be.
But to focus upon Power, is to reduce your aim, your telos, your goals’ perspective to things. There is little or no room for contemplation in schemes of power, you abandon the depths and move from Quality to Quantity, from Principle to particular, from long range to short, from Right & Wrong, to what you can pragmatically get away with at this particular moment, leaving you with little or no ability to see further than the hand – or fist – in front of your face. Ultimately you install the powerful over the Truthful, the pleasing moment, over, and in opposition to, the Virtuous life.
One is difficult and one is easy, to borrow from Dumbledore (who borrowed from classical mythology),
“Soon we must all face the choice between what is right and what is easy.”
That would once have been a fine summary of the goals of an Education: to prepare students for making that better choice. Now it is not even considered. Mustn’t jeopardize self-esteem, don’tcha know.
And between these two approaches, of knowledge of what is right, in order to do what is right, as against Knowledge as a means to Power, it is the latter that is by far the easiest and most enticing.
Pursuing power is easy – and always has been.
Doing what is Right is hard – and always has been.Turning a person, a populace, away from one and towards the other, is making a change that makes a difference, and it takes a morally informed person to know – or to care – about that difference, which sharpens the point of the phrase attributed to de Tocqueville’s – America’s greatness resulted from, and depends upon, its goodness, the quality of caring deeply about what is right and good with the necessary corollary of being incensed over what is wrong, or in other words, having ‘heart‘.
Knowledge without heart is mere data, trivia, useful but unimportant facts, suitable for multiple choice questions only (and why?), not for contemplation. Knowledge, to be true knowledge, requires heart. It requires heart in order to be offended by a lie because it is a lie, and without that, then all that you know is reduced to mere utilitarian usefulness and it is that which dictates your response – or your lack of one.
Our educational system has been dead set on removing heart, dead set on removing imaginative works of literature – forcing factoids over heart – dead set on replacing the greatest works of Western Civilization with the driest ‘essays of fact”, as Noah Webster put it. The ultimate illustration of this might be the recent survey which found “The Worst college in America!” to be little Shirmer college, a Great Books college, which directs its entire effort at not just acquainting its students with those great books, but involving them in discussing and debating them, rather than answering multiple choice questions about what others have said about them.
And where has this change of direction gotten us? Further down the road that Webster himself decried just a few decades after starting us down it:
“Principles, Sir, are becoming corrupt, deeply corrupt; & unless the progress of corruption, & perversion of truth can be arrested, neither liberty nor property, will long be secure in this country. And a great evil is, that men of the first distinction seem, to a great extent, to be ignorant of the real, original causes of our public distresses.”
I’d give almost anything to attend little Shirmer College, or better yet, to have my kids attend it.
Adding up the aphorisms
Fittingly, wacademics across the nation are quickly discovering, from college presidents criticized for saying that “all lives matter”, to law professors forced to apologize for daring to ask law students to consider whether or not inciting riot might be a legal issue, discovering that when the heart has not been educated, then it is mere usefulness that will drive their students and that usefulness will be shaped by what is desirable and satisfying, not by what is good and true, and usefulness will not only be cold and empty, but will trump both morality and sensibility (you might want to consider just what sort of person considers what is moral and what is sensible to be in conflict, but that’s for a much later post).‘Why?‘ you ask? Here, let me assemble these aphorisms for you so that you can see that if knowledge is Power, and all knowledge is viewed absent moral value (in relativist diversity), reduced to fact alone, then here’s how the progression flows:
Knowledge is Power.
– Get an education to get power
Power corrupts.
– Get more education to get more power; the more the better.
Absolute power corrupts absolutely,
– go deeply into debt and get as many degrees as you can – go for the power!.
Reviewing the year 2014, especially Ferguson and Gruber and the reactions to them, it is difficult not to conclude that significant segments of our society are already there, what with the responses I’ve received from everyone from the average person to the elected politician, in response to discovering that the administration (Obama’s and Romney’s) used willful deception to get power and control over all of our lives, their collective shrug is little more than:
“Meh. More people have healthcare thanks to ObamaCare.”
That’s it. No concern that it was wrong to do, no outrage over using deliberate lies to build public policy upon, no sense of concern over the exercise of governmental power over all Americans being built upon a lie, all of that and more has received nothing but a near universal – ‘meh‘.
But the apathetic ‘meh’ to Gruber’s lies, and the brash protests of students and #Ferguson protesters demanding that ‘justice’ conform to their wishes, are but two sides of the same pervasive skepticism. What follows from that inability to stand by or to state what you know with certainty, is a perpetually apathetic swinging between distracted passivity, and passionate outbursts, as the whims of rootless emotional appeals dictate. Tailor made for such a people, is the no longer tired old phrase of Thracymachus:
‘Justice is what is best for the powerful’ -Thracymachus (and every tyrant and dictator of the nearly 3,000 years since him)
No longer a cheap rhetorical ploy, it is now a sincere worldview, one now being promoted by leading MIT Professors and POTUS’s alike.
That’s certainly a change worth noting, an enthusiastic and historical leap backwards – Pro-Regression – and one that we’re going to be experiencing the effects of for quite some time to come. I didn’t think that the average person had sunk so far as to accept that… the tenured, and the political apparatchiks, sure, but… not my neighbor, not family.
d) Transformational Reform
Educational reform appears to have finally succeeded in reforming our nation from one intent upon being good, to one intent upon securing power for power’s sake, which brings us back around to the third accurate, though mis-attributed aphorism:“America is Great because America is Good – if it ever ceases being Good, it will cease to be Great.” aphorism attributed to de Tocqueville.
Not only is that a change we could do without, but it is one where we will surely cease to be, if it is not unmade soon. Not a good sign at all. The moderns have taken it for granted that the rush towards ‘science!’ required a rush away from the moral, the religious, the poetic – a mad rush away from anything smacking of imaginative heart. That has driven our abandoning everything from Homer to the Bible, from Aesop to nursery rhymes – in today’s educational world, those are all out. Facts alone are all they see any students needing, pack ’em in, drill ’em in, if they can repeat correct data then they have all the skills they need to succeed.
The problem is that data, absent heart, is truly meaningless, and skepticism is what follows. It leaves one without convictions and able to ‘justify’ any whim at all.
When Hannah Arendt described the Nazi, Adolph Eichmann, on trial for war crimes committed in WWII, as demonstrating the banality of evil – that was and IS the ideal that modernity has been striving for. Many however, such as in the article linked, didn’t get it, they thought her observation of a passionless system was somehow excusing the raving lunacy of Nazism, but they are missing an important point – both the bureaucratic drone and the raving ideologue are but sides of the same coin, drawn on the bank of skepticism.
For instance, you aren’t going to get someone who thoroughly understands Individual Rights, and the importance of Property Rights and respect for the rule of rightly reasoned law to their lives, to merely shrug over shop lifting. Neither are you going to prod them into a torch carrying frenzy over the death of a criminal complicit in the violence that ended his life. But someone who is skeptical of even our ability to know what is Right or Wrong? It is entirely within such a person to express either apathy, or violent indignation, at the emotional prodding of a demagogue, because there is no substance within them to resist his beguiling appeal.
The Skeptical mind, far from being mentally tough, is a mind with no substance, no form, they can be molded into either riotous frenzy, or just as easily convinced to bring their apathetic efficiency to filling out death sentences in triplicate – they are without heart. The Skeptic, via their dis-knowledgeable apathy, will be unperturbed over pits full of corpses, its evil found entirely unmoving, and unremarkable, and as invisible, to them, as the water a fish swims in. The reason it hasn’t yet ‘happened here’, is only because the hand-me-down memories of elder relatives, warnings of nightmares from certain beliefs, have kept us aping ‘moral outrage’ whenever reality has approached too closely to the modernist ideal. But those memories are fast fading, our proper outrage quickly becoming laugh tracks in our lives, and that road which skepticism leads to, and which is the mark of the modern age, is too easily accessed from our own front doors.
If that is not a major shock to you, or at least something you recognize as a critical wrong, or even just a source of embarrassment – then you are pursuing regress – and you are in a sick, sad state.
And that illustrates the need for what I’m trying to accomplish in these posts, to show you what signs and stars to look for in order to get your bearings and return to sanity, rather than spin your wheels or go around in circles, and it does take more than just ‘hurumph!’ing at the #Gruber’s of the world. For instance, what answer can you give to those who say ‘meh‘ to Gruber?
Can you explain not just that their response is a poor one, but also why? And do so not simply to win an argument or to shut someone up, but to help someone make sense of things? Can you explain to people who actually think that they are doing good, why the good they seek is actually bad? Can you explain why skepticism does not mean being tough minded, but means having a head full of mush?
Not tell. Not insult, but Explain, can you explain where their response has left them and why they should be dissatisfied with that? If it were easy, it would not be a problem, and if I could do so briefly, I would (and only after doing so would I go into endless detail). Winning our way to actual Progress will require our knowing our terrain, knowing where we are and where we are going in our travels between Progress and Regress, and for that reason I’m making this journey as much for my own benefit as for yours.
To be continued.
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Goodby 2014: From Gruber to Ferguson, Evil is the new Good – The History of Progress begins with its absence, part 5 a,b, c & d
a) Evil is the new Good
I know what you’re asking, ‘Why this?‘ Right? I mean, we’ve got Ferguson exploding again, and what with all the rest of the News Cycle churning around and more, why am I continuing with this odd… sort of History-ish series of posts pursuing the nature of Progress and Regress?Let me answer that question with another question.
Why are these situations so common, rather than uncommon?
Consider that since I first began writing this post, we’ve passed through several news cycles, led by Jonathan Gruber admitting that ObamaCare was a lie to fool the ‘stupid people’, Obama has declared his intention to issue an Executive Order to let in illegal immigration, Ebola has come and (or so we hope) gone, ISIS is still beheading fast and furiously, Houston’s Mayor launched an assault on religious liberty (forgot about that one, didn’t you), Gruber is back, ongoing efforts against the 2nd Amdt, or Common Core#Ferguson has exploded with rioting against against the judicial system, and now Korea closing our movies and Taliban slaughtering a school… and that was within hardly more than a month’s time.
And we certainly don’t need to limit our time frame to just the last couple months to see a virtual parade of more of the same. I mean, it’s not as if these very same issues are really anything new, right? Ferguson/Watts? Ebola/AIDS? ISIS/Al Queda? Houston or Catholic Hospitals or forced fed healthcontrol? Marysville/Sandy Hook/Colorado? And Common Core/Race To The Top/every-educational-reform-going-back-to-1800? Don’t let the seeming kaleidoscopic events snow you, instead ask yourself if there is some sense in which these very separate events are in some sense fundamentally similar?
I’ve questioned, answered and posted on these ever recycling news cycle issues enough times already – more than enough times. The reason why these issues are so common is because having the ability to look at these situations in a more productive way, has become so uncommon. All of these seeming changes, are the result of a long ago change that has too long remained unchanged and unchallenged, and that change is central to the reason why all of the progress made in recent centuries has been transforming into the rapid regress of today. Granted, beneath the surface of the news cycle, what has not changed is difficult to see, and while the superficial distractions of the recycling are easily mistaken for real changes – the only real changes taking place have been within us – all of which serves to mask what remains unchanged… and so… here we are.
Yes, that requires a bit of explanation.
Easier done perhaps by looking at one aspect of some of the more recent changes in us as a people, one that is very much worth noting, though maybe not for the reasons you might think. The embarrassing boastings of Jonathan Gruber, and the results of the #Ferguson Grand Jury verdict, though seemingly different on the surface, have quite a lot in common, with each other, and with the recycling of the news cycle.
I’ve already ranted a bit on the #Ferguson situation here and here, and even a quick hit on Gruber, but aren’t Gruber’s lies just politics as usual?
Nope, at least not the part that I see as being worth noting. What’s easily noted is that we had a well respected MIT economics professor, Jonathan Gruber, who was a highly paid consultant to the administration precisely because of his position as a highly respected MIT economics professor (and who was previously employed by Romney, BTW, and for the same valuable ‘insights’ that the Obama administration payed him so handsomely for), who was caught on video – multiple times – cheerfully advocating for a policy of highly opaque administrative lies, so that they could take advantage of the ‘stupidity of the American voter‘ – for their own good.
Not surprisingly, the occasion of these videos being seen by the American people has brought about some rampant and hilarious denials from Administration apologists who’ve rushed out to make declarations about Gruber’s namelessness and irrelevance, before realizing that they were each already on video praising and name dropping Gruber’s name in hopes of his name’s respectability lending some credibility to their schemes – Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, John Kerry, and all the way up to Obama himself, publicly thanked him by name for his help on ObamaCare.
Hilarious.
Sadly, while their denials might have been seen as somewhat heartening, or would if it showed that they at least felt a sense of awkwardness at being caught in the lies they were telling, but there too appearances would be deceiving. Democrats weren’t backtracking because they just discovered they’d been lied to, they were backtracking because they’d feared that his boastings about their plan had given a rhetorical advantage to the Right, which they sought to prevent. Not by correcting the lie with the Truth, no, they were trying to backtrack from his lie, with new lies of their own. Or IOW, they wanted to prevent the Right from getting an advantage, NOT to correct the lie.
But there’s little surprise in that, politicians have been doing that for ages, right? Right, and liars lying isn’t what caught my attention here. Liars lie, that’s what they do. It’s a problem alright, but it’s not the problem.
You might begin to see the real problem by looking more closely at this quote from Gruber which unintentionally sets the stage and lays the situation out::
“… “There’s larger principles at stake here. When these states are turning – not just turning down covering the poor people – but turning down the federal stimulus that would come with that. So the price they are willing … They are not just not interested in covering poor people, they are willing to sacrifice billions of dollars of injections into their economy in order to punish poor people. It really is just almost awesome in its evilness.”…”
Now I grant you, it is surprising that he dares speak of ‘Principle’, after having just boasted about having purposefully written the ACA in such a convoluted manner so as to deceive the ‘stupid Americans‘ into supporting it. And on top of that, the only thing remotely identifiable as a principle in what he touted, larger or otherwise, was that apparently, in his humble opinion, the desire for goodies should trump whether or not how you go about getting the goodies, is right or wrong. But as crazy as that is, that’s a distraction, and not what I find to be new and alarming. The idea that someone failing to do what they clearly know to be wrong, could somehow be considered to be an ‘evil’ – that amounts to an assertion, by a professor from one of our top colleges mind you, that: ‘Evil is the new Good‘, an and a belief that it is perfectly acceptable to use evil means, such as lying to gain power over you, ‘for the greater good’.
Still, while that’s most definitely a problem, it’s still not the problem. The real problem has been the public’s reaction to all of this – that ‘s what has shocked me, and on two different levels, the first being the most obvious.
You see as the #Gruber hits kept coming, I was thinking that being lied to would actually matter to most people, so I made several comments to Democrat & Independent voters, such as:
You do realize that he was talking about you, right? Those of us on the Right weren’t buying any of it at all, and we spent painful amounts of time and effort pointing out the very lies he’s boasting about having told, and more, while you dismissed us. In short, to borrow a phrase:
‘You were the Stupids they’d been waiting for!’
But it turns out that Obama’s original quote came far closer to the truth:
“We are the ones we’ve been waiting for!”
For to my surprise, the public’s reaction to these lies has been a collective: ‘meh’, and that my friends, that’s the problem.
And the second aspect of the problem, is not seeing that as being a problem – that is an indication of how bad the problem really is.
Does anyone really not realize the significance of an entire people having little or no reaction to being wronged and lied to?If you don’t have a natural response to what is wrong or to being wronged, then how difficult could it be to manipulate you into either going along with what you should not, or into expressing outrage where there is no real cause for it?
Is that not what we are seeing happening all around us through all of the endlessly recycling news cycles?
Because the shocking change I see in friends, neighbors, family members and elected office holders, is that those ‘stupid folk‘ aren’t batting an eye about the lies that Gruber is on record admitting! They are non-plussed that what he has been admitting was knowingly used to form govt policy, by those who are now attempting to distance themselves from him! Ironically, the responses I’ve been getting from people, they have been precisely the ‘larger principle‘ that Gruber referred to, in inglorious action:
“Meh. More people have healthcare thanks to ObamaCare.”
IOW: They got what they wanted, and how they got it, they couldn’t care less about. Why should you find that worrisome? The reason why, is that someone who’s interested in getting something for nothing, clearly has no interest in anything to do with reality or the truth to begin with (in fact they are rooting for less of each) – what they are looking for, as every good con man knows, is an excuse to justify going along with the deception being fed to them.
And that same ‘justification’ is the same mindset that’s driving the demand for a Justice without any concern for determining what Justice should be, either in #Ferguson or Garner’s #ICan’tBreathe – or in still Other other words, in the minds of a sizable portion of the American public, for them all it seems that “The Ends justify the Means” is perfectly uncontroversial, and that should alarm you.
Here we have a situation where the leftists are looking at being lied to, not from the perspective of dupes being taken advantage of, but from the perspective of people implicitly in on the lie, people who are fully aware that what they were being told, was a lie, a lie which they were happy to look to as an excuse to justify going along with the greater deception. IOW, they were actually thankful to be lied to, so that they could look as if they had the ‘moral high ground‘ (that’s some deadly irony right there), a ground knowingly built upon lies, in order to be able to bark at conservatives for being ‘evil’… which is the most normal, natural, primitive desire a person can have – the natural desire to have what cannot be, the desire for what you want because you want it, over and above what you should want.
For a society which once prided itself as being based upon the rule of Law – of doing what is Right over what is satisfying, that is as dramatic, high level, and widespread an instance of regression, as you’ll find.
Let that sink in: The leftist, and large numbers of the enthusiastically shallower portions of the Libertarian and Right bands of the political spectrum (see the prejudged outrage over the ‘injustice’ of the #Ferguson & #Garner verdicts), are now apparently comfortable with being in the position of looking to known lies, in order to get their bearings and to take direction from them. W.T.F. is that?!
Again, not so much for what they are doing, but for the lack of any internal restraints against doing what they’re doing – they’re fine with it!
Don’t fool yourself, this is not simply a bad situation.
A bad situation is one where you find you’ve messed up, you made an error, you were inefficient or foolish in what you did, and disquieting consequences followed. But this is a case of deliberately seeking after an absence of Truth, an instance where people seek to ‘knowingly’ exclude what is True, from their awareness. That creates a vacuum which only power will find welcoming, leaving the “IN” door of evil ajar – can it be otherwise? Arguing not to convey what is true, but to intimidate others into going along with your favorite lies… and feeling no compunction or embarrassment or shame about it… who else but a power worshiper could find that welcoming?
b) The end of the road of education reform – and its ends – has been reached.
These transformations ought to remind us of a line from many moons ago, from the British historian Lord Acton, who said,“Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”
But has anyone given thought to what it actually means? Having power that is not strictly subordinated to what is right and true, having the power to bring you what you want because you want it, begins to corrupt even the best of men. If you haven’t the internal standards and restraints to order your desires, then that unchecked power will draws you down through the satisfaction of your desires, separating you further and further from what what is right, nudging you from virtue and into vice, or in other words: becoming corrupted. That absence of goodness will soon have you, as J.R.R. Tolkien had Bilbo put it, feeling like
‘“I feel thin, sort of stretched, like butter scraped over too much bread.’
, and you, as a moral being – the only true mark of Progress – really does begin to fade away.
You’d better think upon it, and for godsake don’t write ‘fairy tales’ off as worthless, because there is almost nothing else in society today that will hold such thoughts up as being serious and significant enough for you to consider them! Where else but Fairy Tales, Fantasy and Young Adult Sci-Fi will you be challenged to confront what it means to be human? Note: I did not say “Where else will you wallow in your favorite vices and examine how that empowers your relationships” which is the focus of what passes for ‘literature’ today. And I didn’t, because it isn’t worth the html to do so.
What with this being the case, we very well may have reached, or will soon be reaching, that point where significant percentages of We The People, have been corrupted absolutely, or near enough to it to be a distinction without a difference. And nothing good can follow from that.
One consequence of that corruption upon a society, is the inability to recognize or desire what is right, and the flip side is that neither will they realize when they are being wronged. Several questions about such society come to mind, but given a society which prides itself upon its ‘free public education’, surely one of the questions a person should ask, is how has their means of educating themselves have been allowed to become such an abysmal failure?
c) Three true things that were never said by Aristotle, Francis Bacon and Alexis de Tocqueville
There is a road we’ve been travelling down that we appear to have reached the end of, and it began with a change of course that might be best seen in how popular opinion has moved from one popular aphorism, to another, and I’ll pick three to illustrate it, starting from the earlier source, attributed to Aristotle:“Educating the mind without educating the heart is no education at all.” – aphorism attributed to Aristotle
, to
“Knowledge is Power – aphorism attributed to Francis Bacon *”
and of course,
“America is Great because America is Good – if it ever ceases being Good, it will cease to be Great.” – aphorism attributed to Alexis de Tocqueville.
Interestingly enough, while not technically accurate – neither Aristotle, Bacon nor de Tocqueville actually said those words, at least not in any translations I’ve ever seen (and yes, Bacon, though English, wrote in Latin) – they are accurate summaries of what they actually did say, though in many more other words. But be that as it may, that master aphorist – popular hearsay (or today aka: ‘the internet’) – has somehow, correctly, distilled and polished their thoughts into these three succinct, representative and very quotable phrases.
Inaccurate, but True.
Aristotle can be found to say much the same things in his Politics (the book I have the most issues with), and in the Nichomachean Ethics (my favorite of his), but the reason why this is true, he put into the fewest words, in his Poetics:
“Part IX
It is, moreover, evident from what has been said, that it is not the function of the poet to relate what has happened, but what may happen- what is possible according to the law of probability or necessity. The poet and the historian differ not by writing in verse or in prose. The work of Herodotus might be put into verse, and it would still be a species of history, with meter no less than without it. The true difference is that one relates what has happened, the other what may happen. Poetry, therefore, is a more philosophical and a higher thing than history: for poetry tends to express the universal, history the particular. “The heart, the imaginative, the poetic deals with higher more philosophical concepts which are necessary to give meaning to the data they refer to. And with all due respect to Aristotle (and he is due a great, great deal of it), ‘what may happen’ doesn’t cover the half of how Poetry rises above History. The poetic, the imaginative doesn’t simply state what may be, but it illustrates it, it makes its points and binds them together with your interests, your reactions and expectations, inducing in you a catharsis that secures its points not only to your brain but integrates them with all the rest of what you know, binding your heart and mind together, transforming mere data into Knowledge with a capital “K”, which you are unlikely to forget or to trifle with.
Regarding the aphorism attributed to Francis Bacon, he actually said in his essay “On Heresies“, speaking of divine power, that:
“…for knowledge itself is a power whereby he knoweth”
Bacon’s secretary, Hobbes, yep, Thomas ‘life is nasty, brutish and short‘ Hobbes, attributed to his employer/teacher, “the phrase,
“The end of knowledge is power”
All the same, taking Bacon’s essays as a total, the aphorism “Knowledge is Power” is a good summary of the thrust of his thinking, and is an excellent summary of Thomas Hobbes’ own beliefs, both of which have had huge implications on the last four hundred years of western history. How the Baconian disengaged us from the Aristotelian, can be seen via the father of Pro(Re)gressive Education, John Dewey, in Chp 2 of his “Reconstruction In Philosophy”:
“…The train of ideas represented by the Baconian Knowledge is Power thus failed in getting an emanci[Pg 52]pated and independent expression. These become hopelessly entangled in standpoints and prepossessions that embodied a social, political and scientific tradition with which they were completely incompatible. The obscurity, the confusion of modern philosophy is the product of this attempt to combine two things which cannot possibly be combined either logically or morally. Philosophic reconstruction for the present is thus the endeavor to undo the entanglement and to permit the Baconian aspirations to come to a free and unhindered expression. In succeeding lectures we shall consider the needed reconstruction as it affects certain classic philosophic antitheses, like those of experience and reason, the real and the ideal. But first we shall have to consider the modifying effect exercised upon philosophy by that changed conception of nature, animate and inanimate, which we owe to the progress of science….”
What he means is, that his Pragmatism – the abandonment of Principle for what is expediently useful (for the moment, and no more) – could not stand up beside an image of Virtue without being laughed off the stage – or out of the classroom – and so the virtuous, the imaginative, the treasured classical literature of Western Civilization, had to be given the boot, for the Bacon. And the Baconian is, in its ends, the refutation of the Aristotelian, and modernity is decidedly Baconian.
Back before them all, Socrates set us on the path of the One in the Many, the principle Truth behind the infinitude of particulars, for the same reason that Aristotle remarked that the Poetic was more important than the Historic – not because the poetic is more important, but because it is what makes it possible to comprehend the particulars. Knowledge is the organized integration of what you know to be true, and the deeper you know it, the more truly you comprehend it, and that deeper path is found through reflection and contemplation – it illuminates the principles behind the particulars, which enables you to behave more wisely, more long range, and for the first time making it possible to pursue Happiness. Contemplation is aided by well written material, one line of a philosophic or religious gem, or a phrase of poetry, can provide the means to better understand who you are and what your place in the world is, could or should be.
But to focus upon Power, is to reduce your aim, your telos, your goals’ perspective to things. There is little or no room for contemplation in schemes of power, you abandon the depths and move from Quality to Quantity, from Principle to particular, from long range to short, from Right & Wrong, to what you can pragmatically get away with at this particular moment, leaving you with little or no ability to see further than the hand – or fist – in front of your face. Ultimately you install the powerful over the Truthful, the pleasing moment, over, and in opposition to, the Virtuous life.
One is difficult and one is easy, to borrow from Dumbledore (who borrowed from classical mythology),
“Soon we must all face the choice between what is right and what is easy.”
That would once have been a fine summary of the goals of an Education: to prepare students for making that better choice. Now it is not even considered. Mustn’t jeopardize self-esteem, don’tcha know.
And between these two approaches, of knowledge of what is right, in order to do what is right, as against Knowledge as a means to Power, it is the latter that is by far the easiest and most enticing.
Pursuing power is easy – and always has been.
Doing what is Right is hard – and always has been.Turning a person, a populace, away from one and towards the other, is making a change that makes a difference, and it takes a morally informed person to know – or to care – about that difference, which sharpens the point of the phrase attributed to de Tocqueville’s – America’s greatness resulted from, and depends upon, its goodness, the quality of caring deeply about what is right and good with the necessary corollary of being incensed over what is wrong, or in other words, having ‘heart‘.
Knowledge without heart is mere data, trivia, useful but unimportant facts, suitable for multiple choice questions only (and why?), not for contemplation. Knowledge, to be true knowledge, requires heart. It requires heart in order to be offended by a lie because it is a lie, and without that, then all that you know is reduced to mere utilitarian usefulness and it is that which dictates your response – or your lack of one.
Our educational system has been dead set on removing heart, dead set on removing imaginative works of literature – forcing factoids over heart – dead set on replacing the greatest works of Western Civilization with the driest ‘essays of fact”, as Noah Webster put it. The ultimate illustration of this might be the recent survey which found “The Worst college in America!” to be little Shirmer college, a Great Books college, which directs its entire effort at not just acquainting its students with those great books, but involving them in discussing and debating them, rather than answering multiple choice questions about what others have said about them.
And where has this change of direction gotten us? Further down the road that Webster himself decried just a few decades after starting us down it:
“Principles, Sir, are becoming corrupt, deeply corrupt; & unless the progress of corruption, & perversion of truth can be arrested, neither liberty nor property, will long be secure in this country. And a great evil is, that men of the first distinction seem, to a great extent, to be ignorant of the real, original causes of our public distresses.”
I’d give almost anything to attend little Shirmer College, or better yet, to have my kids attend it.
Adding up the aphorisms
Fittingly, wacademics across the nation are quickly discovering, from college presidents criticized for saying that “all lives matter”, to law professors forced to apologize for daring to ask law students to consider whether or not inciting riot might be a legal issue, discovering that when the heart has not been educated, then it is mere usefulness that will drive their students and that usefulness will be shaped by what is desirable and satisfying, not by what is good and true, and usefulness will not only be cold and empty, but will trump both morality and sensibility (you might want to consider just what sort of person considers what is moral and what is sensible to be in conflict, but that’s for a much later post).‘Why?‘ you ask? Here, let me assemble these aphorisms for you so that you can see that if knowledge is Power, and all knowledge is viewed absent moral value (in relativist diversity), reduced to fact alone, then here’s how the progression flows:
Knowledge is Power.
– Get an education to get power
Power corrupts.
– Get more education to get more power; the more the better.
Absolute power corrupts absolutely,
– go deeply into debt and get as many degrees as you can – go for the power!.Reviewing the year 2014, especially Ferguson and Gruber and the reactions to them, it is difficult not to conclude that significant segments of our society are already there, what with the responses I’ve received from everyone from the average person to the elected politician, in response to discovering that the administration (Obama’s and Romney’s) used willful deception to get power and control over all of our lives, their collective shrug is little more than:
“Meh. More people have healthcare thanks to ObamaCare.”
That’s it. No concern that it was wrong to do, no outrage over using deliberate lies to build public policy upon, no sense of concern over the exercise of governmental power over all Americans being built upon a lie, all of that and more has received nothing but a near universal – ‘meh‘.
But the apathetic ‘meh’ to Gruber’s lies, and the brash protests of students and #Ferguson protesters demanding that ‘justice’ conform to their wishes, are but two sides of the same pervasive skepticism. What follows from that inability to stand by or to state what you know with certainty, is a perpetually apathetic swinging between distracted passivity, and passionate outbursts, as the whims of rootless emotional appeals dictate. Tailor made for such a people, is the no longer tired old phrase of Thracymachus:
‘Justice is what is best for the powerful’ -Thracymachus (and every tyrant and dictator of the nearly 3,000 years since him)
No longer a cheap rhetorical ploy, it is now a sincere worldview, one now being promoted by leading MIT Professors and POTUS’s alike.
That’s certainly a change worth noting, an enthusiastic and historical leap backwards – Pro-Regression – and one that we’re going to be experiencing the effects of for quite some time to come. I didn’t think that the average person had sunk so far as to accept that… the tenured, and the political apparatchiks, sure, but… not my neighbor, not family.
d) Transformational Reform
Educational reform appears to have finally succeeded in reforming our nation from one intent upon being good, to one intent upon securing power for power’s sake, which brings us back around to the third accurate, though mis-attributed aphorism:“America is Great because America is Good – if it ever ceases being Good, it will cease to be Great.” aphorism attributed to de Tocqueville.
Not only is that a change we could do without, but it is one where we will surely cease to be, if it is not unmade soon. Not a good sign at all. The moderns have taken it for granted that the rush towards ‘science!’ required a rush away from the moral, the religious, the poetic – a mad rush away from anything smacking of imaginative heart. That has driven our abandoning everything from Homer to the Bible, from Aesop to nursery rhymes – in today’s educational world, those are all out. Facts alone are all they see any students needing, pack ’em in, drill ’em in, if they can repeat correct data then they have all the skills they need to succeed.
The problem is that data, absent heart, is truly meaningless, and skepticism is what follows. It leaves one without convictions and able to ‘justify’ any whim at all.
When Hannah Arendt described the Nazi, Adolph Eichmann, on trial for war crimes committed in WWII, as demonstrating the banality of evil – that was and IS the ideal that modernity has been striving for. Many however, such as in the article linked, didn’t get it, they thought her observation of a passionless system was somehow excusing the raving lunacy of Nazism, but they are missing an important point – both the bureaucratic drone and the raving ideologue are but sides of the same coin, drawn on the bank of skepticism.
For instance, you aren’t going to get someone who thoroughly understands Individual Rights, and the importance of Property Rights and respect for the rule of rightly reasoned law to their lives, to merely shrug over shop lifting. Neither are you going to prod them into a torch carrying frenzy over the death of a criminal complicit in the violence that ended his life. But someone who is skeptical of even our ability to know what is Right or Wrong? It is entirely within such a person to express either apathy, or violent indignation, at the emotional prodding of a demagogue, because there is no substance within them to resist his beguiling appeal.
The Skeptical mind, far from being mentally tough, is a mind with no substance, no form, they can be molded into either riotous frenzy, or just as easily convinced to bring their apathetic efficiency to filling out death sentences in triplicate – they are without heart. The Skeptic, via their dis-knowledgeable apathy, will be unperturbed over pits full of corpses, its evil found entirely unmoving, and unremarkable, and as invisible, to them, as the water a fish swims in. The reason it hasn’t yet ‘happened here’, is only because the hand-me-down memories of elder relatives, warnings of nightmares from certain beliefs, have kept us aping ‘moral outrage’ whenever reality has approached too closely to the modernist ideal. But those memories are fast fading, our proper outrage quickly becoming laugh tracks in our lives, and that road which skepticism leads to, and which is the mark of the modern age, is too easily accessed from our own front doors.
If that is not a major shock to you, or at least something you recognize as a critical wrong, or even just a source of embarrassment – then you are pursuing regress – and you are in a sick, sad state.
And that illustrates the need for what I’m trying to accomplish in these posts, to show you what signs and stars to look for in order to get your bearings and return to sanity, rather than spin your wheels or go around in circles, and it does take more than just ‘hurumph!’ing at the #Gruber’s of the world. For instance, what answer can you give to those who say ‘meh‘ to Gruber?
Can you explain not just that their response is a poor one, but also why? And do so not simply to win an argument or to shut someone up, but to help someone make sense of things? Can you explain to people who actually think that they are doing good, why the good they seek is actually bad? Can you explain why skepticism does not mean being tough minded, but means having a head full of mush?
Not tell. Not insult, but Explain, can you explain where their response has left them and why they should be dissatisfied with that? If it were easy, it would not be a problem, and if I could do so briefly, I would (and only after doing so would I go into endless detail). Winning our way to actual Progress will require our knowing our terrain, knowing where we are and where we are going in our travels between Progress and Regress, and for that reason I’m making this journey as much for my own benefit as for yours.
To be continued.
