RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/10/25/we-live-under-a-tyranny-of-the-self-righteous/

We no longer live in an age of moral relativism, but one of moral absolutism.

That’s one observation made by Canadian academic Eric Kaufmann in his latest book, Taboo, published this year. It’s an arresting inversion of a long-held view. Everyone today does indeed seem to know what is ‘right’ and what is ‘wrong’.

But it also makes it hard to square the argument that postmodernism is at the root of our ethical woes and moral vacuum. Rather than living in a state of doubt and ambivalence, as postmodernism’s most optimistic advocates argued in the 1990s, we now actually inhabit a world where people cleave to firmly held truths and fight over them with righteous fury.

This can be seen most evidently in the present day over Israel and the Middle East. For many, the Israelis – and very often, by extension, the Jews – are the personification of evil. Hence, the precipitous rise of virulent anti-Semitism and of correlating sympathy for the Palestinians. In the minds of many, this is a war of good against evil. The Palestinian flag has itself become a universal symbol of goodness. And when you feel you have good on your side, any sort of appalling or belligerent behaviour or words are permissible.

This Manichean viewpoint is replicated in matters over the environment. Here, those who supposedly have right on their side deem it acceptable to resort to any sort of anti-social behaviour because it’s for a ‘good cause’. Self-righteousness is an intoxicating sensation and a self-perpetuating one. The self-righteous become consumed by their own sense of power. Elsewhere in this regard, others abide by the creed that race determines everything. Others hold to the inviolable sanctity of trans rights.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/10/two_lawsuits_challenge_swampbuster_and_the_regulatory_labyrinth_of_the_administrative_state.html

Dwight Waldo, whose 1948 book The Administrative State gave the eponymous term widespread usage, believed that public administration is rational action designed to maximize public goals.

Unfortunately, the administrative state and its bureaucrats no longer have the public on their minds.

Without any constitutional authority, the administrative state frames, enforces, and adjudicates the regulations of a plethora of alphabet agencies. Unelected bureaucrats, politicized by monied NGOs and lobbyists, exercise powers of all three branches of government, disregarding the separation of powers and the checks-and-balances provisions of the Constitution.

Such is the viselike hold of the administrative state that Chief Justice John Roberts, dissenting in a 2013 judgment on a regulatory scheme of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), wrote: “The administrative state ‘wields vast power and touches almost every aspect of daily life….’ The Framers could hardly have envisioned today’s ‘vast and varied federal bureaucracy’ and the authority administrative agencies now hold over our economic, social, and political activities.”

An example of the arbitrary power the administrative state wields are some of the rules agencies have framed for the Swampbuster provisions, passed by Congress in 1985, under which the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) can deny benefits to farmers who do not voluntarily give up farming on wetlands. And who designates wetlands? It is the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS), a federal agency of the USDA. Using Swampbuster, the USDA has come to regulate property it would otherwise not have been able to.

However, four recent Supreme Court decisions have reined in the administrative state. The court swept aside decades-old precedents to shift the balance of power from the agencies to the courts. The Swampbuster provisions and NRCS-framed rules, too – seen by many legal experts as violative of property rights and overly broad in implementation – have been challenged in two recent lawsuits. Though the courts have yet to decide on the Swampbuster lawsuits, the four Supreme Court decisions will likely have a strong bearing on the cases.

Here, in brief, are the salient points of the four rulings:

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/10/it_s_still_the_economy_stupid_globalists.html

A paradigm shift occurs when there is a radical change in thinking from an accepted point of view to a new one.  Changes in social consciousness are not easy.  Institutions defend orthodoxy with all their assorted powers, while new ideas receive support only from iconoclasts who are often dismissed as kooks or disparaged as domestic enemies.  

Prevailing opinion is like a heavy boulder sitting in the valley between several steep hills.  For a novel idea to succeed, its proponents must push that boulder up the slope until it reaches the top of a neighboring peak.  Two observations follow from this analogy: (1) when moving the heavy boulder of conventional wisdom in a new direction, the gravity of traditional consensus works to roll it right back into the valley where it originally rested, and (2) once the boulder is finally pushed up a hill with the force of sufficient evidence and popular support, it will quickly roll down the other side and rest in a new valley of conventional wisdom.  Changing human minds, in other words, is a punishing exercise until you reach a tipping point, when social change occurs rapidly.

We are right now in the midst of one of these phenomenal paradigm shifts.  Americans are “awakening” to the idea that the federal government does not have their best interests at heart.  They are pushing back against mass illegal immigration.  They are resisting government surveillance and censorship.  They are questioning economic regulations that have weakened private property rights while giving a small number of corporations and financial elites almost total control over commerce, the food supply, and the monetary system.