RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/socialism-is-for-the-incurious-11567460002

I was struck by a news report this summer about Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont. It has long been known that he and his wife chose to spend their honeymoon in the Soviet Union. But it was news that he never availed himself of the opportunity to visit Alexander Solzhenitsyn when the great writer and moral witness was living as a refugee in Cavendish, Vt., between 1976 and his death in 2008.

Some comments about that story attribute Mr. Sanders’s negligence to ideology, as if he, being a fan of the Soviet Union, made a silent protest by ignoring the famous anti-Soviet figure in his midst. But I think the deeper reason for his neglect was a quality of the socialist or communist or revolutionary sensibility that is too little remarked. I mean its ingrained, indeed its programmatic, lack of curiosity about other people.

The philosopher Sir Roger Scruton, in a thoughtful anatomy of the French Revolution, is one of the few people to underscore this feature of the totalitarian habit of mind. “This absence of curiosity,” Mr. Scruton notes, “is a permanent characteristic of the revolutionary consciousness.”

An important reason for this lack of curiosity is the prominent role that abstractions play in the mental and moral metabolism of the totalitarian sensibility. This feature was articulated with some poignancy by Rousseau, who, at the end of his life, sadly observed: “I think I know man, but as for men, I know them not.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/274819/progressives-cynical-exploitation-mass-shootings-bruce-thornton

The second multiple-victim shooting in Texas in a week brought out the usual clichés and useless policy prescriptions from the progressive media and Democrats running in the presidential primary. And also as usual, the protestations of being “heartbroken,” and the demands for banning and confiscating certain weapons, are rote responses that apart from having little material value, display a cynical exploitation of suffering for political gain.

One wonders, for example, why all this “heartbreak” and “thoughts”––“prayers” are now verboten for progressives––are never publicized about the lethal violence in Chicago, Baltimore, and other blue-state fiefs. Fifty-three people died in August from mass shootings, an unusually high amount. The August toll in the Windy City was 46 murdered––almost a quarter fewer than last year. And these sorts of numbers happen every month of the year in Chicago totaling 539 dead in 2018. But do we hear politicians preening their “heartbreak” over these deaths? Are not those lives as precious as those of mass shooting victims? Aren’t those families of the victims just as devastated?

Most of the victims in Chicago and Baltimore are black, as are most of the murderers. I guess “black lives matter” only when the police are involved, or the perpetrator isn’t black. Black-on-black crime doesn’t fit the narrative of “racism,” “white privilege,” or “white supremacism”––unless one wants to depict blacks as helpless victims of “racism,” powerless to control their behavior. By the way, that claim has been an argument for slavery and segregation going all the way back to Aristotle. And just who created the character-degrading, family-destroying, federally subsidized blue-city hell-holes that comprise the “environment” manipulating black people into crime? No wonder race-industry progressives don’t want to call attention to these grisly facts.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/09/are_american_voters_helpless.html

America the land of the free, is under assault by the deadly ideology of Islamic subversion.

There is not a day that goes by that I read comments from all over the social media on major issues that threaten this land of the free. Many Americans know what the problems are, but they are helpless in solving them alone. Why? Because we are a representative republic and expect our elected representatives to know the problems and solve them. Americans love courageous leaders like President Trump and Senator Ted Cruz and despise weak politicians whose only art is playing with nonsocial words.

When was the last time you witnessed a courageous and knowledgeable representative stand up in the U.S. Congress to address the vital issue of Islam’s stealth jihad or Islamic subversion currently exploiting all aspects of American life? I do not remember.

Well, let’s ask a few questions. Aren’t these people elected to keep America safe? Don’t these elected officials work for their constituents? Haven’t they sworn that they “will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic” and that they “will bear true faith and allegiance to the same?”

https://pjmedia.com/trending/35-obama-gaffes-to-make-joe-biden-feel-better-about-himself/

Lately, it seems we can’t go a day without a new gaffe from Joe Biden. When you have to tell your supporters “I’m not going nuts,” it’s clear things aren’t exactly going well for you. So, to make Joe Biden feel better I thought it would be nice to compile the top thirty-five gaffes from Barack Obama, the man whose coattails Joe Biden is so desperately trying to ride.

35. Obama doesn’t know what committee he’s on.

While speaking in Israel during his first presidential campaign, Obama claimed to be on a committee that he was not on. “Just this past week, we passed out of the U.S. Senate Banking Committee — which is my committee — a bill to call for divestment from Iran as a way of ratcheting up the pressure to ensure that they don’t obtain a nuclear weapon.”

34. Plagiarizing his campaign speech

We all know that Biden’s first presidential campaign was thwarted by revelations of plagiarism. Obama was also discovered to have plagiarized a campaign speech. Perhaps that’s really why he picked Biden as his running mate, they had that in common.

In 2006, former Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick said the following in a campaign speech:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal’-just words. Just words. ‘We have nothing to fear but fear itself’-just words. ‘Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country’-just words. ‘I have a dream’-just words,”

In 2008, Obama said these words in his own campaign speech:

“Don’t tell me words don’t matter! ‘I have a dream.’ Just words. ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.’ Just words. ‘We have nothing to fear but fear itself.’ Just words, just speeches,”

Obama obviously survived the scandal, unlike Joe Biden.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14794/the-dangerous-stalinism-of-the-woke-hard-left

People on the “woke” hard-left seem so self-righteous about their monopoly over Truth (with a capital T) that many of them apparently see no reason to allow dissenting, politically incorrect, views to be expressed. Such incorrect views, they claim, make them feel “unsafe.” They can feel safe only if views they share are allowed to be
expressed. Feeling unsafe is the new trigger word for demanding censorship.

The other dangerous similarity between the Stalinists and the “wokers” is that both disdain due process for those they deem guilty of political incorrectness or other crimes and sins. They reject any presumption of innocence or requirement that the accuser bear the burden of proof.

For Stalinist and “wokers,” there is no uncertainty or fallibility. If they believe someone is guilty, he must be. Why do we need a cumbersome process for determining guilt? The identities of the accuser and accused are enough. Privileged white men are guilty perpetrators. Intersectional minorities are innocent victims. Who needs to know more? Any process, regardless of its fairness, favors the privileged over the unprivileged.

That is why I make the controversial claim that today, the “woke” hard-left is more dangerous to civil liberties than the right. To be sure there are hard right extremists who would use — and have used — violence to silence those with whom they disagree. They are indeed dangerous. But they have far less influence on our future leaders than their counterparts on the hard-left. They are not teaching our college age children and grandchildren. They are marginalized academically, politically and in the media. The opposite is true of hard-left Stalinists. Many have no idea who Stalin even was, but they are emulating his disdain for free speech and due process in the interests of achieving the unrealizable utopia they both sought. They also have in common the attitude that noble ends justify ignoble means.

We must always remember that it is not only the road to hell that is paved with good intentions. It is also the road to tyranny.

Civil liberties are in greater danger today from the intolerant hard-left than from the bigoted hard-right. This may seem counterintuitive: There has been far more violence — mass shootings in malls, synagogues and other soft targets — from extremists who identify more with the hard-right than with the hard-left. But the influence of the hard-left on our future leaders is far more pervasive, insidious and dangerous than the influence of the hard-right.

People on the “woke” hard-left seem so self-righteous about their monopoly over Truth (with a capital T) that many of them see no reason to allow dissenting, politically incorrect, views to be expressed. Such incorrect views, they claim, make them feel “unsafe.” They can feel safe only if views they share are allowed to be expressed. Feeling unsafe is the new trigger word for demanding censorship.

amgreatness.com/2019/08/30/the-boomer-revolution-and-its-consequences/

The Wall Street Journal this week published the results of a survey that found Americans’ values are shifting drastically, and not in a good way.

The poll, conducted with NBC News, found that Americans care less about patriotism, family, and faith than they did 20 years ago. The percentage of Americans who regard family as very important dropped 16 points, to a mere 43 percent. The importance of religion dropped 12 points, to 48 percent; and patriotism fell 9 points, to 61 percent.

The trend was most pronounced among Millennials and older members of  Gen Z—or Zoomers, as they are sometimes known, who consistently rated these values lower than older Americans: 79 percent of Americans 55 and older valued patriotism, compared with 42 percent of younger Americans; nearly two-thirds of older Americans say they value religion highly, compared with less than one-third of younger Americans.

Taken together, the statistics tell a neat story of moral decline. So young people really are a bunch of godless egoists who think brunch and having pets instead of children is the summum bonum! It’s not quite wrong, but it isn’t quite fair, either.

Young people get a lot of grief from Boomers, but their confusion wasn’t formed in a vacuum. Sure, university, mass culture, and public schooling all have played a role in bringing about these changes, but Millennials are the products of the Boomers, the first true “Me Generation” in American history.

The shifts in core values reflect the ascendance of a culture of selfishness and mindless consumption, but that culture didn’t come from the Millennials or the Zoomers. Before today’s “Me Generation” came into being, there were the hedonist faux-ascetics of the 1960s who melted their brains with hallucinogens while dabbling in Eastern religions of self-denial to stick it to their uptight suburban parents.

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion

My last report was from the county of Dorset in Britain.  Alas, the time my wife and I had in London came to an end in July.  Still, I will be following like a hawk all the minute manouverings around Brexit as Boris Johnson tries to stop Remainer Tory MPs from hijacking the referendum result and keep the UK in the European Union. Proroguing Parliament, as he has just done, would seem to indicate the new PM is to be taken at his word. If you want to see a perfect example of the elected MPs of a party becoming massively divorced from the core voters who put them in Parliament, you won’t get a better example than the foes who have been, if not foiled, at least muted.

It is estimated that some 70 to 75 per cent of Tory MPs voted ‘Remain’ while some 75 percent of Tory voters opted for ‘Leave’.  With Theresa May, also a Remainer, these Manchurian MPs had their perfect instrument.  Her basic negotiating tactic was to offer the EU nearly everything it wanted right at the start, and do so while promising over a hundred times that Britain would leave at the end of March, and that it would not be subject to the EU’s top court etc etc.  She broke virtually every single promise she made and I do not see how you can put a charitable spin on that — perfidy more than incompetence, in my view.  Only when the Tories slumped to eight per cent in the recent EU elections (which Britain should not have been participating in had Theresa May kept her word) did the party’s MPs realise they were writing the world’s slowest suicide note.  That, and Nigel Farage starting his new Brexit Party, which went from nothing to topping the polls in just seven weeks, forced these Conservative MPs to act.

Only when faced with extinction and the total decimation of their party did the Tories choose ‘Leave’ supporter Boris Johnson as leader and the new Prime Minister.  An analogy is Winston Churchill.  The Tories hated the man in the late 1930s.  They tried to deselect him.  Nothing other than the fact Hitler was rampaging through Europe would ever have seen this party – stacked full of wall-to-wall appeasers –  put him in Number 10.  Boris is no Winston.  But he’s almost as hated by the Remainer faction of his party.  And thus far, fingers crossed, he’s doing exactly what we Leavers need him to be doing.  Notice that some Tory MPs are seemingly prepared to put Jeremy Corbyn in as caretaker PM rather than leave the EU with No Deal.  They all need to be deselected, in my view, for their treachery against the party (look at what it promised at the last election) and against the referendum result.

amgreatness.com/2019/08/29/the-political-class-is-exhausted/

There is a small slice of the American populace who, by their own admission, are exhausted.

No, I do not refer to new moms caring for cranky infants or emergency room nurses working the night shift or tactical officers patrolling the ’hood or farmers plowing their soybean crops.

Our bone-weary countrymen populate opinion magazines, newsrooms, editorial boards, and cable networks up and down the Acela corridor. Their fingertips, nearly stripped of all flesh from excessive tweeting, have lost agility. Heads droop over coffee-stained laptops; they can’t even muster enough energy to brush off the morning’s donut crumbs from the keyboard.

Cognitive fatigue has set in: “How do you spell Haberman again,” they mumble to themselves as they struggle to search the pages of the New York Times. Slippered feet shuffle aimlessly under the desk of their home office. Makeup artists in the MSNBC green room desperately try to conceal dark circles sagging under the eyes of barely-functioning hosts and guests.

Now, one can understand the fatigue associated with a prolonged hangover after a two-year bender on Trump-Russian collusion that came up empty. One can certainly sympathize with talking heads and columnists who want to crawl under the covers after being wrong about nearly everything since 2016. And, really, having to interview Representative Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) for the umpteenth time would take its toll on any mere mortal.

amgreatness.com/2019/08/28/false-crucibles/

Every generation in modern American and, indeed, Western history has had its crucibles. We’ve had the Great War, the Depression, World War II, Korea, Vietnam, the Cold War, and various economic crises and foreign policy challenges. There always have been existential threats to our society requiring maximum exertion.

Through that hardening effort and the concurrent sacrifice, such effort requires, many generations have risen to the occasion. They have gone through their own bloodletting, their own walk through fire, to ensure their survival and the success of our nation and people. In this way, the inner steel of generations of young Americans was tempered.

But not so much for this one.

Pop Culture Familiarity Breeds Contempt

Through a combination of great material affluence and relative economic and military superiority, the young of today did not have to face the life-and-death struggles endured by their recent ancestors.

Given that, there is  a profound narcissistic boredom and we are living with the resulting intellectual lethargy. They have searched for and found the false crucibles of cultural nihilism, political animism, and masochistic socialism.

A sizable number of this generation does not want to grow up, does not wish to mature. It is natural that they would embrace the childish cultural and political norms more usually associated with angst-filled college sophomores.

They engage in a deep conformity to these ersatz deities, startlingly afraid to dig deeper and past the leftist indoctrination of the recent past, lest they arrive at a philosophical or political location that would make them unpopular among their peers and with their institutional leftist superiors. Few have the courage to be an outlier in relation to a popular culture that demands fealty as the price for being considered au courant.

Though these predominantly twentysomethings have come to consider themselves rebels against a supposed white male oligarchy, they parrot the same tired dried out nihilistic clichés and irrational platitudes made intellectually stylish by white males themselves only a couple generations prior. They are offering nothing but warmed-over 1960s schtick.

https://pjmedia.com/victordavishanson/why-socialism-and-why-now/

“Socialist! is no longer a McCarthyite slur.

Rather, the fresh celebrity “Squad” of newly elected identity-politics congresswomen — Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.) and Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) — often either claim to be socialists or embrace socialist ideas. A recent Harris poll showed that about half of so-called millennials would like to live in a socialist country.

Five years ago, septuagenarian Sen. Bernie Sanders (D-Vt.) was considered an irrelevant lone socialist in the U.S. Senate — Vermont’s trademark contribution to cranky quirkiness. But in 2016, Sanders’ improbable Democratic primary run almost knocked off front-runner Hillary Clinton, even as socialist governments were either imploding or stagnating the world over.

After Clinton’s loss to Donald Trump in the 2016 general election, Sanders is back, running as a socialist warhorse, promising endless amounts of free stuff, with those promises suddenly being taken seriously.

Sanders, like the members of the Squad, has limited political power. But the celebrity and social media influence of these new and retread socialists has been on the upswing — especially in the current 21st-century climate of radical transformations in economic and political life.

Note the shock over Clinton’s 2016 defeat, the furor directed at a take-no-prisoners Trump, and sudden progressive criticism of the Obama presidency as too temporizing, weak and ineffectual. And there are still other undercurrents that explain why currently socialism polls so well among young Americans.

College-educated Americans collectively owe an estimated $1.5 trillion in unpaid student loans. Many of these debtors despair of ever paying back the huge sums.