RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/jordan-peterson-and-conservatisms-rebirth-1529101961

Jordan Peterson doesn’t seem to think of himself as a conservative. Yet there he is, standing in the space once inhabited by conservative thinkers such as G.K. Chesterton, C.S. Lewis, Russell Kirk, William F. Buckley Jr. and Irving Kristol. Addressing a public that seems incapable of discussing anything but freedom, Mr. Peterson presents himself unmistakably as a philosophical advocate of order. His bestselling book, “12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos,” makes sense of ideas like the “hierarchy of place, position and authority,” as well as people’s most basic attachments to “tribe, religion, hearth, home and country” and “the flag of the nation.” The startling success of his elevated arguments for the importance of order has made him the most significant conservative thinker to appear in the English-speaking world in a generation.

Mr. Peterson, 56, is a University of Toronto professor and a clinical psychologist. Over the past two years he has rocketed to fame, especially online and in contentious TV interviews. To his detractors, he might as well be Donald Trump. He has been criticized for the supposed banality of his theories, for his rambling and provocative rhetoric, and for his association with online self-help products. He has suffered, too, the familiar accusations of sexism and racism.

From what I have seen, these charges are baseless. But even if Mr. Peterson is imperfect, that shouldn’t distract from the important argument he has advanced—or from its implications for a possible revival in conservative thought. The place to begin, as his publishing house will no doubt be pleased to hear, is with “12 Rules for Life,” which is a worthy and worthwhile introduction to his philosophy.

What I call “splash” news- a blackout of virtually everything else- while pundits parse, praise, and pan high level meetings, is on full display with the recent Kim/Trump summit.

A note of caution; I like Donald Trump and wish him well, but I can’t stop thinking about past “historic meetings”and how they ended.

Nixon/Kissinger went to China in 1972 to meet with Mao Tse Tung , a, ruthless tyrant and mass murderer and enslaver of millions. In resolving to restore relations with China, they abandoned Taiwan a most reliable ally. Now there was a success. Remember Tiananmen Square in 1989? After several weeks of demonstrations, Chinese troops entered Tiananmen Square on June 4 and fired on civilians. Estimates of the death toll range from several hundred to thousands.

Then in 1978 there was the “historic” Camp David Accord signed after Anwar Sadat went to Jerusalem to bark orders at the Knesset demanding full return of the Sinai Penisula (92% of all land captured in 1967 and retained in 1973 after Egypt lost both wars against Israel). He further demanded a got concessions from Menachem Begin, including promises of “autonomy” for the Arab residents of the West Bank. We see what the promise of”autonomy” has led to. And for the record, the “normal relations” that were established did not halt the sermons and schoolbooks calling for Israel’s destruction.

And then there was the “historic” Oslo accord of September 1993, with handshakes all around among Clinton, Rabin and mass murderer and arch terrorist Yasser Arafat on the lawn of the White House. The media cooed and swooned and seasoned statesmen predicted peace at last in the Middle East. The Israelis gave up shrines and towns to Arab control and the Arabs swiftly destroyed them and resumed terror against civilians in markets, buses, beaches, weddings and restaurants, leaving mangled strollers and dead babies still in their cribs.

So I curb my enthusiasm….rsk

Gaza was surrendered to the Arabs in 2005. The lush and productive farms which provided produce to millions of people,, state of the art irrigation technology, and modern and updated gardening tools and equipment were purchased for the local Arabs by two Jewish American philanthropists. In response to “independence” all farms, homes and equipment were trashed and rendered useless as soon as the Israelis vacated. Furthermore, rockets were launched into Israeli population centers. And Gaza was taken over by terrorists who drove the population into chaos, shortages and dismal conditions.

As Andrew Bostom reminds me it was ever thus. For 12 centuries since its Muslim conquest conditions have been brutal. In “Land of Dust”-Palestine at the Turn of a Century” by the late Middle East Scholar Saul S.Friedman, the author describes Gaza:

“Gaza itself, the city of Samson’s torment, proved to be a place of straggling and mean appearance, where 35,000 residents lived in the meanest and most sordid way……The people lived in squalid hovels….their veiled women drew water from brackish wells. And many of the adult males supported themselves by theft or smuggling to the bazaars of Jerusalem.”

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/06/the_end_of_merit.html

Everywhere we look, the principle of merit is compromised or regarded as the worst form of unfairness. Sanctioned mediocrity is now the order of the day. Standards of achievement are diluted, hard work goes unacknowledged, and the desire to excel in one’s field or to accept responsibility for one’s actions and even for one’s failures is in abeyance. Individual talent, intelligence, entrepreneurial success, and personal discipline are dismissed as unjust advantages deriving from the exploitation of the dispossessed. “You didn’t build that,” as Obama notoriously proclaimed. The inevitable result is the devitalizing of political, intellectual, and professional life to the point where a society finds itself in a state of “progressive” deterioration.

Examples abound.

The American (and Canadian) university system is in precipitous freefall, filled with students largely incapable of scholarly ability and civil decorum, professors who do not or cannot teach, gender studies mavens who pollute the curriculum with feminist groupthink, administrators infected by political correctness who propagate “hate speech” laws and shut down controversial debate, and so-called “diversity officers” inimical to diversity of ideas. In effect, the university has opened its doors, in the name of affirmative action, student empowerment, and equity hiring, to a cohort of self-righteous incompetents and mischief-makers. The consequence is predictable. The weak and the undeserving profit at the expense of the shrinking cadre of the committed and the qualified, and society is the worse for it.

Journalism, once a respected profession, has lost its reason for existence, having scrapped its mandate to report on events and to act as public watchdog. Instead, it devotes itself to dishing up propaganda, fake news, and outright lies. Media outlets hire not journalists in the established sense, but journolists, partisan peons poorly trained in linguistic proficiency and utterly devoid of ethical standards. Those who depend on the media for information are thus systematically deceived, leading to a further coarsening of public cognition.

Similarly, our various welfare organizations and government departments, originally conceived as a social safety net, have violated their founding impetus and have come instead to celebrate failure and ineptitude. The ambulance network in drug-infested Vancouver, for example, is too busy responding to its constituency of addicts to provide prompt service to tax-paying citizens. Municipal authorities are dedicated to saving those mired in the throes of self-abuse while ignoring the rightful claimants to paid for social services.

http://thefederalist.com/2018/06/06/no-donald-trump-hasnt-especially-bad-rule-law/

If your contention is that Donald Trump has the propensity to sound like a bully and an authoritarian, I’m with you. If you’re arguing that Trump’s rhetoric is sometimes coarse and un-presidential, I can’t disagree. I’m often turned off by the aesthetic and tonal quality of his presidency. And yes, Trump has an unhealthy tendency to push theories that exaggerate and embellish small truths to galvanize his fans for political gain. Those are all legitimate political concerns.

Yet the ubiquitous claim that Trump acts in a way that uniquely undermines “the rule of law” is, to this point, simply untrue.

At National Review, Victor Davis Hanson has it right when he argues that “elites” often seem more concerned about the “mellifluous” tone of leaders rather than their abuse of power. “Obama defies the Constitution but sounds ‘presidential,’” he writes, “Trump follows it but sounds like a loudmouth from Queens.”

But while Obama’s agreeable tone had plenty to do with his lack of media scrutiny, many largely justified, and even cheered, his abuses because they furthered progressive causes. But not only did liberals often ignore “the rule of law” when it was ideologically convenient, they now want the president to play by a set of rules that doesn’t even exist.

Partisans always tend to conflate their own policy preferences with “rule of law” — or “democracy” or “patriotism.” Even taking that tendency into consideration, the pervasive claim that Trump undermines law typically amounts to little more than questions of how he comports himself. Rarely, if ever, does it have anything to do with the Constitution.

The Normandy Invasion, also called Operation Overlord, was launched on June 6, 1944 with the simultaneous landing of American,British, and Canadian forces on five separate beachheads in Normandy,France. By the end of August 1944 all of northern France was liberated, and the invading forces reorganized for the drive into Germany where they would eventually meet with Soviet forces advancing from the east to bring an end to the Nazi killing machine and an end to the Holocaust.

Two brothers Henry King, age 21 and George King 24 were killed on the beaches only a few days apart. In President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s letter to my husband’s grieving family, he stated:

“…..Freedom lives and through it he lives in a way that humbles the undertakings of most men….”

Freedom, alas, did not live for the millions upon millions who were enslaved and murdered by the communist tyrannies of the Soviet Union and China when World War 2 was over. Read ” Reflections on a Ravaged Century” by the late and incomparable historian Robert Conquest.

The near miraculous rescue of Dunkirk was completed on June 4th, 1940. The last of the British soldiers left on June 3 under heavy fire and strafing and bombing by the Nazis. Churchill ordered the Royal Navy to return on 4 June to the French rearguard.
Altogether, about 338,000 men were rescued in the Dunkirk evacuation, including 123,000 French soldiers – 26,000 French on that final day.

“We must be very careful,not to assign this deliverance the attributes of a victory. Wars are not won by evacuations…..We shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end. We shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air…..We shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be. We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.”

http://thefederalist.com/2018/06/02/whats-next-conservatism/

Conservatives tend to be skeptical of joining great political movements because they tend to be skeptical of both politics and movements that are great. They prefer the little platoon, the shire, which they know to be safe—or at least probably safer than what lies beyond. Not all politics may be local, but all politics that isn’t local tends toward the totalitarian, however far short of it it may actually fall.

That sounds almost like a philosophy of government—though not a government that any American alive today has experienced. But times can change, and they have with the election of Donald Trump. Conservatives who have been asking, “Where do we go from here?” have discovered the answer may be: “Where Donald Trump is going.”

Most conservatives and many Libertarians saw the conservatism of William F. Buckley Jr., the founder of modern American conservatism, as a compromise (today’s Libertarians tend to see it as just compromised). Buckley was a free marketeer who opposed radical social experimentation. But he accepted the superstate (even knowing it was a threat to freedom at home) because it was necessary to do battle with the threat to freedom from abroad: communism, the force of darkness that threatened the globe for almost half a century.

Today’s young Libertarians, who came of age as Ronald Reagan was readying history’s dust bin for the Evil Empire, think the previous age consistently overrated communism’s threat. It didn’t; and the youngsters should show more respect for the analytical ability and survivalist instincts of their freedom-loving forebears whose blood ran strong for so long—even as they should respect their forebears’ desire to preserve a culture free from, and opposed to, radical social experimentation unmoored from the truths and traditions that sustained Western Civilization for centuries.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/06/does_gun_control_lead_to_genocide.html

Rational conversations about gun control are difficult to come by. Hyperbole as well as deliberate misstatements only lead to emotional tirades. With this in mind, I will tread carefully toward illuminating the question posed by this article.

In their 1997 paper titled “Of Holocausts and Gun Control,” Daniel D. Polsby and Don B. Kates, Jr. note:

The question of genocide is one of manifest importance in the closing years of a century that has been extraordinary for the quality and quantity of its bloodshed. As Elie Wiesel has rightly pointed out, ‘This century is the most violent in recorded history. Never have so many people participated in the killing of so many people.’

Yet:

Contemporary scholars have little explored the preconditions of genocide. Still less have they asked whether a society’s weapons policy [contributes] to the probability of its government engaging in some of the more extreme varieties of outrage. Though it is a long step between being disarmed and being murdered – one does not usually lead to the other – … it is nevertheless an arresting reality that not one of the principal genocides of the twentieth century, and there have been dozens, has been inflicted on a population that was armed.

Considering the point that “one does not usually lead to the other,” some factual background might be useful.

In 1929, the Soviet Union established gun control. From 1929 to 1953, 20 million dissidents were rounded up and murdered.

An account by Gabriella Hoffman, who writes “My Family Fled Communism. Stop Pushing Soviet-Style Gun Control Here,” highlights this history.

Compared to the United States, Soviet-occupied Lithuania was gun-free except for those in elite governmental positions. My dad always said the Soviets succeeded in oppressing Lithuanians and others by first disarming them. I always knew he was right, but aimed to confirm his assertions. Low [sic] and behold, he was right about gun confiscation as a pretext to installing tyranny in a country.

Here’s a case study from Firearms Possession by Non-State Actors: The Question of Sovereignty (2004) published in the Texas Review of Law & Politics.