(by Dlanorrenrag*)
WHILE ACADEMIA SLEPT:
A civilization’s ideals affect what it and its members become and how they evolve or morph.
No imperfect, incomplete mortal can very long perfectly live up to ideals, yet each of us can come closer if we at least recognize and share ideals towards which we aspire.
A civilization, through its leaders, needs skill and vision to sense and plot the values and ideals it needs to inspire, in order to compete and flourish.
To not succumb, a healthy civilization needs vision and will enough at least to identify its challenges (stability, sustainability, and surpassability of environment and population) and to name its challengers (tick-academics, value-nihilists, death-dealers, doper-hedonists, trust-breakers, poverty-pimps, inspired-cynics, business-thugs, political-usurpers, and idea-fundamentalists).
Upon identifying its challenges, civilization may better identify the values and ideals that can surmount such challenges, so that leaders may at least more clearly perceive and inspire that which cries out to be done.
If academics and scientists are so damn much more “rational” than spiritual leaders, then why have they not yet approached, or made any discernible or measurable headway in, the challenge to identify and inspire that which civilization needs to do in order to flourish or at least to remain viable?
What the hell are Western academics doing, apart from sleeping through the systematic deconstruction and trashing of every traditional value of Western Civilization, in order to substitute each new short-sighted, Balkan-empowering, hedonistic-toleration du jour?
Viewing the demographic trends of Western Civilization, what the majority of its academics call “rational” appears instead to be impotent, inept, and insane! For God’s sake, Western brains need to be shaken, if not stirred!
****
From http://www.csmonitor.com/2001/1002/p13s1-leca.html :
“While we in academia slept, the terrorists were planning their next attack. We didn't study this according to our intellectual traditions.”
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11 comments:
See this: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/21/opinion/21friedman.html?th&emc=th
Obama is callow and unseasoned (I dread having to hear his platitudes for years — at least Bush’s bushisms convey some comic relief), but Obama is no more callow than many politicians. He hardly deserves to be demagoged as Anti-Christ.
I recently had the audacity to watch An Inconvenient Truth. I also read an in depth book about global warming. The upshot is that Al Gore’s facts are stretched. Yet, his underlying message remains much more worthy than Limbaugh, et al, allow.
For the life of me, I fail to appreciate why we should go about with business as usual, even as population and CO2 projections explode.
Something is out of balance in The Force (or in our water). But I sense that no modern political party has leadership or cajones (will) for establishing and enforcing bounds needed to prevent civilization from sinking.
I am hard pressed to appreciate what bounds of social decency our leaders among Democrats would preserve, nor what bounds of economic decency our leaders among Republicans would not trample.
I wish the DNC had cajones to nominate Al Gore. Flawed as he may be, he is better than the offerings now before us. Failing that, I go to McCain. (Unless Morpheus finds Neo.)
Re: "getting out of here while the gettin's good"
The more unbalanced we become, the more the Y2K justification for overloading our progeny seems to grow stronger --- at least with the more calloused among us.
But "I" deconstruct almost everything -- even death.
"I" expect, in some respect, we will be back.
Not saying that is necessarily a good thing, but karma needs a few good laughs.
Who knows --- next time, the Supremes may rule for Gore.
From Randy:
In An Inconvenient Truth I thought the graph of projected world population growth pretty much told the story. I think that will surely doom the politically unattainable remedies. At our age, I think we'll be getting out of here while the gettin's good.
See http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/05/22/AR2008052203016.html
Obama seems a pleasant fellow, but is dangerously self deluded about the extent of his callowness. A course is not wise merely because it is opposite that of Bush.
Unfortunately, in the "science" of persuasion (of jurors, buyers, and voters), the role for rationality is far inferior to that for style.
Indeed, considering the disproportionate number of academics who tilt left, I wonder how great is the role for rationality among academics --- would they really make better jurors?
Wanting stylish absurdity, we are surely poised to get it.
But, before we take a deep dive into the pool of Obama's brain, I hope someone notices there is not much water in the pool.
Talk about a leap of faith!
"Surely he will do no worse than Bush."
Affirmative. We will not get decent leadership until we begin no longer to drink so deeply of what our leaders and educators falsely present as a happy-face-on-a-stick choice between a philosophy of noble lies vs. cynical deceit.
Those moral-zombie philosophies are just different flavors of the same false drink. See http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/28/dining/28flavor.html?th&emc=th.
In other words, politicians will not tell us the truth until we begin to deserve it. See http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/28/opinion/28friedman.html?_r=1&th&emc=th&oref=slogin.
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Surely he will do no worse than Bush (who has shown no interest in meetings or discussions with anyone who does not bow to him). Perhaps it is a mistake to have meetings or talks with those who we have designated as enemies, however the current administration's arrogance has not won us any friends or admirers, has not furthered the cause of peace, or made us safer, nor has it lead to any great successes I am aware of. Rather, we are the butt of jokes and ridicule by much of the free world. He reminds me of the "Emperor who had no clothes."
We have lost much prestige and respect by our rush to war and regardless of what policies we may implement, our great country may never recover its former glory and reputation. History has shown that superpowers come and go - we have fallen far, lets hope we do not continue on the way down.
I am very sad about the condition of our country and have no doubt that we will finally get what we deserve. We had best stop tearing each other apart and do some soul searching. Continuing the same flawed policies that have gotten us into this mess - it just keeps getting worse. Obviously, some new ideas and policies are needed.
See:
http://www.newsmax.com/kessler/McClellan_credibility/2008/05/28/99674.html
McClellan is not much of a man.
Bush's blunder was more in the management of the aftermath than in the decision to invade Iraq.
McClellan just pours gas on the big lie technique now adopted by the last defenders of Marxism, i.e., the VRGF (vast romantically gay farce). The jihadis plainly tell us, everyday, of their intentions. But the VRGF think the jihadis' promise to give the West a swift hard kick in the ass is only an idle threat. After all, mommies and daddies of the VRGF never followed thorugh to give their progeny one.
The West is being undone by a worldview that finds no support in history or in common sense, but only in romantically gay imaginations.
Consequences of this farce will be high; if justice prevails, consequences will be visited first upon Marxist gay romantics (i.e., letists).
Accept less Rosseau, more Voltaire.
There they go again ....
MCCLELLAN AS PIGGY:
From http://www.townhall.com/columnists/KathleenParker/2008/05/30/revenge_of_the_nerd?page=full&comments=true :
Adding to the humiliation of being inarticulate in front of the national media were the incessant characterizations of McClellan as a loser. Michael Wolff's Vanity Fair profile was particularly brutal and, perhaps, predictive of the revenge to come. McClellan, Wolff wrote, seemed to have "some terrible social disability," and had become a "kick-me archetype" in the press briefing room. "He's Piggy in 'Lord of the Flies': a living victim, whose reason for being is, apparently, to shoulder public ridicule and pain (or, come to think of it, he's Squealer from 'Animal Farm'). He's the person nobody would ever choose to be."
Few can read those words and not feel some empathy for McClellan -- the picked-on boy who just wanted to be one of the cool guys. With few friends and no respect from peers, it seems entirely plausible that McClellan began plotting his revenge long ago. That behind his flaccid facade of befuddled calm was a focused mind marking time.
He would show the Bushies -- and he would show the world -- that Scott McClellan was nobody's chump.
Fast-forward to this week and McClellan is no longer a socially disabled, farcical figure bullied by the press, but king of the bully pulpit -- a triumph of lucidity. All he had to do was switch sides and say what the vast majority of Americans already believe.
Who's the fool now?
Unfortunately for the short, unhappy political life of Scott McClellan, the boy who squealed all the way home may be stuck with the title after all. Because no matter how sweet the revenge, on the playground, the snitch is trusted by no one.
See also http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2008/05/mcclellan_book_published_by_so.html
LEFT CAN’T HANDLE REALITY:
See also http://www.americanthinker.com/2008/05/true_liberals_must_be_appeaser.html :
All modern liberals must be appeasers --- because that's their ideology. They constantly proclaim to the world that peace-at-any-price is their single, greatest, overarching goal. The older generation of American liberals would never say that --- it would sound obviously stupid to them --- but they are now gone.
Conservatives have a more tragic view of life; we tend to think that in a world filled with aggressors, civilized nations must be willing to go to war. That means war in all its messy reality --- not just Clinton's Kosovo War where you never see the blood. Conservatives want to live in peace like any sensible human being. We just know there is not a single shred of evidence that we can have peace without armed vigilance. Efforts to do it, like the racist and anti-democratic UN, always turn into some morally grotesque reality show.
Like Great Britain a century ago, the United States is now the world cop, along with a few reliable allies. Without us, there would be no stable peace in the world. History has put us in that path; we can refuse it, but we would have to live with the consequences. Who else would you like to be in charge? Russia? China? Europe, which could not even get 30 transport helicopters together recently, just to rescue refugees in war-ravaged Chad? Europe loves to scream at us, but it will never step up to the responsibility we bear. Morally speaking, Europe is a hostile welfare addict. They love us only when they need us.
Liberals demand metaphysical certainty on such questions as going to war against Saddam. But that's just another pipe dream. There are no life decisions where knowledge is perfect, certainly not when it comes to a criminal tyranny like Saddam's.
....
If you tell Ahmadi-Nejad that, as a true Leftist, peace is your overarching goal, he instantly knows you've lost. Remember, this is the culture of the shrewd Persian rug merchant. They know how to read the cards. Fanatics like A'jad are driving for victory, not peace. They are willing to sacrifice much, much more than any Western nation.
Since 9/11 liberals have made it clear in a thousand little ways that they are just not willing to resist a suicide-bombing enemy. They don't have the moral fiber, and they always misunderstand reality. Starting from false premises, the Left always ends up with false conclusions. It is stunning to behold, but just look at Carter, Clinton and Obama. Self-righteous, blind-as-a-bat, and adored by the bubbleheads.
A few months ago 91 Iraqi civilians were blown up by two mental patients suffering from Down Syndrome, their bomb probably triggered by remote control. None of the American media made a fuss about the atrocity. They're never going to blame the actual criminals.
....
For the enemy, killing civilians is a matter of policy. Liberals keep missing that point, desperately looking for "root causes." For fanatics the root cause is always ideology.
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Bin Laden's recent audio messages openly celebrate 9/11 as a great victory. But the American Left just avoids thinking about it. They are convinced the United States is the enemy of civilization. They adore Europe, instead, without understanding that we, the United States, have been keeping the peace for Europe for sixty years. The Europeans do the very minimum possible to keep themselves safe; and with welfare chewing up their money, their military budgets are constantly shrinking, along with their courage and common sense. Without us there would be no peaceful Europe and no peaceful Middle East.
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If we'd never had smilin' Jimmy in the White House, a pro-Western Shah would now be making Iran prosperous and largely peaceful, something like India and China. Iran would help stabilize the Middle East, as it did under Shah Reza Pahlavi. The price of oil would be lower than it is today, because tanker traffic through the Gulf would not be at risk as it is now. The murderous Iran-Iraq war could have been avoided entirely, because Saddam Hussein would not have attacked a powerful American ally. More than a million lives would have been saved if Jimmy Carter had just told the Shah of Iran to hang on.
That was the real price of Jimmy's appeasement.
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If Barack Obama took over as president of the United States, all the thwarted tyrants in the world would see their big chance. They would quickly test American resolve, just as JFK was tested by the Soviets. The Chinese might seriously threaten Taiwan, which they think is theirs by right. Russia might move on Georgia and the Ukraine. Hugo Chavez might invade Columbia, just to try out his shiny new Russian jets and tanks. Under Obama, the United States might not be serious about international power, but all the hungry little tyrannies will be very serious indeed. It's their big opportunity.
....
The Left cannot escape responsibility for 9/11, for the mullah tyranny in Iran, and for undermining American security in a thousand other ways. These folks are dangerous, not because they are stupid or evil, but just because they just can't handle reality. It's like a truck driver who can't see the oncoming traffic. The driver doesn't get credit for good intentions. The Left always forgives itself these little gaffes, but reality is unforgiving.
MISOVERESTIMATING PRESIDENT:
From http://www.americanthinker.com/2008/05/blame_bush_for_mcclelland.html :
They are all shocked because one thing has been consistent about this President: his "misoverstimation" of his own charm and its effect on those around him -- political allies and enemies alike. This misoverstimation is the psychosis behind the New Tone, the Kennedy Education Bill, looking into the soul of Vladimir Putin, the whole misguided concept of "compassionate conservatism"....and the belief that elevating little worms like McClellan to heights far beyond what their talents merit will be repaid with kindness.
CONSENSUS TRANCE / 1000 YARD STARE:
From http://jewishworldreview.com/cols/sowell042908.php3 :
One of the painful aspects of studying great catastrophes of the past is discovering how many times people were preoccupied with trivialities when they were teetering on the edge of doom. The demographics of the presidency are far less important than the momentous weight of responsibility that office carries.
HOPE:
From http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/30/opinion/30brooks.html?_r=1&th&emc=th&oref=slogin :
Your job is to restrain Iran’s momentum until the fundamental correlation of forces can shift. For amid all the doleful news, there is a hopeful tide. Opinion is turning slowly against extremism. The über-analyst Dennis Ross says that he has noted it among the Palestinians. Michael Young writes that opinion is shifting against Hezbollah in Lebanon. Peter Bergen, Paul Cruickshank and Lawrence Wright have in their different ways written about the intellectual crisis afflicting Al Qaeda. It may not happen over the next four years, but as Ross has noted, where Islamists rule, they wear out their welcome.
Your job may be to wage rear-guard political battles until the ideological tide can turn. It’s not glamorous work, but governing isn’t campaigning. You volunteered for this.
While Marxist Leftist Brains Slept:
From http://www.americanthinker.com/2008/05/reality_check_on_the_mullahs.html :
I have been warning that it is a deadly miscalculation to engage in infighting, and sit and wait out this emerging catastrophe. It is little more than an exercise in denial to believe that nothing bad will happen, and that the corrupt inept Mullahs will likely shoot themselves in the foot instead of wreaking havoc on the world. I also keep pleading that we should forthwith help the Iranian democratic oppositions send the death-bearer Mullahs back to their mosques. It is the free world's best and most urgent option.
What sane person would want to take a chance to wait and see if the mad Mullahs, once they have the bomb, would use it or not?
See also http://amilimani.com/.
From http://amilimani.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=102&Itemid=2 :
“Europe will be Muslim in a dozen years,” promises the Islamic Republic of Iran’s Supreme Guide (dictator) who is racing full-speed ahead to make as many bombs as possible with long-range missiles capable of delivering their payload anywhere in the world.
....
America, with a long history of protecting religious freedom, still clings to the “hands off” practice of leaving alone any doctrine or practice billed as religion. A thorny problem is in deciding what constitutes a religion and who is to make that call. The dictionary supplies a sociologically useless definition for religion: “The expression of man’s belief in and reverence for a superhuman power recognized as the creator and governor of the universe.” Just about anyone or any group under this definition can start a religion, and they indeed do—and some do so at significant costs to others.
....
Bluntly speaking, no one can be a faithful Muslim and an American at the same time. As more and more Muslims arrive in non-Islamic lands, as they reproduce with great fecundity, as they convert the disenchanted and minorities, and as petrodollar-flush Muslims and Muslim treasuries supply generous funds, Muslims gather more power to undermine the democratic rule.
From http://jonjayray.tripod.com/hitler.html :
Clearly, the idea that Hitler was a Rightist is probably the most successful BIG LIE of the 20th Century. He was to the Right of the Communists but that is all. Nazism was nothing more nor less than a racist form of Leftism (rather extreme Leftism at that) and to label it as "Rightist" or anything else is to deny reality.
....
It was the Left who were on Hitler's side, not the conservatives. And the Left were on his side because he was one of them.
From http://www.americanthinker.com/2008/05/how_cryptomarxism_won_the_cold.html :
Liberals are upset today because free-market economies are growing too fast, and are therefore polluting an unsullied Mamma Earth. Tens of millions of ordinary people in China and India are doing too well. The elites seem to yearn for the good old days --- the famines in India, the massacres in Russia and China --- and that wonderful sense of being in charge of human progress.
And yet ... in spite of years and years Leftist catastrophes, our organs of propaganda are still tilting drunkenly to the Left. Crypto-Marxism, a barely disguised revival of the old farce, is flourishing in our chattering classes. The prestige that Marxism lost in the real world soon came back in fantasy. Oh, if people only loved one another! Oh, if people only cared! Oh, if we only had real solidarity with the wretched of the earth! That's the feel-good story. But the real yearning is for power: Oh, if only people like us were in charge of everything.
In Britain, under the daily pounding of the Bolshie Beeb, the most admired "philosopher" of all time is now ... blood-dripping old Karl Marx. Freedom is routinely trashed; thieving tyrants like Hugo Chavez are celebrated.
"Crypto Marxism" --- crypto meaning "hidden" --- is a useful word to describe what's happened in the last twenty years. Because as soon as the Soviet Union crumbled, a host of barely disguised post-Marxist ideologies grabbed the microphones: the Green Movement, now furiously peddling global warming fraud; Third Way socialism in Europe, trying to hitch the welfare wagon to free markets; the European Union, a new autocracy of unelected committees, exactly what the USSR used to call "workers' Soviets"; the unbelievably corrupt, bigoted and self-serving United Nations; and all over the academic world, an explosion of anti-Western and anti-democratic fads like Post-Modernism, Multi-Culturalism, Deconstructionism, Feminism, anti-Zionism, Black Liberation Theology and other repackaged Marx imitations. It was a triumph of image-making and marketing.
Today, crypto-Marxism dominates our political discourse. It's wild --- just as if Nazi goose stepping had became a popular sport after World War Two, instead of the hula-hoop. The Nazis were horrific in their thirteen years in power. The Marxists had seventy years in the Soviet Union, and managed to kill 100 million people according to Marxist historians themselves. But here we are, twenty years later, and all that is deliberately wiped from our minds.
....
As Rush Limbaugh often says, conservatives stopped teaching when the Soviet Union fell. Marxists, on the other hand, just accelerated their propaganda. Privately they mourned the "idealistic" experiment of the Soviet Union --- never confessing their own, whole-hearted participation in unrelenting evil. The Boomer Lefties rose to power in the 1970s, and they were not going to sacrifice their religiomania just because all the Marxist nations walked away from Marx. (Except for North Korea, which is still as murderously Stalinist as ever.)
In fact, without the Soviets our hard-core Leftists were no longer agents of a foreign power --- as the KGB archives showed that many of them were during decades of Moscow's control. So they could pretend to be running different "idealistic" movements: Red changed to Green, but that was it. The mainstream media learned to peddle that old Daily Worker agitprop instead of real news, until talk radio and the web broke the media monopoly, and conservatism revived. In Europe this is only barely beginning to happen.
Since 9/11 the Left has been telling itself how really patriotic it is --- providing that you redefine patriotism as internationalism, just like the old CP USA. And of course, the vitally important history of the Cold War is being written by the hard-core Left. It's just as if the Confederate South controlled the history of the Civil War.
....
The triumph of crypto-Marxism is not just weird, it's dangerous. The Reds haven't changed. They have just metastatized: That is why we are now so vulnerable to the next wave of totalitarianism, the Islamofascist kind. The long struggle of Western civilization against bloody tyranny is being covered up. The very real danger of new totalitarianism is being dismissed.
We have to start teaching again from scratch.
Well, that's how it is.
Note to conservatives: You don't win a war until the histories are written.
Roll up your sleeves and go to it. There's work to do.
QUOTES FOUND IN THE AMERICAN THINKER:
Yes, of course, words matter, as many leaders of ambitious movements have mightily declared.
...the power which has always started the greatest religious and political avalanches in history rolling has from time to immemorial been the magic of power of the spoken word, and that alone.
Particularly the broad masses of the people can be moved only by the power of speech.
(Author: - Adolph Hitler, Mein Kampf)
"...it would be illusory and dangerous to ignore the intimate bond which radically unites them (liberation theologies), and to accept elements of the marxist analysis without recognizing its connections with the (Marxist) ideology, or to enter into the practice of the class-struggle and of its marxist interpretation while failing to see the kind of totalitarian society to which this process slowly leads."
- (Author: Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Prefect, now Pope Benedict XVI; written in 1984)
Quotes From The Audacity of Hope:
"In the history of these (African people's) struggles, I was able to see faith as more than just a comfort to the weary or a hedge against death; rather, it was an active, palpable agent in the world." (p. 207)
"It was because of these newfound understandings (at Trinity under Wright) -- that religious commitment did not require me to suspend critical thinking, disengage from the battle for economic and social justice...that I was finally able to walk down the aisle of Trinity...and be baptized."
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