What Leftism Does to People
News Photo of Occupy Wall Street... or possibly a still from "Night of the Living Dead."
The true test of a philosophy is not what it promises to make of the world but what it makes, in fact, of its adherents. Human nature is remarkably recalcitrant, but ideas do affect people over time, for good or ill, and the societies people make will ultimately bear the image of those effects and thus of the ideas. When historian Paul Johnson, in his book Intellectuals, detailed the often vicious and demented lives of such thinkers as Rousseau, Shelley, and Marx, he was not engaging in casual ad hominem attacks, or playing gotcha with our universal tendencies toward weakness, perversion, and moral failure. He was attempting to trace both the origins and the consequences of his subjects’ philosophical errors. Our beliefs arise from who we are and we become what we believe, a process which, according to our choices, can either resemble a spiral staircase heavenward or a flushing toilet. To him who has, more will be given, and from him who has not, even what he has will be taken away.
Leftism is bad for people. It makes them awful. The unwashed, ill-mannered, anti-Semitic, entitled, and now violent mobs littering various parts of the nation under the banner “Occupy” believe their ideas will lead to a better society — but they actually are the society their ideas lead to. Their behavior when compared to the polite, law-abiding, non-racist demonstrations of so-called tea partiers tells you everything you need to know about the end results of statism on the one hand and constitutional liberty on the other.
This is not, of course, to say that every left-winger is a miscreant but rather that the natural, indeed inevitable, result of statism is to produce nations of miscreants. When the state is permitted to make the individual’s moral choices, the individual is forced to become either a slave or a criminal; when the state is permitted to redistribute wealth, it chains the citizen into a rigid, two-tiered hierarchy of power rather than freedom’s fluid, multi-layered rankings of merit and chance; when the people are taught to be dependent on entitlements, they are reduced to violence when, inevitably, the entitlement well runs dry; when belief in the state usurps every higher creed, the people become apathetic, hedonistic, and uncreative and their culture slouches into oblivion. I need hardly expend the energy required to lift my finger and point to Europe where cities burn because the unemployable are unemployed or because the hard-working won’t fund the debts of the indolent; where violent and despicable Islamism eats away portions of municipalities like a cancer while the authorities do nothing; where nations that once produced history’s greatest achievements in science and the arts can now no longer produce even enough human beings to sustain themselves.
You know, I keep recommending your articles on Facebook and whenever I’m challenged on them it seems to turn into a personal attack, not a debate about the issues. Why do you suppose that is?
LOL. Why indeed…
Hmm, that’s funny, last time I checked in on the OWS movement I saw a Marine Corp veteran who had just served two tours of Iraq, get shot in the head by some renegade cops. The young man who was shot did not strike me as some mad, unwashed “anti-semitic” zealot (I’m amazed that people try to pin this lable on the movement. Really it’s too bad, because it means that when real anti-semitism actually occurs, people are going not going to believe it, having heard “wolf!” cried so many times). No, I think this 24 year old Marine veteran, Scott Olsen, was simply a young patriot exercising his 1st amendment rights, along with thousands of others across the country. Support America, Support capitalism – but fair, merit based capitalism, not one based on handing over endless tax dollars to banks. Support our troops. Support fellow Americans right to disagree with you. As much as you may hate to admit it, they may actually have a point. Constantly raving about anti-semites is unproductive, and sort of pathetic too. God bless.
Not once have I heard any OWS protesters say “We support ‘merit-based capitalism.’”
What I hear is “Smash the Capitalist State!”…”Marx Was Right!”…etc.
We’ve now seen surveys of who most of these OWS protesters are. They are far-left radicals, professional protesters who cut their teeth on the anti-globalization riots of the 1990s. They despise capitalism, period.
And what of that “Iraq War veteran” that the Left is glorifying? Not all war veterans are the same, you know. I remember when Veterans for Peace was actually giggling over the 9-11 atrocity. It’s probably still on YouTube somewhere.
There’s no doubt that there is a radical element, but I would say they remain a minority, and a highly visible minority, because those are the people the news cameras like to focus on and interview. The tea party had its share of crackpots as well, no? Any mass movement will have its center and its peripheral elements. I think that at the heart of the Occupy Wall Street movement is this idea that the 1% has obtained its mind boggling wealth at the expense of normal hard-working, middle class Americas. It is absurd for middle class Americans to support banking tycoons in the name of capitalism, Adam Smith, the invisible hand, etc. You can be pro-capitalism (and I am) and still criticise banks, the two are not mutually exclusive. The financial sector has basically been a big leach for the last twenty years, supplanting America’s industrial might, destroying its productive capacity and generally running the entire American economy into the ground. They have been bailed out numerous times at tax payers expense and yet still insist on their obscene bonuses. They are not rich out of merit, they are rich in the same way that mafia dons are rich, because they are ruthless, unscrupulous, unpatriotic and have bought off the political class and large parts of the media. This to me, is why I would go to the protest: because I am against that one percent, whether Democrat or Republican, they have made this country weaker. And incidentally, I think it takes all kinds of soldiers to make an Army, Republican, Democrat, Independent, black, white, hispanic, whatever, if they love their country and want to fight for it, Respect.
I have seen with my own eyes who the OWS are ( I watch the news on both sides, I read the paper on both sides, I go on line and look at both sides). Yes there are some middle aged hippies, but mostly 19 to 25 year old’s whining about their personal plight in live, most of whom know nothing of politics, nothing of capitalism, nothing of marxism, nothing of economics or banking, nothing of Barnie Frank/Chris Dodd and their Fannie/Freddie highjinx and generally have nothing to teach a retired business man of 62 who started 7 companies and employed hundreds of people with good pay and dignity along the way.
They are led, fed and bed by well trained organizers of the radical left. The simple research that has been done on the street by several people (never mind the love affair with the MSM) has shown these groups to be a wild mix of uninformed zombie marxists, anarchists and homeless (the latter of course still around from that dreadful president Reagan and what HE and the republicans “who eat babies and hate the poor” did to them?).
This is your future America, look at it hard when you vote. Do we really want these people dictating our future.
They have nothing to tell me except how I will vote. Unfortunately they have been handed much more power than they deserve.
Thanks
Anton Cowley wrote, “last time I checked in on the OWS movement I saw a Marine Corp veteran who had just served two tours of Iraq, get shot in the head by some renegade cops.”
The level of argument you put forward is primitive in the extreme. You know nothing of this Marine Corp veteran except that he was a victim of the police. Being a random victim of a police action does not make one worthy of praise or of damnation. He could be a wonderful, sweet, altruistic person who seeks the benefit of mankind at every turn or he could be an evil person who has tortured his parents, raped his girl friends and made any of his unfortunate offspring sorry for the day they were born.
More important, perhaps, is that bringing an example of a single individual can NEVER be more than interesting. He may be a typical OWS supporter or an exception. Mr. Klaven at least attempts a broad picture under the presumption that what you see is what you get. His conclusion is worthy of serious consideration – that a larger world modeled upon the microcosm of the current OWS crowd would not be pleasant or a viable model for humanity for the long haul.
AGREE. The Marine issue is a lame excuse as “top cover” for a group of protesters who, in my view from what I have seen, all scream socialism, communism, incoherent speech, and none have articulated anything remotely close to “Support America, Support capitalism – but fair, merit based capitalism” as ANTON has stated.
Anyway, thank you Mr. Klavan for the humor and satire I so love! I share your stuff all the time and just love it. Wish more people could see it, understand it, and smile at its familiarity with today’s liberal bias and ideology.
Vote Ross Perot 2012!
Kudos to you Larsky. You worked hard, lived the American dream, employed people, did your share. But don’t forget that your generation, the Baby Boomers, had it better than any generation in the history of the United States, perhaps the world. This current generation of young people, that you say form the majority of the OWS, are facing a very different situation than you did in your twenties, back when America actually made things. Tell me, how much did going to college cost back then? Probably pretty close to free. Many of these same 19-25 year olds you say are “whining about their plight” probably owe tens of thousands of dollars on the loans they took out to finance their education. And now they can’t find a job. When the Baby Boomers were that age, in the post war years, there was pretty much full employment: now only 46% of young people between 19 and 25 yrs. old have a job. And that’s not because they’re lazy. IT’S BECAUSE THERE ARE NO JOBS OUT THERE. And now they have these huge debts and no way to pay them. The banks own them.I don’t know about you, but if I were them I’d be demonstrating too. Take a look around. This economy has been destroyed. There are tent cities in America, under freeway overpasses, in vacant lots. Type “American tent city” into Google. These are middle class people who worked hard and got screwed. I don’t think we need to worry about the homeless “dictating” our future. Or crazed marxists. We all know that’s not going to happen. What could happen to some people, probably a lot of people, is that they’ll lose their job, or get some terrible disease that isn’t covered in their health insurance (if they have any), they’ll hold on for a while, do the best they can, hope for better days, and then one day they’ll get a knocl on the door and it’ll be the sheriff, there to kick them out of their house. So who’s homeless now? It’s a very different time. You’re obviously smart, but you also had the good fortune to go into business when the United States was still a meritocracy, when education was all but free, and when the financial was still actually doing what it’s supposed to do. This current generation of young people are screwed. Go to an OWS camp and talk to them. They’re much smarter than you think.
The truth is the Marine was injured by his own chosen slugs, the OWS crazies so get up to date. Like Reagan said “The problem with democrats is they know so much that isn’t so”. Democrats haven’t changed since then, they are all still America haters and liars.
The first amendment doesn’t protect a right to riot and the misguided Marine vet was not shot but was almost certainly hit by a teargas canister. I’m sure that many young veterans are hurting in this economy but joining the Donner Party protests will not solve that problem.
It has come out that Olson website is IHateTheMarines.com. He is also anti-Jew.
The leftist provokoteurs tried their best to incite a riot. They are in search of a victim. You have tried to make Olson your poster boy and he is he is foul cheese.
It was a gas grenade, he was not “shot” (as perhaps you imply).
Education wasn’t free for me, my friend and I knew that a Degree in English or Art History probably wouldn’t have cut it.
I’m at the tail end of the Baby Boomer Generation. I’ve had a great life (based on my merit) and due to other factors, none of them my own, my lifestyle has changed. What I had planned and saved for was decimated recently. I’ve never lived beyond my means and paid most of my bills on time. I saved for my children’s education, but it wasn’t enough at crunch time, so they had to take out some loans.
My oldest son graduated with a business degree from a good school two years ago and got a great job as did many of his friends. His friends that got the English and Art history degrees….not so much.
I’ll admit that his loans will cramp his style, but so what. He’ll pay them off, like any responsible person should.
I had loans that I paid off. I have a mortgage that I’m paying off. Why should I, he or anyone pay off anyone else’s?
Didn’t John Kerry serve in Viet Nam as well as that windbag, Murtha?
I agree with some of the protester’s opinions. It’s just too bad the movement has been hijacked by the left and there isn’t really any cohesive message. I’m hearing a lot of sexual abuse, robbery and drug use of late. I think it’s time to stick a fork in them.
You say: “I think that at the heart of the Occupy Wall Street movement is this idea that the 1% has obtained its mind boggling wealth at the expense of normal hard-working, middle class Americas. It is absurd for middle class Americans to support banking tycoons in the name of capitalism, Adam Smith, the invisible hand, etc. ”
You parrot the Marxist economic philosophy perfectly. Marx and OWS believe that rich people get rich at the expense of the poor. This has been proved false a thousand times over but this falsehood remains the core of the OWS movement.
Maybe even you will understand this simple example. If I build a garden shed with my own hands and my neighbor does not I am richer than him by one shed. But he is no poorer. Wealth is created. OWS isn’t smart enough to understand that. I hope you are.
Great comment. That about says it all in a nutshell.
“Shot in the head???” That’s not what I read in news accounts. He was hit on the head by a tear gas cannister by an unknown pitcher. Since many protesters all over the world throw the tear gas cannisters back at the police, I just wonder????
Also, he seems to have disappeared these days. Also, I believe you significantly amplified his war/service record. Just sayin’
See my blog for an analysis of the OccupyWhatever playbook.
Simple, declarative sentences. Faultless logic. Fact not fantasy.
How unlike the scribbling of the left.
A virtual mob is a a mob nonetheless.
funny how that works out. FB arguments are strange, lefties never get the point, and argue over things unsaid.
I see the Left (in all its variations) as mistaken, not evil. The hypocrisy is a by-product of what is held to be a humanistic, socially responsible philosophy. I tried to lay out the variations of leftism here: http://clarespark.com/2009/12/16/perceptions-of-the-enemy-the-left-looks-at-the-right-and-vice-versa/. I think that Klavan, though I agree with the drift of his argument, is too hard on roughly half of our society.
If the philosophy consistently results in evil then those that follow that philosophy participate in that evil. That makes them evil.
Only if they recognize the result as evil and that philosophy as the cause. More often, the rank and file at least, are convinced by others or self-deluded into finding other reasons for bad results. Such as blaming the failures of Communism on external factors, or in-fighting, or simply not being “pure” socialism, but never that the underlying Marxist philosophy is fundamentally flawed.
Goes hand in hand with “sure, it never worked before, but -we’re- here now.”
So ignorance is the excuse? Useful idiots? Try using that argument in a court of law.
Clare, you have it exactly backwards, the ones who show nothing but hatred and disdain for much more than half the population are the leftists, who are not merely mistaken any more than every tyrant who ever abused the population was merely mistaken. It is all about power and greed and it is evil! The democrat party has been taken over by communists, as have the unions, most of our educational system, and the media.
This is exactly so. Look at what the leftists do to those on the other who side who frighten them, like Palin, Rubio, Cain, etc. They make up lies about them, smear them, and even go after their families. They’re like the jihadis who play by no rules other than their own and who cry foul when you smack them back for it.
Half, or more correctly about 52%, of res publica is merely ignorant and self-interested. Lenin’s description of them as “useful idiots” is apt if harsh. The people who lead them on the other hand are indeed evil, and some of them even know it.
“I see the Left (in all its variations) as mistaken, not evil.”
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no, Clare; the left is evil and the evidence abounds. Look at any society that has been under leftist rule and the only common denominator is misery. Look at virtually anything the political left in this country has touched and the result is failure. The rabble of OWS is a testament to public education, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the American left; the irony is that the failure is intentional.
The same might be said for the state of the economy. POTUS tried something that was an abject failure and, despite the results, wants to do more of the same. David Axelrod’s comments over the weekend were simply the latest round of liberal projection. Whenever you hear the left accuse Repubs of holding some nasty thought or planning some horrible outcome, it is usually exactly what liberals actually want done.
The truth about liberalism is that it seeks to be judged on the intentions of its ideas, not the results of its policies. It hides behind a parade of victims and mascots, many of whom neither asked for nor wanted the representation. Liberalism also requires an abjectly uninformed populace in order to have any power.
That sounds like a DUH moment.
I live in the heart of darkness – Manhattan, NY. I’m ashamed to admit that I rarely post anything “conservative” on Facebook. Whatever else you may call it, I will assert it is about the most anti-intellectual forum ever created (excepting the Academy, of course). As such, it is a natural haven for those who don’t know any better, and those who should (“progressives”). I used to try to find middle ground by tipping my hat to the moral impulse that as is being pointed out on this thread, drives a lot of liberal “thinking”, and then gently trying to inject a little reality and suggestions of practical solutions. Instant disapprobation, if not outright invective always the result. Just. Don’t. Have. The energy. And, I have to live here.
I…and those like me…are the reason our Exceptional Republic has arrived at this juncture, because I fail to “rage, rage against the darkening of the night”.
no one HAS to live anywhere. On the other hand, you could understand this: a principle means you are willing to lose something in return for your belief. What are you willing to lose? The company of people who despise anyone who thinks like you?
Yep, same here!!!!! Leftists can’t debate the issues. The ones who aren’t so lazy that they don’t actually know anything about the issues know that they can win a debate. Personal attacks are all they have!!! You can simply take a good look at our current wanna-be dictator & his underlings both in his administration & in Congress to see that!
The trouble is, leftism tempts people who may be geniuinely good and caring with POWER. They see it as power to do good, to help, to change the world. That in itself isn’t a bad thing. What’s bad is the anti-democratic acquisition and exercise of power. Leftism, like Islamism or Communism or Nazism, gives people permission to bully and steal from their fellow citizens – basically to run over anyone who gets in the way of “progress.” There’s nothing as dangerous as a group of people who believe they’re right, good, and naturally entitled to rule without limits.
Bugs:
“…those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.” — C.S. Lewis
“Understand Frodo, I would use this ring out of a desire to do good. But through me it would enact terrible evil.”
“Progressives”, as a rule, are utterly and absolutely convinced that they are better, smarter, more “moral”, and just inherently nicer than everybody else. As such, they believe that given absolute power, they can achieve absolute good. And that all that is stopping them are all those unenlightened dolts who disagree with them, who are of course evil; after all, if they weren’t, they would agree with the progressives, who are incapable of being wrong about anything.
Which means that even if the progressives are not the sort who crave power because they enjoy hurting other people (and there are more like that than the faculty lounge crowd will ever admit), sooner or later they run headlong into the Gill Fallacy;
Gill Fallacy
The belief that the tools of totalitarianism, used by a benign leader, can accomplish good without in the end doing evil.
Source; Star Trek (The Original Series), episode # 50, “Patterns of Force”, written by John Meredyth Lucas, directed by Vincent McEveety, first aired 16 Feb 1968.
Named for John Gill (David Brian), a Federation cultural observer who, on the planet Ekos, introduced National Socialism as a way of helping the planet recover from a devastating world war. The results were, to say the least, unfortunate for all concerned.
There is always someone ready to believe that they can use such tools for “good”, because they are simply too “good” to be tempted by the urge to use them for personal gain.
About half of such people are not as “good” as they believe themselves to be. The other half find that their subordinates are much worse than they would have believed at the start. (This was what happened to Gill.)
They also invariably overlook the fact that those who start revolutions are rarely those who end up controlling the new state that results from same. And that the successors are often in it for power, alone.
But I believe that the main reason that leftism, in all its forms, attracts people who end up hurting others is even simpler than that. It’s because the basic “rule by the elite’” philosophy of the left is inherently attractive to those who are afflicted with one form of megalomania or another. The idea of having total power over others, and being able to reward or punish at their whim with no “blowback”, excites some people no end. Giving them political power is rather like turning a chimpanzee loose in an oil refinery with a lit blowtorch.
The late Hunter S. Thompson almost got it right in a Scanlan’s article in 1972. Commenting on the so-called “Jesus People” movement of the time, Thompson (who had little tolerance for religion in general) stated that “Entire empires have been done in by vengeful freaks claiming a special relationship with God”. (One wonders what he thought of modern-day Islamism.)
Unfortunately, he forgot the corollary. That being that an even larger number of polities have been destroyed by those who believed that they, themselves, were in fact gods.
clear ether
eon
Any movement that encourages a sense of entitlement, a sense of being better than those who are not members, merely for membership, is a seductive and dangerous thing.
Good examples. One thing to remember: anyone is susceptible to the totalitarian temptation, whether their politics are left or right. There’s always an impulse to say “To hell with the rules, let’s just do it!” Much easier than all that democratic dithering. The goal is THERE – why not just go for it? I think everybody feels that way sometimes. It’s just that most of us, don’t REALLY want to do that because we know what the results would be.
At the moment, however, the rhetoric and behavior of America’s leftists – including the liberal-in-chief – make it sound like they’re seriously considering cutting some major corners in their efforts to impose the complete progressive regime on the US. It really seems as if they’d be happy if Obama were able to rule by fiat. It’s kind of creepy.
Yes! I would take over the world except that, darn, I don’t want to do all the paperwork involved in running it properly afterward. Mostly I just want the government to take care of that paperwork, protect me from evil bullies and leave me the hell alone as long as I don’t become one of the bullies. Unfortunately the lefties ARE the bullies I hate.
Where have you been? He is ruling by fiat. As of October 6, 2011, he has signed 97 executive orders. Just in the last week, in an attempt to get his jobs bill crammed down our throats, he has signed another five or six EOs.
Congress should be in revolt at this point. On his TV show, Glenn Beck told Jim DeMint almost three years ago that Obama would make Congress irrelevant. And he has.
What good are checks and balances when obama is allowed to act with impunity? He is behaving like he’s a king or a dictator, and nothing is done about it. This is how easy it is to take over a country.
I really like what Newt said a week or so ago, he promises to repeal all of President Zero’s executive orders starting the afternoon of his inauguration.
ANd since the military didn’t intervene tells me the republic is lost.
and what do we hear from GOP leadership, GOP candidates, GOP Conservative Freshman class elected in 2010, and the media?
crickets…
Hail, Caesar. We who are about to go broke salute you.
I think Congress has made itself irrelevant. It’s paralyzed. It’s no longer fulfilling its role in the “system of checks and balances.” Obama’s rule by EO is the only way anyone can get anything done anymore. Unfortunately for us, he’s doing the wrong things.
Progressives also have a g-d complex.Combine that with an adjustable moral standard,they will commit/endorse everything from theft to genocide and justify it with claims of “saving” a country,race or ideology.
They are then heroes to be worshiped.
Call it by any name you like but leaders of this caliber are narcissistic sociopaths who feed on accumulated power from their weak,confused and naive followers.You find these charismatic leaders in colleges,politics,religions,cults,media,serial killers and mass murderers.They cannot comprehend good and evil moral ideals.They believe their own lies and supreme rights over others.
The OWS crowd is just waiting for a supreme leader,like Obama,to join them so they can fix the world with justifiable crimes.
If you look at the most shocking supporters of the OWS movement, you find many who have that same g-d complex. Like speaks to like.
This conversation on leftists and power reminds me of Nacy Pelosi, a very good example of someone in it for the power. I remember vividly a quote just after she was made speaker not about how she hops to show what true service is to the nation is, but that she can be an exampel to young woment “that they can take, and weld power” in the USA. Also, just look at her book title ” Know your Power” seriously she thinks she is a ruler, not a servant of the Governed.
Nicely done, sir. Who knew that, in addition to being funny and inventive, you could be smart?
Gee, Mr. Klavan, I thought George W. Bush was the Anti-Christ -that’s what the left wing blogs and the left wing MSM (forgive the redundancy here) always told us.
But now that you mention it, I don’t recall President George W. Bush EVER trying to DIVIDE America along economic or racial lines the way President Obama has done.
Excellent essay sir, thank you.
This is because Obama sees everything through a divisive prism. By being raised up among those who have all the bad qualities of humanity in such abundance, greed, envy, jealousy, hate, etc., he learned them all by the numbers.
And thus, as he looks through his prism, he does so from a philosophical prison, where he’s convinced he’s right and anyone who disagrees with him is wrong. Nothing good can ever come from such a person. The fact that such an emotional cripple is also sitting in the oval office doesn’t help matters. When you compare him to say, Eisenhower, Obama is but an absolute child in all things. I would like to think that if anyone of Obama’s ilk was under Ike’s command, Ike would relieve him of duty forthwith and with extreme prejudice.
Never, though, has such a collection of fundamentally flawed people been in such positions of responsibility in our government. They really went whole-hog this time. They’ve outed themselves entirely. Reid, Pelosi (complete with flying monkeys), Dodd, Frank, Holder, and on and on and on; They are all on record as having said some of the stupidest, most ignorant things anyone in their position have ever said.
“You’ve got to pass the bill in order to find out what’s in it”
“Unemployment checks are the single biggest boost to the economy”
“We’re not worried about private sector jobs; We’re focusing our attention on government jobs right now”
The list is virtually endless. And, the joke they’re not getting is that the media proudly displays their idiocy as if they’ve said something pithy or clever.
The old expression comes to mind about arguing with idiots, one I cannot name the original source and the other from Twain, as he paraphrased the bible. “Be careful arguing with an idiot for the disinterested bystander may not be able to tell the difference”.
But the biggest problem with the left is that they lack any moral center. I’m not overly religious but I find the rule of law, based on our Judeo-Christian origins to be a mighty good blueprint. Better than any other nation before us.
The ten commandments make sense. The objective teachings of the Word Of God seem lucid and plain.
But lefties have forsaken anything having to do with Christianity and therefore are a ship in a storm without both a rudder and a compass. Even if they have a direction, they have no idea how to get there and everything they’ve done in the past 60 or so years has been a “we’ll figure it out as we go along”. Yet another “pithy” quote from the esteemed Pelosi (complete with flying monkeys).
No moral center makes today a different set of “rules” than yesterday. Back in the 60′s and 70′s that idiocy of “If it feels good–do it!” was a surefire recipe for disaster. And it proved to be the undoing of much of society. Kind of a “I’ll do my homework later, I want to play right now” which is exactly the way Obama acts and shows us how irresponsible he really is. Vacation time is more important than jobs..and in spite of his yammering about the republicans “blocking” his “jobs bill”…remember when he was on vacation and didn’t really give a flip about the unemployment situation? That was this past summer. Then all of a sudden, “Pass this bill!”.
He’s so petulant, so obnoxious, so utterly rude that I would kick him out of my house the first time he opened his mouth. What’s kind of nice though is that he’s his own kryptonite; His own worst enemy. He is currently whistling past the graveyard and will soon find just how irrelevant truly is. How the American people, both left-leaning and moderate and certainly right, reject his many “qualities”.
Eon’s analogy of a monkey with a blowtorch is very apt. I would only make one change….the monkey is drunk.
I’ll just make an applaud to the above mentioned. An exellent article on the misery inbuild in marxism and its clones, mr. Klavan.
The irony is that the Left turned their back on traditional heroes like Columbus, FDR or Babe Ruth because it was learned and then more generally assumed they were slavers, corrupt or drug addicts.
What they replaced them with were pedophile/druggies like Ginsberg, depraved rappers, suicidal drunks like Kerouac and cool people who expire at age 27.
A perfect analogue is the “Hunky Jesus” gay contest in San Francisco every year; they go at Jesus in R-rated fashion even though no Christian country I know of bans gay pride parades because it’s 2011 but the SF gays, whose clock runs on 1954/Jim Crow time, are conspicuously silent about Islam, which allows such a parade only in Turkey and that’s probably throwing a Eurozone bone.
In 50 years the group in SF will catch up and go after Islam; of course their immigrant Third World ‘we’re all equal’ Muslim heroes will have closed down any such possibility by then with complaints, threats and lawsuits, the first wave of which we are experiencing even now.
In Spain last year a night club had to change it’s name cuz it sounded offensive to a Muslim and a gay pride parade was taken to the cleaners by our adherents to Islam. Good work Spainish morons.
Yes, the Spanish are indeed morons. Two days after the al qaeda attack on the trains in madrid, they voted in a leftist government. “oh, we’re sorry we caught your eye, but see, we’ve voted in leftists now, so everything will be ok…won’t it?”. Pathetic. And to think this was once one of the most powerful countries in the history of this planet. What happened to the Spanish? The Brits are going that way too. Again – a tiny nation that ended up running a huge chunk of the world, the richest most powerful country there had ever been at the time, now reduced to pandering to muslims like a lap-dog, paralysed by leftists.
The Left has a favorite tactic to get publicity: Find something that most Americans cherish–and then trash it.
On left-wing websites and blogs, you find a plethora of articles entitled “Why I Don’t Celebrate Thanksgiving” or “Why I don’t celebrate the Fourth of July.”
After the 9-11 attack, Katha Pollitt wrote a screed in which she proudly said she forbade her daughter to display the American flag except in the privacy of her own bedroom.
The Left lost the fight for revolutionary socialism after the U.S.S.R. collapsed and China instituted market reforms. So nowadays the Left really isn’t “for” anything. They’re just “against” everything.
No.
Long before 50 years Islam will have executed the group in SF, and everywhere else in America, if we don’t stop them now.
Relax and enjoy the comedy show, the last time the left engaged in “Occupy” type antics was right after Nixon got elected. All they managed to do was wake up Nixon’s Silent Majority and get him re-elected. If it hadn’t been for Watergate and some of Nixon’s other antics the election would have been a blow out
Back then the left had 50,000 dead soldiers to claim as their “cause”. That’s a lot more of a “cause” then blaming Wall Street because college costs have risen at three or four times the general inflation rate.
Yes, and blaming Wall Street for the rise in college tuition is to be totally oblivious to or intentionally ignorant of the real cause of the “rape of the student” with rising tuition. 1) the bottomless well of student loans supporting the unconscionable increase in tuition; 2) government grants to colleges to support “diversity” and other nonsense; 3) expansion of the administrative side of the college to support “diversity” and keep track of the money from students and government; and, 4) the professoriate and bureaucratic sense of “entitlement” to $250T annual salaries for six months work.
How long will it be before some enterprising young graduate decides that the schools have defrauded him and others like him and find a good shyster lawyer to sue said schools for repayment of all their loans? I’m surprised it hasn’t happened already. The schools are just like a really skillful used car salesman with a naive mark. Suck you in with a slick advertisement and then suck out every dollar you’re going to make for the next several years or the rest of your life if it’s the school instead of the used car salesman. Over all, I’d have to say, most used car salesmen seem more ethical than the school administrators.
“How long will it be before some enterprising young graduate decides that the schools have defrauded him and others like him and find a good shyster lawyer to sue said schools for repayment of all their loans? I’m surprised it hasn’t happened already.”
There are a couple of such cases wending their way through the courts as we speak.
Six months? Get outta here. Maybe for the Graduate Assistant teaching the professors classes.
“When the state is permitted to make the individual’s moral choices, the individual is forced to become either a slave or a criminal.”
Simply brilliant quote.
OWS cannot govern a camp with a few hundred people.
They ask us to believe they can govern a nation.
Excellent points Mr. Klavan!
The thing that stands out to me with the OWS crowd is this moral starting point of theirs…the unearned and unmerited goodness or righteousness of it all. It’s like a brand that they wear with pride…functioning as some sort of shorthand for who they ‘are’. Falling for it is the equivalent of assuming that everyone wearing Nikes is an olympian athlete.
The ‘OWS brand’ (rather than identifying a bunch of vacuous, irrational, sniveling, fascist/statist/collectivist automatons) would have us see them (with MSM’s help) that they’re actually “compassionate, caring, politically active, keenly aware, generous, oh-so intelligent, world-changers…oh, and let’s not forget earth-friendly.’
Best of all…(while we’re flipping reality inside-out) like everything else in their coddled lives, no effort is required. Because, God forbid, in this new world they’re trying to create, you don’t have to actually ‘be’ good or ‘do’ good.
Why modern liberals are 100 percent (not just 99 percent) wrong about everything
I pray, pray for a 68 Dem convention part II. Occupy the Democratic Convention!
Now that would be television worth watching!
Thank you Mr Klaven for this clear and concise description of OWS. I enjoy your writing always.
This is one of those articles that make me think: it’s time to unsubscribe. Yet, PJM does represent the thinking of some conservatives. Many of the OWS crowd gets my support because they have identified the (approximate) one percent that are the ‘controllers’ of societal oppression. This writer wants to stimulate the ‘leftist versus rightist’ phony debate and inconsequential values of ‘shallow politics -as opposed to those of ‘deep politics’ – because it keeps the spotlight off the true perpetrators of evil and societal oppression: the elite corporatist controllers. If writers such as this one were to spend some time investigating the reality of the actual results of corporatism, global capital, and the fascism rampant in both the ‘left and the right’ political nests today, he just might through real independent thinking join the OWS crowd, as I have. Encouraging inane perceptions of ‘the left’ or ‘the right’ keeps one thinking from connecting the dots that the OWS crowd has begun to do.
If you don’t mind the question, what makes the left versus right debate phoney? What are the deeper issues? I sure don’t hear anything that sounds like that from the speeches I’ve heard reported from the OWS movement –but then I’m not listening to them all day, so perhaps I’ve missed something essential.
I will grant you that everything that Mr. Klavan has voiced regarding those who believe they’re here to save the world from itself is true. Furthermore, such things can be said about either end of the political spectrum. Yet, the stuff I see reported from OWS suggests they’re at that extreme.
How do you decide what an extreme is in this context? How did you figure out who the “true perpetrators” are?
Again, my questions are many because you’re starting from a place that I do not understand. Please humor me.
“…the true perpetrators of evil and societal oppression: the elite corporatist controllers.”
Forgive me, but you don’t sound like someone who’s awaked to the truth. You sound like someone who’s drunk the Kool-Aid.
Comrade Lenin aptly described people like you as “useful idiots.”
I don’t know, Art.
I used to say to people that Woodstock and Ruby Ridge were not miles apart, they were next door neighbors.
Individualists who can think for themselves naturally resist being indoctrinated. They (and I like to count myself and the writers and readers here among them) possess an inner strength that the OWS’ers don’t have and seemingly can’t comprehend. We simply don’t want or need anyone to tell us what to do, what to think, how to act, or what to believe.
We can do all this for ourselves, thank you. No twinkles required.
You forgot one point. They’re also known as the lazy generation. They don’t want to put forth the effort to succeed but rather want it handed to them. My wife works for a new dentist who, although a good dentist, admits he’s from that generation and doesn’t really put forth the effort to grow his practice. Makew a fine example of an OWS zombie.
I would have to wonder if he’s that lazy, will he put a lot of effort into making sure he does a good job when working on someone’s teeth? How long before he’s sued for malpractice if he takes shortcuts?
Over my more than 60 years on this planet I have observed that leftist/socialist/progressive/Marxists college students tend to arrive at one of two outcomes. They either: (A) become conservatives because the radicalism of their youth becomes the conservative viewpoint in their dotage; or, (B) like the Norwegian lemmings, they follow their leaders over the cliff.
Many of them never grow up: Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, Diane Feinstein, Barbara Boxer, Henry Waxman, Patty Murray, Chuck Schumer, James Clyburn. I could go on and on. These people never matured. They are 50-, 60-, and 70-year-old children who, to our detriment, have been elected to positions of power where they can actually move the trucks and road graders around the sandbox.
I’m currently reading “Radical Son,” David Horowitz’s revealing autobiography. I’m not very far into the book, but already he has hit on two characteristics of all liberals. One is the inability to think of oneself as a whole person, able to stand on one’s own two feet and make decisions for himself or herself. There is an unquenchable need to belong to a group to make oneself whole, and thus to take on the values and thoughts and practices of that group and disregard all others. The second characteristic is the narcissism of the adolescent: Notice me! Barack Obama exudes this second characteristic. It seeps out of the pores of his skin. I have never seen him in a public setting without this characteristic on full display. Perhaps that’s why I cannot stand to look at the man.
Very astute, JK. Most conservatives I know are careful observers of human behavior. It’s kind of the answer to the left’s religious belief that “you can’t judge a book by its cover” being the appropriate response: “No, but you can tell a lot about it.”.
One that the lefties do categorically without fail is counter the statement that “Just because a person does a thing a certain way, do not assume they do ALL things that way.” I do not know the derivation of this statement but I know in my own case, I do certain things a certain way but when it’s more important, I do them more diligently and with greater attention to detail.
However, the people on the left, well, you can pretty much count on them never surprising you. You can count on Obama to approach everything the same way; That is, how it will make him look. This is the A, number one WRONG way to go about things. But it ties in with that thing about belonging and not being able to consider oneself as a whole person. And counting on others to validate you is a fool’s errand.
For most conservatives, we learned the lessons about “fitting in” or belonging to a certain group in our pre and adolescent years. My own experiences left me pretty fed up. Wearing my hair a certain way or smoking dope to “be cool” were part of the “uniform” of fitting in. So, I made a decision at 16 that I was going to be myself and to hell with what everyone else thought. I’ve actually had people tell me that “You need to work harder at fitting in, go to social functions, mingle.”. To which my response is, “Why? Why go to a place where there are people who I don’t care for, who don’t care for me and I’ll have a perfectly miserable time?” Obviously, I am not a politician.
If I go to a social gathering, it’s to meet and have fun with people I share a common interest with and with whom I enjoy their company. I cannot do pretense, duplicity and I especially hate cliques and the seemingly obligatory gossip that goes with it. So, I guess I’m really not into socializing due to the traps and clashes that some people seem to find so absorbing.
But I digress.
The people on the left and, to a large extent, the ruling class elites in the republican party are completely unaware of their voluntary slavery to fitting in and carrying the water for the democrats. Their biggest motivator is fear but it’s shrouded in layer-upon-layer of other “reasons” that fit their security blanket of preservation. Boehner is a stellar example as is McCain.
But, it’s a given that the people who would most likely run the nation much better than the elected types lack the narcissism and need for belonging that such types are attached to. In other words, they are overqualified. Plus, the real go-getters are out going and getting, instead of pursuing a life of false achievement in government.
I’m tired of leftism and rightism and all the plastic categorization. These “Occupy Wall Street” idiots are the losers of America; products of (and offspring of products of) the sixties with their ignorance and drugs and anti-everything that relates to civilization.
Yes, Wall Street has needed a lot of fixing and has needed supervision that it has never had. The stock exchange was created to provide capital for industry and to provide investors with safe opportunities for investment. It has gravitated to become a large gambling casino that is of no help to industry but simply gives the croupiers and dealers opportunities to enrich themselves.
I would round up all of these protesting losers around the country who should be looking for jobs or creating businesses instead of messing up our streets. I would cut them off from all so-called entitlements, their unemployment insurance, their welfare, their food stamps, etc. Give them something concrete to protest about. Concurrently, I would find a way to impeach Obama who is not much better than these protesters.
Mr. Klavan, this is simply the most brilliant analysis I have read of leftists. If I read nothing else or do nothing else today, reading this article made it worth getting out of bed.
Kudos to you.
This fine piece needs the addition of a single word to make it definitive and irrefutable:
Collectivism.
Leftism is collectivism and nothing else. Collectivism, the erasure of individual identities and rights from political calculus, ensures that the biggest and most ruthless mob will reign over all…until it fractionates internally, at which point the largest and most ruthless faction will predominate, and so forth ad infinitum.
As she so often did, Ayn Rand pinned it to the wall:
Food for thought…if you can get a collectivist to think for himself.
It’s no great mystery that those who fear competition the most would desire to eliminate it, while simultaneously figure out ways to profit because of it.
After all, look who our politicians are. In my estimation, they are not competitors in the strictest sense of the word, for, a popularity contest, by today’s standard, seems to simply imply who can spend the most money to get the “optics” right. Given that we live in the emotionally stimulating world that television gives us, it’s also no wonder that commercial time is so expensive and that politicians need that sound bite and visual grab to get voters on their side.
“Hope and Change” might be considered a winning sound bite were it not for the fact that it’s been proven to be such an empty, hollow thing. But the statists capitalized on the fact that those two statements are, by definition, hollow and relative. They mean very different things to different people.
But the statists also miscalculated in 2008 that the nation was wanting collectivism. After all, they had been working on it for so long, the time was as ripe as it was going to get to spring the trap. Only they misspelled it “TARP”. That was just the start.
On and on they went to destroy, regulate, hinder, criticize, and hamstring anything/everything that business was trying to do. In many ways they have been successful. They have many of the courts in their pocket, the media, and other entities to help them strong-arm their agenda but they were and are so very wrong about how much collectivism the people really want. There are enough of us around to know that with socialism comes a loss of freedom.
And we still value freedom above all else, unlike our European cousins who like their free stuff at the cost of it.
Just one little thing to quibble about and that is in referring to The unwashed, ill-mannered, anti-Semitic, entitled, and now violent mobs littering various parts of the nation under the banner “Occupy”
you assume that they want a better society.
I think that you are being too kind to them. They are not interested in society but only in scrounging material benefits for themselves.
Although at another time, more might could be said about this, for now—and, from my experiences in moving among them (the “Occupier” types) on the Left coast (Portland)—I can say that, on both counts, you’re correct: With hope and inspiration you’ll develop a life in which upon simple common sense time constraints, you have to buy “new”, until then, “scrounging” or “dumpster-diving” for material benefit can be fun—you know, finding overlooked value? But, it can become a preferred way of life. And yes, as the hen enjoys scratching in the dirt for sustenance, people who embrace that scrounging as a best life-style, do not typically desire anything better of life, eventually becoming only of a net drain on or liability to the larger society; and of natural course, because mankind are to make use of their inspiration or “measure of faith”, in the absence of initiative to exercise that faith, that life-style will descend into all bad things of the lower nature. And for just one example, there, scrounging will develop into theft upon various pretensive justification, and as between peers in that life-style, borrowing or stealing from each other is introduction or initiation into the tribal group—”It’s ‘us’ against ‘them’.”, thence, propagating over-all poverty and hopelessness and further lack of inspiration in their own group and weakness in the larger Society, but which, really doesn’t matter because, “In the end, we’re all gonna die anyway—right? But if I hafta die, I wanna take a bunch of pigs wi’me.”,
So, the only real answer for the Occupiers is the same thing as for every other human being: that new approach to life, that awakening of His Holy Spirit within, which is commonly referred to as “the Gospel of Jesus Christ”, that increasing oneness with the power for creativity and the artistry inhering in it, . . . and all of which in that better existence, they refuse and prefer to deny, and especially by cliche, as in: “Bush lied, and people died!”; so, . . .
So yeah, while eking your sustenance with a shovel and a rake and a hoe in the smiting sun can be a pretty tough curse, if you were there exercising your strength and skill, you wouldn’t be out robbing convenience stores, . . . or shooting up, . . . or trying to occupy the city—would you?
So will you go to the south park blocks and Jamison Square to preach the gospel to OWP? I’ve wondered how that may be done in such a way as to not inadvertantly enable their occupation or appear to be supporting their cause even while loving the people.
Just…pray.
Leftism is simple modern day feudalism.
I do not usually comment, but I have to say how much I enjoyed this article. I am sure someone else has thought of rebranding the “OWS” protestors, but I wonder if anyone has thought of calling them the ” Oh, We Suck” protestors?
Well, Andy
at least I agree with you on Bush.
“The gracious and open-hearted George W. Bush versus the divisive, self-serving, and dishonest Barack Obama, just to take one example.”
Is Klavan pulling some satire with this most recent screed? He can’t be serious. Bush lied, people died! He selected the most evil person in the history of the world to run the country (Cheney). Don’t believe me? Then watch Oliver Stone’s “W”. Bush/Cheney/Cain literally used the entire past decade to steal from the poor, whether sending vast armies to kill and loot, or by ensuring that a huge company (Haliburton) got all the contracts in Iraq, or by ensuring that every stinking pizza sold in Afghanistan was supplied by Godfather’s Pizza. As for Obama? Any wars? Any lies? Any dead babies? And cheap America pizzas being forced on uneducated brown people? Shame on you prunes…all of you!
Why are gas prices so high now?
Why is food so much more expensive now?
Why is the national debt so deep now?
Why does LovelyEarth put on such an ugly mask
I can’t believe that you would put forth Oliver Stone as being a truthful and honest critic of George W. Bush. Stone is so far left that, when he moves, it’s almost on a horizontal plane. Wise up!
You haven’t graced us with your presence in a while, lovely. And that’s Miss Prunepicker to you, ma’am.
On balance of evils, myself, I don’t consider favoritism in excluding some of the makers of pizza to have been especially signal to ultimate evil in corruption.
And except for some mere and rather puny entertainment in political elections, cliches are of little worth, . . . or interest, . . .
Lovely Earth, you are such a buffoon. It is incredibly ignorant to think that Oliver Stone is, in any way shape or form, an authoritative reference to the truth.
Chris, ask your self this: would Herman Cain (that perverted “molestadoro”) sell a pizza to Oliver Stone? The answer, of course, is NO! So who here is the ideologue? Who here is the discriminator? If I want a delicious pizza, I should be able to get any pizza I want, without regard to the pizza maker’s ideology! You have all the crazy right wing trapping with pervert Cain: perv, out to make money, scary looking dark rings under his eyes, etc….
You sound like a nutcase.
Actually I think Herman Cain would have sold a pizza to Oliver Stone. He’s a businessman selling a harmless product (and a pizza is harmless unless you’re stuffing the whole thing down your throat twice a day.) He’d sell pizza to anyone who has the money to pay, and he’ll do it in 30 minutes or less!
How about Bill Clinton, a man accused of rape and guilty of philandering? Oh he’s just fine to you, isn’t he? Two women claimed to have been made ‘uncomfortable’ by Cain 16 years ago and to you that makes him a pervert. You have no credibility.
Nothing has been proven against Herman Cain and yet this vile entity misnamed Lovely Anything terms him (that perverted “molestadoro”) while giving Stone, that committed drug taker and Castro lover, kudos.
Ugh.
You’ve been fooled by someone whose moniker should be “Copy and Paste.”
Did you know the word “gullible” isn’t in the dictionary? I thought that was really weird.
No, LovelyEarth is a troll.
“Foolishness is bound up in the heart of a Child”
I really resent any arguments that conclude that Cain would, indeed, sell pizzas to Oliver Stone. These men polar opposites on the political scale; Stone is thoughtful, talented, progressive, and maintains a clean pale hue; Cain is perverted, sinister, and is suspiciously dark in coloring. I can never, for the life of me, see Cain parting with a delicious, satisfying pizza or box of hot wings for that matter, knowing full well that his better is the recipient and will obtain great satisfaction thereby. You are blind as a Smokey Robinson if you cannot see that!
You are cracking me up today!
Today’s efforts may be a little too convincing, lovelyearth, you’ve sucked in quite a few more than usual.
Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.
Wha…?
OK – Now we know that you aren’t serious. Once an individual starts to suggest that skin tones are indicative of a person’s virtue or vices we have officially reached the land of the Happy Pill Academy.
I’m assuming that this isn’t satire. So my main comment is: prove it. Give some evidence, any evidence, to validate your statements; otherwise they border on blood libel.
*Bush lied, people died! What lies did he tell? Saddam’s WMD stockpiles and connections with terrorists have been demonstrated.
He selected the most evil person in the history of the world to run the country (Cheney). Why do you define Cheney as evil? Again, prove it.
Bush/Cheney/Cain literally used the entire past decade to steal from the poor Really? Where’s the money? Last time I checked no loot was shipped here.
…or by ensuring that a huge company (Haliburton) got all the contracts in Iraq There are only a very few companies in the world that can do the work that Haliburton does. Who else would you suggest do this work?
or by ensuring that every stinking pizza sold in Afghanistan was supplied by Godfather’s Pizza. Prove that one. Even if it is true, go and look at government contracting regulations (which Congress writes). You generally don’t get a tremendous number of bids to supply pizza to soldiers in a war zone.
As for Obama? Any wars? Aside from Libya, Uganda, and the one he’s trying to start with Pakistan?
Any lies? Don’t get me started. “Jobs saved”?
Any dead babies? Aside from the ones left to die in closets after failed abortions?
And cheap America pizzas being forced on uneducated brown people? ??? That’s just weird.
Quote I heard in church the other day:
“Most rebels are lifelong misfits. They pretend to oppose a current injustice, but in reality they are fighting hopeless emotional battles they lost years ago, perhaps in childhood”
-Tom Hopkins
Interesting thought. When I see people for whom left-wing activism is a complete, self-contained, and permanent lifestyle, I do wonder what’s going on in their heads. These are the people who show up at every demonstration – different cause, same cast of characters. You wonder if they have (or have ever had) real jobs, families, responsibilites.
I’m not discounting the importance of economic ideologies, but forced collectivism has a more pernicious cohort, postmodernism. Any rational dialogue and course of action on the first becomes next to impossible since our culture has become saturated with the second. It truly is a mental disorder. While academia (and “pop” academia) has been the incubator or both, they’ve gone viral. All of those multi-million dollar indebted “studies” majors, who will never be able to find productive employment, who cannot reason their way out of a brown paper bag, are framing the discourse.
“When the state is permitted to make the individual’s moral choices, the individual is forced to become either a slave or a criminal.”
Or both, as I witnessed in the Soviet Union. It was very hard to
survive without stealing, which practically everyone was doing, and
comlete, suffocating unfreedom. Was hard to hold your head up high,
it in itself was suspicious.We ran as soon as the gates were open in
1991, and are very sad to see how blind too many people are to clear
lessons of history, or just plain old common sense.
Wow. You explained the fruits of Leftism so clearly and with an example of it right before us in OWS, it can’t be denied. All I can say is great article, Mr. Klavin. Thank you!
Drug abuse, open sex, public masturbation and defecation. This is a movement of lowlife, unhinged, soulless commie scum that’s crawled out of the sewer and wants to transform America into one vast putrid wasteland-now joined by subversive Islamists because of their mutual hatred of Judaism, Christianity, Capitalism and the West.
Of course, the real irony there is that if real, unadulterated full-blown communism a la USSR 1970 were to happen tomorrow, the first people sent off to the gulags would be OWS’ers.
This actually sounds like an extremely good description of all the thieves in the top floors of those skyscrapers on Wall Street. Seems like you have a lot of hate in you. Meditate, drink green tea, try not to look in the mirror and you’ll feel better.
Andrew, I have read several good pieces describing “who” and “what” leftists really are as people… but yours ranks up there with the best.
Tragically, leftists have always been and will always be spoiled and petulent children… suffering from arrested development and trapped in adult bodies.
This motley group includes people who can’t or don’t want to compete in the real world, people struggling with envy and resentment, people with alternative lifestyles, secular progressives who want to be their own God and can’t stand being judged by anyone or anything, and finally… elitist intellectuals, snobs and busy-bodies who think they know better and want to run our lives.
Let’s make a real statement, folks.
Get involved, and pass the word… November, 2012.
Who knows… we might possibly save a Republic.
This reminds me of the Agent in ‘Serenity.’ When asked about the future utopia he’s going to live in he becomes indignant.
“I’m not going to live there, Mal! I’m a monster. There will be no place for me there.”
How many monsters has the romantic movement produced? There are gargantuan monsters like Hitler, Stalin and Mao, and minor monsters, like Shelley abandoning his wife and children, but at root the entire romantic movement from the very beginning was nothing more than selfishness which is somehow expected to lead to a selfless perfection. The problem is that there is one unalterable fact of human existence: habit trumps intention. This is the message of Jane Austen’s “Mansfield Park” most explicitly, but it is a common thread in all her work. If you form bad habits, they enslave you. This is the real reason we Mormons don’t smoke and drink etc. Why give up your freedom for slavery to a substance? And if you protest these things don’t enslave you, then give them up for a year just to prove it. What you’ll learn is that you CAN overcome your bad habits, but it HURTS. Not only because of the physical withdrawal; there are social consequences, and your brain, which has worn grooves in your synapses so that believing you can’t have fun without being drunk makes it true, and it hurts to get out of those ruts and think new thoughts. That’s the reason Jesus came to Earth–to save us from our bad habits. Smoking or drinking are minor matters; try breaking out of a dependence on pornography or hook-up culture or removing your envying and hatreds on your own–it takes a God to make those changes stick. Ask any smoker whether twenty years after quitting they don’t still have occasional cravings, even those who used hypnosis to break the habit. We all work ourselves into wrong thought-patterns that become habitual, and breaking clear of them is always extremely difficult.
Therefore, as Andrew says, we’re looking at the future because those who become monsters to bring about utopia will remain monsters once it’s achieved. But they won’t line up calmly for the firing squads or march meekly into their concentration camps. They’ll be the one directing the firing squads, and running the camps, and instead of perfection, their new society will be the same as the old one, just with different tyrants in charge.
If the romanticists preached personal perfection first, then it might make sense. Perfect people would make a perfect society, after all. But that’s hard, and being a jerk is easy, so they stick to the easy way and give us our Nazi death camps and Cambodian killing fields. I certainly don’t think that those consumed by hatred and resentment should be given power over those they hate and resent. Fortunately they’re an impotent bunch; the toughest of them are mere bullies.
I urge everyone to read Ann Coulter’s new book, “Demonic.” It’s all about mob mentality (and the liberal left) and it is right on, especially in light of what’s going on now with the OWS.
Her detailed description of what actually went on during the French Revolution (the eptiome of mob behavior) is astonishing. You will never read these facts in a school textbook. Not for the faint-hearted, however.
Interesting, that last line; ” Look at them, and understand that that’s what tomorrow will look like if they have their way today”, could just as easily be applied to the TEA party, hardly an alarming prospect.
Really? You compare the two?
What I see is: OWS = raping, pillaging pirates vs TP = Aunt Fanny’s tea party.
Sorry the point was missed . Only comparison I tried to make was that the same lens works either way; i.e. look at the TEA party for an idea of what we’d get if THEY have THEIR way – - which, to use your example,if it were to end up being Aunt Fanny’s TEA party that would be fine with me.
Nice news photo. Every day is Halloween at an OWS protest.
Hey, Occupy Wall Street, Halloween’s over– you can take your masks off! Oh, wait…
How many here had to work for their allowance while growing up? I mean even simple things like washing the dishes, making your own bed, cleaning your room, things like that? Now, I wonder how many of the OWS crowd had to do such things? Entitlement starts young. If you learn to work for what you get it sticks with you. If you learn mommy will do it and daddy will give you money then that is what you expect from life. Too bad it doesn’t work that way in real life.
A shorter but equally accurate version of this article: Leftists are stupid and evil.
They’re too stupid to realize how stupid they are and they’re so convinced of their moral superiority to realize how evil they are.
I see how the OWS community reacts and acts to assaults, robbery and rape now I cannot wait to see how the community handles a murder.
“Cast him/her/them out with down twinkles no doubt!”
“The unwashed, ill-mannered, anti-Semitic, entitled, and now violent mobs littering various parts of the nation under the banner “Occupy” believe their ideas will lead to a better society — but they actually are the society their ideas lead to.”
So true! This was a great article, clear, true, and succinct.
Another fine Klavan-tastic cultural disection.
Now a stab at elaborating on 18. Francis W. Porretto ‘s ever-insightful observational out-posts…
When I see in its mildest form the muddled and at the most extreme clearly psychotic ramblines of these protesters, be it the edited variety on Fox or the auteur version ala Youtube, it is almost a direct link transporting me back to my own mispent ideological meanderings at Kent State in the early and mid eighties.
Because on what planet do such little acorns survive until they can sprout their wings and fly fly fly into the halls of infamy throwing actual bricks through the windows of actual business’ or farting their way through the drum circle Music world?
Academia. And certianly in the immortal words of Don King…only in AMERICA!
The only real estate where the collectivism that Francis speaks ever managed to take root in otherwise pragmatic and capitalist U.S.ofA.
(Please provide even a remotely similar Chinese example)
It doesn’t take ONSTAR to track a direct link to this fortification of the left and long captured wing of the Democrat party that now has gone all in with Obama – not only their most favorite Son (having part-timed there himself) but as the President who since FDR has most relied on said Academy to provide his nighmare version of the best and brightest to command and control top down ‘bottom up’ federalism.
(from Van Jones to Cass Sustein to the sinister Minister of all things engergetic – Energy SEc DR Chu – who should be required to dress properly like the mandurian he is – a villian right out of central casting in a Quinten Tarantino KILL BILL sequeal!)
In this liberal neatherworld – not real yet incredibly well funded – there exists some bizzare alternative reality that cannot be fully understood unless one actually encounted the Greatful Dead concert phenom sometime during the 70′s or 80′s.
In fact the paradox of the Greatful Dead goes a long way to explaining the new ‘occupiers movement.’
Next to KISS, there was never a musical group that better understood – and went on to commercially profit from – mass marketing than the Greatful Dead. They understood ‘budling’ as a money maker even before it became the fundemtal way to finance and profit from movie making in the 80′s onward.(product placement..ect) They incorporated everything Dead – right down the meaning of ‘is’. And they made tanker ships full of money doing it.
Yet the essense of their appeal was that they were the ultimate anti-commercial ‘rebels’ of the sixties. Even more paradoxical – their shows LITERALLY DELIVERED A SLICE OF THE SIXTIES – because when you went to a Dead concert – it didn’t matter if YOU DID DRUGS OR NOT – there was a ‘feastive’ if you will atmosphere to their shows unlike anything anywhere else.
In short – to attend a show was to fall down the rabbit hole and in a very odd way wind up at ‘THE LAST WALTZ’ at the Fillmore West in the mid-seventies – figuratively speaking; weirdness abounded and was palpable. You could touch it, feel it, even taste it – And really there was no explaining it.
So I humbly suggest;
For the twerps now occupying everything from planet zero to the latest hated symbol of Wall Street outside some Peets Coffee in Seattle, there is some kind of floating ‘zone’ that they and fellow malcontents manage to connect with – in the same weird way.
And again. I don’t believe in UFO’s, although I liked the band back in the day. Yet I look at these protesters, and the spreading movment that the MSM is absolutely infatuated with, and there is this odd outer-space grad program unfolding like the Trouble with Tribbles as far as an original gangster Star Trek metaphor…..
And besides 1 per centers like Kevin Spacy and Susan Sarandon springing to cater the set with free cheese burgers or egg McMuffins…
What I intuit is fifty plus years of over investment in what used to be great American Research universities that have now morphed into pension plans for real hippies who never left the farm after their first acid trip – all perversly underwritten by exorbitant tuition prices – which likewise perversly turns our youth attending into slaves to debt in a rapidly decending sick jobs lottery – that ultimately we are licensing in a habitually perverse way as well.
Of those youth now showing up to openly embrace the unhealthy anti-hygine agenda of a bygone era of back to eathiers(only now via Urban Camping in the homeless mode), they are the brats that Frank Zappa warned us about on his terrific late 70′s epic flop of an album that is still a classic to his loyal fandom…SHEIK YORBUTI…in a signature tune off the album
FLAKES
….[partial stanza]
I’m a moron, ‘n’ this is my wife
She’s frosting a cake
With a paper knife
All what we got here’s
American made
It’s a little bit cheesey,
But it’s nicely displayed
Well we don’t get excited when it
Crumbles ‘n’ breaks
We just get on the phone
And call up some …{flakes}
They rush on over
‘N’ wreck it some more
‘N’ we are so dumb
They’re linin’ up at our door
Well, the toilet went crazy
Yesterday afternoon
The plumber he says
*Never flush a tampoon!*
This great information
Cost me half a week’s pay
And the toilet blew up
Later on the next day-ay-eee-ay
Blew up the next day
WOO-OOO
{I strongly encourage indulging a Google on the full lyrics – its easily linked and you won’t be dissapointed}
In conclusion….
….we are witnessing the great faux ‘protest’ of a generation, a generation insipired to replicate a romantizied version of the ugliness that wreaked havoc on America starting in Watts in ’64 and eventually (thankfully)petering out as a Halloween tradition of arson in Detroit lingering for decades afterward…
…and it is both inspired and directed by tenured idiots sitting at their state paid for computers in college departements where they enjoy a lush six figure income (if not in 1% range they certainly have dined with more than a few) and rarely if ever actually teach while they enjoy having no overhead to pursue personal profit at their offices…
We as a society should pull the plug on their party pronto. Just like various mayors and govenors are moving to do with the twating sqatters stiking up various ‘occu-poo-stations…’
Thanks again Andrew for sharing the writers itch to scratch our imaginations into thinkings straight about serious matters the newsboys are too busy to actually report.
While the rest of us just scratch our heads or arse while we struggle to move through our lives sane and intact.
The Daily Rash has a hysterical story about a middle aged man who still lives with his parents, who travels to New York to protest against greed. http://www.thedailyrash.com/many-middle-aged-wall-street-protesters-still-living-with-their-parents
The Daily Rash is a satire website, like The Onion, but you can bet there are middle-aged leftists living with their parents at those #OCCUPY “protests”.
Mr. Klavan,
Thank you for your article. I thought it was very interesting but basically a joke. In response to the title/summery of your article, I have this rebuttal:
What economic libertarianism does to people. Look at Mexico. That is what the USA will look like if the so called “Tea Party”/GOP/wingnuts gets their way.
Yes, because demanding government accountability and fiscal responsibility is exactly the same as narco terrorism.
You poor deluded fool.
See comment 41(a)
Sorry, Mr. Independent, your opinion doesn’t count until you learn to spell “summary.” Give it a shot. You might also learn about Mexico: it’s a statist system, in the cast of our enlightened Europeans.
ivan soto
Your pedantry is surpassed only by your ignorance. Thank you for pointing out my typo. It is interesting that while you criticized my spelling error, you neglected to use proper sentence structure in your comment. What you should have written is: “until you learn {how} to spell summary”.
On a more relevant note, you are completely wrong on your view of Mexico. Excluding its energy sector, Mexico has one of the most libertarian economies in the world. Unlike the U.S. and Europe, Mexico has minimal regulation of its economy. That’s economic libertarianism. Q.E.D.
There’s nothing libertarian about Mexico’s economy; it is a racist kelptocracy. The whole damned country runs like a titty bar, everybody has to pay somebody to work and they live off a pittance and what they can steal or whore for.
It is basically the old Roman system of patron and clients. The client pays the patron for the “privilege” of waiting the tables in his restaurant; there are no wages and the client lives off some proportion of his tips. That’s why every business in the country runs like everyone is trying to steal from it; its because they are.
The top level of patrons are the “blue-eyed Mexicans,” those with Spanish ancestors. The society divides down in caste ranking as one has less and less Spanish heritage until you get to the true brown-eyed Mexicans, the Indians who are at the very bottom of Mexican society. They have a vocabulary of creoles, mulattoes, quadroons, octoroons, etc. that any upper class Southerner of the Jim Crow days could envy.
In fact, under Comrade Obama, our Country is well on its way to becoming a racist kleptocracy.
art chance,
You don’t seem to understand what the word libertarianism means. So let me educate you. According the Webster’s Dictionary, libertarianism is the belief that “people should be allowed to do and say what they want without any interference from the government”. With their minimal regulations and enforcement, that’s the Mexican economy.
As far as Mexico’s “top level patrons being blue-eyed Mexicans”, you might want to actually do some research on this subject before you make ridiculously racist comments like that. http://www.carlosslim.com/
Finally, it has been under REB administrations that has made our Country well on its way to becoming a third-world dump like Mexico. It would seem that economic libertarianism is every bit the false religion of fools that socialism is.
I neither need nor want “education” from some smartass lefty who tries to style himself an “independent.” You’d find out just how deregulated and libertarian the Mexican economy is if you tried to start a business there with permission and payoffs to all the right people. They have a system of crony capitalism that Comrade Obama would just love to set up for his cronies here in the US.
art chance,
What we want many times is not what we need. In your case, you are very much in need of an education; for a great many things.
To begin with, I was unaware that “lefties” now make it a point to criticize MSNBC. I think that’s about as likely as someone on the right criticizing Fox “News”. The problem that many people like you have, is that you never learned to think for yourself. If you’re a moonbat you just repeat what you’ve heard on MSNBC…If you’re a wingnut you just repeat what you’ve heard on Fox “News”. So since you’ve been told to attack anyone who disagrees with you, it never occurs to you to stop and think to yourself. Instead you just think to yourself ‘this isn’t what I’ve told lefties think but he disagrees with Fox so he must be wrong’. No, not so much. Being an Independent is not about being both right and left or being middle of the road. Being an Independent means doing what’s right based on what science and history has proven is right. And I mean right with a little r.
On your assertion that I’m unfamiliar with the lack of regulations in Mexico; once again you’ve proven that you’re a dupe of “Fox”News” or MSNBC. For the past eight years my supply company has had offices in Mexico. It takes less time the open a business, costs less money, and is much less regulated than most other countries I’ve done business in. My knowledge of this is not just based on research but also on personal experience; experience that you obviously do not have. That experience has proven that while economic libertarianism is great of business, it bad for a workforce. Mexico proves that. And when your boy Bush and his cronies created the Great Recession, the REBs proved that if we follow their lead, we could end just like Mexico.
Many years ago when I was still young enough to be naive and stupid I worked on an archaeology project in Central America. One day I noted with authority to the project manager, older and wiser than me, that I found it refreshing that I didn’t see any racism among the many people I had met during our tour of duty. She noted that everyone in Central America knows every shade of brown there is and exactly where they fit in the hierarchy. That, she said, is why you are deceived into thinking there is no bigotry or racism, that and you are a stupid Gringo.
Thanks.
larsky
And your comment is relevant to this discussion how?
larry j
Wingnuts demanding government accountability and fiscal responsibility; is that a joke? Young man, every REB administration in U.S. history has increased the federal deficit and the size of government.
Mexico’s embrace of economic libertarianism is what has allowed narco-terrorism to thrive there.
It is you who are very foolishly deluded. You must be a Fox “News” or MSNBC viewer. How sad.
You, sir, are the wrong one. Mexico does not have economic libertarianism, it is more a mercantilist economy, run by approximately 100 families. http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/news/articles/0816grupos.html?&wired
They control all the major industries and prevent true free market capitalism from emerging. You have confused the selling off of government run enterprises to select, wealthy individuals with the building of businesses from the ground up. Why don’t you ask one of the millions of illegals in this country what kind of free market he lived under in his native country?
flyover mike
According to the Webster’s Dictionary, libertarianism is the belief that “people should be allowed to do and say what they want without any interference from the government”. With their minimal regulations and enforcement, that’s the Mexican economy.
The millions of illegal’s that run away from Mexico are proof that economic libertarianism does not work. Otherwise, why hasn’t worked in Mexico?
Mexico is not libertarian. The state plays a large role in the economy. PEMEX is the state run oil company that does everything from pull the oil out of the ground to put it in your car. Agricultural Loans are given out by the government. Government ejidos did much of the farming, until they degenerated into the rural version of Cabrini Green Housing Projects.
They do not allow the importation of cars — so all autos must be built in Mexico. Result is that new cars are 2X as expensive. This also creates an underground industry of importation and false licesing of import cars.
The one thing the government has to to is to provide safety and rid the country of violence — The Federales have never been able to to that. Until that time the economy will founder.
They used to preclude corn imports to protect inefficient farmers. Now they allow in US corn and tortilla prices have fallen — helping the poor who are most hurt by high food prices.
sunsetdistrict inc,
Your main counter-argument about Mexico is not just wrong, it’s dishonest. I stated earlier “excluding its energy sector, Mexico has one of the most libertarian economies in the world”. Mentioning PEMEX in your last comment is a red herring.
Also, your assertion that Mexico does not allow the importation of cars is false. In Mexico, it is perfectly legal to import cars but they have high tariffs on the importation of those cars; but so does almost every other industrialized country (excluding the USA). So that was a lie for you to write that.
The bottom line is Mexico has a tiny fraction of the regulations and the regulators that the U.S. does. To simply the concept for you, consider this: In the USA there are almost 1.5 million regulators at the local, state, and federal level (that number only includes regulators that are supposed to by directly regulating commence). In Mexico there are less than 40,000. Do you understand that 40,000 in less than 1.5 million?
One of the things that government has to do (but not the only thing) is to provide safety and security. A government will not be able to do that if it has a libertarian based economy. The failure of Mexico proves that.
The Heritage Foundation ranks countries in terms of economic freedom and liberty. Nexico is #52. The USA is #9. Hong Kong is #1. North Korea is #172.
sunsetdistrict inc,
The Heritage Foundation is a joke. They’ve been wrong on so many things so many times, they can’t be taken seriously. Correct me if I’m wrong, didn’t they state over and over and over again that Iraq had WMD?
To your point about their ranking of countries economic freedom, consider that they ranked a Chinese territory as number one. If you use a little common sense, you would understand that that is absurd.
If insisting on pasting the label “libertarian” on Mexico makes it look good to you, you have far greater problems than the occasional typo.
To put it another way, anybody who wants what Mexico is has to be either profoundly ignorant or a complete sicko.
mark v
If insisting that Mexico’s economy is not libertarian (which it is) makes you feel good, then you have far greater problems that the occasional belief in fantasy. Like most winguts or moonbats, you sound like you’ve been duped by Fox “News” or MSNBC.
To put it another way any REB who thinks that economic libertarianism won’t lead the US into becoming Mexico 2.0 is profoundly ignorant.
Personal insults means I win and you lose. You got nothing.
sunsetdistrict,inc,
First of all, I never insulted you personally. That was a lie on your part.
Second of all, your argument loses because it’s wrong and based on fantasy or is just wrong.
Third, I stated facts you while you stated opinions. I opinions that sound identical to nonsense I’ve heard spouted on Fox “News” and MSNBC.
I will let you have the last word.
sunsetdistrict,inc,
If you have something intelligent to add to this discussion, I’d like to hear it. But so far, you have not.
If you look at the Bureau of the Debt, you’ll find that it increase under every president for generations even including when we were allegedly running a budget surplus. If any corporation kept its books the way the federal government does, all its officers would be in jail.
Mexico is a failed government where corruption is even worse than Obama (and that’s saying something). The narco terror gangs are running roughshod over the government and corrupt military and police officials are selling them the guns to do so.
larry J,
First of all there is no such thing as the “Bureau of the Debt”. The Bureau of the Public Debt is the agency that tracks public debt. Try to turn off Fox “News” or MSNBC and do your own research. I’ve head Sean Hannity use that exact same phase. You’re embarrassing yourself by quoting clowns like that instead of thinking for yourself. The only instances when the federal budget has been kept manageable, has been under DEM administrations. The REBs have always increased it.
Mexico is a failed libertarian economy, where the nacro-terrorists have all but taken over the country. What has allowed that to happen in Mexico, is what the right is advocating for in this country.
Getting the name of a fairly obscure government agency slightly wrong does not invalidate my point. The debt has been increasing over the decades under both Republican and Democrat administrations (and more importantly, control of Congress). Your contention that debt only increases under Republicans is a lie. Trying to defect the point about Fox and MSNBC is also weak since I watch neither.
Your contention that Mexico is a failed libertarian economy is laughably wrong. It has a decades-long history of massive and institutional corruption. It has nothing to do with libertarianism and everything to do with politicians and government officials at every level enriching themselves at everyone else’s expense. They are a national example of running a government “the Chicago Way” and Obama is doing his worst to run things here the same way.
I’m not even sure why we’re arguing about libertarianism. This is a conservative website, right? You want to debate with libertarians, go over to Reason.com.
larry J,
I never stated that your ignorance invalidates your point. My point was that your ignorance invalidates your credibility. It was not a deflection to point out that you’re regurgitating talking points from Fox “News” or MSNBC clowns; it was simply stating a fact. I always find it amusing that when wingnuts or moonbats do so they immediately claim, ‘I don’t watch Fox “News” /MSNBC. Really?
Your contention that Mexico is not a failed libertarian economy is laughably wrong. It has a decades-long history of massive de-regulation which has led to the inevitable corruption. De-regulation and/or no regulation have everything to do with economic libertarianism. They (Mexico) are an example of running a government the REB/”Tea Party”/wingnut way. And Mexico proves that economic libertarianism does NOT work.
One of the best articles I have read in a long time! Hits the nail on the head! Thank you, Andrew.
This would be a perfect argument against everything that the occupy wall street movement stood for if indeed it stood for anything mentioned in your article.
You mention entitlements, which are a huge issue and I don’t believe that anybody is entitled to social support simply because they were born on American soil. The only entitlements I’ve heard mentioned by anybody I know who supports the Occupy movement are the entitlements held by the wealthiest people in this country. I’ll name a few corporate entitlements first, since they’re the ones that make right wingers so mad:
The right to be a person and be represented as a person in court, thereby laying the burden of responsibility for unethical actions on the whole company rather than those persons responsible. Because of this strange perceived entitlement, business executives who make disastrous decisions offset their expensive bad habits by laying off American workers and then reward themselves with enormous pensions and perks with the money they made from illegitimate life insurance policies and outsourcing.
The right to, as an entity unattached to any sovereign nation’s laws, create political puppet shows in third-world countries. Abusing power(money) by using it to influence the labor policies of nations whose elected officials eat beluga caviar and sip champagne while ignoring widespread poverty and starvation. Supporting regimes all over the world that make Al Quaeda and Hammas look like puppet shows – 4 million people dead in the Congo all so that we can have the microchips and capacitors that make our cell phones and computers work.
The right to poison the drinking water, the air and the food in any country they can find with lax environmental policies in order to ‘stay competitive’ with China. Hiding behind a bought and sold notion of patriotism, in order to make the products that Americans want in quantity rather than quality so that quarterly earnings are up up up but forgetting that Americans need jobs in order to buy that garbage in the first place, unless of course mommy and daddy are in that 1% block.
Let’s not stop there though! There are more people who abuse and disgrace the system that keeps this country from functioning! There are more people who feel entitled!
Corrupt politicians who take legal bribes from lobbyists, because having money to throw at the policies you want created or destroyed means that your equal rights are just a little bit more equal than some no-name constituent.
Corrupt unions who have made it their sole mission to bankrupt entire city and state governments. Firefighters in small towns who save fewer lives than the average social worker but who make and retire at a six figure income. Unions that buy local officials who just happen to fit a few raises and bonuses for their members into the next revision of the budget at the cost of cuts in education.
Big government AND big business create enough problems to justify marching in the street. The tea party and the occupy protestors are both right but their members only listen to squawk boxes like you, Andrew. Rightists and leftists sit in their ivory towers and their echo chambers, hearing only what they want to hear and pointing out garbage like your absurd article and this one: http://www.blueridgemuse.com/node/3539 and shouting ‘this is why they’re wrong!’.
You don’t know why ‘they’ are wrong because you wouldn’t even give them a moment’s pause, the same goes for them. This ‘article’ you wrote is pitching people in the wrong direction and I seriously question your motives. I’m a moderate republican, divisive rhetoric like yours and that on the left hurts this country far more than thousands of hippies shouting about corporate greed.
Why don’t you go do some good? The next time the inspiration hits you, mister Klavan, to write an article that will inspire ignorance and contempt, put down your pen or your keyboard and go volunteer at a soup kitchen, a dog shelter or build houses for habitat for humanity. Maybe people wouldn’t have to worry about entitlement if somebody as smart as you would use their energy and intellect to do something useful. If you already do all of that, just do it more.
Then again, what do I know? I’m just a guy wrenching and welding my way through college, hoping to do some damned good in this miserable world. I disagree with you so clearly I must be a communist, leftist, nazi, anti-semitic, racist, hateful, marxist pinko slimeball.
“Then again, what do I know? I’m just a guy wrenching and welding my way through college, hoping to do some damned good in this miserable world. I disagree with you so clearly I must be a communist, leftist, nazi, anti-semitic, racist, hateful, marxist pinko slimeball.”
No, you are just a very young person who’s view of the world is full of straw men and imaginary evils.
You live in a place that has provided its citizens more individual wealth than anywhere on earth at any time. But you seem unhappy. You object to the notion of limited liability for corporations because, why? Is it because you are more interested in punishing people than protecting them? How do you thing large enterprises could exist, like power companies and auto manufacturers if the management and owners were personally exposed to every legal action taken against the organization? No one would start any enterprises. Even the members of my hobby clubs are protected in that way.
There is certainly corruption and favors but the perpetrators are politicians. How much corruption is there on the local high school student government? Not much. Why? Because they have no power to destroy lives. If they did, someone would be trying to buy them off.
Try to enjoy life more and be grateful for the opportunities your youth and your citizenship afford you.
The “media” figured out long ago, that they had to transform themselves into a circus performance to get attention. So they did. Their literary work doesn’t even make the minimal grade for fiction.
These “Occupy Whatever” parasites, are trying to get themselves considered a protected category of “the gullible” within the “race, religion, and national origin” classification of “underprivileged”. And with the “DENSA” bunch we now have running Congress and the White House, they’ll probably get it.
P.S.
Thanks, Mr. Klavan, for a truly sagacious article. It’s very encouraging to see such wit in print.
Hear, hear!!
Just yesterday I heard an interview with an OWS spokesperson calling herself “grimwomyn” who, when asked about the violence, drug use, etc. taking place at OWS, replied that the occupiers represent a microcosm of society at large(implying that one would expect to find such activities in ANY assembled group of people). Did she realize what she was saying? She was so near the truth it’s scary. She was wrong about the society at large part. What AK says above hits the nail on the head. OWS represents a microcosm of a fraction of society that believes that the ends (pseudo-marxist statism) justifies the means (lawless vagrancy). What we see IS what we’ll get if the OWS folks have their way.
Here’s what Rightism does to people:
Georgia Men Arrested in Terror Plot
http://www.ajc.com/news/atlanta/four-north-georgia-men-1214918.html
INVESTIGATION: ‘Occupy’ Protesters Live in Mansions
http://dailycaller.com/2011/11/02/nyc-arrest-reco…
To the OWS protesters and socialists everywhere Scripture has the answer. Forgive me if my quote is not letter for letter correct. “When Thou Shalt Eat Of The Fruit Of The Labor Of Thy Hands, Thou Shalt Be Happy, And It Will Be Well With Thee”.
The Wisdom here is that by providing for yourself, taking care of your own, accepting responsiblility for one’s self, you can find happiness and well-being.
Hard work and productivity are good things; the OWS protesters need to learn that.
I’d add, Scripture also teaches ” Thou Shalt Not Covet”. What belongs to others belongs to them and no else has a right to it. Covetousness destroys both those doing the coveting, and those whose goods, property, talents, etc are being envied.
Need I mention “Thou Shalt Not Steal”?
Mr. Klavan:
STANDING OVATION!
A failed state is not, at any point, the same thing as a libertarian paradise. A libertarian paradise has the fairly applied, minimally invasive, benign rule of law. Mexico does not fit this definition.
Mexico has a corrupted, weak political system, wretched police, and a laughable military. Entire states are given over to the caprices of narco-traffickers. For all our jokes about California pot- farmers, Miami drug importers, midwestern meth cookers, we haven’t handed over an entire state to their follies. We’re still pretty clear that they are not the good guys.
For that matter, the positive elements of government- even progressive positives- clean water- clean air- education—-the government fails on a regular basis. Simple things- agriculture–civilized things- well-maintained trucks for a shipping industry–all of these are not reliable. I know one person who went to high school in Mexico. He’s from a very, very good family. The others- eighth grade is as high as they go, and they’re proud to have made it that far.
ari,
It’s interesting that I could copy your last post and simply replace Mexico with the USSR and libertarianism with communism and your argument would be the exact same argument made by the far left.
Economic libertarianism like communion is just a fantasy. Both are nothing but false religions for fools. The failure of Mexico and the USSR prove that neither system works.
Since you are so wise, what is your prescription for society? You reject both Soviet central planning and libertarian limited government. Maybe you are a fan of monarchy or theocracy.
john,
I prescribe a Keynesian based capitalist system. Where the government does not own or manage the economy but properly regulates it. The success of countries like Canada, Germany, and Singapore prove that such systems work (excluding their health care systems).
Maybe you should stop getting your ideas from Fox “News” or MSNBC and learn to think for yourself.
I love my conservative websites and I appreciate the PJ but I really have to say that this observation here seems pretty mute when you have an ad for Allen Grayson on the front page. I realize that some advertising is out of your control but if we are to defeat progressivism we should not be supporting it on our websites. Fox does this too advertising media for CNN. It is to me, oxymoronic. I am just saying…
Thanks for the comment. Just to be clear, ALL advertising is out of my control.
Exactly. And precisely why I have none.
d(^_^)b
http://libertyatstake.blogspot.com/
“Because the Only Good Progressive is a Failed Progressive”
So, basically, the highest ambition of the Leftie is to be perpetually paid as a George Romero extra. How sad.
d(^_^)b
http://libertyatstake.blogspot.com/
“Because the Only Good Progressive is a Failed Progressive”
Go left too far as the clock turns counter-clockwise; then you hit ultraconservative, ultra-strict society; it is utopia in reverse. Keep going and you become a prosperous nation again, with free democratic principles. Oh no, rise of the liberals, as you continue to wind in reverse you run into the leftist again, until you’re wound so tight — the spring lets lose and there’s anarchy and the few wait it out, while the peasant revolt is squashed, and lots of people die. Or you can inject God into society, change your ways and make his way the way of the land, and live in peace and love.