Beyond Politics: Removing the Progressive Drag on America
Fighting the soul-killing, wealth-destroying acts of progressives over the long term is going to take much more than winning an election or two. It will require neutralizing their influence throughout the culture. That’s much harder, of course, but essential if we’re to have to a country that does more than seesaw between two power-hungry parties while spiraling ever downward.
The reasons that wider change is a must are not hard to find. Even where their relative numbers are low, progressives have come to dominate much more than just the Democratic Party and the major news outlets.
They control curricula for public K-12 education almost everywhere, despite the presence of a great many teachers who disagree with their views. Progressive educators’ numbers are bolstered by the roughly 70-85% of college educators and administrators who identify as liberals. They dominate credential-required education courses, and strongly influence textbook selection.
Clearly, postmoderns have long been the decision-makers and creators for most mainstream film and television, even while they make up a minority of total participants. Major films and television programs are made by many thousands of writers, actors, technicians, and so forth, who line the bell curve of viewpoints. Yet it’s a rare movie that doesn’t blithely depict entrepreneurs as rapacious, or anti-pharmaceutical crusaders as saintly.
Even TV advertising often shows the influence of John Muir’s grandchildren. One Ad Council commercial asks: “What do forests mean to you?” The question spurs absurd answers like “sparkling clean water” and Native American tree worship. Fairy-tale “green” commercials extend even to truck ads these days, as if a half-ton Dodge Ram pickup could — or should — be “eco-friendly.”
Magazines like Scientific American, once upon a time offering real science for the layman, have become organs for anthropogenic global warming propaganda. Smithsonian runs features on the alleged superiority of primitive cultures. National Geographic touts how negligibly modern humans are in advance of apes. That would’ve been unthinkable as recently as three generations ago, yet for today’s followers of Rousseau, it’s so obvious as to be beyond debate.
As these examples show, the influence on American culture of progressive ideas goes far beyond and far beneath politics. They represent a full-scale assault on all classical liberal values: reason, objective ethics, natural rights, capitalism, and their products — freedom and industrial production. Cleaning up Washington will be the barest beginning to reversing a century-long slide in America, one that has accelerated in the last four decades.
Ending bailouts, lowering federal spending, and tinkering with Social Security will give everyone some economic breathing room. But these actions won’t right a country that’s been increasingly tilting left for the past 40 years. And without fundamental change even those victories will be too small, and woefully short-lived.
What to Do, and How?
It goes without saying that changing the culture wholesale is a tall order, given the ubiquitous and deeply entrenched nature of progressive ideas in modern life. And, with the real and significant differences between factions in the pro-freedom, pro-America camp, it’s an even taller order.
Cooperation between the very different types of people that make it up was always dicey and will remain so. No one will ever convince an Objectivist that the Christian deity exists or that Jesus’ Gospels are the proper guide to living or basis for society. Likewise, no libertarian will ever persuade an Evangelical Christian that abortion is not murder.
But there was a time in American history when such things, as important as they were in personal terms, were not make-or-break issues on a social level, much less in politics. A hundred years ago progressives were a tiny minority, and their views very sparsely infected the law. As a result, most Americans of very different viewpoints could live and let live, disapproving as they may have been of those who thought and chose differently.
But with the intrusion of the federal government into every aspect of life, everything has become political. Amit Ghate made the point well in a recent PJM article, “Ideas and the State.” Getting the government out of those thousands of intimate personal decisions, and limiting it to constitutionally enumerated powers, will create a large penumbra around the individual.
I completely agree that the repeal of the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries will be a difficult undertaking. LOL.
Okay Lawrence, now go back and ask your teacher for another suggestion to post!
You call that an argument, sweetie?
Larry, your first comment is some kind of a theory that deserves an argument in response? Pull the other one.
Repealing 60 years of Progressive perversion of society
will be easy, for the same reason it was impossible
to oppose while it was going on: Money;
As long as a nation has a Middle Class with essentially
unlimited discretionary income to be tapped for taxes,
even the most obvious of wasteful policies are endurable,
but when the money goes away, and the Hard Times arrive,
the People will demand changes in policy, _now_ and will
not take no for an answer.
M. Report, I couldn’t respond directly to your comment. I think you’re right. There was no visible cost to leftist encroachments. They have become more onerous but for a long while they were tolerable or even a matter of indifference while the mighty American economic machine performed. AA speaks of low-bottom drunks who just don’t get it until they lose their family, job, and every shred of self respect they have. I think we’re like that. We’ve been rich enough to indulge the most fantastic delusions and a long time ago Solzhenitsyn thought we would only reverse our course when we encountered the “crowbar of events.”
“I also sense a fair degree of bitterness and resignation among many righties here, leaving them ready to blow the whole thing up, because society has simply gone in a direction that they despise, and evidently do not understand.”
It is sadly evident that the “righties” have wondered off the democratic reservation. That is why they are called “Radical right-wing extremists.” The rise of Radical right-wing extremism is cyclical. When a Democrat occupies the White House, they crawl out from under the rocks and inflict their poison. During Republican ascendancies, the differences among the Rightists are papered over with patronage and faux patriotism.
Like other righties of the past, they tilt against the elites-on this page it is the academics. The school system is in the hands of the “progressives.” The Texas School Board’s rewriting of the textbooks just never happened. The Left has all the power. What lies! The right-wing extremists have been running for school board membership for decades. Every John Birch Society chapter or cell, Independent American Party local, has run candidates for School Board for years and years. Throw out the liberal teachers from the liberal arts colleges. They want to pray in the morning, read the bible in the afternoon and celebrate the Confederacy at the dinner table.
We are not advancing our young peoples science educations because every fundamentalist Christian sect in this country opposes science, believes in creationism and intelligent design. Lowest common-denominator Television occupies far too many hours of the young peoples lives. The hell with Edward R, Murrow tradition and the liberals at PBS. Read the Bible, oppose Darwinism and evolution, and then compete for science scholarships to the top schools. What a hard-righty-tighty bunch of loony tunes.
Don’t forget fluoridation, Lawrence. Outlawing slavery was bad enough but then those homosexual commies came out with fluoridation!
Oh, and Lawrence. Was there fluoridated water in the twin towers of the World Trade Center or wasn’t there?
I rest my case.
Lawrence, Sweetie, will you pay my higher taxes for me?
I just know you are not a civil service bottom feeder, a night crawler.
Go for it sport! You want it, pay for for it !
Oh, and Lawrence, Sweetie, you may want to keep your romantic inclinations to yourself.
As if people like the progenitors of the postmodernist political Left had anything to do with the progress made over the past few centuries, or ever.
While there may be some interest in modifying or removing certain Constitutional Amendments, it is a road that must be walked over the long term, uphill, across numerous election cycles. The fact of the matter is these changes will NOT impart immediate benefits and are difficult to sell to the electorate without an immediate benefit. We’ve been trained to buy benefits with votes for many decades and that isn’t about to change quickly. If ever. A solution, IMHO, is to address welfare benefits just like any other income. They made it possible to list government entitlements on a home mortgage application! THIS IS A QUESTION OF FAIRNESS! If you sweat for a living you get a W-2 if you’re a citizen. You invest and you get a 1099-MISC. Government takes our taxes, christens them ‘income, redistributed’ and both parties pass them out like Halloween candy for votes. All this ‘income, redistributed’ should be reported just the same on a new IRS Form 1099-GOV. You can’t change it if you don’t track it.
There is no method to fix economic problems with Political / Social solutions.
Economic problems in America stem from two major causes;
1)Central Banking system ( commonly called the Federal Reserve) out of control and subservient to European Banking families. Since its creation in 1913 the US Dollar has lost 90% of its value. The Federal Reserve to this day refuses congressional Audit of its books, transfers in and out of Europe, or the ledgers of assets / Liabilities. It is an Entity operating outside supervision of the US government or taxpayers.
2) Most of the US Dollars loss was from 1971 when President Nixon removed Gold as the asset backing the US dollar and replaced with Petroluem ( Petro Dollar system ) to back the US Dollar. Once Gold was removed it was a free for all and deficit spending became the normal method of budget for US Government and devaluation of the US Dollar.
This is the reason gas station attendants could buy a house in the 50-60′s, the US Dollar had value. Once Gold was replaced with petroleum, it has been a fast downward spiral into massive debt that today tops 100 trillion when including all liabilities on and off the books ( including social security, military pensions, medicare, etc).
The real danger for the future are Petroleum kingdoms such as Iran, Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, Russia replacing the Petro Dollar system ( the US dollar), with Euro, or Chinese Dollar which has already started. When enough Petroleum producers replace Petro dollar system then collapse of the US dollar is complete.
This article needs to take into account social pressure, political pressure, cultural pressures, all stem from Economic pressure. If the parents did not need to work overtime and spend more time with Family, have more time for their spouse, less pressure paying bills, etc, etc….the rest of society will fall into place.
The Federal Reserve must be forced to operate in transparent and supervised manner, open its books for Audit. The US dollar must be given asset backing again to strengthen its value. These two actions will bring about the social and political change America desperately needs before it slides further over the edge.
well if it were up to you we would have little red school houses and still be beating will over the head with stickes instead of being a super power as we are today. do you get tunnle vision with your head so far up ur butt
Except it was the “little red school houses and … beating will over the head with stickes” that led to superpower America.
And it’s the 50-year-old movement away from literacy and towards self-esteme that corresponds to a progressively weaker, dumber and more violent USA all across the board.
In the little red school houses, discipline problems meant smoking on campus and shooting spitwads in class. In the current high-tech school, we debate whether it’s OK for a teacher to sexually assualt a girl in front of class and for students to bring guns and murder people.
Americans have a hard time accepting the idea that there is no solution to our problems. Chaos is coming and we are dead as a nation. Argue all you want. We failed to “refresh the tree of liberty” for 223 years and now we will pay the price.
Bang on, Ron!
Though Perren has the correct and well-reasoned prescription for “Getting the government out of those thousands of intimate personal decisions, and limiting it to constitutionally enumerated powers…”, it is for a world that has yet to pass its tipping point.
The Lorenz (chaos) equations applied to populations/culture demonstrate irreversibility of our decline in either deomographics (well below the 2.1 reproduction replacement rate within the culture) or education — the disseminator of culture to the population.
It is already impossible to take the Draconian measures required:
1. Decimate the Civil Service by firing 9 out of 10 sniveling servants.
2. Sunset all laws. Test rewrites for constitutionality by a Robespierrean Council .
3. Limit elective office terms and institute capital punishment for service disloyal to the constituition.
— (and institute urine tests immediately)
None of that will happen. The fall, despite leaf-like dips and pauses, remains unstoppable.
When the universal franchise was introduced a hundred years ago, people said the system would go to hell. Now it is going to hell.
Obviously a government cannot go on forever spending much more than it collects. For a while printing money and borrowing money will work, but eventually, it is bound to lead to trouble, and big trouble is approaching fast.
Government inexorably and rapidly gets more expensive and more intrusive. No doubt more taxes could be collected if they went after the politically well connected, but overall taxes are close to the Laffer maximum – if they raise taxes on those whom it is easy to raise taxes on, for example a tax on luxury yachts, they will get less money, not more money.
A tax on gas, beer, and cigarettes would work, but be unpopular with the electorate. A tax on bankers, educationists, and lawyers would work, but would be unpopular with the well connected – and even such taxes would merely postpone the day of reckoning. Government’s existing commitments are unsustainable with any politically realistic, or even politically unrealistic, tax rise.
The welfare state is simply running out of money.
There are two related problems: Theocracy and democracy. The masses are stupid, the elite is theocratic.
Because the elite is theocratic, they compete for power by each being holier than the other, that is to say, more politically correct than the other – but because their religion is this-worldly, they are required to have religious beliefs about this word rather than the next, thus each member of the elite competes to be further out of contact with reality than the other.
Because the masses are stupid, they succumb to politicians promising that the voters can vote themselves rich.
A hundred years ago, progressivism was a sect of Christianity with ambitions for theocracy and world conquest. To better pursue these goals, it discarded theism, becoming theologically indistinguishable from universalist Unitarianism, thus evading the restraints imposed by the first amendment.
Consider, for example, the doctrine that men and women are equal – therefore the same and interchangeable: Women, supposedly, can be firemen and soldiers. Men, supposedly, can marry other men.
The modern progressive theory of equality is in fact a variant of Christianity.
Equality of men and women, and of the races, makes no common sense or
biological sense. Men and women, for example, are biologically so different, that pretty much however you decide to measure them, chances are slim that they will prove to be equal.
When I discuss the matter with leftists, the main argument is some kind of skepticism with regard to efforts to measure people (which always end up demonstrating sexual and racial differences). For example, Gould is skeptical about IQ and race.
Understood as a species of Christian belief, it makes sense, because the Christians believe that the most important part of the self is immaterial. If it’s immaterial, then material differences have nothing to do with it. So Christians are free to believe pretty much anything they want about this most important part of the self, unconstrained by material evidence of any sort. They are free to believe that deep inside everyone, there is a core, an essence, that is not the slightest diminished by bodily infirmity etc. etc. I.e., the soul.
The progressives jettison God, replacing God with, presumably, Nature. So “equality before God” becomes “equality before Nature”. That is, natural equality (of some unspecified sort). And this could be how the progressives manage to believe in some unspecified “natural” (biological or whatever) equality even though no evidence backs them up. Their belief is derived, not from evidence, but from the Christian heritage of progressivism. Their belief looks superficially like a scientific hypothesis because all the terms in it could be interpreted as referring to natural things, but it doesn’t really have any empirical content, because “equality”, while it could refer to something measurable, does not actually refer to anything measurable. Any attempt to measure something to test the claim of “equality” is attacked by progressives.
Progressives are using naturalistic-sounding words to talk about equality, but they are behaving as though it didn’t make any sense to try to measure it, which is how Christians would behave with respect to attempts to rigorously test equality before God. Their reaction would range from skepticism that it could be done, to the sense that it doesn’t even make sense to try, and finally to the certainty that it is heresy to even suggest such a thing and the person suggesting it is evil and possibly a sorcerer and should be burnt at the stake.
The progressive reaction to naturalistic attempts to assess equality is exactly the same as the Christian reaction would be.
The Christian view of equality is entirely impervious to empirical evidence, and so is the progressive view. It makes sense, then, to interpret progressives, when they talk about male and female equality, and about black and white equality, as really talking about the Christian soul, even though they themselves do not realize this is what they are doing because they have forgotten why they are going through these mental motions.
Interesting ramble, that is a different take on the concept of “God-given rights,” but what would be your response to the “inequality” between sexes and races? That voting, occupations, etc should be weighted toward the superior (as determined by…?) or that we just go with stronger smarter dogs taking the food away from the weaker dumber dogs?
How about the idea that the process of civilizing and socializing “naturally” pushes toward a somewhat arbitrary “equality?” Christianity was certainly a step in that civilizing process. Is the risk that there are always barbarians out there, ready to sack our cities and burn our libraries when we get too civilized?
As a Christian in the Biblical sense I think you’re confusing equality with similarity. Men and women have fundimental differences, but who’s more human – men or women?
I’ll never forget when someone told me that people are “obviously” not all equal as some are short and some are tall. OK, since we’ve established a difference let’s explain the equality issue: who’s more human?
What you wrote about progressivism as an illiterate heresy of Christianity was brilliant and goes a long way toward explaining why it’s so difficult to reason with them.
“… difficult to reason with …” Progressives or Christians?
Mr Perren, you may begin the repudiation of the Left, or help it, by ceasing to use their flattering term for themselves, “progressives”. As the term has been around since the late 19th century it is at least antiquated as well as a self deception on their part. In addition powerlust and control are as hold as human beings and their anthropological ancestors, so why not stick with leftists.
I prefer leftist scum myself, but I’m willing to compromise.
Look what such self flattery has done for example to poor Lawrence above, #1, where the poor thing attributes all progress of over a century purely to his politics, pathetic.
Johnt, you are so correct. No real progress can be made as long as free-thinking people continue to allow the socialists, proglodytes, fascists, ‘rats, and other leftists to always define the terms of the debate.
Despite consistent failure to deliver on its Utopian promise and the tens of millions murdered, maimed, tortured and starved throughout the 20th century in its pursuit, collectivist ideology surges more strongly with every wave of commencement ceremonies in America.
Why?
The product of this perennial paradox here in the U.S. is an increasingly lethal, parasitic Welfare State – one which is slowly consuming its host, devouring every penny of the wealth generated by capitalism and every bit of individual liberty guaranteed by the waning republican form of government guaranteed in our Constitution. And the host is willingly offering itself up for the sacrifice.
Again – why?
IMHO, speculating on “what to do” is absolutely pointless and quite possibly self-defeating, unless we get a handle on this critical question.
Collectivism can rightly be seen as a lethal form of ideological AIDS. Like any deadly virus, it’s imperative that we fully understand its vectors and genetic structure. This socially suicidal ideology takes hold in the human mind and heart for a reason, and until we identify that reason we are just making the patient comfortable as she succumbs to the disease.
Thus, getting a handle on this paradox and finding ways to deal with it will have to go deeper than simply – temporarily – rooting out Marxist sensibilities across the spectrum of academia (as if that were even possible without first understanding why they proliferate so virulently in the first place).
Collectivist notions have existed since the days of Plato, but it’s no coincidence, IMHO, that the socially destructive symptoms of this disease emerged in earnest with the advent of the industrial revolution, and seem to have increased with advances in technology, rather than the reverse. Again – why?
I believe that if we look at this problem from the standpoint of Human Psychology, rather than through the foggy lens we use to examine history, society and politics, we can gain a much clearer insight into how and why this virus spreads and kills. By turning the problem on its head, perhaps, we can crack collectivism’s genetic code and recognizing the following: it’s not that leftists think a certain way – rather, those who think a certain way are susceptible to the false promise of leftist ideology.
Looking at this problem as a facet of human psychological development provides a world of new insights, the most critical of which is, of course, a guide to vaccinating young minds against this virus. Part of that naturally involves a fundamental overhaul of the education system, and a rollback of the “reforms” implemented by people like Dewey, the constructivist cult that controls education, and bureuacrats in government who seek control over the mind of the electorate as a means to political power.
But a bigger part is understanding what we need to roll back to. No, it’s definitely not the straw man of “little red schoolhouses” but, instead, a return to the form of education that provided a framework within which the student vicariously gained the knowledge and experiences that led to moral maturity. Prior to the industrial and technological revolutions, this knowledge and experience were gained directly from a very early age. As time went on, the responsibility for imparting this knowledge fell to classical education. But very soon thereafter that responsibility simply evaporated, and therein – I believe – we can find our answer to “Why?”.
This is a subject that is far too complex to cover in a blog comment. I invite those who find a germ of inspiration in this notion to join me here in discussing and brainstorming about this idea further.
…the responsibility for imparting this knowledge fell to classical education. But very soon thereafter that responsibility simply evaporated, and therein – I believe – we can find our answer to “Why?”.
Flight of some of the best and brightest into occupations other than teaching where there was more money to be made, subsequent mediocrity of those left behind in the pool who became responsible for shaping the minds of America’s youth, susceptibility to groupthink and conformity, a 60′s inspired kind of mental laxity replacing intellectual rigor, teachers’ unions…pay, status etc. becoming more important than teaching, the introduction of all kinds of mealy-mouthed, undemanding “feel good” courses, grade inflation, being promoted automatically to the next grade despite dismal academic performance, an “everyone gets a blue ribbon” mentality that made it a sin to draw attention to differences in children, busy working parents opting out, the society’s overall decline in standards reflected in the school environment, a concerted move to remove the school’s power and capacity to discipline students and demand standards be met, desire to shield every child from “danger”, real or imagined, wrapping children in cotton so they are adrift when it comes to developing tools for real adversity later in life…
This…
The Animal School
A lot to counter here to return America to something resembling common sense and sanity.
Insights into the “thinking” of the current Progressive-In-Chief…
America today: Governed by a Ghost
It may seem incredible to suggest that the anticolonial ideology of Barack Obama Sr. is espoused by his son, the President of the United States. That is what I am saying. From a very young age and through his formative years, Obama learned to see America as a force for global domination and destruction. He came to view America’s military as an instrument of neocolonial occupation. He adopted his father’s position that capitalism and free markets are code words for economic plunder. Obama grew to perceive the rich as an oppressive class, a kind of neocolonial power within America. In his worldview, profits are a measure of how effectively you have ripped off the rest of society, and America’s power in the world is a measure of how selfishly it consumes the globe’s resources and how ruthlessly it bullies and dominates the rest of the planet…Obama takes on his father’s struggle, not by recovering his body but by embracing his cause. He decides that where Obama Sr. failed, he will succeed. Obama Sr.’s hatred of the colonial system becomes Obama Jr.’s hatred; his botched attempt to set the world right defines his son’s objective. Through a kind of sacramental rite at the family tomb, the father’s struggle becomes the son’s birthright…Incredibly, the U.S. is being ruled according to the dreams of a Luo tribesman of the 1950s.
President Obama doesn’t pay much attention to world history. Perhaps he has been too busy cooking his own.
With the breakup of the world of the Left started us down with FDR, Wilson & LBJ….the natural course of things will “clean the system”…….
alex pointed out the corrupting influence of a central bank and fiat money. Such suggestions are usually derided as conspiracy tinged and we are told we must live with our ‘modern’ system of money.
This is a fantastic video which really lays out how culturally corrupting a central bank is. We’ve got to get past this problem conservatives have who self censor on the issue of the central bank.
The Cultural Upheaval of Loose Money
Saturday, April 10, 2010 by Jeffrey A. Tucker
http://mises.org/media/4822
Currently only 11% of the US population over the age of 18 are veterans. This number will continue to fall as the Vietnam vets die off.
It has been my experience that military service provides an offset to liberal education and bias. It is my deep concern that there are too few people with skin in the game.
I’m sure that some military service DOES help people see things in a less collectivist light but expecting everyone to serve in the military is probably unrealistic. The military probably doesn’t need or want that many soldiers and surely many people will not pass the entry requirements on health grounds alone.
In my opinion, simply having a job in the private sector, even just for a couple of years, can go a long way to countering collectivist notions. I strongly suspect that most government employees, including teachers at every level, have NEVER worked in the private sector and therefore did not have any contact with “the real world”. Perhaps if all government appointments, including teaching, were subject to a requirement that the appointees worked at least two years in the private sector, we would soon see a major decline in the collectivist attitude. This will take some time, of course, but the sooner we start, the sooner we should see results.
And if we want to achieve results a little more quickly, we could insist that existing government employees get two years of “real world” experience within the next 5 or 10 years. Let them start small businesses or flip burgers or whatever to earn those real world credits.
I strongly believe that there is no such thing as common sense. Instead, what we really mean when we talk about common sense is EXPERIENCE. If our collectivist friends were made to acquire a little bit of genuine experience of “capitalism”, I think we’d see that they quickly learn that capitalism isn’t so bad after all. That realization would surely become part of their teaching and the next generations of kids would be spared the suffocating experience of being told that everything America stands for is evil.
The train has left the station, Mr. Perren. When we walk from the first car toward the caboose we think we are making progress, but the train has never left Washington.
Power was taken incrementally; it will not be returned incrementally. It will certainly not be given up without a fight. As a man said, we must think and act anew.
One example: schools must be all voucher, all the time. Do not direct it, do not play the game, let things evolve. Our better angels always win in such a contest. The founders had no system, and Tocqueville observed that while no Americans were highly educated, Americans were the best educated people on earth. Then we came upon public schooling, which eventually devolved to German schooling. We did not have the wealth for vouchers back then. Now we spend great fortunes to impose mediocrity and conformity. Just let go.
Chesterton: The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of Conservatives is to prevent mistakes from being corrected.
Perren is right. Here is an essay that a wrote when Obama was elected:
A Vast Left Wing Conspiracy
Remember the 60’s radicals? The protests, the flag burning, the draft dodgers, the drugs, the spitting on U.S. soldiers at airports returning home from Viet Nam? Ever wonder what happened to them and their ideology? They overwhelmingly ended up in politics, journalism, academia and law. Not what most Americans would call “honest work”, but nonetheless fields that have proven useful for promoting their agenda. The one thing they all still have in common is their lifetime commitment of undermining God, country, the family and the military. To achieve these ends, they’ve orchestrated their efforts as follows:
- those that entered politics employ class warfare and racism to thwart our Constitution and push their progressive socialist reform.
- the media cooperates by presenting the “news” with unending liberal bias in order to desensitize the public to the liberal agenda.
- those in high school academia do their part by teaching political correctness and revisionist history (America was founded by greedy old white men that invented sexism, oppression and slavery) in order to dumb them down enough for their indoctrination into hard core Liberalism in college. The goal is to turn out young adults that are incapable of critical thought and will blindly accept the liberal propaganda that the politicians and the media present to them.
- the lawyers—especially those in the ACLU—bring expensive lawsuits against anyone who gets in the way, and the ones who become judges become activist judges, and collaborate by interpreting the law in a manner that advances their liberal causes.
These subversive components of the “Me Generation” (aka “Generation Zero”) and their unholy alliance have relentlessly pursued their agenda for forty years. Their efforts finally came to fruition with the election of Barack Obama and a Democratic majority in the House and Senate.
First step would be school vouchers. This simple step returns the schools to the individual not the collective.
Mr. Perren,
You make some valid points. Albeit the ‘Scientific American’ magazine is utter garbage, its ‘Scientific American Mind’ counterpart is far better. Sure, there are redundant studies in ‘SAM’ though limited.
In an ’06 SAM they’d a piece/study of ‘Diversity in the Workplace’ results showing not one iota of ‘more creativity, ideas’ sprouting.
‘Diverse’ workplace, neighborhood, downtown is an area touting EDUCATED, LAW ABIDING people. I don’t care about their racial makeup whatsoever. If these very same people are motivated, self governed and don’t expect empathy and vice versa, fantastic!
I had my first brush of ‘pushing back against Progressives’ when stationed in the military in the S.F. Bay Area, attending school at UC Davis. Due to my always changing work schedule I was often attending class in my fatigues.
I’d rather have completed my BS, like my AS in a military-type setting. Unfortunately my branch didn’t povide such options then.
I attended Davis for a degree whereas I’d gone to school for nearly a year in the military, working in that environment as well when attending. Professor’s would claim of this ‘bever being the case’ or ‘unlikely’ yadda yadda. I’d speak up when appropriate and reply their accounts were false. I’d later bring data amd/or provide accounts for my claims. It drove ‘em bonkers.
Suffice to say, putting so much faith in a person with a respectable academia and little/no experience is a fool’s errand. You need only look at our ill equipped CiC and his ‘decision making’ for validity.
I’ve worked in the private, private contract, military, Government/Federal sectors. The latter being heads and shoulders worst of the other sectors. For reasons being not enough time in the day to explain.
I’m surprised at the negative tone taken by most of the commenters here. You can lie down and play dead, or go off to a closed little circle and brainstorm, or dismiss the whole thing as “repealing” whole centuries, but Mr. Perren certainly did outline the first step in taking the country back from its nihilistic naysayers and intrusive nanny-staters: take back education.
And the first step to that is for members of the community, not just parents, to start monitoring what’s taught in our schools and mounting strenuous objections to those things that are at odds with common American values as stated in the Constitution. That means joining school boards, asking to occasionally sit in on classrooms if one has been alerted to a problem teacher, making it a point to let school administrators know the community is watching, restoring discipline, facing hard truths about reality, and concentrating on actual, basic subjects instead of feel-good “self-esteem” seminars. Another step is to tackle the education departments of universities where so-called “progressivism” is being slathered on new teachers like butter on bread, and where these teacher/students get straight A’s just for showing up for class. Think I’m exaggerating? I worked at a university for 13 years, and that’s exactly what I observed.
America still has good teachers and good schools, but the numbers are consistently brought low by those huge numbers of inner-city schools and Che Guevara “alternative academies”, where the basic subjects take the back seat to class and race warfare propaganda, and where the teachers are expected to be little more than babysitters. Ugly to say, but true, and if we don’t start addressing that, we’re in for a helluva lot more trouble than what we experience today.
I might also say, that monitoring what’s taught in schools means actually reading the textbooks that the kids are expected to read. You’d be horrified at some of the crap they’re being taught out of those books.
We are a superpower because of little red schoolhouses and the education that was imparted to children many years ago. Take a look at the curriculum of those days. Children learned to read and write . They could even perform arithmetic calculations. They werent instructed in self-esteeem, cushioned from any and all risks, nor were they indoctrinated with hatred for their country and it’s ideals . What science that was taught was hard science, not todays politicized nonsense like global warming . In those days people knew you could NOT consume that which had not been produced ( so keynesianism had to wait) . Moreover they knew that theft was wrong (so socialism had to wait too) . I am all for retoring an education which didn’t gloss over the consequences of debt and theft .
Today
ED REFORM WITHOUT PROGRESSIVISM:
There has never been a published study to see if fluency at writing the alphabet in K-1 facilitates the acquisition of literacy and prevents reading problems. Neither has there been a published study to see if fluency in delivering correct answers to simple addition facts in second-grade leads to subsequent mastery of arithmetic and science. I personally have ample evidence that both of these possibilities are true.
The “establishment” doesn’t want to see such studies, because they believe the brains of problem students are “different”. Journalists don’t want to upset education professors, school psychologists, or teachers’ unions because of circulation. Politicians don’t want to “go there” because of votes. However, such studies are simple, cheap and easy. The problems with our schools are immense and of over-riding importance. It is time to think of our country, and not of personal gain.
Please read the following carefully, and act responsibly!
Sincerely,
Bob Rose
^^^^^^^^^^^^^
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Home | EdReports | MAKING EDUCATION HISTORY ON THE INTERNET
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MAKING EDUCATION HISTORY ON THE INTERNET
12/05/2010 00:27:00 EducationNews.org
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Maria Montessori
5.12.10 – Bob Rose, MD – I started a yahoogroups listserv and recruiting a number of “whole language” teachers to help test Maria Montessori’s 1912 postulate that making young children “expert” at writing the alphabet would make them “spontaneous” readers
MAKING EDUCATION HISTORY ON THE INTERNET
During the school year of 2002-2003 I started a yahoogroups listserv and recruiting a number of “whole language” teachers to help test Maria Montessori’s 1912 postulate that making young children “expert” at writing the alphabet would make them “spontaneous” readers.
To my delight, there turned out to be a very strong correlation between how many letters of the alphabet first-graders could write in a timed, 20-second period of time and how good their reading skills were. To my delight, there was a very strong correlation. However, the Whole Language Teachers did not believe in “setting specific achievement goals”, and I was asked to unsubscribe from the list.
During the following school year (2003-2004) I created my own yahoogroups listserv and recruited another group of five kindergarten teachers willing to submit correlation data between alphabet-letter writing fluency and reading skills. Children were identified by ID numbers, rather than by names, to keep the study ethical.
There had been 94 students in the Whole Language “control” group, and I got a total of 106 student correlations from the five “experimental” kindergarten teachers, all of whom had also gotten very strong correlations between writing fluency and reading skill.
I immediately emailed the editorial offices of over a dozen well-known education journals, asking if they would be interested in me submitting a write-up of our study for possible publication. I got only two responses: one said, “That couldn’t possibly be true”, but the editor of the Harvard Educational Review enthusiastically invited my submission. I wrote up our study and had it sent in three days later. (In March, 2004). A few months later I received a standard letter of rejection from them.
Since then I have emailed copies of “my manuscript” to HUNDREDS of educational psychologists, journalists, education professors, politicians and school superintendents. Though I received a few informal polite replies, no one seemed to take my idea seriously.
During the second half of the 2008-2009 school year I recruited a number of different kindergarten and first-grade teachers to my listserv. All who participated again saw positive correlations, but it was decided to wait until this present (2009-2010) school year to repeat the study and see if we could get enough data to publish a meaningful meta-analysis onto the internet.
So far (5/5/10) we have data from three first-grade teachers at a Catholic private school in an upper middle-class Midwestern city. The data from these three teachers involve a total of 60 first-graders. Not only is there a correlation between alphabet-writing fluency and literacy, BUT EVERY ONE OF THESE CHILDREN IS NOW ABLE TO READ. (We got baseline data last year from a first-grade in one of the most affluent and academically successful elementary schools in the state of Pennsylvania. NOT ALL of their first graders were readers, though there was indeed a correlation between writing fluency and reading skill).
At this Catholic school teacher # 1 wrote she had the children practice writing the alphabet three days a week. (We had recommended five minutes each school day). Her class’s writing fluency rates ranged between 63 and 123 letters-per-minute (LPM), and her median student wrote at a rate of 72 LPM. Teacher # 2′s median rate was 75 LPM, and the median rate for teacher # 3 was 84 LPM.
A kindergarten teacher in our study wishes to be identified as “Mary Jane from rural South Carolina”. She tells us that 93% of the children in her school receive subsidized lunches, and as of early May, 2010, only two of the children in her kindergarten are not yet readers. The principal of a highly successful elementary school in Atlanta had once told me on the telephone that children should learn to read in kindergarten, not in the first-grade.
Some years ago the retired archivist of the Calvert School (a private elementary school in Baltimore, Maryland), sent me a copy of a privately published booklet published in 1996, the centennial of the founding of the school. The original headmaster, G. Vernon Hillyer, wrote that, “If you teach children to write, you needn’t bother teaching them to read”. In his first-grade (the school had no kindergarten), children simply learned to write the sentence, “I see a tree”. Thereafter they learned to write, “The tree is green”. After about three months, all the children were literate, and then began to study a formal curriculum and to write meaningful essays. Twenty years later, he wrote that the school had never failed to teach a normal child to read and write.
In traditional Russia, children were taught literacy at home, before they began school. In Russian, as in English, various letters are pronounced differently in normal colloquial speech than they are written. As a matter of fact, there is not word for “to spell” in Russian. Instead, if one wishes to ask how a word is written, one just asks, “How is that written by syllables”. For example, the word “govorit” (he speaks) is colloquially pronounced “guvareet”. When asked how it is written, one answers: “Goh-Voh-REET”.
In other words, one basically doesn’t learn to read in Russian, one learns simply to write. And anyone can read anything anyone can successfully write! (I studied Russian for three years in college, and this way of learning to write in Russia is confirmed by several people educated in Russia whom I have known in the past.
We appreciate this May 1st, 20101data from Ardis, which we’ll consider “end-of-the-year” data, even though a nice lady at the Michigan Board of Education just told me on the telephone that the children in Macomb Count, Michigan, adjacent to Detroit, will actually probably be attending school into sometime in June.
In the past Ardis, a kindergarten teacher, has told us her school has a high number of the children of immigrants in her class. I’m waiting to hear by direct email from Ardis whether she wants any particular restrictions placed on her identify and location, and/or can she give us any more graphics about her class.
Ardis included two interesting remarks in her report. One is “I have to admit I haven’t kept up with the fluency training during this second semester as much as I did last year.” The other important comment is “Every single person [i.e., kindergartner} is a reader - there are no struggling or non-readers this year".
At any rate, Ardis' data of May first indicate there were 26 kids in her kindergarten. One has moved away, and of the remaining:
Four students wrote the alphabet more rapidly than 40 LPM. There reading levels were, respectively, high, average, high and high.
Eight students wrote at between 30 and 39 LPM. In descending LPM order, their reading levels were high, high, high, high, very high (3rd grade level), low average, low average and average.
Eleven students scored between 21 and 27 LPM. Again, in decreasing order of LPM, their reading levels were: medium, high, high, low average, low average, medium, average, low average, high, very very high [3rd grade level; autistic], (this student’s LPM was 21) and average.
Two students scored only 18 LPM. Their reading levels were high and low average.
Nancy, an Ed.D kindergarten teacher, also from Macomb county (part of metropolitan Detroit), just provided us with the following data:
Two of our 26 students scored better than 40 LPM and both rated as “above grade level” in reading skill.
Two students scored 39 LPM, and that are also “above grade level”.
Five students scored between 30 and 36 LPM. In decreasing order of LPM rates, they were rated
“above grade level”, “below grade level”, “above grade level”, “above grade level” and “at grade level” respectively.
Eight students wrote at between 21 and 27 LPM. Each of these eight were rated as “at grade level”, in my opinion of their reading ability.
Five students wrote at 15 LPM. Of these, one was “at grade level” and the other four were “below grade level”.
In the fall of 2009 the average LPM rate in my class was 7 LPM. At present it is 28 LPM.
Historically, many authorities on the subject of literacy instruction have stressed the importance of adequate practice in printing alphabet letters. The first-century Roman writer and rhetorician, Marcus Fabius Quintilianus (ca A.D. 35-98?) wrote that with regard to becoming literate, “Too slow a hand impedes the mind”.
In 1912, Maria Montessori wrote, in effect, that teaching young children to print letters is easy, that it is easy to teach children to read after they have practiced printing alphabet letters, but that it is difficult to teach children to read if they have not practiced writing them.
Marilyn Jager Adams noted that prior to the onset of the twentieth century the “spelling drill” was the principal means of inducing literacy for several millennia.
I believe that the cumulative suggestion of our repeated on-line meta-analyses supports the idea that making children fluent at writing the alphabet during the first two years of school will be an important advance in the teaching of literacy throughout the world. We hope this summary will be relayed to K-1 teachers everywhere via the internet.
I think the importance of our findings is not in the strength of this on-line research. To be scientifically valid, studies must not only be reproducible, but reproducible by different experimenters.
The most outstanding result of our research is having learned that no one, in spite of vast sums being spent on “literacy research”, has ever done and published a study to see if Maria Montessori’s postulate holds true for Anglophone children, or whether it does not!
Bob Rose, MD (retired)
Jasper, Georgia
email: rovarose@aol.com
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Comments (1 posted):
Patrick Groff on 14/05/2010 07:52:10
Dear Dr. Rose:
I was pleased to see your revelation of the fact that most young children in the U.S. are denied an effective manner in which to develop their reading abilities. This practice is so notorious that I call it a form of academic child abuse.
Your comments also lead me to the conclusion that the public needs to be informed that professors of reading education are the major cause of the failure of American children to read commpetently. I hope in the future that you will add that truism to your other pertinent remarks.
Patrick Groff, Professor of Education Emeritus, San Diego State University.
[For commentary on this essay on the Houston Examiner, please go to http://www.examiner.com/examiner/x-11062-Houston-Gifted-Education-Examiner~y2010m6d3-Progressive-education-has-destroyed-our-school-writing-alphabet-makes-young-children-expert-readers
Yesterday I got an enquiry from a PhD educator in Scarsdale, NY. I think this is going to turn out to be very newsworthy!
Bob (rovarose@aol.com)
Its not huge but I’d like for you to think about what this would do: As part of the needed austerity the federal government will no longer hand out money for liberal arts degrees. Only math, science, engineering.
Seriously, think about it. Do China and India subsidize post feminist anthropology?
How to Liquidate the Left, huh? Haven’t heard this sort of bloodthirsty rhetoric since I read Lenin’s pamphlets. Comparing ol’ Jeff to Lenin is giving the poor fella way too much credit, of course, but at least he’s got the bloodlust down pat.
Feel the melodrama! Reducing progressive influence to rubble does not mean eliminating progressivists, nor did the author suggest that – more fantasies of the left. The author suggested that we assert more of our own control over their propaganda and the means of pushing nonsensical ideas.
Reforming education seems reasonable. Getting rid of public education; not so much.
The high-stakes tests which are required for graduation have already turned education in a more conservative direction. It has not gotten rid of the promotion of self esteem, gay rights, or global warming, but it has refocused the agenda toward skills, often, quite to the disgust of many teachers.
I spent my whole career in education, being generally more conservative than my colleagues, and growing more conservative as I grew older, but generally remained more liberal (I would say centrist) than most here at PJM. I have said a number of times on this forum that conservatives should go into teaching and fight the good fight. It is a lot easier, I know, to blather about getting rid of public education and giving everyone vouchers, but that simply ain’t going to happen. A majority of middle class people, whose children go to decent to middlin to excellent public schools, would not stand for the chaos which would ensue for their children.
Almost everyone responds to common sense when it is presented in the correct forum at the correct time. I am still trying to figure out what it is about your conservative mentality that makes it unable or unwilling to go into education and push for the values you believe in. Part of it may be that many tend to be liberal when young and teaching seems like a reasonable thing to do. If one is conservative when young, there evidently,is little desire to be (or survive as one) a teacher, and if one becomes conservative later, many other liberals have already taken the teaching positions.
Maybe the whole concept of being a teacher is simply alien to the conservative mind. Is it too much of a nanny-feminized job, without the risk of business or the physical challenge of the military, fire, police etc?
Perren’s article already explains why society as a whole has become more liberal. Prosperity, and “easy living” if you will, advances in technology and medicine have made people feel that security is a “God-given right’ or the equivalent. People dread disease and dying, even more now though, and want to do the safe and careful thing to avoid it. The military is definitely NOT a preferred occupation these days among the majority of the population. And even if the right to security is not God-given, people will support a government which claims to give it. Terrible economic times may shake that view, but such times would hardly seem likely to push people to vote for the right. In the Depression, who did people elect and re-elect over-whelmingly?
Yes, you can work as a parent, work on the local schoolboard, etc. to push for your agenda, but the general problem with righties is that they tend to over-reach, as I think, Zombie has tried to show. Generally, if you concentrate on winning the small battles, one day at a time, you will have better success than demanding that schools to stop teaching evolution or just go “poof.”
I also sense a fair degree of bitterness and resignation among many righties here, leaving them ready to blow the whole thing up, because society has simply gone in a direction that they despise, and evidently do not understand.
It is what it is, as life has always been.
“I also sense a fair degree of bitterness and resignation among many righties here, leaving them ready to blow the whole thing up, because society has simply gone in a direction that they despise, and evidently do not understand.”
Well so much for “You say you want a revolution.”
Yes, many of my peers talked of revolution, but when I looked at the French and Russian versions thereof, there seemed to be a lot of blood n the streets, which (go figure) did not strike me as a good choice. And if they went on readin’ Chirmsn Mao, they weren’t going to make it anyhow.”
Limp “Blathering Centrist”. Non-sensical range of logic. Contradictions abound. And D-White had a “career” in “Education”.
20. Dwight
“The high-stakes tests which are required for graduation have already turned education in a more conservative direction…”
“I am still trying to figure out what it is about your conservative mentality that makes it unable or unwilling to go into education and push for the values you believe in.”
Keep trying.
“…but it has refocused the agenda toward skills, often, quite to the disgust of many teachers.”
“… to the disgust of many teachers.”
“… to the disgust of many teachers.”
“I spent my whole career in education…”
Are you one of The Disgusted?
“Generally, if you concentrate on winning the small battles, one day at a time, you will have better success than demanding that schools to stop teaching evolution or just go ‘poof.’”
“… to the disgust of many teachers.”
Identity confusion, passed on no doubt.
“…being generally more conservative than my colleagues, and growing more conservative as I grew older, but generally remained more liberal (I would say centrist) than most here at PJM.”
“I also sense a fair degree of bitterness and resignation among many righties here…”
Get a clue Teach. Look at the results. The cattle drive has not worked. Period.
Lather was thirty years old today
And lather came foam from his tongue…
And sometimes, he’s so nameless,
That he hardly knows what game to play,
Which words to say.
It’s not likely that you really care about an answer, but I’ll give one anyway.
No, I am not one of the disgusted and defended the tests to those who were. The tests forced us to expect the more limited students to do more of the hard stuff, whereas before, it was possible just to do easier “higher interest” things which would not cause as many problems and student frustration. A good teacher can still do the material he/she has a passion for; maybe not all of it but some of it and adjust all the material so that the skills get taught.
Many teachers, like most human beings do not like to be told what they must do, or change what they have gotten used to doing BUT some core curriculum is a good thing. My school went from English electives for the last three years of high school (which was the case 35 years ago) to electives in the senior year only and the AP course were not elective. The curriclum became more structured, more proscribed, LESS loosey goosey and that was before high-stakes testing.
But English, as I have said earlier is more skills oriented, as opposed to let’s say history, where they simply cannot teach all of it and sometimes they are choosing between (to use extreme examples) the Revolutionary war and Vietnam, Martin Luther King or the Founding Fathers. When you have to leave something out, it becomes politically charged, to the extent that anyone cares and high stakes testing exacerbates that problem, because one teaches more to the test and has to exclude more. But I have been over that ground before.
Hmmm… D-White. I remember taking tests nearly everyday from K-12 through college through certification in an engineering field, along with charts being placed in front of me 10 minutes before a recording session. It was pass the test or don’t move on. I seriously doubt that I was the only one being tested, and I seriously doubt that studying for the tests did great harm to my education/vocation.
Roping off education from reality will not provide teachers or students with an educational experience that is even near useful. Most “good” students get by on their own wit and initiative, and find success in spite of a system that basically indoctrinates in how not view reality as reality. Teachers per say are not entirely to blame, the massive government involvement sets up a situation where resolution is near impossible. It is a blatant conflict of interest.
Of course…
They took away all of his toys.
“I also sense a fair degree of bitterness and resignation among many righties here, leaving them ready to blow the whole thing up, because society has simply gone in a direction that they despise, and evidently do not understand.”
It is sadly evident that the “righties” have wondered off the democratic reservation. That is why they are called “Radical right-wing extremists.” The rise of Radical right-wing extremism is cyclical. When a Democrat occupies the White House, they crawl out from under the rocks and inflict their poison. During Republican ascendancies, the differences among the Rightists are papered over with patronage and faux patriotism.
Like other righties of the past, they tilt against the elites-on this page it is the academics. The school system is in the hands of the “progressives.” The Texas School Board’s rewriting of the textbooks just never happened. The Left has all the power. What lies! The right-wing extremists have been running for school board membership for decades. Every John Birch Society chapter or cell, Independent American Party local, has run candidates for School Board for years and years. Throw out the liberal teachers from the liberal arts colleges. They want to pray in the morning, read the bible in the afternoon and celebrate the Confederacy at the dinner table.
We are not advancing our young peoples science educations because every fundamentalist Christian sect in this country opposes science, believes in creationism and intelligent design. Lowest common-denominator Television occupies far too many hours of the young peoples lives. The hell with Edward R, Murrow tradition and the liberals at PBS. Read the Bible, oppose Darwinism and evolution, and then compete for science scholarships to the top schools. What a hard-righty-tighty bunch of loony tunes.
Progressives also initiated the Drug War. Now a days they are fighting it.
When we finally end it, Progressives will in fact have been champions of greater liberty.
And who is fighting the Progressives on this? The Christian Right.
It is not all black and white.
You also have to consider that every one is against crime (harm to others). Where the Christian Right has gone wrong is in believing that government can effectively fight vice (harm to one’s self).
Reforming education seems reasonable. Getting rid of public education; not so much.
The Christian Right and the Progressives colluded on inflicting public education on America. They were designed as Protestant indoctrination centers to counter all the Catholic and Jewish arrivals from Europe. Evidently the indoctrination got away from the Christian Right.
Too bad. They got what they deserved from their illiberal ideas.
It is all a bubble. We have better ways of delivering education at lower cost. In 20 years the whole education system will look nothing like it does today.
In Middle America a majority of the communities are centered around their schools, or the school is ONE of the major centers. Imagine Friday Night Lights culture, (for better or worse) with the students scattered between home schooling, online schooling, and seven to twenty seven other different learning venues, rather than the three or four current choices. Schools are obviously struggling with the melting pot vs the diversity models, but the simple fact that the students are together has some melting pot effect. The diversity meme is supposed to have a melting pot effect in the bigger picture.
Are there scores of problems, a hundred decisions and indecisions before the taking of toast and tea? Is the latest generation going to hell in the most modern way possible? You betcha. Life is a messy business.
You really don’t get it do you?
Noone herewould send their kids off to Soviet schools in the 1980s in the USSR. Rather kill them instead.
which part of US Socialist schooling (it’s written “public” but pronounced “socialist”) don’t you understand?
It would be kinder to shoot your kids then send them to the socialist gulags that are public schools.
If you love your kids – homeschool or private, paid-for, Capitalist schools.
tilting left for the past 40 years
It’s the past 100 years
1913 -Progressive Income Tax
1913 – Popular election to US Senate
1917 – US in WW1
1920 – Universal Franchise
1930 – Smoot-Hawley
1932 – ERA & RFC
1933 – Securities Act
1934 – Securities Exchange ACT, Glass-Steagall
1941 – US into WW2
1945 – Strategic action ends war with Japan.
1947 – Marshall Plan
1951 – Term Limits
1951 – Removal of MacArthur, refusal to take strategic action in Korea
1961 – DC Electors
1962 – Refusal to take strategic action lead to US defeat in Cuba and Turkey
1964 – Poll Taxes outlawed
1971 – Universal Youth Franchise
1973 – Refusal to take strategic action leads to US defeat in Vietnam
1990 – Refusal to take strategic action leads to US stalemate in Iraq
2010 – Refusal to take strategic action leads to US defeat in Iraq
2010 – Refusal to take strategic action leads to US defeat in Afganistan
Have you even read Dewey? Seriously!! Dewey was a fierce individualist. As a conservative myself who has read Dewey, I wonder if any of these anti political progressives who slam him have even read his stuff. Particularly his later work. It would pay to pick up something he has written as opposed to reading someone else’s misinterpretation of him. In other words, read a book!
I know this comment is old, but perhaps someone will see it and I wouldn’t want them to get the wrong impression.
Dewey is the very opposite of a “fierce individualist.” Everything, literally every book and article Dewey ever wrote took the viewpoint of a collectivist. For Dewey, learning and living were all about socialization, fitting in, conforming to the group.
Just as one telling quote, I offer:
“[T]he only true education comes through the stimulation of the child’s powers by the demands of the social situations in which he finds himself. Through these demands he is stimulated to act as a member of a unity, to emerge from his original narrowness of action and feeling, and to conceive of himself from the standpoint of the welfare of the group to which he belongs.”
It doesn’t get any more collectivist than that. But if you’re still not convinced, I offer this:
“Society in its unified and structural character is the fact of the case… the non-social individual is an abstraction arrived at by imagining what man would be if all his human qualities were taken away. Society as a real whole, is the normal order, and the mass as an aggregate of isolated units is the fiction”.
The Ethics of Democracy, 1888 (From The Early Works of John Dewey, 1882-1898)
I recently met up with some folks from the Council for Conservative Citizens -CofCC.org. What they say in their ‘principles’ I say ‘ditto’ and the hell with centuries old (failed and refailed) Progressives. and their off the wall thinking.
Funny thing with the Progressive left. They complain the Right wants to go ‘back’ 100 years. Well, where and when the heck does the ‘left’ think progressives started in 2008 ?? They started way way way before that!!! And ‘progressively’ failed each and every time!
Just goes to Show how the left is so easily lead… backwards
I’m still not sure what the hang up about equal justice in America is?
I’m pretty much sick of every ‘group’ the Government has to pander to (thanks to the left). Its pretty much ridiculous and it costs me too much damn money!
The only people the Government should be pandering to is our aged, the mentally challanged (well, thats pretty much a lot of people these days)strike that one. The mentally ill is better choice of words. Those who suffer severe disabilities. Children. And people/children suffering from abuse and neglect – at the hands of family, childcare, hospitals, or strangers.
Sorry, but our poverty level in America is about 300 time higher than most of the people in the world. Our ‘average’ poverty in America consists of 1-2 bedroom house/Apt with a ‘non-dirt’ floor, car, 42 inch TV screen, cell phone, washer/dryer, food stamps and some form of health insurance (medicaid). Think I’m kidding – go look it up.
Entitlements are killing the American Dream. Government is sure to run out of other peoples money. We need to go back to KISS… it worked before…
Progressives may despise the sordid criterion of profit, but anything that runs without a budget is bound to end for lack of funds. The current Progressives grab for power was stated two centuries ago by Reverend Malthus.
Malthusian thought has had a long spin, the closest to eternal life seen on earth. Paul Erlich kept it going with his best seller, Population Bomb (1968), and its soul went marching on with Limits to Growth (1972), of the Club of Rome, and a host of publications over the last two decades that support the man-made global warming scare. After warming stopped for fifteen years it was sold as climate change and now as climate disruption, to exploit the publicity over the latest natural disasters that befell mankind. A switch of brand name to prop up sales of a failed product is frequent publicity practice.
In another gimmick the UN Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change (IPCC) takes peer-review as a synonym of approval by higher authority. All should believe because an alleged consensus of climate scientists says so. But science recognizes no authority above proof backed by experimental evidence and it does not matter who publishes the proof. Who peer-reviewed the work of Newton? To begin with, he has no peer. Who peer-reviewed some 400 papers published by Einstein over half a century? Again, nobody did. Under its own rules, IPCC must then rate Newton and Einstein as irrelevant to science because they lack approval by higher authority. This intolerant stance, combined with the Climategate revelation of the perversion of the procedure, has rendered the “peer-reviewed climate science” of IPCC an object of derision.
Peer review means that a paper submitted for publication meets the editorial standards of a journal – and nothing else. If its standards are high, a science journal will weed out the papers that don’t add to the stock of knowledge, stand on poor evidence or questionable method. To its credit, the procedure used over two centuries has done much to improve quality of what was published in science journals and avoid waste of time with implausible ideas. It is not infallible. Over forty years, some 250 papers were published about the Piltdown Man as the missing link of ape and man, until it was laid to rest as a hoax.
Another ghost that must be laid to rest is the idea that economic development must be stopped to save the planet from man made catastrophic climate, even while one quarter of mankind has no access to electricity and is mired in all the woes that go with it. It is based on the belief that the world is running out of:
· Non-renewable resources of a finite planet;
· Space for a population that grows at an exponential rate;
· Time to reduce carbon dioxide emissions that will bring climate disruption.
None of the tenets is true, but well funded propaganda has made them accepted with an act of faith.
Mankind does not consume the planet like a piece of cheese. There are no non-renewable resources in a world subject to the law of conservation of matter. Human consumption never subtracted one gram from the mass of the planet; matter only changes form and may be recycled. Energy for it is potentially available. One cubic kilometre holds deuterium, fuel for fusion reactors, with energy content equivalent to that of all known petroleum reserves. The oceans hold three billion cubic kilometres of water, more that enough for any imaginable need. Water is not scarce and desalinisation plants already furnish one fifth of the water supply of a big city like Madras, in India, with a process that uses reverse osmosis membranes. A new nano-tube membrane, that requires far less energy, holds the promise of making desalinised water cheap enough for irrigation purposes, a boon to a dry places like Australia with a coast of 25000 kilometres, or the Sahara for that matter. Mining companies never had use for the notion that the planet holds a fixed inventory of resources because they are aware that little is known about the content of the crust of the earth. Since 1850, The Economist has maintained consistent records of the value of commodities, and none has shown an increase symptomatic of scarcity. On the contrary; in 1850, food for a human being was eight times more expensive than it is today. In 1950, less than half of world population had a diet above 2000 calories/day while today 80% have it, and population has tripled since 1950. The Malthusian fallacy has always been that technology will remain frozen forever. It currently holds that fusion energy never will be practical.
UN population forecasts point to stability of world population in the course of the 21st century, and some estimates foresee a drop in population at its end. A new topic of concern is the widespread ageing of populations, clearly seen in Japan with a population that heads to extinction. China heads the same way and West meets East in a suicide pact with a birth rate that is approaching that of the Chinese official policy, of one child per couple. Overcrowding is a local problem seen in places like Calcutta, but far from the predicament of mankind. With an efficient economy, the world population of six billion could live comfortably on 100000 square miles, the area of the state of Wyoming (0.17% of the terrestrial area of the planet). Manhattan and the Copacabana beach district of Rio de Janeiro have higher population densities that do not seem to drive people away with insurmountable problems.
Climate disruption induced by economic activity is the last straw clutched by Malthusians as the cause of all misfortunes that happen on the planet. A dust storm in Australia; the Indian Ocean tsunami; an earthquake on the Himalayas; floods in Pakistan and concomitant drought in Russia; tribal wars in Africa; a snail plague on the Isle of Wight; volcanic eruption in Iceland; collapse of a bridge in Minnesota; hurricane Katrina; summer floods in Bolivia, that Evo Morales blames on fuel consumption by Americans. Anything goes if it serves the aim of suspect pecuniary interests: rationing the consumption of fuel and international licensing and taxation of its production. It means power over every act of all human beings. Qui bono?