Politicizing Ourselves to Death: Is the Culture War Over?
As post-election hangover sets in, we continue to witness incivility rolling like a tidal wave through this great nation. Much of this is due to the culture war, which grows more intense every day. One should wonder, is it worth fighting anymore? Or, has it already been won?
The answer lies in our ability to find reality amidst an amalgamation of data constantly coming at us through our television, computer, and smartphone screens from untrustworthy media outlets. A highly mediated and politicized culture has many challenges and it is up to us not to get sucked into the machine.
It is becoming more and more difficult to decipher the truth through a nonstop stream of information. Today we see an increase in what Daniel J. Boorstin referred to in 1961 as “pseudo events,” which are a close relative to propaganda. In The Image: A Guide to Pseudo Events in America, Boorstin writes, “while a pseudo-event is an ambiguous truth, propaganda is an appealing falsehood.”
Ambiguous truths behind words like “forward” (to where?) and “hope” (for what?) and “change” (from what to where?) can easily join with propaganda that appeals to those eager for convenient falsehoods. Boorstin continues, “propaganda oversimplifies experience, pseudo events overcomplicate it.” The mess that is our current state of politics begins to make more sense when considering Boorstin’s model. What we have today is an oversimplification of rhetoric and an over-complication of hidden meanings.
Another problem, the fear mongering and political intimidation, will also continue in the coming years. It is the so-called cultural progressives who scare women, homosexuals, teachers, environmentalists, and minorities into thinking that they have no say in society and someone must rise to fight for them against a malevolent 1%. This conspiracy theory derives from a pre-constructed reality sold as truth with intent to frighten. French philosopher and post-structuralist Jean Baudrillard wrote about the lack of reality in his 1981 study Simulacra and Simulation:
The real is produced from miniaturized cells, matrices, and memory banks, models of control – and it can be reproduced an indefinite number of times from these. It no longer needs to be rational, because it no longer measures itself against either an ideal or negative instance. It is no longer anything but operational. In fact, it is no longer really the real, because no imaginary envelops it anymore. It is hyperreal, produced from a radiating synthesis of combinatory models in a hyperspace without atmosphere.
This is where our media and culture have us positioned. At this point, it would be smart not to support any group or candidate that exploits certain people for political gain because it is all used for purposes of control and veiled as support in subjective terms like “equality” or “fairness.” Equality for whom? Fairness according to what? This tactic can be viewed as simulacra brought on by pseudo-events. In this postmodern digital age, truth is subjective and whoever has the most appealing truth, not the actual truth, rules the day.
There wouldn’t be the amount of mass-mediated simulacra and pseudo-events today if not for the 24/7 television and digital news cycle which perpetuates an unrealistic hyper-reality. In his famous text Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman argues that our desire for distraction could very well be the end of us. This is what Aldous Huxley feared when he wrote Brave New World in 1931. Today, it appears that Huxley was right and there is no better proof than the current state of television. Today we can see how television news as well as fake comedy news poison the well of intelligent thought. In 1985, Postman wrote:
I should go so far as to say that embedded in the surrealistic frame of a television news show is a theory of anticommunication, featuring a type of discourse that abandons logic, reason, sequence and rules of contradiction. In aesthetics, I believe the name given to this theory is Dadaism; in philosophy, nihilism; in psychiatry, schizophrenia. In the parlance of the theater, it is known as vaudeville.
Ahead of its time, Postman’s book nailed how our news cycle works to influence us today. The flow of information through myriad filters makes the truth almost impossible to find. In addition, the influx of comedy news such as The Daily Show and The Colbert Report leaves ignorant viewers thinking they are actually informed. This, if it weren’t alarmingly true, would be the stuff of satire.
Postman’s notion that TV culture creates a sense of anti-communication still holds. What we have seen is a shift in our politicians that has transitioned from leader and policy maker to celebrity. In 1999, Neal Gabler wrote Life: the Movie: How Entertainment Conquered Reality: “By the late twentieth century the chief business of Americans was no longer business; it was entertainment.” Our culture obsesses with entertainment — not only have we had an actor in the White House (who was a celebrity turned politician in Ronald Reagan), we currently have a politician turned celebrity with Obama. From talk shows to fundraisers and back again, Obama has taken America on a ride that touts style over substance. As the line between politics and entertainment continues to blur, Vice President Joe Biden is scheduled to appear in an episode of NBC’s Parks and Recreation. Gabler continues:
The great cultural debate that loomed at the end of the twentieth century and promised to dominate the twenty-first, then, was one between the realists who believed that a clear-eyed appreciation of the human condition was necessary to be human, and the postrealists who believed that glossing reality and even transforming it into a movie were perfectly acceptable strategies if these made us happier – a debate, one might say, between humanness and happiness.
Entertainment truly has conquered reality. The question is not just how can we get it back, but can we get reality back at all? Have we fallen too far down the well of celebrity obsession to crawl back out again? Does media illiteracy render the culture war a mute point? This is a question that is difficult to answer; only time will tell how people will respond to a culture that is out of synch with reality. The truth remains that we are still a harshly divided country and our primary means of information are unreliable. This is why everyone is currently losing the culture war.
The best we can do is continue to move forward by asking questions, thinking critically and independently, and refusing to take marching orders from any politician or media outlet. We must understand that with a media-saturated culture, motivations are not always clear, strings are always attached, and that finding the truth takes effort. We as consumers may not always get to choose the information we receive. What we can do, however, is decide which values we use to interpret it. Remember, the power remains with the end user and not the supplier of information. Understanding that notion will give us more power than we might imagine.
****
Image courtesy shutterstock / Vlue
Related at PJ Lifestyle:
The first culture war is over, and the Left won.
The second one is about to start.
Nobody won the culture war. It is still raging and unsettled because capitalism is on the line, and it is not easy to see how both major political parties are internally incoherent and fighting among themselves. But it is possible to identify a master narrative that is hegemonic: http://clarespark.com/2012/11/07/capitalism-is-on-the-line.
It is deeper than capitalism. People want to live as they please but always be caught by a safety net of government paid programs. The problem is these program require a stable or growing population to have enough workers to pay the taxes that provide the benefits. Unfortunately the very existence of the programs seem to discourage people from investing in the raising of children. Social Security worked fine when there were 16 workers per retire or even 4. We are at 2.8 now and dropping fast. A this point the free riding of childless becomes a question of fairness. Why should the two children of a couple who took the time and expense to raise them also have to pay for the retirement of a neighbor who remained single and childless? If we are relying on future generations to pay our bills when we get old don’t we also have an obligation to contribute to the creation of that generation?
@NC Mountain Girl: you hit one of the central most important problems.
1. No civilization with an imploding population has survived an extended military conflict
2. No civilization with a decreasing population has experienced a steadily growing economy (this is actually simple math)
The pill came in 1966 if I am not mistaken. Then in 1968 the final rebellion. I believe this is the last “shine” of Liberalism. Like those poor infirm people that muster all their energy raise from their beds as if they were miraculously cured only to die a few minutes later.
Liberals will have to face the power of numbers. In this part of the universe 2+2 still equals 4.
I’m not sure there is a singular cultural anymore. I think there’s been a cultural diaspora over the last twenty years due to the explosion of media options with the internet, cable channels, streaming video, facebook, etc. Also immigration has been too massive to assimilate resulting in the retention of their homeland culture. In older times there were some intersections between subcultures – maybe a church or living in the same city or watching the same nightly news cast that would give subcultures an anchor point or some common ground to relate to each other and gain understanding. Now a lot of our subcultures that have very little intersection between them.
What I find mind boggling is that modern subcultures are not limited to a geographic area. They’re scattered all over and stay connected via internet, cheap air travel, and social networking. This makes it hard to figure out what the future will look like.
I think it’s more likely their will be some kind of “culture divorce” rather than a “culture war” – but with subcultures scattered and intermingled, how do we arrange a property settlement?
Forced relocations. I’m ready. Draw the lines and devide the spoils – then let us move to our respective locals. I’m done and just want to drop out and hang out with like-minded people.
Problem is, the others aren’t about to let us go without the fight of our lives, because if we were to leave them to their own devices, they’d have to provide for themselves.
True dat. The takers aren’t going to let the makers leave without a fight.
Hard to believe you filled four screens writing on this topic and never got around to mentioning Andrew Breitbart. He served as an effective homeopathic cure for the condition you diagnosed. G-d, I miss him.
First of all I want to apologize if my analysis offends anyone. I intend not to harm anyone. 500 years ago the Modern Age began. One can describe those five centuries as a long “war against authority.” Justified or not, Luther thought nothing of tossing the authority of the Pope out the window. Then nobility did the same with their kings, then the bourgeois did the same with nobility, and then the proletariat got rid of the bourgeois. I admit this is not as clean and orderly as I put it here but it is the general idea and direction of the age: a push against the old order. We arrived at 1914 and the last crowns standing lost any relevance if not their own heads. The question at that moment was: what to do with the loot. Natural capitalism gave way to Liberal Capitalism, which emerged as a more savage en dynamic force. Then two alternatives of Socialism: Fascism and Communism. Well, Capitalism died in 1929 having spent all its energy. It was replaced by the New Deal (Capitalism mixed with Socialism) and similar arrangements around the “free” world. Fascism died on the deck of the USS Missouri in 1945. Communism died at the end of the 40′s but the heavy carcass lumbered on until 1991 and survives in some small countries. China and Russia are no longer Socialist countries. What survives around the world is a mix of the old Capitalism mixed with Socialism like iron mixed with mud.
That was roughly the world that emerged after World War II. But the rebellion was not over. We arrived at the summer of 1968. There the original rebellion was turn against *authority itself* and not against some mere Pope, king, or President. That is where Liberalism began to die: a house divided will fall. What seems to you now like a victory of Liberalism in the US is nothing but the exercise of a false option: Romney (a good and decent man) was less liberal than Obama. That’s all.
So do not despair but prepare to construct the world that will emerge after Liberalism destroys itself. It may take a year or ten but eventually it is going to kick the bucket. The fever is about to kill the organism. Preserve in you, your family, and your community as much of the good American spirit as you can. The country will survive and we shall see yet another day because we are one Nation, under God, indivisible. They are instead going to divide themselves and fight over the spoils (it always happens) and we will be burying some and reeducating others.
Look at all that’s been happening from a distance in space and time and you shall see. This is not the beginning of a “new America” but the end of a fever that has exhausted its course.
A most eloquent elucidation of exactly what I have been thinking. A meme, of sorts, that is floating around is that we should just let it burn. Let it devour itself because, there can be no other result. I agree. Fighting against it is impossible now. No amount of rhetoric, no matter how accurate or eloquently stated, will change the minds of the perceived victim class now. Only reality can. I hope it doesn’t get too ugly, but I fear it will be very, very bad.
Excellent post.
@98ZJUSMC: exactly. There is no way to convince the dead to walk again or hear our words. Anyone who believes that life can be sustained on credit and gifts should check into a mental ward. But that is what a huge number of us believe now: print money, borrow, anything but hard work and common sense! What do you think will happen to them? Be grateful that you have a good head on your shoulders. We will survive on exactly that: work and common sense. But first we will have to witness the collapse and learn the lessons of history like those Romans did. The Vandals and Goths brought unwittingly a new age. From the sack of Rome in 410 a.D. to the American Revolution there are only 1,400 years. A short while in the context of the history of man. This too shall pass and sunny days will come our way again.
Great post. I agree. However, I don’t see Russia and China as “mixes of the old Capitalism mixed with Socialism”, but as plain tyrannies, or kleptokracies, and Fascism is in my opinion very alive (and kicking, alas) under the mask of Nazislamism, around Iraël, in AfPak, Africa, Indonesia, or in Europe.
Democracy, however imperfect we may have experienced it in western countries, is a treasure, the most developped stage of human political condition, but it requires properly educated citizens (a wide-spread educated middle class), and is vulnerable to demagoguery. I see it as the standing position of man versus the bent chimp’s way of moving. It’s a delicate equilibrium to achieve, and humanity has not yet learnt how to stand with confidence. Athens fell. There was no more practical talking of democracies for centuries. All a way of life was lost, including mastery in some arts (think of the dark ages) Then people outside monastery came to read about the Greeks, and that gave way to the Renaissance and what you said about the end of middle ages, leading to the Enlightment, the Revolutions, etc.
My guess is that Democracy will be subdued and replaced by a perverse form of tyranny that will pretend to act in a democratic way, just as we can see it in some countries (former colonies, for example), making it all the more complicated for honnest people to fight it and establish a real democracy. The most terrific example is what happens in Mexico: the following article is long but it’s a must-read (whenever it was published in a liberal newspaper…):
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/07/02/120702fa_fact_finnegan
But it can be even worse. What scares me most is that people used to fight for their nation in modern times. Obama’s abandonnement of America’s Exceptionnalism tolls the bell for the end of that period (with the notable exception of Israel). What will remain? Gangs, tribes, religious clans, too small to rule a nation, too big too rest. That means civil war. We had the awful wars of religions in France. In most places, I feel that ethnic fights will occur. See in Africa : every pseudo-election is followed by the loser’s calling to arms and burning villages. And such a turmoil might go on until a new equilibrium is found, be it ethnic uniformity in a country through genocide, devastation by an epidemy, etc.
I don’t know when the humanity will try to stand up again, nor if it will succeed, but I really don’t see how it won’t fall hard in my lifetime. But let this not be a reason not to try!
@Alpha: I was describing the situation in the broadest possible way. Liberal interpretation of history will lead to their demise. The forces they unleashed to get to power are not controllable once they get there. The world is not Russia. The “mix” of Fascism, Communism, and Capitalism is the result of the collapse of the postwar structure. The “containers” are broken. Economic pragmatism destroyed ideology. Now economies, currencies, cultures, etc. are dying for lack of guiding principles. A world with no principles is a world rife with insecurity that breeds high prices, corruption, inflation, crime, etc. The good news–in my very subjective opinion–is that once the superstructure of Liberalism collapses there will be nothing left: “Comrades, we can’t continue living this way” famous last words of a USSR leader. A new world is emerging and UNBELIEVABLE AS IT MAY SEEM RIGHT NOW it is a traditional conservative world. Why? because that is sustainable. Christendom arose from the ashes of the Roman Empire. Not that the Empire was ready to die, it was Christendom and the new world of the Middle Ages that were ready to be born.
The American economy has hours left to live and that is the engine that moves the world economy. Once the plunge into darkness begins the process will accelerate until only islands of traditional, conservative, industrious people survive to restart the Nation after learning the lesson of the millennium. Possible the most expensive lesson ever learned!
The fever you write of cannot but be an EVIL dark ages rank with death and dissolution. Now crank in the last 500 years of science and engineering into that equation: EVERYONE IN THE WORLD CAN KEEP DIRTY 1950s energy technology going, dirty nuclear, dirty coal and petroleum AND the fact that there are over 10,000 labs in the word currently capable of producing a plague capable of wiping out the human species. The number of nukes in the world will guarantee a nuclear war somewhere, if not everywhere once the veneer is lifted and the knives come out.
In my opinion the human race just committed global suicide. I’d bet my paycheck humans will be extinct or 100% living like animals in 200 years, no civilization at all. My hope is China keeps pumping money into their space program, and gets at least some breeding humans off this rock before we kill each other off.
The USA wasn’t only the shining city on the hill, it was the dam holding back the great Asian conquers, Islam, China, Russia. Once we are gone as a power, THEY will hold sway, and the REAL descent into hell for humans will begin. They will lash at each other with the terrible tools of war begot with science and engineering leftover from our time. They will have NO restraint fighting over the toy of the earth, and like the primitive children they will be, they will break the toy. Remember planet of the apes??? something like that. If we fall now, and leave these tools without adult (read: western classical liberal attitudes) supervision, they WILL be used, and often, until they CANT be anymore.
The limits of the coming fever are survival, those that fail to survive cannot pursue their enemies anymore. This age of man is probably all but over.
There is hope. I know it looks dark now and you are right: all things continuing as they are now we would not last long. But evil is not in control of the world, God is. Evil will be allowed to flourish and then suddenly turned off. That’s what I believe and I have good reasons to believe it. For those who are good but live without a Christian outlook there is always the duty to resist evil as intelligently and strongly as possible. Evildoers always overplay their hand. Eventually they implode. Evil is parasitic by nature. Once they have destroyed enough of the good around them they turn on to themselves and collapse. Look at history and you shall see. The very emergence of this blessed country is proof that history generates its own antibodies to evil. Do not dismay.
Yup. That’s sounds exactly like what God “revealed” to St John the Divine almost 2000 years ago. Every day it gets closer and closer…
Catino, I believe your predictions are probable. I write about this in my prophetic novel “The Noah Option.” Like the dark ages, we will have to preserve civilization in “islands” as you say (I call them “arks” in my novel. On Amazon and Kindle http://www.TheNoahOption.com. Like the monks of the dark ages preserving the learning of Greek and Roman times in walled monasteries against the Visigoths, we will have to “go underground” to preserve the concepts of limited government and free enterprise for a future generation that will value it.
This adoration of democracy is deeply flawed. Originally in sparta you had to have “served”. Now all you have to do is breathe. Democracy should be limited to those who contribute. When you are in a tough time, and need welfare or food stamps you should work to get back to being part of the contributing class. Otherwise the takers will vote to take until there is nothing left to take.
Communism did not die; it’s what we’re looking at in the US today. Remember, Communists infiltrated all of our cultural institutions in the 1930′s; no matter what happened to the leaders in the 1950′s, no matter what happened politically in the 1980s and 1990s, Communist ideas took hold in the Catholic Church (Bella Dodd’s 1100 homosexual priests, the takeover of our unions, etc), many many people in this nation did receive and continue to receive a Communist formation. It’s interesting to compare these excepts from Cleon Skousen’s “45 Goals of the Communist Party in the US” with America today:
1. U.S. acceptance of coexistence as the only alternative to atomic war
2. U.S. willingness to capitulate in preference to engaging in atomic war
4. Permit free trade between all nations regardless of Communist affiliation and regardless of whether or not items could be used for war.
6. Provide American aid to all nations regardless of Communist domination.
11. Promote the U.N. as the only hope for mankind. If its charter is rewritten, demand that it be set up as a one-world government with its own independent armed forces.
15. Capture one or both of the political parties in the United States.
16. Use technical decisions of the courts to weaken basic American institutions by claiming their activities violate civil rights.
17. Get control of the schools. Use them as transmission belts for socialism and current Communist propaganda. Soften the curriculum. Get control of teachers’ associations. Put the party line in textbooks.
20. Infiltrate the press. Get control of book-review assignments, editorial writing, policy-making positions.
24. Eliminate all laws governing obscenity by calling them “censorship” and a violation of free speech and free press.
25. Break down cultural standards of morality by promoting pornography and obscenity in books, magazines, motion pictures, radio, and TV.
26. Present homosexuality, degeneracy and promiscuity as “normal, natural, healthy.”
27. Infiltrate the churches and replace revealed religion with “social” religion. Discredit the Bible and emphasize the need for intellectual maturity, which does not need a “religious crutch.”
28. Eliminate prayer or any phase of religious expression in the schools on the ground that it violates the principle of “separation of church and state.”
32. Support any socialist movement to give centralized control over any part of the culture–education, social agencies, welfare programs, mental health clinics, etc.
38. Transfer some of the powers of arrest from the police to social agencies. Treat all behavioral problems as psychiatric disorders which no one but psychiatrists can understand [or treat].
40. Discredit the family as an institution. Encourage promiscuity and easy divorce.
41. Emphasize the need to raise children away from the negative influence of parents. Attribute prejudices, mental blocks and retarding of children to suppressive influence of parents.
The jaw gaping ignorance of Luther you display boggles the mind. He “thought nothing”? He thought very rightly so, the sale of indulgences, the worship of icons the putrid stench of corruption emanating from the Roman Catholic Church was leading their followers to hell and eternal damnation.
He most certainly did not “think nothing” of the risk he was taking spiritually through excommunication by Papal Bull or physically through incarceration and punishment after the Diet of Worms.
Lastly, any argument that Luther was simply railing against authority is laughable. Perhaps you should familiarize yourself with his response to the Peasant Uprisings, “Against the Murderous, Thieving Hordes of Peasants”.
“A preconstructed reality shown as truth”???
The gains won by minorities, women and gays are only a few decades old.
I was a teenager when Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated.
I remember.
So was I. And though there were grave and unjustifiable injustices perpetrated on most blacks, it was also true that there were thriving black neighborhoods all throughout the country with many black entrepreneurs that owned banks, food markets, manufacturing companies, recording companies, etc. etc. It was not paradise but they could make it as prosperous as any white neighborhood or better.
The system needed correction–for sure–but how come that correction happened to pass through the destruction of the black family and specifically targeted to the upward mobile, education-leaning black man?
If you remember the day when MLK was assassinated you probably remember what the word Dixiecrat stood for at that time.
Deconstructing history to sell “liberation” to “victims,” sir?
They’re enslaved again, this time without toiling.
WE are toiling, WE are enslaved. THEY party.
“…you probably remember what the word Dixiecrat stood for at that time.”
The Southern Democrats of the era who upheld Jim Crow.
Once the national Democratic Party moved away from its alliance with the Dixiecrats to support civil rights, white southerners abandoned the Democratic Party to find a more congenial home in the Republican Party. (The GOP explicitly courted them with its “Southern strategy.”)
No need to take my word for it. Go check the proportion of Romney votes in the previous Confederate states. Then you might do a little soul searching.
Why is it always is 1968 to the Left? Maybe you need to do even more soul searching yourself. Why do almost all of the blacks stuck in the vicious circle of poverty and ignorance these days live in cities controlled by overpaid unionized public employees and corrupt Democrat politicians?
Maybe it is because that way it is easier to use fear and demagoguery to keep them voting for the Democrats that run the lousy schools and man the polices forces that can’t keep them safe even as they enact the strictest gun control laws in the nation.
Hey, it can be true that blacks did not have full equality and also true that, compared to any other point on the space-time continuum, it was paradise by comparison for them as much as for those who benefited even moreso from the the way America was run.
For one thing, the IDEA of equality must logically precede the REALITY of equality, in the REAL world at least. But not in the fantasy world of communist liars and murderers.
It’s time for conservatives to start fighting the war that socialists have been waging against us.
Here’s a few ideas:
1) Radically change copyright law to a flat 5 years with no extensions after which works pass into the public domain. Make this change retroactively apply to all current copyrights.
This is the stake through the heart of the hollywood and media vampires that have been feasting off of middle America whilst killing it.
2) Eliminate the non profit tax status for all non religious organizations. No more tax deductions for 1%ers that donate large sums of money to university trust funds, political and environmental organizations.
3) Embrace student debt forgivemenss, but let the lenders claw back their losses from university endowments. Make higher education liable from endebting kids while providing worthless indoctrination.
1) Radically change copyright law to a flat 5 years with no extensions after which works pass into the public domain. Make this change retroactively apply to all current copyrights.
Your intent of robbing the entertainment field is anti-republican. You may not like hollywood but it brings in a lot of money from overseas.
Patent and copyright law is a capitalist mechanism intended to protect the inventor. My company stays in business due to copyright law of software. Take a good look at random photos of say medical operating rooms from around the world, and pay attention to the gear you see. That equipment is either US made or licensed from US companies, and the software running it was created in the US as well. And this is only the medical field. The US owns the majority of the worthwhile patents and copyrights on this planet. US created technology is also what powers planet viewing telescopes on the ground, in space, and robots on other planets. Patent/copyright ownership is the backbone of the US economy.
You would be willing to trash the economy over your perception that hollywood is portraying things that you don’t agree with?
The rationale for copyright is a limited monopoly to incentivize technological development. Not near permanent rent taking by advantaged groups.
And most software developers see current ip law as a minefield that they have to negotiate that inhibits innovation.
And most software developers see current ip law as a minefield that they have to negotiate that inhibits innovation.
Wow, that’s impressive; I’ve been in R&D since the 70′s and even *I* don’t know most software developers.
Try again, and this time at least pretend like you actually have somne idea of what you’re talking about.
You must be right, I agree with you. I would say eliminate the concept of a charitable organization, and switch to the concept of charitable activities. You get the deduction for what you do, not for who you are. And while we are at it, eliminate publicly funded scholarships. Instead give vouchers that can be spent on a line of study at any school. That would created a market for educational services, and make it harder for schools to push useless side agenda courses.
Absolute agreement. Very smart.
The weakest link in the socialist chain is higher education. It’s also the most dangerous link. Its where future judges, senators, legistlators and journolists get their indoctrination and marching orders.
The same influential universities that are driving hard leftist agenda are sitting on gigantic endowments virtually none of which is devoted to educating students. There’s no reason why any student at Harvard, or most other prestige university should be paying one penny of tuition. Instead, they charge astronomical tuition to screen out undesirables (AKA red staters)and gain connections for the east coast monied class (including a few cherry-picked outsiders – such as one B.H. Obama).
They are a sacred cow for too many – including many on the “right”.
It is imperative that:
1. Any endowment income not expended during a calendar year be taxed.
2. Online / distance education, non-degree programs and specialty certification be strongly encouraged (note the administrations hostility to online “for profit” institutions.
I would like to see:
1. Institions cover student loan interest on loans made to students who cannot obtain jobs.
2. Salary cap on professors at institutions that accept any form of federal aid.
Using an illustration from Deesillustration.com further moves pjmedias into the fever swamps of the paranoid, antisemitic, anti-reason camp that I thought this site was opposed to.
I’ll replace it with something else.
Thanks for the heads up. I wasn’t familiar with that illustrator but I am now. They won’t be appearing here again.
The author overlooks the fact that both sides engage in the spread of unreal and false narratives and expectations. Both sides of the ideological divide engage in the behavior he describes.
Both sides attempt to use government and the political arena to impose their own culture and values upon the rest of America, and the rest of the world. Neither side actually promotes truth, reality or individual freedom and liberty. Both sides use language to promote freedom and liberty while claiming that they, alone, are on the side of the angels. Their actions, to any open minded and objective individual, proves their words to be lies. What either of them says, versus what they do, is so different as to stun an objective obrserver into open-mouthed disblief.
Trying to reason with either side, no matter the language or argument used, no matter the factual and independent evidence provided, has become an excercise in futility.
To employ an over-used pop cultural reference, both sides have taken the blue pill. Neither side wants to confront reality.
Meanwhile, the people we keep electing and re-electing to government, Republicans, Democrats and Independents alike, leave government wealthier than when they entered our employment. That is, most of them, especially in D.C., become independently wealthy. In some ways, it can be said that they have a better grasp of reality than any of us, their supporters.
Blame whoever you want, but both sides bear an equal amount of guilt.
You’ve enjjoyed a vacation from history, You’ve enjoyed the virtual reality you and others have created. The problem is, that reality is crashing…and their is no Nemo or any other saviour available to restore that virtual reality.
The dream is over. Now, it’s time to wake up.Most of you will be like the character, Cypher, in the movie referenced above. You know that none of it is real…but you don’t care. Ignorance is bliss…until the system uses you up, anyway.
Look, conservatives, and libertarians, are not going to be able to compete with the mass media (Hollywood, msm). If we are going to counter the myths (lies) that the left wants to use to define (the lies they tell themselves about who we are) then we are going to have to go man-to-man.
We conservatives need to reach out at the personal level. It is hard to lie about people when you know them personally. It is hard to spread the myth that conservatives are racists when blacks and Hispanics actually know white conservatitves. It is hard to spread the myth that evangelicals want to force morality on people when people get to know evangelicals.
Over the next four years conservatives, especially evangelicals, need to reach out. On the east coast (northeast) evangelicals need to aggressively plant churches. Then help those churches launch daughter churches. We may not have power but we can have influence.
My suggestion is that all of you need to reach out and get to know more minorities. Connect with conservative blacks and Hispanics. Show that you have common beliefs and values. Evangelicals need to build more congregations in urban areas. We need to intergrate minorities into our lives.
And we need to reach out to single women, especially those with children. Become a family to them so that they no longer see government as “husband and father”.
We have to have an intense ground game. if we move quickly, the left can not counter us. BTW, look at how the K-Love radio network is going into the areas controlled by the left. They are our advanced network.
Well, the speaker says Obamacare is the law of the land. The city of San Francisco is authorizing sex change operations at public expense: this was after the state of California was forced by federal court order to release a third of its prison inmates due to inadequate health care while under direct supervision, custody, and control of the state. It’s a generational thing: apparently the senior citizen is going to be rationed health care on a cost benefit quality of life basis by the state to pay for youthful Virgil’s vagina. (Of course, if Virgil can become Virginia, what’s the point of a same sex marriage?) Oh, and those free career criminals will now responsibly get better health care from those state health care exchanges to pay for the medical consequences of their drive by shootings–or, more likely, get their healthcare from the increasingly impoverished local city and county governments going bankrupt. I’m sure it will all work out in the end, just like when prohibition was the law of the land.
Events of the last few years were anticipated and predicted by a student of culture, Pitrim Sorokin. Find a copy of “The Crisis of Our Age” [1941] and gain
insight into how this culture occurs and unfolds.
A quite solid and highly informative analysis, using Sorokins’ model, is that of the late Harold O.J. Brown. Joe’s book is entitled “The Sensate Culture.” Dr. Brown applies the Sorokin model and then proceeds to demonstrate how events today and consequences are expected, though not welcomed.
I suggest a book of Richard Weaver, “Ideas Have Consequences.”
If the troubled and anxiety-riddled reader will get these books and read them, the path is clear and understandable.
Finally, Sorokin anticipated our current sexual revolution also. See his book on
“The American Sex Revolution.”
Good reading.
Culture is over long over, and the war is about to begin.
Chris, I think you’re on to something. However I’m not sure today’s TV/movie culture is sending a message but is rather spreading a virus that destroys rational thought. You can’t counter with different message; the Obama supporters believe the lies of Obama without question. You have to cure the disease, but by the time the kids are of voting age, it’s already too late. It’s like they already have 4th stage syphilis and their brains are gone.
One of the big cultural phenomena in the US today is the belief in Zombies, that they’re either here or coming. Note the popularity of the Zombie movies especially the Resident Evil series with Mila Jovovich battling the evil Umbrella Corporation and their mad plan to turn most of the human race into Zombies.
I always thought the Zombie stuff was fairly harmless science fiction/horror fiction, but no more. I now totally believe in Zombies. They aren’t coming, they’re already here in the US. And they are going to destroy America.
How does one recognize a real Zombie? Watch this short video clip of Bob
Hope: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iFPgzD0JDcQ
By my count there are at least 60 million Zombies in the US. At least that’s how many voted for Obama not knowing, not caring what they do, blindly following orders.
Not only are Zombies real, so is the Umbrella Corporation. The only unknown is who is the CEO of the Umbrella Corporation? Some would say Obama but my money is on Soros. Anyway, it’s definitely not Biden, Pelosi, or Reid (one suspects they might have been accidently exposed to a weakened form of the zombie virus)
Yes, I know, some of you think it’s just a theory but hey, I’m just following the facts here … besides, how else do you explain the election last Tuesday??
My husband was watching a “The Walking Dead” DVD on his laptop on a flight recently. He began to close the lid during a gory part but the young woman next to him said, “Oh, I’ve seen all that” and began to tell him her theory of how, medically, zombieism would occur. He was dumbfounded but didn’t have the heart to tell her she didn’t know her ass from a hole in the ground.
Republicans Got the Shellacking We Deserve
http://conservativeblackchick.com/blog/2012/11/07/republicans-got-the-shellacking-we-deserve/
Wash76, You’re right. There are absolutely great non-white candidates out there. Herman Cain, EW Jackson (in Virginia), and many many others. The problem is the Republican party is seeing them for the first time and is hesitant to nominate these candidates to top political jobs (e.g. President, Governor, Senator) unless they have a successful record of getting elected to lessor positions. I would say we’re in a transitional period. We need to be more inclusive and start a dialogue amongst believers of liberty, and limited government of all racial and cultural groups. I would say fear and uncertainty on how to start that dialogue exists but we have to break through it. I applaud your effort and those of many others to break down that wall. Don’t give up. Your effort will pay dividends in the long haul. Let’s hope we survive the current political and economic insanity long enough to turn the tide.
How the Party of Donald Trump and the Birthers can complain about the incivility of the other side is astonishing. You guys are like little kids who kick adults in the shins and then are surprised when the grown ups get mad.
It is time for those of you who can to grow up. Spouting cartoonish ideological narratives and potted history will just get you typed as hicks and nuts.