I much enjoy Kurt Schlichter’s columns.
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I realized that, Damon, I was just saving time. And…according to the pop-up warning I just got, he moderator won’t let me reply to more than 3 consecutive posts at one time, so combining posts is a positive trait on the forum. Little did I know… I must wait until someone replies to me.
Or later…I will try to post this now.
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Some people say that two such “larger than life” men would not work, but perhaps it is “larger than life” that we really need more of. There is plenty for two egos to do.
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So Trump, who is Teflon, and DeSantis, who doesn’t give a crap. That’s a tag team for 12 years of conservative administration in the White House.
But, I think a Congress purged of many Leftists in 2023 must act to fix the military even before the commander-in-chief gets to it. And a public must demand action for the sake of national security. Why isn’t that an important thing for our military anymore?
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Sorry, Jeanne, about that rule of “the moderator”. I didn’t make or ask for it. I think it comes with the design of such Forums as this.
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“Climate change” is a bogus issue made up by globalists as a scare tactic to bring us all into submission to their agenda of making us all “own nothing and be happy”.
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Jeanne: What we must remember is that the military (and the police) are a nationalized industry. Necessarily so, but the laws of no-competition, no-chance-of-going-bankrupt still apply. Both professions have a strong streak of honoring altruistic self-sacrifice, but let’s not kid ourselves into thinking everyone in the military is keen to get a Medal of Honor, even if only posthumously. (When I was in the Army, “NCO” was jokingly interpreted as ‘No Chance Outside’, and I think this has gotten MUCH worse over the years. Which is another reason you need that AR15, but that’s another argument.)
Liz: I am sure there is huge hype about climate change, and we all know that the entire Left believes in ‘never letting a good crisis go to waste’. I follow the leading ‘denialist’ site, Watt’s Up With That, which is very honest re. statistics on average surface temperature around the globe.
[ http://www.wattsupwiththat.com/ ]
However, I haven’t done any deep, extensive reading about it, for lack of time and energy (okay, laziness). My assumption is that the graphs on Watts Up With That are correct, average temperatures are rising, and – as any student of thermodynamics will know – when you insulate a heat engine, it does more work, and the ‘work’ of the earth is weather. How much humans contribute to this, if at all, and what we can realistically do about it, is another question.
I’ve argued with Lefties about this subject – it’s an article of faith with them – and I always say, I will pay close attention to your arguments, if you can show me you’re qualified to understand the science, so could you just remind me what a Fast Fourier Transform algorithm is, computer modelling being critical to the argument about projections into the future … and they always go silent or just sputter.
But basically I take Mark Steyn’s attitude: the climate’s gonna do what it’s gonna do, and even if some massive act of global self-denial could stop it, that’s not going to happen. But if we really worried about it, we’d have a massive nuclear power plant building program, which of course most Leftists also have a religious reaction to.
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Yes, I agree. The earth’s temperature has always warmed and cooled over time. Its the idea that it’s manmade and that its going to kill us unless we destroy capitalism that’s bogus.
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A good question. A “conservative welfare state” sounds like a contradiction in terms, but consider this:
Why don’t we not tax anyone at all, but have government supported by voluntary contributions? Or, at least have the miltiary supported that way, fulfilling dream of thse Bay Area liberals I used to see with bumper stickers that said, “Wouldn’t it be great if our schools had all the money they needed, and the Navy had to have a bake sale to buy a new carrier?”
But the fact is, that wouldn’t work. People either wouldn’t anticipate a situation where we might need a military, or they would be ‘free riders’ on the contributions that the rest of us make.
Many young people don’t anticipate becoming old and unemployable, or ill. On their own, they wouldn’t take out insurance against these things. Yes, you would, dear reader, but many of your contemporaries would not.
So I’m for a ‘welfare state’ that, in addition to forcing them to pay taxes for nuclear submarines, also forces them to buy insurance.
My model here is ferociously-capitalist Singapore, with its ‘Provident Fund’. [ Central Provident Fund - Wikipedia ]
I’m for this regardless of the current political circumstances. But even if I were a minarchist, at the moment looking like I want to dismantle what little welfare state the US has would be the last thing I’d be doing.
We’re in a war to save America. Now the America of 1950 had its problems, but the Social Security system was not really one of them. The America of 1970 had its problems, but Medicare was not really one of them. Of course, all ‘entitlement’ programs are dangerous, just as a professional military on top of a military industrial complex is dangerous, because they want to grow, grow, grow. But these are problems we can deal with, just as we backed out of too much welfare state in the 1990s, deregulated the airline industry, and as the Europeans de-nationalized their white elephant nationalized industries.
That’s not what we’re fighting the Left over now. We’re fighting over whether there will be a recognizable America at all – 1950s, 1970s, even 1990’s – they want to destroy the whole thing.
So that’s the only issue worth fighting about. And if a former Democrat UAW member who believes in a $15/hr minimum wage, and the union shop, can be persuaded to join with me on that, I will postpone arguing with him or her on those issues.
In war you have to set priorities, and we are in a war.
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Yes, exactly - we’re in a war with the Left/Globalist elite, that goes way beyond the welfare state.
The “Green New Deal” is not just about draining money out of us and growing government, but about totally destroying our energy and the economy at the same time. The “fast track” to totalitarianism.
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I understand your opinion, your reasoning.
Tell me please, have you read Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom? Milton Friedman’s Free to Choose? Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged? If you have, what is your opinion of each of them? I ask because all of them - by no means agreeing with each other on every point - argue against some of the points you make.
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Liz: could you spell out in a bit more detail (or give links to sites where it is spelled out) how this conspiracy works? Who makes it up, when did it start, why do they want to do what they’re doing?
In particular, I wouid like to know why the big ‘woke’ corporations want to destroy the American economy, since their income depends on the American economy.
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I’m not answering FOR Liz of course. But my immediate answer to your first paragraph’s questions is: Karl Marx, Saul Alinsky, Herbert Marcuse, plus the New Left rebels of the late 1960s and 70s, plus the environmentalists, the feminists, the gay lobby … I guess you know the list.If you want to understand the mentality of the destroyers, you cannot do better than read Dostoyevsky’s The Possessed (also titled in English The Devils or The Demons). That prophetic novel also casts much light on what happened to Russia in 1917.
As for the question in your second paragraph, I too would like to know the answer.
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Doug1943,
I think it is an excellent idea to invite submission of “best, high-quality sites” they know of, but it would be interesting to have people say why they like each site and what makes it “high-quality”, as you have done with the ‘Twilight Patriot’ site. We may include an “Our Favorites” list on the home page of interesting web sites - as does Powerline, which would be my first submission for well-informed - erudite, but not stuffy - blogging by a group of good-humored intellectuals. It was Powerline that exposed the letter concerning Bush’s military service as a hoax and precipitated “Rathergate”.
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Yes. I agree entirely. (I had forgotten that about Powerline. Poor Dan Rather … I grew up watching him on TV, back in the days when it was not, or did not appear to be, partisan.)
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Jill: yes, these people were the thinkers, and in some cases the activists, of the Left. But they didn’t form a unified cohesive secret organization.
Funny coincidence: I’m just in the process of reading Crime and Punishment (which I started about fifty years ago) … perhaps I’ll switch to The Possessed.
One point: I don’t think Marxism, in any of its flavors, has very much to do with what is happening to our country now. Marx would be crucified by the ‘woke’ mobs today, as would the great Marxists of the 20th Century. (I can claim to know what I’m talking about here, because for the first 20 years of my adult life I was a very serious hard-core Marxist … a Leninist in fact. And not an armchair academic, but an activist, spending the summer of 1964 registering Blacks to vote in the South, and also spending a few months in military prison during the Vietnam war. Plus uncounted hours selling a radical newspaper at factory gates, marching in demonstrations, holding public meetings and private study groups grappling with Lenin’s Collected Works. Makes me cry now to think of the wasted time!)
I can assure we that we, then, wanted to fulfill Western civilization, extending it to the proletariat and to the backward countries of the Third World. (If you read The Communist Manifesto, you’ll find Marx and Engels penning a paen of praise to the bourgeoisie and the wonderful things they were doing…) Okay, our methods were misguided, but our motives were not ignoble. The so-called Left today want to destroy civilization. And while we’re on the subject, I should say that patriots could learn a lot from the Leninists with respect to how to build an effective organization and how to use it to advance one’s poltical aims.
In fact, I wish we had a conservative Lenin today. And a Leninist-style organization. (Which is what the John Birch Society was supposed to be … but its brilliant founder went mad.)
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My answer would be the same as Jillian’s, also add to that list any site that covers the “Agenda 21” or “Agenda 30” objectives. Or the list of goals and objectives of the WEF. Or the Communist party.
The answer to why corporations seek to destroy the American economy is hard to fathom, but they must buy into something along the lines of the Cloward-Piven plan - that by collapsing the system, they can then “rescue” it with a Socialist “Utopia”.
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But the thing is, under socialism, people like Bill Gates would be privileged bureucrats at best. In the old Soviet Union (where I lived for a few months in 1985, by the way), the top bureaucrats had perhaps four times the income of the bottom layer of the population. They had a nice flat, a car, maybe a little country cottage – a ‘dacha’ – … and that was it. If they didn’t turn up for work on Monday morning, the secret police would be after them on Tuesday.
No wonder they fell over themselves to become real capitalists!
So I just don’t buy the idea that Bill Gates and George Soros are sitting around looking forward to becoming functionaries in a backward socialist economy. No one supports genuine socialism any more, except for a tiny handful of eccentrics.
To ‘socialists’ nowadays, ‘socialism’ means Scandanavian social democracy … ie a flourishing capitalist economy that can pay the taxes to support a comprehensive welfare state.
I think conspiracy theories – ie the idea that there is a small group of secret, powerful conspirators consciously plotting our destruction – plays the same role for conservatives that the gods did for our Stone Age ancestors: an explanation for forces we don’t understand.
And the problem is, modern society is difficult to understand. Even a fairly simple society like the Soviet Union fooled many smart people in the West, who thought it was very durable.
And who predicted the rise of militant Islam?
I don’t think we can – at the moment, anyway – analyze society the way we can analyze a strange electronic device or machine. That’s why I’m a conservative. I am wary of making radical changes to things that have more or less worked for centuries, especially if those radical changes are the brainchild of some intellectual.
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Interesting background! One of my favorite books is “Radical Son” by David Horowitz.
But didnt Marx want to destroy the bourgeoisie?
And isnt their desire to destroy civilization now just an extension of that same idea?
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Marx believed that the bourgeoisie, by developing the ‘forces of production’, had advanced mankind enormously.
He was no ‘back to the land’ Greenie! But he also believed that the forces of production had now outgrown the ‘relations of production’ (private ownership, commodity production), and that their expansion had ceased. So he expected ‘the accumulation of wealth at one pole, misery at the other’, the ‘miserables’ being the propertyless proletariat – the urban working class who had only their labor to sell.
He believed that they would inevitably organize, and eventually become politically aware, and would then take over society and reorganize it on a socialist basis, greatly expanding the forces of production. (This is highly compressed – I’ve left out the Third World, the peasantry, nationalism).
The bourgeoisie would be abolished in the same way that they feudal lords were – by having their property taken from them.
Whether or not this would involve violence, and how much, was a secondary, contingent question. Engels believed the transition to socialism in Britain might be peaceful. (How foolish that was. Of course the bougeosie would resist, regardless of who had won what vote in some election. Ask Salvador Allende.)
The analysis of Marx and Engels, their poltiical perspectives, their motives … are nothing to do with today’s ignorant, spoiled-brat ‘woke’ Leftists, who actually despise their own working class.
I don’t know about Marx and Engels, who never got even close to political power, but Comrade Lenin would have sent these people to a labor camp.
Lenin was also a sexual prude, by the way, despite being an adulter.( Typical man.) He would have had drag queens trying to sexualize children shot out of hand, probably.
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