I have not posted in a while, but it’s because the sequel to Sunlost is alllmoooost readddyyyyy…. I swear!
Anyway, I wanted to comment on this, er… actually, I wanted to adapt a comment I made about it on Facebook.
Just ran across an article at Breitbart. Combine this with the Administration’s removal of the Clinton-era policy, “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” and sending women into combat; you’re left with a very odd view of the military.
In with gays, out with Christians…. One of those groups happens to be a much larger percentage of the nation, and has traditionally comprised the bulk of the military. Can you guess which group it is?
This nonsense proceeds from a fundamentally confused view of the purpose of the military. Why do we have a military? Is it so we can treat everyone in the nation fairly, provide jobs and scholarships to young people, and have a group of folks who fill out nice uniforms? Is it to get people into shape with PT exercise programs and boost their self esteem?
Nope, we have a military so that we can kill people and break things. In a fallen world, there will always be threats to free nations, so there will always be people that need to be killed and things that need to be broken in order to preserve American liberty. Why is this, you ask? When has war not ravaged most of the world on a regular basis? People are naturally bad. Long before the advent of modern technology, most cultures did a pretty good job of antagonizing each other, even with enormous mountains (literal as well as figurative) in the way of trampling over neighboring peoples. In fact, its likely that if technology had been developed to this point before Western Society had been established, then the tribalism of non-Western cultures would have eradicated all but the last squalid, battered, and wounded nation.
Turns out, technological development is achingly slow without the pillars of Western Society… Just saying… Love this game…
Regardless, the purpose of a military is to maintain optimum proficiency with the objective of posing a devastating threat to enemies of our nation, and also to follow through on that threat when necessary. We could call this a “line in the sand,” if an American politician hadn’t so recently sullied that phrase, redefining it by failing to act when the line he drew was crossed. I guess he sees a line in the sand as analogous to a fence on the southern border… just not really worth much.
That said, those serving in the military give up certain rights, i.e. the right to live where you want to live, the right to take time off whenever you feel like it. Yes, you have a lot of options in the modern military, but ultimately the buck stops on your X.O.’s desk and if he nixes your plans, tough luck, corporal; fall in.
You also give up rights when you seek to become a part of the military. For instance, you give up the right to be paralyzed from the waste down. Can’t physically follow through on that requirement? Tough luck, you ain’t gettin’ in, civvie. That’s life. Anything that detracts from maximized military efficiency should not be tolerated in the service; anything, including the natural difference in physical strength between men and women. The military is not here to cater to situations and lifestyles, nor does it exist to offer to anyone a paycheck and easy access to college funds.
So is the military here to allow gays to express themselves? Nope, although that wouldn’t be an issue, except for the long, detailed knowledge of what is necessary to maximize the effectiveness of your fighting forces. Homosexual relationships within a military unit can seriously compromise the maneuvers of that squad (and if you’re laughing because of all the puns, shame on you. You try writing a sentence about this that can’t be turned into a lewd joke!).
Is the military here so that Christians can proselytize unbelievers? Not at all. But how exactly does it harm combat effectiveness when someone is open and honest about his faith to those friends he develops in the ranks? You’d be fighting an uphill battle to explain that one, if for no other reason than our military has been predominately (overwhelmingly) composed of semi-religious christians, dedicated Christians, and devout Christians, for the bulk of American history. I don’t have the stats to back it up, but I’d bet the sixteen dollars in my wallet right now that Christians volunteer for military service at a far higher rate per capita than do atheists, Hindus, or Muslims.
Or will the Pentagon come out and court martial the next Nidal Hasan as well as the next Dwight Eisenhower? (Ike was a Christian by the way) With groups like CAIR running defense for any muslim activity, why would we expect the Pentagon to go after the hard targets as well as the easy ones? (That is a bit of a double entendre for you enlisted servicemen out there.)
Okay, okay. I am being unfair. Nidal Hasan compared to Dwight Eisenhower? Okay, but the Pentagon really does need to show how Christians discussing their faith with people in the military is on par with Hasan shooting people. Some of these radical atheists are just off-their-rocker stupid. And I know that because I have a few atheist friends who look at this stuff and facepalm as fast as I do.
Whatever. Have a good time, everyone… except you Christians in the military… You guys are threats… causing insomnia attacks in the radical anti-christian crowd… Yeah…
Well, Lionsgate sent a notice to mediafire who was hosting my Hunger Games notifications, so they suspended one of the files… Which is odd considering that ALL of the files were lifted from the film itself. I was hoping the lawyers wouldn’t bother about this, since the files are rather ambiguous and I’m giving this stuff away for free.
However, it is their property and rather than wait and see if they eventually ask for suspension of the rest of the files, I have taken the initiative to remove them myself. I apologize, Lionsgate. It’d be great if you could offer high quality versions of these, stuff without as much background. Maybe they’ll sell these and make a killing. Hope so!
No one should be surprised that people on the left call such stories fascist. As Jonah Goldberg made clear almost a decade ago, fascism as an ascription is most often used to mean “something you are which I dislike,” while actual fascism as an approach to government is a religion of state power, and is therefore the domain of the left. The stunning rebuke of state-worship in the horror of the holocaust was enough to entirely reverse the left-wing embrace of the term fascism, which only served too well for those lefties who were deep into Joseph Stalin’s rect**. (I apologize, but there really is no better way to describe journalists like Walter Duranty and academics of the same mind). Anyway, being the easiest referent to absolute, tangible evil on this Earth, fascism became the left’s go-to insult. Instead of debating, they yell FASCIST! and then claim the high ground, as though they are being reasonable, rather than isolating their ideology from criticism by labeling evil all opinions which are not their own. This tactic has been expanded to other words too, such as racist, war-monger, sexist, homophobic, etc. Even words like corporatist and capitalist, which are not innately understood as bad, are used as though they were.
According to Breitbart, one reviewer said that the film is so over-the-top, so much into Tea-Party fantasy land, that it shouldn’t have been made at all. Think of the consequences! You’ll just encourage the red-state, fly-over-country Constitution-lovers! Oh, the horror!
Let me be plain; Red Dawn is a great movie, even just as a popcorn, action flick. Interspersed among the action sequences, a few lines of drama carry through predictably. But who wants a really unique and complex personal drama when they’re trying to rescue the country from the commies?
Now, let’s talk about something that I think the film does a great job of capturing, something that has made America a nation truly unlike any other in history, different in a fundamental way. Individualism.
There are a few different definitions for that word, so we ought to nail it down quickly. Individualism is self-ownership. I own myself, you own yourself, etc.
Why is this important? Well, for starters, if everyone in a society owns himself, then each person is most responsible for his own condition. This encourages people to self-actualize, to make something of themselves. People owning the reward for their activity makes them very productive. This has been well understood as far back as William Bradford and Plymouth Plantation. (For those who don’t know, that was before Adam Smith.) Strong, innovative industry relies upon individual initiative which is best driven by one’s will.
All of this productivity drives more than just economics. A rising tide lifts all boats. Poverty is nothing like what it once was in America. We have a nation where the primary dietary problem among the poor is obesity, not scurvy. Not only are people better off in how far their dollar will stretch, how much they can purchase with it, people are better off because the wealthier people are, the more Americans afford charitable efforts and funds. The economic effects are impossible to ignore, though. Medical treatments become better, electricity gets cheaper, phones get smaller, cars get safer, apparel becomes more plentiful and comfortable, groceries become exponentially more available, and on and on and on. (and on and on)
A nation of self-ownership promotes several other things as well. Morality, regional cohesion, neighborliness, the shunning of crime, admiration for those who work hard… these things are called cultural capital. They are traits and behaviors which are built up slowly and steadily over a long period of time. Be cautious, because they are easily destroyed and very painfully constructed, especially when you look at the possible alternatives. America’s profound, unique cultural capital is one of things that sets it apart from the rest of the world.
Additionally our pioneer spirit, which was magnified as Americans moved West to build their dreams, is perfect for the defense of a small government under the Constitution and federalist system. Before Japan declared war on the United States (already hours into the Pearl Harbor attack on Dec. 7 1941), they briefly considered an invasion of the mainland. Recall that Hawaii was not an American state until almost eight years later. Whether or not the quote actually proceeded from Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, it rings true; any invading force would be met with a rifle behind every blade of grass.
It’s not just in Red Dawn. There are more guns owned by American citizens than every military force on the planet, though not quite combined unfortunately…
When every citizen owns himself, and as a group, own the government, they will be more than willing to defend those rights. Any cursory examination of the spirit which passed the Second Amendment to the Constitution reveals that the individual is the last refuge of liberty. That he must stand up and defend this federal arrangement; the state is a creation of the citizen, not the other way around.
These things are necessarily the direct opposite of statist views; that state power is a good in and of itself, that problems among people will not be fixed but for the meddling of self-anointed intelligent elite. Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Frederich Nietzsche, Robespierre and Bonaparte, Woodrow Wilson and Earl Warren, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin and Joseph Stalin, Mao Tse Tung and Kim Jong un… These are names of people who have generated and operated on the ideas of power as its own justification. The track record is appalling. America ought to learn from the example before embracing any more of the crap that brings statist reviewers to deride great film like Red Dawn.
Depictions of the U.S. being invaded by armies always come across as odd and mythical. Red Dawn is a good example, and also Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 comes to mind. No nation but Mexico has ever been foolish enough to seriously consider invading mainland United States, and Mexico failed miserably before leaving the border areas of those days. (The Halls of Montezuma referred to in the Marine Corps hymn are situated deep into Mexico. Though we conquered that nation fully, we gave the Mexicans their nation back. America is a benevolent victor. Don’t let Zinn tell you otherwise.) An invading army would be truly torn to bits by the average American township, so it skirts the edge of absurdity to depict a military invasion of America, at this moment in time.
(Shout out to the great Oleg Volk who is the source for two of the images in this post.)
Betcha didn’t know this, huh?
Oh, interesting side-note; the first gun control laws in America were implemented by Democrats in the south against blacks, freed slaves, in order to keep them from being able to defend themselves. The National Rifle Association was formed by Republicans specifically to fight for blacks’ rights to own firearms. Isn’t reading history great?
**Update: these files are no longer available. See this post for an explanation.**
Things to post on this site are beginning to stack up, as I continue to procrastinate actually finishing each of them. Here’s something different, though.
These’re a few things I clipped from the blu-ray audio tracks. I always thought that some of the tones in the film could make decent text notifications. The one named “Alternate” turned out really well and the other three are pretty cool. For those of us who use messengers on our phones, as well as texting, it’s nice to have distinct notifications for each service. Check out the samples below!
Alternate:
Long:
Katniss’ Hunt:
In that mediafire folder, there’s also a snippet I named “Katniss’ Hunt.” Those who have seen the movie will remember it. At the midnight release, I remember watching Katniss out in the woods and listening to the audio. ‘Ohhh! Minimalism well used! I have to get this soundtrack!’ I thought. Then once I did, it turned out that the Hunt was sominimalist that it didn’t warrant being added to the score; bit of a disappointment.
No matter; here it is direct from the disc, with the sound effects and everything, including the first two lines exchanged between Gale and Katniss. Enjoy!
Oh, also; most random traffic on my site is here looking for political analysis regarding The Hunger Games, which is no surprise. Hopefully my take is illuminating some things for people. With the next installment of the films scheduled to debut later this year, the subject will certainly arise again, and I’ll point out a few new things.
Hamlet: Let me question more in particular: what have you my good friends, deserved at the hands of Fortune, that she send you to prison hither?
Guildenstern:Prison, my lord!
Hamlet: Denmark’s a prison.
Rosencrantz: Then is the world one?
Hamlet: A goodly one, in which there are many confines, wards and dungeons. Denmark being one o’ the worst.
Rosencrantz: We think not so, my lord.
Hamlet: Why, then ’tis none to you; for there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so. To me it is a prison.
To see a decent portrayal of this scene, skip forward in the youtube video below to 53:30, or just watch the whole thing. Excellent film.
Powerful lines, as only Shakespeare could write (and yes, W.S. of Stratford upon Avon did write them). How often do we hear this today? “For there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” It’s everywhere! Every choice has been reduced to this post-modern asphyxiation; from the muddled distinction between entertainment and excrement, artistic transcendence and pornographic filth, effective communication and garbled nonsense.
The modern version of the statement sounds like this; “There is no such thing as absolute truth.” Essentially, truth has been reduced to a personal preference, or even worse, has been subjected to the violent winds of democracy and autonomy. The statement is actually self-referentially incoherent, which is a long-winded way of saying it’s hogwash, it’s absurd! For all truth to be relative requires that at least this truth be held as absolute.
Give it some thought; if the statement is taken at face value, can we accept that absolute truth absolutely does not exist? Can we accept that absolute truth exists but not absolutely? Is this not a contradiction in terms? If nothing is either right or wrong, but thinking makes it so, what are we to think of the statement that nothing is either right or wrong? Is it right and wrong? If nothing is truly right or truly wrong, then so too that statement cannot also be correct, because it may as frequently be incorrect. Therefore in those moments, truth becomes absolute, the very thing meant to be undermined in the first place!
We are forced to amend this absurdity into seemingly-valid territory with the caveat that it is human thought which generates rightness and wrongness. Can the rightness and wrongness of all things really depend upon our own independent consideration of them? What about the statement itself? Does it not demand for itself exclusion from being subject to the dictatorship of human thought which ingrains morality into whatever is desirable?
One fascinating point that this makes though, is that morality seems dependent upon an independent mind. I would argue that logic demands morality to be founded upon an independent, personal mind which is also objective; since truth being absolute and particular morality being truthful (not merely a vestige of the evolutionary process), then the universality of that moral truth must come from a non-human mind which transcends material existence and maintains absolute sovereignty over the universe. (See: The Moral Argument for the Existence of God and also Wiki’s page.)
I’m not here trying to propound the argument for the existence of God, though I believe it quite a powerful method to offer reasonable atheists good evidence for God’s reality. My purpose for this post is to dwell primarily on that relativity which seems not relative and inescapable, if we grant the lines Shakespeare put into his character’s mouth.
Hamlet didn’t believe what he was saying. He was trying to buy time, and so was pretending to be a madman, insanely incapable of seeing right from wrong. He was hiding in use of reason to destroy all reasonable foundations. If you can find an argument of logic which invalidates logic itself, you are mistaken. You cannot build a secure house but for the security of its foundation. Shakespeare understood that. G.K. Chesterton also wrote in his great work Orthodoxy, that madness is not creativity seizing control, but logic running wild. It is not that a man may imagine himself as a cabbage, but that he may devise a sweeping logic to convince himself of it.
Friedrich Nietzsche decided that God was dead, slain as the myth of imagination by the sword of reason. And after all his efforts to divine a source for right and wrong apart from that myth, Nietzsche went insane, spending more than a decade of his life in an asylum, incapable of caring for himself unto his death. He simply could not reckon his atheism with the natural inclinations of the human heart. Not only does the heart insist upon real, objective moral truth; it insists upon each individual’s frequent inability to abide by those boundaries.
C.S. Lewis’ Mere Christianity expands upon this as well. There is this pesky ought which eternally stalks our souls. We do and we desire, and yet there is also this thing that we know we ought to do, which is frequently neither our preference nor our behavior.
Where Hamlet pretended to be insane by thinking all truth relative, Nietzsche actually drove himself into the chains of madness by insisting upon it, at least so far as morality is concerned. “[T]here is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so” is a statement which tempts every mind, because it sounds so reasonable at first glimpse, and yet a second glance shatters it as a statement defeated by itself.
René Descartes said, “Cogito ergo sum,” translating to, “I think, therefore I am.” He messed this up a little. You can be sure you exist because you think, but your existence is not contingent on your thinking. Your thinking does not bring about your existence; thinking can only reassure you of it. The same is absolutely the case with morality. Your ability to think about moral truth does not bring it into its existence. Rather, the independent, pre-existence of moral truth is evidenced in our frequent, sometimes-involuntary consideration of it.
In some ways, this post is a preparation for an upcoming post (one of these days) regarding the second movie of the Dark Knight Trilogy, The Dark Knight. That film is loaded with post-modernist nothing-is-true bilge on the one side, pitted against Batman and absolute moral truth on the other. It’s fantastic really, and the whole trilogy presents numerous depictions of conflicts in modern culture which are relevant and worth discussing. Hopefully, I’ll have a series on that soon. My chicken scratch file about those films is pretty packed, so…
Two more quick points: Hamlet was free to regard Denmark a prison if he really wanted to. There’s a difference between something being what it actually is and what we choose to feel it is. In many ways, all human experience is threaded through that distinction perhaps precariously. Yet, reality is not shaped merely by our consideration of it. We must be careful.
And secondly, Ophelia does actually go insane in Hamlet, and the debates rage on why, with the feminists and university types insisting that it’s patriarchy, gender role pressure, abuse, and so forth.
*shrug*
I figure if you’re getting a dozen mixed signals from someone you love (Hamlet), your father is killed, your only other consolation (Laertes, her brother) is out of country, and to top it off, you’ve had a weak psychological constitution your whole life, you’re very likely to sink into a depressed confusion.
There’s not a whole lot out there which isn’t being said. In a nation of 300+ million, you’re going to have one of each. When the deepest sources of passion are added to the mix, there is no limit to the hyperbole which comes to light, justified and unjustified.
On the afternoon of the Sandy Hook shootings, I posted a lengthy tirade on Facebook attacking the disgraceful politicians who were out harping against gun ownership quite literally before the dead had assumed room temperature. Much of that is worth reiterating, and maybe I’ll post the entire text here. But in the days that have followed, several other things became more apparent.
The federal government has sought to ban certain types of firearms and certain magazine capacities. New York has taken the initiative to implement such measures on a statewide level. (Connecticut already had a ban on these weapons, and that didn’t stop a law-breaker from breaking the law.) Alternatively, Wyoming and Texas have both moved to ban federal gun laws in their states. Wyoming will punish federal agents who attempt to enforce federal gun laws with two years in prison.
Whether or not this state nullification is legal or practical is up for debate. What it does make clear is this; the nation is no longer a set of diverse cultures unified behind a common belief in the Constitution as the best possible construction of government. In order for a nation to exist, there must be some point of commonality, which America no longer possesses.
Yesterday, I was chatting with someone on a messenger service…
It is depressing to see so many in this nation so fully hoodwinked by the philosophies and policies that utterly laid waste to the world during the twentieth century. The only thing which preserved America from the devastating impact of leftist ideology was a powerful dedication of the people to the Constitution, which severely restricts the role of government, and thereby limits the amount of damage that can be done in collectivist schemes.
What was maintained by Americans in the previous century has quickly been abandoned in the current. Leftist ideology was shown to be a failure in the Communist mode, in the socialist mode, in the cultural mode, in the moral mode… And yet it survives as the new default ideology in the United States, which had not embraced it during the times when societies of Europe, Asia, Africa, and Central/South America were razed by it.
Yeah, maybe some out there are scratching their heads saying, ‘Only the Berlin wall was razed, not all of Europe.’ I disagree. I think Andrew Klavan is right, that Europe has been in the death throes since the World Wars. Being incapacitated from defending its traditional culture and heritage, it is being overrun by anything else which is more powerful. As Muggeridge wrote:
“So the final conclusion would surely be that whereas other civilizations have been brought down by attacks of barbarians from without, ours had the unique distinction of training its own destroyers at its own educational institutions, and then providing them with facilities for propagating their destructive ideology far and wide, all at the public expense. Thus did Western Man decide to abolish himself, creating his own boredom out of his own affluence, his own vulnerability out of his own strength, his own impotence out of his own erotomania, himself blowing the trumpet that brought the walls of his own city tumbling down, and having convinced himself that he was too numerous, labored with pill and scalpel and syringe to make himself fewer. Until at last, having educated himself into imbecility, and polluted and drugged himself into stupefaction, he keeled over–a weary, battered old brontosaurus–and became extinct.”
Sadly, it appears that Muggeridge was only off by a few decades, even regarding the United States. Even a cursory examination of Europe as it once was and as it now is will find stark, unsustainable differences. The other areas mentioned have clearer issues. Only China presents an interesting analysis, sustaining itself as a massive parasite on the sectors of free market it has embraced, relinquishing no autonomy in any other matter.
And yet, and yet! America, in the greatest position to learn ten thousand lessons from these other nations that are in permanent decline, has decided to flee sense and follow the wisdom of the ages, the post-modernist narcissism and dementia of self-appointed elites who say that the only truth is that there is no truth. Why would anyone trust anything said after someone makes that statement?
Is there not at least a logical certainty one could take in the alternate position? Truly, it should be more comforting to embrace concrete positions that can be absolutely understood moment to moment, rather than trusting a fluid system not to overturn your raft when it lifts up a wave of trouble.
Life is an uncertain experience. It will have ups and downs. The great temptation of man is to generate truth as a dynamic concept which changes given the circumstance (essentially for inconstant man to decide what truth is at any given moment). That is the essence of materialistic Darwinism; that all is change in material circumstance, and there is nothing beyond the individual experience. But truth is by definition external to the individual, or it is not true at all.
This probably all sounds ethereal and confounding, so let me bring this to a practical example. If someone tells you that the Constitution is a living document (that what it says changes, based upon the circumstance), what they are really telling you is that we do not have a Constitution. For a living document takes on whatever meaning the person wishes to add to it.
“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.”
“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”
“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master — that’s all.”
Ahhh, the classics… Always way ahead of their time. You see, if the left is right [sic], and the Constitution is a ‘living’ document, then the question becomes not what the Constitution actually says, not at all! It becomes a question of who can amass a greater mob of power behind their particular preferences for what the Constitution ought to say. This is the difference between the rule of law (republicanism) and the rule of the majority (democracy).
Walter E. Williams is fond of asking people whether they would like to play poker with living rules. “That is to say, maybe my two pair beats your full house, depending upon the circumstances.”
Drawing this back to my original point, if Wyoming regards the Constitution as a document with specific, knowable, and original meaning; then it is bound by its agreement to the Constitution to behave in a specific way, namely to respect life, liberty, and property as the property of individual people and to leave those rights which are not addressed in the Constitution as the property of the states or of the people. After all, the Constitution demands this in no uncertain terms.
New York (especially City) has embraced the notion that the Constitution is just a dusty old rule book that we can’t understand and shouldn’t try to, because it “upheld slavery!” after all. (Not sure we can reconcile those two assertions, by the way. On the one hand we can’t understand it, and on the other it’s disgraceful, what it means.) Thus the government is not restrained in anything it wants to do, at all. And we should not be opposed to the government banning weapons because weapons kill!
Okay, if your eyes haven’t rolled out the window already, let’s just give them all of that for the sake of argument. You cannot find a point of commonality between Wyoming and New York with regard to the Constitution’s limits on governmental power. Given that the government conveniently sides with greater endowment of its own power, it is not unreasonable for states that believe in the original Constitution to leave the Union which no longer abides by it.
Now, this should not be thought as a light thing. It is no small matter for the nation to divide, very likely with permanence. But the nation is already divided. I do not believe you could find a majority of people who want Wyoming to be not part of America, and yet, that is not to say it would not be the best route for Wyoming to go, in terms of protecting personal liberties.
Hopefully, this state’s nullification idea will catch on and reassert state’s rights are more powerful than the federal government, so long as the object in question is personal liberty. That would be a tremendous miracle, given where we are now, and it would require voluntary cultural changes as well. We shall see.
If the piling on of trillions more in debt continues, it is unlikely that all 50 states will remain in the union. This is like having a credit card with a spouse that moved out months ago and continues to spend twice the amount both of us make. At some point, the one spouse is going to assert legal action to get out and leave the debt on the shoulders of the spendaholic.
Recently, I read Daniel Hannan’s Why America Must Not Follow Europe. You know he’s right, but you hate it at the same time. Mark Steyn‘s After America goes into greater detail on America’s embracing a steroid-infused version of the program that is currently Europe’s death knell. Hannan’s other book The New Road to Serfdom is longer and while it educates, it terrifies. All three of these books need to break sales records in the next week. America needs these warnings before we decide how the next four years should be approached.
This British MEP understands America and American liberty better than roughly one half of the Congress.
One item that has always been uniquely American is the debate fostered by acknowledging the natural equality of every person, defined as each person owning himself. Wait, wait, wait… There are so many qualifications necessary here, you say.
Sure, we had slavery when America was founded. We overcame that disgrace because it was inconsistent with the morally-superior principle of universal human equality. It is demented to destroy the principle of equality because it was been violated by people who were trying to establish it for the first time in history. Thomas Sowell said it best:
However much history may be invoked in support of these policies, no policy can apply to history but can only apply to the present or the future. The past may be many things, but it is certainly irrevocable. Its sins can no more be purged than its achievements can be expunged. Those who suffered in centuries past are as much beyond our help as those who sinned are beyond our retribution. To dress up present-day people in the costumes and labels of history and symbolically try to undo the past is to surpass Don Quixote and jeopardize reality in the name of visions. To do so in ways that harm the already disadvantaged is to skirt the boundaries of sanity and violate the very claims of compassion used to justify it.
At some point, we’ve removed the stain and those who do not move on are not solving the crimes of the past, but perpetuating them. Condemnation of goodness is disgraceful, the same as justification of atrocity. We have no ability to create a perfect system. That is for the next life. The best we can do is mitigate imperfection.
Now, there is something interesting about America that gives us a unique position in the world. We take for granted the right to hold and express our opinions. Why wouldn’t we? We’ve always had that right and it has never been denied. As noted in my last post, the First Amendment’s coverage has been expanded to include things that are not speech under any common understanding of the term.
Hannan notes that in Europe, the opinions of regular people simply do not matter. Those in power retain power, and for the supposed benefit of the people, are absolutely impervious to any influence from those they reign over. The European Union was not subjected to the will of the people; rather it was foisted upon them, often against the will of the overwhelming majority.
Baron de Montesquieu, noted for his famous power corrupts quote, laid out in his Spirit of the Laws that the scale of a people governed should be inversely proportional to the amount of responsibilities the government has. America embraced that, and built a government which was very light on the top, left a great deal of authority to the states whose governments left even more obligation on the local townships and cities where the individual could have the most control.
This created a vibrant atmosphere where everyone’s opinions mattered, where they could directly affect the administration that would deal with their lives, and where the federal government was a distant creature that really had very little impact on the everyday lives of the common man.
Stating that All Men are Created Equal will inevitably bring you to the idea that every opinion must matter and that discussion is enormously beneficial. In Hannan’s books, he talks about how different this is in the United States as opposed to Britain or the EU. If your opinion counts for absolutely nothing, what is the point of talking about it?
The existence of talk radio is an excellent example of the American vibrancy of discussion. Several hosts have been enormously successful and, despite what may be said often about talk radio, there are few other venues where the differences of ideas may be actually debated and weighed for their merit. Local people can call in to the local shows, or even the national shows, and make their case for their particular viewpoint. That’s a good thing, even if it sometimes sounds like bickering.
In order to maintain a free society, people must be engaged, which requires that their opinions be tested regularly. This also means their elective choices must actually have an impact on the local governance. Small government is not merely a mantra of the Tea Parties; it happens to be the most sensible structure for a federal authority that is given certain tasks by its millions of citizens.
Once breaking the Constitutional barrier and enlarging the responsibility of government, natural human equality is destroyed and replaced with one or another form of bigotry. Even before it gets to corruption, it has already arrived at some point of suppressing the liberties of some in favor of those of other people.
We are pretty far away from the original American idea. Glimmers of its brilliance remain, though. Everyone in America knows to his core he is entitled to his beliefs and may decide how to vote for himself. Most of America still asserts the Constitution as the best possible structure for national government.
Our nation is a long way from dead, a long way from Europe. Those trends of European autocracy can be expunged, I believe, more easily than most people know. It seems that Washington D.C. fears the loudest ideological minority, because the rest of us believe those loud people have a right to speak. Don’t be afraid of debate.
More than once this past week, I have heard people admonishing others with that old refrain of ‘don’t discuss politics or religion.’ Nonsense. That’s not the American way! Discussing politics and religion doesn’t have to make enemies! It makes a better society. People who entrench themselves in their views and refuse to discuss them are as bad as people who refuse to acknowledge when a superior argument has clearly defeated their own idea.
The best thing we can do to maintain a free society is to be open and honest and courteous in discussing what a free society actually is and how best to preserving it for those who will follow our generation.
“Sharing” Faith
I have not posted in a while, but it’s because the sequel to Sunlost is alllmoooost readddyyyyy…. I swear!
Anyway, I wanted to comment on this, er… actually, I wanted to adapt a comment I made about it on Facebook.
Just ran across an article at Breitbart. Combine this with the Administration’s removal of the Clinton-era policy, “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” and sending women into combat; you’re left with a very odd view of the military.
In with gays, out with Christians…. One of those groups happens to be a much larger percentage of the nation, and has traditionally comprised the bulk of the military. Can you guess which group it is?
This nonsense proceeds from a fundamentally confused view of the purpose of the military. Why do we have a military? Is it so we can treat everyone in the nation fairly, provide jobs and scholarships to young people, and have a group of folks who fill out nice uniforms? Is it to get people into shape with PT exercise programs and boost their self esteem?
Nope, we have a military so that we can kill people and break things. In a fallen world, there will always be threats to free nations, so there will always be people that need to be killed and things that need to be broken in order to preserve American liberty. Why is this, you ask? When has war not ravaged most of the world on a regular basis? People are naturally bad. Long before the advent of modern technology, most cultures did a pretty good job of antagonizing each other, even with enormous mountains (literal as well as figurative) in the way of trampling over neighboring peoples. In fact, its likely that if technology had been developed to this point before Western Society had been established, then the tribalism of non-Western cultures would have eradicated all but the last squalid, battered, and wounded nation.
Turns out, technological development is achingly slow without the pillars of Western Society… Just saying… Love this game…
Regardless, the purpose of a military is to maintain optimum proficiency with the objective of posing a devastating threat to enemies of our nation, and also to follow through on that threat when necessary. We could call this a “line in the sand,” if an American politician hadn’t so recently sullied that phrase, redefining it by failing to act when the line he drew was crossed. I guess he sees a line in the sand as analogous to a fence on the southern border… just not really worth much.
That said, those serving in the military give up certain rights, i.e. the right to live where you want to live, the right to take time off whenever you feel like it. Yes, you have a lot of options in the modern military, but ultimately the buck stops on your X.O.’s desk and if he nixes your plans, tough luck, corporal; fall in.
You also give up rights when you seek to become a part of the military. For instance, you give up the right to be paralyzed from the waste down. Can’t physically follow through on that requirement? Tough luck, you ain’t gettin’ in, civvie. That’s life. Anything that detracts from maximized military efficiency should not be tolerated in the service; anything, including the natural difference in physical strength between men and women. The military is not here to cater to situations and lifestyles, nor does it exist to offer to anyone a paycheck and easy access to college funds.
So is the military here to allow gays to express themselves? Nope, although that wouldn’t be an issue, except for the long, detailed knowledge of what is necessary to maximize the effectiveness of your fighting forces. Homosexual relationships within a military unit can seriously compromise the maneuvers of that squad (and if you’re laughing because of all the puns, shame on you. You try writing a sentence about this that can’t be turned into a lewd joke!).
Is the military here so that Christians can proselytize unbelievers? Not at all. But how exactly does it harm combat effectiveness when someone is open and honest about his faith to those friends he develops in the ranks? You’d be fighting an uphill battle to explain that one, if for no other reason than our military has been predominately (overwhelmingly) composed of semi-religious christians, dedicated Christians, and devout Christians, for the bulk of American history. I don’t have the stats to back it up, but I’d bet the sixteen dollars in my wallet right now that Christians volunteer for military service at a far higher rate per capita than do atheists, Hindus, or Muslims.
And speaking of that, isn’t this the same Pentagon that utterly refused to stop a major by the name of Nidal Hasan from “sharing” his faith at Fort Hood? I guess screaming “Allahu ackbar,” while shooting forty or so of your fellow soldiers isn’t acceptable religious expression, but the long series of disquieting e-mails to jihad-praising muslims, overtly-radical-Islamist presentations justifying suicide bombings, and having tentative links to the 9.11.01 attacks… Apparently all of that is peachy keen… For muslims.
Or will the Pentagon come out and court martial the next Nidal Hasan as well as the next Dwight Eisenhower? (Ike was a Christian by the way) With groups like CAIR running defense for any muslim activity, why would we expect the Pentagon to go after the hard targets as well as the easy ones? (That is a bit of a double entendre for you enlisted servicemen out there.)
Okay, okay. I am being unfair. Nidal Hasan compared to Dwight Eisenhower? Okay, but the Pentagon really does need to show how Christians discussing their faith with people in the military is on par with Hasan shooting people. Some of these radical atheists are just off-their-rocker stupid. And I know that because I have a few atheist friends who look at this stuff and facepalm as fast as I do.
Whatever. Have a good time, everyone… except you Christians in the military… You guys are threats… causing insomnia attacks in the radical anti-christian crowd… Yeah…
Like this: