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Posted by Anthony on June 7, 2009
The impact that Saul Alinksy’s ideology had in the thinking of the man currently occupying the office of the presidency, one Barack Hussein Obama, is well documented. Thus, I will not document it myself, and submit the reader to Google.
Having only read excerpts of Alinksy’s Rules for Radicals, I was pleased to have the opportunity to sit down and read it for myself in its entirety. Knowing how influential Alinksy was for the young Obama (and many others who now occupy seats of power) I am more worried than I was before now that I’ve actually read this book. Go to the library and pick up the book. You need to read it.
The subtitle of the book is “A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals.” It is not an inappropriate subtitle. Alinsky is all about pragmatism and realism. Alinsky is dismissive of ethical questions related to the question “Does the end justify the means?” He says:
The practical revolutionary will understand Goethe’s “conscience is the virtue of observers and not of agents of action”; in action, one does not always enjoy the luxury of a decision that is consistent both with one’s individual conscience and the good of mankind. The choice must always be for the latter. Action is for mass salvation and not for the individual’s personal salvation. He who sacrifices mass good for his personal conscience has a peculiar conception of “personal salvation”; he doesn’t care enough for people to be “corrupted” for them. (pg 25, chapter titled: Of Means and Ends) Read the rest of the entry… »
Posted by Anthony on June 1, 2009
It has been noted that Dr. Tiller was gunned down in his church. It is a wonder that no one has proposed the obvious: more gun control is necessary. Allow me to be the first to call for it publicly.
The first thing we need to do is make it illegal to have guns in churches in Kansas.
Then we need to make it into a crime to single out abortionists for murder. We should tack it onto the Hate Crimes legislation coming down the pike. There is nothing worse than hate inspired murder. Read the rest of the entry… »
Posted by Anthony on February 2, 2009
This weekend I read one of the scariest things I have heard coming out of the Global Warming crowd. That is saying something. I have documented elsewhere on this blog some other things they’ve said, like comparing denying man-made Global Warming to denying the holocaust. This is so disgusting I almost sat down and wrote a book exposing the various principles at work in it but stopped when I thought of at least one that is already written: C.S. Lewis’s The Abolition of Man
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In summary, the London Times article references a certain Jonathon Porritt, a Global Warming bureaucrat who reportedly says,
“I am unapologetic about asking people to connect up their own responsibility for their total environmental footprint and how they decide to procreate and how many children they think are appropriate,” Porritt said.
“I think we will work our way towards a position that says that having more than two children is irresponsible.
‘Environmental footprint’? The whole ‘over population’ argument has been around for a long time. We’ve heard that we don’t have enough food or water or resources in general to feed the world’s population, or, if the population is unchecked, we won’t in ‘X’ amount of years. And ‘X’ amount of years is always being pushed back as we discover that, in fact, we can accommodate ‘Y’ number of people after all. But as scary as these arguments go, they at least have an air of plausibility. I mean, if you can only feed half the world’s population that obviously signals a legitimate problem. Or, if there are so many people that humans occupy every 10 yards of the earth’s surface area, that seems legitimate, and perhaps a reasonable ‘environmental’ basis for action.
But what does Porritt mean?
The Optimum Population Trust, a campaign group of which Porritt is a patron, says each baby born in Britain will, during his or her lifetime, burn carbon roughly equivalent to 2½ acres of old-growth oak woodland – an area the size of Trafalgar Square.
Oh no. Dear God, not 2 1/2 acres. 2 acres maybe, but not 2 and one half! Something must be done! Porritt says what must be done:
Jonathon Porritt, who chairs the government’s Sustainable Development Commission, says curbing population growth through contraception and abortion must be at the heart of policies to fight global warming.
He should get together with Obama. The two obviously have the same idea of abortion: “safe, legal, and rare*” (*where rare is defined by a hundred times more than we are currently aborting). Read the rest of the entry… »
Posted by Anthony on December 2, 2008
By now have we all heard about the tragic incident on ‘Black Friday’ where a Wal-Mart worker was trampled to death in the early morning hour? Predictably, New York legislators aim to prevent another occurence by…. passing a law. Here is one article describing the effort.
I just want to ask these Democratic New York lawmakers if they think it is worthwhile to create a new law for every variation on human misconduct? In their defense, the habit of passing laws after isolated incidents is common throughout the land. One of the more recent examples of note is the passing in Missouri of a ‘cyber bullying‘ law on account of one incident when a girl committed suicide because of what was said to and about her online. I suspect that many of the gun laws in this country are derived from similar isolated events. But is it really fair and right to take one instance of a thing and then pass a law about it?
Perhaps ‘fair’ and ‘right’ has nothing to do with it but rather it is a question of practicality. I used to be of the school that said that ‘ignorance is no excuse’ in regards to following the law or rules (ie, in my classroom when I was a teacher) but then I had a short list of rules that had enough sense to them that they could be easily learned, easily remembered, and easily applied. Who possibly could make themselves aware of the tens of thousands of pages worth of legislation passed now in this country, not even including our tax code?
I guess that there are many aspects of this problem. For example, I think lawmakers feel useless if they aren’t passing laws. The idea that perhaps their job was to make sure legislation was kept to the minimum seems far from their mind. And you can’t blame them. If a councilman (or a US Congressman) passed no legislation in a term one can imagine the populace thinking he was just lazy. Also, I think some people just like to be ordered around.
Are there alternatives? I think so, but it would be a lot more work. It would require raising children to be decent and have common sense. On a national scale, that would require some agreement on what things are decent. And this would be difficult, since the current trend is to purge any notion that any one thing is right or wrong and the call for ‘tolerance’ is intolerantly shouted.
In the meantime, a lot of good and decent people did not trample anyone and a lot of good and decent people are not bullying people online and a lot of good and decent people are not flying into a rage and running out that instant to obtain a gun by any means available. But the rest of us 300,000,000 have to live with an every narrowing base of personal liberties and freedoms. It just ain’t right.
Posted by Anthony on June 26, 2008
Already I’m seeing and hearing reactions to today’s Supreme Court tossing of the DC gun ban saying that this is conservative judicial activism. As I understand it (I haven’t read the decisions myself), even the dissent is making that accusation.
I don’t agree, personally. I believe that the ruling was constructionist (which makes me wonder why Kennedy went with it) but let’s assume it was judicial activism. Is this not then an illustration about the foolishness of a judicial system that is allowed to deviate at will from the words on the paper? There is no right to an abortion listed in the Constitution, ala Roe vs. Wade. There is no language in the Constitution or even the state constitutions ensuring that gays have as much right to ‘marriage’ as others. And yet, courts have found that they are. This is the bed the liberals made: now lie in it.
As far as I’m concerned, if states want to decide to legalize abortion, or legalize gay marriage, so long as it is done via the legislative branch, which is supposed to represent the will of the people, I will not be happy but at least I can say that democracy is preserved and that there is at least hope that we can yet persuade people to another position. But on the current model, people are essentially disenfranchised. In order to overturn a ruling, in particular the SC ruling, you need to A. get a justice in there with the views you like and B. Get a case to come before them that matches the thing you want to accomplish.
Not easy to do. It can take a generation to pull it off, if not a century. Seems like a bad way to run a country, to me. If this is in fact an instance of judicial activism from the conservative side, then let this be a warning and a call to action to the liberals: it’s time to stop using the courts to push our agendas and trust the people and the legislative processes.
Posted by Anthony on May 25, 2008
I was handed a bunch of interview questions a while back and we actually had an audio interview but that interview is now lost in the hills of Argentina (I kid you not). I have been answering them one by one on my blog at www.birthpangs.com but this one (and a couple to come) I thought would be relevant here. You can read the other four questions and answers at the Birth Pangs site. Here, reprinted, is question five and my answer:
Why pick a post-nuclear war setting to explore these themes: first, the theme of human virtue and fortitude, and, second, the theme of ultimate truth?
Interestingly, what I wanted to do in the book decided this setting. I didn’t start out wanting to have a Mad Max landscape. A Mad Max landscape was the natural outgrowth of some of the purposes of the book. What I wanted to get at is a point where everything is stripped away leaving only individual people striving on their own, free from the structures of government, church, and civilization. There aren’t many plausible scenarios that can give you that and one of the things I wanted to remain is plausible. I know that there are fantastic elements to the book… but under my argument (slowly revealed over all the books), is that everything in the books can actually be true in our own world. So, how do we get from the world we are in now to a world in which every man has to fend for themselves, rebuilding what they believe and how they think free from peer influence? A post-apocalyptic setting is required, unless I want to have a completely fantastic Perelandra world.
Now, I wanted that setting to help lay out virtue and fortitude and even ultimate truth because I believe we take the crutches of society for granted. I am not saying that society’s influence is bad or improper, only that we shouldn’t take it for granted. We like to think of ourselves as good and righteous and brave people, but really, what would we be like if there was no policeman to think about or no armies to concern ourselves with? I think we need those curbs, but my point is that we shouldn’t fool ourselves about ourselves. We may only be civil because it is imposed on us. But what if those curbs weren’t in place?
If the curbs weren’t in place, we’d really find out the robustness of our virtues. We’d find out if we’d behave if there was no policeman to tell us to do so. We’d find out if we were brave when confronted with an injustice or a dastardly deed we had no policeman to call, but had to do something ourselves.
This ties in now with the question of ultimate truth. You don’t have anyone telling you what is right or true anymore, yet each and every one of us has an innate sense that there are right or true things, though we grasp at them and nearly always fail to meet our own standards, let alone the standards of others (think CS Lewis’s Mere Christianity, the first chapter). What are you going to do? You can’t rely on authorities- authorities are gone.
In the Birth Pangs world, this is the real situation and the people struggle endlessly with them. But I do not think that our situation is much different. We still have to answer the same questions, only now we might say there are too many authorities, too many voices telling us what is true and real. Our problem is sorting them out and that basically requires the same process and methodology as starting over from ’scratch.’
I should say that I had wished to make a clean slate in the Birth Pangs world, with literally everything stripped away, but found that I couldn’t. The same principles I explore are the ones that demand that certain realities persist. There are still lingering tensions from past hates, for example. The UN has come in and taken away all of the guns, and a gunless world truly gives us an opportunity to be courageous and test our mettle, but I couldn’t realistically get rid of them all. That meant an on-going discussion about ‘gun rights’ which couldn’t be avoided. There are various political movements that surface that have their origins in our own times, and I couldn’t realistically suggest that they were completely gone, either. What to do about them forms a backdrop to the series.
Still, the main objective I think was reached: people found out what they were made of without the boundaries and crutches of ‘civilized’ society and likewise flail about for ideas on determining the source and nature of real truth.
Posted by Anthony on May 23, 2008
I am gently informed by Mormons that the Mormon-like polygamist community in Texas are not Mormons. Read their arguments and my initial post on this subject here.
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So, a Texas court has ruled that the State acted inappropriately as it extricated more than 400 children from the Texas polygamist compound. Here are two articles that discuss the matter:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080522/ap_on_re_us/polygamist_retreat
http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=080522213014.gw8y4mb6&show_article=1
That article contains this comment which is consistent with my earlier post, which takes issue with the hypocrisy involved:
“The Department conceded at the hearing that teenage pregnancy, by itself, is not a reason to remove children from their home and parents.”
And according to this article, the 911 phone call which started off the whole thing is now believed to be a hoax.
Now, I want to make it perfectly plain that I have no affection for Mormonism. I found it deeply ironic that a number of Mormons would challenge my description of these Texans as ‘Mormons’ while they, no doubt, feel perfectly entitled to the name ‘Christian.’ My problems with Mormonism run deep.
But here we have a plain example of the need for, and the disintegration of, our first and second amendment rights. We also see exposed the blinders that organizations such as the ACLU are wearing. The trampling of the civil rights of this community in Texas was pretty obvious almost from the beginning. Yet no one came to their defense because… because… they were a religious people whose views were dastardly… they had sex with multiple partners (which secular society frowns upon) some of them, we were told, were underage (which even the porn industry denounces, judging from the spam I get). [that's sarcasm, friend]
The secular response might have been different, I suppose, if the impregnated young women had access to abortion!
This Texas case is an example of a bandwagon run out of control. The ugly truth is that there are many, many people out in our country today who believe that religious parents are inherently dangerous and that they should be more closely watched. (Consider this WND article, for example). The difference is that we saw it writ large in Texas. Christians should take notice. If there is legitimate child abuse involved then that is one thing, yet even then ‘innocent until proven guilty’ is still the guiding principle of our land. We can- and should- at least have expressed our outrage at the trampling of their due process rights.
On that front, I think even the Christian community bears some responsibility for not speaking out. I warn: If the scurrilous religionists in Texas are treated like dirt, what is to say that some day some other religious group is deemed to be scurrilous? Who will come to their defense then?
First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out because I am not a socialist.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out because I am not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the incurably sick, and I did not speak out because I am not incurably sick.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out because I am not a Jew.
Then they came for me, and there was no one left to speak for me.
