Good stuff
Bookworm on Apr 06 2007 at 5:32 pm | Filed under: Uncategorized
For reasons entirely unclear to me, I haven’t been linking to the stuff at Flopping Aces lately. I say unclear because Curt and his co-bloggers have an extraordinary ability to ferret out political and military information and to present it vividly. I’m always fascinated by, and I usually learn something from, the stuff I read there.
I wandered over there today and, with every article I read, fully intended to link to it in a separate post here, at my own blog. After about five articles, though, I realized that it would just be easier to suggest that you check out the blog yourself and, perhaps, consider it something that should be on your regular reading list.
Email This Post To A Friend
2 Responses to “Good stuff”
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
Wow, Book, a slew of links even you couldn’t untangle? Must be major.
Speaking of other blogs.
This is what the right-wing blogs do all the time. Do you think Jihad Watch and LaShawn Barber’s Corner and BLACKFIVE and Mudville Gazette and Wizbang got to be in the top 25 at TTLB only (or even mostly) because of their writing or their core fan base? Not at all! They zoomed to the top because bloggers like Michelle Malkin, Powerline, and Hugh Hewitt talked them up, linked to them, befriended them. It does not make me happy to know that people whose worldview is so narrow, intolerant, exclusive, and hateful are so much better at supporting their ideological soulmates than we on the left, whose values run to diversity, inclusiveness, a place at the table for everyone, human needs before defense contractors’ wish lists.- And No, author isn’t kidding. Read the whole story at the link at the end.
This is exactly what I’m talking about. People who favor discord and selfishness may say that they are the Good and on the path to salvation, but check out their actions. Discord produces discord, it is as simple as that. A universal constant even, although technically if you go down the path of chaos enough, you’ll actually get a sort of uniformity. But that’s neither here or there.
To build something longer lasting, whether in the greater scheme of things or just to things that matter to individuals (blogs) require cooperation, honor, trust, and human goodness. Without it… well, let us just say that you can’t make a house by destroying everything you see. You have to replace it with something people. True, we cannot avoid destruction, but it should be harnessed, harnessed as the Weapons of War and oil are harnessed. It is the power of unity and of cooperating that is at the heart of Good, and it is discord, backstabbing, and shortsighted mistakes that will always fragment and weaken the forces of Evil.
If it was just a clear cut of Good vs Evil, we have our pieces and they have theirs, and never shall the twain meet, Evil would be forever locked in its cage. But it isn’t like that. Because of quantum mechanics or just because of sentient free will, people get to choose which side they will be on. The side that wishes to destroy and replace it with nothing except more destruction, human degradation, and iniquities of all stripes and fluids. Or the side that replaces bad with better, the side that raises people, things, and events above their base instincts and limitations, to something greater and longer lasting.
If you go with my model and use deductive logic, all the behavior on the Left makes sense and is consistent. There are supplemental and alternative models. Selfishness, Baby Boomer psychology, narcissism, political power and greed… but at its base is the eternal struggle between two opposites, a conflict that has gone on for eternity and may still go on for eternity. Humans are just the newest participants in this universal struggle It is hard to name the forces at work. Call it entropy, or destruction. Stabilization or creation. Light or darkness. These forces seem to go beyond human limits and comprehension. We can only see one side of the sphere, we are unable to view it from all perspectives.
diversity, inclusiveness, a place at the table for everyone, human needs before defense contractors’ wish lists.
Taken seriously, one has to ponder this in relation to the greater ramifications of existence. Diviersity, the desire to include, and the place at a table for people, really depend upon diversity of what, desire to include, and what people will be at the table, doesn’t it? The metaphysics of the situation matter, because the forces at play here don’t automatically switch sides just because of our wishes.Good is good, and Evil is evil. They are continuously battling because things that were once Good can be made to be Evil through entropy, and things that were once Evil can be made Good through strength, power, and honor.
True, this is rather humanocentric on an epistemological level. Meaning I’m looking at universal concepts through a human perspective, complete with all the flaws and benefots inherent in such. But that is why I take pains to differentiate Evil from entropy. The concept of a universal constant and function that procedes to unmake all things, beings, and states of existence, is intriguing. But it doesn’t seem Evil in the sense that we see Evil as, evil with a malevolence and cruelty, the desire to inflict pain on humans just for its own sake. Yet we also recognize that evil, such things as Nazism and whatever, accelerate entropy. It accelerates the aging of the soul, body, and spirit. It decays human progress, it blocks it, it even reverses it because it reverses human rights. It strips people of freedom, and forces them to uniformity, but it does so with a cruelty, inefficiency, and a sort of justification. Entropy doesn’t justify itself, well at least last I saw of it when my food was growing cold. Evil has a uniquely and distinctly human component of self-awareness, perhaps logical and to be expected given that humans are its chief servitors and enforcers at this moment in time and space.
So this unique human esque phenomenon has human motivations, of a sort. So they seek to justify themselves. They seek to provide a reason why the Jews must be exterminated. They seek to provide a motivation to support Hitler and Hugo and etc. They seek to manipulate what is maniputable, seek to corrupt what is corruptible, all to swell the ranks of their forces as they inundate across human history and potential.
Certainly the Islamic Jihad and the Left sees themselves as Good people, on the Road of Justice and what not. But what is the truth? And how do you get to it in the mists that is both human deception and universal myopia?
Look at their actions I say. Do their actions sow discord and conflict amongst people and events? Or do their actions harness human potential, freedom, and lives to make something longer lasting and better? The Left says they are out to create a better world. The Islamic Jihad says they are out to create a stronger society, that gives human beings something to worship that is more fullfilling than the decadence, weakness, and decay of materialism everyone sees from the West. People want to join the winning side, they want to do good, if only for themselves while the world burns around them. Regardless of what they say, look at the results. Like all wars, there is deception ongoing. Pierce the veil of illusion. Unfortunately some are better at this than others. But of course, if everyone had the same skill, either being all good or all bad, we would truly have been uniformed, so perhaps it is not as unfortunate as some may think. Fortune is what it is, I suppose we cannot argue against it. We can only make the best of what we can, do the best that we can make in this world.
The two forces in opposition are discernible after all, if people pay attention. People can discern different colors, light from darkness, so certainly they can discern good from evil, right?
What we do need from the blogs is their ability to bring real experts in a field or a locality to bear on news stories. Whether it’s the ability of people on the scene to report news they actually saw happen, or the ability of experts in a field to bypass the media’s filter and explain the real story — that’s valuable.-Grim
A last couple of thoughts to provide some grist for further thinking. The Left seeks uniformity of thought, of action, and of body. People at blackfive seeks differences in opinion, for they believe that useful energy may be extracted from not combining differences (entropy) but through exploiting those differences for their different perspectives by forming a whole greater than the sum of its parts (converting heat energy to mechanical energy). Entropy is a basic formula. This plus that equals what it equals. Or this minus this from the system, equals the result. “Difference”, in the philosophical sense, can be used another way. Instead of mixing the differences together into some kind of gruel or mashed soup, we try to produce something that has ALL the flavors of the original ingredients in a new configuration, creating something unique in this galax I mean world.
Actually, what makes it worthwhile is the chance to talk with a lot of intelligent, interested people, both in and out of the military, about the issues of the day. It’s the philosophy, in other words, that makes it. I’d do it for free — and I do.-Grim
Grim as people who read BF regularly should know, is one of a few I call warrior-philosophers. Part of the Jacksonian political tradition, if you desire some kind of political and background template aside from the philosophical.
I do not claim to be at Grim’s level of the warrior, since after all he is a Marine. On the philosophical level, however, we are similar in that we make use of philosophy. Not for words or arguments over meanings, but in how to better people’s lives, how to ease suffering, and how to defeat the forces of darkness and evil.
Btw, if you Book or others havne’t seen Serenity yet, I strongly strongly recommend seeing it a tleast.
http://www.serenitymovie.com/
http://www.blackfive.net/main/2007/04/funding_blogger.html
Links to things of reference.