It’s red pencil time
Bookworm on Jul 14 2009 at 8:53 pm | Filed under: Uncategorized
With California getting perilously close to bankruptcy, you’d think that the government might want to trim or cut a few extraneous budget items. What’s insane is that, despite an endless list of possibilities, our government claims that everything on the budget is absolutely necessary and cannot be cut. People — we get the government we deserve. Californians keep voting these clowns into office.
Email This Post To A Friend
50 Responses to “It’s red pencil time”
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
Ahh Bookworm, you are governed by imbeciles, and they are reelected by incumbeciles. As we are in Pretzelvania.
[...] Bookworm – It’s red pencil time Sphere It Share and [...]
It makes me think about something that I long-ago learned in psychology. People’s personalities, values and habits don’t usually change unless there is a massive shock to the system. I suspect that this probably applies equally well to California, Illinois and our country at large.
The problems of our country go much deeper than simply Democrats, Liberals, Leftists (but, I repeat myself) and Obama. We have to assess how we got to this point where such
proto-fascistspeople could come to power in the first place before we can really understand how to begin rebuilding ourselves to a semblance of our former glory. Our Founding Fathers gave us a great gift that is now being squandered. Why?You can rely on parasites to consistently vote for more parasitism, at least until the host dies. Then their primary consideration is to find a new host. Things will have to get much worse before they will get better, I am afraid.
Greetings: especially “Jewel”
In concurrence with and support of Jewel’s above submission, I offer the following:
I live out in the San Francisco Bay area. The local train system, Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) is in contract negotiations with its employees union. Last week, on the evening TV news, a video was shown of a union member addressing her fellow members. The gist of what she said was, “We’re not greedy private sector employees; we serve the public.”
A couple of days later, the TV views showed a clip of a DMV employee who was upset about the governor furloughing employees three days a month to limit the financial damage of the state’s $25 billion dollar deficit. Her assessment was, “I’ve worked here for 31 years and now they do this to me. They’re disrespecting me.”
The same evening, a woman, who ran a “family” clinic in San Diego, was shown complaining about the IOUs the state was now issuing in lieu of checks because of the deficit. As she enumerated the “catastrophic” impact of this necessity, the video panned around the waiting room of her clinic, which looked much like Tijuana del Norte.
These three incidents, I believe, show the depths of California’s fiscal problems. These three individuals show no awareness of, in order, being better paid than comparable private sector employees; being more consistently employed than private sector employees; and, being allowed to expend state resources, at their own discretion and without penalty, on people who are not entitled to those resources.
California is the ghost of President Obama’s future. There is no reason for optimism.
Geroge, good analogy. The parasite’s problem in this case is that there will be no new host to exploit. America is, literally, mankind’s last best hope. If we go down, it’s hard to believe that Europe, India, China, Australia or Mexico are going to happily accept 100 million out-of-work American civil “servants” and welfare recipients as immigrants.
11B40, my wife, who is mostly ultra-liberal but has her moments of lucidity, and I look at what’s happening with BART and wonder just how far people can take leave of reality before they realize that nothing gibes.
How can a public utility that is $200 million in the hole afford a salary/benefits increase in the middle of a deep recession? BART’s employees are immersed in that form of magical thinking that has seized America’s non-producers like a cat seizes a mouse in its jaws. They think that “them” (evil rich people) or “us” (the government) will either hand over the money or print it. In either case, no problem and not my problem.
(To top it off, BART employees are the surliest, slowest-moving, most uncommunicative, incompetent bunch of transportation workers I’ve ever run into. “We serve the public,” indeed.)
Apparently we weren’t listening.
When the union dissolves, I vote Washington state takes Montana and Wyoming. I’d rather Oregon go to California along with Colorado.
OK, just wishful thinking, though eastern Washingtonians have long dreamt of separating from the more liberal half of the state.
California, the eighth largest economy in the world, is saddled by that provincial document denying its inalienable right to print money. Actually it is already doing that. Is there a picture of Schwarzenegger on those IOU’s?
The country would have no better luck cutting spending than California has, since we too have become addicted to living beyond our means. And the liberals have done their job well- convincing the electorate that there is an ATM machine around the corner, outside the Bank of the Rich.
On a more cheery note, the current recession is tracking the ’29 crash well, though the stock market retraction has occurred faster than 1929. There is debate whether the massive deficit spending and monetary expansion will shorten the duration or merely stave off the inevitable.
http://www.voxeu.org/index.php?q=node/3421
In another article:
http://www.voxeu.org/index.php?q=node/3591
So what do economists know anyway? Hopefully they will resist the urge to push for a second stimulus. If liberals push it, be sure they see the collapse coming and merely want to raid the coffers one more time.
This is a glass-half-empty scenario. Well, it’s more of a we-dropped-the-empty-glass-on-the-floor-and-shattered-it-into-a-million-pieces scenario.
Will present the glass-half-full scenario when I find one.
Ah, Brian, wasn’t it a Supreme Court Justice who actually said, “The Constitution means whatever I think it means.” ? I haven’t been able to dig up the exact quote… but I seem to recall that that justice uttered those words sometime in the mid-20th Century.
Talk about judicial activism! Judge Sotomayor would be proud. (And she’d fit right in.)
I’m more than capable of sitting on that bench myself. After all, “I would hope that a wise Caucasian man, with the richness of his experiences, would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a Latina woman who hasn’t lived that life.”
MikeD, you and I could serve on the Supreme Court together. I happen to have great empathy for people that must eat bad food.
As a wise male of Frenchie (tribal identity: Gaul and Frank) extraction, I would find that it is clearly stated within the Declaration of Independence (…pursuit of happiness) and within the penumbra of the Constitutional rights that everyone has a right by choice to eat great food and drink great wine to everyone’s full content. So party up!
I feel like someone needs to speak on the behalf of the public employees.
But before I do I need to make a full disclosure here. I am a long time reader and rarely comment, mostly because I don’t have much to add and you all seem to say what I want to say better.
I am a state employed civil engineer who deals in water and flood emergency management in this state. I didn’t go to college to be a public servant; it’s just the way it worked out. And for the most part I am proud of what I do and my service to the people of this state (yes I know that a sounds over the top, but it’s true for the most part). I also consider myself conservative.
That being said, the average public employee is not the bad guy here, nor are they “parasites”. They are average working class citizens who want to make a living, support their families and pay taxes just like all of you. Most public employees actually care about the quality of their work product and actually believe their purpose is to serve the public. Like any big corporation or large bureaucracy, there will be both bad and good employees. The funny thing is its human nature to only see and remember the bad ones. Think about that next time you get good service at McDonalds.
The public employee unions are only doing what they were formed to do; try to maintain their power and obtain and hold onto as many benefits as they can for their members. A lot of employees care very little for their unions, but the reality is we have no choice but to be a member and have little power to change that individually or as a group. But, either way, even the public employee unions are not the bad guys here, they are only looking out for their members interests.
At this point it isn’t exactly fair to say public employees are not feeling the heat. We are now at a 13.25% percent pay cut through furloughs since January with another approximately 5% pay cut looming. In addition, lay offs are looming, with nearly 20,000 lay off notices going out earlier this year and another 2000 threatened to be sent out. Yes the reality is no one has been laid off yet, as the law requires a long lead time and many of those cuts could be absorbed by cutting vacant positions and by attrition (retirement, leaving state service, etc…) I realize that this is small to those of you who have lost jobs, but the reality is state employees are feeling it and are worried about their futures.
My point here is it doesn’t do our side any good to demonize public employees as “parasites” or “non-producers”. It only further distances them from our point of view and makes it near impossible to swing their votes when you set them to lose massively if they don’t vote the status quo. Basically, we are sending them in droves over to the side that created this mess, the Democrats. With the Governor appearing only to target state employees as a way to fix the budget and the constant rhetoric of the conservative media in this state as state employees as “parasites”, “non-producers” etc, our side has all but guaranteed that state employees will vote Democrat out of self preservation. Some will vote outside of their self interests (me included) because I can see the big picture, but most will not. Not because they are stupid or ignorant, but because outside of a small percentage, most people are too busy making a living to be fully engaged in the state politics.
The strategy here is how we, as conservatives, can convince the masses in the middle to vote for real change and try to fix this state’s problems. But we can’t have that debate unless we win. And we can’t win if we alienate everyone except the hard right conservatives. The debate about what and where we cut the state government cannot and will not happen until we win. And we definitely can’t win if we alienate large blocks of apolitical voters by simply demonizing them for holding a certain sort of job.
Feel free to shoot holes in my logic and point of view. I will endeavor to answer your questions and comments.
Sean
Sean:
No matter how much sweeten our rhetoric, the final message conservatives are going to deliver to public service employees is one that they don’t want to hear: The only plausible way out of this mess is to drastically shrink the size of government. Nothing else will come even close to working.
That means the elimination of thousands of public sector jobs. Most people in that category don’t want to hear that hard truth, so I can see why so many of them will continue to vote Democratic. The Democrats will continue to pretend that things can go on as they are, although they’ll find out that governing the Titanic entails something more than passing resolutions ordering up more liefboats.
I feel for you and others like you who are conscientious. But you have been caught up in an ancient misery, namely, when power hungry, feckless, conscienceless men and women use people like you both as thralls who are beholden to them and as bargaining chips, as in, “Don’t you force me to harm all these nice people! It’ll be your fault if I do!”
Sean–thank you for your perspective. I know a lot of hard-working State employees (even at BART
and many hard-working, dedicated teachers. Still, when many in my family are being laid off and those who are employed are not getting annual raises and having to pay more for health benefits, the Unions would do more good for their members if they empathized with the general public. Instead they sound like the seagulls in “Finding Nemo”: Mine! Mine! Mine!
One of the problems with the State Budget is very little of it is discretionary. For this, I blame the State Legislature. Because they refused their job, many special interests, including education and children’s health, have mandated how funds must be spent. Nothing can be cut (even when the “cut” actually means “less of an increase”) without violating a law.
The other problem is the disparity between the producers (i.e., taxpayers) and the parasites. I’m afraid we are either near the tipping point or have reached it. Even though Econ is now required for graduation from high school in California, too many people don’t understand how business works and what “profit” really means–and why it is good.
My point here is it doesn’t do our side any good to demonize public employees as “parasites” or “non-producers”. It only further distances them from our point of view and makes it near impossible to swing their votes when you set them to lose massively if they don’t vote the status quo.-Sean
Good point Sean. While I try to have fun at times, engage in a little hyperbole at others, and occasionally even try to make a serious point, there is a battle for the middle. While I doubt there is a large pool of undecided voters among civil servants there are folks being swayed by the tone of the debate.
The same folks that blamed the housing bubble and resulting fiscal meltdown on Republicans, were more than willing to accept the unrealistic projections of permanently rising valuations. The liberals were more than willing to use those projections to increase government spending and then feign shock by the turn of events.
I did read that California has one of the lowest state employee to resident ratios in the US though.
http://www.ccsce.com/pdf/Numbers-oct08-govt-employees.pdf
Greetings; especially spiff580 (Sean)
I spent some time working in the civil service back in the ’70s. At that time, the basic contract for civil service employees was continuous employment (no strikes & no layoffs) at wages somewhat less than the private sector with a good to better benefit package. (Kind of a security over income package.) As the employee unions grew in number and financial power, they pretty much realized that they had politicians in a no-win situation vis-a-vis employment contract negotiations, especially when the no-strikes laws began to tumble. If employee unions struck, the public was as likely to be angry at the government officials as the unions for the loss of services. Combine this with the ability of the unions to be political contributors in both dollars and manpower, you have a resultant situation where, if you’re not at the table, you’re on the menu. The public and its interests were either not at the table or not very well served.
The point I was trying to make (in #5 above) is that the attitudes and conclusions evidenced in the TV reports are much similar to those of “bad guys and parasites”, somewhere between “I want mine” and “gimme more”. I have concluded that the media involved weren’t at all trying to show the employees in a bad light. Since the time of my civil service sojourn, we have seen, in addition to the ascension described in the previous paragraph, the development of an “affirmative action” mentality in the civil service. I don’t know the exact demographics, but, since the 70s, there has been a fairly concerted effort to undermine employment procedures in order to expedite the number of minorities employed. (The recent RICCI case involving Judge Sotomayor is a recent example of the continuing attacks on objective testing as a qualifier.) I don’t see anything that I could confuse with performance improvement as a result of these efforts.
So, when I see a state with a $25 billion deficit and an 11%+ unemployment rate, I’m thinking more of the farmer, the mule and the 2×4 than how to make nice. I’m sure your assertion about many good and honorable employees in the
civil service has much validity. But, the bottom line is union membership, whether committed or not, has its own moral responsibility. If your leaders are abusing the system, then it is the membership that must deal with it. My father had a expression he used to use when he was shaping my character. It went, “They can make you poor, but they can’t make you kneel.” Sometimes, all you can do is take off the “golden handcuffs” and walk.
Excellent points all, especially the one that started it all (Sean’s). My father, incidentally, was a teacher, so I know something about public sector employment. He was at the other side of the pendulum, when teachers were paid starvation wages. Now, of course, the teachers in my affluent community work seven months of the year, 4.5 days a week, and get paid an enormous salary. At the elementary school level, they’re glorified babysitters, with nice personalities, and almost no education.
Even those silly teachers, of course, are not the heart of the problem. The truly useful people, such as structural engineers, also aren’t the problem. The problem is the special interest groups we’re funding. (And these special interest groups include the fact that our education spends an enormous amount of time — at all levels: elementary, middle school, high school, college — to push a liberal ideological agenda.)
Ideology also permeates other agencies, such as the Labor Department. Basically, you can call that one the “anti-employer” department. The system is rigged so that, even if the employer wins (which never happens), he loses. The Labor Commissioner is one of the reasons so many jobs leave California. It’s not just the high taxes. It’s the impossible position employers inevitably find themselves in at the administrative level. And we taxpayers fund this destruction of our business/tax infrastructure.
The state would save an enormous amount of money if it would get down to brass tacks business — infrastructure, basic education, minimal welfare — and divest itself of just about everything else.
The money freed up — and the decrease in hostility to business — would create more, many more, private sector jobs so, after a brief, tough transition, most of those public sector employees would find other jobs.
Spiff, I agree with you about many good public employees, viewed as individuals. Nonetheless, collectively they are parasites. It matters little to the flea and tick ridden dog that some of his tormentors are well intentioned. If the combined weight of the fleas and ticks equals a certain percentage of the dog’s weight, the dog sickens and dies. The only hope for California is to slash spending, and that absolutely means that the state must slash its payroll. Public employees are never going to vote for that. So, the dog dies.
Also Spiff, I think civil engineers who deal in water and flood management are the kinds of public employees who should be kept, while we let the “community outreach coordinators”, “legislative liaison representatives” and “benefit recipient advisers” all go find honest employment ( for the first time in their lives) in the restaurant sanitation and office building custodian fields, (assuming they are capable of such jobs.)
Unfortunately, I know that public employees who actually do something useful will be the first ones cut. The usual MO for government is to “punish” the public for refusing to pony up yet more and more money.
Unfortunately, I know that public employees who actually do something useful will be the first ones cut.
They are the ones with the least political representation and the least political influence. Of course they will be the first ones cut.
Basically, we are sending them in droves over to the side that created this mess, the Democrats.
97% of DC inhabitants voted for Obama.
Are you worried that the other 3% will be pushed by us to the Democrat side?
Y, yes. Moreover, the threat of cutting essential services is a common tactic whenever government greed is exposed. Local governments always threaten to cut the number of firefighters or police to scare and punish a public that resists ever greater and greater taxes. They never decide the cut the number of employees whose job titles are incomprehensible and whose job descriptions contain nothing specific. Meanwhile, parasites whose 30 year “career” is a large net negative to the public good retire in their 50′s with six figure pensions. (I personally know people who meet this description.)
Everyone, I have read all your comments. I will try to answer you each in turn. Forgive me if I ramble a bit or repeat my points.
Charles: I disagree with you that this is some kind of zero sum game. That in order to fix this states budget crisis thousands of state employees must lose their jobs. I believe there is a middle ground that can be reached either to limit the growth of state government or reduce at a rate through attrition that doesn’t unduly burden the tax payers and state employees. Perhaps that is a pipe dream, but I definitely know if our side continues the rhetoric of everyone who doesn’t see it our way is a leftist, parasite, the enemy or some mix thereof, we will lose and this state will implode. I for one have small children I care about and am not about to give up the fight and go nuclear just to feel good about my righteousness. Politics is about compromise, and unfortunately, conservatives in this state have very little power to win, but we sure as hell can lose the fight for the party. Unfortunately that means we have to play nice within our party and try to convince people sitting on the fence or other side that what we believe in makes sense and is right. We can do that by alienating whole blocks of voters before we even talk to them.
March: I agree with you, that a problem with the state budget is so much of it is untouchable by law. That actually is the fault of the voters and a dereliction of duty of our elected representatives, of which we continue to reelect endlessly. I don’t have the numbers at hand, but I believe state salaries comprise a very small portion of the overall budget.
State employees are only filling jobs that our state leadership decided needed to be filled. Whether we agree with that or not, it is a fact, and it does not make even the below average state employee a parasite. If we want to make changes to the budget our side needs to win (see above).
BrianE: I can only speak to what I see in my office, but my sense is that it is more diverse of political opinion than you realize. Most people don’t talk politics at all; we just try to get our work done. When we do have political debates, it’s usually evenly divided or in relation to some bill or law that affects our program.
11B40: As above, I can only speak about engineers and scientists. Until recently state engineers lagged behind private sector by nearly 20%. And I still believe for similar work we lag, but not by much when you include benefits.
As far as I know, all state employee bargaining units have “no strike” clauses in all of their MOU’s and I have heard no talk of removing them. Like I said before, I’m not particularly fond of our BU’s, but I don’t fault them in trying to protect their member’s benefits. I’m not sure what purpose it would serve for me to quit my job out of some perceived moral obligation when I have a young family to care for. I’m sorry, this budget situation is serious but not so serious that one would need to pull out 2×4 and threaten their fellow citizens because they perceive them as the problem rather than the poor leadership we as state continue to elect. I will accept my fate if my job is cut and move on, but I will not put my family at risk just to feel good about vague sense of moral righteousness.
Book: I really can’t comment on the political bent of other agencies, but at CalTrans and DWR, I perceive no overall liberal bent. We simply try to maintain and improve the state’s aging infrastructure.
Also, I have two small children just starting schools, and I have not sensed a liberal bent within the school. And believe me, after reading your stories, I was watching out for it. It may be more of a product of where I live though.
I also agree that the state would be awash with money if it just did what it needed to do. Infrastructure, etc…, but the reality is, the states have more freedom over just what services and functions it’s government will provide. Which goes to my main point in this post, we have to win to affect that debate.
George: Although I appreciate that you view engineers and scientists in a better light than most state employees, I really don’t know what to say to your statement. My sense is the state provides a lot of services that we could all debate whether they need to exist or not. But the fact is they do, and need and will be filled until we change that as a state. Which once again goes back to my point, we need to win to drive the debate.
The rhetoric has more power than you think. We as a group can think and believe that all, or vast numbers of state employees are collectively parasites, but do we need to proclaim that loudly to the world. How does that make us better than the left? What purpose that does that serve other than to make us feel righteous and good about ourselves?
Y: I may have to disagree with your statistic, but I really don’t want to research it right now. I deal in numbers for a living and understand how they can be manipulated. I’m not saying you are specifically, but I am saying I am always skeptical when someone throws a number out.
Assuming your number is correct; my sense is that most government non-elected employees actually live in DC. On their salaries, they probably could not afford to live in the upscale areas, which would leave them to the vast wasteland of slums of crime and poverty that is our nation’s capital. My sense is the actual government employees who work in DC actually live in outlying areas (just like here in Sac), and are more diverse of political opinion than we give them credit for. But I only have my personal observations to support that.
Guys, I guess my overall point here is that our side cannot win unless we convince fence sitters and even some on the other side that we are right. And we cannot drive the debate unless we win. We cannot do this by alienating vast blocks of voters with ad hominem attacks and hyperbole and drive them over to the other side out of self preservation.
Public employees are more than likely a lot more diverse than we realize. They are tax payers like you, who are trying to make a living for their families etc. They are not the enemy; they do not need to be vanquished and squashed. They are our neighbors and friends. We all stand to lose if this state implodes; not just state employees, welfare recipients, etc. I’m not willing to concede that this state is a complete lost cause, I will fight to save it from the left, but I will not demonize large blocks of citizens simply because I disagree about what our state government should be doing. I will try to convince them that my side is right and has a better plan that will, in the long run benefit all.
Maybe a bit wordy and over the top, but I’m not a professional writer or speaker. Sometimes it takes a while to get to my point. Thanks for listening and I look forward to your responses.
Thanks,
Sean
Sean:
Thank you for an earnest and heartfelt response to my comments and others on this topic. I do not for a second dismiss the worry and concern that must be haunting you now.
In response, the only thing I can say is to recall a science fiction story I read as a boy. In it, a young girl stows away on a small spaceship bound from her home planet to one nearby. When the pilot of the ship discovers her he realizes that he must deliver some hard news.
It turns out that the ship can only carry so much weight; bearing her mass in addition to the pilot’s carefully calibrated mass will result in the ship’s destruction.
So the pilot tells her that he must jettison her or the ship will be lost. She begs for his mercy, but he tells her there is no place in the situation where mercy to function. If he allows her to stay, two people will die, including one—him—who did not sign on to die because a young girl was ignorant of physics. It would be pointless, he says, for him to die for her thoughtlessness and magical thinking. So she must die because she is the one who brought this situation upon them both.
She protests—rightfully so—that her life is at stake. He agrees that, indeed, it is, but that that appeal to sentiment does nothing to thwart the ironclad laws of physics.
I think you see where I’m going with this. I’m sorry, Sean, but it is now a zero-sum game. Your ostensibly well-meaning union leaders and cynical, manipulative, vote-buying legislators have brought this upon us. There is no way to get past a $24 billion deficit with anything short of horrible pain. What possible promises of future self-control could a Democrat-dominated legislature make that anybody who isn’t a fool would believe?
The time has come to pay the piper.
The tragedy, of course, is that workers like you who actually do something productive and constructive will be axed long before your overpaid bosses and all of the parasites that head commissions, or provide such important services as telling teenage girls how to have safe sex, or the self-regarding thieves who now run our universities and colleges.
How do you rescue a situation that is so rotten and far gone? I don’t know. What I do know is that I’m finished with trying to pretend that if we could just dab some new paint on it, we could make Dorian Gray’s portrait attractive again.
Guys, I guess my overall point here is that our side cannot win unless we convince fence sitters and even some on the other side that we are right. And we cannot drive the debate unless we win. We cannot do this by alienating vast blocks of voters with ad hominem attacks and hyperbole and drive them over to the other side out of self preservation.
That’s the same argument behind counter-insurgency in both Iraq and Afghanistan. Thus it is not invalid on its face, but I would say that it is incompletely applied here, in this instance and context.
The other side of the coin to doing too much kinetic operations, which can drive allies away by blowing up their children as collateral damage, is not doing enough kinetic operations, thus allowing enemy operatives to subdue and set up a base of operations amongst our potential future allies. While potential future allies, the average Iraqi part of an average Iraqi Al Anbar Tribe, may wish to side with the US, Al Qaeda has De Facto control of their security climate and the fate of their children. Thus it doesn’t matter what the Iraqi wants, because Al Qaeda dictates the terms due to the simple fact that US kinetic operations are insufficient to oust Al Qaeda to give the suppressed populace a chance to make a better future.
You are stipulating that our danger is from the former. I mention that the current state of the nation is due to the latter, not the former.
The counsel which is taken from the fear that we can drive away people in the middle is invalid precisely because it is made from fear. Strategies and plans should be made on self-asserting and self-correcting variables, but fear isn’t one of them. One’s tactical options should never be rendered limited due to the fact that one fears the enemy’s reactions or one is worried about the potential negative consequences. It should always be based upon positive end results, especially when weighed against the risks taken. If there is no plan to win, then there is no point in sacrificing lives. If all anyone wants to do is to avoid IEDs and ambushes, they could just stay inside the FOB and let the countryside be invested by AQ and other foreigners (Iran).
Now as applied to American domestic affairs, certain changes must be made. But those changes are often superficial and only varying in degree, not in kind.
We still have an insurgency and we still have an occupation, aka counter-insurgency (although those two things are not synonymous). When Bush was in office, the Left was in insurgency mode. Sabotage, demoralization, propaganda campaigns, etc: all in order to decrease people’s trust in the ruling status quo, in order to justify the coming rule of the New Guys, the Hope and Changers. The status quo, or counter-insurgency, is just that. It seeks to reaffirm authority and the status quo, by legitimizing the power and authority of the rulers, whether those rulers be evil or good. It does so by discrediting the insurgency and its methods, by killing insurgent leaders, and occupying the safe bases of the insurgency so that they will find no quarter or comfort to plan and launch raids.
This is important to consider in light of this specific sentence.
Politics is about compromise
Insurgency isn’t about compromise. Neither is counter-insurgency, in the end. It’s about power, who has the authority and the power to sustain that authority. You may get alliances, temporary or permanent, out of the fight, but those alliances are made from mutual interests, not compromise. Compromise, if it ever exists in such a scenario, only exists as a means to an end, in order to bring two opposing parties with similar interests to the same table, by brushing over their dissimilarities.
In this nation we call America, there is no compromise between one side and the other. It just so happens that the ruling elite in power is the status quo, and our enemies, and we currently, you could use the name Republican party although that’s not exactly accurate, are the guerrillas. But, of course, you mentioned public employees, not members of the Democrat party. In this vein, you are proposing that they can be won over. That’s certainly true. Almost anyone can be won over, even if their loyalty to their kings and queens in the federal government is about on par with that of feudal oaths (provide me succor and I will be loyal to my salt). Still, they cannot be won over by weaknesses, by vacillation, by fears. Nor will they come over to our side if their status quo is still pretty tolerable.
Remember the Sunnis. Did they come to like America, join our side and start checking our the real American tribe rather than the media and Islamic sensationalized evil American occupation, right at the bat when things were all roses and cream? No. Things had to get pretty bad before their tribal leaders started thinking about that. And their first reaction was not to go to us for help. Their first reaction was to purge their environment of the new invaders, Al Qaeda.
You see, it doesn’t particularly matter whether we chase people away through our rhetoric, because America has already killed people, like the Sunnis, and then they came on board when their interests demanded it. It was not diplomacy. It was not goody goody bribes and promises. It was mutual interests, in this case the mutual interest of survival against a common foe. You can’t just ‘talk’ about things and this becomes ‘mutual interests’. It doesn’t work like that.
Until public employees get into this situation, this thinking, it almost doesn’t matter what we do or say. Americans killed and arrested Sunnis. Sunnis supported the killing of Americans with intelligence, bases, and active grunt work. Yet we are now allies, perhaps even stronger allies than with the Shia counter-parts in Iraq, although not as strong as with Kurdistan. Did we change? Did they change? No, on both accounts.
See, employees of the government don’t need to change their jobs or their interests. All that needs to change is the situation. But that requires kinetic operations, or in the case of politics, it requires a change in the law or in who holds certain offices. And they don’t need to vote for that change. All they need to do is to be convinced that this change will benefit them more. But even beyond that, they must be hammered into a situation where they themselves will force change, because the STATUS Quo will have become unbearable.
And the status quo will become unbearable because the parasites naturally suffer when the host dies, and the host in this case just happens to be the Democrat party. You don’t need to convince the grunt of this. You just need to convince the ones with political power and authority. they have ambitions and their own power structure. Convince them that their interests are with us and not with the Democrat party, and you can get something done. They, in turn, will convince their followers, the public employee grunts.
Americans have been brought up with this idea that every single person makes decisions for themselves, so that you should try to convince them on an individual basis. As we see with the Democrat party, they are not individuals nor do they organize based upon individuality, so we should modify both tactics and strategy in light of this. But we should not modify such things based upon the fear of what might happen. That won’t get anybody anywhere.
You can’t give people motivation to do something. You can give them rewards or threats, but motivation naturally comes from within, from self-perception.
On the issue of budgets, to which I can at least offer a concrete solution, it should be similar to Georgia’s balanced budget law. Which states that the state budget must be balanced, with no deficits. Thus, something always gets cut, like either education or what not.
People will not do the good thing, unless you make them do the good thing or at least make the consequences of evil horrendously high. If you don’t do this, if you just let “free will” reign supreme, what you get is not free will, what you get is temptation and subtle corruption. You don’t get people doing what their free will dictates. You get a few select aristocrats at the top controlling everybody. That’s what always happens in a democracy, precisely because a democracy is, contrary to popular indoctrinated beliefs, rule by the minority, not rule by the majority. The majority doesn’t decide squat.
Conservatives are too afraid to make changes. They don’t like changes. They don’t want to ram through progressive changes or upheavals. But they must be forced to, just as the Democrats must be forced to withdraw from the battlefield in ruin and tatters. But if the law does not exist, it depends upon people. And if we are depending upon good natured people to make things run, we might as well turn into a full monarchy, rather than a semi-monarchy.
Regardless of the truth behind the rhetoric, the Democrats have successfully painted Republicans as being against change, rather than for change of a different color. Regardless of how this came about, the point is very simple. Most of the Republican platform is temporary even if it was enacted. It is not based upon permanent law, it is not a reform to the institution, to the franchise, itself. It is, as is the name, conservative. Not prone to dramatic acts, changes, and upheavals. Take balanced budgets. The Republican congress balanced the budget under Clinton’s almost second veto. Well, what happened afterwards when there was no amendment to make a balanced budget mandatory? People’s greed took over, that’s what. Even the best of us can succumb to corruption. Of course, there’s best and then there’s Sarah Palin, but we’re getting outside the topic.
The Republicans must change their strategy. They don’t have to change their principle of attempting to preserve American liberty and history, but they do have to change the way they go about it. No more can they just sit around and concede the initiative to the Democrats because the Republicans are “afraid” that what they will do will “alienate” voters or some other meaningless democratic demagoguery issue.
COncerning Martel’s Cold Equations and the zero sum game, I would say that we are dealing with humans, not equations. Thus our actions can change the equations, though they cannot change physics. It is not, however, necessary to change physics. It is not physics that is putting the hurt on us. It is Democrats, and yes they are humans as well. Hard as that is to believe, I know.
It’s not required that there be a zero sum, because you can change the equations and thus the outcome. This is not guaranteed. You can’t get people to agree on everything, nor can you, with 100% certainty, convince people with mutual interests that their interests really are mutual.
Charles: You don’t need to apologize to me, I’m not here for sympathy, nor do I truly fear for my job. If I am cut from state service it will only be the catalyst that gets me to leave this state. I appreciate your story and I get it, but I still fundamentally disagree that we are in a zero sum game here nor do I agree that we have passed the event horizon of this budget black hole.
Like I said before, I do not believe state employee salaries constitute a high percentage of the budget, if I have time today I will attempt to find those numbers. Simply firing large droves of state employees will do nothing other than cause a massive spike in unemployment, massive reduction in state services, and make some on our side of the aisle feel good about themselves that they stuck it to those evil state workers.
We will have won the battle but most likely will have lost the war. You see, if this state collapses economically everyone here loses. If our party takes credit for closing down the state, and it will if we succeed in firing all state workers, etc, my sense is that will only drive the masses back into the arms of those who brought us to that point. And I doubt very much that the Feds will allow this state to catastrophically implode, which once again will position the Dems as the savior of this state.
Y: US politics is about compromise, especially when your side is in the minority. Let’s get real here, were not fighting an insurgency here, nor are we insurgents. The analogy just doesn’t jive for me. We are in the midst of a debate about how this government should be run. And we are losing that debate in this state. Why is that? I don’t have the answer for you, but my sense is we won’t win that debate if we use rhetoric that likens Dems to AQ, or terrorists. Nor will we win the hearts and minds of fence sitters, public employees, etc if we take away their lively hood and set them up to lose massively if they don’t vote democratically. But we do need to convince them that our side has a plan that will be better for everyone in the long run. What that is, I don’t know. A balanced budget law may be a good start.
State employees are not a homogenous bunch; they are not all Dem automatons. My sense is most are tired of this budget roller coaster ride every year and the constant belittling and insulting that they get annually by the public and outspoken representatives of our side. Most would probably welcome a fix in the budget system, even if in the short term it may mean cuts.
As I said above, I don’t fear for my job. But I do fear for my party. I agree with Charles Johnson at LGF on this. There are only two viable parties in this country; one is leading us off the edge and the other is too busy alienating large blocks of potential voters out of some sense of moral righteousness and/or purity.
Sean
Charles,
I came back and read my post and realized it may have been a little harsh. Sorry about that if I came off that way.
Sean
We are in the midst of a debate about how this government should be run.
No, we’re not in a debate. We’re in an argument where one side believes evil is good and the other side believes utopia is evil.
Try to compromise between that. Actually, try to convince the middle that there is such a compromise, if you can first convince them that the two sides aren’t the same, that is.
Democrats and Republicans can’t even get each other to see the same thing, and this is based on a face to face communication with friends, where there is NO chance for miscommunication as would be the case with strangers. People still can’t get it.
And you think our political masters can compromise their way out of this? Perhaps, if they ball up together as a league in order to use corruption to sustain their power. Certainly that compromise would work, but it’s not the compromise promised.
I don’t have the answer for you, but my sense is we won’t win that debate if we use rhetoric that likens Dems to AQ, or terrorists.
This is the same as disarming yourself in the hopes that criminals will leave you alone.
Let me give you a notice on something. The Left has never stopped calling the right things like warmonger, racists, Nazis, etc. And it works. You can dispute the morality of it, but don’t dispute its effectiveness. Not with Obama in power, certainly.
State employees are not a homogenous bunch; they are not all Dem automatons.
Neither are Muslims all terrorists or anti-Americans. It doesn’t matter a thing, however, in the strategic context.
I agree with Charles Johnson at LGF on this. There are only two viable parties in this country; one is leading us off the edge and the other is too busy alienating large blocks of potential voters out of some sense of moral righteousness and/or purity.
That’s rather ironic. Johnson won’t deal with what he calls Nazis, like the BNP, or other such characters in Dutch/EU politics. And he wants to lecture Republicans on “moral righteousness and purity”? That’s a laugh.
Sean:
Thank you very much for your polite, reasoned and thorough answers. (Very engineer qualities, I might add.) I’m just going to throw a few thoughts into the mix.
First, I think that, in many areas of state funding, the problem isn’t so much current salaries as it is pensions. School districts are paying as many non-workers as workers. In other words, we’re funding people who aren’t producing anything, even bureaucratic churn.
Second, I was going to make exactly the same point Charles did, although I was going to use a cancer analogy. Surgery can be painful and it can destroy healthy tissue, but sometimes you have to do it, when the alternative is death. So too, when there is no money, must one cut.
Third, there are a lot of state jobs that simply shouldn’t have existed in the first place. The fact that they’re on the budget now, because of a politically correct mentality during the flush times, is not a justification for their continued existence. They truly represent throwing good many after bad. In a choice between a bankrupt state and beleaguered tax payers, and people who hold phony jobs that were phony from the git-go, it’s a no brainer.
The one thing I know for certain, though, is that George, at comment 18, is right: “I know that public employees who actually do something useful will be the first ones cut. The usual MO for government is to “punish” the public for refusing to pony up yet more and more money.”
Sean:
You did not come off as harsh at all, so please don’t worry about it. We’re discussing a very high-stakes matter, so of course we want our statements to be as direct and forceful a reflection of our reasoning as possible.
I agree with Book’s remarks above—she did a far better job of relating my points than I did—especially when it comes to the obvious pains you took to engage others here.
Just to refocus a bit, I think that charged words used here, like “parasites” and “non-producers,” are aimed at the type of nonsense jobs that the state has created in affluent times. Do we need construction engineers, foresters and hydraulics experts? You bet. Do we need junketeering “educators” in a bloated state department that year after year cannot make a dent in dropout rates or the abysmal levels of reading comprehension? Nope.
Greetings: especially spiff580 at #22.
When my father was shaping my character, one of the verbal cues he was fond of using was “you’re being too smart by half.” What I understood that to mean was that my knowledge was exceeding my wisdom. Nowadays, one hears something similar in “the difference between efficiency and effectiveness”. Being able to do something well does not mean that its the thing to do.
Our political system has reached this point. The confluence of many factors has brought us to a point well beyond rationality. During my military days, part of the folk wisdom was the difference between the Boy Scouts and the US Army. The Boy Scouts, you see, had adult supervision. Well, our political sphere does not either.
Recently, I have been reading (and re-reading) F.A. Hayek’s “The Road to Serfdom”. One of the aspects he addresses is the German civil service during the rise of National Socialism and how that contributed to the loss of political freedom. The essence of his argument was the development of two factors in the civil service, a lowering of employment “risk” and a development of a sense of privilege. As to the former, why assume the risks of private sector employment subject to the vagaries of the business cycle when a public sector sinecure offers such long term stability. As to the latter, in my initial comment (at #5) what I hoped to point out was the “public vs private sector employee” (the servant vs the greedy) and the sense of entitlement (31 years of continuous employment and now this). To me, this evinces the difference between the rulers and the ruled.
I believe that we have reached the point, socio-politically, where either a catastrophic failure or a “deus ex machina” will be required to right our ship of state. I’ll admit to being facetious in regard to both the 2×4 and my morally righteous career advice. If our only problem was public sector employment, I would have still some shred of hope within my beating breast. But the real problem, as I see it, is what I refer to as the “tyranny of the minorities”. There are now so many organized groups of minorities (read “victims”) that there is no longer any real concept of or commitment to a “greater good”. We want energy independence but can’t get the oil out of the ground. Farmers need water but the fish must come first. It seems as if, if Willie Sutton, the infamous bank robber, were around today, he would be a lobbyist, because the government is where the money is. The ability of our politicians to pander to these minority groups is a clear sign of the level of corruption that is the mother’s milk of our current governments at all levels. And now, our current government, both executive and legislative, is busy devising more ways to put these groups on financial lifelines to insure their existence and growth throughout perpetuity.
This is no way to start a weekend…
Re: Bookworm, 7/17: +1
“No, we’re not in a debate. We’re in an argument where one side believes evil is good and the other side believes utopia is evil.”
Debate or argument, either way our side is losing, and I believe partly because of our inability to convince the masses in the middle that we have a better idea and plan. Part of the reason we can’t do that is because of rhetoric like “one side believes evil is good” and so forth.
Although, one can try to compare this to how we fight and win wars on the battlefield, the analogy is not perfect. We will not win this argument by demonizing them, nor will we convince the fence sitters that we are different when we act the same and offer them nothing.
“This is the same as disarming yourself in the hopes that criminals will leave you alone.”
Nope, not anything like that at all. One is the physical action of disarming one self, the other is choosing to use civility, logic and reason rather than rhetoric and craziness to win the debate. A true warrior knows when to use diplomacy and when to use force.
I am acutely aware that the left uses rhetoric and it seems to work for them. On the other hand, when our side uses that strategy it only seems to backfire and drive voters away. Why is that? Perhaps it’s an effective strategy for them; I’m not so sure we should get down in the gutter with them though.
“That’s rather ironic. Johnson won’t deal with what he calls Nazis, like the BNP, or other such characters in Dutch/EU politics. And he wants to lecture Republicans on “moral righteousness and purity”? That’s a laugh.”
Actually, I think Charles has documented quite well why he has come to his position on the BNP, etc. Agree with him or not, he has still presented his point of view well. That not being the topic here though, and personally I don’t want to debate it, I’m not sure how that invalidates Charles position that it is in the best interest of the Republicans to be inclusive. I’m fairly certain; Charles does not mean that the Republicans should court skinheads, KKK and/or the American Nazi Party though. But what he does mean in this context is the religious conservative movement should not solely drive the party agenda, i.e. creationists, ID etc…
One can preach a code to live and not personally live up to it. That does not necessarily invalidate that code though.
The reality is our side will have very little power to drive the debate (argument) if we can’t win elections. We will not win elections by alienating large blocks of voters and pushing out the less conservative members of our party. In this context you do win by squashing your enemy, and the only way we can squash the Dems is by convincing more voters that we are right.
Sean
Part of the reason we can’t do that is because of rhetoric like “one side believes evil is good” and so forth.
It’s ironic that you criticize one’s party inability to do the convincing, when the Left does a perfectly good job of convincing Americans with their rhetoric of Republican=racist,mean,evil Nazi.
Be wary of self-contradictions in your debates.
One problem with your point Y. I’m refering to Dems, not the left. Not all Dems are leftists.
Even so, you have not invalidated my point above.
Just because it works for the left we should do it too? That’s a great way to prove that our side is different and better. Get down in the gutter with the otherside. Yeah.
I’m not saying these strategies should be completely off the table, only that the targets should not be large blocks of potential voters. It serves no purpose to alienate them even if they vote largely one way.
Don’t mistake logic, reason and civility for weakness.
Take it easy Y.
Sean
I remember how Worf, the Klingon security officer in Star Trek/The Next Generation, often counseled Captain Picard to shoot first and ask questions later. Picard usually didn’t take the advice, preferring to try to pow-wow or parlay with strangers.
But sometimes he agreed with Worf, knowing that in an all-out battle the Klingon was decisive and commited.
Ymarsakar, you are this site’s Worf. Your instinct—thank God—is to cut through the BS and take on the enemy directly and without hesitation. The enemy in this case is the left, and the increasingly vile and anti-life Democratic Party.
But Sean has a point. Although the heart of the party is a moral and intellectual wreck—Obama, Reid, Pelosi, Franken, Frank, Clinton, Murtha, Schwarzenegger, and so on, ad nauseum—there are still people in it who can be reached. Obama is beginning to come apart, and even the butt-kissing pansies in the press are starting to eye the exits. I have no problem with trying one last time to use honey to try to draw out the remnant group of decent people in the Dem Party who are finally waking up to its rottenness.
Let this play out a few more months. If our willingness to maintain this final patience leads to failure, then we will do what we need to do—including in-your-face opposition and even armed resistance.
I’m refering to Dems, not the left. Not all Dems are leftists.
The specification is meaningless. The Republicans did not lose to the fringe “Left” that only constitutes the 25% of this nation that are traitors to the US Constitution, assuming they ever even gave their oath to it in the first place. The Republicans or the conservative coalition lost to a political party, and the Left is not the political party of the United States of America. The Democrat party, however, is. To initiate the subject of election losses, one must necessarily include political parties, not exclude them.
The distinction between the Dems and the Left is meaningless. Due to the fact that you seek to advance political agendas through a political party, you have staked your views on the point/claim that political parties must seek the middle or simply the majority, with the latter being not synonymous with the middle in my view. In so doing, you try to explain unexpected reversals or political setbacks by saying that the people are turned off by X amount of rhetoric. This narrative is completely sunk, however, by the fact that “X amount of rhetoric” is the very reason why you are trying to figure out how to get back what was lost in this nation.
You can switch around the blocks and the puzzle cubes all you want by calling this faction a different name from another faction. These distinctions only matter once you grasp the fundamental reality of what things work, why they work, and why they sometimes don’t work. Just making a distinction doesn’t change the effectiveness, the reality, of such tactics: such tactics that you would seek to proclaim as ineffective for the Republican party. Instead of seeking to analyze why it is ineffective when it was effective against Republicans and thereby justify your point, you just say it’s not effective at all, which is the easy way though it is neither the logical nor the accurate way.
Everybody can, and many have, used the justification that the reason why they don’t use something, for example torture, is that it doesn’t work. It’d be much harder, with a requisite higher demand for logic and analytical capacity, if they admitted that such things worked but that they had ulterior motives for not using it. It doesn’t make them right, it only makes the case harder to make. Which is why people don’t make such cases, they take the easy path of saying it doesn’t work. But it does work, and people don’t want to deal with that problem. But if they want to win, they had better deal with the reality behind the rhetoric.
This is a fine distinction, yes. But once this is ignored, everything else might as well be built upon a foundation of quick sand.
Don’t mistake logic, reason and civility for weakness.
I’ve clearly outlined where you failed in your logic. Theoretically, logic and reason is useful for cultivating strength, as it allows the perception and analysis of reality for what it is, not just what people want it to be. In this case, I don’t see any consistent logic. Probably because I’ve studied the necessity of cultivating strong tactics and strategy against a foe like Al Qaeda, while you just brush off the analogy as being baseless or irrelevant. You don’t think of the Dems or of the Left, or whatever you wish to call the other side, as being like an enemy on par with AQ. Thus your strategic and analytical “logic”, so to speak, is already weakened by the inability to be consciously aware of certain fundamental points of reality. Reality here, not wishes and fishes.
This, like all fine distinctions, is easily brushed off as unimportant if it doesn’t fit a person’s world view. Well, logic wasn’t designed to cater to people’s fantasies and whims. It was designed to make you hear what you needed to hear, make you see what you needed to see. The truth, in this case, is not about what people want to believe nor is it about what they wish is true about politics in America. The truth is what you need to see and hear, and logic is one way to arrive at the truth. Logic, of course, can also be consistently wrong, but that’s human nature for you.
In this scenario, your logic is not well formed, thus it doesn’t matter if your ultimate conclusions are right or wrong, because you didn’t get to it via logic. And without logic and its ability to self-correct itself through derivative corollaries, inductive, or deductive verification, what is reason based upon apart from faith?
I perceive the inability to accept the truth, the evidence of reality, as being a vital component of weakness. And claiming the side of logic, while violating its tenets, is not going to convince me otherwise. Electricity doesn’t care about who is right or wrong, it only cares about the physical reality of the world. We are not electricity, but all conflicts and strife deals with the physical world and not just with the fantasy projections of human minds and hearts.
Just because it works for the left we should do it too?
We will not win this argument by demonizing them, nor will we convince the fence sitters that we are different when we act the same and offer them nothing.
Just because it works for the Left (we have noticed blacks being told to vote Democrat while being offered nothing but abortion of black babies), it won’t work for us? That’s your original argument. My argument was never that just because it works for the Left, we should do it. I said it would work (meaning you were wrong), not that we should do it. If you had a capacity at analysis and memory recall, why do you think you got that wrong.
It serves no purpose to alienate them even if they vote largely one way.
Here we go with the circular logic again. The reason why it is true that this will ‘alienate them’ is because ‘you say so’. Not because logic had anything to do with it. Why? Because propaganda is designed to make useful idiots out of dupes, the same kind of people who constitute the “middle”. It works for the Left, because they treat the middle the way the middle really is. They treat them like Nigerian email scams treat the dupes, because they know it works. Your losing battle trying to make some point about what people should and should not do based upon the conclusion that certain things don’t work because they alienate X, is not very effective. Try again.
P.S.
The real reason why Republicans lose is because they can’t grasp tactics, strategy, or basic issues of logistics. They don’t even know what logic is, let alone how to fight with it. Some of this has to do with them not being experts in the political or military arena, but most of it has to do with a basic fundamental lack of classical liberal education. The barbarians don’t need a Greek education to sack a city. But citizens need logos and spirit and charis to defend a city. And I see pitifully few instances of logos.
Ymarsakar, you are this site’s Worf. Your instinct—thank God—is to cut through the BS and take on the enemy directly and without hesitation. The enemy in this case is the left, and the increasingly vile and anti-life Democratic Party.
Even though I don’t like Stark Trek for its pathetic attempt at portraying whatever they thought they were portraying, I appreciate your sentiment.
But Sean has a point.
A dagger has a point. Doesn’t mean it will do what you think it will do. Doesn’t mean it will only kill the guilty and spare the innocent. It is a tool, and like all tools, it depends upon the user.
The user, in this case, is misusing the tool.
Y, be careful, you tread closely on getting personal here. I have a more than adequate problem solving and reasoning skills, its what I do in the real world. And I have more knowledge of strategy and tactics than you give me credit for. What I do lack is great writing and debate skills. Dont mistake my wordy and sometimes disjointed writing with stupidity and ignorance. I have real life to contend with between comments and I dont always have time to throughly review and edit what I say.
The specification is not meaningless as far as planning strategies to win. The dems/left what have you have successfully separated all of us into little voting blocks. I dont like it, but thats what we have to work with. This is due in part to our failure to drive the debate. But within those blocks, there are voters to be swayed.
Second, you still have not invalidated my point. The dems/left have used rhetoric successfully, but I have not seen it used successfully by our side. Perhaps you are right that may be because of leaderships inability to grasp strategy and tactics. Or perhaps what draws people to the Republican party does not allow them to use that strategy well (moral center, civility, maturity).
You are correct that it is illogical to say the strategy will not work when we have seen it used by the left so effectively. Two things bring me to that conclusion, one, we are not the left, two, I have not seen it used successfully by my side in my politcal awareness lifetime. Sometimes reality defies logic, and only observation and testing can answer those questions.
Once again, my main point still has not been invalidated, nor do I concede that I have lost here (but I’m not claiming I’m winning either). The reality is we cannot drive this debate if we continue to lose elections in this state (CA). We will not win if we cannot convince a majority of voters to vote for our side. And I believe you will not convince the the majority (or what ever you would like to call them) by alienating them.
More later I think.
Sean
>>We will not win if we cannot convince a majority of voters to vote for our side.>>
The problem is that you are unlikely to convince the majority of voters to choose that which they perceive is against their best interest. They see the “bennies” promised by the left as theirs. First they lust after the bennies promised, then when they receive any portion of those bennies, they perceive them as their rightful property. They then want _all_ the bennies, or they want the ones they have forever. The Republicans offer them the right of making their own choices – and the price is “the bennies”. They’re not buying. They’re not about to buy.
I can remember in the days of the cold war, we cheered any tale of the escape of anyone from behind the Iron Curtain. I remember later hearing that some who made the escape later when back…living in a capitalist society was “too hard”. I thought that was astonishing – even unbelievable – but now I see a society that is becoming the same…unable to live without the state to care for them.
The grand experiment may be over – not because the concept failed but because it’s “too hard” for a whole bunch of people. It’s a lot easier to be a domesticated farm animal – even if you’re destined for slaughter – than to be a wild animal not knowing where the next meal is coming from, and always on the lookout for the predators. It does entirely depend on the moral fiber of the people, and since the goal for the last 70 years or so has been to destroy the basic moral fiber of this nation, we may not have enough left to appeal to. The only way to win the battle in the long run is to develop the Judeo Christian ethic once again in our children. Even if you win an election – any election – you cannot rebuild without rebuilding the underlying ethic of the population. The ethic that got us where we were before we began the last road was the Judeo Christian ethic. It is what made us unique, and having been pulled off that path by the temptations of the flesh, we have lost our way and are easy prey for the spoilers.
To win the election, you’re asking people to choose the hard way. I don’t think it’s going to happen – not unless they lose everything first. They’re going to have to go cold turkey first. We’re going to have to prepare to start over. My question is…assuming we are given the opportunity to start over…are there any changes we can make that would prevent us (the “us” of the future) from falling into the same error? or is it just a moral reality that we cannot achieve real heights without free will, but the free will must always offer the risk of failure?
Have you read the Mistborn trilogy by Brian Sanderson, suek?
No…never heard of it. Should I have?
Sorry, wrong name. Brandon Sanderson.
Should I have?
Those particular novels are an interesting life lesson, I would say. Like the Deathstalker novels I recommended to Laer P of Cheatseekingmissiles, it concerns with the good guys fighting an insurgency against the ruling elites, the ones with de facto military supremacy and occupation of all areas of national and public power and influence.
It’s a very inspirational story which I believe would benefit many here in these dark times.
To win the election, you’re asking people to choose the hard way. I don’t think it’s going to happen – not unless they lose everything first. They’re going to have to go cold turkey first. We’re going to have to prepare to start over. My question is…assuming we are given the opportunity to start over…are there any changes we can make that would prevent us (the “us” of the future) from falling into the same error? or is it just a moral reality that we cannot achieve real heights without free will, but the free will must always offer the risk of failure?
In one respect, you are describing the human condition. We will fail and succeed, generation after generation, and this cycle doesn’t appear to be breakable. Not unless we transcend ourselves, of course, utilizing either technology or something else entirely different.
However, even when we know perfection does not exist, even when we know the sin of Utopia, there is still value in striving for excellence. Even if in the end we will all be defeated. Esprit de corps. And free will? That is the question, is it now.
As I recommended the Honor Harrington series (and Off Armageddon Reef) to Mike D, which has ended up with him taking some unexpected vacations from this blog
, so do I too recommend the Mistborn trilogy.
These are inspiration stories. Fictionalized yes, but the trials are no less demanding and the sacrifices no less real. Every legend, after all, was based upon some kind of truth, a human truth if not an actual historical event.
>>We will fail and succeed, generation after generation, and this cycle doesn’t appear to be breakable.>>
So…
“It isn’t whether you win or lose…it’s how you play the game” ? Both small scale, and large scale?
And also …the old expression my mother used to use…
“Shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations”.
It has to be American in source – no other nation offers that possibility – but I don’t know where it originated.
“The sins of the father shall be visited upon the son even to the seventh generation” may also apply. I once thought that was a curse, but have come to realize that it’s just a statement of fact.
We create our futures in our children.
As I mentioned before, people like Obama see the mistakes of others and they believe that by destroying free will, by making other people’s choices for them, that Obama will make things better due to Obama’s superior intellect and “experiences”.
I do not take that view. Certainly I share the Left’s view of humanity and its foibles, particularly concerning war, poverty, and etc. But I’m a true believer, not a dupe, cannon fodder, or tool of the Left’s political class. I pursue the means that will necessarily achieve my goals. My goals, not their goals. And in so doing, I believe that you can keep free will just as it is. All you have to do to get people to make better choices is to change the consequences of those choices. You don’t have to make the choices for them. You just have to make one choice very very painful, the choice you don’t want them to take. Make evil work for good. Make greed work for America. Whatever works, use it if it will help. Discard the useless. Adapt the useful to your own cause. Cement the Sunnis and any other potential allies. If they are willing to work, give them loyalty tests. If they betray us, give them a noose or bullet free of charge.
Thus Tookie justifiably gets killed for a variety of reasons. 1. Where there is life, there is hope. Where there isn’t life, there is no hope of repeat offenses or more victim bodies.
2. Death is the ultimate way of saying “don’t do this”. It is instinctual, it is genetic, it is primordial and cultural and educational and intellectual all rolled into one. Death is the forever equalizer and we all know it. Nothing, not propaganda, not America, not the Thug in Chief Obama, can reverse it. God can, but then again, that’s God.
3. It is also a way of saying, we are free. We are free to make decisions that we are confident in, even when the consequences are permanent death and irrevocable execution of selected individuals. We will take such moral consequences on ourselves, we will not back out, we will not quibble and say “what if he is innocent, then it would be better to have stripped 25 years of his life rather than all of his life”. Yeah right, a failure in duty to sentence the guilty and release the innocent. It cannot be lessened because of “mitigating circumstances”. Anyone that seeks to do so is a moral coward that believes hacking off a man’s arm is better than hacking off his leg. Only a matter of degree, people. Like nuking one city rather than two. It’s a matter of degree, not a matter of kind.
“It isn’t whether you win or lose…it’s how you play the game” ?
You can’t win against death. But you can win against other mortals. There are plenty of enemies to kill and achieve victory over, but death is not one of em. But it doesn’t matter, we are not here to fight death, Gods, or any other supernatural and omnipotent beings like entropy.
We can adequately fight our mortal foes just fine. Even if you are legally “unarmed”. And by legally, I mean not in actuality.
Victory, to be victory, must be both transparent and transient. It does not last, but that’s the point of life, that it does not last. Thus that is the goal, to create life, knowing it does not last. To create the United States, knowing that it is not for forever. We are not here for forever, we are here for the people that lives right now, for the ones that can live right now, and for those that will be alive in the future.
The Left wants to be Gods, they wish to be immortal. They want perpetual wealth, perpetual power, and perpetual control over the fate of humanity until the end of the universe. That is not exactly humble.
Well…_that_ was interesting! Lots of links that look promising, and they seem to take a number of different directions/applications. Here are a couple – I’ll chase some more another time…
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/letter_from_america/1178345.stm
http://www.pennsylvaniafiduciarylitigation.com/2008/07/articles/business-succession/shirtsleeves-to-shirtsleeves-in-three-generations/
I just finished Hero of Ages. It is awe inspiring.
I’m still sitting here shocked. And by now, few things can shock me.