To help keep ourselves grounded over the screams from the Left, it’s periodically helpful to contrast Progressive belief systems with reality.

When I read the news of late, I keep thinking of the ancient proverb that serves as a title to this post: “Whom the Gods would destroy they first drive mad.” In the West, the Left is in the grip of a fierce insanity, enthusiastically, fiercely, and even violently embracing delusional thinking.

In the real world, throughout the animal kingdom, there are boy animals and girl animals, distinguished by different DNA, different biology, and different behaviors. There are always outliers who, by quirks of nature or by choice, reject these differences, but the differences exist nonetheless and inform the bell curve of behavior across species. In Progressive world, though, as The Kinks once sang, “Girls will be boys, and boys will be girls; It’s a mixed up, muddled up, shook up world.” An edgy rock song about a guy’s accidental (or maybe on purpose) hook-up with a transvestite has become the Progressives’ core truth.

In the real world, the climate has changed incessantly for the last 6 billion years. Moreover, the last two thousand plus years of human history reveal that humans thrive when the world warms and die when the world cools. The best example of this last point is the medieval warming period — a time during which wines were made in Greenland — which saw an explosion in population. That warming period was followed by a cooling period which saw starvation across the medieval world, weakening people’s immune systems and forcing specific changes in global trading patterns that led to contact with the plague carrying marmot in the Russian Steppes. The result: A pandemic that killed 1/3 to 1/2 of the world’s population. In the Progressive world, the combination of 150 years of temperature records (for it was the Victorians who slowly began tracking temperatures); systematic scientific fraud aimed at adjusting pre-1950 temperatures down and post-1950 temperatures up; and computer models that are incapable of reflecting the complexity of future climate events, has resulted in a push to return the world to a Hobbesian pre-industrial era during which life was “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”

In the real world, communism has consistently failed to deliver on its promises of equality and material prosperity, offering instead violent, repressive totalitarian dictatorships, starvation, chronic shortages of all goods, and invariably brutal warfare. Likewise, in the real world, capitalism has consistently lifted people up from poverty and despair, bringing about in every generation riches and luxuries unimaginable just a generation before. Capitalism functions even better when it operates in a society shored up by a strong moral tradition (I prefer the Judeo-Christian one myself). In the Progressive world, capitalism impoverishes and socialism brings peace, harmony, equality, and wealth. Moreover, stabilizing moral traditions are dangerous, hate-filled, and must be destroyed. [Read more…]