Maggie's Farm

Where the heck did this idea of a noose being a symbol for racism come from? To me, nooses always made me think of horse thieves and cattle rustlers, and hangin' judges out West. Frontier justice. Well, also of Nathan Hale, who gave his life for the cause of freedom.

I fully agree with the piece at Never Yet Melted that it is a newly-minted pseudo-symbol in the wake of the Jena scam, which he also discusses, as we did earlier today. A diversion from that embarassment, and a wholly disingenuous one.

Does anyone really believe "the offended" anymore? Nowadays, everybody wants to pose as "offended" or "abused." It's pitiful to proclaim that one sits on a pity pot, but society seems to give you more points for being pitiful than for being cheerful, resilient, and relatively productive in life. Cry-babies are emotional blackmailers.

I am deeply offended by "the offended" and by the semi-professionally offended, but, despite my offended status, nobody is pandering to me, giving me free stuff, or offering me a pass on my sins. Boo hoo.

Disregarding the truth, people are now going nuts about nooses: Free Speech Left Hanging - NY Post.

Let's keep nooses around, without inventing one more phony subject that everybody is supposed to try to look virtuous and sensitive about, and to tiptoe around. The noose worked just fine on Saddam, and Osama would look very handsome in one.

I wonder whether all of this just pre-Halloween, Haunted House craziness. (And, speaking of crazy, how many other blogs have "noose" and moose in their front page post titles at the same time? Not to mention Techno-Viking.)

French accuse Dutch of "unacceptable cowardice."

The French economic decline. Yanks and Brits buying up their countryside.

Entitlement creep isn't a law of nature - it's a leftist strategy. The original big error was not means-testing Social Security.

Steyn makes the case that ideas like expanding SCHIP to the middle class is the worst thing we can do "for the children." 

One quote:

 I’m in favor of tax credits for child health care, and Health Savings Accounts for adults, and any other reform that emphasizes the citizen’s responsibility to himself and his dependents. But middle-class entitlement creep would be wrong even if was affordable, even if Bill Gates wrote a check to cover it every month: it turns free-born citizens into enervated wards of the Nanny State. As Gerald Ford likes to say when trying to ingratiate himself with conservative audiences, “A government big enough to give you everything you want is big enough to take away everything you have.” But there’s an intermediate stage: A government big enough to give you everything you want isn’t big enough to get you to give any of it back. As I point out in my book, nothing makes a citizen more selfish than socially equitable communitarianism: Once a fellow’s enjoying the fruits of Euro-style entitlements, he couldn’t give a hoot about the general societal interest; he’s got his, and who cares if it’s going to bankrupt the state a generation hence?

That’s the real “war on children”: in Europe, it’s killing their future. Don’t make the same mistake here.

More from the Steyn editorial at Flopping

A Jacksonian makes a detailed case for the sociopathy of the Clintons.

The fact that the details become tedious is because the pattern is so consistent.

Related: Has the silence begun to crack that they hang out with crooks, grifters, and scammers?

Reposted from 2005

A dog's view: It's seared - seared in my cultural-bio-psycho-social memory, just like Jung meant. Remember the George Papoon campaign? As I lie here on the kitchen floor, hoping some cherrries will fall off the plate, I am remembering that glorious "One Organism - One Vote"  campaign.

"Papoon for President - Not Insane"

We animals and other organisms lost that election, but it was a wonderful time back in 1970. The voting machines were designed to exclude and to discourage one-celled animals from voting. Gosh, Uncle Steve Post and those guys on WBAI....great stuff. A Revolution that failed. You human gods would be lying on the kitchen floor, being fed dry cardboard kibbles for supper, and we dogs would be going to work all dressed-up like dandies - wow - I mean bow-wow - and running the country. We figured that Papoon would get the massive bacteria and amoeba votes and that would turn the whole country into Greenish-Brown-Pond-Scum-colored states. Plus, if we were short a few votes, they could all just divide, and double their vote.

It's all from The Firesign Theater.

(By the way, can you name that breed in the photo?)

Edward Feser, author of Locke, asks the above question in a dense, meaty, scholarly piece at TCS which takes more than a couple of minutes to absorb. His conclusion:

Those who seek to appropriate Locke's legacy today must decide which part of it they value most, for they cannot coherently have it all. One must either endorse Locke's revisionist metaphysics - his rejection of objective essences and final causes in nature, his reductionistic account of the nature of persons, and so forth - and abandon the traditional moral and religious elements of his philosophy; or, if one wants to maintain these conservative elements, one must reject the revisionist metaphysics, and return to something like the Scholastic worldview it replaced. One must be either a radical or a reactionary. It is no longer possible (if it ever was) to be a Lockean.

It is indeed difficult to discuss subjects when assumptions and premises are not shared. It is difficult to be a nation under those same conditions.

I think it is always necessary to clarify assumptions before discussing any issue.

Steyn: "The common space required for civil debate has shrivelled to a very thin sliver of ground." -  The 'cold civil war' in the US. (thanks, H)

From Malanga in City Journal, a quote:

The new Religious Left is in one sense not new at all. It draws its inspiration from the Christian social-justice movement that formed in the mid-nineteenth century as a response to the emerging industrial economy, which many religious leaders viewed—with some justification—as brutal and unfair to workers. In America, the movement gained traction thanks largely to the efforts of Baptist minister Walter Rauschenbusch, who served New York City’s poor. Unlike nineteenth-century reformers who sought to help the poor by teaching them the bourgeois virtues of hard work, thrift, and diligence, Rauschenbusch believed that the best way to uplift the downtrodden was to redistribute society’s wealth and forge an egalitarian society. In Christ’s name, capitalism had to fall. “The Kingdom of God is a collective conception,” Rauschenbusch wrote in Christianity and the Social Crisis, politicizing the Gospel’s message. “It is not a matter of getting individuals to heaven, but of transforming the life on earth into the harmony of heaven.”

Sounds like Obama. The whole thing, The Religious Left, is here. 

I suspect this is a vocal, but not sizeable, group of people who will be given good media access despite their "theocratic" inclinations. The "Social Gospel," it seems to me, has very little to do with Christianity, which concerns itself with matters of the spirit and saving souls, and thus largely rejects earthly concerns about things like power as vain  distractions and temptations. I would steer clear of churches that do politics, and I believe that Dr. Dobson (who is truly wise on the subject of Christian child-rearing) is similarly foolish to get involved in political matters. It should be beneath their dignity.

About Benjamin Disraeli, by Gelernter in the Weekly Standard (2005). A quote:

Like nearly all successful politicians, he was a fine actor and first-rate manipulator, accustomed to saying things he didn't necessarily (wholly) believe. Like nearly all brilliant men, he could be hard to read. Like all celebrated wits and superstar parliamentarians, he was a champion improviser, superb at making things up as he went along. For all these reasons, historians tend to forget his passionate sincerity on the topics he cared about most: Britain, the Jews, the Tories, the government of England. No man ever left behind so many pregnant thoughts for his followers, admirers, and professional interpreters to ignore.

Read the whole thing.

Dr. Seuss was a political cartoonist before he wrote kid's books. From a Dr. Seuss/Harry Reid piece at Gateway:

Quoted in this piece at Protein Wisdom by his reader Tomas:

This SCHIP argument is not about who does or doesn’t care about children. Christ. It’s about the proper role of government. That’s why the retorts from the Olbermanns of the world are so clueless at best, downright dishonest at worst.

If the left would at least acknowledge when its proposed programs do not fit in the intended government framework — that they go above and beyond, but are necessary because of such-and-such — the ensuing debates would be a lot less infuriating. But the left reliably skips that part every time. They proceed from the get-go as if everyone is operating in the same terrain, and pretend it’s thus merely a debate about the actual merits of various proposals.

It’s a rhetorical approach that has gummed up the gears of our political discourse for more than four decades now. It has caused us all to waste a depressing amount of breath, time and energy, sitting here constantly arguing past each other, all because the left is sloppy/dishonest with the debate’s most basic premise.

If only from the perspective of efficiency, it’s maddening.

Read the whole piece. Link above.