The Senate has started debate of the final version of the stimulus bill. And the ultimate fate of what Senator McCain aptly called "generational theft" - the wholesale plundering of the US economy - rests in the shaky hands of two GOP senators, Arlen Spector and Olympia Snowe. Susan Collins has already committed to this abomination, and Teddy Kennedy is physically unable to vote, so it comes down to these two to get the sixty votes it needs to pass.
This bill, if it passes, will affect America's economy for years to come, which is exactly what Obama and his allies on the Left want. It's worth noting the bill was only released to Congress at 11PM last night, that it's over 1,000 pages in length and that it was released in PDF form - so that searches by keywords is impossible.
That's because they don't want Congress - or you- to know exactly whats inside. And this from an administration that campaigned on 'transparency' and pledged to put legislation like this on the Internet for five days so people could see it!
Like that tax cut for 95% of Americans and support for domestic oil creation, that was just sucker bait to get the gullible rubes to pull the lever for Obama and his fellow Democrats.
This bill is filled with payoffs to Obama's political allies like ACORN, expands government immensely and provides very little in tax cuts or job creation for Americans..an average of $13 per week in tax cuts per family. That'll buy very little, especially when fuel costs and inflation go up. Even the home buying credit, designed to help the housing market was cut out, except for a small amount limited to first time home buyers.
The bill also expands entitlements like the Earned Income Credit and opens the door for nationalized ( and rationed) health care. Unhappy with your HMO now? Just wait.
The final tally? Including debt service, interest and the expansion of entitlements, $3.27 trillion, according to the Heritage Foundation. And those figures pretty much agree with the ones put out by the Congressional Budget Office.
Spector and Snowe have both taken their phones off the hook, and Harry Reid has apparently promised Spector, Snowe and Collins to count their votes out of order so that none of them ends up being that 60th vote that puts this over the top. The final vote will likely come this weekend.
I can't say it surprises me, but I remain amazed that the dinosaur media is still so enamored of the One that they have abandoned even a pretense of journalistic ethics, objectivity and oversight. Instead they 've become not journalists, but advocates. For most of them, it appears to be enough that their preferred candidate won, that he appeals to their sense of style, and that he sounds good reading a teleprompter . And they are paying no attention to what this legislation is likely to do to America, themselves, or their families' futures.
The lead story today? A plane crash in Buffalo. The much bigger trainwreck in the US senate is being ignored.
We're in for a very bumpy ride.
It appears that the best we can realistically hope for is that when the Republicans gain control of the House and Senate in 2011. they can undo some of this.
ReplyDeleteA popular tactic has always been to say (as if you were stating a fact) that the Republican and Democrat parties are both corrupt so it doesn't matter what one does compared to another.
ReplyDeleteFor Dems, they use it to de-legitimatize criticism from Repubs rather than defending their positions on their on merits (cause they have none).
For Republicans, this is charged in order to either get rid of RINOs, hold corrupt Republicans to account, or various other things like that.
For independents, it is either a run at pseudo-intellectualism by appearing to be "above the fray" when one says "pox on both their houses" or it is simply a remarkable sign of cynicism and disbelief in any positive qualities at all in American politics.
In reality, meaning in the analytical reality of strategy concerning an objective end result of Victory or Defeat (which is about as non-negotiable as Dying and Living), when Democrats spend, it is permanent. When Republicans spend, it is temporary.
The US Constitution is not designed to run a system without a corruption. It is designed so that corruption, if it exists, is controlled but primarily, made into something that is temporary. It either balances itself out through the greed of men or it is eliminated through systems and institutions designed to balance and improve the entire structure so that theft and corruption are neither legal nor necessary nor easily attainable. Transparency. The RUle of Law. These things are products of the existence of high corruption. They weren't there to begin with and suddenly corruption sprung up instantaneously to challenge the Rule of Law. No, the natural state of things is "No Rule of Law" and "anarchy" and "kill whomever you want if you can get away in time". Corruption is one of the natural states of the human species. It is the rule of law that is artificial.
Now the Dems use corruption, spending, and various other things not because they want to further their greed, although they do do that, but because they know that if they can shatter the system, nothing will stop them from doing anything they want. The system was designed with the intent in mind that all men are fallible, greedy, and full of vice. That this means they will fall to weakness and, if given a choice, often will choose the wrong ones for the wrong reasons. So thus certain things like the veto or the Electoral College or the two houses of Congress are created in order to correct the mistakes inherent in the judgment of humanity. But, this doesn't work against traitors. This doesn't work against those knowingly and purposefully undermining the system in order to destroy it. For how is a system, run by men, going to be able to defend itself when the men the system counts on to do things have been subverted? It doesn't work anymore. The Constitution is not a God nor an AI with independent powers and decision making ability. It can only do what the people allow it or want it or are willing to die to make things get done.
And that is the fundamental difference, independent of all the propaganda, between Republican spending and Democrat spending. They are not the same thing, not even close.
But they want you to think it is. They want you to think that it is only a matter of scale. But it is not a matter of scale. It is a matter of institutions, breaking or making them.
I think that that is an unrealistic hope, B Poster. All the current Republicans will do is shift spending from one set of programmes to another set of programmes. After all, they held the House, the Senate, & the Presidency, from the 2002 mid-term elections till the 2006 mid-term elections. ( Actually, they held the House from the 1994 mid-term elections. ) What, pray tell, did they abolish ? Can anyone name a single Department, Agency, Ministry, or Bureau which was, by legislation, ABOLISHED ?
ReplyDeleteB.Poster: If TheChosenOne does what T.Bliar did to the UK, it will be far too late to undo anything by the time the people realise what has happened.
ReplyDeleteAs for making the pdf of the bill/act machine searchable, I sugggest putting it through an OCR program with output as rtf or similar. It may make a complete mess of the layout and the graphics, but you will get to the text.
Plane crash in Buffalo AND a beheading. Big news, indeed. But not nearly as big as this crap load sandwich. Sickening. Just sickening. 52% of the voters have asked for it. They deserve it. The rest of us? Just hope that a few Republicans can sort out part of the mess down the road. Not getting my hopes up of THAT ever happening, though.
ReplyDeleteAnonymous,
ReplyDeleteWhile it is true that the Republicans held the House, the Senate, and the White House from 2002 to the mid term elections in 2006, they never had enough votes to survive a fillibuster from the Democrats or squishy Republicans.
Also, during this time the Democrats and their allies controlled the news media, the Government bueracracies, and the courts. The Democrats and their allies still control these areas today.
As such, abolshing a Government agency or department would have been impossible. Any legislation to do so would be unlikely to survive a fillibuster from the Democrats. Even if it did the decision to abolish the agency would be challenged in court and the decison to abolish the agency would be over turned by the courts. Also, the media would probably do all it could to defend the agency in question. Given all of these factors, there would have been no way to abolish any government agency during the time that the Republicans controlled the Hosue, the Senate, and the White House.
Given the fact that while I pray Obama's economic policies succeed in turning the economy around it seems unlikely that they could possibly succeed. The miserable failure of these policies will probably lead to the media who shilled for Obama and his team being fully discredited. Also, Obama's big government policies will be discredited as well.
After this happens it may just be possible to actually cut some government agencies. I certainly hope so. The first one I would eliminate would be Environmental Protection Agency.
Onerous environmental regulations are making it impossible to drill for more oil domestically and they are making it impossible to build more refineries. These regulations are hurting regular Americans significantly. As such, I would start with eliminating the EPA and I would roll back many other regulations concerning the environment.
The environment does not need "protection" from humans. Humans are only one species among billions. It is ludicrous to believe that they could impac the environment in any meaningful way.
Assuming the country survives the Obama Administration and his Democrat pals in Congress it may be finally be possible to began the wholesale elimination of numerous government programs.
To BPoster : I thank you for your response, but I must confess puzzlement & perplexity re your train of argument. You say that it is impossible to abolish anything. Previous generations of politicians have been able to abolish oodles & noodles of agencies.
ReplyDeleteEg, the US Post Office Department was once a federal cabinet position. Nixon persuaded a fully Democratic Congress to privatise it in 1971, at which point it became the current United States Postal Service. I recall all the debate re the proposed transition vividly as if it were yesterday.
But I can give you an even better example : the ICC. The Interstate Commerce Commission was once one of the most powerful agencies in Washington. I visited their labyrinthine headquarters once in the 1960s & felt as if I were walking through an ancient Roman Emperor's mausoleum. They regulated trains, railways, freight, interstate bus travel, trucking, & other interstate non-private, non-personal matters. They enforced federal anti-racial discrimination laws vis-a-vis interstate travel. I was told by someone there that, at one point, they even had regulated the phone industry. It was allowed to dissolve itself slowly from the 1970s till its formal coup de grace in 1995. This was an agency which had once been so powerful that in my youth I'd hear it referred to as the de-facto ' 4th Branch ' of the federal government.
I'll skip, for brevity's sake, descriptions of whole alphabet soups of New-Deal Rooseveltian agencies which were abolished during the 1939-1945 War & during the wonderful 2-year Republican Congress of 1947-1949. ( Mid-term Congresses can be quite good. )
Article 1, Section 8 of the US Constitution states that : ' The Congress shall have power ... To regulate commerce with foreign nations, and AMONG THE SEVERAL STATES, and with the Indian tribes ; ' [ 3d line, emphasis mine ; as an American Indian, I enjoy seeing that we were at least mentioned en passant ] ' ... To establish post offices and post roads ; ' [ 7th line ]. The reason I quoted these 2 lines was to demonstrate that even though Congress had the complete, unchallenged right to create & maintain these 2 agencies, they could, nonetheless, privatise, or abolish outright, agencies whose legality was given to them by the Constitution itself. If the Congress can abolish perfectly legal, Constitutional agencies, then they can certainly abolish the non-Constitutional agencies whereto I have made reference in other letters to this web site. ( The 10th Amendment states that : ' The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people. ' The single most important, & the single most neglected, amendment, the 9th Amendment states that : ' The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people. ' You can not tell me that there isn't a lot of completely illegal, indefensible bullying of the people being done by Washington, DC, which can be defended on the basis of anything in Article 1, section 8, nor by the various amendments to the Constitution, now numbering, I think, 27. )
Before I digress too far afield, BPoster, I wish to address the question of the filibuster, which you broach. This is extremely important. To abolish a department, agency, ministry, or bureau, you do NOT have to pass a separate bill for the explicit, sole purpose of abolition. You don't. All you need do is what I term 'zero - line ' the entity in question in the annual appropriations bill for the federal budget -- that's it. That's all you need do. Simply write zero, zilch, nothing, nada, naught, nought, no thanks, no way, no, 0, $0, $00.00. The House could have done that. The Senate could have done that. The bicameral reconciliation committee could have done that. They didn't. They didn't try to. They didn't want to ! They had no interest in small government. Oh, they will gladly shift spending round in order to fool people with their legislative sleight of hand. ( Little Billy Bureaucrat & Little Betty Bureaucrat may need to switch agencies. ) They'll point fingers at each other. But that's it. I was travelling quite frequently during that 2003 - 2007 complete-Republican-control era , & I watched in disgust as the pretty - boy Republican legislators from all round the country would jump in front of every camera which they could acquire, corner, & corral in order to babble re the evil Democrats & how the GOP were the small government party. ( They were obviously rehearsed as they all tripped over the same manifest talking points. ) They would talk & talk & talk. They were willing to do anything save walk into the Capitol, sit, & abolish something by resolution & vote. You could also leave whole departments, agencies, ministries, bureaux out of the annual appropriations bill for the federal budget. The question of filibuster does not enter the picture. I should like to point out that, as recently as 1996, Bob Dole ran for the Presidency with the promise of abolishing the Department Of Education.
To Ymarsakar : I must confess to being thoroughly frightened by your position that, quote : 'the natural state of things is "no rule of law" and "anarchy" and "kill whomever you want if you can get away in time", end of quote. Mon Dieu, no, no, no, no, no ! You sound like a follower of Thomas Hobbes, whose false dichotomy of the so-called barbaric state of nature vs the so-called civilised big government is at the root of too many later dictatorships' raisons d'etre. I totally, unequivocally, reject that premise. On the contrary, people in the state of nature were quiet, timid individuals. They thought in terms of specifics, not generics. They literally couldn't see the wood for the trees unless they chose to speculate on such matters. They were few in number originally, &, originally, most of them were unrelated to one another, for mankind have no single source, but, rather, many, separate, disparate sources. Eg, we American Indians are, in origin, completely unrelated to all other races. Indeed, the Indian races ( at least those who did not marry outside of their own nations, ) were, in turn, completely unrelated to one another & were completely separate races with completely separate origins as completely separate races. ( Obviously, later intermarriage over the millenia has abolished racial purity in every corner of the globe, but that was later. ) Man was migratory, quiet, peaceful, occasionally chased by a bear, but, on the whole, content, & able to survive foraging for food : vegetables, berries. Compassionate, empathetic, sympathetic & completely unwarlike. Most of the American Indian nations did not even have a word for war in their respective languages, let alone the concept of war. In fact, it was the white man which brought the concept & the word to the majority of Indian cultures. There is a charming historical footnote relating how sympathetic Whites in the Pacific Northwest taught the Nez Perce, the final free Indian nation, the theory of war ! They had to borrow the English word ' war ' ! People, left on their own, with enough to eat, & sufficient warmth & coolth, are innocuous, harmless creatures. At worst, they will be apathetic & lazy. The situation which you are describing, supra, & which the followers of Thomas Hobbes describe in identical language is not the state of nature. It is, rather, a much later stage of history wherein burgeoning populations can no longer feed themselves and/or ideologies ( political and/or religious ) have mesmerised & hypnotised the people.
What you refer to as cynicism en passant could also be labelled as realism, as fidelity to the facts & experience. Look, I was a fervent supporter of the wonderful Gerald Ford. 66 vetoes of spending bills in 29 months ! That's doing something real. So, sadly, insiders in the GOP which supported a rival tried to deny him the 1976 nomination. He only received enough votes at the convention when the roll call reached the Ws. I can't recall which W state finally gave him the nomination. After Ford's loss, I gave up on the GOP -- they were mostly responsible for destroying him, just like in the case of Chester Arthur, another great & accidental president betrayed by the GOP. As far as I am concerned, I didn't really leave the Republicans, they left me. There used to be Senators like Senator Packwood, Senator Hatfield -- senators serious about abolishing stuff. There was President Ford. Vice President Rockefeller. There was Senator Barry Goldwater, a true, small-government, libertarian conservative Republican. The GOP was pro ERA. In fact, it was co-sponsored by Ford onto the House floor. ( The Republicans were the 1st party to propose an ERA in their party platforms. ) There was William F Buckley, Jr advising from the sidelines. Milton Friedman was advising from the sidelines. ( He was asked before his death what his greatest accomplishment was, & he replied his successful campaign to end military conscription, ie, military slavery. ) The Ford-era Republicans were a lot which I could admire. After that, other than the 1st 2 years of the Gingrich era, ( which were great, but only for the 1st 2 years, ) there was nothing vaguely libertarian to be found with them, or, should I say, small-government, as the terms libertarian & constitutionalist seem to frighten some Republican 'social conservatives', a group which I don't pretend to be a part of.
In sum, if I am cynical, it is because I'm old & have heard these arguments before. You have to give me something concrete. I insist on specifics. I say, 'a pox on both their houses' ! The Donner Party was more honest about their intentions for their fellow man than either of these 2 current parties.
Apologies for length of post. Insomnia can make me quite loquacious. Ciao !
whose false dichotomy of the so-called barbaric state of nature vs the so-called civilised big government is at the root of too many later dictatorships' raisons d'etre.
ReplyDeleteThe reason for the existence of dictatorship is to control and harness power. It has nothing to do with civilization, raising living standards, protecting the people, executing the defence of human rights, and so forth.
Given that dictatorships don't need a justification to exist, it is an end in itself, it doesn't need Hobbes as a defense. Dictatorship is its own defense.
It is, rather, a much later stage of history wherein burgeoning populations can no longer feed themselves and/or ideologies ( political and/or religious ) have mesmerised & hypnotised the people.
The same dictates that go into tribal warfare which motivates people, like in Rwanda, in launching a first strike against their neighbors is the same consideration involved in the sabotage of the institutions of any higher end civilization.
The breeding of fear, the use of insecurity, and the exploitation of people's vulnerabilities and needs allows "First Strike" policies to be enacted. In Rwanda, it ended up as a genocide, by intent if nothing else.
This is a facet of human nature that has no differentiation regardless of whether you speak of barbarians living hand to mouth out in the wilderness or citizens of a highly evolved civilization.
People do not act rationally in the presence of fear or when they believe their neighbors are going to exploit/attack the people's village and family. This allows extreme measures to be taken. Those extreme measures, however, inevitably fail due to constraints on logistics and you have a counter-attack/massacre. And so it goes, for most of the history of the human species.
When Obama or Blair comes on the scene, they use the same tools, for slightly different results. They increase insecurity. They either destroy the economy or draws in violent Muslim immigrants to further destabilize things. They create threats and then proclaim themselves our saviors via fiery and smooth rhetoric.
All in order to do what? To justify drastic measures to avoid a catastrophe.
And so a nation falls, in the end, to the same thing that causes tribes to be destroyed. Distrust of each other. Fear that if the government is going to give payouts to one company or identity group, why not grab the loot for yourself first so they can't do it to you. And on this goes, this cycle of violence and exploitation. Eventually the strength and treasury of a people will be ended by this and a new Dark Age will result, a new age of man living as nature intended animals to live.
On the contrary, people in the state of nature were quiet, timid individuals.
People in the state of nature were always afraid of the dark, of predators, and of strangers. Such fears motivated them to attack first and ask questions later. To exploit first and never trust anyone except family.
In so far as two different members of two different tribes meet in the wilderness are "timid", they are so because they are scared out of their minds and will take any unusual action as a sign of violence and will use that as an excuse to attack, murder, and destroy. That is the state of nature.
After Ford's loss, I gave up on the GOP -- they were mostly responsible for destroying him,
Ford, the President presiding over the utter defeat of our armed forces, its demoralization and destruction, in addition to overseeing the Democrat backstabbing of our South Vietnamese veterans, could not be elected. I wouldn't have voted for him, precisely because he couldn't stop the Democrats, precisely because he used the veto too many times on too many unimportant issues, thus forcing no other way open for him. He put the Dems on alert notice, and the Dems put up a veto proof majority in response, and thus fell Saigon.
Ford himself knew that he failed to keep up Nixon's Honorable Peace. And the legacy of that would be with this nation for decades untold.
I say, 'a pox on both their houses' !
Thanks for supporting the Democrat demoralization and destruction of American institutions then.
Gerald Ford, in my view was one of our most underated presidents, as well as a singularly decent man of uncommon courage.
ReplyDeleteAnd it was not the GOP who destroyed him, BTW, but the press and the Democrats in Congress.
Watergate was essentially a coup d'etat by the press and the Left, aided by Nixon's misplaced sense of loyalty to his surbordinates and his own distrust of the media.
The emotions and raw hatred raised by this were a precursor to the Bush Derangement Syndrome of later years.
Into the mess stepped Gerald Ford, not only inheriting the emotional climate engendered by Watergate but an economy in recession (the Market crashed in '74) and a hostile Congress dominated by Leftist Democrats, many of whom got elected for the first time in the backlash against Watergate a couple of months after Nixon resigned and was pardoned in 1974.
That pardon took extraordinary courage on Gerald Ford's part. He had to know that by doing so,he was destroying any hopes of being re-elected. But he realized that without pardoning Nixon, the trials and the vitriol would go on without cease and paralyze the country for months or even years.
Essentially, he jumped on a grenade, calmed the country down and gave it confidence in our governmental system by sheer force of his Midwestern, good guy persona. People were livid at the Nixon pardon, but most of them were willing to accept the necessity,because Jerry Ford went on television to tell them why - and for the most part, they trusted him.
I'm not sure any other politician in America could have handled that as skillfully as he did.
And while that allowed the country to move on, the Democrats made his administration a living hell...including repudiating our pledged word and cutting off the military supplies we had promised
Thieu in South Vietnam an dLon Nol in Cambodia, both of whom had successfully stopped the attempted communist invasions of their countries.
Once the cowards in Congress cut off their resupply, they were overun, and millions of Vietnamese and Cambodians died or were made refugees because of it.
And Gerald Ford had to sit there and watch it happen.
After Watergate, I don't think any Republican could have been elected to the White House, not even Reagan.
In that sense,I've always felt that the US was lucky he lost to Ford, even if it meant we had to suffer through Jimmy Carter for one term.
Regards,
Rob
To Ymarsakar : I'm Gobsmacked ! I've read your most recent letter, & I feel as if I'm arguing with an extra-terrestrial -- an intelligent, English-speaking extra-terrestrial, but an alien, nonetheless. I don't understand your philosophy ; I disagree with the premises embedded in your arguments ; & I find the phrases you utilise to be oxymorons which contradict & disprove your own arguments even before you have reached the ends of your own sentences.
ReplyDeleteLet me start with that point : your phrases. I'll quote you as best as my memory permits.
You mention the word 'dictatorship', & then you proceed to state 'it has nothing to do with civilisation' ! It has everything to do with civilisation ! Man in the state of nature didn't have dictatorships -- how could they ? They weren't settled. There were no armies. There were no police. There weren't even any villages in the true state of nature. People foraged for food & might not see another human being for days, even weeks, at a time.
You use the phrase 'tribal warfare'. That has nothing to do with the state of nature, &, in fact, would be impossible in the state of nature : there were NO tribes at that historical stage. There could not be a war. For a war, you need organised political & military entities with supplies, storage, & a sense of common political mission. You need a SETTLED (sc, civilised, city-fied,) populace with some form of territorial commitment. This is impossible for man in the state of nature.
You speak of 'barbarians living hand to mouth'. You confuse utterly the concept of barbarians with man in the state of nature. Attila The Hun & the Huns were barbarians. The Vandals were barbarians. Man in the state of nature was not a barbarian. Barbarians are evil, aggressive, warring, 'vandal'ising, destructive, murdering, stealing agents. Man in the state of nature is the complete opposite. Barbarians are childish. Man in the state of nature is childlike.
You state that 'people in the state of nature were always afraid of the dark, of predators, and of strangers'. No, they were not afraid of the dark ! They were childlike, not idiots ! They were perfectly capable of watching the Sun sink into the Western skies & realise that the Sun would return in the morning in the Eastern skies. Do cats & dogs shriek in terror every evening when the Sun sets ? Of course not. They were not afraid of strangers per se, although they would realise, as we do, that not everyone can be trusted. Once satisfied that a person was not evil, they got along quite peaceably. ( Hey, modern human beings, homo sapiens, are known to have co-existed peaceably with the now-extinct Neanderthals for tens of thousands of years in the Eastern Hemisphere. ) Consider how ' Koko ', the sign-language gorilla gets along quite peaceably with his blond teacher girl ( what is it with blond girls & gorillas, by the way? King Kong, &c ) Think also of the surviving beautiful cave paintings. Have you seen any of the reproductions of the 1 at Lascaux? I was born too late to have the opportunity to see the original cave ; however, I have visited the reproduction, Lascaux II. The paintings are principally of horses. There are also some deer & some cattle. There may have been 1 whole person represented. They just weren't vain individuals. Characteristics created by civilisation which you falsely & erroneously impute to man in the state of nature are wholly absent. By the way, they discovered, at some point, skeletons of modern man from ca 30,000 BC in Romania : their arms were weaker & could not be fully raised. In other words, they could not, by definition, be club-wielding or sword-fighting individuals. How exactly were they supposed to be combatting each other ? By head - butting each other ? That should also lay to rest the silliness of your ' they are scared out of their minds and will take any unusual action as a sign of violence and will use that as an excuse to attack, murder, and destroy. That is the state of nature.' Au contraire, that is the state of a degenerate civilisation. You could not be further from the state of nature than that. There was a wonderful little comedy from the early 90s called 'Encino Man', which I think caught the real feel of what a man in the state of nature, or the slightly later cave man, would appear as, if transported somehow to modern times.
Man in the state of nature was so far removed from later, technological societies, whereof dictatorships are an example, & so individualistic, that they were incapable of foreseeing or understanding those MUCH LATER stages. As I said, they were quiet, timid individuals. They were migratory & foragers. They were so few in number that they would delight in encountering other human beings. I can see the cave man & his cave girl frolicking through the meadows hand in hand, running through the woods playfully, occasionally running into someone, thereby resulting in children. It was a carefree existence which we might well envy. The problem, in the very long term, was that the human races were quite fertile. This brings us to that famous equation of Malthus : populations tend to multiply geometrically ; whereas, food production & supply tends to grow arithmetically. The Malthusian conundrum. Then, & only then, do things change. People turn to the cultivation of food crops : farming. They turn to hunting. They form settlements : villages. They form nations. Then we reach the stages of depravity which include dictatorships & unprovoked wars. Those much, much later stages in history are what you are thinking of, Ymarsakar. But note the great spans of time which we have trudged through to reach those barren epochs. Note all of the steps we have taken just now to put behind us the state of nature before we arrive in those valleys.
You speak that 'a new Dark Age will result, a new age of man living as nature intended animals to live'. I have no way of knowing if a new Dark Age approaches, neither have you : the future is unwritten. How did they put it in the Terminator films? There is no Fate but what we make. But a Dark Age is not an aspect of the state of nature -- they are complete, polar opposites. WE could not return to the state of nature even if we wished. There were only a few thousands, perhaps a few ten thousands of people in the earliest days of mankind. 99.999 % ( per cent ) of mankind would have to disappear to allow the remainder to have the potential to live as pure foragers. ( Remember, man in the state of nature was a pure forager. ) But, even then, it would be impossible because of the memory of the survivors of what had once existed. Not to mention, all the remaining infrastruture of civilisation, eg, buildings, & c.
Before I forget, you claim that 'dictatorships don't need a justification to exist'. Of course they do ! In fact, other than controlling internal security, they will expend more time, effort, & money on internal propagandisation on their own people than anything else. They need raisons d'etre. People need to know why they have to suffer. Why they have to hunger. What is the objective for all of this sacrifice ? Even if we agree that the populace as a whole are defenceless against a well-armed internal security police force, we still have to take into consideration the security forces themselves. They have to be kept in line. They have to be vetted as to their reliability. They have to be convinced that it is in their own interest to engage in some very unsavoury activities in order to keep the dictatorship going. The further you travel up the bureaucratic ladder in the regime, the less people you have. A dictator is a a hostage to his own regime. That is why the Communist USSR spent so much time propagandising their own people. They had to.
I mentioned in passing that most of the native American Indian nations did not even have a word for 'war' in their respective languages. You might have thought that I was simply being quaint. I wasn't. I was demonstrating that certain concepts which you falsely & incorrectly impute to Man universally, are, in fact, not universal, not even after man has left the state of nature. I grant that once we have reached the stage of tribes & nations, we are not, by definition, dealing with man in the state of nature ; however, we are still pretty close & can garner much important, relevant info. If man, even after leaving the state of nature, can be innocent of the theory & concept & even the word of 'war', then we may safely deduce that the concept is not only not a product of man's nature, but that it requires, as a prerequisite, an extremely 'advanced' state of political development.
Your criticism re Ford's use of the veto saddens me. Your final ravings leave me wondering how old you are. You sound as if you are a teen ager. You certainly do not seem to have a deep grounding in history. You certainly could not be a product of that era. For one thing, you seem not to have heard of the war-criminal Lyndon Johnson, the Gulf Of Tonkin, Nixon's own invasion of Cambodia, Kent State, Jackson State ...
Re : your final sentence, your Parthian shot. Let's see, I had mentioned in 1 paragraph : President Gerald Ford, President Chester Arthur, Senator Packwood, Senator Hatfield, Senator Bob Dole, Vice-President Rockefeller, Senator Barry Goldwater, William F Buckley, Jr, Milton Friedman, & Newt Gingrich, ALL REPUBLICANS, ALL MENTIONED POSITIVELY by me ( &, in 1 paragraph, at that ! ), &, so, you accuse me of being some sort of undercover agent for Obama ! Remind me never even to try to be a friend to you --- you're missing several marbles in your head.
Man in the state of nature didn't have dictatorships -- how could they ?
ReplyDeleteOf course they had dictatorships. The original Tribal society or just the patriarch and his family formed the nucleus of any totalitarian "what I say goes" deal.
Of course, it was more complex than that, just like Saddam's control of the Sunnis and Shia were more complex than just "do as I tell you". But in principle, it was the same deal. Trust in the strong man to get things done.
'TRIBAL SOCIETY' Man in the state of nature did not have tribes or societies. That was MUCH LATER.
ReplyDelete'TRIBAL SOCIETY' Man in the state of nature did not have tribes or societies. That was MUCH LATER.
ReplyDeleteI don't mean to be offensive but you are seriously ignorant on this subject and I do really suggest you get some kind of background here. Any background at all would probably be better than none.
But as for my argument, all I need to say is that even wolves and animals out in nature have their tribe/clans/packs. And you say humans were just somehow different when we came on the scene? Come on. Let's be realistic here.
Animals have societies. Insects have societies. Man with a brain would not have societies because....?
Barbarians are evil, aggressive, warring, 'vandal'ising, destructive, murdering, stealing agents. Man in the state of nature is the complete opposite. Barbarians are childish. Man in the state of nature is childlike.
ReplyDeleteI don't think you should be talking about marbles being lost quite just yet, sirrah.
Hey Rob, where do you get these people? Do you have to pay em?
ReplyDeleteIf I wanted one of em for my blog, how would I go about getting one?
Thanks in advice for your wise and sage counsel, Rob.