“More People Have Died In Ted Kennedy’s Car Than In Nuclear Power Plants”

Visualize Whirled Peas

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Hey, someone had to do it.

A Decline in Courage may be the most striking feature which an outside observer notices in the West in our days. The Western world has lost its civil courage, both as a whole and separately, in each country, each government, each political party and of course in the United Nations. Such a decline in courage is particularly noticeable among the ruling groups and the intellectual elite, causing an impression of loss of courage by the entire society. … And decline in courage is ironically emphasized by occasional explosions of anger and inflexibility on the part of the same bureaucrats when dealing with weak governments and weak countries, not supported by anyone, or with currents which cannot offer any resistance. But they get tongue-tied and paralyzed when they deal with powerful governments and threatening forces, with aggressors and international terrorists. … To defend oneself, one must also be ready to die; there is little such readiness in a society raised in the cult of material well-being. Nothing is left, then, but concessions, attempts to gain time and betrayal. … Facing such a danger, with such historical values in your past, at such a high level of realization of freedom and apparently of devotion to freedom, how is it possible to lose to such an extent the will to defend oneself?

This was like before he got purged by Stalin correct?

Link

How did we journey, in the space of 6 short years, from JFK’s famous speech to the Jefferson Airplane’s drug-induced, summer of love, response? And what does this have to do with the Demographic changes we are seeing in our culture?

In the last couple of days, first Glenn Reynolds, and then Donald Sensing, wrote interesting pieces looking at some of the factors that have led to a Demographic threat to America. In The Parent Trap, Glenn Reynolds commented on the various social costs of having children:

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Implicit in both of these formulations is the heightened Narcissism of the child bearing cohort. This is a result of trends which began with the post-war “baby boom” cohort which came of age in the 1960s. In Part III of my series on Narcissism, Disintegration, Suicidality & the Fall of the West, I described how the confluence of material abundance and the decrease in childhood mortality led to smaller families in which each individual child was imbued with enhanced parental emotional investment:

Was it in Volpone? “Let’s die like Romans,. Since we have liv’d like Grecians. …”

Shrink said that children of the baby boomer generation grew up without that veneer of suffering and sacrifice that their parents went through. This meant that it tends to cause such children to view themselves as all important, as eternal, the eternal child. And such narcissistic behavior tends to be anti-social in that if the only person that matters is you, then there is little group harmony, except of the mob variety.