Want to get a little perspective?

The New Neo Posted on by

Try this for size (hat tip: Gerard Vanderleun at American Digest). The video includes a lot of new-agey political stuff, but it’s the pictures that are wonderful:

OVERVIEW from Planetary Collective on Vimeo.

Here’s an early post of mine on my own memories of those first views of earth as seen from space.

And since I’m one of those types who’s easily reminded of poetry, that video made me think of this poem, of course:

YOU, ANDREW MARVELL
By Archibald MacLeish

And here face down beneath the sun
And here upon earth’s noonward height
To feel the always coming on
The always rising of the night:

To feel creep up the curving east
The earthy chill of dusk and slow
Upon those under lands the vast
And ever climbing shadow grow

And strange at Ecbatan the trees
Take leaf by leaf the evening strange
The flooding dark about their knees
The mountains over Persia change

And now at Kermanshah the gate
Dark empty and the withered grass
And through the twilight now the late
Few travelers in the westward pass

And Baghdad darken and the bridge
Across the silent river gone
And through Arabia the edge
Of evening widen and steal on

And deepen on Palmyra’s street
The wheel rut in the ruined stone
And Lebanon fade out and Crete
High through the clouds and overblown

And over Sicily the air
Still flashing with the landward gulls
And loom and slowly disappear
The sails above the shadowy hulls

And Spain go under and the shore
Of Africa the gilded sand
And evening vanish and no more
The low pale light across that land

Nor now the long light on the sea:

And here face downward in the sun
To feel how swift how secretly
The shadow of the night comes on …

Give me your tired, your…

The New Neo Posted on by

…welfare recipients.

John Hinderaker has two alternate theories:

…[T]he Obama administration is actively recruiting indigent foreigners to come to the United States to receive welfare benefits. Its Welcome to USA.gov page is largely about the welfare benefits that new immigrants can receive. The administration has even partnered with the government of Mexico to advertise the availability of food stamps to Mexican immigrants (including, although this is not officially stated, illegals). In part because of the Obama administration’s recruitment, the number of non-citizens receiving food stamps has quadrupled since 2001, to an estimated 1,634,000 as of June 2012…

If we assume that the administration’s goal is to maintain the United States as a strong and prosperous nation, then its immigration policies are quite literally insane. I can see only two possible explanations for the administration’s eagerness to attract welfare recipients from other countries. One is that Obama is so blinkered by ideology that he irrationally believes that any expansion of government spending must necessarily be a good thing. The other is that his objective is not, in fact, to preserve America as a strong and prosperous nation.

And I have two words in response (or maybe it’s one, since it’s hyphenated): Cloward-Piven.

And then there’s the fact that the vast majority of these voters probably will vote the Democratic ticket some day, and/or their American-born children will. It’s really a win-win situation for the left, isn’t it?

And yes, I’m very cynical. But, I think, rightly so. There’s really (as Hinderaker suggests) no other logical explanation.

[UPDATE 4:40 PM: See this comment for a possible error in the post’s premise. I am extraordinarily busy today and don’t yet have time to check it out myself, but I will later this evening.]

Please…

The New Neo Posted on by

…read this.

And then could someone tell me why Fox’s show “Red Eye” is on at 3 A.M. instead of prime time?

And don’t tell me that the sort of problem described at the link is just a drop in the bucket and we need to do something about education, movies, etc.. We can walk and chew gum at the same time.

And please don’t tell me it’s because it’s called “Red Eye,” either. Change the time and change the name.

And this comment at this post at Ace’s is spot on:

Always been a source of frustration for me, that counterarguments to bumper sticker slogans often require no little effort in setting up, let alone explain.

“Visualize World Peace” should be easy to discredit, but it takes lengthy dissertations regarding human history, anthropology, psychology to even get to the point where you can begin to nullify this stultifying catchphrase.

Had an English teacher tell me just how powerful (for better or for worse) bumper stickers can be: Have you ever seen a car with a 5000 word essay taped to the bumper?

Allan Bloom on the ubiquity of moral relativism—in 1987

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ve written before about Allan Bloom’s masterful The Closing of the American Mind, published in 1987, here and here.

And I probably will again. It is so richly loaded with thought that almost every sentence might cause the reader to pause and reflect. Plus, it’s extremely readable. Bloom has done something extraordinarily difficult, which is to write a serious work about education, politics, history, and philosophy in a very lively style.

Apparently, that’s the kind of guy he was.

I’ve only read (that is, re-read; I read much of it a few years ago) a small portion of the book so far. But I was blown away at the outset by the first few paragraphs of his introduction, entitled “Our Virtue.” And so I’m going to reproduce some of it verbatim, just for you, to whet your appetite for the book itself. Remember as you read this that it was written no later than 1987, and probably a bit earlier:

There is one thing a professor can be absolutely certain of: almost every student entering the university believes, or says he believes, that truth is relative. If this belief is put to the test, one can count on the students’ reaction: they will be uncomprehending. That anyone should regard the proposition as not self-evident astonishes them, as though he were calling into question 2 + 2 = 4. Those are things you don’t think about. The students’ backgrounds are as various as America can provide. Some are religious, some atheists; some are to the Left, some to the Right; some intend to be scientists, some humanists or professionals or businessmen; some are poor, some rich. They are unified only in their relativism and in their allegiance to equality. And the two are related in a moral intention. The relativity of truth is not a theoretical insight but a moral postulate, the condition of a free society, or so they see it. They have all been equipped with this framework early on, and it is the modern replacement for the inalienable natural rights that used to be the traditional American grounds for a free society. That it is a moral issue for students is revealed by the character of their response when challenged—-a combination of disbelief and indignation: “Are you an absolutist?,” the only alternative they know, uttered in the same tone as “Are you a monarchist?” or “Do you really believe in witches?” This latter leads into the indignation, for someone who believes in witches might well be a witch-hunter or a Salem judge. The danger they have been taught to fear from absolutism is not error but intolerance. Relativism is necessary to openness, and this is the virtue, the only virtue, which all primary education for more than fifty years has dedicated itself to inculcating. Openness—and the relativism that makes it the only plausible stance in the face of various claims to truth and various ways of life and kinds of human beings—is the great insight of our times. The true believer is the real danger. The study of history and of culture teaches that all the world was mad in the past; men always thought they were right, and that led to wars, persecutions, slavery, xenophobia, racism, and chauvinism. The point is not to correct the mistakes and really be right,; rather it is not to think you are right at all.

The students, of course, cannot defend their opinion. It is something with which they have been indoctrinated. The best they can do is point out all the opinions and cultures there are and have been. What right, they ask, do I or anyone else have to say one is better than the others? If I pose the routine questions designed to confute them and make them think, such as, “If you had been a British administrator in India, would you have let the natives under your governance burn the widow at the funeral of a man who had died?,” they either remain silent or reply that the British should never have been there in the first place. It is not that they know very much about other nations, or about their own. The purpose of their education is not to make them scholars but to provide them with a moral virtue—openness.

Every educational system has a moral goal that it tries to attain and that informs its curriculum. It wants to produce a certain kind of human being. This intention is more or less explicit, more or less a result of reflection,; but even the neutral subject, like reading and writing and arithmetic, take their place in a vision of the educated person. In some nations the goal was the pious person, in others the warlike, in others the industrious. Always important is the political regime, which needs citizens who are in accord with its fundamental principle. Aristocracies want gentlemen, oligarchies men who respect and pursue money, and democracies lovers of equality. Democratic education, whether it admits it or not, wants and needs to produce men and women who have the tastes, knowledge, and character supportive of a democratic regime. Over the history of our republic, there have obviously been changes of opinion as to what kind of man is best for our regime. We began with the model of the rational and industrious man, who was honest, respected the laws, and was dedicated to the family (his own family—what has in its decay been dubbed the nuclear family). Above all he was to know the rights doctrine; the Constitution, which embodied it; and American history, which presented and celebrated the founding of a nation “conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” A powerful attachment to the letter and spirit of the Declaration of Independence gently conveyed, appealing to each man’s reason, was the goal of the education of democratic man. This called for something very different from the kind of attachment required for traditional communities where myth and passion as well as severe discipline, authority, and the extended family produced an instinctive, unqualified, even fanatic patriotism, unlike the reflected, rational, calm, even self-interested loyalty—not so much to country but to the form of government and its rational principles—required in the United States…

But openness…eventually won out over natural rights, partly through a theoretical critique, partly because of a political rebellion against nature’s last constraints. Civic education turned away from concentrating on the Founding to concentrating on openness based on history and social science. There was even a general tendency to debunk the Founding, to prove the beginnings were flawed in order to license a greater openness to the new. What began in Charles Beard’s Marxism and Carl Becker’s historicism became routine. We are used to hearing the Founders being charged with being racists, murderers of Indians, representatives of class interests. I asked my first history professor in the university, a very famous scholar, whether the picture he gave us of George Washington did not have the effect of making us despise our regime. “Not at all,” he said, “it doesn’t depend on individuals but on our having good democratic values.” To which I rejoined, “But you just showed us that Washington was only using those values to further the class interests of the Virginia squirearchy.” He got angry, and that was the end of it. He was comforted by a gentle assurance that the values of democracy are part of the movement of history and did not require his elucidation or defense. He could carry on his historical studies with the moral certitude that they would lead to greater openness and hence more democracy. The lessons of fascism and the vulnerability of democracy, which we had all just experienced, had no effect on him.

Liberalism without natural rights, the kind that we knew from John Stuart Mill and John Dewey, taught us that the only danger confronting us is being closed to the emergent, the new, the manifestations of progress. No attention had to be paid to the fundamental principles or the moral virtues that inclined men to live according to them…

Note how long ago all of this had already hit its stride; Bloom was a student of that history professor back in the mid-1940s, having been born in 1930 but having also been precocious enough to get his undergraduate degree at the age of eighteen from the University of Chicago after having entered at fifteen.

Note also the tone of barely-restrained sarcasm; Bloom seems to have had a certain amount of contemptuous anger at those academics who could have been so stupid as to not have realized the effects of their throwing out the precious baby and leaving the dirty bathwater (it seems his first history professor was none too happy with his challenges, either). As the book goes on, some of the best passages involve Bloom’s description of the faculty’s craven abdication during the student uprisings of the 1960s, when he was one of those who tried (in vain, as it turned out) to hold his finger in the dyke of the best traditions of Western Civilization.

The left and the liberals

The New Neo Posted on by

In yesterday’s thread on Limbaugh’s epiphany, commenter “DNW” asks some interesting questions:

I’m curious as to how many continue to believe the old saw that conservatives and libertarians on the one hand, and modern liberals on the other, “at base” and when left to their own devices, really want the same things out of life? How many continue to believe that they interpret reality, and experience meaning, and find their satisfactions in much the same ways; differing only as to the recommended mechanics involved in most effectively getting the maximum number of their fellows there?

I think that at least some of the confusion on the right comes from the perception of “modern liberals” as a unitary group versus a mix of fairly disparate ones. Those who believe it is a unitary group are, in my opinion, conflating two things: the rank-and-file, not-especially-politically-aware-or-informed liberals who regularly vote Democrat but who are not especially consumed with politics; and the committed leftists who rarely label themselves as such and instead call themselves “liberal” or “progressive,” but who are extremely aware and committed and well-informed about alternative history, PC thought, tactics, and strategy. The former (and larger) group is merely following the latter one, which sets the agenda, calls the shots, and manages the propaganda.

It is the former who fit the description of “basically wanting the same things out of life” as conservatives. It is the former who might switch their thinking if given enough information and time (and if they were interested enough to really pay attention to the right as opposed to paying attention to what the left says about the right).

I know that many people, including some in the comments section of this blog, disagree with the characterization I have just offered and say that everyone left of center, liberals and leftists alike, politically aware and active or not, are either (take your pick of descriptions) evil or at least very fundamentally different from those on the right. I think they are different, but for liberals (as opposed to hard-core leftists) that difference lies in the information they get and where they get it, and in some cases the ways in which they process and understand information. I most especially do not think they are evil, although unfortunately they may end up helping the triumph of evil.

I believe I know that about them because I not only know these people very very well, I basically used to be one of them in many, although not all, ways (I always was a critical thinker, for example—as are a certain small percentage of the liberals I know today). What changed is that I became more interested in politics and in learning in more detail about what’s happening in the world and I immersed myself in that, including an exposure to the arguments of the right. As a result I encountered new sources of information to round out my knowledge base, and ended up setting foot on a path that changed my political affiliation, although not my basic self.

I think that DNW—and others on the right with the even more extreme point of view that all liberals are evil—are motivated at least in part by their sense of outrage at Republicans’ and conservatives’ often wishy-washy reactions in the face of those leftists who are out to destroy the US and what makes it great and distinctive. So they want those “can’t we just all get along?” Republicans to realize how utterly serious this battle is, and how late the hour. And so, in their justified rage at the leftists, they are acting as though the leaders and those who do their bidding without much understanding or knowledge of what they’re up to are identical in terms knowledge and motivation.

I think it’s a distinction that matters, become some liberals can be reached (hey, even some leftists can be reached, as evinced by the life story of someone like David Horowitz, although that’s quite rare). We need to figure out how to reach those people, not to demonize them.

USDA is already running the re-education camps

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ve read about this sort of thing before, of course, although I’ve been fortunate enough so far to not have been required to endure a stint in the re-education camps myself (give them time):

Judicial Watch today released previously unseen USDA videos revealing a compulsory “Cultural Sensitivity Training” program requiring USDA employees to bang on tables, chanting in unison “The pilgrims were illegal aliens” while being instructed to no longer use the word “minorities,” but to replace it with “emerging majorities.” Judicial Watch received the videos pursuant to a May 18, 2012, Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request.

The sensitivity training sessions, described as “a huge expense” by diversity awareness trainer and self-described “citizen of the world” Samuel Betances, were held on USDA premises. The diversity event is apparently part of what USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack described in a memo sent to all agency employees as a “new era of Civil Rights” and “a broader effort towards cultural transformation at USDA.” In 2011 and 2012, the USDA paid Betances and his firm nearly $200,000 for their part in the “cultural transformation” program.

This is the sort of thing that’s been flying under the radar, although there’s little question in my mind that it’s only the tip of the iceberg of what’s already occurring, and that the plan is to make it the wave of the future as well. And note that those who are doing this seem fully aware that, if people were to find out about it, a lot of them would be incensed. So best keep it as secret as possible:

USDA Training Administrator, Vincent Loran, in an October 10, 2011, email previously revealed by Judicial Watch, asked Betances for a copy of a training video vowing to keep it secret. “It will not be used for or show [sic] in any way shape or form,” Loran promised.

Of course, training sessions like this serve to only offend at least some people, and solidify their opposition to PC thought. But they work quite nicely on others, who’ve already been softened up by an educational system that more and more is dedicated to this sort of thing as its most pressing task, far more pressing than actually educating either the majority or the minorities—oops, emerging majorities—it is supposed to serve.

So, could Rahm Emanuel become…

The New Neo Posted on by

…the first Jewish president?

Only if Hillary decides not to run: “Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel is said by well-connected Democrats to be considering the idea of running for president if Hillary Clinton opts out of the 2016 race.”

But Hillary will decide to run. And she almost certainly will be elected. You heard it here first (although I continue to hope I’m wrong).

It occurs to me—not for the first time—that our presidential future is likely to be a series of “firsts.” No WASP male will ever win again; the American people desire continual diversity novelty—although ordinarily Jews don’t count in that particular equation, because “diversity” can only come from groups considered underprivileged and oppressed. So even if by some wild chance Hillary declines to run, I don’t see a presidential future for Rahm.

He’s too short, anyway.

Rush Limbaugh has an epiphany about Obama

The New Neo Posted on by

Part of this humorous rant by Rush Limbaugh is thick sarcasm, and part of it is a straightforward acknowledgement of a new realization he’s come to about Obama.

I hardly ever listen to talk shows, and so I’m quite unfamiliar with Rush Limbaugh’s program except what I read about it now and then in the press or the blogosphere. But it’s my impression that this election has knocked him for a loop like no other has before it. Perhaps, as with many conservatives, it surprised him most because he thought the American people were thinking a certain way and it turns out they were thinking another way. Some of his boundless self-confidence may have been shattered, and he’s had to regroup.

That’s what his post-State-of-the-Union-Address rant sounds like. Although much of it is funny, it’s a bleak kind of humor, and there is this kernel of very serious truth within it:

…I do want to tell you something here that has been sort of an eye opener for me. Now, it may have been something that you understood long ago. It may have been something you put together long ago. I must confess that I only just realized this today. And it’s about trying to understand how could so many people say they disagree with Obama’s policies and yet reelect him…

How in the world can people be dissatisfied with the country’s direction while at the same time support the very agenda that’s causing it? This just doesn’t compute to you and me. We recognize that it is Obama’s agenda which is leading to the problems this country has and thus the dissatisfaction that people have regarding the country’s direction. But the majority of people who vote, there is no connection of those two things whatsoever…

So Obama is not at all connected to the tragic destruction of this country. He is seen as somebody who wants to fix it…Now, maybe one reason is that he’s successfully blamed Bush all these years and the exit polling data last November, vast majority of people still do blame Bush for the economy, but it’s more than that. It’s that Obama never, ever, allows himself to be seen as governing. He is constantly campaigning.

Obama is constantly seen as in competition with what’s happening in Washington. It is though there are straw men. There are men behind curtains. There are invisible, evil people doing all this to the country. He’s trying to expose them and he’s working very hard. Romney is one of them. Bush was one of them. There are a bunch of other people, we don’t know who they are. But Obama is trying to find them. He’s trying to expose them and trying to fix all this. Obama is not seen as the guy behind the curtains pulling the levers. Obama is not seen as the guy who does not like the way the country was founded and is trying to take this country in a different direction. He’s not seen at all in the way he really is. It can’t all be because of the media…

This is what you and I are gonna have to learn and learn fast. No matter what is said, no matter what evidence happens, no matter what’s reported, it will not be possible to connect Obama to the negativity that’s happening in the country today because he’s campaigning against it himself. That’s the reason for the perpetual, never-ending campaign. It is why, in eight years, he will never allow himself for even one day to be seen as actually governing or presiding over any of this.

He’s always going to be running against the very things he’s doing.

Has there ever before been a president who presents himself as a mediator and conciliator while simultaneously stirring up hatred and conflict? And been so successful at the deception? Has there ever before been a president who will not leave his fingerprints on anything? And gets away with it? Has there ever before been a president so inclined to blame his predecessors, and for so long, and with whom the American people has so cooperated with in that endeavor?

And I think Limbaugh is correct in saying that, although the sycophantic press is of course heavily, heavily involved, it is not the whole explanation or even close to it. The American people has lost the ability to see clearly and to demand performance from Obama. Obama is the first president to not be judged on his record.

[ADDENDUM: And this, newly released, is right in line with Obama’s presidential history of taking responsibility for nothing:

Bowing to pressure from Senate Republicans, the White House disclosed on Thursday that President Barack Obama did not personally ask the Libyan government for help during September’s deadly terrorist attack on the American compound in Benghazi. Instead, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton reached out on his behalf, according to a letter from Obama’s official government lawyer, Kathryn Ruemmler, to key Republicans.

“Secretary Clinton called Libyan President Magariaf on behalf of the President on the evening of September 11, 2012 to coordinate additional support to protect Americans in Libya and access to Libyan territory,” she wrote.

The response to this will probably be the usual crickets chriping. Or for all I know, praise for something-or-other—perhaps for 2016 President-elect Hillary.

So why was this oh-so-informational information that explains absolutely nothing about why Obama failed to do so, or what he was doing instead, finally released now? Here’s why:

Ruemmler’s response, obtained by Yahoo News, could clear a major obstacle to the confirmation of Republican former Sen. Chuck Hagel to be defense secretary.

GOP senators had vowed to block his nomination unless the White House detailed Obama’s personal outreach to Libyan officials during the Sept. 11, 2012, attack.

He must really want Hagel at Defense.]

Martin Peretz is surprised…

The New Neo Posted on by

…by the fact that the guy who took over TNR, Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes, told Peretz he planned to do one thing with the magazine and has actually done another.

Surprised, Martin? Why?

I can’t read the full Peretz article at the WSJ because it’s behind a pay firewall, but Volokh has some liberal (ha ha) quotes from it [emphasis mine]. Peretz writes:

[The most recent issue of TNR has] established as fact what had only been suggested by the magazine in the early days of its new administration: The New Republic has abandoned its liberal but heterodox tradition and embraced a leftist outlook as predictable as that of Mother Jones or the Nation.

That was hardly the fate I expected for the magazine. Yes, Mr. Hughes had run Barack Obama’s highly successful social-media operation during the 2008 presidential campaign, so a certain Democratic affinity was to be expected. But his assurances of open-mindedness in running the magazine inspired confidence. . . .

There is something strange about Chris Hughes’s journalistic vision. He has said in public and to me that he intended for the magazine no longer to be known as a liberal journal, for it not to take up only one side of an issue. Fair enough. An earnest expression of this sentiment is the fact that the magazine has stopped publishing editorials.

But maybe editorials are no longer needed, given the articles themselves. The magazine now seems to live in a space where those “little insurrections of the mind” are unwelcome. It is akin to the atmosphere in many colleges and universities: There are prevailing orthodoxies but they aren’t recognized as such. Mr. Obama himself is the main one. The president is an object of fealty at the New Republic in a way that Woodrow Wilson and even Franklin Roosevelt never were.

Welcome to the reality you’ve apparently been denying for years, Mr. Peretz. You thought you were creating an organ for the sort of fair, thoughtful, open-minded left that questions authority whether it comes from left or right, and that it could endure that way? That proves that you never understood the left at all, although you were part of it.

And you apparently never understood Barack Obama, either, or most of his hired hands, if you trusted them to do what they say they will.

Of course, this may all be some sort of reaction by Peretz to losing his fiefdom and seeing it taken over and steered in a new direction. It may, in other words, be more personal than principled. But although ego may have a bit to do with it, I think his surprise and anger about the larger issue is sincere, as well. Peretz’s sort of liberalism, including his support of Israel, has become increasingly out of date, and he may just be beginning to realize it.