I, Me, Mine

President Obama needs to get himself some new speechwriters—maybe some people who recognize how narcissistic he sounds when his speeches use “I” all the time.

On second thought, why bother? It’s not like I want to see his image improve. 2013 can’t get here fast enough.

A Partial Review of The Ominous Parallels

As you can tell from many of my recent blog posts, I’ve found a lot about The Ominous Parallels, by Leonard Peikoff, that’s made sense. I don't agree with his criticisms, in Chapter 5 especially, of Christianity, though, and recommend How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization and The Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success for an alternate perspective.

“What’s Past Is Prologue”

From p. 156 of TOP:

Liberalism, according to Weber, means an end to illusions, including the “illusion” of human progress—along with an attitude of endurance, “endurance [in Lilge’s words] to bear the destruction of all absolutes, with no sentimental turning back or rash embrace of new faiths, only the strength to hold out in the radical though bleak veracity of a cleansed mind.” As to selecting the proper course of action, Weber told the gathering, each individual has to decide the ideals that are “right for him.” Since only questions of means, not of ends, fall within the province of science, he said, ends must be chosen subjectively, by reference to feelings.

The Will of the People

From The Ominous Parallels, for comparison purposes:
“The will of ‘the people,’ it seemed, was unmistakable. The [Socialists], however, had grasped the lesson of Hegel and were undeterred: they understood that the people does not know what it wills.”

From President Barack Obama to George Stephanopoulos:
“ ‘I think the assumption was if I just focus on policy, if I just focus on this provision or that law or if we're making a good rational decision here, then people will get it.’ ”

Live-Blogging My Way Through The Ominous Parallels

I’ve been reading The Ominous Parallels off and on for about three weeks—I really need to start carving out some time to devote to it.

Several of my prior posts have been on the book; I have a couple of other posts to make on bits of it I’ve read recently. Part of the reason I’ve held back is the sense of live-blogging; another part is the fear that the book will disappoint me in the end.

I just read a passage, though, that demands a blog post of its own. This book is just full of what seem to be ominous parallels between conditions in Weimar Germany and current conditions in these United States:

The culture of Weimar Germany advocated irrational emotion. The economy demanded it. It provided conditions which allowed men no other mode of functioning.

The Republic was a mixed economy, the kind established by Bismarck and mandated by the nation’s new constitution. There was an element of economic liberty, and there were growing government controls—direct or indirect; federal, state, or municipal—over every aspect of the country’s productive life. The controls covered business, labor, banking, utilities, agriculture, housing, and much more. As a rule each new set of controls conferred benefits on some German group(s), at a cost. The cost was incurred by other groups, whose forced sacrifice paid for the benefits. The victims responded predictably.

Confronted with increasing British exactions one hundred and fifty years earlier, the American colonists did not decide to beef up their lobby in the English court; they heralded the rights of man and decided to throw off the yoke. There were no such ideas in Weimar Germany. The Germans did not question the code of sacrifice or the principle of statism. These ideas, they had been taught by every side and sect within their culture, specify how man ought to live and the only way man can live. They define the moral and the practical.

. . .

The authors of the Weimar constitution had believed that a controlled economy in the hands of a democratic government would foster peaceful cooperation among men, as against the “ruthless competition” and “war of all against all” which they held to be inherent in a free market. What the mixed economy produced instead was a ruthless competition among groups, a collectivist “war of all against all.”

. . .

Neither the warring groups nor the parties which courted them had any means to know what favors to insist on, when, or at whose expense, or when to yield to the demands of their antagonists, who also had to survive. By the nature of the system there was no principle to follow; no one could devise a rational way to divide a nation into mutually devouring segments, or an equitable way to conduct the devouring. Every group, therefore, swung at random from the role of beneficiary to that of victim and back again, according to the passions, the tears, the fears, the alliances, the front-page propaganda, the back-room deals, and the expediency of the moment.

Life, Spengler said, has “no system, no program, no reason.” It is not necessarily true of life itself. It was true of life in Germany’s mixed economy.

That kind of life has consequences. In 1923 the Germans discovered one of them.

1089 and a Wake-Up

’Nuff said.

Someone Else for President in 2012

With all the times he’s reversed himself, and with all his broken campaign pledges, running against President Obama’s record in 2012 would be too easy. The Democrats are going to have to nominate someone else—someone who will say, “Oh, I won’t do any of those things President Obama did.” But will the country believe her?

Unintended Consequences(?)

Why are all the Democrats’ programs anti-family? Why do the Democrats insist on programs like child care tax credits? Why don’t the Democrats ever stump for programs that support the traditional family, where the mom wants to stay home and take care of the children herself rather than send them to daycare? Why is the Democrat vision of a family one in which both parents work outside the home? Why is the Democrat vision of a family one in which there is only one parent?

Pop Philosophers

Leonard Peikoff, from The Ominous Parallels, p. 139:

Today Americans no longer seek philosophic guidance from philosophers, but from whoever fills the place philosophers have vacated: politicians, economists, psychologists, gurus, etc.

No, it’s worse than that. Americans today, as a general rule, seek philosophic guidance from celebrities—pop singers, movie stars, etc.; basically, whoever is the box office draw du jour. At least politicians, economists, and psychologists are generally well-educated and can be expected to read a book once in a while.

Thank God for Rush Limbaugh

’Nuff said.

Pragmatism

Obama’s supporters call him a pragmatist like that’s supposed to be a good thing.

From The Ominous Parallels, p. 53:

Thinkers for decades had been saturated with the Kantian view that facts “in themselves” are unknowable, and with the voluntarist view that action has primacy over thought. As a result, a growing chorus—helped along by Schopenhauer, Marx, and Nietzsche, among others—began to suggest that men should dispense with any concern for facts or reality. Ideas, it was increasingly claimed, all ideas, are merely subjective tools designed to serve human purposes; if, therefore, an idea leads in action to desirable consequences, i.e., to the sorts of consequences desired by its advocates, it should be accepted as true on that ground alone, without reference to the (unknowable) facts of reality.

This new approach reached its climax and found its enduring name in America, in the writings of William James. James called it: pragmatism.

Two Minutes Hate

George W. Bush is the Democrat party’s Emmanuel Goldstein. Barack Obama ran against George W. Bush in the 2008 presidential election. Martha Coakley is running against George W. Bush in the 2010 Massachusetts special election. The Democrat party plans to run against George W. Bush in the 2010 off-year House and Senate elections.

Obama Then and Now

Before the 2008 presidential election, candidate Barack Obama claimed he was going to be post-partisan.

Before the 2010 special election to replace Teddy Kennedy, President Barack Obama warned that a Republican win, by eliminating the Democrat party’s supermajority in the Senate, would put an end to his agenda.

If President Obama were truly going to be post-partisan, what need would he have for a Democrat supermajority in Congress?

More from The Ominous Parallels

From The Ominous Parallels, pp. 93–94, with some minor edits:

On what moral grounds, even in the privacy of his own mind, could a man, accepting the [party’s] ethics, object to or resist any decree, no matter how brutal or monstrous, issued to him by the spokesman and embodiment of the [people]? On the grounds that the decree destroys his personal values—his goals, ambitions, happiness, life? Qua altruist, he has been trained to the view that he must learn to sacrifice for the sake of others. On the grounds that the decree visits suffering, expropriation, and death upon other men, who are innocent? Qua altruist, he has been trained to the view that they must learn must learn to sacrifice for the sake of others. On the grounds that the decree violates his conscience, his independent moral judgment? Qua social subjectivist, he has been trained to the view that moral judgment is not his prerogative but society’s. On the grounds that the decree violates his principles? Qua pragmatist, he has been trained to the view that whatever works, as judged by the [spokesman and embodiment of the people], is right. On the grounds that the decree commands an absolute evil, which must be fought to the end? Qua relativist, he has been trained to the view that there are no absolutes.

Yes We Can

From page 42 of The Ominous Parallels by Leonard Peikoff:

“To all doubts and questions,” said Rosenberg, “the new man of the first German empire has only one answer: Nevertheless, I will!”

Talk about an ominous parallel….

Deceptive Advertising

I heard a commercial today hyping something called the “National Grocery Stimulus Program”; I heard another commercial today hyping a “bailout” program for credit card users.

I just love how some companies will latch onto terms in the public consciousness like “stimulus” and “bailout” to try to give themselves an aura of respectability.

It probably says just as much about the ineffective “stimulus” effect of the U.S. government’s own “bailout” programs—after all, the reason these terms are in the public consciousness is the hype given them by the mainstream media; if they worked, the media wouldn’t need to hype them.

One Of These Things Is Not Like The Others

I read recently that Oliver Stone wants to “rehabilitate” Adolph Hitler, Mao Tse-tung, Joseph Stalin, and Joseph McCarthy, saying that they “ ‘have been vilified pretty thoroughly by history.’ ”

It’s interesting that he would lump McCarthy in with three totalitarian dictators responsible for regimes that murdered millions. Hitler, Mao, and Stalin are heroes of the Left whereas it is the Left that has vilified McCarthy. The only thing McCarthy did was to accuse some Communist sympathizers of being Communist sympathizers.

The mistake McCarthy made was in waiting until the Communist sympathizers had gotten too firmly entrenched. I’d be interested in seeing McCarthy's image rehabilitated if it were someone other than Oliver Stone taking up the job.

Get a clue!

Please, get a clue, PRESIDENT Obama.

The country does not just want to see your Justice Department investigating terror attacks. The country wants to see your Homeland Security Department preventing terror attacks—that is, stopping terror attacks before they happen.

An Apt Description

I’ve just started reading Thomas Sowell's The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy. I’m still in the middle of another book, so I don’t know when I’m going to read past Chapter 1, but I found something in the first chapter that seems to be an apt description of the strategy employed by the Left in hyping the AGW myth:

Despite the great variety of issues in a series of crusading movements among the intelligentsia during the twentieth century, several key elements have been common to most of them:

1. Assertions of a great danger to the whole society, a danger to which the masses of people are oblivious.
2. An urgent need for action to avert impending catastrophe.
3. A need for government to drastically curtail the dangerous behavior of the many, in response to the prescient conclusions of the few.
4. A disdainful dismissal of arguments to the contrary as either uninformed, irresponsible, or motivated by unworthy purposes.

Given that Thomas Sowell’s book was published in 1995, it’s amazing that Al Gore—and Barack Obama—can still get away with playing this game with regard to anthropogenic global warming; it’s amazing, in fact, that they can get away with playing this game at all.