Posted on 10/18/2015 10:47:11 AM PDT by george76
One at a time.
The military force is supposed to be here to protect our country from invasion.
God Bless the men and women of our armed forces, past and present, but the politicians have had them in harms way nation building elsewhere while our borders are overrun with invaders.
Blame that on the policy makers, but depending on your area you may hear the not so subtle sounds of people who are not here legally (invaders) at the nearest WalMart or other similar store.
If you were not afraid some other country would come here and take your stuff, you would not need a Military. Its very existence is based on the very real (and justified) fear that people from elsewhere will do just that.
Similarly, if you are free of fear of fire because there is a fire department (even next door), I strongly suggest you light a match and hold your finger in the flame.
Fire Departments and even Police Forces are there to react to a problem. By the time someone calls them you already have a problem.
If you were not afraid you would not have called them and you would have handled it yourself.
If people were not afraid problems would arise they cannot handle, they would not have fire departments and police departments.
Fear is healthy, as long as it is not crippling.
It motivates more people than anything else.
If you have no fear, you are either heavily medicated, are ridiculously confident your taxes were done correctly, live in a cocoon, or are one who could not be held responsible for their actions in a court of law.
Right down to having an extra can of beans on the shelf just in case humans fear, and rightfully so.
We fear the unknown, making everyone from fortune tellers to the sellers of MREs comfortable, if not wealthy.
We fear the dark, so we light it.
We fear that which we cannot control (nature) so we build enclaves of humans huddled together and establish rules right down to how tall your lawn can be and what color to paint your house because we fear our property values will go down if we don't subject ourselves to the most petty tyrannies.
Humans FEAR.
We even fear our God.
Freedom from fear has no roots in anything but the stories which help put our children to sleep in time for us to make more children or get some sleep ourselves, because, we wouldn't want to be late to work and lose our job, now would we?
what’s the saying “men sleep peacefully because other stand ready”? ...that I attributed as a society providing a degree of freedom from fear...and is a valid legitimate function of government.... one of the oldest functions of men gathering in group is for someone to stand watch while the others sleep..
My point is that we have those standing ready standing ready because we fear.
Terrorists cause fear (that’s what the whole ‘terror’ thing is).
Our Government uses fear as the justification for laws, and waving our fear in front of our faces passes the most repressive laws a free country ever had.
Insurance companies thrive on fear.
Safety companies thrive on fear (some very justified).
Military forces, police, fire departments, weather forecasters, firearm manufacturers, ammunition makers, those who make seat belts and air bags and impact absorbing barriers, life jackets, and lifeboats all exist because we fear. We even have people sitting in tall chairs at the pool because we fear. We fingerprint our children and pull out some of their hair, we demand photo ID, we buy tin wallets to keep our credit cards in, and lock our doors because of fear.
Somehow you seem to think we have a right to be free of something that is so interwoven into the economics and culture of our society, into the core of human nature, as to be inextricable?
There is no Right to be free of fear.
Not in this life.
Nor did the Founders even think for a second to write such down. It is a theoretical construct designed to dupe the unwary into thinking the nanny State would keep people safe and thus absolve the individual from responsibility to provide and protect their own. It is Socialist utopian nonsense. It is a fairy tale for children.
My only freedom from fear comes first from Faith in The Almighty, and beyond that in the preparations I have made, the skills I have, and the belief the people I know and would go to the aid of in a crisis will come to my aid if they are not similarly engaged. That belief may or may not be justified. But I sleep at night having done what I can.
The taxing and spending is just a play for power which isn't ideationally supported. No outcome or permanent good is contemplated. It is only a process for supporting diseased personalities in power.
Their problem is that the Founders did not contemplate a career track for professional rulers, but just the opposite (having contemplated the harm done other societies by that sort of parasite).
So the parasites had to invent a series of long-running political excuses for continuing to hold power and wield it for their own benefit and for the benefit of duly grateful special interests.
LOL -- Damn those Saxon kings!
Boy, can you hold a grudge!
1913 Woodrow Wilson.
Social critic/muckraker Vance Packard identified the drift to the left in journalism in his 1960's book (1966, I think), The Hidden Persuaders. He located the cause of the drift in lefty-leftier J-schools, particularly Columbia, which had for years been doing BDA (battle-damage assessment) on how well their propagandization of the student body had forced them to leeeeaaaaannnn to the left. Columbia rigorously scouted its students for their motive in majoring in journalism. The "right answer" was something like, "to make society better". You can imagine the flurry of C- grades handed out to people who evinced other motives (like pay, travel, etc.), and gentle nudges in the direction of the English Department or foreign languages.
Packard's section on J-schools, IIRC, was one section in a book that dealt mostly with advertising and its effects. By the 1960's, J-school students were already registering as 60+% liberal/Democratic. Other sources verify that they reached 90% in the 1970's, and, indeed, in the 1972 presidential election, journalists confessed to voting for ex-Stalinist tool George McGovern by 9:1.
FDR, for sure, under the pretext that it was necessary during the Depression when many people were out of work. Roosevelt might almost have liked the Depression to go on so that he could stay in power by giving stuff away, but most people were happy to get back to work eventually.
In WWII and the Cold War, there was a kind of contract. Government could give you "free stuff" but it could also send you off to war whether you wanted to go or not, so what you got may have had a price tag attached.
I guess it started in the 1960s with Johnson. It was prefigured by J.K. Galbraith's book on The Affluent Society. The idea was that the economy was going to generate all kinds of cheap stuff forever and ever and government would have a role in distributing it.
John F. Kennedy wasn't above that kind of pandering, but he did put the Cold War first when he gave his inaugural speech, and when he gave it, the country wasn't what it would become just a few years later.
On the other hand, are there any successes in this war?
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