No kidding.
Good stuff.
Well worth the read.
“Blind Leftist Devotion “
Sounds like an old Blues singer! Oh! Wait a minute! I’m thinkin’ of Blind Lemon Jefferson! Never-mind!
The Free Press the Founding Fathers spoke of is alive and well.
Too bad it’s in Canada.
The difference being that Socrates had no pre-determined goal of destroying his society. He asked questions because he really was interested in the Truth.
However, he really was greatly destructive to Athenian society, and they executed him for it. Tearing down beliefs without replacing them with something better (or at least something else) is a recipe for individual and societal disaster. For Socrates the search for Truth was enough. For many of his acolytes it wasn't and some of them earned places among the greatest villains in Greek history.
the imess—beschloss spiel
is choice!
beschloss’ father is on the radio and in print in the
california desert. same anti-gravity attitude.
This is why you cannot even begin to have a reasonable debate with these people. We're a hair's breadth away from a descent into violence and savagery that will take everyone by surprise. Why would this be the case? Because those with the leftist worldview have invested their entire existence in what amounts to a fundamentally insane and downright evil premise: that your life doesn't belong to you.
Chantal Delsol, in her landmark Unlearned Lessons of the Twentieth Century has an excellent perspective on this refusal to face reality:
Vital resistance and resentment are the two main responses to the events of 1989 (she refers here to the collapse of the old Soviet Union - Ward). Vital resistance: the mind realizes its mistake - it admits, for example, that nationalization of the means of production does not produce a happy society, but rather laziness and constant shortages; it refuses, however, to let go of the idea because of its passionate attachment to it. Existence - adventures, friendships, successes - is nourished and permeated by this belief to such an extent that the belief becomes an identity; the individual cannot renounce it without committing a kind of symbolic suicide. No one can admit... that his existence reflects the echo of a failure.In other words, no one wants to admit that the premises upon which one has constructed their entire raison d’être amount to an empty, shrieking fraud. But it's a lesson that will go unlearned by most of them until it is far, far too late.
Balint Vasonyi observed that, "The communists have learned to their rue (one hopes) that it is a great mistake to kill millions of people."
This, I believe is a vain hope and is thus one of the great unlearned lessons of the twentieth century. Vasonyi suggests that communists belatedly realized that they were killing off their most productive people. I seriously doubt that, for not only did they not care, but that the deliberate slaughter of the 'productive classes' was an act completely consistent with a worldview built upon the will to power. In the revolutionary communist degringolade, the society they rule devolves quickly from a high-trust to a low-trust, to a no-trust one - as it must. Because the destruction of trust, the dissipation of what Francis Fukuyama terms 'social capital' is necessary if one wishes to reduce people to chattel. A double-edged sword, to be sure. When trust is is everywhere destroyed, those who hold power must also live in fear.
Further thoughts:
Many of the dupes and useful idiots on the left claim that they are all for 'social justice' but most of them have no real idea of what that term really entails. 'Social justice' as it the term is used today is a con game used by the clever to advance their personal wealth and egos, and by the ruling class as an instrument to destroy trust. In fact, when successfully applied, 'social justice' destroys a great deal more than that. It is a linchpin in the process of dehumanization, a process that plays into and feeds upon the the aims and desires of will to power driven monsters - killers without conscience.
Monsters and motives aside for the moment, the chief problem with 'social justice' is that it is based upon a defective notion of human rights. 'Human rights,' after all, are the chief argument made by its advocates for the imposition of social justice and the redistribution of wealth. Chantal Delsol, in Unlearned Lessons of the Twentieth Century argues that, in order to avoid conflict, what she calls 'modernity' has reduced the the concept of rights to the merely biological and the material. This is a low-rent way for the smug and the self-righteous to assert their assumption of moral superiority, as it neatly dodges - and in fact destroys - the larger questions of human dignity and aspirations. As Delsol puts it:
"And yet... what is left of man if we take away his territory, culture, his religion, his ideals of liberty and justice, and even his dreams of utopia and glory?... By devaluing our place and dreams, movements and thoughts, passions and desires, in order to spare ourselves from defending them at the cost of our blood, we reduce the subject to defending his last little possession - specifically, his blood, his body and the comfort that goes with them. If he cannot feel a connection to his culture in the broad sense, both in time and space, and therefore cannot see himself as responsible for it and serving it, man is no longer anything more than a Sapiens with strong emotions (explains the fundamental infantilization that is the hallmark of the Left, doesn't it? --Ward).
As I see it, 'modernity', as Delsol defines it, has striven to achieve not so much as the Neitzschean 'transvaluation of all values' as the devaluation of all values. The great irony is that it has left the latter to the will to power driven monsters and the former to those whose job, witting or not, is to reduce us all to chattel.
But it's not as if this pack of smug elitists and their applauders and enablers didn't have a choice. They all did. They simply refused to reckon with the fact at the end of the road they've chose to travel lies madness, atrocity and slaughter. Another unlearned lesson of the twentieth century.
“They had a choice, all of them. They could have followed in the footsteps of good men like my father, or President Truman. Decent men, who believed in a day’s work for a day’s pay. Instead they followed the droppings of lechers and Communists and didn’t realize that the trail led over a precipice until it was too late. Don’t tell me they didn’t have a choice.Now the whole world stands on the brink, staring down into bloody hell, all those liberals and intellectuals and smooth-talkers… and all of a sudden, nobody can think of anything to say.”
Rorschach – from The Watchmen movie
Must read.
"Phantasy," according to Herbert Marcuse, is man's guide to ethics and politics.
“The first step for this is to defang the serpent by de-funding the Ivy League, or at least cleaning the decks of its illiterate Marxist masters.”
The west had taken in the Communists, e.g., The Frankfurt School, little realizing it was a baby viper. It sheltered it, nurtured it, protected it and now this is the result of its gratitude: a full grown vipers nest in the university and a poison that has spread through the body politic.
From there you can connect dots to whatever you want, but I don't think he makes his case.
Democrats have been looking for a glorified king-figure since JFK, if not FDR, and Obama is merely the latest.
Liberals have wanted to believe so much and for so long in an intellectual, genius leader, that they convinced themselves that Obama was the one they'd been waiting for.
Once the identification was made it was hard to look around it and see Obama clearly.
For some on the right Adorno is the reason for everything the left does. For leftists, he's old hat, an Old World, old-fashioned, dead white elitist.
The remaining Adornoites are few and it's not at all clear that they really are blindly devoted to Obama.
While we are doing this why not also run the Communist party of America out as well.
What a lot of people are not hearing or seeing evidence is that the CPA or CPUSA was heavily influencing Obamas election.
There was even at the time some FReepers that found out all the cell phones used by Obama were in fact registered by the CPA.
So while we get cheerleaders ranting about showing the “Long Form” we should also unearth every thread or connection the CPA has had with building Obama into a political ally.