Casey’s train runs off the track with his over-generalization of events such as the Japanese Americans were put into “concentration camps”. They were “internment camps”, not the real killing camps of the Nazis and the Communists.
There are good people in govt and bad people. The “bad” ones are in control because their leaders have been able to bamboozle the masses, even the educated ones. They have played the race card very effectively, lied, performed massive cover-ups, and schemed. Some are communists, marxists and racists, and unfortunately they are in control.
However, there are others in govt (or who have now been forced out of govt) who oppose this totalitarian group/trend and are speaking up at grave risk to their jobs and reputations.
It is bad out there (I’m in the heart of the beast), but there is also hope and light (i.e. the Tea Party movement, Alan West, Michele Malkin, etc).
Casey knows nothing about the so-called “McCarthyism” period. If he did, he would have shut up before even referring to it.
Take his rant as “interesting” and then read something serious such as “Ameritopia” or “Liberty and Tyranny.”
Great article.
going to another country really isn’t a solution for the average lower to mid middle class family - it’s the same as moving to a town in a state you’ve never been - you will always be an outsider when push comes to shove.
I’d propose that it’s more beneficial to be around Family and close friends when it comes to surviving upheavals. Those in wagontrains that settled the West, for instance, were almost always interrelated families traveling together and then homesteading next to each other as groups. There is safety in numbers. imo jmo
Bump
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The work lacks an essential wisdom I'm sure the author would not recognize as wisdom at all, apparently not allowing even for the possibility of Providence. Practical and pragmatic discernment by men and women with common since and those who had contemplated long and hard over the Christian Gospel were both necessary to come up with our Declaration of Independence, for example. Too many Libertarians wrongly discount God as a tool used by unfeeling power hungry people to pacify "boobus americanus." It is not a logical outlook, and as such the Libertarian must be as disheartened as any at the alliance between academic (the sciences in particular) with the Ruling Party.
The dismissal even of the possibility of Providence taking an interest in our lives as individuals takes off the table an army willing to lay down their lives for their friends, those, in the best traditions of American history, preferring to die where they stand over living on their knees.
The author might think such an attitude not to be a demonstration of action in self-interest, though no greater love there be than laying down one's own life for one's friends.
The situation in Britain's North American colonies in 1775 is a good example of the value of persistence in resistance without regard to the transitory opinions of the majority not in favor of taking up arms.
"There are seven characteristics I can think of that define a sociopath, although I'm sure the list could be extended."
It can be:
8. Sociopaths inspire fanatical loyalty. I have identified some because of this marker.It was 420 years from Cincinnatus to Julius Caesar.9. Sociopaths exploit chaos, disaster, and social unrest, which they willingly create or exacerbate, emerging as saviors, heroes, and leaders to adoring incognoscenti.
10. Sociopaths not only lack the capacity for remorse, but they are also incapable of love, gratitude, sympathy, or empathy. Although they pretend the opposite.
11. Sociopaths are manipulative and paranoid.
12. Under peaceful and ordinary circumstances, most circumstances yield to social preassures and remain invisible; however when they are provoked to violence they are capable of the most hideous and unimaginable atrocities.
13. Sociopaths are unrecognized by most non-sociopathic people, mainly because non-sociopaths cannot imagine that such people could exist.
14. Sociopaths are highly resistant to any attempt to change their personalities. They tend to be very pleased with themselves exactly as they are.
15. Sociopaths tend to have a sixth sense, which can give them certain awareness almost like and idiot savant.
An excellent source of information about the sociopathic personality is The Sociopath Next Door by Martha Stout. The statements I have made about the sociopathic personality are based on my own extensive experience with such people; they are not paraphrases of Mrs. Stout, whose writings speak for themselves.
I don't think so. What he has said is absolutely on target, and his insights are astonishing.
He lost me when he started pushing Argentina as a place to be. There’s something in his writing and thinking that hits me as kind of a double secret reverse sociopathy.
"All knowing" statements like this tend to turn me off. But most of the rest is good, and the comments even better.
Or just republicans in general?
We went after Al Qaeda. Singling that out as an example of sociopathology is itself sociopathic.
There’s not a tight fit between clinical descriptions and political actors. You can find some “sociopathic” or “narcissistic” traits in politicians, but as in the general population there’s a distribution, with some people at the extremes and most in the middle. In comparison with the rest of us that middle may be shifted towards the pathological pole, but most politicians aren’t in the extreme, sociopathic range.
I found the column, and maybe even more so these FR comments that followed, fascinating. I am certain I have had as my direct assistant in a municipal government job for the past five years a person with NPD. And, it has become more and more clear to me that I will never be able to rid myself of him because the elected official I answer to is probably suffering from that or even a step worse. I guess it’s somewhat heartening-maybe the real word is scary-to find so many others facing the same challenge.
BTTT. This needs to be seen far and wide.