Stormy forecast for May?
After months of smooth sailing,
Green boss hits rougher seas
~ Alan Findlay, Ottawa Sun, May 5, 2007
Posted on 05/06/2007 8:08:22 AM PDT by GMMAC
Idiotization of the masses
David Warren, The Ottawa Citizen
Published: Sunday, May 06, 2007
In my absence I see that the Conservative government I voted for has embraced a broad new "post-Kyoto" nanny-state environmentalist agenda, to head off competition from the environmentalist lunatics on the other side of the Commons floor. Also, that they have sunk in the polls -- having been trashed by the media for insufficient environmentalist zeal, and for insufficient sensitivity to the health and safety concerns of Islamist psychopaths caught red-handed by our military in Afghanistan.
The sense that one is returning from vacation to a madhouse is on me again. The question of whether democracy was really such a great idea bubbles again to the surface.
Not a serious question, of course. We are stuck with our system just as it has evolved -- representative government for a population that has been idiotized -- and there are only two ways forward.
One is to somehow make the people smarter, so that they forcefully demand the elimination of government from all gratuitous nannying and redistributive functions, and its return to protecting us from criminals at home and tyrants abroad.
In other words, we all agree to grow up, and to re-assume, at the individual and family level, the risks that come from having been born on this planet.
And the other is to continue sinking.
For I simply do not have the means to overthrow the existing regime and install something more sensible.
Yet neither do I see a plausible way to claw back the nanny state by conventional political means, for we have all, to greater or lesser extent, grown into its machinery. No one agrees to be the first unplugged from its cumbersome and arbitrary and often morally malignant life-support apparatus. The whole machine will have to break down before the people attached to it can be set free.
In the meantime, we feel compelled by the illusion that the machine is capable of perpetuating itself and protecting us -- even after we, the people, have largely ceased to have babies, or make net contributions to the tax furnace that feeds the engine that drives the machine.
It does not matter how we came to believe it, we have, in practice, all come to believe that a massive, legalistic, micro-managing bureaucratic machinery under the direction of the most aggressive vested interests is the best way to secure the greatest decadence for the greatest number.
Do I sound like a libertarian? I'm not. It happens that the elimination of most of the government bureaucracy is a necessary precondition to the restoration of a sane social order.
But that is to draw attention only to the negative, or destructive task. There is also a positive and creative task, which is to rebuild, through individuals and families, a social order in which good has some chance of triumphing over evil, or on the less spectacular days, better over worse.
This means in turn rebuilding the church, and the many allied, non-governmental institutions that reinforce a wise moral and spiritual order. For I am not among the naive who think that men and women are naturally sanctified. Guidance we need, and will always need: but guidance in freedom, not an elected tyranny that makes all free choices on our behalf.
The church in its nature addresses adults, with counsel. The state in its nature addresses children, with force. It is for adults to regulate children, and not the state to regulate all. The secularization of everything involves, necessarily, the idiotization of the masses, the reduction of human life to the conditions of a kindergarten in which we are told what to do and given fatuous reasons.
In America (our America; Canada is an American country), we had a population that would not be nannied, for a long time. This was chiefly thanks to pioneering conditions on a new continent, combined with the sort of immigrants we used to get from Old Europe -- the enterprising types.
The continent is now settled. The proportion of our income that is taxed has gone from negligible to nearly half. In addition to the many enterprising immigrants -- and from all over -- a significant number are attracted chiefly by the welfare provisions of our nanny state. The conditions have changed, and we have changed.
And we can't go back, in time, only forward. But would that we could choose our way forward, rather than having it chosen for us, by the fate that awaits any society whose members are unwilling and unable to act for their own good.
David Warren's column appears Wednesday, Saturday and Sunday.
© The Ottawa Citizen 2007
Stormy forecast for May?
After months of smooth sailing,
Green boss hits rougher seas
~ Alan Findlay, Ottawa Sun, May 5, 2007
The sky is falling!! The sky is falling!!
wow. what a grat piece.
thanks
sory sp.
i meant “great” piece
Did Chicken Little legally migrate to Canada ??
Leftist voters are not stupid, it's just that they are more susceptible to the evil force of envy. Leftism is powered by envy, and leftists are quite smart in using government to lash out against those they envy.
If conservatives can come up with an effective antidote for envy, leftism will be cured as well. Unfortunately the problem has been studied for many thousands of years with little progress. The only effective antidote known, and enshrined in one of the 10 Commandments, is the simple advice to not do it. What can be done when our neighbors continually choose to ignore this profoundly wise advice?
It’s interesting that the “nanny state” was prophesied by de Tocqueville almost two hundred years ago when our republic was still in it’s infancy, and freedom and responsibility flourished. Here’s an excerpt from a previous posting.
“Hayek, like Tocqueville, saw that in modern bureaucratic societies threats to liberty often come disguised as humanitarian benefits. If old-fashioned despotism tyrannizes, democratic despotism infantilizes.
“It would,” Tocqueville writes, resemble paternal power if, like that, it had for its object to prepare men for manhood; but on the contrary, it seeks only to keep them fixed irrevocably in childhood; it likes citizens to enjoy themselves provided that they think only of enjoying themselves… . It willingly works for their happiness; but it wants to be the unique agent and sole arbiter of that; it provides for their security, foresees and secures their needs, facilitates their pleasures, conducts their principal affairs, directs their industry, regulates their estates, divides their inheritances; can it not take away from them entirely the trouble of thinking and the pain of living? … [This power] extends its arms over society as a whole; it covers its surface with a network of small, complicated, painstaking, uniform rules through which the most original minds and the most vigorous souls cannot clear a way to surpass the crowd; … it does not tyrannize, it hinders, compromises, enervates, extinguishes, dazes, and finally reduces each nation to being nothing more than a herd of timid and industrious animals of which the government is the shepherd.”
Global Warming? Saving lives one degree at a time!
From the Glenn Beck Special of May 2, 2007 - Exposed: The Climate of Fear
The globe is getting warmer. In fact, it`s warmed .7 degrees Celsius over the last 10 years. It`s not up for debate, but there are questions as to why it`s happening, how could the traffic it may be. Who is right? Who`s wrong?
BJORN LOMBORG, AUTHOR, “THE SKEPTICAL ENVIRONMENTALIST`S GUIDE”: With global warming you`re going to see more heat deaths, but what most people don`t tell us is we`re also going to see much less cold deaths.
And actually, many more people die from cold than from heat, so for England alone you mentioned the number 2,000 people. Actually that`s what we expect will die from more heat waves in 2080, but what we have to remember is that 20,000 fewer will die from cold each year in 2080.
Now I`m not sitting and saying we should go for global warming, but I`m saying we need to know both.
LOMBORG: Yes, and basically the point is again to say we have a tendency to bark up the wrong tree. We worry intensely about climate change, but the point is we can do very little good at very high cost.
Let`s focus on where we can actually do a lot of good. If we care about this planet, if we care about its environment, shouldn`t we do where we can do the most good first?
What these Nobel laureates basically told us if we spend our money on HIV/AIDS, we can do $40 word of good for every dollar. If we spend it on Kyoto, we can only do 30 cents. Let`s do the $40 first.
BECK: Give me — give me the top five quickly, and where does global warming fall in this list?
LOMBORG: Basically what they told us was it was HIV/AIDS, malnutrition, free trade, malaria and agricultural research. Those are things that we can do cheaply and do an immense amount of impact in this world right now and also for future generations.
Kyoto came down at the bottom. Not because climate change is not real, but simply because the way we tackled it through Kyoto is very expensive and a very poor way of helping the world.
http://towncriernews.blogspot.com/
You are absolutely correct. The great majority of Dem voters I know are driven by that simple emotion. I have two close Dem friends who are always obsessed with "the rich" as in "the rich have too much money". Both of my Dem friends had more money and things than I had. But they couldn't get over their feeling that life was unfair to them because someone else had a little or a lot more money than they did. One friend refused to believe that any rich person got his or her money legally or without inheriting it. I suspect that particular emotion, envy, impels most Dems to vote the way they do.
BTTT!
Later
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