Political Correctness, Critical Theory, the Frankfurt School…this blog has covered Cultural Marxism many times (most notably in this awesome, detailed guest-post by CodeSlinger).
Yet, it seems that there are many people who are still unfamiliar with the history of this cancer on our society. Therefore, I bring you a quick refresher:
As I am still at the ‘Essentials of Freedom’ conference (videos ‘coming soon’), CodeSlinger has very graciously written this guest-post:
(This is a parody, found here, but the sad fact of the matter is… it carries more truth than Obama’s actual words to the American people. Why does it matter? Because much of it also applies Canada, and the rest will soon. Wherever America goes, Canada soon follows.)
Mr. Speaker, Mr. Vice President, members of Congress, fellow citizens:
This summer we will commemorate the 100th anniversary of the start of World War I.
This senseless, destructive war was started and championed by politicians who cared nothing for the 9 million people who lost their lives.
And in doing so, they began a century of warfare which continues to this day.
Our military industrial complex is larger than ever. We have nearly 2 million troops and national guardsmen, plus 3.5 million civilians employed in the defense sector.
With such awesome capabilities, we continue to resort to violence and death to exact political goals which benefit a tiny elite.
All of this has created a police state in the Land of the Free that is a far cry from the country we all grew up in.
Your government has spawned a culture of fear and intimidation. Nearly every federal agency, including the Fish and Wildlife Service, has its own gun-toting police force to pistol-whip citizens into submission.
And we’re stocking up. Your government has recently procured 1.6 BILLION rounds of hollow-point ammunition to supplement our existing supplies.
But frankly, we don’t need guns to harass citizens.
Our tax authorities have become more threatening than mafia warlords. The plunder is so severe that record numbers of Americans are renouncing their citizenship and leaving the country.
There are now dozens of federal, state, and local agencies and courts which have the power to confiscate your assets without any due process.
In addition to your house, your business, and your savings, we also have the authority to take your children away from you as if they are property of the state.
We are here to tell you what you can and cannot put in your own body, and whether you can collect rainwater that falls on own property.
In fact, on any given business day, the federal government issues hundreds of pages of new ‘rules’, proposed regulations, draft bills, executive orders, and/or regulatory notices.
And if you are not compliant with these rules, you may be committing a crime. Whether you know it or not.
When this nation was founded, there were four federal crimes on the books.
Today there are THOUSANDS. Plus we have millions of government employees at all levels to enforce the penalties.
All of this, of course, is financed by you, the tax slave.
You (plus unborn generations) are the poor suckers charged with paying off the national debt we politicians have created.
Officially the debt is just north of $17 trillion. But if you include Social Security and pension shortfalls, the figure is several times higher.
You’ll never know for sure because we have become masters of deceit regarding official statistics, whether inflation, unemployment, or our liabilities.
But the situation is so dire that the Congressional Budget Office projects the Social Security Administration’s disability insurance trust fund to RUN OUT by 2017.
We get by, year after year, by increasing the debt. And at well over 100% of GDP, we have truly reached the point of no return.
We are now in a position where we must default. Either we must default on our national debt, or we must default on our obligations to you the citizens.
We may end up stealing your savings. Robbing your Social Security. Taxing you to death. Or simply inflating away the value of our debt.
Naturally, we’re going to screw you in the process somehow… so be prepared for that. Especially the inflationary tidal wave that’s coming.
Our central bank has expanded its balance sheet at an unprecedented pace, creating massive asset bubbles in its wake. These asset bubbles have disproportionately benefited the ultra-wealthy at the expense of everyone else.
Such wanton money printing has also been tremendously destructive to our credibility. Other nations worry about our reckless irresponsibility. That’s why we keep spying on them.
Make no mistake: the consequences of our actions are here. And the days of the United States as the world’s dominant superpower are finished.
As the decline hastens, we will struggle to sell our debt to the world and to ship our dollars abroad. Fewer nations will be interested in our empty promises.
And without the generosity of other nations loaning us money at record low interest rates that fail to keep pace with inflation, you will really be screwed.
When this happens, you can absolutely count on us to clamp down even harder on the economy and control even more of your lives. For your own good, of course.
No, this may not be the country that you all grew up in. But it is the state of our union… whatever remains of it.
And so my fellow Americans, I urge you to grab your ankles and get ready for a little “shared sacrifice”.
But don’t worry about me, or my senior staff. We will leave government with cushy pensions, $750,000 speaking fees, board seats on public companies, and top positions in the industries that we have accommodated at your expense.
And of course I will be paid handsomely for the arrogant memoirs I will write in which I deny any responsibility for the shit I’ve gotten you all into.
So when I say “shared sacrifice”, I really mean “your sacrifice”.
Thank you. God bless you, and God bless these United States of America.
What exactly is Political Correctness?
What is Critical Theory?
Why do feminists attack European/Christian/Jewish misogyny, but no other form?
Why is the American brief history of Slavery the only form condemned by modern inteligentsia?
I have written a little about this, and the one and Only CodeSlinger has not only widely commented on the topic, but also guest-posted ‘What is Cultural Marxism’.
If you prefer the answers in a video format, here is a very accessible summary (saying much of what CodeSlinger’s post several years ago explained) by PJ Media’s Bill Whittle:
Reference: Serenity (a most excellent movie from the Firefly universe – I’ve seen it many times and highly recommend everything Firefly related!!!)
My post on the Warman vs Free Dominion and John Does verdict has received an unusually high amount of comments – especially for an obscure little blog like mine. While this is flattering, it does not really diminish the pain this verdict has inflicted on me – even if my interest was not financial (as I was not associated with either the plaintiff nor the defendants, though, I have developed great respect and affection for the defendants over the years that I have followed this case for).
No, my interest may not have been financial, but it is as personal as it gets: this verdict, as it currently stands, restricts freedom of speech to such a degree that had major media outlets dared to honestly report on it, the populace would rebel. I honestly believe that to be true – though, some of the comments I received do make me wonder…
For example, one commenter, ‘harebell’, said:
‘You keep posting a series of quotes, that is not an argument for anything it’s a list of people’s opinions.
To claim there are some inalienable, a priori rights based on individual preferences and desires is fine in theory. But each of those individual ideas on rights and preferences will come into conflict with those of others and then both sets will be accused of infringing on the rights of the other and therefore wrong. A person’s rights are what a community agrees they are especially if the community has the power to enforce what it says. It really doesn’t matter whether that community is based on a moral system or an ethical system they will create laws limiting behaviour because my idea of what constitutes freedom will be different to yours. Giving up absolute freedom is the price we pay to live in Canada because we have to live with others.’
Obviously, I tried to explain this, in the following, highly imperfect way:
Individual freedoms are the cornerstone on which our society is built – just read up on our history.
While Americans valued equality, Canadians have always cherished individual freedoms – until, that is, Cultural Marxists re-wrote our textbooks and educated the last generation in revisionist history, depriving it of even the knowledge of its true heritage.
Historians like Professor John Robson have written extensively on this.
But, if you wish to go into some detail here, let me give you a very, very short version:
Canada is a Constitutional Monarchy: this is a form of democracy which is not an absolute democracy ( ‘absolute democracy’ is also called ‘the tyranny of the majority’, as exemplified by two wolves and a lamb taking a vote over what to eat for dinner).
This form of democracy recognizes that each and every citizen has inalienable rights which, no matter how large a percentage of the majority votes to take away, must not be violated. The only legitimate role of government is to protect these rights, so that each and every citizen may exercise them freely.
One such basic right – one we can most easily understand – is the right to bodily integrity. This means that if there are 4 people who need a kidney, a liver, a lung and a heart each, the government cannot arbitrarily appoint a 5th person to be the organ donor, on the grounds that ensuring 4 citizens live outweighs the 1 citizen’s right to live.
(There are very good books by much more intelligent people than I that explain this well – I do urge you to read up on our history.)
In other words, our society is based on the proposition that the majority must not be permitted to harm minorities – even the smallest minority of one citizen. To the contrary, when a government begins to strip citizens of their human rights, that government becomes illegitimate and loses it justification to govern.
It is sad that this was not covered in your civics class in high school…
Of course, the wise and eloquent CodeSlinger answered her much better:
‘harebell:
You write “To claim there are some inalienable, a priori rights based on individual preferences and desires is fine in theory.”
Well, no. It’s not. It’s a contradiction in terms. Rights, being a priori, are derived from first principles and therefore cannot be based on individual preference.
You also write “A person’s rights are what a community agrees they are especially if the community has the power to enforce what it says.”
This, too, is a contradiction in terms. A person’s rights are derived from what kind of creature a human is, and therefore cannot depend on anyone else’s agreement.
Like most Canadians, you have been taught to confuse privileges with rights, and lulled into accepting the poisonous lie that the collective supersedes the individual – in other words, that might makes right. As soon as you accept that, you have enslaved yourself: you cease to be a free individual and become a ward of the state.
The whole idea that rights can somehow be based on consensus is fundamentally flawed.
Consensus, to be productive, requires that each individual contribute independently out of his experience and insight. When consensus comes under the dominance of conformity, the social process is polluted and the individual at the same time surrenders the powers on which his functioning as a feeling and thinking being depends.
— Solomon A. Asch
This concept, “powers on which [a person’s] functioning as a feeling and thinking being depends,” is the core of what we mean by a right. To clarify this, let’s go back to basics. Let’s start with some definitions:
privilege: a special advantage, benefit, or exemption, selectively granted to some but denied to others.
right: a freedom, entitlement, or immunity, so fundamental to human nature it cannot justly be taken away or given up.
See the difference? See how you are disempowered by confusing privileges with rights? See how the government benefits at your expense by using the schools it runs to confuse you in that particular way?
When we speak of “inalienable individual rights,” by the way, the words “inalienable” and “individual” are added only for emphasis and clarity. Strictly speaking, these qualities are already inherent in the definition of “rights.”
Okay. So, what are these inalienable individual rights? They are:
Life, liberty, property, privacy, self-defence, and self-expression.
Why these and only these?
Well, the rights to life and liberty are the essential primary rights and the rights to property, privacy, self-defence, and self-expression are necessary and sufficient to guarantee life and liberty. By necessary and sufficient, I mean that nothing more is needed, and anything less would not be enough.
These six rights form an irreducible core: you either have all of them, or you may as well have none of them.
The inalienable individual rights give form and substance to the idea that every individual is inherently entitled to live and to act in his own self-interest and is immune from being interfered with in so doing. Further, since man is a rational animal, mental life and liberty are as important as physical life and liberty. Neither has value without the other.
Now, these ideas are crystal clear and incontrovertible when people live alone in a state of nature. It is when they come together in groups that confusion often starts – but it need not, if we think carefully and ignore those who have a vested interest in confusing us.
After all, the whole reason individuals form communities is to increase the benefits they derive from exercising their rights in return for accepting some responsibilities to the community – be it a family, village, city, province or nation. This, in a nutshell, is the social contract.
The crucial concept of a contract is quid pro quo: you give something in return for receiving something. Meaning, unless the community increases the benefits you derive from exercising your rights, you owe the community nothing at all.
Thus we must never allow the collective to take precedence over the individual, otherwise we negate the whole reason for forming a collective in the first place! Unless we hold inviolate the principle that the rights of the collective are derived from – and subservient to – the rights of its constituent individuals, the entire social contract becomes null and void, and any attempt to enforce it amounts to tyranny.
From this we can immediately see that the primary duty of the state must be to equally guarantee the equal rights of each and every individual. Whenever the government oversteps the boundaries defined by this primary duty, it breaches the social contract and thereby forfeits its legitimacy.
The whole foundation of the legal system follows just as immediately: a crime is committed whenever any person’s rights are violated and harm results. The severity of the crime is proportional to the harm which results. Thus, where there is no harm, there is no crime. Any law which is incompatible with these principles is unjust, and an unjust law is no law at all.
In other words, your right to swing your fist ends at the tip of my nose, and vice versa.
The whole purpose of the law and the state is to guarantee that to both of us equally, and anything else it does is unnecessary or illegitimate.
Yes, it really is that simple.
And it all rests on the absolute primacy of inalienable individual rights.
The quotes I posted say all that much more clearly and eloquently than I ever could – and also give proper credit to the great men I learned it from. Read their words again, and you will see what I mean:
A right is not what someone gives you, it’s what no one can take away from you.
— U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark
No man has a natural right to commit aggression on the equal rights of another, and this is all from which the laws ought to restrain him.
— Thomas Jefferson
Rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others. I do not add ‘within the limits of the law’, because law is often but the tyrant’s will, and always so when it violates the rights of the individual.
— Thomas Jefferson
It is not the function of the government to keep the citizen from falling into error; it is the function of the citizen to keep the government from falling into error.
— U.S. Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson
Must a citizen ever for a moment, or in the least degree, resign his conscience to the legislator? Why has every man a conscience, then? … It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right.
— Henry David Thoreau’
A couple of days ago, I mentioned to CodeSlinger that one of my sons was doing research in the branch of Mathematics known as ‘Combinatorics‘. His response was not only informative, it was just as passionate as my son gets when he talks about the subject.
So, for your pleasure and elucidation, here is CodeSlinger’s commentary on Combinatorics:
Spencer-Brown, G, 1969: Laws of Form, London: George Allen & Unwin.
Parker-Rhodes, A F, 1981: The Theory of Indistinguishables: A search for explanatory principles below the level of physics, Synthese Library, vol. 150, Springer.
Parker-Rhodes, A F, & Amson, J C, 1998: Hierarchies of descriptive levels in physical theory. Int’l J. Gen. Syst. 27(1-3):57-80.
Noyes, H P, & McGoveran, D O, 1989: An essay on discrete foundations for physics. SLAC-PUB-4528.
A few days ago, I posted on the 2nd Amendment and a pro-gun ownership ad. After a short comment exchange, I received this response from CodeSlinger which, in my never-humble-opinion, deserves a full post of its own.
It is that important!
CodeSlinger says:
And this ramifies into the whole issue of the source and nature of rights and morals.
By claiming that rights are conferred by the state and morals are a matter of consensus, the neo-liberals utterly destroy the concepts of rights and morals. They reduce rights to the status of mere privileges, and they reduce morals to the status of mere laws.
In this way, neo-liberalism is no better than the religions it denigrates. Neo-liberals claim that rights and morals are handed down by the state, while religious people claim that rights and morals are handed down by God. They do not recognize that a man has rights simply by virtue of existing, nor do they understand that right and wrong are determined solely by what kind of creature a man is.
A man is a living creature capable of reason and compassion. From this it follows immediately that his inalienable rights are life, liberty, privacy, property, self-defence and self-expression. It also follows directly that whatever causes a man harm by violating his rights is wrong, and whatever is not wrong is right.
Recognition of these principles places strict limits on the rightful power of the state vis-à-vis the individual, much the same way that the American Constitution was intended to do, only more so. It leads to the understanding that the only legitimate purpose of the state is to equally protect the equal rights of each and every individual. Everything the state does beyond that causes more harm than good.
And, of course, this flies in the face of everything the neo-liberals want, which is why they hate the Constitution and the principles of inalienable individual rights and universal morality on which it is based.
These principles give them freedom to do as they please, but also burden them with responsibility to take care of themselves — all without violating the rights of such others as have not violated theirs.
But neo-liberals would rather give up their rights and freedoms and bow down to the state, which they want to make all-powerful, because they foolishly think an all-powerful state will take care of them. This desire is hopelessly unrealistic and childish, and it is exactly what religious people want from their God.
Thus when neo-liberals call themselves citizens of a state, they mean exactly the same thing that religious people mean when they call themselves children of God. In this regard, religious people are more honest than neo-liberals, because they acknowledge that being taken care of by an all-powerful entity reduces them to the status of children — or chattel, which they acknowledge when they compare themselves a flock of sheep.
Neo-liberals seek to spare themselves this admission by secularizing their beliefs and values. But a rose, by any other name, would smell as sweet.
The cultural Marxists who created neo-liberalism, complete with its politically correct self-sacrificial secular Edenism, were highly accomplished psychologists and sociologists. They knew perfectly well that this would happen. If they tore down traditional religious and family values and created widespread conditions leading to arrested emotional development, there would be only one possible replacement that could meet the subconscious psychological needs of the resulting post-modern tribe of hopelessly lost adult children: the apotheosis of the totalitarian state.
That’s right, neo-liberals worship the totalitarian state, even while they fancy themselves to be oh-so-sophisticated and secular.
This is what really underlies their rabidly relentless attack on the Constitution and the principles it is based upon.
Yesterday, I posted: ‘A sober thought post-US 2012 election’.
I received an insightful and deeply analytical comment on it from CoreSlinger. (Plus, he said I was right!)
It is powerful and should stand on its own:
Xanthippa:
I think you have hit the Republicans’ problem squarely on the head.
Many people, who would embrace the small-government, individual-rights, balanced-budget, common sense aspects of the conservative platform are not only terrified of the morally-constipated, holier-than-thou, bible-thumping religious zealots, but also horrified by the damn-those-gooks, war-for-profit fat-cats of the military industrial complex.
By forcing these groups into an awkward alliance and indiscriminately mislabelling them all collectively as “the right,” the Democrats have been able to overshadow the common sense of the true right, and convince large segments of the public that a vote for the Republicans is a vote for intolerance, oppression and war.
This is exacerbated by the fact that cultural Marxist indoctrination is everywhere. It has denigrated all of the strong, benevolent archetypes that people traditionally depended on for reassurance, safety, and security — God, father, and husband. But the deep psychological needs that gave rise to these archetypes in the first place are as compelling as ever, so people are only left with one place to turn to — the state.
The difficulty is that the average person doesn’t have the time or the inclination to really think through the issues. Therefore, a strong belief in God is one of the few things that enable many people to resist cultural Marxism’s gradual but relentless erosion of common sense, common decency, maturity, and self-reliance.
This is why the awkward alliance exists. Those who think independently are too few to stand against the indoctrinated majority alone. The result is and attempt to pit the two branches of the indoctrinated majority — secular Edenists and fundamentalist Christians — against each other.
And this is what has lead us to the spectacle we see today: the Republican party represents a sort of religious national socialism (a paradigm of the left) not unlike Nazi Germany of the 1930’s, while the Democratic party represents a sort of state-capitalistic collectivism (a paradigm of the farther left), not unlike present-day Communist China.
As a result, those of the true right — who want a small, non-invasive, financially prudent government that protects the rights of the individual and the freedom of the market — are left without a voice.
Rightists claim that leftists are fundamentally incapable of reasoning from cause to effect, if the outcome doesn’t please them. Interestingly, leftists accuse rightists of the same thing. The real truth seems to be that the two groups just think differently. In particular, it has to do with left-brain dominance versus right-brain dominance. Right-wingers are left-brain dominant and vice versa.
Interestingly, this is consistent with the way the nervous system is wired: the left side of the brain controls the right side of the body, and vice versa. It’s also consistent with how the two sides of the brain operate. The left side of the brain is concerned primarily with symbolic processing, language, reasoning and the sense of being an individual. The right side of the brain is concerned with holistic processing, imagery, intuition and the sense of being one with the world.
As we mature, the left brain gradually assumes an increasingly dominant role. The thing is, modern cultural-Marxist-controlled schooling does a very good job of preventing this from happening; instead, it arrests mental development and turns out a population of narcissistic adult children. Paradoxically, the primacy of self is heightened in right-brain dominant thinking. The childish world view is not only “I am part of the world” but “the world is part of me.” It’s not far from there to “the world exists to serve me.”
And this is what we find in the world view of the left-winger. The leftist wants the rightist to be more concerned with the world than with his own family, because the leftist understands that he is not part of the rightist’s family, but he feels himself to be part of the world and the world exists to serve him. This is patently muddled and inconsistent from the rational point of view of a left-brained right-winger, but it resonates pleasingly with the intuitional perspective of a right-brained leftist.
Now, we must remember that almost everyone uses both sides of their brain, but they use them to different degrees, so one side or the other dominates. You could say that left-brain dominant people have feelings about what they think, and right-brain dominant people have thoughts about what they feel.
In summary, it seems that the majority of people want a small, accountable, financially prudent government that respects individual rights and freedoms, but not if it comes bundled with intolerance, oppression and war.
So this is the bundling we must undo.
And to do that we must ask ourselves, how can we frame our message of classical liberalism, based on natural intrinsic morality and inalienable individual rights, in a way that will be comprehensible and compelling to these chronically right-brained left-wingers from both sides of the conservative / progressive divide?
In response to my post about the UN plans to ‘regulate’ the internet, CodeSlinger made a comment which I think deserves a full post of its own:
Good algorithms for dynamic routing through ad hoc wireless mesh networks are already available in the public domain. Most people already have more processing power and bandwidth than they actually use, and the amount of computing power you can buy for a buck just keeps on doubling every 18 months. All this surplus is can be made available to carry other people’s traffic.
The only thing holding back a truly unkillable internet is the fact that most people aren’t willing to spend much money on the uplink side. They will buy a wireless router with enough range to cover their home, but not enough to cover their block. But just let some of these draconian measures pass and see how fast that changes. People will quickly figure out how much better the internet works when everybody is their neighbours’ ISP.
Already, in densely populated areas, we are seeing increasing overlap between the coverage areas of people’s routers and their neighbours’ routers. As this trend accelerates, larger and larger urban areas will de facto become independent sub-networks that cannot be killed or surveiled from outside.
In rural areas, however, the problem is a lot worse because each router has to cover an area that may be miles in diameter in order to achieve overlap. Before you get anywhere near that range, though, you run into CRTC limitations on transmitted power.
And maintaining connectivity between distant population centers is an even bigger problem. However, a German group called the Chaos Computer Club is developing the Hackerspace Global Grid: a system of communications satellites (!) which will interface to inexpensive ground stations that anyone can buy or build.
Here is an article about the project: Hackers plan space satellites to combat censorship.
The internet is about to get dramatically harder to regulate!
CodeSlinger had left a comment on a post about the ‘Occupy Toronto’ demonstration which I think deserves a post of its own:
Xanthippa:
By contrast, I found the crowd at Occupy Victoria very receptive to my libertarian message.
I didn’t go there to speak. I went to find out, first hand, what these people want. And what I discovered was… they haven’t got a clue.
I heard a lot of crowing about coming together, and a lot of whining about being oppressed, but no one had any idea what to do about it.
I didn’t go there to speak. But I couldn’t help myself.
So I spoke to the crowd about the importance of individual rights and freedoms.
The kind of rights that have nothing to do with what’s written on some piece of paper.
The rights we are born with. The rights nobody can take away from us.
The crowd applauded enthusiastically.
I remarked that we had heard a lot about tyranny and abuses of wealth and power.
But none of these abuses would be possible if we lived in a place that respects the inalienable rights and freedoms of every individual.
The crowd cheered wildly.
I said that we had heard a lot about collective action and direct democracy.
But a collective is made of individuals, and democracy is nothing but mob rule unless it respects the inalienable rights and freedoms of every individual.
The crowd roared its approbation.
I told them that this is the underlying cause and cure for all the diverse concerns of the assembled people.
This is what unites us.
This is the one thing we all need. We need to take back our –
Inalienable. Individual. Rights and freedoms!
And to do that we must set our government one simple task:
Protect the equal rights of every individual equally!
And beyond that – leave us the hell alone!
The crowd thundered unanimous agreement.
I didn’t go there to speak. But I’m glad I did.
Because it proved that these people are not as stupid as they are made out to be. They know truth and sense when they hear it. They just don’t hear it very often.
I went there to find out what this movement is all about.
I came away absolutely certain that now is the time to clearly and forcefully bring the libertarian message to the people of Canada.
The people of Canada are more than ready to hear it.
Xanthippa's Chamberpot 