Showing posts with label Puritanism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Puritanism. Show all posts

Friday, May 21, 2021

Joe Biden, the Puritan Catholic, is as bad as the libertarian Justin Amash ever was, making the perfect the enemy of the good, but sillier

President Biden: "Every Time We Let Hate Flourish, We Make A Lie Of Who We Are As A Nation"

"We're the United States of America. We're unique among all nations. We are uniquely a product of a document. Not an ethnicity, not a religion, not a geography, of a document," President Biden says. "Every time we're silent, every time we let hate flourish, we make a lie of who we are as a nation. I mean it literally. We can not let the very foundation of this country continue to be eaten away."

This stupid, futile hate crime business was started by George H. W. Bush.

You might as well outlaw human nature and roll out the guillotines.

Hair on fire fundamentalism about the Declaration of Independence is no different than about the Constitution. The only thing Joe Biden is proving is that the left has its own strutting American exceptionalist fool, too.

"Somebody, somewhere had a bad thought. America is finished!"


Sunday, November 22, 2020

Does Carson Holloway for The Federalist even live in America 2020, torn by $2 billion in damages from rioting and looting?

 From his essay here:

Tocqueville was certainly correct that the dire legacy of slavery would not be eliminated immediately upon its abolition. America’s path toward racial justice was long and difficult, continuing for many decades after the end of the Civil War. Nevertheless, over time the process turned out better than Tocqueville expected. The country was not engulfed in a race war, and whites and black Americans gradually learned to live with each other as fellow citizens.

If you subscribe to ideology qua ideology, you can pretend that what your lyin' eyes are trying to tell you isn't true. And Holloway explicitly embraces the ideological habit of mind which blinds him to our reality:

Moreover, the northern settlers — and particularly the Puritans of New England — came to America not only with the general habits of freedom characteristic of all the English but with a peculiarly intense inclination toward self-government. They came, Tocqueville says, driven by a “purely intellectual craving,” seeking the “triumph of an idea.”

Accordingly, he embraces a sharp, ideological distinction between North and South, which is nothing but a caricature, as if neither love of lucre nor racism existed in the North: 

Tocqueville clearly regards the original southern settlers as less moral and less enlightened than their northern counterparts. The northerners came to America primarily to found self-governing communities based upon their (lofty and demanding) religious vision of a righteous society. The original Virginians came primarily in the pursuit of gain.

You will hardly find in American "conservatism" anywhere any rumination on the founding of the colonies as corporations, entities which were explicitly formed for gain for and by the English Crown in cooperation with the Bank of England. That was the whole point of Samuel Johnson's "Taxation No Tyranny", which ridiculed Americans with "Why do we hear the loudest yelps for freedom from the drivers of Negroes?", which is the main reason why no one reads it. The American colonists broke the business deal with the Crown, violating their contracts. We responded by gussying up our thefts with lofty bs about freedom and equality and rights. French loans, and the French navy, helped us get away with it.

Tocqueville's antipathy toward the South is an artifact of French affinity for the excesses of those Enlightenment ideas which enjoyed a higher traffic in the American North, but also of immemorial French hatred for England which enjoyed free trade with the American South. He is hardly the guide Holloway makes him out to be. 

If there is any commonality left with the French vein in 2020 America, we have seen it in our streets with the violence, destruction, and blood-letting too reminiscent of the excesses of the French Revolution. The difference is that French republicanism sought to literally behead aristocrats, whereas now the rage is explicitly racial, focused on whites.

We have not learned to live with each other as fellow citizens. Cancel culture is everywhere, a euphemism for murder. The triumph of the ideas of BLM will literally mean the death of whitey. 

Any conservatism which pretends otherwise isn't worthy of the name.

Tuesday, October 22, 2019

Wednesday, May 1, 2019

Wednesday, December 5, 2018

Bush 41's Americans with Disabilities Act has made the Social Security disability insurance trust fund nearly insolvent because no one ever imagined people would milk it

Contrary to critical analysis, Bush 41 did have a vision thing, it was just a mistaken vision.

He imagined a kinder gentler America full of kinder gentler people, at the expense of a sober estimation of human nature which recognized and reckoned with the baser instincts residing in every human heart.

Conservatives are supposed to specialize in that, but Bush 41 did not.

This mistaken example of liberalism wasn't just a one-off, either. The lack of sobriety extended also to his hate crime legislation.

Bush 41 imagined you could eradicate hate by criminalizing it, as if America ought to become a theocracy with "Whosoever hateth his brother is a murderer" becoming the law of the land. But who doesn't kill except out of hate? "Nothing personal, just business" is for the movies, not reality. It's as if long established laws differentiating involuntary manslaughter from murder never existed. Now the damn idea has metastasized into the force which is at the heart of America's perilous polarization, and its insanity. We aren't allowed to hate anything except the haters, while entertaining our hate secretly all the while. Enter cognitive dissonance on a national scale. Everyone knows the truth, they just can't say it.

So they're saying Bush 41 was a patrician as they bury him today. Puritan was more like it.



No one expected that more Americans with disabilities would be dependent on government 25 years later, but that’s what has happened. ...

The ADA made no change to Social Security, yet there has been a substantial increase in the number of people who saw the offered hand described by President Bush bearing a monthly check.

The number of workers who receive Social Security disability-insurance payments has almost tripled. At the end of 2014, 9 million workers had a disability award that entitled them and their dependents to a monthly government check. This was a 197 percent increase over the 1990 number; over the same period the working-age population had increased by only 29 percent.

The disability path out of the labor market has become much more inviting since the ADA became law. More claims point to pain and other conditions whose diagnoses largely rely on patients’ subjective experiences rather than the self-evident disabilities of those who have appeared in coverage of the ADA’s 25th.


Monday, October 1, 2018

The new puritans at CBS News flatly lie about Kavanaugh's testimony


"Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh has repeatedly said that he was legally allowed to consume beer as a prep school senior in Maryland."

That's a flat out lie. Kavanaugh never testified that he was "legally allowed".

He copped to drinking beer while under age, that's all, and that seniors were legal . . . at the time about which he testified.

That's how every under age drinker gets it to this day.

Tuesday, May 22, 2018

Chicoms admit human nature is evil, justifying imposition of tyrannical "social credit system" modeled on FICO

Apparently the model is the US FICO credit scoring system, except a low score on the Chinese version really emphasizes the socialism, meaning the State won't just stop you from getting a loan to buy a car or house, it will prohibit you from simply traveling, as a form of punishment. Socialism, you see, aims to be all-encompassing, a secular form of Puritanism.

From the propaganda source itself, globaltimes dot cn, here:

In 2014, China released an outline for building a government-led national social credit system, pledging to establish a set of laws and regulations regarding social credit, a credit reference system that covers the whole of society and a related reward and punishment system by 2020. Whether people have ridden the train without tickets, violated traffic laws, conducted heroic acts or performed exemplary acts are rated and the score plays a part in their life, determining whether he or she can buy a plane ticket, secure a loan etc.

In today's Chinese society, trustworthiness is not highly honored. That's why we see corruption, expired vaccines, commercial fraud, tax dodging and academic cheating from time to time. Take the arson case in Hangzhou last year. A nanny started a fire that killed a mother and her three children: She was in huge debt and starving for more money from her wealthy employer. It was a tragedy caused by the lack of a credit ranking system.

Wednesday, February 15, 2017

Under pressure from Puritan Democrats, Puzder withdraws nomination to Labor Dept.

From the story here:

Over the last few weeks, Senate Democrats repeatedly hammered the CKE Restaurants executive for his business practices, like the risque advertising employed by fast food chains Carl’s Jr. and Hardee’s.


Thursday, November 12, 2015

The legacy of the left's long march through the institutions since the 1960s is . . .

. . . the repudiation of the Bill of Rights, which is why so many Americans fled the Democrat Party and joined the Republican Party, starting with Ronald Reagan ("the Democrat Party left me"). They are just like the Puritans, who preferred to switch rather than to fight.

Unfortunately, there's nowhere left to which to switch, indeed, to retreat.

It's either us, or them.

Sunday, February 24, 2013

New York's Puritan Mayor Bans 2-Liter Pop With Pizza Deliveries

Story here.

It used to be conservatism and reaction which in 1950 were said not  to exist as real ideas but only as mere actions or irritable mental gestures. Now it's liberalism and progressivism occupying that role, but without actually resembling ideas. They represent emotions instead, usually of revulsion, especially for people who are fat, or of shame, especially for holding otherwise intelligent opinions critical of other people's culture, way of life and religion.

Wednesday, February 6, 2013

Liberals Everywhere (and libertarian elites) Sneer With Doyle McManus: How Dare You Live In A Bigger House?

 
 
 
 
 
Today's liberal sneer comes from Doyle McManus for, you guessed it, The LA Times, here:

But don't take it from me. Take it from the economists at the Mercatus Center, a mostly conservative think tank at Virginia's George Mason University. ... "Recent empirical research suggests that the mortgage interest deduction increases the size of homes purchased but not the overall rate of homeownership," they wrote. ... You can be sure that home builders and Realtors, whose businesses thrive on big houses and high prices, will push back hard against any proposal for change. ... The mortgage interest deduction subsidizes big houses and bigger mortgages, but that's not a good use of tax dollars. Its benefits flow disproportionately to the wealthy and do nothing for the working poor.

In other words, God forbid that modestly incomed people with big families should live in the same comfortable digs as the elites. No, the only thing suitable for them is something small and cramped in keeping with their station in life. The "Realtors" is a nice touch, with a capital "R", the evil purveyors of this excess and offense against the crabbed liberal view of life. We have met the enemy, and he works for Remax. Puritanism still lives, my friends, in the indignant hearts of the America's liberals.

George Mason University, for its part, is a libertarian bastion, not a conservative one, and being socially liberal, libertarians are ever helpful to one side and one side only: liberalism. Make no mistake about it, the societal decision long ago to subsidize home ownership is a by-product of the conservative consensus of yesterday. That consensus recognized that the basic social unit was the family, defined as a husband, wife and children, the incubator for the transmission of the values of our civilization, and that shaping tax policy to support it materially was not only in the best interests of the present, but of the future.

The people who attack that now are either dimwits, or enemies. 



Wednesday, May 25, 2011

Average Wage Slave Uses 14 of 18 'Vacation' Days

Puritanism lives.

Story here.

Wednesday, April 6, 2011

Puritanism Lives!