“When one is contending with an ideological regime, the line that must be held absolutely to the end is to reject, without discussion, the description of reality set forth by this regime.  As soon as one puts one’s fingers in the gears and admits this description includes a “partial truth”–for example, that there are Aryans and non-Aryans, and that a “Jewish problem” therefore exists–one is lost.  The will now obeys only a distorted intelligence.  It remains only to beg the “Aryans” to resolve this “problem” in a “humane” manner.  In the world of ideology, the “partial truth” that holds seductive power is the very site of falsification and what is most false.  This rule holds true for all ideology, and particularly for communist ideology.  As soon as people accepted a description that divided reality between socialism and capitalism, they could only beg the two “camps” to obey the general principles of morality–even if this meant granting superiority, in principle, to the first for its having done away with “exploitation.”

“The No, the refusal to discuss, must be set forth from the first moment.  If it is not, one loses one’s sense of the false logic that occurs with the second step, which is introduced by therefore.  The Treaty of Versailles humiliated Germany: therefore it is necessary to take a certain measure in order to solve the Jewish problem, therefore. . . .Until, by an imperceptible drift, one arrives at the Final Solution.  Workers are exploited: therefore there must be a revolution, therefore. . .etc.  We must flee the “partial truth,” because this truth, however indisputable in appearance, is already embedded in a system of insane logic.”

Alain Besancon

Our old crock pot gave up the ghost after 20 years and we bought a new one.  I’m still counting the improvements in crock pot technology that 20 years of free market competition yielded for less money than the original.

• a slim oval design
• glass lid with vent holes
• ergonomic lid handle with a spoon carrier
• built-in silicon lid gasket
• transport clips for locking the lid down for trips to pot lucks
• removable spoon drip tray
• bracket for holding the hot lid which also spins around to provide a cord wrap structure
• easily cleanable aluminum housing
• lighter weight heating element
• flip up silicon handles for secure handling
• 3 stage heating element

No doubt these many improvements did not come from one source.  They came about from multiple innovations by many companies competing to win customers in the free crock pot market.

Imagine how many of these innovations would not have occurred in a government-controlled crock pot market.  Imagine how the absence of competition coupled with the presence of federal oversight and regulation would have cemented that 20 year-old crock pot design into our culture.

Consider the medicare-subsidized and fda-regulated health care industry in America, or the new federally-managed American automobile industry.  Consider driving a 50-year-old Chevy on the island of Cuba.

Governments don’t adapt very well.  It’s not in their nature.

The problem with the left’s legislative agenda for America, which they seem unable to adequately describe in less than a thousand pages of federal spaghetti-legalize, is we’ll never know all of the wonderful human products, behaviors, solutions, and creativity that they preclude from coming into existence.

…was the vote in the Senate against shutting down Guantanamo, however Obama won’t stop lobbying his case.  Perhaps Obama is not so realistic as many think.

Obama Speaks. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .Cheney Speaks

The force you must exert to survive is defined by your enemy, in this case, an enemy that views civility and individualism as weakness and infidelity.  So the dilemma is to uphold your own civility and be harmed or killed, or do what’s necessary to defend yourself so that you can survive and perhaps achieve civility.  Our enemies impose this dilemma on us, fully cognizant of what such dilemmas do to our media-enhanced national discourse.  Under the conditions we must accept as targets of the Islamist war, we cannot have both absolute civility abroad and guaranteed survival at home.  Pretending that we can is a prescription for our own annihilation.

Cheney is right to draw attention to the progressive’s redefinitions of terms related to the war, as if a few semantic adjustments on our part will make us materially safer.  The progressive’s fallacy in this case is to assert that because we must use barbarous tactics to defeat a barbarian enemy, we also do not value civility.  Of course we continue to value civility.  Why else would we do whatever we must do to reestablish conditions where we can enjoy it again?

Ironically, the progressive message–that Americans don’t value civility–is likely to come from a 20-something between sips of a hot latte’ at Starbucks with their Prius/mobile bike-rack parked in the lot.  Today, national policies issue from brains washed clean of analytic capacity, the naive graduates of America’s progressive universities who march in lock-step conformity and smug superiority in Ward-Churchill-inspired fantasies of the perfect present we could have had if only Bush hadn’t stolen the 2000 election.

Obama readily throws much of what America did in response to 9/11 under the bus to garner the approval of this or that 3rd world dictator or European socialist.  But consider the many people we’ve met in Asia who are amazed at the restraint shown by America in response to 9/11 when we didn’t drop nuclear weapons on the countries harboring, sponsoring, and emulating Islamic terrorism.  Had China been attacked the way the U.S. was on 9/11, the crater where Afghanistan once stood will still be smoking.

The Global Times is the voice of the Chinese government.

“The advanced health care infrastructure in the US has ensured that life has not been interrupted by the outbreak, at least for the moment.  But the impact of swine flue can be disastrous for countries without proper preventive systems.  Few countries can afford the expensive healthcare system the US enjoys. . . .More protective actions in the US would be for America’s own good and would benefit the rest of the world as well.”

It would seem the expensive healthcare system Americans “enjoy” serves America’s “own good” better than a guilt-trip from the Global Times.  This is a teaching-moment for all those countries who “enjoy” socialized medicine.

(click to enlarge)

“We have not yet understood that to subsume our world under the concept of “capitalism” is already to enter into the dichotomous worldview of ideology.” Alain Besancon

[T]he moral destruction of communism was worse because the confusion between common morality and communist morality remains deep rooted.  With the latter hiding behind the former, it is parasitical and polluting, using common morality to spread its contagion.  Here is a recent example: in the discussions that followed the publication of The Black Book of Communism, an editorial writer at the French communist newspaper L’Humanite’ announced on television that 85 million deaths did not in any way tarnish the communist ideal.  They represented only a very unfortunate deviation.  After Auschwitz, he continued, one can no longer be a Nazi, but one can remain a communist after the Soviet camps.  This man, who spoke in good conscience, did not realize at all that he had just articulated his own most fatal condemnation.  He could not see that the communist idea had so perverted the principles of reality and morality that it could indeed outlive 85 million corpses, whereas the Nazi idea had succombed under its dead.  He thought he had spoken as a great and decent man, idealistic and uncompromising, without realizing that he had uttered a monstrosity.  Communism is more perverse than Nazism because it does not ask man consciously to take the moral step of the criminal, and because it uses the spirit of justice and goodness that abounds throughout the earth to spread evil over all the earth.  Each communist experience begins anew in innocence.

Alain Besancon, A Century of Horrors, 2007.

American leftists will ridicule their comparison to communists, however, in moral relativity, in masking harmful policies under good intentions, and in denial over their policies’ historical failures, leftists and communists are a distinction without a difference. (more…)

John Andrews’ speech  - wmv file, 48 megs.

The psychological state of the militant is distinguished by his fanatical investment in the system.  This central vision reorganizes his entire intellectual and perceptual field, all the way to the periphery.  Language is transformed: it is no longer used to communicate or express, but to conceal a contrived continuity between the system and reality.  Ideological language is charged with the magical role of forcing reality to conform to a particular vision of the world.  It is a liturgical language for which every utterance points to its speaker’s adherence to the system, and it summons the interlocutor to adhere as well.  Code words thus constitute threats and figures of power.It is not possible to remain intelligent under the spell of ideology.

The most obvious sign that ideological insanity is artificial is that it is reversible: when the pressure ceases and circumstances change, one gets out all at once, as if from a dream.  But it is a waking dream–one that does not block motility and maintains a certain apparently rational coherence.  Outside the affected area, which is the superior part of the mind in a healthy person–the part that articulates religion, philosophy, and the “governing ideas of reason,” as Kant would say–the comprehensive functions seem intact but focused on and enslaved by the surreal object.  When one wakes, one’s mind is empty; one’s life and knowledge must be entirely relearned.

Alain Besancon, A Century of Horrors, 2007.

The Republican mistake of the 2008 election was to embrace a portion of the left’s ideological insanity to bring in moderates, which ended up ratcheting the debate to the left.  Whoever concluded that Republicans could score by giving the ball to the opposition should be fired. (more…)