by Nancy Salvato
If there is one thing for certain in this world, it is when Jack Nicholson plays the male protagonist in a film, his performance will be outstanding. As McMurphy, in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, his impression on me is as compelling today –as it was over 30 years ago when I first watched him bring to consciousness the minds of assorted inmates staying on Nurse Ratched’s ward of the mental institution. The message I took away while watching McMurphy undermine Nurse Ratched’s authority over her unit -until she has him lobotomized, stands the test of time. Power hungry people will resort to any means necessary to maintain control. Although Nurse Ratched’s actions were extreme, her display taught me just how vulnerable people are if they are labeled mentally unstable or forfeit the responsibility of making decisions on their own behalf. Those placed in their charge are not necessarily looking out for them.
Inherent in writing and exposing one’s own ideas about terrorism (or the war against radical Islamism), the border threat, or political correctness, is the likelihood of being branded a right wing nut. Being labeled as such isn’t personally offensive (I’ve begun to grow my Alligator Skin) but there is the danger that being branded as such could chip away at my credibility, which is the whole idea behind such mudslinging. This is why it’s so important to be able to back up an argument with facts. This is extremely difficult in the face of a movement doing everything it can to shut down ideas which run counter to their own.
For example, let’s look at the Fairness Doctrine. In an editorial titled the Unfairness Doctrine, the editors of the National Review Online point out that even though Fairness Doctrine was not passed into law this time around, other forms of legislation could equally serve to stifle free speech. The liberal think tank "Center for American Progress," founded and run by former Clinton White House chief of staff John Podesta, has proposed there be new national and local limits on the number of radio stations one company can own, a de facto quota system to ensure that more women and minorities own radio stations, and that the government should require commercial owners who fail to abide by enforceable public interest obligations to pay a fee to support public broadcasting.
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Posted by Walt as Biased Media, Socialism at 11:13 PM EDT
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by Thomas E. Brewton
An enduring society is not a random assemblage of people drawn together, like pigs around the feed trough, waiting for welfare-state handouts.
The liberal paradigm recognizes no spiritual dimension to human nature or to human society. In the liberals' atheistic and materialistic world, humans are merely animals a notch along the evolutionary scale from the apes and, like them, motivated only by material factors: water, food, sex, and shelter.
Societies, in that paradigm, are held together by whatever may be the currently reigning regulations governing those material wants. A political society theoretically is a lump of clay that intellectuals are capable of shaping anyway they wish.
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Posted by Walt as Cultural Issues, Socialism at 12:13 AM EST
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by Thomas E. Brewton
Liberals' head-in-the-sand urge to pull troops out of Iraq is nothing new. Western democracies, entranced with liberal Progressivism, have failed repeatedly to preserve social and political stability.
In words that apply to public opinion today, Walter Lippmann, in The Public Philosophy (1954), described his dismay in the summer of 1938, when war in Europe seemed inevitable.
….there was no sure prospect that France and Great Britain would be able to withstand the [German] onslaught that was coming. They were unprepared, their people were divided and demoralized. The Americans were far away, were determined to be neutral, and were unarmed….. I began writing, impelled by the need to make more intelligible to myself the alarming failure of the Western liberal democracies to cope with the realities of [the 20th] century.
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Posted by Walt as Atheism, Communism, Cultural Issues, Socialism at 11:54 PM EST
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by Thomas E. Brewton
American labor unions are pushing candidates for the Democratic Party's 2008 presidential nomination toward expansion of the welfare-state and massive inflation of the sort that the Great Society spawned.
After both World War I and World War II, the British Labour Party led England into its destructive liaison with socialism that destroyed British industry and reduced England to the "sick man of Europe."
Harold Meyerson's January 31, 2007, column in the Washington Post describes the behind-the-scenes power exerted by labor unions, especially the government employees unions. Their immediate goal is imposition of universal, socialized medicine, of the sort championed in 1993 by Hillary Clinton.
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Posted by Walt as Labor, Socialism at 11:04 PM EST
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by Thomas E. Brewton
Liberal social justice is based on statistical averages relating to an abstraction called "humanity." Individual morality is not an element in that liberal cosmology.
One of the first legislative acts of the newly ensconced Congressional liberals was increasing the minimum wage. Countless studies have demonstrated that the legal minimum wage is counter-productive. But it sounds good and it can be applied at one shot without the tedious process of arriving at fair wages in individual cases.
The minimum wage is an example of the sound-good, feel-good statistical virtues of liberal-socialist-progressivism. Another is Al Gore's championing the Kyoto Protocols that would eliminate millions of workers' jobs in the Western world to reduce greenhouse gases, a statistical virtue that state-planners hypothesize will prevent the current high-point cycle of sun spot activity from warming the earth.
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Posted by Walt as Socialism, U.S. Political Issues at 1:28 AM EST
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by Thomas E. Brewton
As noted frequently in past postings, the unavoidable tendency of socialism is concentration of political power in the hands of a ruling elite who decide for the masses what their living and working conditions are to be. This is called state-planning.
In ways that would have been inconceivable as recently as the 1920s, our everyday lives are circumscribed by unelected bureaucrats in Washington who make regulations, enforce them, and adjudicate them, too often without our access to the normal safeguards of the common law. Those bureaucrats think of the IRS, for example, issue rulings that most Federal courts will not contest, on the grounds that they lack the supposed expertise of the tens of thousands of Federal regulatory bureaus.
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Posted by Walt as Socialism, U.S. Constitutional Issues at 10:10 PM EST
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By Thomas E. Brewton
The socialistic welfare state is extolled by liberal-socialistic- progressives as more Christian then Christianity, because the welfare state purports to help the needy. So did Hitler's National Socialism.
Traditional Christmas spirit, depicted in Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol, was the warmth of family gatherings, friendship, and loving kindness to everyone.
Today, however, many people insist that socialism IS Christianity.
It's certainly true that the early churches established by the Apostle Paul grew rapidly, because people found there the Christian love and fellowship, as well as support for the poor, sick, elderly, and disabled, that was available nowhere else.
The socialist political state, however, is expressly atheistic and materialistic. There can therefore be no identity between Christianity and socialism, simply on the superficial basis that they nominally espouse some of the same objectives.
The collectivized compulsion of the socialistic state is exemplified by bureaucratic rules mandating certain conduct, described in tens of millions of regulations.
The spirit of Christmas is written in every individual human heart.
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Posted by Walt as Cultural Issues, Socialism, U.S. Political Issues at 6:42 PM EST
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