The New Clarion

There’s a huge, full-court press on right now to paint the Tea Party movement as being just the usual “right-wing extremism“.  Even Obama is doing his bit to feed this meme.  It’s sufficiently pervasive that even my non-political friends are noticing it — and some of its participants are hyperventilating so fast that they are literally seeing things that aren’t there.

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Talk radio host and Detroit News columnist Frank Beckmann had an oped on Wed. 3/24 “Dem’s health care claims lack real proof” which testifies to the kind of education they received. While Mr. Beckmann makes his point well, my point is that they don’t need proof, at least not empirical proof. (more…)

The reality of what it means to live in an America fundamentally transformed by leftist fools has not even begun to sink in, and we get this from Rep. Dingell:

Let me remind you this [Americans allegedly dying because of lack of universal health care] has been going on for years. We are bringing it to a halt. The harsh fact of the matter is when you’re going to pass legislation that will cover 300 [million] American people in different ways it takes a long time to do the necessary administrative steps that have to be taken to put the legislation together to control the people.

Doubtless the closest statist to you will explain that Dingell did not mean “contol the people” in a bad way. His intentions are good. He just wants to help. And to help 300 million people, well, you can’t just let them run around doing what they want. Control. It’s good for you. Bend over and take it.

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Sen. Mitch McConnell says,

‘Repeal and replace’ is likely to be the slogan for the fall elections.

What do they mean by replace? Free market reforms? Getting government out of medicine?

Or do they mean some compromise plan that redistributes wealth to give the uninsured health care insurance?

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At the signing ceremony the ever amusing Joe Biden said to the Godfather, “This is a big f***kin’ deal.”

Did you expect more dignity from the Democrats at what is, by their own statements, an historic event? Instead of Cicero they sound like Al Capone in Cicero, Illinois.

But why shouldn’t they talk like gangsters? They went to the mattresses to seize control of one-sixth of the economy. They now have the power to make offers the American people can’t refuse. It is a big f***kin’ deal.

Health care reform was such a success that Daily Kos is already looking forward to the next big reform.

Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner will be speaking this afternoon about financial reform at the American Enterprise Institute, not exactly a place brimful of folks who give smiles to reforms that involve the government unless it’s reducing its oversight role. Over the weekend, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke made some rumblings about the need to do something about firms that are “too big to fail,” calling their existence “pernicious” and an “insidious” barrier to competition. And starting at 5 p.m., Senator Dodd will lead the executive committee of the Senate Banking Committee in the first round of marking up the 1336-page Restoring American Financial Stability Act of 2010. (Summary here.)

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All right then.  Now that the socialized medicine bill has passed, we will now find out once and for all whether Billy Beck is right — that America is dead.

I do not yet agree with Billy.  America is not dead yet.

However, the knife is at last on its jugular.  Americans must now face the final alternative: to renounce liberty in favor of duty to others — or to summon up the moral courage to say No.

No to whom?  Seeing as I’m an Objectivist, the expected answer is no to altruism.  That is correct — but I am not operating at that level of abstraction here.  Objectivists have been making that point for over half a century now, and sadly, the mainstream epistemology is sufficiently crippled such that people still insist that liberty and duty can coexist.

I’m going to put the alternative to everyone, in terms of a plain concrete, one that lays it out in no uncertain, clear-cut terms, that will separate the moral adults from the altruist children.

It runs as follows:

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History was made tonight. In the past year the American people said they did not want socialized medicine. Tonight the Democrats said “Tough. You’re getting socialized medicine whether you like it or not because we know what’s good for you better than you know.”

Socialized medicine is here to stay. The Republicans will not repeal this legislation. I write this first because they never have significantly rolled back the welfare state. The programs of the New Deal and the Great Society are all still here with us; they created the mess we’re in today. Nobody talks about repealing them.

Second, if you listened to the final speeches of Republican John Boehner and Democrat Nancy Pelosi before the vote, it was obvious who would win, and it was obvious that socialized medicine is here to stay.

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Rep. Alcee Hastings speaks:

There ain’t no rules here, we’re trying to accomplish something….All this talk about rules…. When the deal goes down… we make ‘em up as we go along.

Drew M. reacts:

“A government of laws and not of men”-Stuff John Adams actually wrote.

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234 years is a good run by any standard. Now, as with all things, it comes to an end.

Or as Jennifer Rubin puts it,

This is the talk of tyranny.

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The Democrats are intent on passing their health care reform even if it kills them. There is currently some question as to whether or not Nancy Pelosi has the votes to pass the Senate bill in the House. But the Dems have figured out a postmodern solution to this problem: pass the bill without a vote.

…it looks like House Democrats won’t have to vote directly on a Senate bill they really don’t like. The speaker hasn’t made a final decision, but she told her rank-and-file during the meeting that the plan now is to craft a rule that would “deem” the Senate bill passed once they approve the package of fixes.

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Gus Van Horn considers the question of why liberals hate Sarah Palin so much. I’ve noticed in my personal relations with liberals, especially women, that they do have an intense negative emotional reaction to Palin. The Alaskan Governor really bugs them. Gus takes a guess at the reason:

My first stab would be that they see her as typical of “little” people who need their help — except that she is uppity.

I think that is part of it. The left believes in two classes: the rulers and the ruled. Although few will admit it in America, the longing for a stratified class society in which everyone knows his place has always been important to anti-capitalists. This is why capitalism’s first enemies in England were conservatives who longed for a return to the feudal order. Sarah Palin, with her soccer mom demeanor and her guns, is clearly meant to be among the ruled. There’s nothing more offensive to the ruling elite than a commoner who rises above her station.

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At PajamasMedia, Amit Ghate shows off a fairly straightforward application of principled thinking as he tackles the common, yet artificial distinction between “force” and “violence”, first noted by Ayn Rand during the ’60′s.

The comments, as usual, are full of the usual pragmatism that shows up when an Objectivist op/ed shows up at PJM.  They are usually of this sort — a conservative who chides the writer for “errors” which are merely artifacts of his own incomprehension.  (The most advanced of these are the ones that dimly recognize that principled thinking is afoot, but chide the writer for burdening his point with “amateur philosophy”.)

What suddenly jumped into my head was the realization that this sort of thing exactly parallels a well-known phenomenon from history, which not only concretizes the “epistemological primitivism” I’ve been writing about, but is an instance of it: the Cargo Cults of the South Pacific.  (Ironically, the reason why it was fresh in my mind was because I’d read some comments on conservative blogs recently, aptly applying the label to some Leftists.)

From the Wikipedia article:

“A cargo cult is a type of religious practice that may appear in traditional tribal societies in the wake of interaction with technologically advanced cultures. The cults are focused on obtaining the material wealth (the “cargo”) of the advanced culture through magic and religious rituals and practices, believing that the wealth was intended for them by their deities and ancestors.”

Lacking any kind of grasp of the nature of what they saw, including its causal origins, the islanders imagined that by re-creating the accidental surface details of American military personnel — i.e. what they could perceive — they could somehow enjoy the full benefits of their presence once more.

That isn’t merely an apt description of how conservatives view the U.S. Constitution — and liberty itself; it’s precisely the same phenomenon (even down to “traditional”,  “Deities” and “ancestors”).

The only difference, is that the ignorance of the South Sea natives was not deliberate.