The New Clarion

Today is different
And tomorrow the same
It’s hard to take the world
The way that it came
Too many rapids
Keep us sweeping along
Too many captains
Keep on steering us wrong
It’s hard to take the heat –
It’s hard to lay blame
To fight the fire –
While we’re
Feeding the flames

– Neil Peart “Second Nature”, from the album “Hold your Fire”by Rush

Billy Beck is beating the drum over the murder of Jose Guerena in Arizona, and rightly so.  What I wish to highlight here is the horrible spectacle of mainstream minds raising the alarm over the increasingly violent intrusions of the government into our lives, even as their underlying ideologies move them inexorably towards that end-of-road.  To judge by the reaction around the blogosphere, both Left and Right are aghast and angry over Guerena’s death — but I will show how, in fact, both “sides” are, at root, complicit in it.

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In my previous writings on the topic of ideological causality, I have emphasized the “end of road” of an idea and/or of ideologies, as determined not by one’s intentions, but by the logic and flow of these ideas.  Even a completely passive-minded individual does not sit still; he will still drift slowly, “downhill”, towards its destination.

Today, I will sketch out the flow of ideas with a “triangle”, going both ways along the conservative road.  I start with an article by one conservative and work backwards (or “uphill”) to its root premises — and then logically back “downhill” to another article, by another conservative, which is superficially unrelated, but fundamentally trapped within the same premises.

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1. How to understand Rush Limbaugh.

2. Republicans give up trying to repeal Obamacare.

3.Environmentalist farmers returning to animal power. I wonder if these people are more interested in farming or impressing their fellow environmentalists.

4. George Monbiot despairs because environmentalism seems to be out of touch with reality.

5. Jay Cost argues that Obama will lose in 2012 because we are in the worst economic recovery in 50 years. Karl Rove says the electoral math does not look good for Obama in 2012.

6. Quin Hillyer makes a good argument that Willie Mays was the greatest baseball player ever.

UPDATE: Added the Willie Mays link.

Today we celebrate the killing of Osama Bin Laden. There has been little to celebrate in our long, muddled effort against totalitarian Islam, so let’s relish this triumph.

I think of this as a tactical victory in the context of our strategic defeat in this war. We have yet to get serious and fight this war the way it should be fought. Altruism and egalitarianism have us so submissive to world opinion that we can’t even name the enemy. The existence of the Department of Homeland Security shows that our government would rather keep its own citizens in a permanent state of terror than destroy the enemy.

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