I’ve foregone (is that a word?) news this weekend in favor of watching season two of Eureka. It’s very good whenever they keep that cocky felon off the screen. There’s a lot of Easter eggs for science nerds.
I did take a quick glance at global geopolitics, enough to confirm the standing diagnosis: we’re still doomed.
That’s probably why my interest in our shared problems continues to wane. The Tea Partys got me off my butt and into blogging. That they are proving ineffectual gets me back into the recliner. And considering the quality of public “discourse”, it’s good that we’re sinking.
Wow. For a title of “eureka!”, this was sure a downer. This is why it’s never good for me to share my feelings. Uhm…hey, Thanksgiving’s in four days! Hooray?
World's Only Rational Man 
Thanksgiving… We don’t do that here. We can eat turkey throughout the year!
My Texan friend always says “when I look at the GOP candidates and the Dem alternatives… we’re f-ed.”
Welcome to the ship of the damned. Please enjoy your stay Americans. We’re all f-ed, so we can as well enjoy it while it lasts.
That said… Skyrim.
Other than that, how do you think things are going these days?
W.O.R.M., I want you to think about this: how long did it take to get into this mess?
Bismark’s Germany showed Progressives here they could take power and wield it. Teddy Roosevelt was part of the problem, even, from the standpoint of big government, and he took office in 1901! Or even look at the Dems in the 1960s: the liberal wing hijacked the party, but it took years for them to achieve power and start getting results, and even then, they only managed to get Carter and Obama elected since then. (I don’t classify Clinton as radical left, though I might be wrong on that.)
Ideas and culture, like physical objects, have momentum. To change the direction, either a huge amount of force as to be applied all at once, or a smaller force over a long period of time.
Basically, what I’m saying is, don’t give up! We’re fighting and changing things, spreading ideas through this blog, and talking with others. But it’s going to take time. Right now, the TEA Party is working within the Republican framework, trying to take control at the local/grassroots level so that they can start controlling states, and then once that happens, they can control national stuff.
For those of you who want to see a fictional representation of a party being taken over, read The Fourth Protocol, one of Forsythe’s best.
I’d need to do research, but the conservative renaissance may have started with William F. Buckley. It’s taken time, and effort, and fighting–decades of all three–but conservative ideas and principles are no longer out of the mainstream to mainstream society. Another example is Justice Thomas: after his confirmation in the ’90s, he’s often written dissents, but he blazed the trail where eventually a number of his ideas on jurisprudence and rights are now part of accepted Supreme Court doctrine. Again, though, it took decades, and he had disproportionate weight among those he was trying to influence, as opposed to just ordinary guys like us, who are about 1/300,000,000 of the U.S. population.
Only issue I have with is that Bismarck’s united Germany is hardly anything useful for “progressives”. It was the Germany that Japan tried to model itself after in the late 1870s and later.
Bismarkian Germany was a (the?) prototype of the welfare state. He deliberately pushed the state as primary care provider over the churches of the time in the name of social welfare, to keep the masses from rising against the government. Welfare state is quintessentially progressive, and in some sense is what progressivism is all about: state care and control of the individual. That’s why I use it as the Ur-Example (though it probably isn’t).
The problem is that the progressive disease has infected both parties to the marrow. It’s practically tailor made to appeal to politicians. This is why you can often catch the “conservatives” operating from the progressives’ premises. The whole “us people in power are smart and can dictate good outcomes” part of progressivism is like catnip to politicians, and Keynesian philosophy part of progressivism is seductive to politicians because it makes things so simple and tells them “you can fix anything by spending, be it wasteful or not”. Congress only has 2 levers with regards to the economy, and the progressives tell them “you’re so smart, fix this for us with more regulation and more spending, shovel that money out the door!” Everybody wants to be the hero, and the progressives play the politicians like fiddles.
It’s hard to counter their message with “we got this, please sit on your hands”. Perhaps we should put things in terms the politicians will be more receptive to… A “You must save us from the mistakes of your bumbling predecessors!” might work, but many of their heros and mentors are insulted in the process. Looking to Clarence Thomas, it seems that it CAN work, and quite well too, but it requires someone who looks past the last hundred years to ground themselves.
So I come to the inevitable conclusion: we need thousands and thousands of Clarence Thomas clones. I’m no good at biology, anyone else working on it?
Zane does gets less annoying if I remember right.
As for Geopolitics, it’s pretty clear everyone is doomed, but isn’t that the historical norm?
“That they are proving ineffectual gets me back into the recliner.”
tsk tsk.
“Perseverance and spirit have done wonders in all ages.” George Washington