Mark Levin in his Liberty and Tyranny quotes Eric Hoffer:

“Those who see their lives as spoiled and wasted crave equality and fraternity more than they do freedom. If they clamor for freedom, it is but freedom to establish equality and uniformity. The passion for equality is partly a passion for anonymity: to be one thread of many who make up a tunic; one thread not distinguishable from the others. No one can then point us out, measure us against others and expose our inferiority.”

I speak to this reprehensible, inexplicable conformity into which the left most earnestly seeks to inter us. I have always, always reacted viscerally against the notion of the”tribe”. Even when I was in the culture’s grip, nothing in me welcomed the intrusive insistence that we are one, we are the world.
It is this seeming implacable compulsion to erase significance, much like the unwillingness to comprehend the necessity of recognizing those absolutes that – regardless the obdurate denial by leftists – govern this world. And it is quite incomprehensible to me. I wither inside at the thought of the collective. I have no use for groups, find them ominous actually- especially if they chant.

I always am amused when it is suggested that those on the right are indoctrinated. I would suggest that there are very few who escape indoctrination on some level, to some degree. When I was much younger I used to imagine who I would be had I never had my world delivered to me via media and a public education – both entities sacrificing truth in their deluded social engineering quest. When someone denigrates your beliefs by suggesting that you couldn’t possibly have assembled your own point of view is insult enough. But to somehow be so lacking in self-awareness as to imagine that you yourself hadn’t also been subject to some indoctrination is simply obtuse.

Thing is, life usually can strip away conditioning that isn’t congruent with reality, assuming you spend much time in reality, something the ruling political class does very little of. Reality will not march to the Progressive tune of uniformity. To achieve this idiotic utopia, coercion must be used. Brainwashing, manipulation, and most grotesque, in my view, ravaging the language. Something that is done at such an alarming pace now I wouldn’t be surprised if they banned the dictionary for being so absolutist. How dare any tome claim to define anything. All is relative, everything is everything…”and they shall call good evil, and evil good…”

In the seventies Neil Simon sang a certain sentiment that grated my every nerve. “If you can’t be with the one you love, love the one you’re with..” he pattered, putting into innocuous melody the mantra of faceless promiscuity. Nothing matters. No one person matters. Any pliant body will do. Love is relative. Everything is relative….

How insidiously quiet the shriveling of the human soul is, you seem never to hear the scream until it is fading away.

Astrophysicist and author David Brin has noted the prevalence of the imperative of “otherness” — the mandate that one must try to see any dispute from the other party’s viewpoint — among Americans generally, and particularly among Americans who identify themselves as liberals. When he first wrote of it, he said he’d found it to be so strong that it had sunk below the rational level in most of the people he knew, and operated essentially without conscious invocation. (Link)

This is what I have come to call the CJS, or ‘Charles Johnson Syndrome’; when the inexorable detritus of liberal indoctrination leaves your everyday conservative defenseless in the face of the enemy, deprived of voice and sense after decades of leftist PC inculcation. In the case of LGF’s Charles Johnson, his liberal ideological underpinning proved to be far more deeply entrenched than his brief foray into conservatism could prevail against. Inevitably, the deeply held contempt for Christian-Judeo values that is preached incessantly to Americans from every media outlet their entire lives overruled any emerging comprehension of what he had for so long been trained to devalue. Eventually Charles dropped the demeanor of reasonable debate and became a little Blog-tator, weeding out of his robust conservative audience those who failed to adhere to Charles’s re-emerging amoral template.

A quick aside, commenting on this censorial nature of the left invites a topic too large to touch on here, and I do realize the right has resorted to a book-burning mentality often as well. However, I recall in the early months of my political awakening the utter confusion I experienced when these totalitarian traits came from what I had always assumed were liberal arenas, not having yet understood the transmogrification of liberalism. I feel safe saying that any ideology demanding suppression of opposing views has no Truth capable of contending on the battlefield. I have not called for censoring the left, but to ignore the fact that a reciprocal generosity is lacking is idiotic and obtuse. To subject oneself to the fallacy of hate legislation, the favored cudgel applied to “offensive” speech, under the pretense of practicing fairness, is to unleash the Orwellian whirlwind we now reap.

Getting back to the specific topic at hand, I ran into this CJS type “whirlwind” yesterday on Twitter, confronting in one woman this obdurate insistence that my conservative credentials (apparently someone is handing out certificates of conservative authenticity) were somehow faulty if I refuse to demonstrate tolerance for the gay class, or “the other” – a term condescendingly employed to ascribe a phobic aspect to perceived non-tolerance. Yet tolerance seems to have been redefined as acquiescence, a sacrifice of principles to the point of nullification in order to demonstrate some misguided notion of American ‘equality’ and ‘fairness’.

The same syndrome is rearing it’s nasty head via those ‘conservatives’ who denounce we who refuse to incorporate the same moral equivocation in evaluating the “religion” of Islam, accelerated by the Ground Zero Mosque desecration. Atlas Shrugs has battled against this dhimmitude for a decade. It seems that in order to prove that Americans are essentially such superior, moral people that we will permit our own destruction. But there is nothing morally superior about accepting evil as a valid member of the community. To be bereft of all means of judging is to stand defenseless against all onslaught, as if by stubbornly clinging to the notion of “American equality” that we need become supine inferiors, ashamed of our traditions and identity.

This touches on so many of the maladies that have innervated the normally strong American will. I am reminded of an explanation given about the OT telling of Sodom & Gomorrah. Skeptics ask how could Lot be considered a righteous man when he was so ready to offer his daughters for the erotic pleasure of the crowd of men beating at his door seeking the angels they’d observed entering. The answer given was that Lot was quite used to the soup he swam in, inured to the evil practiced around him.It did not occur to him as unreasonable or untoward to offer his daughters. I think that is quite true of the American conservative. We are no longer appalled, nor do we even recognize, the evil that now parades about in the light of day. Those who consider themselves conservative, who subscribe to the values inherent in the founding of America, none the less, are quite oblivious to the memes or precepts that we have absorbed in this innocuous, familiar soup that contradict the core of the values we seek to preserve.

I am not going to delineate my thinking on the gay issue in this post, but the fact that I was attacked by the twitter conservative as an “intolerant fundie” because I hold a certain opinion of homosexuality serves to spotlight the fissure that threatens any unity Conservatives might achieve. For me, it goes to foundational principles. A poorly laid foundation may temporarily support the edifice built on it, but inevitably defective material will imperil the integrity of the entire structure, ultimately leading to it’s collapse. The defective material conservatives innocently bring into the mix is our relationship with nihilism. We are quite used to it. It is a seductress whose call we have long listened to. It is that element of the homosexual question that I object to.

Homosexual marriage is favored by the Left because of this nihilistic instinct, because of its potential to dismantle a natural-law-based, Judeo-Christian Civilization. Monogamous, heterosexual, child-centered marriage is the building block of the Left-detested real world it is bent on annihilating.

[...]

A ruling that declares the State to be indifferent to the fruit of the family has struck the heart of the Left’s enemy. The practical conclusion is that self-contained gratification is of equal value as children.

Nihilism is advanced by the homosexual marriage debate because it affords the Left with “proof” of the evils of America. Far from being superior to other cultures, we still persecute the “other,” we are shown to be religious obscurantists, bigots, and even hypocrites since we criticize Islamic countries in which homosexuals are hung, but outlaw homosexual marriage. The Left deftly convinces Americans that only by shedding their traditional morals will they demonstrate true enlightenment, freedom, and what we heretofore falsely touted as national respect for freedom. (Link)

The nihilism inherent in homosexuality inevitably expresses itself in an enervated feminized society – regardless of how nice and clever and engaging it’s denizens are. And may I head off at the pass the accusation that by saying all of this, I am advocating for the eradication of gays. I most emphatically am not. But attempting to normalize an aberrant sexual behavior necessitates distorting reality to the point where the elitists now freely seek to convince us sheeple that there are no gender differences at all, as if by developing a “body of research” attached to a PHD is sufficient voodoo to belie reality.

The power of the Leftist culture lies in the illusion of its undisputed veracity.This illusion needs to be shattered.

(Link)

PDX 911 Truth on Frankfurt School Cultural Marxism in America from rcoones on Vimeo.

Valdas Anelauskas lives now in the USA having been driven out of his home country (Lithuania), under political exile, and is doing his best to expose the Frankfurt School and Cultural Marxism and how it is being implemented here in the USA.

He states in one of his writings:

“Today, reflecting on the time when we first arrived here, I realize how naive I was. Or perhaps ignorant. I really believed that the United States of America was a democratic and free country. Moreover, I imagined it to be a highly advanced and progressive nation, maybe even the most civilized country on earth in history. How foolish of me!”

He points out that many of the Marxist plans and ideology he saw in the USSR are actually happening here in the USA within popular social movements …. having different names but Marxist never the less. Most have no idea it is happening. Cultural Marxism is very much alive here and the plan is being carried out here and now. The location of the presentation had to be changed twice at the last minute because of disrupters.

(Disclaimer: Views and opinions presented here are for informational and educational purposes only and may not necessarily be those of the makers of this video)

It’s been a long time since I posted one of my favourite poems, here for you to enjoy, one of Wislawa Szymborska’s.

A Few Words on the Soul
by Wislawa Szymborska
translated from the Polish by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh

We have a soul at times.
No one’s got it non-stop,
for keeps.

Day after day,
year after year
may pass without it.

Sometimes
it will settle for awhile
only in childhood’s fears and raptures.
Sometimes only in astonishment
that we are old.

It rarely lends a hand
in uphill tasks,
like moving furniture,
or lifting luggage,
or going miles in shoes that pinch.

It usually steps out
whenever meat needs chopping
or forms have to be filled.

For every thousand conversations
it participates in one,
if even that,
since it prefers silence.

Just when our body goes from ache to pain,
it slips off-duty.

It’s picky:
it doesn’t like seeing us in crowds,
our hustling for a dubious advantage
and creaky machinations make it sick.

Joy and sorrow
aren’t two different feelings for it.
It attends us
only when the two are joined.

We can count on it
when we’re sure of nothing
and curious about everything.

Among the material objects
it favors clocks with pendulums
and mirrors, which keep on working
even when no one is looking.

It won’t say where it comes from
or when it’s taking off again,
though it’s clearly expecting such questions.

We need it
but apparently
it needs us
for some reason too.

Isn’t that fabulous? So simple on the surface, so deep below.

A British soprano, Kate Royal, who I had not heard of before tonight, sings Bailerou from Canteloube’s Songs of the Auverne.

Since I don’t have time to post tonight I thought I’d leave you with something more pleasant than the crappy political news that abounds these days.

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And this I can’t resist, a video of Susan Boyle at age 22.

If there was ever any question, she’s always had talent. In a 25-year-old video that recently surfaced, a fresh-faced Susan Boyle – just 22 at the time – takes the stage at a local Scottish club looking trim and youthful.

In the clip from Scotland’s Daily Record, the Britain’s Got Talent star sings “I Don’t Know How to Love Him” from Jesus Christ Superstar and Barbra Streisand’s “The Way We Were” in the Motherwell FC’s Fir Park Social Club singing contest. Boyle, now 47, had been a late addition to the local singing team, Coventry Tam O’Shanter, after someone had dropped out.

“I can remember that she was a shy young girl, but also very attractive back then – she turned a few heads when she came into the club,” school caretaker Gerry McGuinness, 61, told the Daily Record of her appearance, 10 years before she would take singing lessons. He was there for the performance and dug up an old tape after seeing Boyle on TV more recently.

“Even back then, I don’t think anyone expected too much from her because she was so shy, but when she began singing people took notice,” he said. “It’s great Susan is finally getting some recognition. She is a great singer and it seems right that at some point she would get the credit she deserved.”

H/T People.

Susan Boyle mania has swept the world! From The Times, a recording Susan made ten years ago of Cry Me a River has surfaced. It’s a mystery how someone didn’t recognise her talent years ago.

I have thought that the major part of what made Eutopia pacifist was the protection afforded by the US Military, freeing them from the expense of providing for their own defense and allowing them to indulge in Socialist welfare statism and feel good smug superiority over the cowboys standing on guard against the Soviet Communists, much like the thirty something ‘man’ living in his mom’s basement. Seems like that might have been just an enabler of sorts but not a cause of the Eu disease of emasculation and impotence.

I came across Life on Venus: Europe’s Last Man by Adam Kirsch via ALDaily and though it’s longish it’s well worth the time spent if you want a superb analysis through Nietsche’s Zarathustra, Fukuyama and three of the greatest Eu novelists of the last fifty years, Ian McEwan, W G Sebald and Michel Houellebecq.

The twentieth century, of course, did not turn out to be the age of the Last Man after all. The two world wars and the global violence of the Cold War demonstrated to anyone’s satisfaction that irrationality and cruelty, which Nietzsche feared were dwindling resources, still flourished in abundance just underneath the thin crust of modern civilization. But then came 1989 and the end of history—or at least The End of History and the Last Man, as Francis Fukuyama put it in his influential book. It is almost always referred to simply by the first part of its title; to his critics, Fukuyama is the man who declared “the end of history,” triumphally and, needless to say, prematurely.

But the second part of the book’s title is actually more telling, and more representative of Fukuyama’s argument. No sooner had humanity emerged from a century of hot and cold wars than Fukuyama was resurrecting Nietzsche’s admonition that a world of peace and prosperity would be a world of Last Men. “The life of the last men is one of physical security and material plenty, precisely what Western politicians are fond of promising their electorates,” he pointed out. “Should we fear that we will be both happy and satisfied with our situation, no longer human beings but animals of the species homo sapiens?”

While Fukuyama appreciates the seriousness of the Nietzschean warning, he hears it from the perspective of a partisan, not a foe, of liberalism. The danger he foresees is not simply that bourgeois democracy will cause human beings to degenerate, but that degenerate human beings will be unable to preserve democracy. Without the sense of pride and the love of struggle that Fukuyama, following Plato, calls thymos, men—and there is always an implication that thymos is a specifically masculine virtue—cannot establish freedom or protect it:

That’s a taste of what the article is about. It is interesting to one such as me who doesn’t have time to read novels anymore to have reconfirmed Milan Kundera’s assertion in The Art of the Novel, one of my favourite books by the way, that the novel was invented to say what philosophy, because of its technical nature, could not about history and the human condition.