Some years ago, more than I care to recount, I served at the US Mission to the UN. Years later, again, more than I care to count, I served at the US Mission to the OAS. Much of the work involved fighting over obscure resolutions and parsing words, trying to wring every possible definition and interpretation out of words. To some observers, this exercise struck them as silly, as obscure as some Talmudic scholars arguing over the meaning of some forgotten phrase in the bible. It was certainly easy to ridicule it; I, however, soon discovered that this was far from silly or “just academic” posturing. Words have meaning, and the left is very good at ever so subtly altering the meaning of words so that over time those words no longer mean what they meant. Words, of course, are the bullets of intellectual debate. If you allow your opponent to select your ammo for you, well, let’s just say you are at a disadvantage.
Gee. I hope this dude isn’t serious. Because it’d be a shame for him to learn just how fundamentally unserious such linguistic and hermeneutic concerns are, particularly when the calculations needed to fully understand it won’t fit on a whiteboard, or fail the test of “conservative” pragmatism and realism, which seems to be twofold: 1) can we express it with a bumpersticker, and 2) how many moderates will it bring us in the next election cycle?
Ideas, kernel assumptions, animating principle, the fundamentals of thought that promote, organically, a conservative epistemology — these are for suckers with too much time on their hands. Philosophy doesn’t win elections. Hair and teeth and and pandering — coupled with never, ever tying your dog to a car roof — these are things that do.
So go back to your books, eggheads. The consultants have some phrases they need to focus group, and they can’t be bothered by your futile abstractions that the masses are far too dumb to ever fully understand anyway.
Clown nose off.
(thanks to geoff b, who recognized in the excerpted bit a certain…similarity to things he’s read before. Though neither of us can quite place exactly where)
Welfare.
Healthcare. As a right.
Free public education.
Social Security.
The Federal Reserve.
The Department of Health and Human Services.
ad infinitum.
And the left solely owns the high moral ground because they can hide behind the projected appearances of these utter failures, to a department, to an agency, and nearly to a man.
Yet reality conflicts the left’s super ego every time:
And it still limped on for 519 years in the West, which is longer than we’ve been around, in any form, and in the East they rode that trend for another 977 years after Odoacer had “the little Augustsus” packed off into retirement somewhere.
So lets not overplay the Roman card. Like Adam Smith said, there’s a lot of ruin in a nation. Twenty years (give or take) and six volumes worth is what Smith’s contemporary Edward Gibbon found.
I think it’s possible to argue that the British Empire did not actually go the way of the Egyptians, the Romans, the Ottomans or the Hapsburgs because one of its “colonies” rose up and took its place before it reached the “tipping point”. So we get to experience the effects instead…
I think he read it in an Egret’s sand scratchings…
I was reading this earlier and thought of you, Jeff.
Silly GOP! The moderates will never vote for you because they are leftists and do not actually want a half ass approach to leftism. They regard you as congenitally unclean. You exist for them to heap their own guilt upon. You are a magical scape goat to absorb their every failure. They lead you on to suppress the turn out of your own base, who you intemperately screwed over for empty promises of false affection, and who now justifiably revile you as treacherous, addled, weaklings of no account.
Right.
Rather, let’s relate manifestations of Roman collapse in the passage quoted to today’s parallels.
Or we can play the good socialism vs bad socialism game in order to gauge principles not intellectually, but by their argurable durability in what are perpetually failing empires, the parallel to which is that familiar relativism and revisionism the left would use just as easily and to just as true an effect.
On a short enough timeline even Krugman is right: There is no debt if yesterday there was that debt and we survived it just fine. Krugman knows relativity and longevity matter.
All I know is whether Rome or chopped liver, it all comes out the same in the end when the front end follows patterns so familiar that if we wanted, we could textbook them.
I’m not sure what good the failure-bound policies of empires are except to define themselves.
“So lets not overplay the Roman card.”
Yeah, the barbarians at the gate then didn’t have nukes…
The British Empire did not peak until the end of the 19th century, long after the United States was no longer a colony. The United States didn’t become the biggest emoire on the block until sometime in the 20th century. When depends on what metrics you want to use, but it certainly wasn’t any later than 1942.
Yes, it is true that all nations contain a lot of ruin. The magic that the United States had was that this ruin was embraced under the penumbra of creative destruction so that any failure — nay, any success — was on the road to obsolescence before long. Sadly the creative part is being quickly strangled out of our nature and with it the will and ability to move beyond the ruins. Who can envision an urban revitalization plan for Detroit? And yet, cities like San Francisco, Chicago and London have been rebuilt from the ruins. It certainly isn’t a lack of knowledge that keeps us from succeeding.
At what point in our colonization of the rest of the galaxy will someone christen a freshly peopled city or planet New Detroit?
And that thing about the barbarians at the gate, the Romans hired the barbarians as their mercenaries. They were inside the gate. Attila grew up in a Roman “court”.
As Will Durant said, “Civilizations are born stoic and die epicurean.” Wagyu beef and arugula anyone?
I can dig it, Charles…
Excellent point.
With apathy being the opposite of action – and best actions being indistinguishable from love – the inaction incumbent in apathy is effectively evil. Scholars consider the nature of historical evil to cite not it’s supervillain-like character, but its simple lack of imagination. From time to time a people surrender to a hating apathy that dooms them to the evils such dim, dismal organizations as theirs always exhibit.
Existence violates non-existence, action violates inaction, love violates apathy, and imagination violates the slothful selfishness marking the end of hope and humanity.
In this light Hope and Change™ was a load of carefully constructed marketspeak bullshit whose shameless, retailing, pandering audacity was exceeded only by its staggering corruption of what was left of the right and good, and of what’s proved to work when we already know what never shall.
If we can’t so much as revitalize a Detroit then it’s time to lay down, let the darkness come, and may the best of us one day struggle back to our feet. It’s probably the only way to get back to where we once were from here.
It’s really just sort of a paraphrase of the oft repeated Heinlein quote about bad luck.
Before I as thinking about San Francisco after the earthquake and Chicago and London after the fires, but think about London, Tokyo, Berlin and the hundreds, if not thousands, of other cities utterly destroyed during WWII. We only talking about two generations here and the damage Detroit — the physical Detroit — has endured is nothing compared to that. The problem is more like dry rot rather than existential trauma. It is soft power that has failed Detroit, the progressive politics and financial mismanagement that no amount of money in a bailout will fix. It is clear from what has been published that the people inside the city still refuse to admit the nature of their problem. Like all addicts they will have to hit bottom before they can get clean. And that bottom is going to be very ugly. The only question is how many more Detroits and San Bernardino’s are we going to have before the first state fails. The dominos will then fall very quickly.
It is clear from what has been published that the people inside the city still refuse to admit the nature of their problem.
what do you think is their problem?
Democrats, nr.
If I had to point to one single problem that is bringing us all down, it would be public unions. Outlaw those, and we might have a chance.
Of course that isn’t going to happen, so we don’t have a chance.
Sometimes history repeats itself in a sort of negative image way. Maybe Obama sees himself as a modern day Diocletian — more bureaucracy, more taxes, ideological persecutions, a Persian-style imperiousness.
Democrats,tribalists but same differenceExactly.
too bad for detroit their tribes are economic losers
You should read the whole thing at the link Jeff G. has up above.
And the next post is good also.
oh i read that post. i was just wondering how you unwind the detroit “tribe”. have the “takers tribe” utterly overwhelmed the “makers tribe” that collapse is the only option?
my solution is that the state of michigan start taking over sections of detroit , walling it off from detroit, and starting all over. just keeping pushing the cancer to a smaller area.
Sheesh, geoff that’s bad. I mean, really bad, incoherent bullshit.
OT: In an earlier thread I mentioned this executive order from Obama, one of two, that was reported thus.
What they are saying is BS. The whole reason for these “trusts” aka “corporations is the federal rule that for an individual to own a class III item they must in addition to the fingerprints and an FBI background check, one much more rigorous than the usual gun buying background check, you have to have your local Chief law enforcement officer sign off on your obtaining the item and in quite a few areas the CLEO will not sign off on anyone thus overriding and laws all by themselves and banning these guns and other items.
Trusts don’t have to have the CLEO sign-off and so they have been used to get around an obstructive mini-tyrant’s misrule. Here is a rundown of the issue and what is known so far.
Déjà vu
LBascom @ 5:26
Just remove from public unions the ability to collect dues to be used for political purposes. It has worked in Wisconsin.
It is soft power that has failed Detroit, the progressive politics and financial mismanagement that no amount of money in a bailout will fix. It is clear from what has been published that the people inside the city still refuse to admit the nature of their problem. –
First, the City needs to realize that the solution will NOT come from the city government. No amount of “city revitalization” plans will work. Free market unleashed is the only thing that will help. Grants, and this and that? They always end up going to friends, etc, and half of that shit ends up buying someone a vacation home in Florida.
The train station is a marvelous example It was BEAUTIFUL. The city decided to put it where it did because “they” wanted the city to grow in that direction.
It never did. Ever. That train station has always stood out there by itself. It’s floors of offices never rented to anyone. I don’t think any but the first few bottom floors EVER were occupied.
Politicians make horrible decisions. They simply have no clue. Kinda like how they’re now building that train to run Woodward. @@. From 8 (or 9?) mile to the city. As if ANYONE in their right mind would leave their car in a lot on 8 mile.
I have an eloquent refutation of this right on the tip of my mind. A few mint juleps and a grasshopper, and I might be bothered to put it ink to paper, so to speak.
I don’t know Mueller, that might be a start to getting rid of them, but not the solution. The problem with public unions is they are engaging in a conflict of interest when they negotiate their contract, basically against the people.
Here is a good treatment of the subject, as they say, read the whole thing, but a good pull quote:
Kinda on the same topic — Sonny Bunch: Do Glenn Greenwald’s Supporters Ever Get Tired of Being Lied To?
Oh, but there’s nothing to see here. Now move along.
Not ridiculous, it’s a feature, the main feature of progressiveism. A quote I’ve used a number of times before:
That the Democrats have unionized this to turn it into a money machine to get elected is just a wonderful side benefit that has made the expansion easier, faster, but the essence is the bureaucracy itself.
If anything we should be thankful for the unionization, as that overreach has exposed this design, to transfer real power to the unelected and unfire-able, while there is still a chance for the frog to jump out of the hot water.
“If anything we should be thankful for the unionization”
I gotta disagree. I mean I think I see your point, but I don’t think unionization merely revealed the plan, but actually enabled it. As in, made it possible.
Also, this Syria thing is getting funny.
“Sonny Bunch: Do Glenn Greenwald’s Supporters Ever Get Tired of Being Lied To? – See more at: https://proteinwisdom.com/?p=50753#comment-1013506”
See, I am now at the point where I am more likely to take the word of Glenn Greenwald than I am to take the word of e.g. the NSA.
Likely that makes me even more of a Bush authoritarian-cultist. Them’s the breaks.
newrouter, I should have said problems rather than problem. There isn’t just one. Start with valuing perception over reality, permanent one party rule, identity politics, fiscal mismanagement, and corruption. I’m sur eyou can add on from there.