Social Degeneration

[philunderwood]

Social Degeneration: Part II

By Thomas Sowell

www.JewishWorldReview.com |

Although much of the media have their antennae out to pick up anything that might be construed as racism against blacks, they resolutely ignore even the most blatant racism by blacks against others.

That includes a pattern of violent attacks on whites in public places in Chicago, Denver, New York, Milwaukee, Philadelphia, Los Angeles and Kansas City, as well as blacks in schools beating up Asian classmates — for years — in New York and Philadelphia.

These attacks have been accompanied by explicitly racist statements by the attackers, so it is not a question of having to figure out what the motivation is. There has also been rioting and looting by these young hoodlums.

Yet blacks have no monopoly on these ugly and malicious episodes. Remarkably similar things are being done by lower-class whites in England. Anybody reading "Life at the Bottom" by Theodore Dalrymple will recognize the same barbaric and self-destructive patterns among people with the same attitudes, even though their skin color is different.

Anyone reading today's headline stories about young hoodlums turning the streets of London into scenes of shattered and burning chaos, complete with violence, will discover the down side of the brotherhood of man.

While the history and the races are different, what is the same in both countries are the social policies and social attitudes long promoted by the intelligentsia and welfare state politicians.

A recent study in England found 352,000 households in which nobody had ever worked. Moreover, two-thirds of the adults in those households said that they didn't want to work. As in America, such people feel both "entitled" and aggrieved.

In both countries, those who have achieved less have been taught by the educational system, by the media and by politicians on the left that they have a grievance against those who have achieved more. As in the United States, they feel a fierce sense of resentment against strangers who have done nothing to them, and lash out violently against those strangers.

During the riots, looting and violence in England, a young woman was quoted as saying that this showed "the rich" and the police that "we can do whatever we want." Among the things done during these riots was forcing apparently prosperous looking people to strip naked in the streets.

The need to bring people down in humiliation that marked the mass violence against the Armenians in Turkey nearly a century ago, and that later marked the Nazi persecutions of the Jews in Germany, is still alive and well in people who resent those who have achieved more than they have.

A milder but revealing episode in England some time back involved burglars who were not content to simply steal things but also vented their hostility by scrawling on the wall: "RICH BASTARDS."

In the United States, young black thugs attacked whites with baseball bats and took their belongings in Denver, while voicing their hatred of whites. But it is all a very similar attitude to what has been found in other countries and other times.

Today's politically correct intelligentsia will tell you that the reason for this alienation and lashing out is that there are great disparities and inequities that need to be addressed.

But such barbarism was not nearly as widespread two generations ago, in the middle of the 20th century. Were there no disparities or inequities then? Actually there were more.

What is different today is that there has been — for decades — a steady drumbeat of media and political hype about differences in income, education and other outcomes, blaming these differences on oppression against those with fewer achievements or lesser prosperity.

Moreover, there has been a growing tolerance of lawlessness and a growing intolerance toward the idea that people who are lagging need to take steps to raise themselves up, instead of trying to pull others down.

All this exalts those who talk such lofty talk. But others pay the price — and ultimately that includes even those who take the road toward barbarism.

[philunderwood]

Social Degeneration: Part III

By Thomas Sowell

www.JewishWorldReview.com |

The orgies of violent attacks against strangers on the streets — in both England and the United States — are not necessarily just passing episodes. They should be wake-up calls, warning of the continuing degeneration of Western society.

As British doctor and author Theodore Dalrymple said, long before these riots broke out, "the good are afraid of the bad and the bad are afraid of nothing."

Not only the trends over the years leading up to these riots but also the squeamish responses to them by officials — on both sides of the Atlantic — reveal the moral dry rot that has spread deep into Western societies.

Even when black youth gangs target white strangers on the streets and spew out racial hatred as they batter them and rob them, mayors, police chiefs and the media tiptoe around their racism and many in the media either don't cover these stories or leave out the race and racism involved.

In England, the government did not call out the troops to squash their riots at the outset. The net result was that young hoodlums got to rampage and loot for hours, while the police struggled to try to contain the violence. Hoodlums returned home with loot from stores with impunity, as well as bringing home with them a contempt for the law and for the rights of other people.

With all the damage that was done by these rioters, both to cities and to the whole fabric of British society, it is very unlikely that most of the people who were arrested will be sentenced to jail. Only 7 percent of people convicted of crime in England are actually put behind bars.

"Alternatives to incarceration" are in vogue among the politically correct elites in England, just as in the United States. But in Britain those elites have had much more clout for a much longer time. And they have done much more damage.

Nevertheless, our own politically correct elites are pointing us in the same direction. A headline in the New York Times shows the same politically correct mindset in the United States: "London Riots Put Spotlight on Troubled, Unemployed Youths in Britain." There is not a speck of evidence that the rioters and looters are troubled — unless you engage in circular reasoning and say that they must have been troubled to do the things they did.

In reality, like other rioters on both sides of the Atlantic they are often exultant in their violence and happy to be returning home with stolen designer clothes and upscale electronic devices.

In both England and in the United States, whole generations have been fed a steady diet of grievances and resentment against society, and especially against others who are more prosperous than they are. They get this in their schools, on television, on campuses and in the movies. Nothing is their own fault. It is all "society's" fault.

One of the young Britons interviewed in the New York Times reported that he had learned to read only three years ago. He is not unique. In Theodore Dalrymple's book, "Life at the Bottom," he referred to many British youths who are unashamedly illiterate. The lyrics of a popular song in Britain said, "We don't need no education" and another song was titled "Poor, White and Stupid."

Dr. Dalrymple says, "I cannot recall meeting a sixteen-year-old white from the public housing estates that are near my hospital who could multiple nine by seven."

In the United States, the color may be different but the attitudes among the hoodlum element are very similar. In both countries, classmates who try to learn can find themselves targeted by bullies.

Here those who want to study in ghetto schools are often accused of "acting white." But whites in Britain show the same pattern. Some conscientious students are beaten up badly enough to end up at Dr. Dalrymple's hospital.

Our elites often advise us to learn from other countries. They usually mean that we should imitate other countries. But it may be far more important to learn from their mistakes — the biggest of which may be listening to fashionable nonsense from the smug intelligentsia.

These countries show us where that smug nonsense leads. It may be a sneak preview of our own future.

"Send not to know for whom the bell tolls. It tolls for thee."

[philunderwood]

Depraved but not deprived

By Mark Steyn

www.JewishWorldReview.com |

Unlike many of my comrades in the punditry game, I don't do a lot of TV. But I'm currently promoting my latest doom-mongering bestseller so I'm spending more time than usual on the telly circuit. This week I was on the BBC's current-affairs flagship "Newsnight." My moment in the spotlight followed a report on the recent riots in English cities, in the course of which an undercover reporter interviewed various rioters from Manchester who'd had a grand old time setting their city ablaze and expressed no remorse over it. There then followed a studio discussion, along the usual lines. The host introduced a security guard who'd fought for Queen and country in Afghanistan and Bosnia and asked whether he sympathized with his neighbors. He did. When you live in an "impoverished society," he said, "people do what they have to do to survive."

When we right-wing madmen make our twice-a-decade appearance on mainstream TV, we're invariably struck by how narrow are the bounds of acceptable discourse in polite society. But in this instance I was even more impressed by how liberal pieties triumph even over the supposed advantages of the medium. Television, we're told, favors strong images – Nixon sweaty and unshaven, Kennedy groomed and glamorous, etc. But, in this instance, the security guard's analysis, shared by three-quarters of the panel, was entirely at odds with the visual evidence: There was no "impoverished society." The preceding film had shown a neat subdivision of pleasant red-brick maisonettes set in relatively landscaped grounds. There was grass, and it looked maintained. Granted, it was not as bucolic as my beloved New Hampshire, but, compared to the brutalized concrete bunkers in which the French and the Swedes entomb their seething Muslim populations, it was nothing to riot over. Nonetheless, someone explained that these riotous Mancunian youth were growing up in "deprivation," and the rioters themselves seemed disposed to agree. Like they say in "West Side Story," "I'm depraved on account of I'm deprived." We've so accepted the correlation that we don't even notice that they're no longer deprived, but they are significantly more depraved.

In fact, these feral youth live better than 90 percent of the population of the planet. They certainly live better than their fellow youths halfway around the world who go to work each day in factories across China and India to make the cool electronic toys young Westerners expect to enjoy as their birthright. In Britain, as in America and Europe, the young take it for granted that this agreeable division of responsibilities is as permanent a feature of life as the earth and sky: Rajiv and Suresh in Bangalore make the state-of-the-art gizmo, Kevin and Ron in Birmingham get to play with it. That's just the way it is. And, because that's the way it is, Kevin and Ron and the welfare state that attends their every need assume 'twill always be so.

To justify their looting, the looters appealed to the conventional desperation-of-deprivation narrative: They'd "do anything to get more money." Anything, that is, except get up in the morning, put on a clean shirt and go off to do a day's work. That concept is all but unknown to the homes in which these guys were raised. Indeed, "Newsnight" immediately followed the riot discussion with a report on immigration to Britain from Eastern Europe. Any tourist in London quickly accepts that, unless he hails a cab or gets mugged, he will never be served by a native Londoner: Polish baristas, Balkan waitresses, but, until the mob shows up to torch his hotel, not a lot of Cockneys. A genial Member of Parliament argued that the real issue underlying the riots is "education and jobs," but large numbers of employers seem to have concluded that, if you've got a job to offer, the best person to give it to is someone with the least exposure to a British education.

The rioters, meanwhile, have a crude understanding of how the system works. The proprietor of a Bang & Olufsen franchise revealed that the looters had expressed mystification as to why he objected to them stealing his goods. After all, he was insured, wasn't he? So the insurance would pay for his stolen TVs and DVD players, wouldn't it? The notion that, ultimately, someone has to pay for the insurance seemed to elude them, in the same way it seems to elude our elites that ultimately someone has to pay for Britain's system of "National Insurance" – or what Canada calls "Social Insurance" and America calls "Social Security."

The problem for the Western world is that it has incentivized nonproductivity on an industrial scale. For large numbers at the lower end of the spectrum (still quaintly referred to by British reporters as "working class") the ritual of work – of lifetime employment as a normal feature of life – has been all but bred out by multigenerational dependency. At the upper end of the spectrum, too many of us seem to regard an advanced Western society as the geopolitical version of a lavishly endowed charitable foundation that funds somnolent programming on NPR. I was talking to a trustiefundie Vermont student the other day who informed me her ambition is to "work for a non-profit."

"What kind of ambition is that?" I said, a little bewildered. But she meant it, and so do most of her friends. Doesn't care particularly what kind of "non-profit" it is: As long as no profits are involved, she's eager to run up a six-figure college debt for a piece of the non-action. The entire state of Vermont is becoming a non-profit. And so in a certain sense is an America that's 15 trillion dollars in the hole, and still cheerfully spending away.

In between the non-profit class and the non-working class, we have diverted too much human capital into a secure and undemanding bureaucracy-for-life: President Barack Obama has further incentivized statism as a career through his education "reforms," under which anyone who goes into "public service" will have their college loans forgiven after 10 years.

Why?

As I point out in my book, in the last six decades the size of America's state and local government workforce has increased over three times faster than the general population. Yet Obama says it's still not enough: The bureaucracy needs even more of our manpower. Up north, Canada is currently undergoing a festival of mawkish sub-Princess Di grief-feasting over the death from cancer of the Leader of Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition. Jack Layton's career is most instructive. He came from a family of successful piano manufacturers – in 1887 H A Layton was presented with a prize for tuning by Queen Victoria's daughter. But by the time Jack came along the family's private-sector wealth-creation gene had been pretty much tuned out for good: He was a career politician, so is his wife, and his son. They're giving him a state funeral because being chair of the Federation of Canadian Municipalities and the Toronto Renewable Energy Co-operative is apparently more admirable than being chairman of Layton Bros Pianos Ltd.

Again: Why?

The piano manufacturer pays for the Federation of Canadian Municipalities, not the other way round. The private sector pays for the Vermont non-profits and the Manchester rioters and the entire malign alliance of the statism class and the dependency class currently crushing the Western world. America, Britain, Canada and Europe are operating on a defective business model: Not enough of us do not enough productive work for not enough of our lives. The numbers are a symptom, but the real problem, in the excuses for Manchester, in the obsequies in Ottawa, in the ambitions of Vermont, is the waste of human capital.

[philunderwood]

Politics turns dangerously rougher

By Tony Blankley

www.JewishWorldReview.com |

In the past few weeks, leading Democrats in Congress have called Tea Party members terrorists, said they should go to hell and accused them of wanting to lynch black people. Last weekend at an event attended by President Obama, the head of the Teamsters Union, Jimmy Hoffa Jr., attacked the Tea Party, screaming, "President Obama, this is your army. We are ready to march. Let's take these sons of bitches [Tea Party members] out and give America back to an America where we belong." (Note: The president was not on the platform when Mr. Hoffa spoke.)

So far, neither the president nor any prominent Democrat has condemned such remarks - even though the phrase "take out" is commonly used to describe an act of criminal homicide. Thus, Mr. Hoffa's statement might rise to the level of incitement to violence.

Of course, the First Amendment protects political speech - even obnoxious and abusive language. But the Supreme Court has always recognized that some words are not protected. Thus, in Virginia v. Black (2003),the Supreme Court found that while "The First Amendment affords protection to symbolic or expressive conduct as well as to actual speech ... the protections afforded by the First Amendment, however, are not absolute, and we have long recognized that the government may regulate certain categories of expression consistent with the Constitution." Thus, for example, a state may punish those words that "by their very utterance inflict injury or tend to incite an immediate breach of the peace," the court said in Brandenburg v. Ohio (1969). And the First Amendment also permits a state to ban a "true threat." Such speech encompasses those statements in which the speaker means to communicate a serious expression of an intent to commit an act of unlawful violence to a particular individual or group of individuals. (Political hyperbole is not a "true threat.") The speaker need not actually intend to carry out the threat. Rather, the court said, a prohibition on true threats "protect* individuals from the fear of violence" and "from the disruption that fear engenders," in addition to protecting people "from the possibility that the threatened violence will occur."

Tea Party members could reasonably feel fear of violence from union activists after Mr. Hoffa's call to "take out" Tea Party members. Given the history of violence associated with unions in general and the Teamsters in particular. (Mr. Hoffa's father, also president of Teamsters, is widely believed to have been murdered by fellow Teamsters.) Of course, both the Michigan attorney general and the U.S. attorney general would need to assess the specific statutes to see whether Mr. Hoffa's words are criminally proscribed. (Yes, I know it is unlikely that Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. would follow this suggestion - more's the pity.)

Whether Mr. Hoffa's words are criminal or not, the emerging tone of the Democratic Party regarding the Tea Party is ominous with the use of words like "terrorist," "lynching," "go to hell," "take them out." It is the language of murderous violence, and it is targeted at a specific group of people. Most disturbing is the failure of Democratic Party leaders to condemn such language, including the chairman of the Democratic National Committee, Debbie Wasserman Schultz. On national television, she specifically and repeatedly evaded any comment on Mr. Hoffa's statement. No president or other party leader can be held responsible for the utterances of all of his political colleagues, nor can he be expected to respond to every intemperate word. But when the words are by other party leaders themselves and are nationally reported, a moral obligation arises to condemn such language.

One would have to be stubbornly blind and deaf to the current mood not to sense that the nation is moving toward one of the most combustible moments in our political history. We've had three years of economic hard times, deep and perhaps unprecedented national pessimism regarding both the present and the future, angry polarization of political attitudes - and elements of senior leadership of the Democratic Party that, by its silence, might seem to be assenting to such expressions. All of this comes as we enter an always emotional national election campaign.

It is a commonplace to observe that we rarely appreciate the value of what we have until we lose it. And despite all our current difficulties, America has been - and remains - blessed with a nonviolent political and electoral process. We should cling to that tradition with both hands because Americans are generally a rough and ready people. That we have kept violence largely out of our political process can thus almost be seen as providential. We should not, however, rely on providence in that regard. Keeping our politics peaceful is up to each of us - and I have never seen an upcoming political season more in need of our attention to that civic duty.

[philunderwood]

The Financial Mess in the US and Europe

By Walter Williams

www.JewishWorldReview.com |

What's the common thread between Europe's financial mess, particularly among the PIIGS (Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece and Spain), and the financial mess in the U.S.? That question could be more easily answered if we asked instead: What's necessary to cure the financial mess in Europe and the U.S.? If European governments and the U.S. Congress ceased the practice of giving people what they have not earned, budgets would be more than balanced. For government to guarantee a person a right to goods and services he has not earned, it must diminish someone else's right to what he has earned, simply because governments have no resources of their very own.

The first order of business in reaching a solution to the financial mess in Europe and the U.S. must be the recognition that governments have been doing a class of unsustainable things, mostly giving people special privileges and things that they have not earned. It's a matter of not simply what's good or bad for the beneficiaries but what its effect is on society at large and the welfare of a nation.

Take the understandably humane motivation to provide health care services for the medically indigent. If one is concerned about the health needs of a person, why shouldn't the government also provide him with resources for nutrition? Good health is not just medical services and food but a decent place to live. Furthermore, good health is a matter of not just physical well-being but mental well-being as well, so why not have government-sponsored vacations? That's not such a far-fetched idea as one might imagine. Antonio Tajani, the European commissioner for industry and entrepreneurship, has declared vacationing to be a "human right."

Growing social spending in the name of health is just one example of a much larger process affecting the whole of our societies. There's a process that we might call contagion, in which spending automatically and unavoidably breeds more spending. For example, if government provides subsidies for wheat farmers, corn farmers will organize and protest that it's unfair not to grant them subsidies. What case can be made for government's not granting subsidies to all farmers? Then there's contagion across borders. If European farmers get subsidies, American farmers are going to demand subsidies to "even the playing field." How about government bailouts? There's contagion there as well. If Congress bails out General Motors, what's the justification for not also bailing out Chrysler and JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Fannie Mae, AIG, Citigroup and other failed enterprises? Bailouts are contagious both in the short and the long run. Bailouts create what's known as a moral hazard, in which people have reduced incentive to mend their ways.

The bottom line is that the sole tendency of the welfare state is for it to grow and consume more and more of a nation's income. According to "Measuring the Unfunded Obligations of European Countries" (January 2009), by the Dallas-based National Center for Policy Analysis, by 2050, the average EU country will need more than 60 percent of its gross domestic product to fulfill its obligations. According to the 2008 Social Security and Medicare trustees reports, the combined unfunded liability of just these two government programs has reached $101.7 trillion in today's dollars.

It turns out that if Congress taxed away our entire $14 trillion 2011 GDP and put it in the bank, it would just barely cover Social Security and Medicare liabilities. That observation suggests that we can't tax our way out of our fiscal mess. In order to avoid permanent stagnation or total economic collapse, governments must start the process of reducing welfare spending. I wouldn't recommend cold turkey for a heroin addict, neither would I recommend cold turkey for all those people who have been addicted and made dependent upon government handouts. We must find a compassionate way to wean people off government.

[philunderwood]

America Wrongly Thinks Its Prosperity Can't End

By Mark Steyn

www.JewishWorldReview.com |

When the think-tank chappies ponder "decline," they tend to see it in geopolitical terms. Great powers gradually being shunted off the world stage have increasing difficulties getting their way: Itsy-bitsy colonial policing operations in dusty ramshackle outposts drag on for years and putter out to no obvious conclusion. If that sounds vaguely familiar, well, the State Department reported last month that the last Christian church in Afghanistan was razed to the ground in 2010. This intriguing factoid came deep within their "International Religious Freedom Report."

It is not, in any meaningful sense of that word, "international": For the past decade, Afghanistan has been a U.S. client state; its repulsive and corrupt leader is kept alive only by NATO arms; according to the World Bank, the Western military/aid presence accounts for 97 percent of the country's economy. American taxpayers have spent the best part of half a trillion dollars and lost many brave warriors in that benighted land, and all we have to show for it is a regime openly contemptuous of the global sugar daddy that created and sustained it. In another American client state, the Iraqi government is publicly supporting the murderous goon in Syria and supplying him with essential aid as he attempts to maintain his dictatorship. Your tax dollars at work.

As America sinks into a multitrillion-dollar debt pit, it is fascinating to listen to so many of my friends on the right fret about potential cuts to the Pentagon budget. The problem in Iraq and Afghanistan is not that we are spending insufficient money, but that so much of that money has been utterly wasted. Dominant powers often wind up with thankless tasks, but the trick is to keep it within budget: London administered the vast sprawling fractious tribal dump of Sudan with about 200 British civil servants for what, with hindsight, was the least-worst two-thirds of a century in that country's existence. These days I doubt 200 civil servants would be enough for the average branch office of the Federal Department of Community Organizer Grant Applications. Abroad as at home, the United States urgently needs to start learning how to do more with less.

As I said, these are more or less conventional symptoms of geopolitical decline: Great powers still go through the motions but increasingly ineffectually. But what the Council of Foreign Relations types often miss is that, for the man in the street, decline can be very pleasant.

In Britain, France, Spain and the Netherlands, the average citizen lives better than he ever did at the height of Empire. Today's Europeans enjoy more comfortable lives, have better health and take more vacations than their grandparents did. The state went into decline, but its subjects enjoyed immense upward mobility. Americans could be forgiven for concluding that, if this is "decline," bring it on.

But it's not going to be like that for the United States: unlike Europe, geopolitical decline and mass downward mobility will go hand in hand.

Indeed, they're already under way. Whenever the economy goes south, experts talk of the housing "bubble," the tech "bubble," the credit "bubble." But the real bubble is the 1950 "American moment," and our failure to understand that moments are not permanent. The United States emerged from the Second World War as the only industrial power with its factories intact and its cities not reduced to rubble, and assumed that that unprecedented pre-eminence would last forever: We would always be so far ahead and so flush with cash that we could do anything and spend anything, and we would still be No. 1. That was the thinking of Detroit's automakers when they figured they could afford to buy off the unions. The industrial powerhouse of 1950 is now a crime-ridden wasteland with a functioning literacy rate equivalent to West African basket-cases. And yes, Detroit is an outlier, but look at the assumptions its rulers made, and then wonder whether it will seem quite such an outlier in the future.

Take, for example, the complaints of the young Americans currently "occupying" Wall Street. Many protesters have told sympathetic reporters that "it's our Arab Spring." Put aside the differences between brutal totalitarian dictatorships and a republic of biennial elections, and simply consider it in economic terms: At the "Occupy" demonstrations, not-so-young college students are demanding that their tuition debt be forgiven. In Egypt, half the population lives in poverty; the country imports more wheat than any other nation on the planet, and the funds to do that will dry up in a couple months' time. They're worrying about starvation, not how to fund half a decade of Whatever Studies at Complacency U.

One sympathizes. When college tuition is $50,000 a year, you can't "work your way through college" – because, after all, an 18-year-old who can earn 50-grand a year wouldn't need to go to college, would he? Nevertheless, his situation is not the same as some guy halfway up the Nile living on $2 a day: One is a crisis of the economy, the other is a crisis of decadence. And, generally, the former are far easier to solve.

My colleague Rich Lowry correctly notes that many of the beleaguered families testifying on the "We are the 99%" websites have real problems. However, the "Occupy" movement has no real solutions, except more government, more spending, more regulation, more bureaucracy, more unsustainable lethargic pseudo-university with no return on investment, more more more of what got us into this hole. Indeed, for all their youthful mien, the protesters are as mired in America's post-war moment as their grandparents: One of their demands is for a trillion dollars in "environmental restoration." Hey, why not? It's only a trillion.

Beneath the allegedly young idealism are very cobwebbed assumptions about societal permanence. The agitators for "American Autumn" think that such demands are reasonable for no other reason than that they happen to have been born in America, and expectations that no other society in human history has ever expected are just part of their birthright. But a society can live on the accumulated capital of a glorious inheritance only for so long. And, in that sense, this bloodless, insipid revolution is just a somewhat smellier front for the sclerotic status quo.

Middle-class America is dying before our eyes: The job market is flat-lined, college fees soar ever upward, the property market is underwater, and Obamacare is already making medical provision both more expensive and more restrictive. That doesn't leave much else – although no doubt, as soon as they find something else, the statists will fix that, too. As more and more middle Americans are beginning to notice, they lead more precarious and vulnerable lives than did their blue-collar parents and grandparents without the benefit of college "education" and health "benefits." For poorer Americans, the prospects are even glummer, augmented by ever-grimmer statistics on obesity, childhood diabetes and much else. Potentially, this is not decline, but a swift devastating downward slide, far beyond what post-war Britain and Europe saw and closer to Peronist Argentina on a Roman scale.

It would be heartening if more presidential candidates understood the urgency. But there is a strange lack of boldness in most of their proposals. They, too, seem victims of that 1950 moment, and assumptions of its permanence.

[philunderwood]

Dr. Sanity
Shining a psychological spotlight on a few of the insanities of life

drsanity.blogspot.com/

Thursday, January 12, 2012

OCCUPIETY, EUROTRAGEDY, AND THE WORLDWIDE NARCISSISTIC CRISIS

Most people would agree, at least theoretically, that is is quite natural for parents to want to give their children a good life and even sacrifice in the present so that their children's future would be better than their own. Supposedly this is a key tenet of the American Dream.

But that's just an old-fashioned and outdated perspective. Under the auspices of Hope and Change, The American Dream is being transformed into cradle-to-grave dependence on the State. We have pius and (presumably) serious people occupying our cities demanding to be taken care of. All they want is free food, free housing, free education and so on. Not too much to ask of a free society, after all!

Their European counterparts, a few years ahead of them evolutionally, are rioting and are just a little pissed off that the gravy train is ending because they have run out of other people's money to spend on themselves.

Quelle Tragédie! A crisis of megalomaniacal proportions! A triumph of psychological denial!

If you want to understand how the extremely malignant form of entitled narcissism which is prevalent today--the same psychopathology, BTW, that got us into the current economic meltdown in this country and worldwide--then you need look no further than the following two articles.... It never has been about the children...it's all about MEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!

First, from Greece :
Children are being abandoned on Greece's streets by their poverty-stricken families who cannot afford to look after them any more.
Youngsters are being dumped by their parents who are struggling to make ends meet in what is fast becoming the most tragic human consequence of the Euro crisis.

Got that? This is a "tragic" consequence of the Euro crisis! That parents would abandon their small children, leaving them in the street because they can't afford to take care of them anymore.

The crisis is that these self-absorbed parents have always put their own needs and self-fulfillment and satisfaction above the needs of their children. Otherwise they would not be where they are. And, of course, by dumping the children on the streets, they are still doing so.

Who is responsible for their children except for them?

Then we have this, from the Annals of Occupiety:
A man is facing child cruelty charges after his 13-month-old daughter was found alone in a tent in the Occupy DC camp at McPherson Square.

This isn't the first instance of children's needs taking a remote second to the narcissistic antics of their loving, compassionate parents.

But..but...but, you might say, isn't "social justice" and all the leftist and Democratic bullsh**t propaganda (reference the ravings of Nancy Pelosi) all about the children??

No.

It's all about narcissism, victimhood, entitlement, self-indulgence, and the unwillingness to face the consequences of their own choices.

Sadly, children will suffer and there will not be much of a future for them when their parents are more interested in their own comfort and satisfying their every whim and desire.

We are in the midst of a worldwide narcissistic crisis; and, I can assure you that the consequences of this "tragedy" are going to be devastating to civilization.

- Diagnosed by Dr. Sanity

[philunderwood]

Dr. Sanity
Shining a psychological spotlight on a few of the insanities of life

Friday, January 27, 2012

THE LIBERAL SOLUTION: FOSTERING DEPENDENCE

The hysteria on the left regarding Newt Gingrich's calling President Obama the "Food Stamps President" and asserting that more people are no on food stamps than at any other time in history, is fascinating.

Tom Blumer says that Gingrich was factually correct, both narrowly and broadly, then goes on to document why. Blumer cites Gingrich's response to the Food Stamp question and the resulting charge of "racism" leveled at him:
When conservatives care about the poor and conservatives offer ideas to help the poor, and conservatives suggest that the poor would rather have a paycheck than a food stamp, the very liberals who have failed them at places like the New York Times promptly scream “racism,” because they have no defense for the failure of liberal institutions which have trapped poor children in bad schools, trapped them in bad neighborhoods, trapped them in crime-ridden situations. Liberal solutions have failed, and their only answer is to cry “racism” and hide.

It used to be that "welfare" was thought of in this country as a compassionate and temporary means of supporting those in poverty, with the overall goal of helping them in various ways to get out of poverty and providing for themselves as quickly as possible. Gingrich's stark contrast between the "Paycheck vs Food Stamp" attitude reflects this attitude; and it also reflects the deeply held belief that welfare, particularly in the long run, has detrimental psychological effects on the recipients and can make them permanantly disabled.

Indeed, the primary psychological consequences of such long-term charity, especially for those who are aware on some level that they are not disabled, is the slow, steady erosion of genuine self-esteem and feelings of self-worth.

In typically pervere manner, the "progressive" political left has developed a strategy to cover that problem as they forge full steam ahead in creating a permanent class of people dependent on the State. In the same way that they have distorted "self esteem" in childhood development and hyped it to the point that it fosters and enables an unhealthy narcissism, they have managed to foster a narcissistic sense of entitlement in welfare recipients, by eliminating any sense that handouts are a negative thing; and neglecting to mention that they foster dependence, passivity and continued poverty.

No, everyone is ENTITLED to handouts. Poverty is just something bad that happens to them and not ever the result of bad choices on the recipient's part; but rather the result of greedy rich people taking away their share of the American pie--nothing more. And the solution is always--not private charity (how demeaning!), but state-sponsored redistribution of wealth.

Strange as it seems today, people used to object to being the objects of handouts and charity , and the concomitant pity and condescension that it implied; except perhaps in dire circumstances. They looked to their own extended families and friends; or their church for help.

You might put aside your sense of pride and accept it for a while but, again, the goal was to "get back on your feet" as soon as possible.

Not any longer!

In an article in the NY Times from exactly 1 year ago, we are informed that, "Once Stigmatized, Food Stamps Find Acceptance":
A decade ago, New York City officials were so reluctant to give out food stamps, they made people register one day and return the next just to get an application. The welfare commissioner said the program caused dependency and the poor were “better off” without it.

With millions of jobs lost and major industries on the ropes, America’s array of government aid — including unemployment insurance, food stamps and cash welfare — is being tested as never before. This series examines how the safety net is holding up under the worst economic crisis in decades.

Now the city urges the needy to seek aid (in languages from Albanian to Yiddish). Neighborhood groups recruit clients at churches and grocery stores, with materials that all but proclaim a civic duty to apply — to “help New York farmers, grocers, and businesses.” There is even a program on Rikers Island to enroll inmates leaving the jail.

“Applying for food stamps is easier than ever,” city posters say.

The same is true nationwide. After a U-turn in the politics of poverty, food stamps, a program once scorned as “welfare,” enjoys broad new support. Following deep cuts in the 1990s, Congress reversed course to expand eligibility, cut red tape and burnish the program’s image, with a special effort to enroll the working poor. These changes, combined with soaring unemployment, have pushed enrollment to record highs, with one in eight Americans now getting aid.

Commenting on the article, The Weekly Standard noted at the time:
As with any social program, there are many people on it who are indeed needy, but the article makes clear that the revival of food stamp popularity has more to do with state and local officials who are glad to curry favor with local constituents using federal dollars.

Since they're not paying for it, local officials and a network of aid organizations happily aid the federal government in recruiting more food-stamp recipients, regardless of how much they actually need the assistance. Meet Juan Diego Castro, who demonstrates how the system works:
Juan Diego Castro, 24, is a college graduate and Americorps volunteer whose immigrant parents warned him “not to be a burden on this country.” He has a monthly stipend of about $2,500 and initially thought food stamps should go to needier people, like the tenants he organizes. “My concern was if I’m taking food stamps and I have a job, is it morally correct?” he said.

But federal law eases eligibility for Americorps members, and a food bank worker urged him and fellow volunteers to apply, arguing that there was enough aid to go around and that use would demonstrate continuing need. “That meeting definitely turned us around,” Mr. Castro said.

Of course it is morally correct, Juan! Especially in this day and age. Dependence is GOOD! Accepting a handout shouldn't make you even in the slightest bit anxious or impact your fragile self-esteem at all! You are entitled to other people's money, even if you are able to support yourself now!

The Food Stamp program (or SNAP, or whatever it is called now) is not the only program that started out with a good premise intended to help people or make life a little easier. But somehow with programs like this it always ends up fostering dependence and making eventual independence a mere pipe dream.

Please don't misunderstand me. I am not saying that it is wrong in any way to help people in need. I am not saying that people who need help are bad. I am suggesting that the specific approach that has been favored by the political progressive left and the Democrats has serious, psychologically damaging consequences that lead to never-ending dependence, passivity, and continued poverty.

And that approach is to let the government do it, i.e., to use other people's money to redistribute wealth in the manner the progressives want. Donating to private charities is clearly UNprogressive. Witness their personal stinginess in this area: Romney gives 15% of his large income to charity, while Obama gives 1%. But Obama and those of his political persuasion believe they are better people because they want to give YOUR money away to help people. Romney to them (and to some deluded people on the right) is just another evil, money-grubbing capitalist.

Paychecks or Food Stamps? The Free Market or Crony Socialized Capitalism? Private charity or Government Redistribution of Wealth? Independence or Dependence? Obama-style hopeychangey or Real Hope and Real Change?

Two visions of where America should be heading couldn't be more sharply defined than these choices.

- Diagnosed by Dr. Sanity

[philunderwood]

drsanity.blogspot.com/

Dr. Sanity
Shining a psychological spotlight on a few of the insanities of life


Tuesday, April 03, 2012

A CULTURE OF LOSERS

From Wretchard at The Belmont Club:
Shortly before his death, the late Steve Jobs met President Obama at a dinner in California, where “each guest was asked to come with a question for the president.”

But as Steven P. Jobs of Apple spoke, President Obama interrupted with an inquiry of his own: what would it take to make iPhones in the United States?

Not long ago, Apple boasted that its products were made in America. Today, few are. Almost all of the 70 million iPhones, 30 million iPads and 59 million other products Apple sold last year were manufactured overseas.

Why can’t that work come home? Mr. Obama asked.

Mr. Jobs’s reply was unambiguous. “Those jobs aren’t coming back,” he said, according to another dinner guest.

The president’s question touched upon a central conviction at Apple. It isn’t just that workers are cheaper abroad. Rather, Apple’s executives believe the vast scale of overseas factories as well as the flexibility, diligence and industrial skills of foreign workers have so outpaced their American counterparts that “Made in the U.S.A.” is no longer a viable option for most Apple products.

That single exchange between President Obama and Steve Jobs summarizes the cumulative effect of the end of the Victory Culture. No only is America resigned to losing, its captains of industry are willing to tell President Obama to his face that it is no longer possible to win.....

How America went from a country which bestrode the world in 1945 to what one author called a post-Vietnam nation of “extraordinary losers” will puzzle historians far into the future. Perhaps it can be summarized in one phrase. Think small and elect smaller.

How did we become a culture of losers?

Here's a one word answer: Ineptocracy.

Ineptocracy (in-ep-toc'-ra-cy) - a system of government where the least capable to lead are elected by the least capable of producing, and where the members of society least likely to sustain themselves or succeed, are rewarded with goods and services paid for by the confiscated wealth of a diminishing number of producers.

That pretty much covers it.

- Diagnosed by Dr. Sanity

[philunderwood]

2012: A Referendum on Our National Character

By Arnold Ahlert

www.JewishWorldReview.com |

As I have said many times before, there are three types of Americans: the workers, the slackers and the fence-sitters. Inevitably the workers will always work, and the slackers will always be slackers. It is the fence-sitters who determine the overall tone of the nation. If more of them decide it is in their best interests to work, the nation is healthy. If they decide it's in their best interests to become slackers? Welcome to the essence of the 2012 election.

Who's kidding whom? Absent shame, which has receded in direct proportion to the increase in moral relativism, promoting such concepts as dignity, integrity and self-reliance has become a gargantuan task. Some Americans are old enough to remember when going on the dole was something one did only when every other option became untenable. And even then, a certain degree of lingering shame accompanied that choice, along with an equal amount of determination to change course and return to being productive as quickly as possible.

How quaint such ideas must seem to current generations of Americans, many of whom have been steeped in the idea that someone owes them something — for nothing, no less. A couple of sobering stats reveal where the nation is currently headed: last Thursday, the Congressional Budget Office revealed that 45 million people received Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits in 2011. That's a 70% increase from 2007. One in seven U.S. residents received food stamps last year.

The Social Security Administration revealed that a record 5.4 million workers and their dependents have signed up to collect federal disability checks since president Obama took office. As a result, the country now has 10.8 million people collecting disability payments, representing a 53 percent increase over the last ten years.

Now before the professional sob-sisters and brothers get wound up, let's stipulate that there are substantial numbers of both truly needy and truly disabled Americans. At the same time, lets reveal that the CBO has determined that even after the economy improves, the number of people receiving SNAP benefits "will remain high by historical standards," and that a study by economists David Autor and Mark Duggan notes that loosening of eligibility rules by Congress in 1984, the rise in disability benefits relative to wages, and the fact that more women have entered the workforce have contributed to the ever-growing number of "disabled" Americans.

The most revealing factor of the latter study? That would be the "rise in disability benefits relative to wages," which is a polite way of saying that, given the choice between working and "crazy," crazy is becoming an ever more attractive option — for the fence-sitters.

While there are an array of issues that divide America, almost all of them can be traced back to what constitutes the proper size of the social safety net. That includes national security, as anyone familiar with the phrase "guns and butter" understands. What further divides America is the idea that one political ideology bases its success on how many people are put on government programs, while the other one bases its success on how many people are taken off government programs.

For those wondering which ideology has been more successful — up to this point — the answer is quite simple: aside from the aforementioned records, we have become the most indebted nation in the history of the world. Sixteen trillion dollars of national debt, the lion's share of which has been spent on social programs, is the ultimate testament to two over-riding realities: one, no nation on earth has made a greater effort to eradicate poverty and take care of the truly disabled; and two, no nation on earth has made it easier to be "poor" and/or "disabled."

Now one might think that a headlong rush towards national insolvency would sober up even the most bleeding of bleeding hearts among us. One would be wrong. As mentioned above, once the nobler aspects of the human condition have been tossed on the ash heap of history, a nation is reduced to a couple of equally simple and over-riding concepts, as in, "everybody else is doing it, why not me," and its equally odious corollary, as in "screw everyone else, I'm getting mine." Add some flavoring currently known as the "ninety-nine percent versus the one percent" and every iota of rotten behavior is imbued with enough "social justice" to rationalize virtually anything.

It is remarkable how many Americans have become thoroughly convinced that there are more than enough workers — who will go on working no matter how onerous it becomes, no less — to underwrite all of the slackers, and ever-growing number of fence-sitters moving to their side of the ledger. It is far less remarkable that we have a president who would exploit such selfishness and ignorance by taking an American virtue, commonly known as the self-reliant, can-do attitude that has made us the envy of the world, and turn it into a vice, which is what Mr. Obama is doing when labels the alternative to his socialist/Marxist vision as an "on your own" society.

This is nothing less than a full-frontal assault on our national character. Or what used to be our national character until progressives convinced substantial numbers of Americans that success is something that should elicit feelings of envy, rather than admiration and a sense of aspiration. They have further convinced those same Americans that success can only be achieved at someone else's expense. Mitt Romney may not be everyone's first choice for president, but he is dead on when he says that if you punish success, you get less of it. What he hasn't said is that the opposite is true as well: when you reward sloth and envy, you get more of it.

Mr. Obama knows this, but he has an election to win and a country he desires to "fundamentally transform" in the process. That his particular vision of transformation has been played out countless times, leaving a trail of societal and economic destruction in its wake, reveals a level of cynicism and arrogance that appears bottomless. It is a cynicism based on the idea that most Americans are some combination of stupid and helpless, thereby requiring an ever-steady and ever-expanding bureaucracy to run their lives. It is an arrogance that looks at the historical record of destruction such an ideology invariably produces, and concludes that it was only because the wrong people were in charge.

In a time when most Americans had some sense of self-respect, a man appealing to peoples' baser instincts under the banner of social justice would be recognized for the charlatan he truly is. Perhaps that's what is at stake in 2012: whether a majority of Americans still retain any sense of self-respect and dignity, or whether they can be convinced that whatever goes wrong in their lives is someone else's fault.

Americans have always been their brother's keeper. Whether they are willing to be their brother's enabler — to the point of national suicide — remains to be seen.

[philunderwood]

Immoral Beyond Redemption

By Walter Williams

www.JewishWorldReview.com |

Benjamin Franklin, statesman and signer of our Declaration of Independence, said: "Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom. As nations become corrupt and vicious, they have more need of masters." John Adams, another signer, echoed a similar statement: "Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other." Are today's Americans virtuous and moral, or have we become corrupt and vicious? Let's think it through with a few questions.

Suppose I saw an elderly woman painfully huddled on a heating grate in the dead of winter. She's hungry and in need of shelter and medical attention. To help the woman, I walk up to you using intimidation and threats and demand that you give me $200. Having taken your money, I then purchase food, shelter and medical assistance for the woman. Would I be guilty of a crime? A moral person would answer in the affirmative. I've committed theft by taking the property of one person to give to another.

Most Americans would agree that it would be theft regardless of what I did with the money. Now comes the hard part. Would it still be theft if I were able to get three people to agree that I should take your money? What if I got 100 people to agree — 100,000 or 200 million people? What if instead of personally taking your money to assist the woman, I got together with other Americans and asked Congress to use Internal Revenue Service agents to take your money? In other words, does an act that's clearly immoral and illegal when done privately become moral when it is done legally and collectively? Put another way, does legality establish morality? Before you answer, keep in mind that slavery was legal; apartheid was legal; the Nazi's Nuremberg Laws were legal; and the Stalinist and Maoist purges were legal. Legality alone cannot be the guide for moral people. The moral question is whether it's right to take what belongs to one person to give to another to whom it does not belong.

Don't get me wrong. I personally believe that assisting one's fellow man in need by reaching into one's own pockets is praiseworthy and laudable. Doing the same by reaching into another's pockets is despicable, dishonest and worthy of condemnation. Some people call governmental handouts charity, but charity and legalized theft are entirely two different things. But as far as charity is concerned, James Madison, the acknowledged father of our Constitution, said, "Charity is no part of the legislative duty of the government." To my knowledge, the Constitution has not been amended to include charity as a legislative duty of Congress.

Our current economic crisis, as well as that of Europe, is a direct result of immoral conduct. Roughly two-thirds to three-quarters of our federal budget can be described as Congress' taking the property of one American and giving it to another. Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid account for nearly half of federal spending. Then there are corporate welfare and farm subsidies and thousands of other spending programs, such as food stamps, welfare and education. According to a 2009 Census Bureau report, nearly 139 million Americans — 46 percent — receive handouts from one or more federal programs, and nearly 50 percent have no federal income tax obligations.

In the face of our looming financial calamity, what are we debating about? It's not about the reduction or elimination of the immoral conduct that's delivered us to where we are. It's about how we pay for it — namely, taxing the rich, not realizing that even if Congress imposed a 100 percent tax on earnings higher than $250,000 per year, it would keep the government running for only 141 days.

Ayn Rand, in her novel "Atlas Shrugged," reminded us that "when you have made evil the means of survival, do not expect men to remain good."

[philunderwood]

How Times Have Changed

By Walter Williams

www.JewishWorldReview.com |

Having been born in 1936 has allowed me to witness both societal progress and retrogression. High on the list of things made better in our society are the great gains in civil liberties and economic opportunities, especially for racial minorities and women. People who are now deemed poor have a level of material wealth that would have been a pipe dream to yesteryear's poor. But despite the fact that today's Americans have achieved an unprecedented level of prosperity, we have become spiritually and morally impoverished compared with our ancestors.

Years ago, spending beyond one's means was considered a character defect. Today not only do people spend beyond their means but also there are companies that advertise on radio and TV to eliminate or reduce your credit card and mortgage debt. Students saddled with college loans have called for student loan forgiveness. Yesterday's Americans would have viewed it as morally corrupt and reprehensible to accumulate debt and then seek to avoid paying it. It's nothing less than theft. What's worse is there's little condemnation of it by the rest of us.

Earlier this year, as a result of a budget crunch, the Philadelphia School District had to lay off 91 school police officers. During the 1940s and '50s, I attended Philadelphia schools in poor neighborhoods. The only time we saw a policeman in school was during an assembly period when we had to listen to a boring lecture about safety. Because teacher assaults are tolerated — 4,000 over the past five years in Philadelphia — school police are needed. Prior to the '60s, few students would have thought of talking back to a teacher, and no one would have cursed, much less assaulted, a teacher.

I couldn't have been more than 8, 9 or 10 years old when one time, on the way home from school, my cousin and I were having a stone fight with some other youngsters. An elderly black lady walked up to my cousin and me and asked, "Does your mother know you're out here throwing stones?" We replied, "No, ma'am," praying that the matter rested there. Today an adult doing the same thing risks being cursed and possibly assaulted. Fearing retaliation, adults sit in silence as young people use vile language to one another on public conveyances, in school corridors and on the streets.

Yesteryear there was little tolerance for the kinds of crude behavior and language that are accepted today. To see a man sitting on a bus or trolley car while a woman is standing used to be unthinkable. Children didn't address adults by their first name. By the way, over the course of my nearly 45 years of teaching, on several occasions, students have addressed me by my first name. I have told them that I don't mind their addressing me by my first name but that my first name is Professor.

Much of what's accepted today would have been seen as bizarre and lowdown yesteryear. Out-of-wedlock childbirth was a disgrace and surely wouldn't have occasioned a baby shower. Popular TV shows such as "The Jerry Springer Show" and "Maury" feature guests who openly discuss despicable acts in their personal lives, often to the applause of the audience. Shame is going the way of the dinosaur.

You say, "Williams, you're just old-fashioned and out of touch with modern society." Maybe so, but I think that a society's first line of defense is not the law but customs, traditions and moral values. These behavioral norms — transmitted by example, word of mouth, religious teachings, rules of etiquette and manners — represent a body of wisdom distilled over the ages through experience and trial and error. They include important legal thou-shalt-nots — such as shalt not murder, steal, lie or cheat — but they also include all those civilities one might call ladylike or gentlemanly behavior. Police officers and courts can never replace these social restraints on personal conduct. At best, laws, police and the criminal justice system are a society's last desperate line of defense.

[philunderwood]

Long, but well worth the read:

www.qando.net/?tag=barbarism

[philunderwood]

Our Deviant Society

By Walter Williams

www.JewishWorldReview.com |

Here's one usage of the term gentleman: The gentleman helped the fallen lady to her feet. Here's another, one we might hear from a newscaster or a police spokesman: Tonight we report on the arrest of two gentlemen who raped, sodomized and murdered an 80-year-old woman.

During earlier times, to be called a gentleman meant one was honest, brave, courteous and loyal. Today "gentleman" is used interchangeably in reference to decent people and the scum of the earth.

Much of today's language usage demonstrates a desire to be nonjudgmental. People used to shack up; now they cohabit or are living partners. Few young women of yesteryear would have felt comfortable to publicly declare they slept around. Unmarried women used to give birth to a bastard; later, this was upgraded to an illegitimate birth or a nonmarital birth. In many instances, unwed mothers proudly hold baby showers celebrating their illegitimate offspring, and the man, if known, who sired the baby is referred to as "my baby's daddy" or sometimes as "my baby daddy."

Homosexual marriages, which are not a basic human survival trait, were unheard of; today, in some jurisdictions, homosexual marriages have legal sanction. To be judgmental about modern codes of conduct is to risk being labeled a prude, racist, sexist or a homophobe. People ignore the fact that to accept another's right to engage in certain peaceable, voluntary behavior doesn't require moral acceptance or sanction.

Another measure of social deviancy is reflected by the excuses and apologies that are made for failures and how we make mascots out of social misfits, such as criminals and bums. The intellectual elite tell us that it's poverty or racism that produces criminals, as opposed to a moral defect. We call bums homeless people. That suggests a moral equivalency between people who have lost their homes in a fire or natural disaster and people who choose to be social parasites; therefore, neither group is to be blamed for its respective condition. People who are very productive members of our society, such as the rich, are often held up to ridicule and scorn.

Think back to former President Bill Clinton's affair with Monica Lewinsky and the nation's response that "it was just about sex." Therefore, it was no big thing for the president and his men to become involved in witness tampering, perjury, obstruction of justice and a White House-organized attack on Kenneth Starr, an officer of the court. Most Americans thought removal from office was too harsh for Clinton's lawlessness.

That kind of lawlessness helped establish a precedent for lawless acts by President Barack Obama. His most recent was an executive order that suspended legal liability for young people who are brought to our country illegally by their parents. He also repealed the legal requirement that welfare recipients must work, by simply redefining "work" to include other things, such as going to classes on weight control. Then there are waivers from Obamacare for favored allies — waivers that offend the principle of equality before the law.

Whether the president's actions were good or bad ideas or not is irrelevant. What's relevant is whether we want to establish a precedent whereby a president, who has no constitutional authority to repeal parts of congressional legislation, can grant special favors and rule by presidential decree like Third World tyrants.

I don't hold President Obama completely responsible for his unconstitutional actions. It's the American people who are to blame, for it is we who have lost our morality and our love, knowledge and respect for our Constitution, laying the foundation for Washington tyranny. It is all part and parcel of "defining deviancy down," which is the term former U.S. Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan coined in 1993 to describe how we've switched from moral absolutes to situational morality and from strict constitutional interpretation to the Constitution's being a "living document." Constitutional principles that do not allow one American to live at the expense of another American are to be held in contempt. Today's Americans have betrayed the values that made us a great nation, and that does not bode well for future generations.

[philunderwood]

www.qando.net/?tag=newtown-shooting

What’s happening to us?

Published December 14, 2012. | By Dale Franks.

I‘m just sick about today. It’s really incomprehensible, isn’t it? Sure, it was the act of a lunatic, and lunatics are, almost by definition, incomprehensible. So, I can’t even begin to get my mind into the sort of space where you massacre children. It’s just been a day of grief and depression.

These kinds of shootings seem to be coming ever faster, and I honestly don’t know what we can do about them. I’m sure that we’ll be spending a lot of time talking about gun control for the foreseeable future, but…well…that’s not really going to solve anything. Quite apart from anything else, there’s 300 million guns floating around in the US. Good luck rounding them all up.

Besides, that’s not really the root of the problem.

I just can’t escape the sense that we are watching our society and culture slouching towards collapse, and that what happened today is a symptom of that. There’s a streak of mad decadence in American culture; a streak of anger, and a lack of civility, and a surfeit of selfishness that can’t sustain a functional civil society.

Our politics are so angry that otherwise sane men physically attack other men, and scream at them like angry children for holding a different political opinion. Our popular media is drenched in sex and violence. Our news media are little more than mouthpieces for socialist pieties. Traditional religion is belittled and reviled in popular entertainment as New Wave beliefs are treated with credulity. Individual responsibility is ignored, while victimization is fetishized.

The litany is depressing, and none of it indicates a confident, forward-looking culture. And it puts out a vibe of craziness and violence that even lunatics can pick up. Maybe they could always pick up on it, but, at least prior to the 1970s, we could lock lunatics up through involuntary commitment. Since then, of course, we’ve ensured that we can only lock up lunatics after they violently act out. So there are a lot of them lurking about, now, many of them homeless, walking the streets.

I honestly have no idea how to fix this. Clearly, government isn’t the answer. A government that can’t even do what is obviously necessary to balance—or even produce—a budget certainly isn’t going to effect any useful cultural change. Besides in a democratic system, the government reflects the culture, not the reverse. Our government is increasingly one that is characterized simultaneously by arrogance and incompetence. Those would be incompatible characteristics in a rational culture, but they accurately describe our culture, the government that reflects it.

We’ve had it so good in this country, for so long, that I’m afraid the culture has internalized the idea that it’ll always be that way. There’ll always be second chances if you screw up, and someone will always be there to keep the machinery running. What problems we do have are First World problems: the free in-flight wi-fi doesn’t work; Starbucks ran out of Pumpkin Spice. We go into debt getting our degrees in Gender Studies, and we expect a lucrative job as a reward. Our kids come in last place in their soccer league, but they’ll always get their trophy for participation.

We’re living off the financial, moral, and intellectual capital of people who opened a continent-wide frontier, defeated horrific foreign tyrannies, and then sent men to the moon. We, of course, will do none of those things.

Quite apart from anything else, we couldn’t afford to. We’ve spent the last thirty years going ever deeper into debt to defer ever making any hard choices. Instead, everybody got everything they wanted. I mean, we got our Great Society, and our Cold War military build-up; Medicare Part D, and No Child Left Behind; wars in the Mideast, and subsidized college loans. We’ve denied ourselves nothing that we wanted, and now that the bill is coming due, all we can figure out how to do is raise taxes, and have the Fed buy back some bonds so we can keep the party going on longer, and stretch out the time that we’re allowed to go ever deeper into debt.

But, not only can we not afford to, we don’t want to embark on some great cultural mission whose rewards will be enjoyed by our children instead of ourselves. We just want to pull up some porn on our iPads, and watch Netflix after we finish.

The founders of the Republic understood that democratic self-governance is only suited to a moral, responsible people. A people who cannot strive to create a polity where ethics and responsibility are primary principles are a people who are not capable of governing themselves. And I no longer see us as a people who can create that kind of polity.

Some of my libertarian friends think that a financial or societal collapse will lead to a better understanding of the importance of freedom, and that a new flowering of liberty will bloom in the aftermath.

That’s a foolish and stupid idea.

What will actually happen is what happened when Rome fell: a period of barbarism and tyranny and darkness will sweep over us at worst, or at best, people will demand that a man on a white horse punish the appropriate scapegoats and make the trains run on time again. Sure, I hope I’m wrong, but history is on the side of pessimism. As nearly as I can tell, all we can do is hold on tight, because we’re getting ready to ride this puppy down in flames.

Still, Rome didn’t collapse in a day, and maybe we can manage to avoid a total collapse and ensuing Dark Age for another 30 years or so, until after I’m gone. Frankly, that’s about all the optimism I have left in me.

But, maybe, in 500 years or so, a confident, adventurous people will once again step onto the surface of the moon. No doubt they will be amazed to learn that the mythical figures of Buzz Aldrin, Alan Shepard, and their companions actually did exist, and set foot there once upon a time, and left behind six beautiful, red-striped banners, spangled with white stars on a field of blue.

~
Dale Franks

[relenemiller]

I'm amazed at the references of "evil" "the devil" and other ugly terminology to place blame for this tragedy.

We are a country in moral deprivation and we are a country without God, period. The "god" of this world is evident in every fabric of secular society.

No one wants to say it, no one wants to admit it....we need God. We can't push Him out of the public arena and then expect Him to be present...when He has complied with the will of the people. How many more disasters need to happen, how many more lives need to be sacrificed at the devil's infamous tool of compromise? How long, Lord...wilt thou have mercy? Wake up America...we need the very God that people today, as in 911 called upon. He did not pick the gun up and slaughter 27 people. It's interesting that people call what happened evil, but those same persons deny Christ?

[Ritty77]

I found this interesting, informative (I don't know much about gun operation), and most of all, factual. Given the recent events and the Left's immediate reaction to push a tenet of their statist agenda, I thought others may like it too.

No "assault weapon" was used in Newtown, CT, yet Sen. Feinstein rushed to call for a ban on assault weapons before the bodies are cold.

I hope I live long enough to see people stop believing all the lies. Just sayin'.

Anyhow:

[relenemiller]

I posted my thoughts on this visit of Obama to this memorial and I'm going to share them here. I believe...he seized the moment to bolster his argument for a ban on guns. He used 27 deaths...20 of whom were babes, to show his disdain for guns. it made me sick. My son lives 15-20 minutes from where this happened. He was telling me that between the media and the president, this has become a circus and the families need privacy and time to grieve.

Interesting post, Keith..thanks for the truth.

[philunderwood]

Are Guns the Problem?

By Walter Williams

www.JewishWorldReview.com |

When I attended primary and secondary school — during the 1940s and '50s — one didn't hear of the kind of shooting mayhem that's become routine today. Why? It surely wasn't because of strict firearm laws. My replica of the 1902 Sears mail-order catalog shows 35 pages of firearm advertisements. People just sent in their money, and a firearm was shipped.

Dr. John Lott, author of "More Guns, Less Crime," reports that until the 1960s, some New York City public high schools had shooting clubs where students competed in citywide shooting contests for university scholarships. They carried their rifles to school on the subways and, upon arrival, turned them over to their homeroom teacher or the gym coach and retrieved their rifles after school for target practice. Virginia's rural areas had a long tradition of high-school students going hunting in the morning before school and sometimes storing their rifles in the trunks of their cars that were parked on school grounds. Often a youngster's 12th or 14th birthday present was a shiny new .22-caliber rifle, given to him by his father.

Today's level of civility can't match yesteryear's. Many of today's youngsters begin the school day passing through metal detectors. Guards patrol school hallways, and police cars patrol outside. Despite these measures, assaults, knifings and shootings occur. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, in 2010 there were 828,000 nonfatal criminal incidents in schools. There were 470,000 thefts and 359,000 violent attacks, of which 91,400 were serious. In the same year, 145,100 public-school teachers were physically attacked, and 276,700 were threatened.

What explains today's behavior versus yesteryear's? For well over a half-century, the nation's liberals and progressives — along with the education establishment, pseudo-intellectuals and the courts — have waged war on traditions, customs and moral values. These people taught their vision, that there are no moral absolutes, to our young people. To them, what's moral or immoral is a matter of convenience, personal opinion or a consensus.

During the '50s and '60s, the education establishment launched its agenda to undermine lessons children learned from their parents and the church with fads such as "values clarification." So-called sex education classes are simply indoctrination that sought to undermine family and church strictures against premarital sex. Lessons of abstinence were ridiculed and considered passé and replaced with lessons about condoms, birth control pills and abortions. Further undermining of parental authority came with legal and extralegal measures to assist teenage abortions with neither parental knowledge nor consent.

Customs, traditions, moral values and rules of etiquette, not laws and government regulations, are what make for a civilized society. These behavioral norms — transmitted by example, word of mouth and religious teachings — represent a body of wisdom distilled through ages of experience, trial and error, and looking at what works. The importance of customs, traditions and moral values as a means of regulating behavior is that people behave themselves even if nobody's watching. Police and laws can never replace these restraints on personal conduct so as to produce a civilized society. At best, the police and criminal justice system are the last desperate line of defense for a civilized society. The more uncivilized we become the more laws that are needed to regulate behavior.

Many customs, traditions and moral values have been discarded without an appreciation for the role they played in creating a civilized society, and now we're paying the price. What's worse is that instead of a return to what worked, people want to replace what worked with what sounds good, such as zero-tolerance policies in which bringing a water pistol, drawing a picture of a pistol, or pointing a finger and shouting "bang-bang" produces a school suspension or arrest. Seeing as we've decided that we should rely on gun laws to control behavior, what should be done to regulate clubs and hammers? After all, FBI crime statistics show that more people are murdered by clubs and hammers than rifles and shotguns.

[philunderwood]

Cultural Deviancy, Not Guns

By Walter Williams

www.JewishWorldReview.com |

There's a story told about a Paris chief of police who was called to a department store to stop a burglary in progress. Upon his arrival, he reconnoitered the situation and ordered his men to surround the entrances of the building next door. When questioned about his actions, he replied that he didn't have enough men to cover the department store's many entrances but he did have enough for the building next door. Let's see whether there are similarities between his strategy and today's gun control strategy.

Last year, Chicago had 512 homicides; Detroit had 411; Philadelphia had 331; and Baltimore had 215. Those cities are joined by other dangerous cities — such as St. Louis, Memphis, Tenn., Flint, Mich., and Camden, N.J. — and they also lead the nation in shootings, assaults, rapes and robberies. Both the populations of those cities and their crime victims are predominantly black. Each year, more than 7,000 blacks are murdered. Close to 100 percent of the time, the murderer is another black person.

According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, between 1976 and 2011, there were 279,384 black murder victims. Though blacks are 13 percent of the nation's population, they account for more than 50 percent of homicide victims. Nationally, the black homicide victimization rate is six times that of whites, and in some cities, it's 22 times that of whites. Coupled with being most of the nation's homicide victims, blacks are also most of the victims of violent personal crimes, such as assault and robbery. The magnitude of this tragedy can be seen in another light. According to a Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute study, between 1882 and 1968, 3,446 blacks were lynched at the hands of whites.

What percentage of murders, irrespective of race, are committed with what are being called assault weapons? You'd be hard put to come up with an amount greater than 1 or 2 percent. In fact, according to FBI data from 2011, there were 323 murders committed with a rifle of any kind but 496 murders committed with a hammer or a club. But people who want to weaken our Second Amendment guarantees employ a strategy like that of the Paris chief of police. They can't do much about hammers, clubs, fists or pistols, but by exploiting public ignorance, they might have a bit of success getting an "assault weapon" ban that will have little impact on violent crime.

There are other measures these people employ in an attempt to end violence that border on lunacy. Massachusetts' Hyannis West Elementary recently warned a 5-year-old's parents that if their son made another gun from a Legos set, he'd be suspended. Elementary-school children have been suspended or otherwise disciplined for drawing a picture of a gun or pointing a finger and saying, "Bang, bang." I shudder to think about what would happen to kids in a schoolyard if they played, as I played nearly 70 years ago, "cops 'n' robbers" or "cowboys 'n' Indians." Maybe today's politically correct educators would cut the kids a bit of slack if they said they were playing "cowboys 'n' Native Americans."

What explains a lot of what we see today, which politicians and their liberal allies would never condemn, is growing cultural deviancy. Twenty-nine percent of white children, 53 percent of Hispanics and 73 percent of black children are born to unmarried women. The absence of a husband and father from the home is a strong contributing factor to poverty, school failure, crime, drug abuse, emotional disturbance and a host of other social problems. By the way, the low marriage rate among blacks is relatively new. Census data show that a slightly higher percentage of black adults had married than white adults from 1890 to 1940. In 2009, the poverty rate among married whites was 3.2 percent; for blacks, it was 7 percent, and for Hispanics, it was 13.2 percent. The higher poverty rates — 22 percent for whites, 35.6 percent for blacks and 37.9 percent for Hispanics — are among unmarried families.

Other forms of cultural deviancy are found in the kind of music accepted today that advocates killing and rape and other vile acts. Punishment for criminal behavior is lax. Today's Americans accept behavior that our parents and grandparents never would have accepted.