If you are convinced we are a Proposition nation not a people, we need to adjust the proposition. I am not, and reject we are or were mere propositions. Whoever utters these words has already betrayed us (you don’t utter them ).
So those who live in ideas can relax the grip of this obsession upon your minds, AND OTHERS.
Do let your obsession with our founding flaws go… there’s no sin to exercise. As we were never an exercise in mere intellect or social engineering, any so called flaws in our design… aren’t relevant. We were built by over 160 years of blood, sweat, suffering and a people who devised a couple of political contracts, if this one has failed we remain a people and get another. No one claims there’s no such thing as France because they’re on their 5th Republic.
The core errors of the Enlightenment are over weighting the problem solving skill called reason, and the tendentious and contentious concepts of right, and the disagreements at times on facts and what they mean.
That’s not our problem.
Our problem is we talk and think too much.
We’re slaves to those who act.
The original sins to exorcise aren’t the Founders, but your own …your own vanity if you need a sin. The Vanity that minds can get it right is above all else the Enlightenment’s mortal sin.
I updated the article to reference the Zetetic blade at the end. I think this gets after a good way ahead for the intellectual part of this. I'm really just trying to address the fact that populism won't be successful as a political strategy unless the framing of egalitarianism as a universal good is rejected out of hand. It is that sense that equality is good that I think encourages people to get stuck in thought over action, because it sets everyone up to try to solve a mental puzzle that can't be solved. I think if we could all just accept that everyone is self-interested and that we're all just trying to get what we think is best for us and ours, then it will better enable action towards those ends. It will also insulate from rhetorical attacks about how what we want is bad. It obviously isn't to us, because it is what we want QED. I believe there is an American people. As you say "We were built by over 160 years of blood, sweat, suffering." I agree and believe we are both Americans. There are those who have passports and citizenship though that want to destroy us. They can be distinguished by their service to the Eye. Just looking for ways to turn these somewhat abstract truths into rhetoric that enables purposeful action to counteract our political enemies.
As it happens… having seen a Green Zone or Two, this one in DC is melting away slowly.
They’re leaving… slowly,
Or dying of extreme old age.
There’s no replacement in sight, or any probable one for the Apex Absurdity that is DC. As history turns for us the problem may not be overthrow of tyranny but establishment of order…
So please define this corrupt version of liberalism other than by association with the globalists. I don't think you're wrong, btw. To cite someone you know well, Friedrich Hayek claimed to be classical liberal rather than a conservative. He did share a tradition, if we are starting from the Enlightenment, which includes David Hume and Adam Smith, to start, and arguably reached a 19th century apogee with JS Mill. (I know that Hume is now often deemed a conservative, but he wrote extensively on liberty, including market freedom, and his defense of free speech is worth reading even today).
I ask because I do think this tradition has been subverted, corrupted and co-opted. Let's take some examples. If we follow the Anglo-American tradition, the government exists by consent of and to serve the people. From Locke and Hume ("I am an American in my principles") to Franklin and Jefferson, et alia. Both intrinsic in this set of beliefs and explicitly stated, the people have a right to rebel -- to overthrow their government if it turns tyrannical or otherwise becomes so vastly dysfunctional it no longer fulfills its reason for existence. If instead we follow the UN on Human Rights as opposed the Anglo-American tradition which discusses Inalienable Rights, the people do NOT have a right to rebel -- do NOT have a right to overthrow or refashion their existing system of government. Instead, and in contrast, the people have a right to representation -- and generically defined participation. This effectively means the following: so long as elections are held in which people can vote, the state cannot neither be deemed tyrannical nor vastly dysfunctional. (The problems with elections globally? Well, books HAVE been written).
Such was not how our Founders understood it, but that seems hardly the core issue. We need introduce the distinction de facto / de jure (in reality vs in law). In British America prior to the revolution, local representation government was an empirical reality. The noted historian Jack P. Greene has well-documented that the conflict was very much the colonial assemblies -- the local "parliaments" -- against the British Parliament in terms of who had legislative authority -- and who actually represented the people living there. In other words, similar to the notion of a "jury of one's peers," representative government was practiced as first local and de facto -- not as nationalized and de jure. Democratic forms of governance existed on the community level -- or not at all. It had to actually practiced -- not conferred once every four years from above by the state as absolute sovereign. Hence classical liberalism emphasized individuals with some degree of self-determination who made choices which had consequences. The state had a greatly reduced role.
In contrast, the current practice of "democracy" -- of representative governance -- is de jure, not de facto: it is the ongoing ratification of absolutist corporate-state authority by highly controlled and hence largely ritual elections. One has the right to vote, but increasingly, one forfeits all the other rights -- including the once Inalienable Rights -- which were part and parcel of Classical Liberalism.
This has since gone global -- what many experts refer to as the "Liberal Peace Thesis." The UN (and often enough, USA) experts arrive, and impose or monitor national elections with NO concern for any de facto democratic practices in the community or representative governance on the local scale. Our experts then pronounce a winner and then call their work done. No concern about individuals engaged in self-determination (however limited) in the personal, professional, and economic spheres -- they voted. DONE. They are represented. They have participated. Now, let the State (often enough, the globalists working through their newly installed leader) do its work unhindered, unchecked. The people will vote again in 3, 4, 6 or whatever more years. DONE. None of this, however, is how Locke or Jefferson or JS Mill understood consent of governed and the social contract. So I'm not sure we can blame them.
Moreover, we have a wider war going on against individuals and even family units doing anything that smacks of self-reliance or self-determination: gardening is now bad for the planet. Exercise, not eating highly processed commercialized foods, and accepting responsibility for one's health and fitness: fascism. "Doing your own research:" socially unacceptable stupidity. (And to think I once taught college students how to do their own research -- and this was a standard part of the curriculum. How insane we all were). Self-defense in circumstances when the rule of law has completely broken down: unspeakable. Barbaric. Don't even go there.
I'll have to get off my intellectual ass and try to explain better -- if only to myself -- how classical liberalism was co-opted and corrupted by the globalists, working hand-in-hand for sure with certain American elites: see the Madeline Albright Doctrine, see JJ Mearsheimer on the Liberal Delusion, etc. But I'm far from ready to give up on the Classical Liberal tradition. That seems like conceding to the Neo-Feudalists. If you are not drawing on this tradition in opposition to the emergent Neo-Feudalism, what is your alternative? If say Locke to Hayek no longer matter, then why fight it? If it no longer means anything to be an American citizen, if we have only the rights the UN grants us, then f*ck it -- why bother?
I didn't do a great job explaining it, I'm just now trying to develop the ideas so I appreciate the dialogue. Basically I think it is an issue of framing. I have no issue with the values of classical liberalism. Indeed I more or less hold those values. The problem occurs when people allow themselves to assume these values can ever be objective. A government can never hold such values, and politics can never genuinely incorporate such values, politics being about using force to get what you want at someone else's expense. Now, for us, what we want is to be self-determined/able to make decisions for ourselves and our children where applicable without interference. We must use force in order to get this, because as we can see, there are many who have a deep desire to ensure that we are denied such negative liberties. They use the rhetoric of the logical destination of liberal values. Self-determination taken to its extreme is, well... I want to be a woman, therefore, I am a woman. Anyone who denies this is violating my right to self-determination!
So I guess the solution isn't to discard liberalism, it is to refine our understanding so that it more closely aligns with truth: these values are not objective. Just because a government is formed predicated on those values means nothing if the human being operating that government don't have those values, and if we're to enforce such a thing it will require tireless effort and aggression because the incentives aren't even working with us, especially at the federal level. We will need to create such incentives ourselves, which again will be very difficult. Many say it can't be done, but I took an oath that obligates me to try.
The main point I'm trying to make is that there is no neutrality in the realm of the political. We are all actors, and we are all forced to play or be destroyed. Those in power use the rhetoric of liberalism and I don't think it is a winning strategy to argue "but thats not real liberalism" when they don't care. They're just mouthing whatever words are most convenient to justify their own exercise of power. I suppose I'm advocating ditching ideological framing to justify self-interest. We can instead justify our pursuit of self-interest by explaining how what we want to do offers a good compromise for everyone. Leftists will be furious, because everything we want to do is sacrilege to their god, but they've produces this dilemma where either we get what we want, or they get what they want. People see where their desire leads (the leftist ideologues) and they also see where collapse of rule of law in favor of absolute power towards whatever purpose leads. I think arguing in terms of a better ideology that we have is a mistake. There is no one alternative ideology that we'll all agree to the way they are all coordinated by the Eye. All we have to offer is practical methods that are sound and acceptable on their face (so long as leftism is rejected) targeting better lives for us and ours (even though this will necessarily have to exclude everyone who isn't an American, if other places want to improve their lot they'll have to make it happen themselves).
Does any of that make sense? It is all pretty clear in my head but I got to explain and it doesn't feel terrible persuasive.
Thank you for the reply. I asked because this is something I am struggling with. JS Mill simply written off as an imperialist -- no need to engage anything he argued. Et cetera and so on. Overcoming inertia, I should soon enough pull together my thoughts on what HRC and the like mean by democracy. Essentially, voting to have your rights taken away. On a not-unrelated note, the USDA would like you to register your garden. Voluntary, for now: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RoBUGKQc08w I find all this creeping interventionism -- this mandated learned helplessness -- at times overwhelming. I am reminded of the famous quote by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn about the Soviet Union purges:
"What would things been like [in Russia] if during periods of mass arrests people had not simply sat there, paling with terror at every bang on the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but understood they had nothing to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people?"
This is NOT a call to violence, but the time to push-back is now. Refuse the indoctrination in learned helplessness, to start.
I don't know why he picked 1787, but I didn't think it was worth editing it. The main Enlightenment political thinkers heavily influenced American intellectuals in the founding period, John Locke is just one example and it isn't like his influence was only from 1787 forward.
What they said or wrote isn’t important, what they DID is important. All the Founding documents were compromises hammered out by dozens or hundreds of men at a time then voted on. Not sacred scripture, this isn’t the Catholic Church hammering out changes to Doctrine of the Faith.
It’s a Political Compact.
ACTAS NON VERBAS.
Words aren’t important.
Especially now, we most assuredly don’t lack for words.
I appreciate your attempts to understand where ideologies and realities criss-cross or keep company, but to suggest that "force" is the answer is to join the sociopaths.
How do I suggest force is the answer in a way you find objectionable? I don't believe the initiation of force is legitimate, but to protect civilization from sociopaths pure pacifism isn't feasible.
Its a big G God to them. I never really know what to do in situations like these as an atheist. I feel like its polite to capitalize.
The people who feel compelled to sit at the tippy top of the social hierarchy regardless of the spiritual costs have questionable physiognomy as a rule. If they had physiognomy that inspired trust then they wouldn't be so damned evil. This is just a hypothesis I'm coming to adopt. Hollywood actors seems like an exception, but they allowed themselves to be twisted by the same dark forces in exchange for money and fame. You know of any good looking internationalist bankers?
If you are convinced we are a Proposition nation not a people, we need to adjust the proposition. I am not, and reject we are or were mere propositions. Whoever utters these words has already betrayed us (you don’t utter them ).
So those who live in ideas can relax the grip of this obsession upon your minds, AND OTHERS.
Do let your obsession with our founding flaws go… there’s no sin to exercise. As we were never an exercise in mere intellect or social engineering, any so called flaws in our design… aren’t relevant. We were built by over 160 years of blood, sweat, suffering and a people who devised a couple of political contracts, if this one has failed we remain a people and get another. No one claims there’s no such thing as France because they’re on their 5th Republic.
The core errors of the Enlightenment are over weighting the problem solving skill called reason, and the tendentious and contentious concepts of right, and the disagreements at times on facts and what they mean.
That’s not our problem.
Our problem is we talk and think too much.
We’re slaves to those who act.
The original sins to exorcise aren’t the Founders, but your own …your own vanity if you need a sin. The Vanity that minds can get it right is above all else the Enlightenment’s mortal sin.
I updated the article to reference the Zetetic blade at the end. I think this gets after a good way ahead for the intellectual part of this. I'm really just trying to address the fact that populism won't be successful as a political strategy unless the framing of egalitarianism as a universal good is rejected out of hand. It is that sense that equality is good that I think encourages people to get stuck in thought over action, because it sets everyone up to try to solve a mental puzzle that can't be solved. I think if we could all just accept that everyone is self-interested and that we're all just trying to get what we think is best for us and ours, then it will better enable action towards those ends. It will also insulate from rhetorical attacks about how what we want is bad. It obviously isn't to us, because it is what we want QED. I believe there is an American people. As you say "We were built by over 160 years of blood, sweat, suffering." I agree and believe we are both Americans. There are those who have passports and citizenship though that want to destroy us. They can be distinguished by their service to the Eye. Just looking for ways to turn these somewhat abstract truths into rhetoric that enables purposeful action to counteract our political enemies.
I will review Z Blade update.
This covers the rejection of equality: /=
What will be popular are deeds.
Otherwise there’s no reason to believe.
As it happens… having seen a Green Zone or Two, this one in DC is melting away slowly.
They’re leaving… slowly,
Or dying of extreme old age.
There’s no replacement in sight, or any probable one for the Apex Absurdity that is DC. As history turns for us the problem may not be overthrow of tyranny but establishment of order…
So please define this corrupt version of liberalism other than by association with the globalists. I don't think you're wrong, btw. To cite someone you know well, Friedrich Hayek claimed to be classical liberal rather than a conservative. He did share a tradition, if we are starting from the Enlightenment, which includes David Hume and Adam Smith, to start, and arguably reached a 19th century apogee with JS Mill. (I know that Hume is now often deemed a conservative, but he wrote extensively on liberty, including market freedom, and his defense of free speech is worth reading even today).
I ask because I do think this tradition has been subverted, corrupted and co-opted. Let's take some examples. If we follow the Anglo-American tradition, the government exists by consent of and to serve the people. From Locke and Hume ("I am an American in my principles") to Franklin and Jefferson, et alia. Both intrinsic in this set of beliefs and explicitly stated, the people have a right to rebel -- to overthrow their government if it turns tyrannical or otherwise becomes so vastly dysfunctional it no longer fulfills its reason for existence. If instead we follow the UN on Human Rights as opposed the Anglo-American tradition which discusses Inalienable Rights, the people do NOT have a right to rebel -- do NOT have a right to overthrow or refashion their existing system of government. Instead, and in contrast, the people have a right to representation -- and generically defined participation. This effectively means the following: so long as elections are held in which people can vote, the state cannot neither be deemed tyrannical nor vastly dysfunctional. (The problems with elections globally? Well, books HAVE been written).
Such was not how our Founders understood it, but that seems hardly the core issue. We need introduce the distinction de facto / de jure (in reality vs in law). In British America prior to the revolution, local representation government was an empirical reality. The noted historian Jack P. Greene has well-documented that the conflict was very much the colonial assemblies -- the local "parliaments" -- against the British Parliament in terms of who had legislative authority -- and who actually represented the people living there. In other words, similar to the notion of a "jury of one's peers," representative government was practiced as first local and de facto -- not as nationalized and de jure. Democratic forms of governance existed on the community level -- or not at all. It had to actually practiced -- not conferred once every four years from above by the state as absolute sovereign. Hence classical liberalism emphasized individuals with some degree of self-determination who made choices which had consequences. The state had a greatly reduced role.
In contrast, the current practice of "democracy" -- of representative governance -- is de jure, not de facto: it is the ongoing ratification of absolutist corporate-state authority by highly controlled and hence largely ritual elections. One has the right to vote, but increasingly, one forfeits all the other rights -- including the once Inalienable Rights -- which were part and parcel of Classical Liberalism.
This has since gone global -- what many experts refer to as the "Liberal Peace Thesis." The UN (and often enough, USA) experts arrive, and impose or monitor national elections with NO concern for any de facto democratic practices in the community or representative governance on the local scale. Our experts then pronounce a winner and then call their work done. No concern about individuals engaged in self-determination (however limited) in the personal, professional, and economic spheres -- they voted. DONE. They are represented. They have participated. Now, let the State (often enough, the globalists working through their newly installed leader) do its work unhindered, unchecked. The people will vote again in 3, 4, 6 or whatever more years. DONE. None of this, however, is how Locke or Jefferson or JS Mill understood consent of governed and the social contract. So I'm not sure we can blame them.
Moreover, we have a wider war going on against individuals and even family units doing anything that smacks of self-reliance or self-determination: gardening is now bad for the planet. Exercise, not eating highly processed commercialized foods, and accepting responsibility for one's health and fitness: fascism. "Doing your own research:" socially unacceptable stupidity. (And to think I once taught college students how to do their own research -- and this was a standard part of the curriculum. How insane we all were). Self-defense in circumstances when the rule of law has completely broken down: unspeakable. Barbaric. Don't even go there.
I'll have to get off my intellectual ass and try to explain better -- if only to myself -- how classical liberalism was co-opted and corrupted by the globalists, working hand-in-hand for sure with certain American elites: see the Madeline Albright Doctrine, see JJ Mearsheimer on the Liberal Delusion, etc. But I'm far from ready to give up on the Classical Liberal tradition. That seems like conceding to the Neo-Feudalists. If you are not drawing on this tradition in opposition to the emergent Neo-Feudalism, what is your alternative? If say Locke to Hayek no longer matter, then why fight it? If it no longer means anything to be an American citizen, if we have only the rights the UN grants us, then f*ck it -- why bother?
I didn't do a great job explaining it, I'm just now trying to develop the ideas so I appreciate the dialogue. Basically I think it is an issue of framing. I have no issue with the values of classical liberalism. Indeed I more or less hold those values. The problem occurs when people allow themselves to assume these values can ever be objective. A government can never hold such values, and politics can never genuinely incorporate such values, politics being about using force to get what you want at someone else's expense. Now, for us, what we want is to be self-determined/able to make decisions for ourselves and our children where applicable without interference. We must use force in order to get this, because as we can see, there are many who have a deep desire to ensure that we are denied such negative liberties. They use the rhetoric of the logical destination of liberal values. Self-determination taken to its extreme is, well... I want to be a woman, therefore, I am a woman. Anyone who denies this is violating my right to self-determination!
So I guess the solution isn't to discard liberalism, it is to refine our understanding so that it more closely aligns with truth: these values are not objective. Just because a government is formed predicated on those values means nothing if the human being operating that government don't have those values, and if we're to enforce such a thing it will require tireless effort and aggression because the incentives aren't even working with us, especially at the federal level. We will need to create such incentives ourselves, which again will be very difficult. Many say it can't be done, but I took an oath that obligates me to try.
The main point I'm trying to make is that there is no neutrality in the realm of the political. We are all actors, and we are all forced to play or be destroyed. Those in power use the rhetoric of liberalism and I don't think it is a winning strategy to argue "but thats not real liberalism" when they don't care. They're just mouthing whatever words are most convenient to justify their own exercise of power. I suppose I'm advocating ditching ideological framing to justify self-interest. We can instead justify our pursuit of self-interest by explaining how what we want to do offers a good compromise for everyone. Leftists will be furious, because everything we want to do is sacrilege to their god, but they've produces this dilemma where either we get what we want, or they get what they want. People see where their desire leads (the leftist ideologues) and they also see where collapse of rule of law in favor of absolute power towards whatever purpose leads. I think arguing in terms of a better ideology that we have is a mistake. There is no one alternative ideology that we'll all agree to the way they are all coordinated by the Eye. All we have to offer is practical methods that are sound and acceptable on their face (so long as leftism is rejected) targeting better lives for us and ours (even though this will necessarily have to exclude everyone who isn't an American, if other places want to improve their lot they'll have to make it happen themselves).
Does any of that make sense? It is all pretty clear in my head but I got to explain and it doesn't feel terrible persuasive.
Thank you for the reply. I asked because this is something I am struggling with. JS Mill simply written off as an imperialist -- no need to engage anything he argued. Et cetera and so on. Overcoming inertia, I should soon enough pull together my thoughts on what HRC and the like mean by democracy. Essentially, voting to have your rights taken away. On a not-unrelated note, the USDA would like you to register your garden. Voluntary, for now: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RoBUGKQc08w I find all this creeping interventionism -- this mandated learned helplessness -- at times overwhelming. I am reminded of the famous quote by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn about the Soviet Union purges:
"What would things been like [in Russia] if during periods of mass arrests people had not simply sat there, paling with terror at every bang on the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but understood they had nothing to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people?"
This is NOT a call to violence, but the time to push-back is now. Refuse the indoctrination in learned helplessness, to start.
But America was already in 1787 (the year of the Constitutional Convention) a fully formed nation of people.
I don't know why he picked 1787, but I didn't think it was worth editing it. The main Enlightenment political thinkers heavily influenced American intellectuals in the founding period, John Locke is just one example and it isn't like his influence was only from 1787 forward.
What they said or wrote isn’t important, what they DID is important. All the Founding documents were compromises hammered out by dozens or hundreds of men at a time then voted on. Not sacred scripture, this isn’t the Catholic Church hammering out changes to Doctrine of the Faith.
It’s a Political Compact.
ACTAS NON VERBAS.
Words aren’t important.
Especially now, we most assuredly don’t lack for words.
I appreciate your attempts to understand where ideologies and realities criss-cross or keep company, but to suggest that "force" is the answer is to join the sociopaths.
How do I suggest force is the answer in a way you find objectionable? I don't believe the initiation of force is legitimate, but to protect civilization from sociopaths pure pacifism isn't feasible.
>who serve the Eye at the End of Time intuitively understand that to best serve their God
Small 'g' god?
> with questionable physiognomy
??
Its a big G God to them. I never really know what to do in situations like these as an atheist. I feel like its polite to capitalize.
The people who feel compelled to sit at the tippy top of the social hierarchy regardless of the spiritual costs have questionable physiognomy as a rule. If they had physiognomy that inspired trust then they wouldn't be so damned evil. This is just a hypothesis I'm coming to adopt. Hollywood actors seems like an exception, but they allowed themselves to be twisted by the same dark forces in exchange for money and fame. You know of any good looking internationalist bankers?
>I feel like its polite to capitalize
it's a small 'g' in John's original. Ask him why :)
>good looking bankers
It's a matter of taste, of course, but off the top of my head: Jamie Dimon, Mario Draghi, Benjamin Strong, some of the 20th century Rothschilds
I feel like Jamie Dimon might defect. Maybe that is just the physiognomy tricking me...
Did you create that public-private-partnership map?
Ignore. Just saw the footnote.