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Deconstructing "Progressive " thought

Creeping socialism. an exerpt from a longer article:

http://www.commentarymagazine.com/viewarticle.cfm/what-kind-of-socialist-is-barack-obama--15421

What Kind of Socialist Is Barack Obama?
Jonah Goldberg
May 2010
 
The assertion that Barack Obama is a socialist became a hallmark of the 2008 presidential campaign. His opponent, John McCain, used Obama’s own extemporaneous words to an Ohio plumber as Exhibit A: “When you spread the wealth around,” Obama had said, “it’s good for everybody.” That, McCain insisted, sounded “a lot like socialism,” as did Obama’s proposals to raise taxes on the wealthy and high earners for the explicit purpose of taking better care of the lower and middle classes with that redistributed money.

Republicans believed they had hit a rhetorical mother lode with this line of argument in 2008, but their efforts to make hay of Obama’s putative socialism proved unedifying, if not outright comic. The National Committee of the Republican Party even formally considered a resolution on whether the Democratic party should change its name to “the Democratic Socialist Party” of the United States. The stunt was shelved infavor of compromise language lamenting the Democrats’ “march toward socialism.”

Fourteen months into his presidency, in March 2010, Obama succeeded in muscling through Congress a partial government takeover of the national health-care system. That legislative accomplishment followed Obama’s decision a year earlier, without congressional approval, to nationalize two of the country’s Big Three automobile companies. In the intervening months, he had also imposed specific wage ceilings on employees at banks that had taken federal bailout money—the first such federal wage controls since an ill-fated experiment by Richard Nixon in 1971. Obama also made the federal government the direct provider of student loans, and did so by putting that significant change in American policy inside the larger health-care bill. In a September 2009 press conference, Obama suggested that a publicly funded health-care system might help “avoid some of the overhead that gets eaten up at private companies by profits and excessive administrative costs”—thus mistaking the act of making money, the foundational cornerstone of capitalism itself, with the generation of unnecessary expenses.

Given his conduct and rhetoric as president, we have every reason to reopen the question from 2008 and ask, quite simply, What kind of socialist is Barack Obama?

Now, when conservatives dare to suggest, tentatively or otherwise, that Obama or his party might be in the thrall of some variant of socialism, they are derided for it. In the wake of health care’s passage, for example, a Salon article mocked conservatives for thinking that Americans now live under “the Bolshevik heel.” When the RNC was debating its resolution in 2008, Robert Schlesinger, the opinion editor of U.S. News & World Report, responded: “What’s really both funny and scary about all of this is how seriously the fringe-nuts in the GOP take it.”

Similarly, in a May 2009 interview, Newsweek editor Jon Meacham mocked the president’s critics for considering Obama to be a “crypto-socialist.” By these lights, socialism is a very sophisticated, highly technical, and historically precise phenomenon that has nothing to do with the politics or ideas of the present moment, and conservatives who invoke the term to describe Obama’s policies and ideas are at best wildly imprecise and at worst purposefully rabble-rousing. And yet when liberals themselves discuss socialism and its relation to Obama, the definition of the term “socialist” seems to loosen up considerably. Only four months before Meacham’s mockery of conservatives, he co-authored a cover story for his magazine titled “We’re All Socialists Now,” in which he and Newsweek’s Evan Thomas (grandson of the six-time Socialist-party presidential candidate Norman Thomas) argued that the growth of government was making us like a “European,” i.e. socialist, country. At the same time, a host of Left-liberal writers, most prominently E.J. Dionne and Harold Meyerson of the Washington Post, were floating the idea that the new president was ushering in a new age of “social democracy.” The left-wing activist-blogger Matthew Yglesias, echoing the Obama White House view that a crisis is a terrible thing to waste, said the Wall Street meltdown offered a “real opportunity” for “massive socialism.”

In an April 2009 essay published in Foreign Policy, John Judis modestly called “prescient” a prediction he himself had made in the mid-1990s: “Once the sordid memory of Soviet communism is laid to rest and the fervor of anti-government hysteria abates,” he had written in a symposium in the American Enterprise, “politicians and intellectuals of the next century will once again draw openly upon the legacy of socialism.” In his Foreign Policy piece, Judis claimed vindication in the age of Obama: “Socialism, once banished from polite conversation, has made a startling comeback.” For Judis, today’s resurgent socialism isn’t the totalitarian variant we associate with the Soviet Union or Cuba but rather that of the “Scandinavian countries, as well as Austria, Belgium, Canada, France, Germany, and the Netherlands, whose economies were shaped by socialist agitation.” This is “another kind of socialism—call it ‘liberal socialism,’” Judis explains, and it “has a lot to offer.”

These ideas were given further empirical weight by an April 2009 Rasmussen poll that found “only 53 percent of American adults believe capitalism is better than socialism.” Of the remaining 47 percent, 20 percent preferred socialism to capitalism, while 27 percent were unsure. Meanwhile, adults “under 30 are essentially evenly divided: 37 percent prefer capitalism, 33 percent socialism, and 30 percent are undecided.” Yglesias argued that the data “reflects the fact that on a basic level ‘socialism’ is good branding. The whole idea is that we should put society first rather than capital, or money. That sounds good!”

Harold Meyerson, who actually calls himself a socialist, wanted it both ways. In a March 4, 2009, Washington Post column, he argued that anyone calling Obama a socialist didn’t know what he was talking about: “Take it from a democratic socialist: Laissez-faire American capitalism is about to be supplanted not by socialism but by a more regulated, viable capitalism. And the reason isn’t that the woods are full of secret socialists who are only now outing themselves.”

But after the Rasmussen data came out the following month, Meyerson changed his tune. In a column titled “Rush Builds a Revolution,” he argued that conservative attempts to demonize Obama as a socialist had backfired and were leading Americans, particularly young Americans, to embrace the label. “Rush [Limbaugh] and his boys are doing what Gene Debs and his comrades never really could,” Meyerson wrote. “In tandem with Wall Street, they are building socialism in America.” Moreover, whereas a more “viable, regulated capitalism” at first distinguished Obamaism from socialism, it now defined Obama’s brand of socialism. “Today,” Meyerson observed, “the world’s socialist and social democratic parties basically champion a more social form of capitalism, with tighter regulations on capital, more power for labor and an expanded public sector to do what the private sector cannot (such as providing universal access to health care).”

Surely if fans of President Obama’s program feel free to call it socialist, critics may be permitted to do likewise.

_____________

But is it correct, as an objective matter, to call Obama’s agenda “socialist”? That depends on what one means by socialism. The term has so many associations and has been used to describe so many divergent political and economic approaches that the only meaning sure to garner consensus is an assertive statism applied in the larger cause of “equality,” usually through redistributive economic policies that involve a bias toward taking an intrusive and domineering role in the workings of the private sector. One might also apply another yardstick: an ambivalence, even antipathy, for democracy when democracy proves inconvenient. With this understanding as a vague guideline, the answer is certainly, Yes, Obama’s agenda is socialist in a broad sense. The Obama administration may not have planned on seizing the means of automobile production or asserting managerial control over Wall Street. But when faced with the choice, it did both. Obama did explicitly plan on imposing a massive restructuring of one-sixth of the U.S. economy through the use of state fiat—and he is beginning to do precisely that.

Obama has, on numerous occasions, placed himself within the progressive intellectual and political tradition going back to Theodore Roosevelt and running through Franklin Roosevelt. With a few exceptions, the progressive political agenda has always been to argue for piecemeal reforms, not instant transformative change—but reforms that always expand the size, scope, and authority of the state. This approach has numerous benefits. For starters, it’s more realistic tactically. By concentrating on the notion of reform rather than revolution, progressives can work to attract both ideologues of the Left and moderates at the same time. This allows moderates to be seduced by their own rhetoric about the virtues of a specific reform as an end in itself. Meanwhile, more sophisticated ideologues understand that they are supporting a camel’s-nose strategy. In an unguarded moment during the health-care debate in 2009, Representative Barney Frank confessed that he saw the “public option,” the supposedly limited program that would have given the federal government a direct role as an insurer in competition with private insurers, as merely a way station to a single-payer system in which the government is the sole provider of health care. In his September 2009 joint-session address to Congress on health care, President Obama insisted that “I am not the first President to take up this cause, but I am determined to be the last.” Six months later, when he got the health-care bill he wanted, he insisted that it was only a critical “first step” to overhauling the system. Arthur Schlesinger Jr. was one of the relatively few self-described moderates who both understood the tactic and supported it. “There seems no inherent obstacle,” Schlesinger wrote in 1947, “to the gradual advance of socialism in the United States through a series of New Deals.”

I will say the sort of Socialist Mr Obama is is a Fascist, or more preciecly; a proponent of the Fascist Corporate State.
 
The conversation goes like this:

"Do you agree with paying taxes to have government-funded schools?"  "Yes"
"Do you agree with paying taxes to have government-funded roads?"  "Yes"
"Do you agree with paying taxes to have government-funded police and fire services?"  "Yes"
"Do you agree with paying taxes to have government-funded defence?"  "Yes"
"Do you agree with paying taxes to have government-funded infrastructure?"  "Yes"
"Do you agree with paying taxes to have government-funded health care?"  "You socialist sonova...!!"

Pretty much every developed country in the world has some sort of tax = services for the many aspects, and that is all socialism.
 
Sigh

Taxation for services is not the issue. Certain services should be provided by the State i.e. monopoly of force (military and police) and inpartial arbitration (the Courts).

After that, many, if not all of the services on the list can be provided by the private sector. In the past, roads, schools, infrastructure (even large scale infrastructure like railways and canals), healthcare and communications were exclusively provided by the private sector. In some cases, should the State decide there was a strategic rational for certain items, they might purchase the service or infrastructure (usually by poviding opportunities for open bids on the good or service desired). Canada's first railroad was built under this sort of arrangement (no railway=no British Columbia as part of Confederation), and soon after there was an explosion of railway building by private investors seeking to capitalize on the new markets and opportunities. On a smaller scale, toll roads preceeded "Interstate" highways by centuries, and even the ones built in the early 20tyh centuyry in the United States were not rivaled until the creation of the Interstate Defence highway system in the 1950's. The next step down would be municipalities which have private garbage collection or bus services, generally at a far lower dollar cost that comparable "public" garbage collection and bus services. (London paid something on the order of $60/ton for public garbage collection vs Kitchener which paid $35/ton for private garbage collection based on figures from several years ago, I doubt the ratio has changed much since.

Governemnt funded healthcare is the most intrusive example yet of overweening State power into your and my private lives. Think of the many, many, many rules and regulations designed to limit our options and freedoms in the name of "public health". We might agree that some are actually useful, but I can and will argue that similar effeccts could be achieved with greater compliance and lower costs through private enterprise. Example: seatbelt and helmet laws. I would say that if Insurance companies were justified and able to adjust premiums or deny coverage based on the policy holder's failure to use common saftey devices, then people would be wearing saftey devices in a big hurry.  Cost to the taxpayer = $0. Freed up police resources could be use for investigating and preventing crimes of violence against people and property.

There are many, many threads here discussing these points, so I leave you to the search function so I don't have to rehash old arguments.
 
Party vs Government. I admit I had never seen the argument parsed this way before, but once you look at it it makes a lot of sense:

http://www.americanthinker.com/2010/05/more_than_just_government.html

More Than Just Government (American Thinker)

By Bruce Walker

What vexes conservatives most? We often think our only foe is too much government, but that is a mistake. The leftist giants of privately owned media, almost en masse, advance a cultural and moral agenda utterly at odds with what conservatives believe. Private colleges indoctrinate young adults with hateful propaganda. The entertainment industry coarsens our morality, savages our faith, and mocks our patriotism.

We want limited government -- and we should want limited government -- because more government means less liberty. But even the most manifest modern versions of vile malice, like Hitler's Third Reich or Stalin's empire, were not so much sins of "statism" as sins of "partyism." Nazis and Bolsheviks saw government as a hand puppet of the Party. In 1942, enemies of Nazism were writing of the "Nazi system, with its .. .absolute claim to the precedence of the Party over the whole State" (The Persecution of the Catholic Church in the Third Reich, London: 1942). The very term "Nazi" refers to a party, not a government.

Those familiar with the grim saga of Soviet power know that the Communist Party, a completely voluntary organization, wielded real power. Stalin, virtual dictator of the Soviet Union, did not even have a government job until May 1941, when he became premier. By that time, Stalin had managed to murder millions, purge many thousands, and terrorize everyone in the Soviet Union -- how? He was General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party. The Party, Nazi or Communist, ran the state, and not the other way around.

Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, and our other great founders grasped this. They constructed in our system of government safeguards for little states against big states, separation of legislation and execution of laws, sovereign states to limit the federal government, and so on. Without party trumping government, "checks and balances," "separation of powers," and "federalism" are self-correcting mechanisms. The toxin the founders dreaded was "factions."

We saw this dysfunction during the health care debate. The legislative branch adopted, without reading or understanding it, a massive bill that Obama wanted. State governments, whose interests lay in opposing this federal power grab, instead responded to ObamaCare along predictably partisan lines. Six of twenty-six Democrat governors, all from conservative states, voiced concerns about ObamaCare. Nearly all Republican governors -- Arnold being an exception -- opposed ObamaCare. Democrat state attorneys general were much more reluctant to file lawsuits against ObamaCare than their Republican counterparts. It is party driving the state, and not the other way around.

But it is more than just "political parties" which threaten us. Not all parties are the same. Some are based upon philosophies of governance; others are based upon "interest group" advocacy. Those of us called "conservatives" simply want an impartial government. That is why we favor proportional taxes, oppose affirmative action as bigotry, and want government to do what it rationally can do best. The Republican Party supported equality for blacks when that principled stand cost them one-third of the nation and huge numbers of white votes outside the South.

The left, by contrast, is an interest group movement, just like the Nazis and just like the Bolsheviks. It embraces Nazi themes like "social justice" -- consigning whites, males, Christians, the affluent, patriots, and others into a leftist-patrolled ghetto. The KKK also supported "social justice" -- so did Father Coughlin, Juan Perón, Fidel Castro, and all those sibling interest-group parties or movements. The state can be used by these odious types, but it is the social justice thugs, not the state per se, which are the problem. In the current immigration firefight, what do conservatives want? More government! We want the federal government to rigorously enforce the law. The left wants the state to vanish and our borders to become meaningless. 

This sort of bigotry against certain citizens in favor of others is so common now that we forget that the prostitution of government to the needs of only some Americans is the opposite of what Washington, Jefferson, and Franklin wished to leave us. Whatever structure of government is bequeathed to a people, political parties which champion particular interests will, inevitably, destroy the worth of that structure.  Interest-group parties are poison to ordered liberty. 

Nominal parties -- Republicans, Democrats, Federalists, etc. -- can also be corrupted. While certain parties, like the Democrats today, seem to be in the belly of the beast that is interest-driven government, certainly Republicans like McCain and Crist can be just as debased. That is why the Tea Party resonates so well. Far from championing any particular factions of America like Obama, who plans to reinvigorate his party by enthusing the young, African-Americans, Latinos, and women, the Tea Party champions simply ordered liberty. 

This elevating and ennobling view of American government means that the rights of greedy, creepy leftists in Wall Street firms are just as sacred to us as our own rights are. The process of freedom is our cause. We view government as we view juries: Verdicts should not be based upon group interest, and laws should not, either. When government acts, it should be only in the general welfare, and those words of Article I are in direct conflict with the toxin of "our group's interest." We defend Wall Street not because Wall Street likes or helps us, but because it is right.

Government has a role only as an unbiased arbitrator of those parts of life which the marketplace cannot mediate. When government acts this way, as it should, then parties and factions still remain, and they still quarrel and feud -- but if government is robust, then the mischief of parties is controlled. So when the KKK lynches a black, more government is required, and when Storm Troopers terrorized German streets or Mafia internecine wars decimate Sicily, more government is required. Factions are the infection, and when these infect government, we are lost. The abuse of government for special interests, not just government itself, is the mortal blow to liberty.

Bruce Walker is the author of two books: Sinisterism: Secular Religion of the Lie, and his recently published book, The Swastika against the Cross: The Nazi War on Christianity.

Page Printed from: http://www.americanthinker.com/2010/05/more_than_just_government.html at May 04, 2010 - 06:52:41 AM CDT
 
While not strictly speaking "Progressiveism" (Bureaucracy existed in Ancient Egypt and Sumaria, after all), progressives have found a powerful ally to enable and enforce their schemes by increasing the scale and scope of an unelected and unaccountable bureacracy:

http://blog.american.com/?p=13936

Bureaucracy and Tyranny
By Alex J. Pollock

May 12, 2010, 2:51 pm
We tend to think of “bureaucracy” as meaning sluggish, complicated, unresponsive paperwork and process. But it has another, more threatening meaning: Rule by the bureaucrats, just as “aristocracy” is rule by the aristocrats—in other words, rule by unelected officers who impose their ideas on you, but cannot be voted out by you or anyone else. Bureaucracy in this sense has an inherent love of power and yearning for authority which cannot be questioned.

Consider the recent activities of the Securities and Exchange Commission.

The SEC criticized Goldman Sach’s synthetic CMO deal. Whatever one may think of the merits of the deal, should you be able to disagree with an attack on you by a bureaucracy? Goldman Sachs publicly disagreed. The SEC got the Justice Department to open a criminal investigation. Warren Buffett defended Goldman Sachs. The SEC announced it was investigating inadequate disclosures by Buffett’s company.

Coincidence? Or a message that you will certainly be punished if you dare to disagree with the bureaucrats?

The Founding Fathers well described “swarms of officers sent hither to harass the people.” It is worth pondering how bureaucracy may have inside it a tyranny trying to get out.
 
More "progressive" manipulation of media and public opinion:

http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/the-trouble-with-wikipedia-a-cautionary-tale/?singlepage=true

The Trouble with Wikipedia: A Cautionary Tale

In February, PJM published an article on German government subsidies of English-language cinema. Why is an American translator from Berlin not allowing the information to appear on Wikipedia?
July 1, 2010 - by John Rosenthal
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Back in February, I published an article on Pajamas Media documenting the substantial financial support provided by the German federal government and other German public agencies to the production of Roman Polanski’s film The Ghost Writer. The film is about a former British prime minister who is suspected of having been controlled by the CIA. Any resemblance between the character in question and a certain living former British prime minister by the name of Tony Blair is obviously intentional.

Nowadays, of course, Blair is most famous — or, more exactly, infamous — in continental Europe for his support for the Iraq war. The fact that such a film received some €5 million in backing from the country that led the self-styled “axis of peace” that opposed the war struck me as being of evident public interest. How readers want to interpret this fact is, of course, up to them. Perhaps it is just coincidence, after all. But I also provided some examples of other recent English-language cinema blockbusters that have received substantial German public subsidies. The list suggests that the logic of German funding of English-language cinema is not merely economic, as defenders of the practice in Germany commonly insist.

A couple of months after the publication of my PJM report, Erik Svane of the euroblog ¡No Pasarán! wrote me to tell me that he had added a reference to the article to the Wikipedia entry on The Ghost Writer. “One sour note came from John Rosenthal,” the otherwise glowing entry on the film now read,

    who points out that the winner of Berlin’s Silver Bear received a large amount of financial support from the German federal government, which happened to be “part of the self-styled ‘axis of peace’ that opposed the Iraq War” led by Blair and George W. Bush.

A footnote provided reference and link to my PJM report. I was, of course, glad that the information had been linked. But I am no fan of Wikipedia and, from previous observations of the evolution of Wikipedia entries, I strongly suspected that the reference would not last long.

About a month after that, John Rentoul, a columnist for the British daily The Independent, posted an entry on his blog likewise citing my research on the German financing of The Ghost Writer and linking my PJM report. Earlier, Rentoul had independently raised the issue of German public subsidies for the film, but he had originally cited a much lower figure of only €200,000 in German public support.

After being informed about the Rentoul post, I became curious what was happening in the meanwhile to the entry on The Ghost Writer on Wikipedia. So, I had another look. Lo and behold, the reference to my PJM report — and, with it, any reference whatsoever to the German subsidies — had been removed. The before-and-after versions can be viewed here and here respectively. As the dates in the Wikipedia history log make clear, the reference had remained in the entry for all of five days.

The Wikipedia editor — or perhaps in this case, more exactly, censor — responsible for the revision was one “Alandeus.” On April 26, in the “talk” section on the article, Alandeus made the following comment. The “Babelsberg” to which he refers is a film studio in Potsdam, outside Berlin.

    Practically all films that are produced in Babelsberg are eligible for or get Federal funding, i.e. loans, so interpreting so much political ill will into it is carrying it a bit far. On the other hand, I question whether Wikipedia is well severed [sic] by opinions from such blog sites. Is this good or valid reference?

Two days later, Alandeus apparently decided unilaterally that it was not and proceeded to remove the reference. Note that he did not, at this time, add his general claim suggesting that German public funding is politically unproblematic. He simply removed all reference to the funding, so that readers would not have to bother themselves with the matter. The irony of a self-appointed editor of a Wikipedia entry suggesting that an online media is not a worthy reference can be passed over here without comment.

As it so happens, the Wikipedia user page for “Alandeus” identifies him as Alan Benson, an “American translator living in Berlin.” Benson’s webpage proudly recounts how he participated in a hundred-thousand-strong anti-Iraq war demonstration that took place in February 2003 in Berlin. It also notes his membership not only in “Democrats Abroad Berlin,” but even in the German Social Democratic Party or SPD. It was, of course, the Social Democratic German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder who would spearhead the international campaign against the American-led intervention to topple the regime of Saddam Hussein.

After I pointed out to Erik that the PJM reference had disappeared from the Wikipedia entry, he then put it back in, along now with a reference to the Rentoul post on the website of The Independent. It took another five days for none other than Alandeus to remove the reference once more. Yet again, Alandeus, in effect, flagged his intentions in advance. In the Wikipedia “talk” section, he defiantly rejected the charge that his previous edit had been politically motivated, noting that per Wikipedia’s “principles,” “personal and group blogs are largely not acceptable as sources.” “Therefore,” he concluded, “John Rosenthal would not be acceptable, but The Independent’s John Rentoul would be.” Never mind that Pajamas Media is neither my personal blog nor a group blog. Above all, never mind that the “unacceptable” source — namely, my PJM report — was precisely the cited source for the “acceptable” one!

True to his own tortured logic, two days later Alandeus removed the reference to the PJM report, but left the reference to the Rentoul post.  But no matter. At least some mention of the German funding had finally managed to escape the censor’s vigilance.

Now, however, Alandeus sought, in effect, to “neutralize” the information on the German funding by adding other information. An amusing French expression describes this sort of procedure as “drowning the fish.” The problem, however, is that one key element of Alandeus’s “new” information consists, more precisely, of misinformation. Although Alandeus’s party comrades/colleagues in Germany and the U.S. rarely showed similar forbearance toward Tony Blair or George W. Bush, I will not call it a “lie.” There is no need, after all, to attribute to malice what can be explained by ignorance.

Here, then, is how the Wikipedia entry presently concludes following Alandeus’s latest revision:

    Most major films produced in Germany can receive a grant (to be repaid) from the German Federal Film Fund (DFFF).[17] The Elfte Babelsberg Film GmbH received a grant of 3.5 million euro for producing The Ghost.

Now, it is true that many films produced in Germany can and do receive support from the DFFF. This fact alone, of course, hardly demonstrates the political neutrality of the practice. Perhaps sometime in the future, the German government will finance a film that insinuates that French president Jacques Chirac was controlled by the German foreign intelligence service, the BND, when he rallied to Schröder’s crusade against the Iraq War in late 2002/early 2003. But I would not recommend that Alandeus hold his breath in the meanwhile.

It is not true, however, that the DFFF grants have to be repaid. It is common knowledge in Germany that the DFFF provides subsidies, not loans. Why else would the German Taxpayers Association protest against the DFFF’s “subsidy-madness,” as it has put it? (See here from the German news site Der Westen.)

But Alandeus need not take my word for it. Here are some official German sources on the matter. The Film Fund of Hamburg and Schleswig-Holstein: “The repayment of [film] project support is only necessary in the case of loans, but not in the case of subsidies (e.g. the ‘reference’ grants of the FFA, the Federal Film prize rewards, and the DFFF)” (p. 13). The municipal government of Potsdam: “…in the case of the DFFF, it [the support] consists of susbsidies that do not have to be repaid…”(p. 27). The German-French Film Academy: “the [DFFF] measures consist of a credit that does not have to be repaid [sic!].”

Or how about the DFFF itself? The very DFFF webpage that Alandeus cites ostensibly in support of his claim contains a link to the English-language version of the DFFF guidelines. Article 13 of the guidelines is titled “Nature of a Grant.” Article 13, paragraph 2 specifies: “The financial aid is awarded as a non-repayable grant….”

So, why did Alandeus suggest otherwise? Only he can know for sure. Perhaps he was confused by Article 19 of the guidelines, which is titled “Repayment” and which merely serves briefly to specify the joint financial responsibility of co-producers. The otherwise enigmatic article is presumably included to cover cases where the grant gets revoked. As is sometimes discussed in German film industry literature (see here, for instance), in theory, such revocations can occur.

It should be noted that some film financing provided by other German public agencies takes the form of “conditionally-repayable loans.” The qualifier “conditionally-repayable” means precisely that the so-called loans do not necessarily have to be repaid: neither in full nor even in part. Even much of this funding thus amounts de facto to subsidies.

Will “Alandeus” now correct his addition and finally permit the Wikipedia readership to know not only that the German government subsidized the making of The Ghost Writer, but that German subsidies are precisely subsidies? Well, in the grand scheme of things it makes little difference if he does.

The larger moral of this story is that Wikipedia itself  is a fundamentally flawed and unreliable source. In fact, it is wrong even to describe — much less to use — Wikipedia as a source. Wikipedia is merely a platform. Since anyone and everyone can edit Wikipedia entries and since they can do so anonymously, Wikipedia is, by its very nature, susceptible to constant manipulation. Indeed, even editors who choose to reveal their real identities remain for all intents and purposes anonymous. Readers will not, as a rule, search out the authorship of each and every edit, and they would not, as a rule, know who the authors are even if they did. As such, Wikipedia editors have no reputations, so they have no reputations to hurt.

At its best, Wikipedia would be essentially just a clearing house of citations of other sources and those sources would necessarily often be competing and discordant. The truth, as is its wont, would only emerge in the process of discussion and debate. But, as the example of “Alandeus” and the entry to The Ghost Writer demonstrates, interested parties can simply decide to “sit on” an entry and exclude citations that contain unwanted information. Since I began writing this article, Erik again added the footnote reference to my PJM report, and Alandeus has again removed it – for the third time!

What is worse, the interested parties editing Wikipedia  might not only be individuals, but also institutions and even interested states or state agencies. If the latter possess the slightest bit of new media savvy, no one else will normally ever know. In 2008, for instance, it emerged that none other than the German foreign intelligence service, the BND, had been engaging in Wikipedia edits. (For details, see my Weekly Standard article on “The Strange Career of Wikileaks.”) The “outed” BND-linked IP networks were quickly purged from the European IP registry.

John Rosenthal writes regularly on European politics for such publications as The Weekly Standard, Policy Review and The Daily Caller. More of his work can be found at www.trans-int.com..
 
Governemnt funded healthcare is the most intrusive example yet of overweening State power into your and my private lives. Think of the many, many, many rules and regulations designed to limit our options and freedoms in the name of "public health". We might agree that some are actually useful, but I can and will argue that similar effeccts could be achieved with greater compliance and lower costs through private enterprise. Example: seatbelt and helmet laws. I would say that if Insurance companies were justified and able to adjust premiums or deny coverage based on the policy holder's failure to use common saftey devices, then people would be wearing saftey devices in a big hurry.  Cost to the taxpayer = $0. Freed up police resources could be use for investigating and preventing crimes of violence against people and property.

Oh well... seatbelt and helmet laws. My favorite examples. Ok please deconstruct this.
Option 1: This is about the state. How does being told/forced to do something by the private sector makes you free-er? That one boggles my mind. The cops pull you over for not wearing a seatbelt - tyranny. The insurer refuses your claim because you didn't - good business. That my friend, is ideology, not a cold hard fact. You have yours, others have different ones.
2: This is about freedom. Ever heard of limited rationality? It is a very interesting, logical theory that seems to demonstrate that one cannot know everything. In that case, it is logical that an organization, i.e. an insurer or, surprise, the state, would be able to pool more knowledge demonstrating that something is dangerous, i.e. not wearing a helmet. You would never be able, as an individual, to gather all the stats to know that for a fact. Same thing, say, pesticids. Can you test every single one to determine their toxic potential? No. The state can, for a minute amount of $$$/person. Companies also can, but would you trust that? Now that an organization has pooled knowledge and proven it, it is much easier to reinforce, reward or punish behaviours that minimize/increase the risk.

And we also both know that some of  the happiest and/or more economically successful countries on the planet are mixed economies, like Scandinavian ones or German economy. Again, balance, the key ingredient. They seem to be living with "infringements" on their freedom or liberties alright.

In the end, libertarianism is an interesting idea not shared by a lot of people. And, this is democracy. Bad ideas shared by many rule.
 
I also forgot to add to my argument, which is just for debate's sake as we all know:

The infamous Quebec snow tire law, a favorite irk or Quebec libertarians. They argue, quite rightly so (I believe), that increasing insurance premiums for those who don't put on snow tires would have had the same effect, put money in the economy, freed police resources, and all that without the restrictive state-imposed deprivation of freedom. I think it's an excellent argument, but...

1. Why didn't the insurers do it? They could have, but didn't. Therefore, maybe the State is in a better place for doing it.
2. How do you enforce it? I mean, "sure I'll put them up" he told his insurer. Really? How do you verify that? If the guy has an accident and didn't have them he's not covered? Or, the garage has to file a conformity report. What then if you change your own tires at home, by yourself? Do you have to send a conformity proof? That, again, does not seem free-er.

Again, I really am not trying to draw hatred or fire, even though I will. This is a good discussion, I think.
 
TimBit:

Not firing here.  But perhaps a bit of sparring is in order.

I believe that Thucydides underlying point is about freedom of choice and whether the individual has a right to make an idiot of themselves, or (in the best/worst case) improve the gene pool by absenting their heirs from consideration as a a result of their folly.

The difference between the state decreeing "thou shalt wear a helmet" and an insurance company decreeing the same is that I can choose to go to an insurer with more liberal policies.  Or I can choose to go to an insurer that will charge higher premiums.  Or I can choose to "self-insure" and cover the costs of the consequences (including funeral and estate fees).

Why does the state mandate that drivers must wear seatbelts and yet remain silent on wearing helmets on ski-slopes?  For that matter why does the state permit ski-slopes?  Or back country bicycling? Or parachuting? Or snowmobiling? Or 16 year old girls to go sailing around the world on their own?

In most of those cases high risk activities put unnecessary demands on state services that were designed to benefit those that toiled in dangerous conditions to gather resources for the state - and its people - whether those resources were centrally collected by the state (a 100% tax rate) and redistributed by the state or collected by individuals (a 0% tax rate) and redistributed by the market.

Shouldn't the state outlaw bicycles with knobby tires, snowboards and water skis because they encourage people to indulge in risky activities that potentially deprive the state of a productive citizen and impose a cost on the rest of society when the risk becomes reality?

 
Timbit, you are actually talking about the Local Knowledge Problem; which demonstrates that the State is in a far worse position to make wide ranging decisions or control large aspects of the economy, since no one can know all the facts in any detail or reasonable amount of time. You can make personal decisions which affect you, the amount of local knowledge is far more manageable and positive and negative consequences accrue largely to you.

The trivial proof is comparing free market economies with "command" economies (the most extreme examples being comparing the Republic of Korea with the DPRK). So long as the State remains outside the realm of the market and confines itself to protecting the people and providing an impartial arbitration service to settle disputes, then personal and economic freedom can reign. Historical examples show smaller polities with high degrees of freedom out competing far larger and richer polities; Athens vs the Persian Empire; Elizabethan England vs the Spanish Empire; Serenìsima Repùblica Vèneta vs the Ottoman Empire or the Asian "Tiger" economies competing against China.

Progressivism fails since it ignores the local knowledge problem and assumes (against all evidence) that people are largely interchangeable and predictable.
 
Thucydides, you say that the state should provide impartial mediation. In your opinion, does that mean that Lobbying like we see in the US is an illiberal practice?
 
I don't believe "Lobbying" to be illiberal.

According to the 1689 "Bill of Rights", which we inherited, every individual (and corporations are individuals) has a right to petition the crown for any purpose at all,  whether that be for a redress of grievance, a request to change the law, or to attempt to influence a contract award.

The issue, for me, is two-fold.

First: that all transactions and communications should be considered in the public domain and transparent (and in that regard a business should expect to foreswear proprietary rights to secrecy when seeking a public contract).

Second: that the "Crown" should be limited in the number of public contracts it awards as each award impacts on the economy as the Crown competes for resources with the citizenry thereby driving up the cost of the resources, including money.
 
I'm more with Kirkhill on this, so long as the process is open and transparent, and liited in size and scope, lobbying and government contracts for the goods and services the State needs to provide State services (i.e. buying police cars, building courts and prisons, paying and equipping service people) is perfectly logical and moral.

Lobbying by providing lawmakers with below market mortgages (Friends of Angleo) or other underhanded tricks is not, and should be exposed and punished with the full force of the Law. Since public trust and funds are involved, swift police action andlong prison sentences should be demanded whenever shuch things are uncovered (not the length of time between the exposure of ADSCAM and the RCMP investigations; even now, no politician has yet to face Justice).

As for impartial arbitration, that really is a reference to the Rule of Law and the provisions of an impartial court to mediate disputes (i.e. civil, contract and commercial law) and criminal justice (so there can be no personal or family vendettas or vigilante action [sorry Batman])
 
Ok please deconstruct this.
>How does being told/forced to do something by the private sector makes you free-er?

Firstly, the "private sector" might offer the option of insuring higher risks for higher premiums, which negates the notion of being "forced" to do anything.  Secondly, a private insurer might deny a claim after the fact of an injury - which you might never have; the government will fine you right now and has created grounds for further intrusions into everyday activities.

For "ignorance of the law is no excuse" to be a sensible legal principle, the law in respect of everyday activities must be comprehensible and common sense to a person of average intelligence and education.

Here is the essential problem of "freedom": for some people, "freedom" doesn't extend much further than the privacy of the bedroom and the liberty to ingest recreational chemicals.  When they have a misadventure, they want the public purse to pay to make it better and are alarmed at the possibility that other, irresponsible people - users of plain tobacco, gourmands and gluttons, motorsport enthusiasts, etc - might have drained the treasury.  The problem is multidirectional - one person's enthusiasm is another's unnecessary indulgence which needs to be forbidden or restrained by law for no reason other than simply to cut public costs.  "Freedom" doesn't mean "proof from consequences".
 
An interesting article on the Progressive mythology:

http://hotair.com/archives/2010/07/08/a-momentary-lapse-of-reason/

A Momentary Lapse of Reason
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posted at 8:52 pm on July 8, 2010 by Ed Driscoll


Megan McArdle, The Atlantic’s resident in-house World’s Tallest Female Libertarian Econoblogger Who Nonetheless Voted for Obama, wrote yesterday:

    Random thought of the day: what if Lord Keynes was right . . . but only in 1932?

Actually, that timeframe makes a certain amount of sense — we know Keynes wasn’t right from 1933 to 1941, when, as UCLA noted a few years ago, “FDR’s policies prolonged Depression by 7 years, UCLA economists calculate.” Or as Mark Steyn presciently noted, in late October of 2008, other nations had economic Depressions at the start of the 1930s; the US had a Great Depression, earning that added sobriquet due to its needless longevity.

And we know that Keynes’ medicine — spend ‘til a nation is even more broke than it was at the start of the Depression — wouldn’t go over well with the American people during 1932, since it wasn’t a part of Roosevelt’s platform. FDR, to listen to him, seemed most concerned with ending Prohibition, and far from promoting massive Make Work Projects, in some ways, ran to the right of Herbert Hoover.

But thanks to almost three quarters of a century worth of self-perpetuated myths, today’s liberals actually couldn’t wait for the 21st century economy to collapse before literally promising to dust-off 70-year old programs. Pennsylvania Democrat Paul Kanjorski was quoted in May of 2008 as saying:

    “All we’re doing is going into the basket and saying, ‘Damn, what did they do in ‘32, what did they do in ‘34, what did they do in ‘36,’ and we’re pulling them out, dusting them off, giving them a paint job, correcting the fenders a bit, and we’re using them…To get us through the horrendous problems we may have over the next several years, we’ve got to make these old programs work, and we’ve got to be as inventive as hell.”

In May of 2008, the Dow-Jones was 2000 points higher than it is today, and unemployment was at about 5.5 percent, half of today’s national average.

At least though, most of FDR’s Keynesian programs were focused on temporarily creating jobs by building things. But that’s the paradox: pace Rep. Kanjorski, we can’t do what they did in ‘34 and ‘36. Thanks to a morass of political correctness, NIMBY “Not In My Backyard” extremism has gone BANANAS — “Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anyone.”

In his op-ed this week, Jonah Goldberg squared the circle:

    Gleichschaltung is a German word (in case you couldn’t have guessed) borrowed from electrical engineering. It means “coordination.” The German National Socialists (Nazis) used the concept to get every institution to sing from the same hymnal. If a fraternity or business embraced Nazism, it could stay “independent.” If it rejected Nazism, it was crushed or bent to the state’s ideology. Meanwhile, every branch of government was charged with not merely doing its job but advancing the official state ideology.

    Now, contemporary liberalism is not an evil ideology. Its intentions aren’t evil or even fruitfully comparable to Hitlerism. But there is a liberal Gleichschaltung all the same. Every institution must be on the same page. Every agency must advance the liberal agenda.

    And this is where the Catch-22 catches. The dream of a nimble, focused, problem-solving government is undone by the reality of hyper–mission creep. When every institution is yoked to an overarching philosophy or mission, its actual purpose can become an afterthought. In 2005, volunteer firefighters from all over the country offered to help with Katrina’s aftermath. But FEMA sent many of them to Atlanta first to undergo diversity and sexual-harassment training (which most already had).

    Such examples are everywhere. What is political correctness other than the gears of the liberal Gleichschaltung? The financial crisis was worsened because Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac became tools for liberal social engineering. Let’s not even mention public schools.

    The White House is determined to be a great friend (i.e., servant) to the unions, so everything from the stimulus to the automaker buyout to the Gulf spill must first pass union muster. Remember those vital, “shovel-ready” weatherization jobs the stimulus was supposed to pay for? The Labor Department delayed them for nearly a year while trying to figure out how to comply with pro-union “prevailing wage” rules for each of more than 3,000 counties.

    Liberalism has become a cargo cult to the New Deal, but many of the achievements of the New Deal would be impossible now. Just try to get a Hoover Dam built today.

But Didn’t Candidate Obama realize this when he was running in 2008? Mickey Kaus recently wrote:

    On page 85 of his excellent quick-history, The Promise, Jon Alter discusses Obama’s 2009 stimulus bill:

        The biggest frustration involved infrastructure. Obama said later that he learned that “one of the biggest lies in government is the idea of ’shovel-ready’ projects.” It turned out that only about $20 billion to $40 billion in construction contracts were truly ready to go. The rest were tied up in the endless contracting delays and bureaucratic hassles associated with building anything in America. [E.A.]

    a) Good that Obama is still learning, but the realization that the expensive projects he repeatedly assured Americans were “shovel-ready” actually weren’t comes a little late, no? The economy needed stimulating 18 months ago. How many unemployed Americans could have had jobs for the last year and a half if Obama had realized the House Dems’ “shovel-ready” pitch was a crock and pursued other, quicker forms of stimulus–like an instant payroll tax cut?

Mickey quipped, “And here I thought the coming to power of the Democrats was a voyage of discovery only for their youthful journalistic enthusiasts.”

Heh. Or as somebody said in early September of 2008, “My fellow citizens, the American presidency is not supposed to be a journey of personal discovery.”

Fortunately though, California’s state government, knowing that its unemployment rate is even higher than the national average, shows that when it wants to cut through the red tape, it can, as J.E. Dyer writes today on Commentary’s Contentions blog:

    Thousands of people in the farming industry have lost their livelihoods and property since California’s “man-made drought” became reality three years ago. In some counties, unemployment tops 20 percent. The state has lost billions in revenue from its largest industry: agriculture.Advocacy groups this spring brought the central dispute, which is over the celebrated Delta smelt in the San Joaquin River delta, to a judicially brokered compromise that now allows some level of water pumping. (A good summary of the process is here.) But this is a conditional outcome: not sustainable and not intended to be so. New development is what’s needed to transcend the limitations of our state water infrastructure, which set us up for the crisis to begin with. But legislators in Sacramento aren’t serious enough to prioritize taking action; they have to wangle votes from each other with unseemly pork, which only makes their “fix” more difficult to present to tax-weary voters.

    There is, however, something on which the political leaders in Sacramento were able to take unified action this week. In 2008, California voters passed Proposition 2, which mandates a set of humane conditions for the hens tended by egg-producing farmers. This year’s legislature has passed a law that will require out-of-state egg producers to conform to the mandate as well, if they want to sell eggs in California. The governor signed it yesterday, demonstrating that they can get things done in Sacramento. The things just have to be on their list of priorities.

    What will it take for California’s political class to recognize that prosperity, public order, and human survival are not givens? They can collapse under the weight of hostile regulation. The Golden State’s sour economy and staggering deficit are the chief exhibits in that lesson today, and worse is probably looming. But by all means, let us fight to ensure that hens across America can spread their wings without bumping into each other.

So how does one fix a worldview that’s so trapped in an imaginary glorious past that it thwarts its ideology’s technological advancement?

Good luck — not even NASA knows how to solve this issue.

Update: Amity Shlaes, the author of The Forgotten Man, her brilliant 2007 look at human cost of the Great Depression, has an op-ed at AOL that dovetails well with this post: “Is Obama Spurring Growth, or Knocking It Down?”
 
More on the coming divide. Hyper credentialism, centralization and ever expanding State power vs disintermediation, local knowledge and response:

http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2010/07/the_neo-reactio.html

The Neo-Reactionaries

Angelo M. Codevilla writes,

The ruling class's appetite for deference, power, and perks grows. The country class disrespects its rulers, wants to curtail their power and reduce their perks. The ruling class wears on its sleeve the view that the rest of Americans are racist, greedy, and above all stupid. The country class is ever more convinced that our rulers are corrupt, malevolent, and inept. The rulers want the ruled to shut up and obey. The ruled want self-governance. The clash between the two is about which side's vision of itself and of the other is right and which is wrong. Because each side -- especially the ruling class -- embodies its views on the issues, concessions by one side to another on any issue tend to discredit that side's view of itself. One side or the other will prevail. The clash is as sure and momentous as its outcome is unpredictable.

It is a long essay, worth reading in its entirety, although I am going to emphasize where I do not share his sentiments. I put the essay in a class that I call "neo-reactionary." Other writing in this vein ranges from the best-selling (Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism) to the obscure (Mencius Moldbug's old blog posts) to somewhere in between (Arthur Brooks' The Battle, which I still have not read.)

I call the outlook neo-reactionary because it is sort of like neoconservatism with the gloves off.

Some core beliefs that I share with the neo-reactionaries:

1. At its worst, Progressive ideology is an ideology of power. It justifies the technocratic few infringing on the liberty and dignity of the many.

2. At their worst, Progressives are intellectual bullies. They delegitimize rather than attempt to persuade those who disagree with them.

3. American government has become structurally less libertarian and less democratic in recent decades. For example, Codevilla writes,

The grandparents of today's Americans (132 million in 1940) had opportunities to serve on 117,000 school boards. To exercise responsibilities comparable to their grandparents', today's 310 million Americans would have radically to decentralize the mere 15,000 districts into which public school children are now concentrated. They would have to take responsibility for curriculum and administration away from credentialed experts, and they would have to explain why they know better. This would involve a level of political articulation of the body politic far beyond voting in elections every two years.

Amen. I live in one of those mega-school districts, which gives unbridled power to the teachers' unions. The widely-unread Unchecked and Unbalanced has much more on this theme. (Note to intellectual bullies: please do not confuse nostalgia for decentralized school districts with nostalgia for "separate but equal.")

Where I part company with the neo-reactionaries (and for all I know, Jonah Goldberg parts company a bit as well) is on the following:

1. Brink Lindsey has a point. The Progressives are not wrong on everything, and conservatives are not right on everything.

2. Tyler Cowen has a point. Manichean, confrontational politics is a dubious project. Questioning your own beliefs can be more valuable than issuing a call to arms to those who share them.

3. Tyler Cowen has another point. Do not think that the majority of people are libertarians. Both Codevilla and Arthur Brooks assert, with evidence I regard as flimsy at best, that two-thirds of the country is on their neo-reactionary side. I strongly doubt that, and even if it were true I do not believe that democratic might makes right.

I think that ideology is partly endogenous. I do not think that it is an accident that an ideology of rational technocratic control grew up as America urbanized and as enormous scale economies emerged in the industries made possible by the internal combustion engine, the electric motor, radio, and television. I do not think it is an accident that the Progressive ideology will be challenged as the Internet starts to alter the economy and society, reducing the comparative advantage of mass production and mass media while increasing the comparative advantage of local autonomy and individual expression. The Internet serves as a constant reminder of the wisdom of Hayek.

We live in interesting times.
 
Revenge of the Bureaucrats (via SDA)

http://www.smalldeadanimals.com/archives/014555.html

Fearless advice you can't refuse

In the Ottawa Citizen, U of Ottawa professor Errol Mendes expresses his thinly-veiled outrage over Stephen Harper's attempts to wrest control of public policy from a deeply-embedded shadow government of unelected bureaucrats:

The proper role of the federal public service is to provide fearless advice to the government on policies that are critical to the future of all Canadians. The government has the right to decide whether to accept that advice or reject it and then to expect the federal public service to loyally implement the government's policy decisions if they are lawful.

What the government can't do, if it does not want to torture Canadian democracy, is to force public servants to develop and promote policies they do not accept as in the interests of Canadians, and then pretend the public service is fully supportive of the ideologically driven policies.

Yes, you read that right: it's up to public servants to decide whether they will accept or not accept the policies of an elected government, and they have a right to determine whether or not a particular policy is "in the interests of Canadians." As for the PM, he's getting in the way, and overstepping his bounds:

This is not the first time the government has sought to undermine the critical task of the public service to provide fearless advice.
What Mendes euphemistically calls "advice," of course, rational people would call "unelected, partisan bureaucrats opposing and stifling the policies of an elected Conservative government":

There is a deep chill in many departments such as Environment, Justice, Foreign Affairs and CIDA, where objective research and advice by department officials on issues such as the real dangers of climate change, deeply counterproductive use of mandatory sentencing, and unbalanced foreign policies and foreign aid are stopped from ever seeing the light of day. In addition, the Prime Minister's Office vets almost all external communication, resulting in Canadians not being able to test the fearless advice offered by public servants against the destructive ideologies of perhaps Canada's most ideologically driven government.

Mendes asks Canadians to join him in conflating democracy and behind-the-scenes bureaucratic rulership:

The undermining of the public service of Canada should be one of the most important ballot box issues in the coming federal election
Yes, well, if millions of Canadian voters were CHRT Tribunal Members like Mr. Mendes was, or if they had been hired by a Liberal prime minister as a senior advisor in the Privy Council Office to "handle diversity in the public service," perhaps they might consider the matter of entrenching the back-door powers of the unelected public service as being one of the most important ballot box issues. As it stands, they seem to prefer that their government be an elected one.
 
An unsettling thought:

http://www.americanthinker.com/2010/08/fascism_as_sadism.html

August 29, 2010
Fascism as Sadism
By James Lewis

In his book  Liberal Fascism, Jonah Goldberg defines "fascism" as an economic and political system. There's nothing wrong with that, but it misses a vital truth about Mussolini, Hitler, Tojo, Saddam Hussein, and Ahmadinejad: the political use of sadism to recruit millions of followers in a campaign of pleasurable punishment against a scapegoated person or group. Read about the Japanese rape of Nanking, if you can stand it, and you'll see thousands of literal rapes as well as sadistic torture and killing of Chinese people by Japanese soldiers as a matter of policy and for psychological satisfaction.

In sadistic warfare, it is essential to see the conquered enemy suffer. For sadistic regimes, it is not enough to win a war; it is at least as important to see the pain of the victims. If you open  your eyes to this very nasty aspect of human behavior, you'll see it -- not just in news headlines about sexual crimes, but in certain political and media tactics as well.

The worst Nazis were ordered outright to suppress any personal impulse of decency or mercy, and to deliberately act sadistically against the scapegoated enemy -- the Jews most of all, but also Russians, gypsies, and any other victim peoples. Saddam Hussein's regime practiced sadistic torture for pleasure, most obviously by Saddam's two sons, Uday and Qusay. In Iran today, sadistic torture is a standard practice, and Ahmadinejad is said to have started his political career as a torturer for Ayatollah Khomeini. Ahmadinejad's personal "spiritual advisor," Yazdi, is on video explaining how rape and torture of boys and women before their execution is permitted by Islam.

Fascism is not just national socialism as a political ideology. It also involves a mob frenzy in which cruelty is whipped up and celebrated. If you listen to Louis Farrakhan, you can hear that same menacing quality in his voice; just like Chicago's Father Pfleger, who could have stepped right out of the Children's Crusade of 1220.

Sadistic insults and fantasies have also been a big feature of the leftist attack against Sarah Palin and her family, just as it was part of the "high-tech lynch mob" that Clarence Thomas finally cried out against in his Senate hearing for the Supreme Court. In America today, conservatives don't carry out sadistic assaults; the Left does it every day. It is not just a political tactic, but a reflection of who they are as human beings. 

Sadism is the enjoyment of cruelty against others. It was a prominent feature of Russia under the Czars, of the Ottoman Empire, and in historical figures like the Roman Emperors Caligula and Nero and the Athenian traitor Alcibiades. Sadism was practiced among warrior peoples like the Plains Indians, where rape and torture of captured enemies was taken for granted. It was not enough to kill the enemy; he and his women and children had to be degraded and physically punished for the entertainment of the victors.

Indeed, group murder and  rape is practiced by chimpanzee bachelor groups on their regular raids against neighboring clans. Chimp groups have been known to hunt small monkeys and tear them apart  in a frenzy of group hysteria. Some human beings can fall back into that condition, too. Group sadism is a psychologically primitive act, a throwback to a more primitive state of being, which is why it is so common and why it can be used to mobilize mobs who feel they have nothing to lose.

In civilized societies, armed force is always used with the greatest self-discipline possible. That is a defining feature of civilized societies compared to all the others. Self-discipline in the use of force is not a reflection of cowardice, like so much of the left's vaunted pacifism. Self-discipline is an aspect of courage and civilized purpose.

"With malice towards none, with charity for all." Lincoln's words are worth repeating here. Lincoln commanded a horrific war in which terrible acts were done in the name of the  Union. When it was over, he did not celebrate the suffering of the South, nor even the victory of the North. "With malice towards none, with charity for all." That phrase defines civilization.

Without over-praising ourselves, that is in fact how the United States has acted in victory. "Charity toward all" was a major reason for the Marshall Plan to rescue Europe, including Germany, and it was a big reason why Woodrow Wilson was so easily suckered by the French and British after World War I. "With malice towards none" drove MacArthur's decision to keep the Emperor of Japan as the head of state after horrific American losses against the Japanese. It was how America behaved in 1990 when the Soviet Union crumbled of its own inner contradictions. We had no victory parades, no annual celebration to commemorate the defeat of our only nuclear foe in history -- until this month, that is, when Iran started its first nuclear reactor. 

With malice towards none: That was how George W. Bush acted in Iraq after the three-week knock-down of Saddam's army. That is why we could not leave Iraq in its own bloody mess when insurgency and civil conflict broke out afterward. We stuck with it, against a vicious sabotage campaign from the entire Left, and we established an elected government.

With charity towards all -- but not with Obama's "kick me" sign on his posterior. The United States has no "kick me" sign on our collective butts, no matter how many apologies our Current Occupant cranks out to medieval tyrants at the U.N.

That is why the whole world knows (even if they won't say it) that the United States is the good cop on the beat, not an imperialistic power. It is also why Europe always runs to hide behind Uncle Sam when the Balkans explode in Serbia or Georgia. It is why fierce enemies in the Middle East need us for peace talks, no matter how fraudulent and hopeless those talks may be.

It is also why the sadistic regimes in the world hate us. We are defined by the nasty regimes who rise against us: North Korea, Iran under the Khomeiniacs, the Sudan, Libya under its mad little dictator.

And here we come back to the link between sadistic cruelty and fascism. Armed warfare can bring out the worst in people, but when the worst behavior is whipped up and encouraged by absolute leaders for sadistic satisfaction, that is as much a defining feature of fascism as one-man rule, concentration camps, genocide, centralized economies, control-freakery, and endless self-glorification.

Today's most threatening version of fascism is Islamist fascism, which visibly shows sadistic pleasure in the verbal and physical abuse of women, Jews, and scapegoated men and boys. Sadistic words and actions are not taboo in militant Islam; they are encouraged and whipped up by imams and national leaders. In Saudi Arabia and Iran under the Khomeini cult, rebels and enemies of the regime are not just punished, but they are openly degraded, raped, and killed for the overt enjoyment of the sadistic regime.

Politics is the endless struggle of civilization against barbarism. Civilization has won many battles, but it has never won a permanent victory. It cannot, not until human nature becomes something very different.

That is why it is so important not to lose the faith and to keep the struggle going. Never give up; never, never, never, never. Churchill had it exactly right.
 
Sadism isn't necessarily a defining characteristic of fascism.

It's not that I care to defend fascism, but by allowing people to evoke sadism and militarism and some of the other really nasty aspects of extremist forms of government and then claim or insinuate those are what define fascism*, we allow the less flashy fascists to propagate and claim they aren't really fascists.

[Add: *Or, to define away other -isms which exhibit sadism, militarism, etc as fascism and "not really communism" or "not really socialism" in attempts to whitewash the practical - as in human - application and implementation of the other systems.]
 
Loss of "status" is probably as big of a motivator as loss of taxpayer funded perques; maybe even more so:

http://pajamasmedia.com/eddriscoll/2010/09/12/palin-pops-the-lefts-status-sphere/

Palin Pops the Left’s Status-Sphere
September 12, 2010 - by Ed Driscoll

Tom Wolfe’s whole career has been defined by his search for new status-spheres to explore, from the worlds of test pilots and NASCAR races, to the self-described “Masters of the Universe” on Wall Street in the mid-1980s. This is how he defined what makes up a status-sphere to an interviewer in 1980:

    Most people put themselves into a status sphere. Whether they’re intellectuals or stock car racers, they tend to emphasize values that, if they were absolute, would make them special people. About 1920, for example, we began to hear the phrase “the booboisie.” The idea was that Americans were in fact idiots, even if powerful idiots. That one notion — that the United States was dominated by a vast middle class made up of brutes and idiots — stayed with us for 60 years. It’s only amended from time to time.

Flash-forward 30 years, and one finds that among those who first coined the notion of “the booboisie” nearly a century ago, very little has changed in their thinking, Shannon Love writes at the Chicago Boyz Website, as he explores “Palin and the Left’s Status-Anxiety:”

    Status-anxiety occurs most strongly when a group has no meritorious claims to its social position. The classic example would be the pre-WWII European aristocrats who inherited their wealth and position, and who therefore had no right to status in an industrial society other than from cultural inertia. Closer to home, the most vicious white racists were poor and working-class whites who knew full well that only racism kept them from being on society’s bottom status tier. As long as all non-whites were judged inferior to any white person, a poor white person still had some status. They bitterly resisted losing what little status they still had.

    Leftism at its heart holds that a small percentage of humans have a vastly superior understanding of everything compared to ordinary people. The point of leftism is to empower these superior individuals to impose their superior understanding upon society by the force of the state. Leftists must be viewed by themselves and others as superior human beings if they are to have a claim to power and status.

    It might seem that leftist elites would have little concern for a loss of status, but in the last 40 years society and political culture have changed a lot. Prior to the ’60s, the left could point to the real and imagined successes of the technocratic progressive era to justify their status. They could claim that they saved the country from the Great Depression, fought WWII and contributed to the post-war prosperity. America’s great cities were peaceful and prosperous under the benign rule of Democratic party machines. People voted with their feet, migrating from what we call today red areas to leftwing blue areas.

    Times changed, but the left remained not only stuck in the ’50s but moved even farther left by mimicking the European left. After the ’60s, the left had few successes to point to. The Great Society failed, the ’70s were an overall train wreck and the once great Democratic cities of the Northeast collapsed. People voted with their feet again but this time migrating from blue areas to red areas. In this process the left lost its meritorious claim to status.

    Since they have few meritorious indicators of a personal and group claim to status remaining, leftists are forced to fall back on the same standards employed by the European upper classes. They try to restrict status not by merit but by conformity to their own life pattern. They demand that people go to the right elitist schools. They demand that people live in certain communities. They demand that people have the right recreational interests. They demand that people enjoy uniform kinds of art and music. They demand that people have the proper modes of speech, accent and allusion. They demand that people have the right religious beliefs. And so on.

    On this basis Palin is a nightmare: She went to a state college. She lives in the “backwoods”. She likes hunting, fishing and sports. She likes country music and representational art. She doesn’t have the right accent. She doesn’t dress appropriately. She’s a Pentecostal instead of atheist, Unitarian, Episcopalian, etc.

    Palin’s success stabs them in the heart of their anxiety. If Palin can be a successful political leader, what does that say about the leftists’ claims of intellectual and moral superiority? If people don’t just instantly assume that leftists are smarter and better than everyone else, why would people trust a leftist government to make so many decisions about the people’s live, e.g., medical care?

    That is why leftists see Palin as a genuine and significant threat of unusual magnitude. In the emotional thinking of leftists, she is a personal threat to everything each individual leftist has attained in life. They feel a sincere, visceral sense of danger about her because she attacks the very core of their egos. They feel the same hatred towards Palin that the European upper classes felt towards the upstart middle-class. They feel the same hatred that poor whites felt towards non-whites. They feel that way for the same reasons. If she succeeds, worse, if she is right, then they become nobodies.

No wonder the Ruling Class has become paranoid. (Incidentally, QED.) You can see that in action here, as the “Southern Poverty Law Center Completes Its Descent Into Madness,” caused by a massive case of Palin Derangement Syndrome, as law professor William A. Jacobson writes, though as another law professor notes, it’s been a long time coming at that palace guard firm.

Of course, as the Blogger known as “Bookworm” wrote at the American Thinker a few years ago, the very terminology that the left creates for itself are linguistic attempts to construct a status-sphere:

    Language is anything but static, something for which we must be grateful.  It’s the dynamism of the English language that, at the high end, gives us Chaucer, Shakespeare, Pope, Dickens, and at the low end, gives us the liveliness of slang and dialect.

    One of the interesting things about English’s constant, beneficial mutations is the fact that some terms which start off as merely descriptive begin to degrade in meaning, eventually ending as insults.  For example, the now archaic word “beldam” started off as a grand old lady and ended up meaning a miserable hag.  “Spinster” originally described a woman who spins, but came to mean a desiccated, narrow minded old virgin.  Another word that ended with a completely degrade meaning was “bedlam,” which describes a completely insane situation, but that had its genesis in Christ’s natal town of Bethlehem.

    And then there’s the word “liberal.”  It comes from the Latin “liber,” meaning free, so the word “liberal” originally referred to one committed to freedom.  Over time, however — indeed, in our lifetime — it came to mean one thing:  someone who could not win an election.  Clearly, it was time for a change.

    Liberals, after some bold attempts to reclaim the title for themselves (and they’ve got the bumper stickers to prove it), decided to jettison the term entirely and come up with a new word to describe themselves.  They are now “Progressives.”  The word “progressive” means to advocate beneficial change and progress, and that’s certainly what Progressives would have the American people believe they offer.

    By giving themselves this label, however, the Progressives have proven yet again that there’s no delusion quite as powerful as self-delusion.  The fact is that, if you pick apart each of the Progressives’ stands on any major issue of the day, you’ll see that either they have staked out positions that were either proven false or ineffective decades ago, or they’re still fighting battles that were long ago won, making their efforts redundant (yet still, somehow, harmful to the modern political process).

That’s a topic that we explored on Friday, in a post titled, “Trapped in his Father’s Time Machine,” the headline of which borrows from Dinesh D’Souza’s brilliant Psychohistorical profile of the president. We also mentioned those trapped in the imaginary cargo cult of the New Deal; add Dana Milbank of the Washington Post to that list, who’s sure, if we just spend another trillion or two, Keynesianism will work this time.

By the way, Shannon’s profile of the left and their obsession with Palin, is a reminder that for whatever his excesses, William F. Buckley, with his old world tone and infinitely expansive vocabulary, was perhaps the only person who could have smuggled conservatism past the gatekeepers of the overculture in the 1960s. But then, that was a period when there still was a mass media overculture, with only a handful of gatekeepers in charge of what we saw on TV and read in the newspapers. As Christopher Chantrill wrote in late July at the American Thinker:

    In Generation One, conservatives fenced with the Ruling Class using foils, masks, jackets, and breeches. In Generation Two, conservatives roamed in the talk radio AM band hinterland around the Ruling Class’s NPR-fortified cities. Now, in Generation Three, conservatives move through the internet as a fish swims in the sea.(Interpolation; interesting reversal of the trope!)

    In Generation One, conservatives wanted to be treated as part of the elite. So they were, grudgingly; Bill Buckley got his “Firing Line” show on PBS, and Milton Friedman got his “Free to Choose.” Generation Two never got past the TV Nazis. No PBS shows for them. Rush’s syndicated television show was confined to middle-of-the-night time slots. Generation Three is different. It aims to get respect with hard-knuckle action in the mean streets of the internet. That is what Andrew Breitbart is all about, as Kyle Wingfield recognizes:

        Breitbart is clear about his desire to turn the tables on liberal media and activist groups. That’s why he went after ACORN, and why it makes sense that he’d set his sights higher than an obscure bureaucrat.

    Breitbart aimed to play the race card right back in the face of the racist NAACP. While the media was busy getting its knickers in a twist about out-of-context quotes, Breitbart had managed to make fools of both the NAACP and the Obama administration.

    Or maybe it’s just a coincidence that the Rasmussen Presidential Approval Index dipped to -20 over the weekend.

    You can’t hurt Andrew Breitbart by playing the “out-of-context” card, the one that leads into a demand to have the conservative racist fired. In the kind of ball that Breitbart plays, there is no appealing to the friendly umpire or the CEO who fears a call from the White House.

    Breitbart is BigGovernment.com. He is BigJournalism.com, and BigHollywood.com, and BigPeace.com. He’s not shilling for some Mr. Big, some right-wing George Soros.

Which is yet another example of information workers now owning the means of production. You’d think that leftists would consider that the culmination of Marx’s 150-year old industrial era dream, but as America’s most influential self-described “progressive” was quoted as telling an interviewer last year, “As president of the United States, there are times where I wish information didn’t flow so freely, because then I wouldn’t have to listen to people criticizing me all the time.”

Disintermediation will make far reaching changes to society (beyond just toppling the old "left-right" division)
 
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