Does Leftism promote social peace?

Throughout history, redistribution of wealth and income has been from the poor to the rich and many of those societies were quite stable -- with Tokugawa Japan being the outstanding example of that. So the idea that redistribution from the rich to the poor is needed to secure social peace lacks immediate plausibility.

Starting with the arch-conservative and deep-thinking Otto von Bismarck, however, the idea has grown that government welfare handouts to the poor are needed to prevent revolutions and social upheavals.  And Leftists have gladly latched onto that idea.

The idea that Leftists would promote social peace is however implausible at first glance.  How could the politics of rage promote any kind of peace?  And there are clear instances where Leftism has in fact promoted social conflict.  Communist revolutions are the pre-eminent example of that but the way the American Left has promoted rage among blacks by telling them constantly that their various disadvantages are due to white racism is another deplorable example.

And it seems clear that Leftists preachings about equality are  hostile.  Such preachings seem more motivated by a desire to tear down the rich rather than lift up the poor.  It is only capitalism that has in fact lifted up the poor.

For decades now I have been impressed by the provocative dictum of Leibnitz  to the effect that we live in the best of all possible worlds. Various improvements in all sorts of things since Leibnitz make it clear that he was wrong but the intended message that some good things have bad things as their precondition and that some bad things are needed to secure good things still resonates.

And I think that hate-motivated Leftist raging about inequality and injustice could be rather like that.  It could be doing us all some good, despite appearances.  Among the genuinely disadvantaged it must create the impression that someone is listening to them  and working on getting help to them. And the alternative to that could well be social unrest.  Traditional societies were able to keep the poor powerless because they controlled the means of communication.  That is no longer so. Communication is something of an epidemic in the age of the internet.  Muslims already use social media to organize their attacks so it is obvious that others could do likewise.

So I am rather inclined to think that Leftism may on balance be a good thing.  It may help preserve social peace. The task of conservatives is not then to shut them up, persecute them or remove them -- which is what Leftists try to do to conservatives.  No.  Our task is simply to do our best to thwart their brainless and destructive levelling policies. Let them preach but also let us block or unwind their ill-considered and impoverishing policies wherever we can -- JR.

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Snapping of the American Mind

No, you haven’t lost your mind.  Yes, America has.

If someone just 20 years ago had said, for starters, that we’d someday elect an anti-American president who would intentionally flood our borders with millions of illegal immigrants and Islamist “refugees,” that we’d soon celebrate as “heroic” a former Olympic champion for mutilating his body and pretending to be a woman, that we’d have five extremist lawyers on the Supreme Court unconstitutionally force the radical redefinition of marriage to mollify people with same-sex fetishes – you might call that person crazy.

Well, crazy is the new normal. America has lost its mind. We’ve snapped. Anyone with eyes to see, ears to hear and a brain to think knows it.  But why? How did it happen? What exactly caused America’s moral GPS to send our nation headlong into oncoming traffic?  And can anything be done to fix it?

Maybe once in a generation are we so graced with a communicator like veteran journalist and best-selling author David Kupelian. His matchless ability to unpack the complicated issues of our day with simplistic precision is nothing short of genius, a gift from God he has shared once more in his latest book, “The Snapping of the American Mind: Healing a Nation Broken by a Lawless Government and Godless Culture.”

As I’ve said before, when David puts pen to paper, it “has the same effect on your brain that yawning has on your ears at high altitude. Things just suddenly pop with crystal clarity.” The closest comparison I can make to David Kupelian is author and Christian apologist C.S. Lewis. As a Lewis enthusiast of the first order, I don’t make that comparison lightly.

In, “The Snapping of the American Mind,” Kupelian one ups himself by exploring, in lucid detail, the root cause of our current age of lawlessness and moral anarchy. Yet, somehow, he manages to leave us filled with hope for American revival and renewal. “Snapping” is just the book America needs for a time such a time as this.

In it you will learn:

    How the left has succeeded in redefining not just “marriage,” but the rest of Americans’ core values, from “equality” to “justice” to “freedom”;

    Why America, unquestionably the least racist nation on earth, is now being portrayed as a deeply racist pariah state;

    Why the United States is intentionally being flooded with millions of needy, dependent, Third World immigrants;

    How a group that amputates healthy body parts and has a 41 percent attempted suicide rate is officially declared “normal,” yet new “research” suggests conservatives have malformed brains;

    Which of the two major U.S. political parties has a far higher incidence of mental illness;

    Why Americans today are more stressed-out, confused, conflicted and addicted than at any time in the nation’s history – and where this ominous trend is leading;

    And much, much more …

Kupelian, who is vice president and managing editor of WND and editor of Whistleblower magazine, authored two previous blockbuster bestsellers, “The Marketing of Evil” and its sequel, “How Evil Works.”

“The progressive left under Obama,” he writes of his new book, “is accomplishing much more than just enlarging government, redistributing wealth and de-Christianizing the culture. With its wild celebration of sexual anarchy, its intimidating culture of political correctness and its incomprehension of the fundamental sacredness of human life, it is also, whether intentionally or not, promoting widespread dependency, debauchery, family breakdown, crime, corruption, depression and addiction.”

“Surveying this growing chaos in American society,” notes the book’s summary, “Kupelian exposes both the utopian revolutionaries and their extraordinary methods that have turned America’s most cherished values literally upside down – to the point that madness is celebrated and normality demonized.”

In essence, “Snapping” untangles the modern-day manifestation of the timeless biblical truth found in Isaiah5:20: “Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter.”

But unlike the woeful occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Kupelian offers a substantive path forward – real hope and real change that will fundamentally repair what the “progressive” left has “fundamentally transformed.”

“I don’t give up hope,” said Kupelian on the radio show “Coast to Coast AM” with George Noory. “I mean, you could say, if there’s no hope then what do you do? You go off, you drop out, you live for yourself, for your family, and you try to live a good life. No; too many people have fought and bled and died to help this country and to help strangers in foreign lands. There’s still half the country that has not had their mind snapped.”

Which half of the country maintains majority influence over the whole, may determine whether we have any future at all.

SOURCE

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GOP Conservatives Are Here To Stay

The election of Paul Ryan as House speaker is a victory for conservatives -- but some say he is still not conservative enough

When Paul Ryan was drafted for Speaker, who held the real power in that dynamic? Not Ryan – he knew he couldn’t say ‘No” because he would catch the blame if everything went to hell. No, the guys with the real power were the dreaded conservatives – they were the ones whose bottoms were getting bussed.

Sure, there are only a few dozen in the Freedom Caucus, but today they are in the driver’s seat, forcing the caucus kicking and screaming to the right. They are the ones who pummeled the House GOP into transforming from the old status quo-reinforcing transactional paradigm based on trading earmarks into an ideological paradigm based on fighting the liberal agenda. The conservatives have won. We need to understand and accept that so we can move on to the next phase in our campaign to destroy progressivism and restore America.

The fact that conservatives have taken the reins away from the moderates makes people mad, mostly moderate people. Their problem is that we conservatives just won’t cooperate and compromise and lose. This insistence on actually doing conservative things freaks out the squares – “You mean, when you said you wanted to defund Obamacare, you guys were serious?”

Now, that’s not to say that many of us on the right are not also frustrated and annoyed at the hardcore conservatives. We are. Even I am occasionally, like when they won’t take “Yes” for an answer. Paul Ryan was saying “Yes” when he agreed to not push amnesty, to maintain the Hastert Rule, and to reform House procedures. In return, all Ryan wanted was to be allowed to spend more of his time with his kids than sucking face with donor class squishes and trading our principles for their cash. Oh no, Paul – don’t throw us in the briar patch.

Yeah, hardcore conservatives are a pain, but it’s a good hurt, like when your legs get sore after a run or your knuckles ache after punching a hippie.

Let’s face facts – without the hardcore conservatives, Paul Ryan would be happily wonking out as Ways and Means chairman instead of promising to give up about 90% of what we want. John Boehner would still be the Annoying Orange of GOP politics, clinking his highball glass in his secret conclaves with the same K Street jerks we want to see shuttering their expensive offices and wearing barrels as they ride out of D.C. in a caravan of battered U-Hauls.

The smart center right guys get this. They know how to make hard lemonade out of the hard right lemons of the Freedom Caucus. I negotiate for a living as a trial lawyer, and I understand that getting 80% of what my client wants on a given deal means I’m getting hi-fived and a bonus. And I love playing the “Craziest Guy in the Room” card. Sometimes, I even am that card. The CGITR strategy involves being the guy willing to pull a Samson and bring it all down on top of everyone – he’s perfectly happy to get smooshed in the collapse just as long as he takes you all with him. That’s the role of the hardcore conservatives who won’t settle for anything less than 110% of what they want. You can point to them, sigh, shake your head sadly, and say, “Gosh, you better give me 80% and then maybe – maybe – I can hold off these lunatics.”

All hail the conservatives who won’t compromise, who won’t buckle, who won’t let the go-along/get-along gang keep going along and getting along. After all, without the hardcore conservatives, the speaker issue would be moot. Pelosi would be in charge and busy helping Obama turn this country into Venezuela II: The Enfascisting.

There’s no turning back either. We are not returning to the days when the House GOP caucus was satisfied to be a bunch of gentlemanly losers happy to spend several terms spinning their wheels on the Potomac as the government grew and metastasized on their watch. Every election cycle, more of the old guard retires and more of the new breed comes on board. The tilt has happened. John Boehner left the speakership and the House for one reason and one reason only – to avoid a humiliating repudiation at the hands of the GOP caucus that a dozen cases of Jack Daniel’s couldn’t make him forget.

Boehner made no secret that he held conservatives in contempt. And for that the conservatives broke him. Maybe the media missed this essential truth, but that’s a lesson ambitious Republican politicians are all going to learn. The likes of David Brooks will wet their collective Dockers, but the Age of the Squish has come to an end. The RINOs are Cecil, the conservatives are the dentists, and the no one wants to the next head on the wall next to Eric Cantor and Sobby John’s.

This isn’t some phase the GOP is going to outgrow. We’re not afraid to demand that those who lead us be conservative. No dignified elder statesman with a track record of honorable defeat is going to talk some sense into us. We have no desire to utter the squish war cry of, “Thank you, sir, may I have another?”

Yeah, conservatives can be annoying. Hell, they often annoy me, and I’m so hardcore that I’d oppose replacing EBT cards with community gruel pots because I think that’s still too generous to deadbeat Democrat-voting losers. But people who actually believe in something often are annoying.

Here’s the reality. We conservatives have won. And as we exchange our place on the fringes of the party with the RINOs – when the squishes mutter that the GOP they knew is gone, they’re right – we are dealing with a whole new set of challenges. We conservatives now represent the GOP consensus, and power struggles we have seen are our growing pains.

We will get through them. We will prevail. We are the conservatives, and this House is now our house.

SOURCE

There is a  new  lot of postings by Chris Brand just up -- on his usual vastly "incorrect" themes of race, genes, IQ etc.

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated) and Coral reef compendium. (Updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on A WESTERN HEART.

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or  here -- for when blogspot is "down" or failing to  update.  Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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