Tag: politics

Why democracy doesn’t work

One wonders how democracy is supposed to work, even in a representative form where the elected representatives actually follow through on their campaign promises to the voters they represent, when the majority of voters are completely ignorant:

When NEWSWEEK recently asked 1,000 U.S. citizens to take America’s official citizenship test, 29 percent couldn’t name the vice president. Seventy-three percent couldn’t correctly say why we fought the Cold War. Forty-four percent were unable to define the Bill of Rights. And 6 percent couldn’t even circle Independence Day on a calendar.

I’m slightly embarrassed to say that I only got 19/20 correct on the citizenship test, although perhaps that’s not too bad for someone who left the country more than a decade ago. But only slightly, since although I made a dumb mistake, I also got one correct that I didn’t think I knew.

Abusive social workers vs pedophile priests

I somehow doubt we’ll ever hear anywhere nearly as much about this, and the rampant child abuse being committed on a daily basis by teachers and other public school personnel, as we do about the behavior of pedophile priests from six decades ago. But give The New York Times credit for going against left-liberal orthodoxy and publishing the results of its investigation:

A New York Times investigation over the past year has found widespread problems in the more than 2,000 state-run homes. In hundreds of cases reviewed by The Times, employees who sexually abused, beat or taunted residents were rarely fired, even after repeated offenses, and in many cases, were simply transferred to other group homes run by the state. And, despite a state law requiring that incidents in which a crime may have been committed be reported to law enforcement, such referrals are rare: State records show that of some 13,000 allegations of abuse in 2009 within state-operated and licensed homes, fewer than 5 percent were referred to law enforcement.

Note that in the United States, 10,667 people made allegations of child sexual abuse between 1950 and 2002 against 4,392 priests. This represented around 4 percent of the 109,694 priests who were ordained and active during that time. Given that there were 13,000 allegations of abuse in one state representing one-fifteenth of the U.S. population in 2009 alone, this indicates that state social workers are 951 times more likely to abuse a disabled person under their supervision than a Catholic priest was to sexually abuse a child.

This doesn’t excuse what the pedophile priests did nor does it excuse the diabolical decision of the Vatican to permit homosexuals to join the priesthood in the first place. They eminently deserve whatever punishment they receive, in both this world and the next. But it puts the scale of their evil deeds into the proper statistical perspective. And while one could argue that physical beatings and psychological abuse are not as bad as sexual abuse and should be omitted from the comparison, one also has to keep in mind that none of the crimes committed by the priests rose to the lethal level either.

It also shows the tremendous hypocrisy of those who simultaneously claim that there is no truth to religion and yet attempt to hold religious individuals to a higher standard than they hold anyone else. Social workers and schoolteachers commit far more abuse, sexual and otherwise, than religious leaders, especially if religious leaders who are openly in direct violation of their religious standards are omitted from the equation as logic dictates they must be. (Why should we be surprised that a man who rejects the Church’s stand on homosexuality should also reject the Church’s stand on the sexual abuse of children or anything else?) But it is quite clear from the reaction of the state agency to the crimes of its agents that the Catholic Church’s reaction to the crimes committed by its priests was an entirely normal bureaucratic one. It can, and should, be condemned by Christians who believe in a higher standard for Christian leaders. Secular individuals, who don’t believe in any such standards, have no such grounds for similar condemnation, especially when they show so little interest in the far more common crimes committed by secular agents of the state.

The boundless evil of socialism

Socialist Hugo Chavez speaks out against breast implants:

Venezuela has one of the highest rates of plastic surgery per capita in the world and in some cases teenage girls have had breast enlargements as birthday presents from their parents. Now Mr Chavez has condemned doctors who “convince some women that if they don’t have some big bosoms, they should feel bad.” Speaking on state television, he said that it was a “monstrous thing” to see that even women from poor backgrounds were now choosing to pay to go under the knife.

Libertarians are in favor of women being free to improve the aesthetic appeal of their bodies if they wish. Socialists call big, beautifully-sculpted breasts “monstrous”.

Any questions?

The left of the right

The Right-Wing News polls a collection of so-called “right-of-center” bloggers, thus revealing that the right-wing blogosphere is a) not particularly intelligent, and b) barely to the right of the New York Times token conservative. Consider their list of most unpopular figures:

10) WorldNetDaily: 60.6%
10) Michael Savage: 60.6%
9) Christine O’Donnell: 60.7%
7) Ron Paul: 64.7%
7) Mike Huckabee: 64.7%
6) David Brooks: 71.2%
5) Pat Buchanan: 71.6%
4) Kathleen Parker: 77.8%
3) Joe Scarborough: 80.6%
2) David Frum: 87.5%
1) Meghan McCain: 93.8%

So, most of the “right wing” bloggers dislike the leading paleo-conservative, the leading libertarian Republican, and the largest right-wing Internet site. Now look at who they like for president:

8) Ron Paul: 35.3%
8) Mike Huckabee: 35.3%
7) Mitt Romney: 44.8%
6) Newt Gingrich: 54.4%
5) Mitch Daniels: +76.1%
4) Michelle Bachmann: +83.6%
3) Jim DeMint: +87.9%
2) Sarah Palin: 89.8%
1) Chris Christie: +98.6%

This shows that the so-called right vastly favors an elephantine RINO over the only candidate who has any clue about the dreadful economic and geo-strategic situations in which the nation finds itself. Hell, they favor Newt Gingrich over Ron Paul! But at least give them credit for preferring Palin to Captain Underoos and the Huckster; they may be short-sighted and foolish, but they’re not complete idiots.

In other words, you can safely conclude that this is not the group that will be leading the charge for human freedom or a Constitutional restoration.

Wisconsin Republicans show some backbone

The Senate outflanks the Democratic fleebaggers.

The Wisconsin Senate succeeded in voting Wednesday to strip nearly all collective bargaining rights from public workers, after Republicans outmaneuvered the chamber’s missing Democrats and approved an explosive proposal that has rocked the state and unions nationwide.

“You are cowards!” spectators in the Senate gallery screamed as lawmakers voted. Within hours, a crowd of a few hundred protesters inside the Capitol had grown to an estimated 7,000, more than had been in the building at any point during weeks of protests…. All 14 Senate Democrats fled to Illinois nearly three weeks ago….

I don’t think the side whose elected representatives ran away has a lot of room for calling anyone else “cowards”. The only cowardly thing the Republicans have done is to exclude police and fire unions from the new law, but I don’t think that’s what the protesters meant. As for the calls for a general strike, Governor Walker will be hoping that the unions try it as this will give him the chance to shatter the public unions for good. There is a term for politicians who take on and break unions in economic hard times, and that is “respected head of government”. Don’t forget that union-breaking was the early signature of both Reagan and Thatcher. If the unions are foolish enough to go to the wall on this, despite getting played so badly, and Walker crushes them, both the Republican nomination and the White House will be his for the taking.

UPDATE: The Democratic Left is showing its newfound, post-Arizona respect for political civility: “Please put your things in order because you will be killed and your familes will also be killed due to your actions in the last 8 weeks. Please explain to them that this is because if we get rid of you and your families then it will save the rights of 300,000 people and also be able to close the deficit that you have created. I hope you have a good time in hell. Read below for more information on possible scenarios in which you will die.”

The unacceptable inevitable

What happens when the unstoppable political force meets the inevitable political issue?:

In the poll, Americans across all age groups and ideologies said by large margins that it was “unacceptable” to make significant cuts in entitlement programs in order to reduce the federal deficit. Even tea party supporters, by a nearly 2-to-1 margin, declared significant cuts to Social Security “unacceptable.”

Doesn’t matter. Here’s the numbers. Show me what we’re going to do about it.

Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Unemployment and Welfare comprise 56.7% of the federal budget ($2.1 trillion.) Defense comprises another 18.7% (about $700 billion.) And interest, today, is a paltry 4.6% (primarily due to ZIRP). Interest expense will double even if we don’t add one more dollar of debt to the Federal side.

Not might double, will double.

And will do quite a bit more than that when interest rates return to historic norms. Color me skeptical that the Tea Party is going to be any more successful in holding the Republican Party’s feet to the fire when two-thirds of them won’t even look at the elephant in the room. Playing ostrich and declaring the inevitable to be unacceptable just isn’t going to accomplish anything.

We’re #2524

It would appear Death By 1000 Papercuts’s Alexa-based metric has Vox Popoli listed as the 24th most popular libertarian site on the Internet. Perhaps this will suffice to convince people that I am really not a social conservative, given that my staunch support for legal drugs, prostitution, and nuclear weapons, (to say nothing of my opposition to military imperialism, financial interventionism, government-sanctioned marriage, and the pledge of allegiance), doesn’t appear to have done the trick.

Now, I’m not into chest-thumping over hits and lists and awards. Except, of course, the one award given by Bane, which I will cherish always. (Note to those who bought into the whole Bane is Dead charade… just look at the Middle East. Now you know what he’s been up to.) First, there are too many horrible sites that are highly ranked and too many very good sites that virtually no one reads to take the numbers game very seriously. Second, let’s be honest, I am a little too arrogant to be inclined to put much credence in a metric that depends upon what most people like, most people being idiots and all.

But I do find it a little mystifying when those with readerships that are but a fraction of the Dread Ilk – let alone the WND readership – attempt to dismiss what I’m writing because they think no one reads it. How, precisely, does that compute?

Mailvox: the grasshoppers cry

NL makes an emotional appeal in defense of Social Security:

You said, “What it cannot afford to do is to permit them to increase while simultaneously spending more on…. massive income transfers to the elderly, the poor and other unproductive classes. “

HOW DARE you say this about the “elderly”. The generations like your ma and pa that worked hard all their lives to get us what we have TODAY. They are OWED their retirement and to have a decent live after.

WE OWE our parents everything for all the blessings we have today. Most just live on a moderate pension and Social Security. As for the poor, I hope you are NOT talking about the widows and the fatherless. (No, not the abandoning kind.) As a Christian you know you are breaking “Honor thy father and thy mother that thy days may be long upon the earth”? If you feel they should not have their monies and call them “unproductive”.

This prodigiously stupid response to my WND column yesterday is, alas, a fairly typical one. The Baby Boomers, as is their narcissistic wont, are clearly in complete denial about the mathematically inevitable consequences of the grand Ponzi scheme that is Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. They don’t seem to grasp that the large numbers that made them such a cultural force from the 1960s onward now renders them a vast financial anchor on the nation that will inevitably have to be cut loose in some manner. Like a vast plague of locusts, they devoured the nation’s harvest and its seed corn.

If the collective “ma and pa” had worked hard all their lives rather than borrowing money to live beyond their means, there wouldn’t be any need for this melodrama. But they didn’t. They spent everything they earned, they spent everything their children will earn, and they spent everything their grandchildren will earn… assuming they weren’t among the millions of women who murdered their children and eliminated future generations post-1973. The elderly of America not only don’t deserve much in the way of respect, they will be extremely fortunate if they are not forcibly exiled to metaphorical ice floes for their inter-generational financial crimes. They not only ransacked the present, they raped the future.

The elderly are presently the wealthiest segment of the nation. Extracting more wealth from the young and transferring to the irresponsible elderly is not only a mockery of justice, it is rubbing salt in the wound. And one does not honor one’s father or mother by robbing from someone else and presenting one’s aged parent with the proceeds of one’s crimes. But it should not surprise us that an aging Baby Boomer would attempt to turn theft into a Biblical injunction.

Not every Baby Boomer is responsible for the crimes of his generation, just as every National Socialist wasn’t responsible for the crimes of the SS-Totenkopfverbände. But that doesn’t make the crimes, or the inevitable consequences of those crimes, disappear.

The new caliphate rises

Somehow, I don’t think we’re going to end up with liberal representative democracies in Egypt, Tunisia, Bahrain, and now Libya:

Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi is believed to have fled the capital Tripoli after anti-government demonstrators breached the state television building and set government property alight. Protesters appear to have gained a foothold in Tripoli as banks and government buildings were looted while demonstrators have claimed they have taken control of the second city Benghazi. It is thought up to 400 people may have died in the unrest with dozens more reported killed in Tripoli overnight as protests reached the capital for the first time and army units were said to have defected to the opposition…. A coalition of Libyan Islamic leaders has issued a fatwa telling all Muslims it is their duty to rebel against the Libyan leadership and demanding the release of all jailed protesters.

It’s interesting to consider the juxtaposition between what is happening in the Middle East and what is happening in Wisconsin. It is apparent that the leader’s sense of his own legitimacy and the military’s support for it plays a significant role in his willingness to stand firm or not. Which raises the question. If the millions of so-called “birthers” began to protest in Washington DC demanding to see Obama’s birth certificate, how long would it take before he fled from the White House?

But that’s neither here nor there as it’s not going to happen. The more important question is when we are going to start seeing mergers between the various Muslim nations. This will be a significant sign that the Ummah is girding up for a new wave of expansion into the Dar al-Harb.

In tangentially related news, Steve Sailer notes that the US media is opposed to electing a new people when it happens in other countries: “It’s funny how much more readily the American MainStream Media grasps how unfair it is for the government to elect a new people in Bahrain—while they cheer it on in the U.S.”