Amerika

America fought two wars that will forever define her. The first was the war between the states, which broke our hearts and corrupted us so deeply we may never be free of it.

The second was World War II, in which our own citizens were so ambivalent about war that we had to make a comic book or Hollywood movie out of it — brave democratic underdog hero America versus those baby-killing Huns and Caucasian woman-raping Japanese — to convince our people it was a good idea.

Whether or not these wars were just, we paid a great price for them: we have defined ourselves as a moral society.

As far as I can figure it, “moral society” means that we put ourselves on the cross. Whenever someone else has a need, we let them crucify us so that we do not commit some immoral act like slavery, Hitlerianism or samurai Spartan codes of honor.

What is valued instead is deference, and making everyone feel happy and included and like they are equally important, even if they have done nothing at all. This way, America is always the moral victor.

In human emotional politics, if you are the moral victor, you are always the injured party and your retaliation is justified. Every Pearl Harbor deserves a nuclear strike or two; every Holocaust deserves a Dresden or twenty.

It’s not far different from the politics of emotional blackmail played by most of the couples you see around you. He states an opinion; she states a contrary opinion; he defers, but that forces her to make the decision; for the rest of their lives, any doubt about that decision is now her fault, and he will silently blame her for it — and she’ll do the same to him, on another issue.

The point in this whole game is that to take responsibility is to become the oppressor.

To take zero responsibility, and yet still be injured, is to be the victim.

Human urine stains the walls and feces is piled up in an alley that’s just blocks away from the Convention Center and other tourist hotspots.

“If they don’t let you go inside, you have to go anywhere. That’s why El Paso is like that,” Roberto Miranda said.

[…]

We questioned the Director of the Farm Workers Center. He told us the people that urinate and defecate in the alleys are not migrant workers.

“That’s a problem by the city. That’s a social problem the city needs to address,” he said.

[…]

French says he’s reported the problem to the city, but he says the city has ignored his pleas for help.

“I think somebody through the city should be responsible for cleaning up all the mess, and the quick fix is porta potties,” he said. – KTSM

One of the marks of a first world nation is that there is not feces and urine staining the streets. This is not a matter of interior decorating (you can do a lot with earthy tones, after all) but of practical interest: our waste is toxic, and bacteriologically active. It’s a no-no to have it near where we live. Simply burying, burning or flushing away waste reduces local water-borne illness radically, which is why waste disposal and good hygiene is one of the symptoms of a society moving beyond third world status.

But here in El Paso, we have feces on the street.

The illegal immigrants say someone should have provided them toilets.

The attorneys tell us it’s not the illegal immigrants; it’s the homeless, and the city should fix it.

The residents tell us the city should fix it.

No one wants to be the one who takes responsibility. That makes you the Romans, not the prophet on the cross. You become an authority figure and you will be to blame, much like all three parties seem to agree hte city is to blame.

What is lost is the obvious: homeless or illegal, there’s a huge population of people who have no purpose in the community who are hanging around and defecating and urinating in the streets. Why not put the responsibility where it belongs — on them?

“But they’re poor,” says Sally Knownothing. At home in her suburban home, surrounded by electronic gadgets and entertainment magazines, she is terribly bored. A helicopter parent, she hovers around her children as she forces them through Mozart for Babies, Early Readers Pre-School, accelerated tutoring and finally, prep school. She thinks of herself as a good parent and a good person. And she just can’t understand why with all this wealth around, we’re letting people go without bathrooms.

She doesn’t want to take responsibility.

She wants the city to do it. She wants anyone but herself and the actual defecators and urinators to take responsibility. At least, that’s how she feels, stretched out on the sofa in the comfortable air conditioning, waiting for Bethany and Jayden to finish preparatory math tutoring so she can find a movie on cable.

In her mind, being poor lets people off the hook for being responsible. It’s someone else’s job. After all, if you’re poor, you haven’t taken responsibility, and thus anyone who’s not poor is the person in authority. And Sally doesn’t want to feel any guilt about this. No more guilt. Between the mother-in-law, Jayden’s low score in algebra, and Bethany posting her tits to Facebook, Sally is just over it all.

Human Rights, closely related to the ideas behind the bloodthirsty, ruthless revolutions in France and Russia, are now being used to give our own Left-wing elite the power to override a thousand years of tradition, national independence and freedom, in the name of something that sounds noble but is in fact sordid and ugly.

In the past 30 years I can think of only one instance – a group of railwaymen who refused to be forced into a union closed shop – where Human Rights have been used in the interests of real freedom. In many other cases, the Human Rights Act has been deployed to reduce the freedoms of the hard-working, the tax-paying and the law-abiding.

The rights asserted have been those of lawbreakers trying to avoid justice, illegal immigrants trying to avoid deportation for criminal acts, prisoners trying to win votes and similar unpopular and unwanted changes for the worse in our way of life.

If Christianity is being sidelined, marriage reduced to the level of any other sexual relationship, Britain being pressed to adapt to immigrants rather than the other way round, extreme feminism imposed on workplaces, schools compelled to re-admit trouble-making pupils, Human Rights will be involved.

Real rights and freedoms are not like this. Our British Great Charters, Claims and Bills of Rights do one simple thing – tell the Government what it cannot do. These are in truth the only rights worth having.

But it has become deeply unfashionable to say so. – The Mail on Sunday

Rights are absolute: someone else must be the oppressor, I must be the oppressed, and so I get a shut-off switch called my rights.

Naturally this progresses from “I use my rights to defend myself” to “If I’m not given what I think I need, my rights are violated.” After all, both having your rights violated and lacking what you need to enjoy those rights, through the eyes of a legal system, amount to the same thing.

Whoever takes responsibility is responsible for the rights of the others.

And if those people end up in a mess, or failing? Then it’s assumed to be the fault of that oppressor.

This is how we go from a liberal rights state to an entitlement state. This is why every liberal state eventually becomes a Socialist state.

Socialist states operate by a simple rule: if anyone else has it, I deserve it, since I am equal and have an equally valid claim to it.

Just like rights themselves, the principle is that everyone else must wait for me, because my rights come first since I’m using them to defend against the rest of you. Except — it’s not defense, usually; it’s the assumption that one must defend against the rest, because if one is not responsible, the others are and that makes them the oppressor-benefactor.

How would you like to be a fifty year old with a couple hundred thousand dollars saved in your 401K and the government tells you that they’re going to force you to start withdrawing the money? And oh, by the way, they’re going to tax it at 30%, 50% or an even higher rate? It gets worse!

Megan McArdle at The Atlantic believes both traditional IRAs are in danger due to normal tax increases and that tax-free Roth accounts eventually will be tapped, too. “I think that Congress is going to go after all of it,” McArdle writes. “But Congress doesn’t have to do anything special to get money out of traditional IRAs; it just has to raise income taxes. (401ks and traditional IRAs are taxed at ordinary income tax rates). Roth IRAs, on the other hand, represent a sizable pool of tax-free assets.”

It gets even worse. From Bloomberg:

The Obama administration is weighing how the government can encourage workers to turn their savings into guaranteed income streams following a collapse in retiree accounts when the stock market plunged.

The U.S. Treasury and Labor Departments will ask for public comment as soon as next week on ways to promote the conversion of 401(k) savings and Individual Retirement Accounts into annuities or other steady payment streams, according to Assistant Labor Secretary Phyllis C. Borzi and Deputy Assistant Treasury Secretary Mark Iwry, who are spearheading the effort.

Encourage workers? Now, exactly how would they do that? More like force workers to buy these so-called annuities. Notice the use of the term “guaranteed income streams”. And what would these guaranteed income streams be invested in? You guessed it, government debt or in nicer terms treasury bills. With one fell swoop, everyone who has an individual retirement account will have all of their life savings stolen by the government. Then what happens when the government defaults on its debt? Sorry suckers… – IMF

All socialist states default to the principle of Other People’s Money, or OPM.

If you create an entitlement state, you will quickly breed the most useless people on earth, because whether they perform or not they get a paycheck. This drives away the capable people, who get tired of supporting a raft of parasites. But those who procreate tend to be the thoughtless, incompetent and irresponsible, which is fine for Government, since as long as it has a stable of irresponsible morons to be pitied, it has an inarguable mission.

“Let me get this straight: You want us to stop feeding these impoverished, malnourished, homeless, sad souls afflicted by mental disease and alcoholism? What kind of a heartless soul-crusher are you!”

But as Sally Knownothing thinks, stretched out on her sofa, it’s just dollars. And we have so many. Why should we care about this irresponsibility/responsibility madness?

In the last 40 years, the percentage of 25-34 American adults who were married has dropped from 80 percent to 45 percent. In 2009, it was reported that at only 52 percent, the percentage of married adults of all ages was the lowest percentage recorded since the U.S. Census Bureau began collecting marital information 100 years ago.

When one considers the widespread availability of wildly entertaining, time-intensive video games as well as high-quality, high-definition pornography produced to suit even the most esoteric sexual tastes, it is not terribly surprising that American men are becoming ever more disinclined to risk pledging their lives and fortunes to the increasingly adipose, decreasingly reliable creature known as the American woman?

Dr. Helen Smith writes: “Nowadays, for many men, the negatives of marriage for men often outweigh the positives. Therefore, they engage in it less often. Not because they are bad, not because they are perpetual adolescents, but because they have weighed the pros and cons of marriage in a rational manner and found the institution to be lacking for them.” – WND

When you make women into victims, and thus command them to be irresponsible, they end up in a permanent role of victimhood which by the relative nature of the universe, requires them to blame the responsible party. If Sally Knownothing’s husband is good to her, provides for the family and loves her and the kids, she’ll have to find another way he’s victimizing her. That’s it! He’s forcing her into the boredom that only stability can bring!

As soon as our society made itself into the avenging superhero, first in the Civil War and next in WWII, it doomed itself by taking on moral rhetoric. Moral rhetoric requires an underdog-hero and a victim. As a result, we all saw ourselves as the victims, and took out our own failings on whoever was in power, if we could not smash the idea of power itself.

Now we’re heading to third world status. Women rut like animals, plop out spawn and blame someone else. Our citizens cannot even demand we enforce laws, and so demand government do everything for them. Government cannot even act when the streets are coated in feces and urine.

It’s a long way to the bottom.

Tags: crowdism