Idealistic IS Realistic

QUOTE OF THE DAY: The trouble with pragmatism is that it's completely useless.
- Sidney Morgenbesser

Political pragmatism is one of the most insidious and pernicious fallacies ever to blight the human race. Its implementation is the crippling of the self.

You have to have a vision. You have to know exactly what you want. Circumstances will force you to settle for less, so always ask for exactly what you want.

To put it in concrete terms: Let's say you want to build a skyscraper. You have to know exactly what it's going to look like before you even start building it. What do you start with? Nothing but an idea. Then, when you get land and labor, bricks and mortar, wood and metal, it still looks nothing like a skyscraper. It's going to take months to build it, and you'd better believe there are going to be problems along the way. Pragmatists look at these details and declare your skyscraper "a nice idea on paper that won't work in practice", settle for arranging the resources into a pathetic lean-to, then angrily discourage any attempts to make something more.

The ideal must be your guiding star. Without a vision, you're just wandering aimlessly.

Balkanization: The Case In Favor

QUOTE OF THE DAY: "Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain't going away."
-- Elvis Presley

For the past 32 years or so, we have been humoring the Far Right. We have been generous and accomodating, giving in to their unreasonable demands instead of telling them what we truly think, in the hopes that they would return the favor. They haven't. They've taken a mile for every inch we've given them. We have had every right to employ the exact same cutthroat, uncompromising politics that they have - but we haven't.

I truly believe that this policy of appeasement and submission to injustice is the only reason that we are not currently neck-deep in a hideous Second Civil War (instead, we are merely neck-deep in a Cold Civil War).

Am I agitating for civil war? Of course not. But the Far Right is absolutely willing to go that far to get what they want. The Left has to at least ask itself: How far are WE willing to go? Let me repeat, I do not want a war. This is why I propose what I consider to be the only viable alternative: a divorce. The South has been not-so-secretly itching to secede for about 150 years now. I say, let them! I am sick and tired of them retarding desperately needed progress. We've freed the slaves, what do we need them for, really?

According to http://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2004/09/red_states_feed.html, 8 of the top 10 beneficiaries of federal tax money are red states - deep red, too, like Alaska, Alabama, and the Dakotas. And the 10 states that receive the least federal tax money in comparison to what they pay? Only ONE (New Hampshire) is a serious red state - 2 others are battleground states (Colorado and Nevada), and the rest, like New York, California, and Massachusetts, are solid blue. Contemplate this for a second. Do I need to elaborate on this matter?

Now, I know what you may be thinking: "We have BARACK FRIGGING OBAMA! America is already headed left! And most conservatives don't want civil war either, they won't let the Far Right go that far!" Or possibly, as one person once told me when I raised the issue previously: "No way. Half of my family is liberal and the other half insane, but we all love each other very much and nobody's pulling us apart."

I'm very sorry, but there's a reason I chose the Elvis quote today: moderates desperately ask, "why can't we just get along?" - well, as things stand, we can't. Moderates don't understand the true nature of the conflict in America. They have tried to smother the issue with sheer weight of numbers, but the Far Right and Far Left understand what they're talking about. We're not going away until the conflict is resolved - and that conflict is nothing less than the struggle to define America's raison d'etre: are we the Land of the Free, where those outcast from other societies can find refuge to live however they want, or are we a "Christian nation", home of the Christian, English-American, Jacksonian ethnic group where everyone else is merely a guest who has to conform to the rules of their culture? America is fundamentally divided between mutually exclusive mindsets and the MOs that follow from them. Simply put, roughly half the country believes in freedom, and the other doesn't - it's just that "freedom" is a "good" word, so they have a completely different definition for it. One George Lakoff wrote an insightful book on this matter that you can learn more about here: http://www.whosefreedom.com/. Like the man says, this is America's most important idea, and we can't operate with two completely different definitions of it.

The Far Right's not budging. Neither should we. What will happen now that we're standing up for ourselves?

No More Alan Colmes!

QUOTE OF THE DAY: "If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical; but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without demand. It never did and it never will."
- Frederick Douglass

As many people already know, limp-wristed liberal strawman Alan Colmes was recently dropped from his seat opposite Sean Hannity. One can only speculate as to why.

My point today is not really to talk about Alan Colmes, but what he represents: the cuddly, harmless, "can't we all just get along" liberalism that, by my estimate at least, was ushered in by Jimmy Carter, and has been the soul of the Democratic Party ever since then.

It was a nice idea: it's nice to be nice to nice people. The theory was, this was the dawning of the Age of Aquarius (or, if you're a serious occultist rather than a poseur, the Aeon of Horus), and if we could but love our enemies, they would pay us back in kind. As another song of the era put it, "there ain't no Good Guys/ there ain't no Bad Guys/ there's only you and me and we just disagree." Heartwarming. But did it work?

Well, they did start paying us back in love - the only problem is, it was their definition of "love." In exchange for Martin Luther King, Cesar Chavez, and Bobby Kennedy, we got James "Child Abuse" Dobson, Pat "Salvation for Sale" Robertson, Ronald "War on Drugs, and the Poor, and Minorities" Reagan, Grover "Fuck the Poor" Norquist, and David "I Used to be a Bloody Grand Wizard in the Goddamned KKK, for Christ's Sake" Duke.

The Far Right has made it unambiguous what they want. As pastor George Grant stated in his book "The Changing of the Guard: Biblical Principles for Political Action," "[It] is dominion we are after. Not just a voice. It is dominion we are after. Not just influence. It is dominion we are after. Not just equal time. It is dominion we are after. World conquest. That's what Christ has commissioned us to accomplish. We must win the world with the power of the Gospel. And we must never settle for anything less..."

We can't afford the Alan Colmes strategy any longer. We are fighting the equivalent of Nazis here. Yes, yes, I know the majority of right-wingers aren't this scary, but you know what? Most Nazis were just regular people too. It is enough for the majority to believe, fear, and obey. The scary people are the ones giving the orders, and Adolf Eichmann and Stanley Milgram (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment) showed the world in no uncertain terms what ordinary people will do under the geas of authority.

I think that the Far Right understands on some instinctual level that their beloved way of life has no place in the world liberals dream of. Our hope has always been that they will see the error of their ways and abandon their white Christian capitalist identities in favor of something good - but they ARE their white Christian capitalist identities; changing that is to them a fate worse than death. They've known all along that this is a war in which the loser will be obliterated. They won't stop until they have EVERYTHING exactly the way they want it. Of course, they can never actually have what they want - the objective Truth itself is against them; but the amount of destruction, suffering, ignorance and order they can cause before they figure that out is incalculable. And when would they figure that out? They're fundamentally irrational - and irrational people can ALWAYS rationalize their way into preserving their beliefs against facts.

As I've said before, the liberal mindset isn't a side or a perspective, but the perspective one attains when you synthesize all others. That said, if they insist on treating us like a "side", it might not hurt to start acting like one. They want "liberal bias"? Let's give them liberal bias!

No more pitching the tug-of-war game. No more compromises. No more appeasement. No more injustice. No more Alan Colmes.

A Song I Wrote

QUOTE OF THE DAY:
In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move.

- Douglas Adams

For the record, this DOES NOT necessarily reflect my true feelings or opinions (although I do stand by some parts of it) - this is just me being deliberately cynical and offensive. Submitted for your approval:

FAITH

Buddha was a coward,
Jesus was a fraud
Moses was a tyrant
who served a tyrant god
Islam is imperial
spread by swords and pistols
Wicca's too ethereal
all gossamer and crystals
L. Ron Hubbard was a con-man
but everyone knows that
Alastair Crowley was
just an overprivelaged brat
Shinto's a religion that makes you wonder why
there was no divine wind over Hiroshima's sky
Hinduism can't explain, if we're all reincarnated
where'd we get these extra souls
that have us overpopulated?
Rastafarians are stoners
Asatru is uncouth
Tantra gives you boners,
but can it give you truth?
The Flying Spaghetti Monster's just a new kid on the block
If Gilgamesh was so great,
whatever happened to Iraq?
Unitarianism's pointless
Ba'hai is so banal
Lao Tzu was a nutcase
Confucius was anal
Zoroastrians see the world in shades of black and white
the Aztecs thought they had to kill
or there would be eternal night
atheists aren't freethinkers
to say there is no god
you first have to know what it is
isn't that a little odd?
A deist's just an atheist trying to cover his ass
agnostic is a cop-out
Santeria's full of gas
the ancient Greek religion discourages ambition
a Satanist is just
another type of Christian
Voodoo is from Haiti
where it hasn't done much good
Celtic paganism's
just dancing naked in the wood
Native American shamanism failed to prevent
the worst genocide in world history
I wonder where the Spirits went?
Inuit religion's depressing
Egyptians keep your heart in a jar
Sikhs keep me guessing at
just how many gods there are
the Australian Aborigines
see bunyips everywhere
Hare Krishna will shave off all your hair
I've spent my life a-seeking, I always fail to find
If you ask me why I have no faith
Because I blew it on Mankind!