Taught to Think

I'm wondering how many of the people who visit here were taught how to think in school?

H/T Dr. Hurd

Pittsburg Police Create Riot At G20

WTF?

I'm Right... You're Wrong."

It seems it is unusual these days to hold onto any belief as rigid as that statement and doing so can lead to one being labelled rigid, inflexible, dogmatic… and my personal favourite, extreme.

But let me clarify something here. When I speak of right and wrong in this manner I am not commenting on a societal norm, or a personal choice. I am not trying to apply my personal prejudice to a situation and write off my bias, feelings or upbringing as falling within or defining what is right or wrong.

In order for such a statement to be made (and to be worthy of consideration) the person making it must have reduced the question of right and wrong to its base. Axiomatic to that question is the principal of initiation of force.

The question of the application of force is a moral one. Ayn Rand said “Force and mind are opposites; morality ends where a gun begins.” The issue and the question don’t get any clearer than that.

So where does that lead us? Well, to certainty.

Here is an example…

Circumcision is wrong.

It is wrong not on religious grounds or feelings or even the necessity of the act itself but because it is procedure performed on infants who are neither mature enough to decide nor are they given the opportunity to decide whether to have the operation performed. It is wrong because of the force.

“But…” the argument begins “it is right in certain cultures.”

Really? Would it be “right” to hack off an infant’s left hand if that somehow had evolved as a cultural norm? How about a forefinger at the age of 6 months. Maybe just the ceremonial removal of all a baby’s fingernails?

Would it be right for a man to keep slaves if that was claimed as a historical or cultural norm? How about cannibalism or any of a host of other barbaric practices?

No.

Circumcision is wrong. It is just as wrong as its less acceptable (in western culture) cousin, female genital circumcision (mutilation). And it is wrong for exactly the same reason… The application of force against children or babies that are too young and/or not permitted to decide what happens to their bodies on their own.

Right and wrong are simple concepts, easily divisible, easily discernible. Applied with the proper principal it is quite simple and quite correct to say…

"I'm right, you're wrong."

Ghosts of Liberals Past

This has me wishing that the end of this repackaged, uninspiring, sophomoric, oh-so-70's exercise in Trudeausocialism, turned policy nightmare would be Ludwig von Mises kicking Ignatieff's ass all the way back to Harvard.

Aside from that daydream... this article also exposes that revisionism is alive and well in the Liberal camp.

When this economic downturn started PM Harper attempted to stick to his conservative roots and to not play Keynesian Russian Roulette with taxpayer funded bullets. However, Jack Layton almost screaming in the House of Commons that "something had to be done for the workers", accompanied by much Liberal gnashing of teeth and beating of breasts demanding that "something be done for the economy" was enough to ignite the PM's pragmatic (and wholly political) survival instinct... Hence the hole being dug by politicians today, to be filled with taxpayer money tomorrow.

Truth be known that I agree with Mr. Ignatieff, the deficit is too high and the Conservatives are spending all too wildly. But Iggy's assumption that his own spending plan will not create such a deficit, and further that the money he is planning on spending will actually (miraculously) shrink the deficit is the kind of mental gymnastics that leads one to think that he can have his cake and eat it too.

Kelly McParland at the National Post takes the time to kick Ignatieff for both Ludwig and I...

How can they be hard-hearted tightwads and loose-spending wastrels at the same time? They're pouring money into the economy, which is bad. The Liberals would spend more, which is good. Interventionist government is good. But interventionist government by Tories is bad. We have to reduce protectionism. But anyone tries to buy a Canadian company and we'll drag them in front of a review board.

I don't get this Ignatieff guy. I can't figure out what he believes. Because I don't think he knows.

Read the whole thing.

Cleaning out my Philosophical Closet.

I have just gone through my bookmarks and deleted a quite popular conservative blog that I have followed for a number of years. as a matter of fact I think this was the first blog I ever began following and reading regularly. No, I'm not going to tell you which blog, this post isn't about that.

I deleted it because I finally saw (or acknowledged) it was racist. Now I'm not talking white supremacist, KKK/Black Panther, Neo-Nazi racist but the more insidious brand of racism, the kind that gets thrown into a conversation and is rarely called a spade as it were.

Its perpetrated by that sensible sounding guy that claims "I'm not talking about culture and I'm not racist." immediately after making a statement about "us letting other types of people into your country" and complaining that "they brought over their religion" and how now "it is all one big mess, because we were to nice and let them come into our country. Now they want everything and anything." While simultaneously blanking out the fact that that very desire (to live as one wishes), is what led people to populate North America in the first place.

It's the person that uses statistics, pointing out that "3.2 per cent of Spain's population was foreign-born in 1998. In 2007 it was 13.4 per cent. Europe's Muslim population has more than doubled in the past 30 years and will have doubled again by 2015. In Brussels, the top seven baby boys' names recently were Mohamed, Adam, Rayan, Ayoub, Mehdi, Amine and Hamza." and drawing a correlation between that fact and some nebulous apocalyptic future if the trend continues.

Incidentally these kinds of statistics pop up quite a bit in the media, reported as floating abstractions which offer nothing of substance to the point being made, and are rarely if ever connected, as they should be, to the vilest form of collectivism there is.

Now I'm no ostrich. I'm not burying my head in the sand and claiming that all cultures deserve the same respect. There is no reason to respect the systemic sexism or the religious violence advocated by some extreme forms of Islam because that is someone's "culture" any more that there is a valid claim that cannibalism should be accepted because the practice was connected to tribal custom in the Amazonian jungle.

On the whole race and culture denote nothing, it is an indication of nothing about the individual as an individual. You can no more decide the beliefs of a man based on his race or culture any more than you can determine the flavour of a wine from the shape and colour of the bottle.

Hippocrates Shrugged

In Obama's America, health care manages you...

45 percent of American physicians “would consider leaving their practice or taking an early retirement”

In the event that this 45% of doctors follow through, that would leave the rest not in a profession but in virtual slavery.

EDIT
An excellent post from F.I.R.M. (Freedom and Individual Rights in Medicine) to add fuel to your intellectual fire.

Genes Of Evil...

''The American relatives have agreed not to have children to extinguish the saga of Hitler and stop living in fear, but have promised to publish a book before they die,'' said Mulders.

This is the sort of nonsense regurgitated by people who believe that your genetic code is the be all and end all of you, the individual. This is the ugly ignorant hand of determinism reaching out from beyond the grave to destroy what could be, or could have been vital productive lives of people who have themselves never done wrong.

Its a psychological, physiological and existential impossibility that being related to one of the most evil men in history means that you will somehow by the miracle of genetics pass that "sin" on to an offspring.

An equivalent lunacy would be to say that existing relatives of the Donner Party should never be allowed to cook at the campsite.

Ignatieff Begins With I

...and he is the I in team.

Metaphysical Value-Judgments

So much of what I post here is tinged with anger, incredulity and despair that I must seem to be a bitter sort, but that just isn't so.

Never the less its useful, cathartic and refreshing to show other sides of your self, even to yourself every now and then. So with that in mind I'd like to introduce you to one of my favorite artists Jack Vettriano.

Now I'm no art critic, but like the man says... I know what I like. For me the art deco coolness of Mr. Vettriano's work speaks of a time of limitless possibilities. It is simple, clean, not overly ornate and unabashedly sensual, sexual and occasionally erotic.

In Thoughts of You - Jack Vettriano

Don't Ever Forget

*

What if Milton Friedman was addressing America's schoolchildren?

Although a President making an address to schoolchildren should not seem controversial, President Barack Obama has managed to arouse a great deal of resistance and opposition to his planned address.

The controversy isn't so much about the remarks of the address (which, being pitched to children, is relatively mild and uncontroversial in of itself), but the larger context of how the administration operates in general and the crude and ill conceived "learning package" that was planned to go with the speech, a package for America's schoolchildren which has all the hallmarks of indoctrination.

Perhaps it would be better if schoolchildren everywhere were to hear from notables like Milton Friedman. I pulled this gem from "Dr Helen":

I would rather think that the words of Milton Friedman from his book Capitalism and Freedom make more sense:

"The paternalistic 'what your country can do for you' implies that government is the patron, the citizen the ward, a view that is at odds with the free man's belief in his own responsibility for his own destiny. The organismic, 'what you can do for your country' implies that government is the master or the deity, the citizen, the servant or the votary. To the free man, the country is the collection of individuals who compose it, not something over and above them. He is proud of a common heritage and loyal to common traditions. But he regards government as a means, an instrumentality, neither a grantor of favors, and gifts, nor a master or god to be blindly worshipped and served.

Now there is a lesson we can all get behind

To Vote... Yet Not To Vote

The Liberal's say they are going to "pull the plug" on the Conservatives minority government (they really, really, really, really, really mean it this time).

Now in most places on the planet when an election is held there are only a couple of reasons for doing so. Either the term of the sitting government is over and by law there has to be an election, or in a multi-party democracy a sitting minority government looses the support of the parliament (or what-have-you) over some real or politically important (imagined) issue.

My question is this... What is the issue (I'll even accept a "politically important" one at this point)? What is the reason that the Liberals have decided suddenly to stop supporting the Conservatives as they have done for the last 303 days? What is the point of spending another $300,000,000 to hold an election that no one outside of the Liberal and NDP spin factories even want?

What would the Liberals do differently? The Conservatives are already governing like Liberals anyway.

The Conservatives have completely divorced themselves from any sort of fiscal responsibility, they have shunned their small government conservative ideals, and they have bent over backwards to pay their way into the hearts and minds of anyone and everyone who they think might even remotely have a chance of voting for them. Sounds just like the Liberals to me.

PM Harper and his boys and girls have behaved like nothing more than Liberal dopplegangers so why should we Canadians have our time and our money wasted on a vote to replace one conjoined twin with the other?

What if they held an election and nobody showed up to vote? What if we were able to get less than 50% of the people of this country to show up for that 5 minutes of "civic duty"? Or better yet what if the usual number of people showed up but didn't mark their ballots, or wrote a personal note to government instead of choosing one empty suit over another.

You could write something small on a ballot, something like "Get to work..." or "Stop stealing from me..."

Politicians often make comments about elections sending them a "message from the voters" well lets send them all a message to smarten the %&@# up and stop wasting our time and money.

Update: Obama's Brownshirts Want Your Information

Seems the Obama administration is going to do a bunch of data mining from popular social networking sites. This initiative has an Orwellian feel to it. As one friend pointed out on FB, it bodes ill for both freedom of speech and freedom of association.

This, coupled with the other recent activities of America's first Socialist Government has some of our rights respecting southern cousins seeing Red, White and Blue.

H/T: Kelly

Barack Hussein Obama: Slightly left of Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev

The only thing missing from this are the "Comrade" and "Dear Leader" honorariums.