RoR: Forum

Post 0

Sunday, July 18, 2010 - 3:22pm

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Good article!

I suspect that the change we will see in the November elections will help to coalesce and make visible the differences between egalitarians and pragmatists on one side with those who support principles in general and individual rights in particular on the other side.

(Congresswoman Bachman announced just yesterday her intent to create a Tea Party Caucus - maybe she read the post I made suggesting just that thing:-) It can work as a way to multiply the power of the newly elected who are fiscally conservative, and constitutionally aware, and it can help articulate and educate about what these underlying principles are.)

I see the coming political changes as an opportunity to articulate our understanding of these differences as Dr. Machan has with articles like this - tying the principles to the concrete events - riding on the powerful emotions that will accompany the coming changes. Commentators have pointed out that the lame duck period may be one where the progressives will become frantic in pushing their agenda. They will have nothing to lose. That makes it an excellent time to articulate the differences between principle and pragmatism and between egalitarianism and equality under individual rights and objective law.

If the political system reverses direction to a significant degree, it then becomes the bandwagon for carrying related goals - like changing the control of educational system. The natural tendency after recovering from a crisis is to focus on causes and discuss what needs to be different so it doesn't happen again. The national audience is going to be more open to hearing about the history of our educational system and its relationship to what happened to us politically.

I think it is very likely that those who have earned their Libertarian reputations over the decades will see a great increase in popularity - becoming 'discovered' by an ever larger portion of the population. We already see the increased sales of Rand's books, and Rand-related books. We see Stossel, Judge Napolitano, Beck with their own TV shows. I would love to see Dr. Machan as a guest on these shows, and to see many of his titles selling in still greater numbers. So, the ideas have all of these channels into the population, but the schools need to be changed for real success and for long-term success.

(p.s., I don't want anyone to think I'm imagining utopia as just around the corner. I imagine things going wrong nearly as much as going right. And, I imagine a great danger arising out of a horrendous economic crisis which we might experience - that is always the greatest time of danger politically.)
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My focus:
1.) Get Tea Party type candidates elected.
2.) Work to keep the Tea Party focus from being corrupted or abandoned by the Republican party or by the politics-as-usual crowd.
3.) Use the high level of outrage experienced by mainstream America to educate about the principles that led to where we are and the principles that we need to focus on to make things right. (Converting from "Tea Party" to "Capitalism.")
4). Piggy back on the Tea Party political success in elections to force changes in the educational system (vouchers, eliminate teacher unions, put strong, rational people people in as admins at universities, etc.)

Post 1

Monday, July 19, 2010 - 7:13am

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Outstanding, as usual.

Unfortunately the education of American students is mostly in the hands of those who embrace both egalitarianism and pragmatism,

I am convinced, as the result of a deliberate and largely successful attack on this country, by way of its open borders and open campuses, during a 50 year+ global struggle with a smart, totalitarian leaning adversary. That adversary might have blinked itself out of existence, but the residue of its deliberate attack on our institutions remains.

There are disproportionate chokepoints in this nation which serve as the staffing points of the highest levels of our state machinery. Those chokepoints were deliberately attacked, and over-run with what you describe as 'mostly.'

What would have prevented that attack from occuring? Not the goodwill of our adversaries. Not our national intolerence for the kind of absolute police state(the very paradigm we were in a global struggle against)that would have made such an attack difficult.

Voices did warn. Voices did speak out. They were drowned out, and we were over-run at handful of key chokepoints, deliberately.

Our institutions are infected to the point that freedom is almost intellectually indefensible, and we rotted from the top, as a nation. That process took decades, reasonable arguments against were insufficient to prevent it. WIth some irony, it could take the 'pragmatic' failure of the nation to prosper under American Totalitarianism, and probably several decades to purge itself.

regards,
Fred

Post 2

Saturday, July 24, 2010 - 7:22am

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The following hypothetical occurs to me: imagine a university that offered ant-virus protection. One that deliberately, as a matter of policy, rejected acceptance of Marxist indoctrination and slop, deliberately and blatantly and as a matter of Page 1 policy, actively screened against it. The only exposure to Marxist thought to be found is guaranteed to be inside the sand box of 'dangerous/faulty political paradigms, the enemies of freedom.'

No left wing aparatchik Darrida inspired complete nonsense in the English Department.

No crazed aparatchiks in the Anthropology Dept foaming on about Nanook of the North's battle with the walrus being a metaphore for the inhumanity of capitalism.

In short, no left wing gibberish at all, except as morality plays, examples of faulty nonsense, the paradigms of the enemies of freedom.

You want your kid exposed to that slop, there is every other university in existence. You want a no-nonsense education that is consistent with the ideas of individual freedom, of free association, of an abhorrence for slavery ion all of its forms, including slavery to the state, then that is what that university offers, deliberately, on page 1. Marxism is studied in the "Dept of Freedom Eating Totalitarian Idea from the 1800s", studied like 'cancer', with the hope that someday such study will lead to a cure for humanity.

No religious indoctrination, especially the religion of Social Scientology. There are plenty of other religious universities instructing acolytes that "S"ociety is God and the state is its proper church, there has to be room for at least one truly Jeffersonian secular public university in this nation.

Could such a university compete in the arena of ideas?

Support of freedom should not include support for the destruction of freedom. Support and tolerance of the destruction of freedom is not tolerance of and support of freedom.

For some reason, we've accepted the argument that 'complete academic freedom' includes support of ideas that deliberately eat freedom. That is nonsense. The enemies of freedom once used that as a wedge idea to over-run our institutions of education, and replace them with the centers of indoctrination they've become.

I'll get right on it...