MIXING MANURE WITH ICE CREAM

Ah, the howls for compromise and consensus!  Let’s look at the true nature of compromise and consensus.

If two people disagree on a point that affects them both, such as a point of law or political principle, they have but four choices.  First, they can sit down and each lay his ideas before the other, discuss their differences, and settle on the best course.  It is entirely possible that one plan will be adopted in its entirety, but if they decide that one plan is best on this point, and other best on that point, they will each freely agree that they’ve found the best path.  Their decision will be based on the merits of their ideas.  This is NOT compromise!

Second, they can agree to disagree and go their separate ways.  This works quite well as long as there is room for them to actually take separate courses.  In the case of the laws and principles that will govern the nation we share, it simply will not work, short of secession, of course.  (In fact, the South tried to “go its separate way” in 1861.  The North’s refusal to allow this resulted in the deaths of over 720,000 Americans, and proved that no part of this nation can do anything that a larger and more heavily armed part forbids.)

Third, one party can simply surrender to the other, leaving one in charge and one in subjugation.  This is not compromise.

Fourth, they can fight it out, survivor take all.  This is not compromise, either.

Compromise is a variation on the third choice, in which one party surrenders to the other, but with conditions and limits.  It is NOT the rational, mature process of finding the best way!  It is the process whereby one man agrees to drink what he believes to be poison, but only in small amounts, or only on Tuesdays.  This leads us directly into one of the greatest lies being told in America today:  that being an ideologue is bad.

An ideologue is a person who lives by ideas.  Individual liberty is an idea; so is fascism.  The human race lives or dies by its ideas.  Using natural gas or electricity to heat our homes to keep us from freezing to death started as an idea.  Canning and refrigerating food to stave off starvation in lean times started as an idea.  The theory that murder is bad is an idea, as is the theory that it’s okay.  The human mind functions to create ideas based on observation of the world around us.  These observations and the ideas that spring from them are not guaranteed to be correct, and if they aren’t, Nature has a way of grading the exam.  Ideas that do not agree with Nature are called mistakes.  There is no such thing as a good idea that won’t work.  If it doesn’t work, it isn’t a good idea; it’s a mistake.

If we demand that humans direct their lives by some means other than ideas, we do two things: we deny their nature as human beings, and we force them go through life as organic mine detectors, learning about the world around them by stepping on mines.  It reduces modern Man, with all of his technology and the collective wisdom of the ages, to the state of our first primordial ancestor.  He had to learn by stubbing his toe because there was no one before him to teach him.  As he learned he transmitted that knowledge to his children by… what?  By ideas.  It’s how the human mind works.  To be human is to live by ideas.

Does this mean we are closed-minded, bigoted, or inflexible?  Of course not!  The human mind is capable of evaluating the results of specific ideas, and, if they aren’t the desired results, it is capable of editing or even discarding ideas that didn’t work.  In fact, the premise that once formed, an idea can never be challenged is at the heart of the anti-ideological movement.  It is beyond absurd.  If people could not challenge or change the ideas by which they live, rational discussion would, indeed, be impossible, and we’d be back to choosing to surrender or fight to the death.

If a freely-functioning mind is wealth, ideas are the currency, or money that represents that wealth.  Ideas are the currency that free men trade.  Some are worth more than others, but all have some value, if only to illustrate error.  If we are to sit down with our neighbors and find the best way through this mess, it can ONLY happen through the development, use and exchange of ideas.

Returning to the nature of compromise, we see that if people discuss and consider ideas, they can find the best of all possible choices.  If elements of one idea are to be changed out for elements of another, it can only be done based on the relative merits of both.  Compromise rejects this process.  Compromise says that we have a moral obligation to take something from everyone’s idea.  Everyone has an equal right to have their ideas represented without debate or evaluation.  It is not moral to believe that any individual can possibly have a plan that is best in all respects.  Note that the issue is not whether it’s possible but whether it’s moral.  We are thus faced with the preposterous situation of saying that being right is of no value, and being consistent is evil.  The only moral plan is one that has elements of everyone’s plan, cut and pasted without regard to merit or even sanity.

Compromise is the war cry of the wicked and the incompetent.  After all, if they had the best plan and the right answer, why wouldn’t they stick to it?  Why would they willingly give up on what they know to be right?  Why wouldn’t they argue for their plan?

I’ll tell you why.  They won’t do that because they know they are wrong, and if their plan were ice water, they couldn’t sell it in Hell.  The person with the right answer has nothing to gain from compromise.  The person with the wrong answer has everything to gain. Evil cries for compromise, knowing that every time virtue yields, the result becomes cumulatively less virtuous and more evil.  Virtue resists compromise because it has the truth, and has no need to alloy it with falsehood.

This is absolutely the source of the plea for compromise from Barack Obama.  He knows he’s wrong, and that his plan won’t sell.  The “moral imperative” of compromise is nothing more or less than the process of progressively diluting right with wrong, and ultimately blaming right for the failure that will inescapably follow.  And he damned well knows it.

Rebsarge
9 November, 2012

THE HANGMEN OF MEN'S SOULS

From the very beginning of the practice of human slavery in North America, it was the practice of the masters to keep their slaves ignorant.  It was illegal to teach slaves to read, though a great many slaves did learn, and in fact, there were many slave schools on plantations.  After Nat Turner’s Rebellion, in southern Virginia in 1831, the laws designed to keep slaves ignorant were much more stringently enforced.  There is anecdotal (i.e., diary) evidence that after the Turner revolt, literate slaves were killed in the belief that being able to read and write made them too dangerous to be kept.  Of all the hysteria that followed Turner’s revolt, this one point may actually have some validity.  Turner was literate, and may have communicated with his troops through the written word.

 

When the 13^th Amendment was ratified, and the peculiar institution finally destroyed, the vast majority of freed slaves were pathetically, tragically ignorant and illiterate. They were also conditioned to believe that their masters were their only source of security, food, shelter, and care.  The masters had so successfully “tamed” them, that even after emancipation, many returned to their former plantations and, for all practical purposes, submitted themselves to their masters again.  That they were technically free made no difference, at all, in their status or their lifestyles.

In 2012, however, the lessons of that awful past have been learned well – by the masters.  All Americans, but most especially Blacks, are kept ignorant of current events and the reality of the circumstances in which our nation finds itself.  Illiteracy and shocking ignorance are more common among American Blacks, especially inner-city Blacks, than any other group.  This is most emphatically NOT a racial trait!  It is a cultural trait – the culture of the slave on the plantation.  Modern masters have not kept Blacks ignorant by banning schools, but rather by controlling what is taught in those schools.  The goal of American public education, as an institution, is to make our children docile believers that their masters are their only source of security, food, shelter, and care.  Even as those slaves of old.  (I do not for an instant mean to say that all American teachers subscribe to this goal!  The existence among us of so many highly-educated people stands as testimony to the integrity and moral courage of thousands of American teachers.  It is the institution and its masters that are corrupt.)

 

There is another parallel to Nat Turner’s time:  loyalty to the masters.  At several points in Turner’s march across Southampton County, his men were fired on by slaves.  No, slaves did not customarily have firearms, but some of the masters felt sufficiently sure of the training of their slaves that arms were issued, and the slaves made sincere efforts to kill those who wanted to free them.  How unbelievable is that?  Ask Stacy Dash, Mia Love, Allen West, or Thomas Sowell.

Depending on whom you read, between 93% and 97% of Blacks voted for Obama.  Even if the lower number is true, this should give us all, especially Blacks, pause.  Is it possible that 93% of the members of any race have the same values and goals?  Is it possible that 93% of the members of any race think the same way about economics, morals, family, patriotism, and freedom?  These are very complicated, abstract ideas, and the claim that such a huge number of people, defined solely by skin color, would agree on them is beyond absurd!  Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke of a time when his children would be judged by the content of their characters, rather than by the color of their skin, and I believe that in these words he gave us the quintessential definition of racism.  Anytime 93% of any race agree on anything, it’s because they are voting something other than the content of their characters.  Either they have betrayed what they think, or they have, literally, been trained to not think.

So what do we see today?  Millions of Americans who have been trained – brainwashed is too generous a term – to believe they must vote their skin.  (In a campaign when women were encouraged to vote their vaginas, I guess this doesn’t seem too far-fetched.)  These same Americans literally howl for the blood of any member of their race who dares to think differently – who makes even a gesture toward rejecting the modern plantation – a desolate and sterile plantation of the soul, in which the minds of men and women who were capable of great things and great ideas have been shackled to a corrupt and despicable belief that their only salvation lies in the magnanimity of their masters.  And they shoot at Ol' Nat.

I have lived most of my life in Albuquerque, NM, where there aren’t many Blacks.  I have, however, spent time in the Deep South, and was exposed to various aspects of Black culture when I was in the Marines in the 1960’s.  I work with a number of Blacks today, and see others around town.  Knowing, as I do, that most of them voted for, or at least support Obama, it is an effort to restrain myself from saying to them, “Do you need the government’s permission to be as good as I?  Do you need the government to hold you up so you can look me in the eye as an equal?  Do you need to point to some two-bit Chicago street punk with an overpriced education to convince yourself that you can deal with me man-to-man?”  It is my deeply-held belief that these questions ought to be answered with a level gaze and a firm, "Hell, no."

How corrupt and downright evil is this thing that has turned such otherwise admirable human beings into such self-doubting and –loathing creatures, and done it supposedly in the name of lifting them up?  During what is called, “The Jim Crow” era, many Blacks were lifted up, and not by the intellectual and moral nooses that lift so many of my countrymen today.  It breaks my heart.  It wounds my nation.  We must change this legacy of servility.