Society is not the criminal but the force which keeps crime in check. When social controls weaken, man’s innate cruelty bursts forth. The rapist is created not by bad social conditioning influences but by a failure of social conditioning.
It’s the Christmas Season. We want to give to the poor. But . . . are some ways more effective than others?
The answer is a resounding Yes.
This has an implication: some ways of helping the poor are disastrous. Self-defeating. Soul-crushing.
This Christmas Season, while the Obama Administration wants you to talk about medical insurance, why not think about giving and receiving and actual human betterment? At the very least, click on over to Townhall.com. And come back here for a few more chunks of holiday wisdom, if not cheer.
On December 22, 1989, Communist President of Romania Nicolae Ceaușescu was overthrown by Ion Iliescu after days of bloody confrontations. The deposed dictator and his wife fled Bucharest with a helicopter as protesters erupted in cheers.
The capitalist distribution network, a complex chain of factory, transport, warehouse and retail outlet, is one of the greatest male accomplishments in the history of culture.
This is a little demonstration/experiment pertaining to a currently celebrated cause.
Not everybody is amused by Schiff’s stunt. But not everybody sees it as pointless, either.
On December 21, 1826, American settlers in Nacogdoches, Mexican Texas, declared their independence, starting the Fredonian Rebellion.
On December 20, 1740, Arthur Lee — Revolutionary Era diplomat, spy, and Virginia delegate to the Continental Congress — was born. He practiced law in London from 1770 to 1776, where he wrote polemics against slavery and in defense of the American colonies’ resistance to the Townshend acts and other tyrannical British policies. He was brother to Richard Henry Lee and Francis Lightfoot Lee.
Modern liberalism suffers unresolved contradictions. It exalts individualism and freedom and, on its radical wing, condemns social orders as oppressive. On the other hand, it expects governments to provide materially for all, a feat manageable only by an expansion of authority and a swollen bureaucracy. In other words, liberalism defines government as tyrant father but demands it behave as nurturant mother.
The pitches aired in service of Obamacare have descended from the twee and lightly vulgar to worse than disastrously kitschy and outrageously camp.
The latest example is not the pajama boy icon for Obamacare, a young man wearing a onesie and demonstrating all the manliness of Peter Pan. Of that, Nick Gillespie agrees, it’s egregious: “For many — arguably most — Americans, this guy is hipster douchitude on a cracker.” But, Gillespie reminds me, I’m not the campaign’s audience. Young single women are.
Hmmm?
No, the nadir of fawning, in-groupy appeal went much further in a video advertisement concocted, we are told, for the LGBT community. You have to see it to believe it — or better yet, just take my word for it. The first minute is jaw-droppingly silly; the second goes beyond tasteless.
Its propaganda value? Dubious. I would not be surprised to discover that this was made as a parody, for comic purposes alone.
But I think I know enough about camp — the theory of which I’ll leave to Camille Paglia — to not be surprised that someone, somewhere, might actually think it a good way to reach the LGBT community.
Folks often complain about advertising. Well, the pandering, lip-smacking vulgarity of “capitalist realism” has now come to the welfare state — even if at the hands of folks not directly connected to government. But to those in the know, let me confess: what gets my goat the most is its frank promotion of “assistance to help you pay.”
With the singer making the most vulgar gesture of all, a show-me-the-money shot.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Judgment comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgment.