Not ‘that Rand’ (although he is often right), but the other one.

Many have noted how life today has come to resemble the corrupt, ever-decaying crony socialism depicted in Ayn Rand’s lengthy second dystopian novel. Now it’s even coming to resemble the demented communalism of her first dystopia, Anthem.

Anthem depicts a frightening future society which has de-valued the individual, replacing “I” (or “me”) with devotion to “We” in every possible aspect of life. The society’s philosophy is captured in sayings like these:

We are one in all and all in one. There are no men but only the great WE: one, indivisible and forever.

We are nothing. Mankind is all. By the grace of our brothers are we allowed our lives. We exist through, by and for our brothers who are the State. Amen.

Some people might agree with the above sentiments, for real. Have you ever heard of We Day? Watch the video at the link; it shows a vast, cheering orgy of thousands of “Me to We” activists celebrating their awesome We-ness.

Mixed in with calls to help The Children, some of the speakers bark sentiments and commands that would fit well in Rand’s dystopia. Just upgrade the event’s arena another notch (fill it with another 20,000 people) and it will start to resemble the North Korean Mass Games.

As for their desire to feed hungry children: Don’t get me wrong, of course that’s nice. I’m all for people helping other people – at their own expense.

But this gang (featuring Al Gore, for example) shows no understanding of what it would take to actually feed the world’s children. What it would take is: universal protection for individual rights to life, liberty and property under the rule of law – so that productive people, working hard for their own gain (not for the great “We”), will then produce, sell and distribute food on a large-enough scale.

More kids go hungry in countries that habitually interfere with production and trade; countries that don’t respect the individual who works to support her own life, liberty and property. Sadly, the Left has turned America into one of those countries, which means we will be cursed with increasing poverty and hunger in years to come.

Report: There Only 17 Total Square Miles On Earth Where Gays Not Discriminated Against

P.S. If you feel that anti-gay discrimination is too serious to joke about (and it is, in some places): then please re-think your willingness (if any) to excuse Islamist dictatorships, and/or your opposition to gun rights.

Consider the following:

• This May, a Florida man was indicted on federal first-degree murder charges, because he aborted his girlfriend’s fetus (giving her an abortion drug without her knowledge). News articles state that she was six weeks pregnant (well under such legal abortion limits as 20 or 24 weeks).
• Also in May, the 300+ charges on rapist-kidnapper Ariel Castro included one charge of aggravated murder, because his assaults on his female victims had terminated a pregnancy.
• In 2004, a CA man was charged with murder after his pregnant girlfriend’s fetus died, due to his assaults on her.

In each example, the men certainly deserve charges/punishment for other reasons; namely, for crimes of fraud, assault, kidnapping or rape.

But murder? In each case, the murder charge arose from the man having aborted his fetus (that is, the fetus created from his genes). Is that just? In each example, if the woman had aborted her fetus, she would not be charged with murder.

Why is it a crime of homicide when the father terminates the fetus, but not when the mother does? Why should the same action (killing the fetus) be a crime, or not, depending on who (which parent) did it?

If the variant were race – If we claimed, for example, that the killing of a black person is somehow not murder, when “who did it” happens to be a white person – then Bob Dylan would write protest songs about the inequality…and rightly so.

Please note, I am not expressing a stand on the above questions. I am asking them, inspired by Bruce’s re-tweet from Matthew H, “…men do not have the same rights as women. We can’t kill & call it ‘health choices’.” The tweet is correct. And why should that situation be? Has the pro-choice movement created a ‘female privilege’, a dangerous new form of legal inequality?

Just caught Erin Burnett on CNN talking about something I had noticed earlier today as trending on Yahoo!

Yup, that’s right, number one above.* On his “700 Club” television show yesterday, his co-host Kristi Watts read a letter from a woman having trouble forgiving a cheating husband. Watts called infidelity “one of the ultimate betrayals“, but Robertson said the woman should “stop talking about the cheating.” After asking some good questions which get at the heart of what it means to be good husband, he otherwise seems to miss the point, dismissing the problem of infidelity — and failing to understand the full meaning of marriage, particularly the marital vows:

He cheated on you. Well, he’s a man, okay, so, what you do is begin to focus on why you married him in the first place, on what he does good.

. . . .

But recognize also, like it or not, males have a tendency to wander a little bit. And what you want to do is make the home so wonderful that he doesn’t want to wander. But, think of the temptations that are out there. The Internet is filled with pornography. Magazines are filled with pictures, salacious pictures of women. Anywhere you turn around, there is some solicitation to the sense to entice a man. And so what you have to do is say, “My husband was captured and I want to get him free.”

Yes, Mr. Robertson is right; males do have a tendency to wander, but marriage vows exist to restrain that tendency, to remind a man that he has, to borrow a term many social conservatives like, made a covenant with a woman, forging a bond more important that the momentary gratification a dalliance with another women might offer.

What this man did was wrong and to earn forgiveness, he should first admit that.

Marriage has evolved for a great many reasons, one of them to control that tendency to wander.  Mr. Robertson should have said as much.  He should have said that what the cheating husband did was wrong — and criticized him for violating his vows.  And for causing pain to a woman to whom he had sworn fidelity. (more…)

To follow up on my post of a couple weeks ago on gay athletes in the 21st century, these news items may be of interest.

First, NBA center Jason Collins comes out. Interestingly, he has a twin who is straight. (Studies show that identical twins are somewhat likely, but far from guaranteed, to have the same orientation.) His article has a few odd political shots in it; I wonder if they come from his co-writer?

Next, kicker Alan Gendreau didn’t get drafted. But not many kickers are drafted, so that may be small news. Gendreau was the first openly-gay player to enter the NFL draft. The Newsbusters article (hat tip Peter H) mentions ABC News’ role in having publicized Gendreau for reasons of political advocacy.

UPDATE: Caught a few minutes of Rush, who predicts that the NFL will soon come out with at least two gay players… because they have to trump the NBA.

I hope he’s right. I mean, can we please get the coming-out-in-sports process over with? Like I said in my earlier post, in 1993 or 2003 I cared about celebrities’ “brave personal journeys” in coming out, but it’s 2013 now. The sooner done and forgotten, the better.

This article from Femen, the feminist protest group, just came across HotAir’s Headlines section:

For the past five years now, we here at the international women’s movement Femen have been waging an active campaign of resistance to the patriarchy in various corners of the world…

The most obvious illustration of the patriarchy is Islamic theocracy, a symbiosis of political and religious dictatorship…

At the heart of Islamism lies the enslavement of women based on control over their sexuality…

I hereby both promise and threaten to deploy an entire network of Femen activists in Arab countries. We will hound Islamic leaders across the globe, subjecting them to desolating criticism. We intend to hound spiritual leaders who are personally responsible for mistreating women…

Femen stands for “democracy, atheism, and sexuality” (per the article), and famously protested Vladimir Putin a couple of weeks ago (video here).

I do NOT endorse everything they believe or do[1], but what’s interesting here is the phenomenon of a left-wing protest group realizing that Islamism is a major threat to the freedom that they seek to live out, and declaring their intention to confront Islamism. We see that occasionally, but not often enough. Some other leftists go for safer targets (such as Christians who, in reality, pose no great threat to them).

These women may be in for some rough times, if they carry out their declaration. While not necessarily endorsing all that they do, let’s give them some credit for their new-found insight, and wish them health and safety! (more…)

I’m late in getting to this, but last week on NBC’s Today, Matt Lauer said:

It’s interesting that in 2013, with attitudes towards homosexuality changing so dramatically in this country, there isn’t a single major athlete in a major professional sport playing right now who has come out and said, ‘I’m gay.’ Why is that?…

I have a possible answer, and a new question.

My answer is: For much the same reason that straight athletes don’t come out and say “I’m straight.” It’s irrelevant. Not every activity or field is one where the customers (spectators) need any information about the producers’ (athletes’) personal lives.

Part of what we love about athletes is their focus on something wonderfully beyond themselves: which is the sport, the game, the discipline it takes to be a winning athlete. Call me crazy, but I find it distasteful when any athlete, gay or straight, insists on my knowing whom they ‘like’ or are dating. I only care about their dedication to (and success with) their sport.

Which brings me to my question: why, in 2013, would Lauer think this is important? This isn’t the 1980s, wherein gays had to battle sodomy laws, or the total absence of gay-straight alliances at schools, or certain professional bans. Today we even have States scrambling to support gay marriage. Lauer’s question itself assumes there are lots of gay pro athletes – so, no real job discrimination.

I must admit that I thought like Lauer did in, say, 1993. Some years later, I came into the 21st century. Join me, Matt!

(Hat tip: reader Peter H.)

Don’t worry, I’m probably not going to make these headline summaries a regular feature. Other bloggers do it better.

Still, I must again express my amazement at how, on any given day, a quick scan of the headlines reveals a world gone awry. Just from Ace and HotAir today:

• The IRS may be spying on your Facebook page and Twitter stream, for God-knows-what reason.
• Hundreds of leftists celebrate Thatcher’s death by partying and/or rioting. Meanwhile, an MSNBC host claims that she embodied greed. So much for human freedom, I guess.
• In Massachusetts, people are no longer allowed to defend themselves from wild animals.
• When are women *not* entitled to control the product of their bodies? When a creepy, duck-speaking lefty feels the need to take control of their kids.
• On the Aurora shooter, a tragedy of errors.
• It comes out that police were warned about him, a month before. That kinda works against the narrative in favor of gun control, so now…
• The Fox reporter who brought it out may go to jail. And…
• The rest of the media doesn’t care. A contrast to the Plame case which, remember, was much ado about nothing (except that it played against a GOP President).
• Meanwhile, North Korea threatens to launch nuclear missiles… and Obama still wants to cut missile defense spending.
• And lefty GWU students can’t get over the fact that a Catholic priest would teach Catholic teachings.

I need to start looking for things that are going right. Of course Obamacare, which kills both jobs and worker benefits, isn’t one of them.

But maybe the fight for gun rights is. Like seeing Mark Matteoli (of Sandy Hook) or Manuel Martinez (formerly of Communist Cuba): two men who understand freedom, and speak out in its favor.

Why do some nations’ birthrates fall? And can Big Government boost them?

[Germany] spends some €200 billion ($270 billion) on promoting children and families per year…But its birth rate, at 1.39 births per woman aged 15 to 49, remains among the lowest in Europe…

…The web of benefits is so complex that even experts don’t fully grasp it: There’s a “child supplement,” “parental benefit,” an “allowance for single parents,” a “married person’s supplement,” a “sibling bonus,” “orphan money” and “child education supplement,” not to forget the “child education supplementary supplement.”

The article suggests that the reason that German women don’t have kids is because the government isn’t funding enough daycare and preschools to make it easy for them.

I have a different theory. My guess is that birthrates fall:

1. because living standards rise. (Kids stop being a help on the farm; start being expensive.)
2. and because the Welfare State gives people the illusion that government will take care of them in old age.

My second point would mean that Big Government measures won’t, over time and on average, raise a nation’s birthrates. The more the State does – the more it hands out benefits and asserts its dominance in citizens’ lives – the less urgent its citizens will feel about procreating. Agree/disagree?

I’ve forgotten where I stumbled across this term, Mean World Syndrome, although it was yesterday!

“Mean world syndrome” is a term coined by George Gerbner to describe a phenomenon whereby violence-related content of mass media makes viewers believe that the world is more dangerous than it actually is…”You know, who tells the stories of a culture really governs human behaviour,” [Gerbner] said. “It used to be the parent, the school, the church, the community. Now it’s a handful of global conglomerates that have nothing to tell, but a great deal to sell.”…

…Individuals who watch television infrequently and adolescents who talk to their parents about reality are claimed to have a more accurate view of the real world than those who do not, and they may be able to more accurately assess their vulnerability to violence…

What do y’all think of this idea?

I have only a few scattered fragments of thought about it, so far. First, I’m suspicious of anything that smacks of Behaviorism. But I also notice that this idea isn’t the standard fare, that our violent media culture somehow programs us to do violent crime. It makes a different point: that our violent media culture (and I would count TV News shows, in that) has given us all a darker vision of the world, making most people a little more frightened and suspicious. True/untrue/?

If you haven’t seen Jamie Farr cum Larry King wannabe Piers Morgan getting into it with Christine O’Donnell, here is that video:

(apologies for the adverts at the beginning of the clip…apparently going on a quasi-news interview show to whore for a new book is matched dearly by a ‘news’ network playing commercials before even online videos)

I have no beef with Morgan being a tough interviewer, and I never really followed O’Donnell’s run for the Senate from Delaware. I realize she’s a social conservative and had run as such.

That being said, Morgan’s insistence on discussing not the debt problem, not the out-of-control runaway spending, not the unconstitutional interference of the current ruling class that led to historic turnover on Capital Hill in last year’s midterm elections; but rather topics such as DADT and gay marriage is a perfect example of why the Left keeps losing elections.

While controversy and drama are good for ratings, there’s also a seriousness in Leftists in the media like Morgan and others insisting on painting the Tea Party with an intolerant brush.

It’s the Alinskyite drubbing and constant drone about Tea Partiers being anti-gay, racist knuckle-dragging Bible-thumping social conservatives that the Left and the media (pardon my redundancy) are hoping to use to discredit their opponents rather than engage in the real argument that they know they’d lose: Is our government too bloated, is it doing things it shouldn’t be doing, and is it impeding our recovery?; or is it not big enough, not spending enough, and not regulating sufficiently?

The Left knows it can’t win that argument in a center-right nation, so they will search for social conservatives within the Tea Party movement (which, unquestionably it can easily find), and then generalize such positions broadly to paint us all as intolerant neanderthals hoping to cast homosexuals into prison.

Can anybody relate an experience at a Tea Party rally or other such event that even addressed social issues? Were gay marriage and DADT even topics of conversation (other than the court’s overreaching in many big cases, and the lack of 10th Amendment appreciation by the ruling class, that is)? I search and search Rick Santelli’s original rant on CNBC but can’t find either of these topics (nor religion, abortion, or race issues) having anything to do with his anger.

I, for one, am completely tired of hearing about social issues. Totally and completely. I can’t believe that with $14,000,000,000,000+ in debt and a new credit line of another $2,000,000,000,000 recently added on, three wars, 9.1% unemployment, GDP growth rate out of a recession at only 1.5%, housing failing, hiring failing, a credit downgrade, that to some morons, the issue of gay marriage and Don’t Ask Don’t Tell is actually pertinent.

As I had admonished them a couple weeks ago, the Social Left in America is ruining our Nation because they care more about their social issues than they do about the fiscal and economic strength of our country.

-Nick (ColoradoPatriot, from HQ)

One of our critics and one of our staunchest defenders respectively got at the weakness in the argument GOProud and this blog have been making asking the GOP to sidestep social issues.

The critic, Tim, in a comment, contended that my “compromise of not discussing social issues” means that Congress will not move forward on DADT and DOMA repeal while “immigration reform for gays will languish. Somehow,” he adds, “the status quo doesn’t seem that great.”

In a blog post, styled as an open letter to GOProud, North Dallas Thirty looks at the status quo from a different angle and also finds it also not great:

But the key to dealing with social issues is not to ignore them completely. Indeed, by making them off-limits, you infuriate those whose support you need and leave yourself open for the Obama Party to exploit them against you. . . .

Take, for instance, abortion.

Regardless of how you feel about it, the simple fact is this: Barack Obama, Harry Reid, and Nancy Pelosi rammed through a bill that not only requires you as a taxpayer to fund abortion, but for that money to be sent to organizations who are covering up statutory rape and refusing to notify parents — and then donating hundreds of thousands of dollars to that same Obama, Reid, and Pelosi.

Read the whole thing, not necessarily because I agree with it, but because I do believe he raises some valuable points.  He suggest that instead of avoiding social issues, we “grab” and “reframe them.”

NDXXX is spot on about abortion.  But, I see that not so much as a social issue, but more as a fiscal.  No government should pay for abortion.

And yes, I do acknowledge that social conservatives are part of the GOP coalition.  But, Republicans risk losing independent voters if they bend over backwards trying to appease these folks.  So, keep the focus on fiscal issues, but make clear they understand social conservatives’ concern.

The less government is involved in our lives, the greater influence private institutions will have.  The government should not mandate that social conservatives pay for a medical procedure they find abhorrent. (more…)