A miscellany of comments
A bunch of unposted comments have accumulated over several days, with the original posts to which they were directed having slipped down the main page, so in order to get them posted I’m placing them in this miscellaneous collection.
N. writes:
The new fashion of appointing immigrants to be ambassadors is perhaps a part of the “globalization” of U.S. foreign policy. Just as corporations seek to have local partners in their overseas branches, the U.S. government now has “local partners” as ambassadors. The issues, of course, are different. Proctor & Gamble or some other large company wants to sell its products in some other country and thus involves people of that local country to represent it back to the main office.
As you point out, the function of the ambassador is not to represent a foreign country to the U.S. government; that’s what their embassy in Washington does. This bad policy strikes me as yet another emotional, feel-good, unthinking “experimental” concept that has more to do with image than with substance.
Ralph P. writes:
To follow up on what I just wrote you, I just read Clark Coleman’s take and there’s a ray of hope! “Romney 2008! Because we can bully him!”
Steven H. writes:
Yesterday, I heard Ingraham ponder, “What’s the difference if Obama is a Muslim”?
Terry Morris writes:
Darwinists possess an (over) abundance of faith, it seems to me. They express an enormous amount of belief in the idea that science is eventually going to solve all the problems with Darwinism. Yet, best I can tell, when science actually does give a plausible explanation for a single evolutionary event, or a small set of “chance occurrences,” “random mutations,” or whatever they decide to call them, the explanation given generally opens up a whole new set of problems for Darwinism more complex than the problem it supposedly just solved. Is this right, or is my mind just inventing this stuff?
LA replies:
What Darwinists and liberals share in common is commitment to a radically simplified, reductive, and false view of world, and a program based on that simplified view.
Liberal idea: Deny God in any meaningful sense, deny transcendence, deny belief in inherent moral truth and objective value, deny existence of larger natural, cultural, and moral categories such as man, woman, child, American, foreigner, Christian, Muslim, right, wrong; embrace pure nominalism. Affirm a universalism in which everything is equal to everything else and nothing is higher or lower than anything else.
Darwinian idea: Deny God, deny transcendence, deny existence of inherent moral truth and objective value, deny existence of larger categories such as species because all species flow into other species; embrace pure nominalism.
Liberal program: Make races equal in outcome, make everyone into an American, export democracy to Muslim lands. It can’t be done, but failure is never admitted, the possibility of failure is never admitted.
Darwinian program: Demonstrate the truth of Darwinism. It can’t be done, but failure is never admitted, the possibility of failure is never admitted.
Mark K. writes:
I’m wondering if the Darwinists’ frustration with Lawrence Auster isn’t based on some sort of law that they feel constricts them. First attempt at a formulation of this law:
The chance of Lawrence Auster accepting the Darwinian theory of evolution (DTOE) is directly proportional to the statistical chance of random mutation and natural selection actually producing a new species.
Looking at this equation, what it really says is that
LA—DTOE = RM.NS
or Lawrence Auster would accept the Darwinian theory of evolution if a genetic mutation occurred to facilitate this. This would be an evolutionary moment in LA’s history. Genetic mutation induces personal awareness of truth.
So wouldn’t it be better if Darwinists attempted to do something genetic to you rather than use the rational powers of persuasion? A genetic reforming of LA would be more in keeping with the theory and might be more convincing as a proof to the rest of us.
James M. writes:
“For the human type of sexual intercourse to evolve by Darwinian processes out of the radically different quadruped and primate type of sexual intercourse, numerous, mutually complementary random mutations had to take place in the male and female simultaneously. And this is impossible. Not highly unlikely. Impossible.”
No, they wouldn’t have to be simultaneous any more than cheetahs had to get faster as soon as gazelles got faster, or vice versa. You’re constantly attacking straw men in your denunciations of Darwinism and arguing a priori and from personal incredulity in ways that are not scientific. That’s not surprising: you’re not a scientist. I’m not either, but I know enough to find you and those who agree with you unimpressive beside proper scientists. I think you can easily find one of those who’s prepared to resolve your difficulties. This is a good site.
It’s not good strategy to put yourself on the losing side of a scientific argument with liberals when you’re right about politics and philosophy. Particularly when liberals are not going to hate what Darwinism is finally saying about racial and sexual differences, after decades of censorship and obfuscation.
LA replies:
I do not accept the supposed authority of “science” in this matter. The Darwinian orthodoxy is not science, but scientism, an ideology stating that only material things and phenomena can exist.
Kilroy M. writes from Australia (December 2007)
I was just thinking… for some of us not Americans, it might be a good idea if you could outline how all the US Republican candidates stand on traditionalist issues. That way we would have a better idea of who to keep our eyes on.
I suggest this only because many of the rightist friends here in Australia are divided on their support of Thompson, Paul, Huckabee and Romney…
In whom should we invest our faith? Are there any other traditionalist friendly candidates in the running that we don’t hear much of?
LA replies:
That’s a tall order. And with Thompson and especially Tancredo departed, any “traditionalist” elements are pretty much gone from the debate. Tancredo is the only nationally known politician I know of who is a cultural traditionalist, who speaks of America and Western civilization as concretely existing things that we are a part of, not just as projects based on an idea.
Katya writes:
My favourite Hitler quote:
“Had Charles Martel not been victorious at Poitiers——already, you see, the world had fallen into the hands of the Jews, so gutless a thing is Christianity!—-then we should in all probability have been converted to Mohammedanism, that cult which glorifies the heroism and which opens up the Seventh Heaven to the bold warrior alone. Then the Germanic races would have conquered the world. Christianity alone prevented them from doing so.”
Adolf Hitler
28 August, 1942
P 667 Hitler’s Table Talk, 1941-44
translated by N Cameron and R H Stevens 1953
All of which begs the question that, since Hitler had the brains to spot the Ultimate Victor over both Islam and Nazism—Christianity—-why aren’t we availing ourselves of it?
Gintas writes:
You wrote: “Do not misunderstand me. I am not wishing for the end of true American order and true American freedom. Rather I am saying about Americans what I’ve said many times about the British, that modern liberalism, with all its illusions, has become so much a part of their essence, that only the destruction of the modern liberal order can end their belief in it.”
I had a discussion recently with a young man in his early twenties about the state of the economy. He was somewhat enamored of the idea of “crashing the system,” meaning bringing down the American economy in some kind of shock. (How this would be accomplished was not clear; I think he thought it was something that was bound to happen given the current state and trends.) He thought it would bring back sense to the American people.
But there are many liberals who also want to bring down the system; not to revive or restore it, but to kill it off completely, and from there strengthen their position. I reminded him of the Great Depression which was a “system crash.” The aftermath has been, as of this moment, a complete disaster, resulting in the general demoralization we see, and of liberalism going from triumph to triumph. It’s not clear that that wouldn’t have happened anyway, given early 20th Century progressivism. Anyway, the Great Depression didn’t bring America back to her senses.
I mention this because there might be a tendency to think an economic crisis will be enough. Of course, it may be enough, but it may also strengthen liberalism. No, I am afraid that only the complete ruination of the liberal order will bring us out. And that means many of us will suffer with it—our livelihoods depend on the current economic state of things, unhinged though it may be. Many fine men went down on the Titanic.
James W. writes:
We may underestimate the possibility that the cure for the democracy delusion is already well underway through our experience in Iraq. Permit me to volunteer that the average Middle American is now deeply suspicious, and resentful, of democracies arranged through our offices at least.
I expect that such people would be glad to embrace John Bolton’s idea that diplomacy is not an objective, but a device; and that national interests can in fact be conducted as war by other means.
Of course, such a policy demands clarity and resolve not likely to be found any longer at the level of national government, which leaves us with the alternative of leaving the pot to boil over. Even that has its attractions, all things considered.
Jason writes:
This is a letter I sent to some of the higher end talk radio people (Rush Limbaugh et al), I will let you know if I get any response.
To whom it may concern,
I am a constant listener to your show, and I will continue to be such. However I am curious and a bit annoyed with you the last couple of weeks, please allow me to explain why.
Over the past couple of weeks, on of your main themes has been, and continues to be, that fact that we do not have a conservative in the race. You continue to bemoan that the Republican party seems to be moving towards an outright liberal in the form of John McCain, or a populist in the form of Mike Huckabee. Mitt Romney is mentioned but since he governed as a liberal it is hard to believe his sudden change of heart of course.
My question is where were you all of 2007? You see, we actually had two real conservatives in the race. Congressman Tom Tancredo and Congressman Duncan Hunter. In the interests of disclosure I was involved in the Tancredo campaign. However if you had simply come out and told your listeners to vote for either of these fine men, maybe we would not be in the position we are in now of choosing another liberal to replace the current liberal in the White House.
Your voices carry so much weight, and you have millions of listeners each and every day. Just a few words from you might have had things move in a different direction. And maybe, just maybe, we would have a real conservative to take on the Democrats, instead of having liberal Republicans to take one leftist Democrats.
When the nominee is finally chosen, and you are not satisfied. Understand that you had the ability to do something about it, and chose not to.
Sage McLaughlin writes:
A reader of David Frum’s weblog at NRO remarks today that, “History will, I believe, be kind to GW Bush…” Is it just me, or has this line gotten tiresome? The fact that so many of his supporters have to make this kind of promise reveals just how obviously terrible Bush appears to be in the present moment. People weaned on tendentious, revisionist history can be forgiven for thinking that the partisans of the future will find a way to paint the President in glowing terms. But as a vote of confidence, it strikes me as conspicuously faint.
LA replies:
And notice the word “kind.” “Kind” implies an act of charity. Almost in the sense of making excuses for him. it’s not the same as “History will recognize the great achievements and talents of this man, which his contempories are too small minded to see.”
Posted by Lawrence Auster at January 29, 2008 01:04 PM | Send