From another blogger, who I shall not link to directly because she would not appreciate it (we blog in entirely different contexts):
"I am sad every time I see some otherwise nice decent person go off on a parroted spiel about "personal responsibility" because I know what they're really saying: I'd rather society fall apart than have to share with others."Which is an introduction to what Glibertarians truly believe: Scrooge was the good guy, and Cratchit was the villain, of Dickens's "A Christmas Carol". It's the same mentality in both cases: I got mine, and f**k you.
The reality is that 5% of the population owning 90% of the assets of the nation is not a sustainable system. The remaining 95% of the population is unable to contribute sufficiently, due to denial of necessary resources for growth as human resources and as consumers, to grow the economy at the rate it needs to grow in order to grow the assets of the top 5% or even to maintain the current economy at a sustainable level. Selfishness of that that sort used to be strictly punished in kindergarten and children were taught to share because it would result in a nicer day for *everybody*, but today's kindergartens are high-pressured academic environments where those sorts of things aren't taught anymore -- children today are supposed to learn how to read in kindergarten, not how to be good people.
So we get the current situation, where we have people who believe in actual seriousness that Scrooge was the good guy. For real. Not kidding. It boggles the mind, but you can click on the link (to a web page at the Mises Institute) and see that they're making that argument in complete seriousness, even though it's absolute bunkum that's causing our society to fall apart around us. These types would literally rather have society fall apart than have to share their toys with other children. It is both sad and pathetic -- and more than a little frightening, because these are all too often our so-called "leaders".
-- Badtux the Unscrooge Penguin
What a shithead Levin is (or at least was in 1998). John Dean examines the type in some detail in Conservatives without Conscience... he's not being insulting; he's merely acknowledging that there are quite a few people out there who seem to have been built without any sort of internal moral guidance, and most of them call themselves conservative. Even though I am no longer surprised, I am still outraged.
ReplyDeleteHi Badtux, great story. In our ever ranging quest to understand the conservative mind, alien to most of us, you plumb the depths of Gilbertian logic - eerily similar to Rand - and it seems that we as a culture are moving closer to an Orwellian mindset where among other things, the idea that "greed is sharing" is pushed by a conservative media and normal-ized by a complicit corporate media. Connecting that to the change in what is now taught in kindergarden (and daycare, and primary schools), compared to oh, 30 years ago, is probably closer to the truth than we'd like to think. Maybe they're getting a lot of Fox News in that 3 hours of TV they are watching on average in day cares today. Well.. probably not, but you know what I mean. It is different.
ReplyDeleteBack to Rand - The story of Atlas Shrugged expresses Rand's philosophy and advocacy of "rational selfishness," It seems they've all read it.
I got a little deja vu, there..
Thanx again for all your good work.
-g
I had to stop reading Levin's article. It is worthy of a DEEP STUPID entry, but I'm not sure I could stomach it.
ReplyDeleteNow, I must go hug a squid.
Cheers!
Jzb the gorge-rising trombonist
Good insight there, Greendayman, on that whole "greed is sharing" bit. Quite Orwellian indeed. Regarding the rest, yeah, I connected a few dots there, I have an interesting ability to connect dots that at first glance don't seem connected. I think the current state of kindergarten is an effect, not a cause -- i.e., because the adults are so selfish and believe greed is good, they will not allow teachers to teach the old kindergarten values because that's "liberal indoctrination".
ReplyDeleteOur society has become sick and diseased, with any suggestion that "I got mine and fuck you" is not a viable long-term philosophy shouted down as "Communist" or "socialist" or (shudder) LIBERAL. I don't know when that happened. I do know that when I was a kid umpty-ump years ago, that was not the way people thought. Even conservatives back then believed it was necessary to be charitable and assist others for the good of society, even though they thought government should be no part of that. "Greed is good" would have appalled them. But then, conservatives were thinkers back then. Today... well. Today's conservatives state with a straight face that Adolph Hitler was a liberal. Tells you all you need to know right there.
- Badtux the Sociology Penguin
And thus those at the top are moving their wealth into gold and relocating it overseas where it will be melded into commerce in foreign countries and thus ensure their financial survival.
ReplyDeleteHow can we expose this travesty and stop the continuing outsourcing which sends even more of the public's money out of the country before it's too late?
S
The reality is that 5% of the population owning 90% of the assets of the nation is not a sustainable system.
_________________
BT -
ReplyDeleteI happened in the 80's - not overnight, but that was when the ugly weed started to spread like fucking kudzu. It's pure Reagan-thatcher-Rand bullshit.
Yes, they do live in a black is white world. That's exactly why I do my DEEP STUPID posts.
You say conservatives were thinkers back then, and it's true to a point, but the greatest conservative intellectual was William F, Buckley, and he was nothing more than a racist with a big vocabulary and faux-Brit accent.
On a somewhat lighter note, I told my lovely wife about this and your mousie story, and she put then together to come up with, "I hate von Mises to pieces!" That's why I love that girl.
Cheers!
JzB the romantic trombonist
I've never really understood this part of the conservative mentality. They don't give one turd about the well being of their neighbors, their community, or their country. Then they try to force "good Christian" morals on the country. There is a lot of passages in the bible that support socialism and requires giving. Funny how that never becomes part of their agenda.
ReplyDelete"The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy: that is the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness." - John Kenneth Galbraith
ReplyDeletePretty much sums it, I'd say.