Don G. Dinsdale Loc: El Cajon, CA (San Diego County)

THE T***H ABOUT BLACK AND WHITE, LEFT AND RIGHT

Thomas Sowell: Liberals Side With Hoodlums, Conservatives With Hoodlums' Victims

World Net Daily - Mar 21, 2016


Much is made of the fact that liberals and conservatives see racial issues differently, which they do. But these differences have too often been seen as simply those on the right being r****t and those on the left not.

You can cherry-pick the evidence to reach that conclusion. But you can also cherry-pick the evidence to reach the opposite conclusion.

During the heyday of the progressive movement in the early 20th century, people on the left were in the forefront of those promoting doctrines of innate, genetic inferiority of not only b****s but also of people from Eastern Europe and Southern Europe, as compared to people from Western Europe.

Liberals today tend to either glide over the undeniable r****m of progressive President Woodrow Wilson or else treat it as an anomaly of some sort. But r****m on the left at that time was not an anomaly, either for President Wilson or for numerous other stalwarts of the progressive movement.

An influential 1916 best-seller, “The Passing of the Great Race” – celebrating Nordic Europeans – was written by Madison Grant, a staunch activist for progressive causes such as endangered species, municipal reform, conservation and the creation of national parks.

He was a member of an exclusive social club founded by Republican progressive Theodore Roosevelt, and Grant and Franklin D. Roosevelt became friends in the 1920s, addressing one another in letters as “My dear Frank” and “My dear Madison.” Grant’s book was t***slated into German, and Adolf Hitler called it his Bible.

Progressives spearheaded the eugenics movement, dedicated to reducing the reproduction of supposedly “inferior” individuals and races. The eugenics movement spawned Planned Parenthood, among other groups. In academia, there were 376 courses dev**ed to eugenics in 1920.

Progressive intellectuals who crusaded against the admission of immigrants from Eastern Europe and Southern Europe, branding them as genetically inferior, included many prominent academic scholars – such as heads of such scholarly organizations as the American Economic Association and the American Sociological Association.

Southern segregationists who railed against b****s were often also progressives who railed against Wall Street. Back in those days, b****s v**ed for Republicans as automatically as they v**e for Democrats today.

Where the Democrats’ President Woodrow Wilson introduced racial segregation into those government agencies in Washington where it did not exist at the time, Republican President Calvin Coolidge’s wife invited the wives of black congressmen to the White House. As late as 1957, civil rights legislation was sponsored in Congress by Republicans and opposed by Democrats.

KKK’s first targets were Republicans – read how Democrats started the group in “Setting the Record Straight: American History in Black & White”

Later, when the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was sponsored by Democrats, a higher percentage of congressional Republicans v**ed for it than did congressional Democrats. Revisionist histories tell a different story. But, as Casey Stengel used to say, “You could look it up” – in the Congressional Record, in this case.

Conservatives who took part in the civil rights marches, or who were otherwise for equal rights for b****s, have not made nearly as much noise about it as liberals do. The first time I saw a white professor, at a white university, with a black secretary, it was Milton Friedman at the University of Chicago in 1960 – four years before the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

She was still his secretary when he died in 2006. But, in all those years, I never once heard professor Friedman mention, in public or in private, that he had a black secretary. By all accounts, she was an outstanding secretary, and that was what mattered.

The biggest difference between the left and right today, when it comes to racial issues, is that liberals tend to take the side of those b****s who are doing the wrong things – hoodlums the left depicts as martyrs – while the right defends those b****s more likely to be the victims of those hoodlums.

Rudolph Giuliani, when he was the Republican mayor of New York, probably saved more black lives than any other human being, by promoting aggressive policing against hoodlums, which brought the murder rate down to a fraction of what it was before.

A lot depends on whether you judge by ringing words or judge by actual consequences.


http://www.wnd.com/2016/03/the-t***h-about-black-and-white-left-and-right/#SptyelOJzdqGdBMK.99



GOVERNMENT LEVIATHAN

COMMON-SENSE CONSERVATISM -- FROM REAGAN TO TRUMP

Exclusive: Theodore Roosevelt Malloch Explains Critical Similarity Between Two Men

World Net Daily - Mar 21, 2016


The best spokesperson for common sense in recent times was Ronald Reagan.

In his farewell address, the 40th president defined his revolution as “a rediscovery of our values and our common sense.”

Actually, from the very start of his political career, Reagan attributed his success to his belief in the idea that government “could be operated efficiently by using the same common sense practiced in our everyday life, in our homes, in business and private affairs.”

Today p**********l candidate Donald Trump, taking up Reagan’s mantle, has laid claim to the phrase “common-sense conservatism.” What exactly does this mean?

Common sense and prudence

In economics, common-sense behavior can be seen as “risk aversion,” defined as a predilection to take precautionary moves, especially when an uncertain future is seen as perilous, full of risks that can neither be fully calculated nor avoided.

In accounting, “risk aversion,” a fundamental concept, is defined as prudence, a standard used to determine, for instance, the time when revenue can and should be recognized – a calculation that typically is neither unimportant nor inconsequential.

Lawyers still abide by the so-called, “prudent (man) judgment rule” to argue cases at law involving judgments of “right” and “wrong.”

The Catechism of the Catholic Church, in Part Three, Section One, Chapter One, Article 7, identifies the “human virtues,” with an addition written in 1806 dev**ed to articulating the “cardinal virtues” by quoting St. Thomas Aquinas in reference to prudence.

That text reads: “Prudence is the virtue that disposes practical reason to discern our true good in every circumstance and to choose the right means of achieving it.” It went on to conclude with some sound advice, namely: “The prudent man looks where he is going.”

If prudent behavior is right reason in action, then why has the importance of prudence to common sense been mostly abandoned, forfeited in more recent times and nearly totally forgotten by our postmodern culture and governments?

Resurrecting common sense

Let’s trace the history of common sense’s demise, for in so doing we will then be able to suggest ways for its possible resurrection.

For Aristotle any conception of the “good life” employed practical wisdom.

Knowledge of the good life is what elevated prudence into a virtue in the first place and identified it as wisdom. This “practical wisdom” for Aristotle was rooted in our experience. Experience teaches us how to apply universal principles to the particular circumstances of life. Aristotle’s inquiry of “practical wisdom” and the “good life” was meant to inform human action.

In the “Nicomachean Ethics,” Aristotle wrote: “Prudence is that virtue of the understanding which enables men to come to wise decisions about the relation to happiness of the goods and evils. … ”

By the time of English political philosopher Thomas Hobbes, however, at the start of the modern era, we witness a complete rejection of such thinking.

Hobbes finds prudence no longer to be a proper concept in philosophy. He cast it aside as “mere conjecture.” This turned classical ethics on its head as prudence was no longer a virtue at all.

During the Scottish Enlightenment, Adam Smith (who was first and foremost a moral philosopher, and later the founder of modern economics), tried to reconnect prudence to morality.

An entire section of his opus, “The Moral Theory of Sentiments,” is dev**ed to the virtue of prudence as a form of common sense. Thinking as he did about the rising wealth of nations, Smith t***sformed the concept of prudence into both an economic and a moral virtue.

Caution is not popular these days, and prudence in that sense is hardly the supreme virtue it once was, if it is a virtue at all.

No longer able to hold back gratification, modern individuals and governments cannot delay desire in the present – even if, in so doing, we could take steps to satisfy ourselves better later in time. Gratification must be instantaneous.

This is why our budgets are out of control and our debt is what it is.

Donald Trump, much like Ronald Reagan, is criticized by politicians on the left and the right for proposing solutions that are “too simple,” not adequately thought out to meet the standard Washington think tanks demand of public policy wonks considered qualified to govern.

But for Trump, like Reagan, common sense was the core of public policy, demanding we ask of all government actions whether today’s modern political excesses – such as a $20 trillion national debt – are prudent.

Put simply, if running a $20 trillion national debt is a bad idea, then to political thinkers of Reagan’s or Trump’s ilk, it only makes sense to take prudent measures to bring the national debt into a more manageable level, perhaps now, before paying interest on the national debt begins taking one-third or more of the federal budget.

Common-sense conservatism rooted in the virtue of prudence is making a comeback because Trump, like Reagan, is calling into question our political purpose and system of cronyism, victimization and entitlement.

It is high time for some more common sense and less immediate gratification, a principle Reagan and Trump would both see as antithetical to the prudent management of government.


http://www.wnd.com/2016/03/common-sense-conservatism-from-reagan-to-trump/#U6DuVogX3CFhSgWA.99

lpnmajor Loc: Arkansas

None of this should have come as a surprise, since it has been happening almost from the beginning. As we learn our way forward as a nation, there will always be those seeking to manipulate that "way" for their own purposes. The underlying motivations for those purposes is often unknown, sometimes even by the individual trying to manipulate things, however, more and more often, those motivations are easy to spot.

People want more stuff and pay fewer taxes, corporations want to make more money and pay lower taxes, politicians want more power without the corresponding responsibility, foreign countries want more stuff from us without being obliged to do what we want them to do. See the pattern? In our form of Government, all power and authority derives from the people, therefor, it is the people that must be manipulated first and foremost.

In the 19th century, Republicans, a brand new party, were all about black rights - now Democrats want to be all about that. Why would those two party's "flip the script"? Simply put, they cannot BOTH - be about the same thing at the same time - or they lose the "shtick" they use to manipulate the people to get what they want. What do they want? They want the power and authority of the people - to do with as THEY see fit. See the pattern?

All of the ridiculous laws, regulations, etc., that we have today, are NOT the result of bad Governance - they are the unintended consequence of the manipulation of the people, perpetrated by both major party's in their quest for ultimate power and control. The irony is; neither party has any idea whatsoever of how to Govern, once they have achieved goal of obtaining that power and control. They only know how to use it - to further their aims of KEEPING the power.

That pattern of behavior can ONLY be altered - by the people who allowed it in the first place - the citizens of the United States of America.

Louie27 Loc: Peoria, AZ

Facts do not account for a t***h by most Democrats. Facts by a Conservative are only a annoyance to liberals and are considered non t***hs.

nwtk2007 Loc: Texas

A great man once said the Beatles were thugs who looked like gentlemen while the Rolling Stones were gentlemen who looked like thugs.

Just my 2 cents.