Why Our Paradigms Ain't Shifting

Thomas Kuhn - Irritator of scientists and politicians.

If you're not a historian, a scientist, a philosopher or a physicists, you probably haven't heard of Thomas Kuhn, the author of the book "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" - at least not directly. You may, however, be familiar with the term "paradigm shift". This is the idea that ideas in a particular field or in a person's worldview remain static until enough evidence comes together to change that worldview causing a shift to a new paradigm. Christians call this a "conversion experience". Buddhists may call it "enlightenment". Archimedes responded to his own little paradigm shift by shouting, "Eureka!"  A paradigm shift, one would think, would be a good thing - a step toward enlightenment. Unfortunately, not everyone always thinks so. When a paradigm shift happens in science or politics or religion, such a shift tends to either make the scientist or politician or theologian terribly uncomfortable or ecstatically happy. Martin Luther experienced this elation when he discovered the principle of righteousness by faith while reading the book of Romans. Pope Leo X on the other hand, experienced profound discomfort when Luther nailed them to the door of the chapel at Wittenberg.

Kuhn's book is pretty heady stuff, but let me give you a very rough idea of what he says. Kuhn maintains that science doesn't progress in a straight line, but roughly in a series of steps with a plateau in between these apparent shifts. The plateaus he calls paradigms.  During the period when the paradigm is broadly accepted, scientists (or politicians or theologians) busy themselves proving the paradigm. If enough anomalies arise that don't fit the paradigm, eventually scientists, politicians, et al (usually from among the younger generation whose opinions are more flexible) will begin to develop a new paradigm model which, when enough evidence is gathered, causes the old paradigm to shift to the new one.

In science, you see this happening at the time of Isaac Newton and again with Albert Einstein. Politically paradigm shifts happen around things like the rise of the Roman Empire, the American Revolution and Karl Marx and the Russian Revolution. In the realm of religion, The Buddha, Confucius, Moses, Jesus Christ, Constantine and Martin Luther have all created religious paradigm shifts in their day. The reason a paradigm shift is such an upheaval is because the folk invested in the old paradigm don't want to have to stand up and tell their students that what they were saying last year was, well......wrong!

I think we are facing a number of pending paradigm shifts today and they all seem to be coming together at once. The evidence for this is in the way the various factions are all shouting at each other, desperately defending their own turf, and not actually listening to one another. The arguments rage on and few are convinced of anything.  There is a reason for this as Kuhn points out in his book.

• "When (political or scientific) paradigms enter, as they must, into a debate about paradigm choice, their role is necessarily circular. Each group uses its own paradigm to argue in the paradigm's defense. The resulting circularity does not, of course, make the arguments wrong or even ineffectual. The man who premises a paradigm when arguing in its defense can nonetheless provide a clear exhibit of what scientific* practice will be like for those who adopt the new view of nature. That exhibit can be immensely persuasive, often compellingly so. Yet, whatever its force, the status of the circular argument is only that of persuasion. It cannot be made logically or even probabilistically compelling for those who refuse to step into the circle. The premises and values shared by the two parties to a debate over paradigms are not sufficiently extensive for that. As in political revolutions, so in paradigm choice--there is no standard higher than the assent of the relevant communities."
                                               - Thomas Kuhn: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.

So the reason everyone is shouting at each other and no one is particularly listening is that we are all defending our paradigms, using our paradigms as self-evident proof that we are right. A hint at how this works can be found in the Declaration of Independence. 

• "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed../"

At the time and even down to this day and age, the royalists (today we call them "elitists") hold to a paradigm where the above enumerated "truths" are very much NOT self-evident. To them it was and still is patently obviously that some men are naturally superior to others and therefore should, by right, be rulers over what Karl Marx (and King George III) would think of as "the masses" or "the proletariat" - lesser quality humans who require the leadership of their superiors. This doctrine is held to be self-evident by Darwin and by those who believed in the "divine right of kings".

 So in the political realm you have two competing paradigms.

1. Progressive Socialism which, I believe is a direct descendant of the feudal belief in a class of superior people called the nobility, has been invested in the idea of collectivism since it was first articulated by Karl Marx. Marx's model for human evolution saw no problem with the restriction of human rights, if it was necessary for the good of the entire race of man. Today that idea is pretty much that free sex, drugs and rock n' roll should be enough freedom to placate the rubes while their betters run things for them.
2. Constitutional Free Market Capitalism in which the majority of Americans (until recently) have been invested has been the paradigm in the U.S. since the states accepted the Constitution as law of the land. The Constitution itself incorporated long-held Christian values and the philosophy of John Locke and others of the day. Since then, this bunch of rugged individualists, almost unique in history, has been invested in the idea of individualism and personal freedom as the model for human progress and liberty for all. The equality of man was the paradigm of the day at our nation's founding and that paradigm led inexorably to many reforms including the abolition of slavery and the rejection of imperialism as a foreign relations policy tool. The idea of an entitled elite has long been repugnant to Americans. We've believed, until recently, that people should be free to solve their own problems individually and as communities. We don't need no stinkin' Kings (or queens or commissars or dear leaders for that matter).

At this point Progressive socialists are trying to win the debate by convincing everyone they've already won the debate!  Can you say "The political science is settled? The progressive left is using the culture, the news media, the entertainment industry and the increasing power of the government to cause a politico-cultural shift from free market capitalism to collectivism. It's the "everybody knows" argument and however illogical that argument actually is, it's a powerful one given human beings and their natural instinct to join herds of other human beings. The need to belong is powerful and progressives are adept in exploiting that need to their own purposes. The Constitutionalists, conservatives and some libertarians are stubbornly resisting the attempted forced paradigm shift in our culture, but, because we have neglected to maintain control of the education system, the next generation of Americans is coming up already indoctrinated into the progress socialist circle. They are being taught the "obvious" superiority of the collectivist model. Converting our kids back to old-fashioned American values is going to be an uphill battle from here on because most are NOT in our circle.

It's not that we don't have tons of evidence to prove our point or to break down our opponents paradigm model. We do. But like Thomas Kuhn pointed out, we're all arguing from within our own circles, using our own paradigms as a self-evident truth. If those we are arguing with won't step into our circle, then we're essentially talking to ourselves.

We see the increasing tension everywhere in our world today between competing paradigms.

• The Anthropogenic Global Warming "settled science" vs the embattled group of scientists who see evidence to the contrary.
• Conservatives vs Liberals
• Christians vs Muslims
• LGBTQ (or whatever it is today) vs traditional marriage supporters
• Pro-life vs. Pro-choice
• Black Lives Matter vs All Lives Matter

Instead of looking at the facts like we all think we do, we mostly focus on the facts which support our own paradigm. When the sides become so incompatible, a "revolution" occurs. Sometimes it's peaceful, though that's seldom the case with political revolutions. Often it can be violent as it was during the Protestant Reformation, the American Revolution, and the Vietnam War protests.

So what can we do to prevent all these factions from erupting into some new sort of paradigm-based cleansing of opposing viewpoints?  The truth?  Probably not a lot. Scripture predicts a very nasty end is going to happen just about now in Earth's history. Like the Mayans, the Christian prophetic calendar is about to run out.

The Good News?  We can teach ourselves how to argue outside the circle of our own personal belief system (paradigm). We can take a page from Jesus who was very good at it as evidenced by the fact that there are about 2.2 billion Christians in the world today - more than any other religion.  How did Christ do it?  He stepped outside the circle - way outside actually. Here's how:

1. He reached out to the outcasts who had been pushed to the fringes of the Jewish circle - the lame, the insane, the lepers, the tax collectors, the prostitutes and the Samaritans. He drew them in and made them a competing core within the community of the followers of God. We do that by reaching out to those who were once with us, but who have drifted away.
2. He sacrificed himself in a tangible way for his followers. We must sacrifice our time, our energy and our money for those we have lost from our fellowship. They need to know we care about them.
3. He empowered his followers to reach out beyond the circle. His disciples and their converts went out to share the gospel with the Gentiles in every part of the world.  Have you noticed that it is often those who come from the farthest from us, who become the greatest spokesmen for our causes? I think of atheists and agnostics who have become Christians like C. S. Lewis, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and Doug Batchelor. I think of liberals who have become powerful conservative advocates like Bill Whittle, Milton Friedman, Dennis Milller, George Orwell and David Horowitz.

The key thing to remember is that, just because your paradigm says a thing is so, that is not going to be a valid argument to someone else who believes that his own paradigm, religion belief system, or ideology is also self-evident.  Sgt. Joe Friday of the old TV show "Dragnet" perhaps said it best.



The only thing that effectively defeats a stubborn paradigm is the relentless bombardment by facts. Name-calling only solidifies an opponents position. Ad hominem attacks, straw man attacks and any number of logical fallacies will work against you. I highly recommend you check out the link I just gave you. It will help you not only improve your ability to articulate your position, but will also help you recognize flawed reasoning when you are pelted with it by some hysterical ideology who is upset by the facts you present. Here are some basic logical fallacies you should avoid.

In CS Lewis' brilliant children's book, "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe," Professor Digory, when told a thing wasn't logical by one of the children, lamented, "What are they teaching in schools these days?"  I leave you with this clip from the movie (below) so this blog ends on less of a downer.

© by Tom King

* ...or political or religious practice for that matter

Why I Give Liberals and Other Minions a Hard Time

Liberals have their own view of how thing work and everything they do is in large part, determined by that ideology. That said, hard right conservatives do much the same thing. It's getting worse every year to the point that things are beginning to grind to a standstill as we wait to see who is going to win the ideological Hundred Years War that's been going on in America. I've met a lot of political ideologues in my earlier career as a volunteer community organizer. I was not paid by Acorn (they had a horror of me) and I am a conservative politically, though probably a good deal less doctrinaire than my Libertarian friends would wish me to be.  My parochial school education probably had a lot to do with my attitude toward problem solving. I believe in looking for problems in need of solutions rather than solutions in need of a problem. I'm kind of contrary like that.


I spent two years on the TxDOT Public Transportation Advisory Committee. We changed the funding formula for the distribution of federal transit dollars to make it more equitable for rural areas that are NOT around Austin and Houston. Austin and Houston are where we keep our liberals. They like to congregate around big cities. Big city liberal lobbyists are quite formidable and had been successful at steering federal transit dollars to their areas to the detriment of more conservative rurals area elsewhere in our vast State of Texas.   I showed the House transportation committee a graph of how much money each rural transit district was receiving and then pointed out that the two men who had testified that the status quo must be maintained were lobbyists representing the transit companies who received the appropriations represented by the two bars on the funding distribution graph that looked like the twin towers standing in a corn field.

That got a laugh from the Republicans on the committee. And then the TxDOT commissioner stood up after me and called the two of them "liars". It was very gratifying. It was a bloody fight against entrenched and experienced political infighters, but with the help of two hard-nosed conservatives on the commission, we got the funding formula rewritten and a plan in place that made the distribution reflect population needs rather than who got to the trough first with the best lobbyists. Me and my chart were universally hated.

It certainly made the distribution of funds fair and effective for small towns and rural areas not associated with Democrat strongholds. It's one of the reasons why I have had problems with Democrats. My little old people I worked with were stranded. I lived in the part of the state with the highest density and percentage of elderly and disabled without access to transportation. One in five adult East Texans at the time had no reliable access to transportation and were, in effect, stranded. We helped stop that. Two of my chief allies in the effort was a taxi company owner named Jamal Mohrer and a savvy city bus company director named Norman Schenck.

With the tremendous and invaluable help of private transportation providers like Jamal, visionary public transit directors like Norman, church groups, nonprofits, sturdy East Texans who care about old people and disadvantaged families, people with disabilities, and a pair of unusually bipartisan Austin liberals experienced in the ways of government, we helped land a federal earmark for an after hours home-from-work and extended bus hours program to benefit transportation challenged families and individuals with disabilities who worked and/or wanted to participate more fully in local life. The partnership between the private cab company and Tyler Transit that came out of it was a wonderful example of what could be accomplished when a diverse stakeholder group puts aside political ideology and solves problems. Unfortunately, I didn't remain there long enough to see the program survive the damage done when aggressively left-leaning members of our local stake-holders group piled on the city council about "rights" and entitlements and completely missed the far more effective argument that without transportation, people who can't drive can't work and can't hope to break free of dependence on entitlements. It's an important argument that my liberal friends habitually missed when they were busily chaining themselves to light poles in front of the governor's mansion and to downtown buses in Austin and Houston which are already liberal towns. Which brings me to today.

In this current election cycle, we conservatives need to broaden our stakeholder group if we want to get things done (i.e. elect a sane person to the highest office in the land). If we don't we're doomed and speaking of doomed.  Sadly, Donald Trump is the only "Republican" who is doing this particularly well, though the folk he is drawing unto himself are not the sharpest pencils in the desk drawer. Ben Carson is also trying to do that, but with less success. Personally, I think that the GOP bosses are terrified of someone like Carson - you know, someone honest and incorruptible. To the country club GOP leadership, and honest man is the last thing this country needs. Honest men are notoriously difficult to "deal" with. So the only one appealing to the broad tent successful is a pseudo-conservative flim flam man with a bad combover. God help us (and I'm not being flip about that).

Left and right agree on a surprising number of things, but disagree primarily on method. When you figure out what you all agree on and focus on that, it becomes considerably easier to come up with a way to make it work. Ronald Reagan had a striking ability for articulating the problem and convincing people that there were rational solutions to those problems.

And, I have found that if you do make a solution work it infuriates the good old boys of both political stripes who depend on no one meddling with their "system".  I've seen the system at work. It is designed to maintain the power and profitability of the political incumbent. A dear friend of mine said the reason he wanted the government to managed things like transit was because they don't run out of money - they can just take more from our taxes, he said. Bless his heart, this man, with a PhD to his credit, believed that the government was trustworthy because, as he pointed out, the government doesn't make a profit (as though making a profit were evil).

Dr. Bob was wrong about the government not being a profit-making concern, though. I mean when is the last time you met a poor elected official.  The government make profit in two ways - directly through graft and indirectly through the accumulation of power and power always equals cash, whether you are writing the checks for those wild parties in Vegas or the taxpayer is writing them. The closer we keep our money to the local level, the more effectively we can manage it and the more efficiently we can address our community's problems. It's harder work and takes effort to get people involved. I did thousands of hours of free work or work that my nonprofit paid me to do in the interest of their clients.

East Texas had 20% of its citizens without transportation in rural areas. So we worked very hard and got our transit budget tripled. A lot of people helped make it happen, both Democrats and Republicans and people who'd never participated in anything political before. My great concern is that we too often  spend our teaching time trying to indoctrinate the new generation into one party's system for doing things. How much better would it be if parents and teachers were to teach our kids how to work with their legislators and with stakeholder groups without reference to politics If we brain-wash our kids, teach them to parrot an ideology; to regurgitate canned answers a'la Bernie Sanders rather than to seek for them on their own, then we wind up raising a generation of something worse than yuppies.

We're raising minions, capable of following a charismatic leader without critical thinking and that frightens me. I first wrote that last sentence years ago - long before Donald Trump came along as a socialist in Republican's clothing. Well before the Despicable Me series hit the movies.  I was cruising through some old blog drafts and came upon this piece. It struck me that we are seeing in this election cycle, the consequences of teaching ideology rather than critical thinking.

I'm on the track to leaving this planet in the next couple or three decades. I just hate to leave behind a culture that, thanks to our failure to pay attention to educating our kids and ourselves, is on track to becoming the worst of Orwell and Huxley's dystopian nightmare futures.  If you'd told me when I first started on this piece that in 2016 we'd have a shifty strip club owner and reality TV star and an open socialist vying for the office of President of the United States back then, I'd have laughed at you.

Not so funny, now though, huh?


Just one man's opinion.

Tom King © 2016

Pick Your Wardrobe Wisely: A Lesson in Racial Politics

Rodney King famously said after his beat-down by LA cops 

and the ensuing riots, "Why can't we all just get along?"

Probably not a Sunday School Teacher - One of theproblems we face when choosing our wardrobe.

 

In the wake of the recent racial unrest over the Florida courtroom drama surround the Trayvon Martin shooting, the political ideologues have fired up their spin machines. Both have come out in support of their own rigid ideologies, of course, but what's been appalling about the whole thing is how little regard is being paid to what we are teaching our kids with all this rhetoric about race.

Like Mr. King's question suggests, it ought to be a simple thing. Let's focus on fixing the problem rather than fanning the fires of hatred based on skin color.  But both sides are doing it. It would be nice if we could get everybody to back off the angry rhetoric and be nice to one another. Unfortunately, it's hard to do that when people see only what they want to see! A million black mothers see in Trayvon Martin their 12 year old child's face. Their real child may be 38 years old and a steel worker, but to his mama he will always be that little innocent boy going to the store for some candy and a Coke.

But a bag of Skittles can be a candy treat or a key ingredient in a vicious street drug called "purple drank" that makes you paranoid and aggressive if you add Arizona Watermelon Drink and a bit of cough syrup.

On the other side, millions of non-blacks see the carnage in places like Detroit, Chicago and L.A. and the gangs of young men in hoodies and sagging pants committing violent crimes and react with fear and with sympathy for George Zimmerman. Many wonder if they should get that conceal and carry permit for themselves.

It's hard to forgive and forget when you are so angry you see only what you want to see and only from your own perspective. It's true, when young black men protest that not everyone who dresses like a thug is a thug. This is no less true than the idea that everyone who dresses and talks like a preacher is a man of God. Evil people like Jim Jones and David Koresh dressed themselves up like preachers in order to make people think they were men of God and then stole from them, raped them, abused them and even got them all killed.

The message of the recent Martin/Zimmerman tragedy should be one that speaks to self-preservation. It's a message I used to try to get across to the kids I worked with. If you don't want people to think you are dangerous, don't dress like a dangerous person, don't act like a dangerous person and don't take substances that make you paranoid and aggressive.  If you do, then you frighten people and frightened people can be far more dangerous than you are, as that poor boy found out. Someone should have done a better job of teaching lesson to Trayvon.

But isn't this a free country?  Shouldn't I be able to dress like a thug if I want to and shouldn't people not assume that I am a thug no matter how I dress?

Well, let's look at that idea a bit.  I, for instance, have every right to put on a KKK hood and walk down the street,  But does it follow, using the reasoning above, that black people should not assume that I am actually a member of the KKK even though I'm wearing a Klan hoodie?  And furthermore, do I have the right to be surprised if black people become angry and feel threatened if I confront them wearing that kind of outfit? 

Of course not. There are thugs and there are thugs.  The Klan guys are thugs as much as any Italian, black, Russian or Hispanic gang member.  Thugs wear outfits that make them look like thugs so people will fear them. There really isn't any good reason to dress like a thug. If there were a war going on and I wasn't a soldier, I certainly would not put on a soldier uniform and go out on the battlefield - not if I expected to live. It wouldn't matter that I wasn't "really" an enemy soldier. It would only matter that I looked like one.

If we lived in a kinder gentler world we could all dress like we wanted to and no one would think any the worse of us. But we live in a world full of real threats to our lives and safety.  In a world where people who dress like thugs often attack you, shoot you or rob you, we are conditioned to treat such people as a threat. It would have taken a huge leap of faith for Mr. Zimmerman to assume Trayvon wasn't going to kill him when the young man was on top of him administering what his girlfriend called a well-deserved "whoop a@#$%" and beating his head against the sidewalk. It's probably a bit more than anyone of any race has a right to expect.



Alright, I get it. Black people have a lot of anger over how they've been treated by white people. But is fanning that anger in our communities, and particularly in front of impressionable children, any way to end the hatred? And if you fan the anger of blacks against whites and say things like, "Sure Zimmerman is half Hispanic, but it was his whiteness that made him murder that boy," are you not inviting a violent reaction from the white community? Not everyone in the white community is over racism yet and most of us, even those who do find racism reprehensible, aren't prepared to submit to, as Martin's girlfriend, Rachel Jeantel, so colorfully put it, the "whoop a@#$%" we deserve.

If we grownups in the community are not careful there is going to be blood in our streets and I will grieve just as much over the blood of black and Hispanic children caught up in the violence as I will for white children. Jesus, Martin Luther King and Ghandi all taught that the way to respond to racism was to resist nonviolently. If there is still racism in our country and my black brothers and sisters wish to resist it nonviolently, I will once again stand beside them.

I'm afraid though that those with an interest in fomenting violence over race in this country are not trying to end racism at all. I think they are trying to use it as a means to seize political power. I don't think they care who gets killed to feed their ambitions and lust for power. Such people do not serve God, I promise you that, whether they have Reverend, Senator, Congressman or President in front of their names or not.

The moral of the story here? If you don't want to be treated like a dangerous thug, don't dress like one, talk like one or act like one. Let your words be "yes" and "no" without all the name-calling and labeling. Don't be afraid to stand against even your loved ones and closest friends if it is the right thing to do.  It's that simple and a lesson that can be learned by both sides in this conflict.

© 2013 by Tom King

Why History Makes Leftists Mad

(c) 2013 by Tom King

Dictators are what you get when you replace God.with a man.

I was going to write a piece this morning on the top ten nasty mass murderers of the past century.  In researching it, I found a nicely researched piece called the "Top Ten Most Evil Dictators of All Time". While the article covers more like the top ten of the past 100 years, it was nicely researched.  What I particularly loved was the comments section.

These kinds of historical laundry lists always bring out all kinds of garbled nonsense from all the wonderful leftist trolls that inhabit cyberspace. You have to know that when you list the sins of truly evil people, you are going to catch hell from the left. These lists of mass murderers, especially if you include facts to back your list up, they inevitably highlight the preponderance of socialists that make your top ten. 

Inevitably when socialism goes off the rails, the only way the socialist leaders can preserve their power is to kill anyone who objects to them continuing to wreck the country.  There are no US presidents on this list because every single one stood down willingly at the end of their terms.  None had a strong enough need to hold on to power, so none had to kill to keep it. Every American president has understood that power is only lent to him for a time.  So far every president has accepted the office as a privilege to serve, granted for a short time only. Each president does his best to execute his duties well and then stands down when his time is done.

America's system of minimal government, balanced between legislative, administrative and judicial branches has proved a powerful stabilizer in the United States. It has created a nation that, while it has risen to be the most powerful nation-state in the world, has felt no need to establish an empire.  As much as you may disagree with the wars America has fought in the past century, we left every country we have fought with in the hands of its own people when it was over and paid for its rebuilding to boot.  You may hate the gulf wars, but we are gone from Iraq and extricating ourselves from Afghanistan as quickly as possible. That is not the act of despots or empire builders. 

In the end we're businessmen. What America wants is what's good for business.  When we can establish open trade between our nations, we all make a little money and the people of our nations are a little better off for it. Is there corruption?  Sure.  But isn't it better for the government to be in the business of rooting out corruption in business than it is for all of us to try and root out corruption in a too-powerful government.  Power corrupts and, as the saying goes, absolute power corrupts absolutely. 

Centrally planned, centrally controlled socialist nations seldom last long.  Once all the wealth is taken from the rich and distributed to the "people" through the government, then the government has to turn back to the people and take back from them.  The only problem is that the people have by then used up what was redistributed from the wealthy and nothing was produced as a result (except maybe some votes for the people in power). 

There is nothing more ravenous and destructive than a powerful central government that can't get its hands on enough wealth to keep it strong.  Soon it beginst to either cannabalize its own economy or it attacks its neighbors.  Placing the record of history where socialists and others can see it always makes the socialist true-believers incoherent with anger. You can read it in some of the comments on the article linked above. The sociology ideology must be right whatever history reveals and if the facts don't quite support the ideology, they become downright frantic.  One commentator screams, "STOP SAYING STALIN WAS A “COMMUNIST”!! He wasn’t a communist at all."  The last resort of socialists, when confronted with the massive failures of socialism, is to simply claim whatever dictator we're talking about wasn't a "real" socialist.  They are always certain that someone more pure could have done it right.

And there's the fallacy. Only God could pull off socialism. The almost absolute power, inevitably given to the leadership of socialist movements, corrupts absolutely. Humans have not the capacity to engineer something as complex as an economy or a culture.  Nobody's smart enough. It's a mistake to try.  It's not an accident that atheism almost always comes hand-in-hand with socialist movements.  It's because socialism is little more than an attempt to build a political Tower of Babel.

The Tower of Babel was meant to create a place for man above the level of the flood so that God could no longer interfere with man's behavior.  Socialism is nothing more than an attempt by man to create Heaven here on Earth.  If we can do that, men reason, then we have no need for God.

If we can just eliminate God, the atheist/socialist reasons, then I no longer have to feel guilty about my naughty behavior and if I no longer feel guilty, I can do anything I want to and.................it begins.  The long slide toward misery, war and mass murder.  It happens time and time again and we can see it in history.

But we don't want to see the evidence of history, because, if we can't create Heaven on Earth, then our only hope is God and if we serve Him, we cannot serve ourselves and we cannot be naughty without guilt. So, in order to support the illusion of socialism, we simply ignore the actual results and stick to the ideology.

And it gives us delightful characters like Mao, Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot, Saddam Hussein, Kim Il Sung, Kim Jong Il and Fidel Castro. 




I'm just saying,


Tom King

You may now continue foaming and ranting.....

Making Peace With Wolves - An Aesop Fable

Creative Commons: Some rights reserved by Harlequeen

“WHY SHOULD there always be this fear and slaughter between us?” said the Wolves to the Sheep. “Those evil-disposed Dogs have much to answer for. They always bark whenever we approach you and attack us before we have done any harm. If you would only dismiss them from your heels, there might soon be treaties of peace and reconciliation between us.” The Sheep, poor silly creatures, were easily beguiled and dismissed the Dogs, whereupon the Wolves destroyed the unguarded flock at their own pleasure.

 - Aesop

 Creative Commons: Some rights reserved by tonynetone

Aesop understood this principle more than 2.600 years ago and yet apparently highly educated politicians still want to send away the dogs and trust in the promises of wolves. Aesop told a second story (below*) with the same theme. He must have thought it important to tell the story twice.

 - Tom

Creative Commons: Some rights reserved by slightly everything

 * A HORSE SOLDIER took the utmost pains with his charger. As long as the war lasted, he looked upon him as his fellow-helper in all emergencies and fed him carefully with hay and corn. But when the war was over, he only allowed him chaff to eat and made him carry heavy loads of wood, subjecting him to much slavish drudgery and ill-treatment. War was again proclaimed, however, and when the trumpet summoned him to his standard, the Soldier put on his charger its military trappings, and mounted, being clad in his heavy coat of mail. The Horse fell down straightway under the weight, no longer equal to the burden, and said to his master, “You must now go to the war on foot, for you have transformed me from a Horse into an Ass; and how can you expect that I can again turn in a moment from an Ass to a Horse?”  

- Aesop

And It's Up Against the Wall......Are Conservatives Fear Mongers?

(c) 2011 by Tom King

Had a liberal commentator on one of the forums today who criticized conservatives for promoting fear. They always call us fear-mongers. It's in the playbook. But it's not because they are deliberately lying about that. Folks on the left really do fear conservatives.  They fear we are going to cramp their sex lives. They fear we are going to make them go to church. They fear we're going to take away their entitlements and starve children and old people. And so they assume that we fear them in the same way they fear us and what we'd do to them if we did things our way.

I was chided by this one woman who told me our fear of the progressive movement was unfounded and that we should just sit back and "give it a chance". She promised we'd like the change.

Yep, kind of like the Russian middle class wasn't afraid of to embrace the revolutionary change that Trotsky, Lenin and Stalin brought to the Russian people. Many of them even tried to embrace the change, right up until the new government virtually obliterated the Russian middle class.  Just like the Jews dismissed any worries about the new Fuehrer as an "over-reaction". Like the Hugenots who expected the Catholic church to tolerate their beliefs because they thought that surely the Hugenots contributed so much to the economy as the core of the nation's middle class. In that, they greatly under-estimated the penchant of the powerful for cutting off their own noses to spite their faces. They dismissed any fear of the clerical authorities right up untill the Inquisition began setting fire to French Hugenot shopkeepers, forcing a mass flight to America. Hey, it was great for us, enriching  as it did, our growing economy with an influx of ready-made middle class traders and shopkeepers. I suppose Idi Amin, Sadaam Hussein, and "Baby Doc" Duvalier all seemed like they'd be okay if you just kept out of their way - till folks discovered how hard it is to stay out of the way of people like that..


History's megalomaniacs have long depended on the fact that the great majority of people in any stable culture refuse to believe anything unpleasant will every happen to them.  They use this stubborn deliberate refusal to believe the worst in order to buy time for them to secure enough power to enforce their peculiar vision of how society should be ordered. By the time the people figure out they've been duped, it's most always too late.

It was getting that way in America before the revolution, but having already been through the process back in Europe, most Americans saw what was coming and dug their heels in - rejecting an insane king and an oppressive British government that seemed intent on wringing the lifeblood from the colonies for the profit of the nobility.

ANYBODY who thinks that they know how to plan a perfect society is dangerous as far as I'm concerned. If things don't go as they plan, they never consider that something may be wrong with their plans. Then they go looking for someone to blame and it's "Up against the wall!" Too much power inevitably corrupts the holder of that power.

As to the direct accusation that I am afraid of what I believe is coming if we don't do anything about it......she's wrong.......I am not afraid at all. That's what the left doesn't get about the Tea Party. We see what's coming and we're NOT afraid. If we were afraid, we'd sit down and shut up and hope no one noticed us. That's how most of the people in the Third World do it. They try to take care of themselves very quietly and to avoid drawing any attention to themselves from the government.

Conservatives are well aware that we are painting a bulls-eye on our own chests and that historically, it's crazed leftists behind the trigger - almost ten to one on presidential assassination attempts alone.

AND WE ARE NOT AFRAID. I figure that if God is done with me, getting run over by a tank or stoned by a mob is nothing to fear. The manner of our death changes nothing. My next conscious moment after my death, I will be looking up to see Christ coming to take me home. I'm only passing through this world anyway. My only task is to do what's right. I learned a long time ago that after a while, a beating doesn't hurt anymore. Refusing to stand up for what is right - that hurts forever.

Knowing what's coming doesn't make me afraid. It makes me determined and I don't think liberals will ever get that. They see the world through their own stubborn ideology and everything must conform to that ideology, even if it obviously doesn't work like their ideology says it ought to. The fault is never with the ideology no matter what. It's particularly hard for folks who do not believe in God to accept flaws in their ideology because for them their belief system is all they have - a hollow substitute for God that doesn't quite fill the need. It's why there is such a powerful need to silence anyone who challenges their ideology.

Like I said in a previous post.  Socialist revolutions are bad about putting their own people up against the wall when they are done with them. Political ideologies are cannabalistic by nature. They devour their own to stay alive. Kind of the opposite of how God works.  The whole idea that the leaders among us would be the lowliest - the servants of all - makes no sense to those who believe in top-down rule by a privileged class of supposedly smart people. You can see why they don't understand us at all.