Thoughts Following the Inauguration of
Septimius Severus
by Fred Reed
Recently by Fred Reed: The New Soviet Asylum
I’ve been thinking about fault lines, and fractures, and diversity, and when it’s all going to implode. I hope I’m still around because it is going to be one gorgeous show. Few things are as entertaining as a truly good disaster.
What is going to kill us is diversity. It isn’t working well. By diversity I mean here the intermixing of large groups of people holding utterly differing and opposed values. There is too damned much diversity in America. It isn’t getting better.
The current donnybrook over guns is not a political question, like whether to raise or lower taxes. It is a clash of civilizations, a confrontation between two groups who seriously don’t like each other and hold irreconcilably different views of life. The two would be happier in separate countries, an idea that has occurred to them. It is that bad.
The Constitution no longer being in effect, the gun-controllers may be able to outlaw guns, chiefly because the federal government also wants to do this, though for different reasons. The gun-controllers think that they are going to stop murder, whereas the feds just want a supine and helpless population. Should they succeed in banning firearms, the result will be a very large element of the population actually hating the rest, and hating the government. Diversity.
Guns are a curious fracture line: As a nation, America is way and gone the most militarily aggressive country on the planet, as note Iraq, Libya, Yemen, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Mali, Mexico, Columbia, Somalia, and so on. The economy is militarized beyond redemption. Yet if a little boy draws a picture of a soldier with a rifle, or a little girl points a gun blowing soap bubbles at a friend, they are likely to be led from school in handcuffs and subjected to psychiatry. Diversity.
The most conspicuous fault lines are of course racial. The United States thinks of itself as a melting pot, but four hundred years after the first blacks arrived they are not at all melted, the Indians are on their reservations, and the Hispanics show few signs of assimilating any time soon. Some melting pot. True, after much hostility, various white Europeans did melt with each other, the Irish and Italians now being regarded as human beings. But that was an easy one.
Cultures are stubborn things. Citizens of Uganda, Haiti, and Detroit are far more similar to each other than to European whites in their attitudes to schooling, crime, work, entrepreneurship, and the role of government. Venezuelans, Mexicans, and Uruguayans differ in various ways, but are more like each other than like Europeans. White Americans resemble Europeans much more than they resemble Africans, Moslems, or Mexicans. We really are African-Americans, Mexican-Americans, and European-Americans.
The racial groups in the US do not have much in common, do not like each other. Diversity.
Then there is the odd divide between the government and the governed. Never in my life have I encountered such pervasive hostility toward our rulers – which is what they are. Even the unsophisticated seem to realize that the real government consists of the President, the executive bureaucracies, the corporations, the media, the racial lobbies, and Wall Street. There is real anger in much of the country against this government and its constant dictatorial imposition of policies that either would never survive a popular vote, or that offend very large segments of the population. Forced integration, the police state, TSA, affirmative action, the teaching or not of evolution, and now gun control. Diversity.
Then there is the divide between the military, that huge plutonium albatross locked around the economy’s neck, and those who want to focus on solving our own problems. The Pentagon and its industrial udders are so embedded in the economy that short of a complete collapse there is nothing to be done about them. They are another example of diversity, an enormous and enormously powerful group whose interests run counter to those of the rest of the country.
And then we have the “culture wars,” the divide between the pridefully vulgar and those who favor cultivation of the mind – a phrase whose very utterance is thought unpardonable. There has always been a divide, though usually an invisible one, between on one hand those of high intelligence and intellectual curiosity, who read a book or two a week of history, politics, the arts and sciences and, on the other hand, those who can’t, don’t, and haven’t read anything. In the days before television, and before there arose the current dictatorship of the proletariat, hoi polloi and people of culture and discrimination seldom met. Neither imposed anything on the other.
Then television appeared, playing to the tasteless and to the semiliterate and worse – while also going into the homes of the schooled. The necessary separation of castes broke down. The crass and witless, outnumbering everyone else, imposed compulsory downward egalitarianism, enstupidating everyone and making it practically a federal crime to correct a student’s English. The government fiercely enforces this to prevent excessively evident racial inequality, and federal control over everything makes it impossible for communities to run their own schools. This divides the country into those angry that their kids don’t learn much, and those who want to make sure that theirs don’t have to. Diversity.
In short, the United States consists of a great many substantial and hostile groups in a way that, say, Japan and Finland do not. It’s every lobby for itself with no one thinking about the country. Wall Street happily rapes the middle class and below with its subprime swindle, enjoying federal acquiescence and perhaps participation. Washington reduces the schools to custodial centers to keep blacks happy, businessmen move jobs to China, and the arms industry impoverishes the nation for its private benefit. Other businessmen encourage illegal immigration to make a buck without the slightest thought for the public interest. Congress doesn’t do anything at all that I can see other than pander to any lobby that pays it, and the Supreme Court could go to sleep forever, assuming that it hasn’t, and no one would notice.
How long can a nation of pickpockets, beggars, and con-men steal from each other before the whole shebang falls down? We are about to find out. Diversity is our strength. Yes indeed.
January 25, 2013
Fred Reed is author of Nekkid in Austin: Drop Your Inner Child Down a Well, A Brass Pole in Bangkok: A Thing I Aspire to Be, Curmudgeing Through Paradise: Reports from a Fractal Dung Beetle, Au Phuc Dup and Nowhere to Go: The Only Really True Book About Viet Nam, and A Grand Adventure: Wisdom’s Price-Along with Bits and Pieces about Mexico. Visit his blog.
Copyright © 2013 Fred Reed
Fred On Everything
JJ3 says:
Great article, very well said, I used to have to attend diversity meeting at my corporate gig years ago, what a joke and a waste of time, everyone knew it but yet we all attended. This is government in a nutshell, everyone knows it is corrupt, inefficient and a bully, yet we all just bow down and do what they say. They make laws turning good people into criminals with a stroke of a pen.
Fortunately, there is a cure, read Von Mises, Rothbard and Hayek, it is surprising how many common sense answers these guys provide to cure the ills of our society.
Unfortunately, no ones reads anymore and the media and economists worship Keynes, the antithesis to the great minds mentioned above.
Oh well, when it all collapses at least we will have a framework for how to construct a society that actually works.
JJ3
http://www.youtube.com.jenklefritz – Soundtrack to the Revolution
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25th January 2013 at 9:32 am
JJ3 says:
Sorry wrong link – http://www.youtube.com/jenklefritz – All original lyrics and songs by me and my fellow youtube musician collaborators.
The Angels Forgot How to Fly by Krassy (Chiwawa) and JJ3
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=evOPV8mhI3g&list=PL83497DAF284FD444&index=7
Monopolies and Manipulated Stats
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OzpRojm80_Y&list=PLtbMRpF6YSS8FO6bcc8yGnYvkqvRnz-uW&index=1
Where were you when the world went mad?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cNzwuTk580Q&list=PLtbMRpF6YSS8FO6bcc8yGnYvkqvRnz-uW&index=4
There’s nothing at stake (except the future of man)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=885T9JSLGdY
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25th January 2013 at 9:36 am
flash says:
If the re-election of Barry Soetoro to Puppet of the United Swindlers has proven anything , it is that the dim-witted and feckless now out-number the law -aiding and principled by a large majority and there is no going back.
The revolution is lost .
INAUGURATION 2013
Obama has hijacked the American Revolution
Pat Buchanan: Speech about equality was ‘nice prose – and transparent nonsense’
author-image by Patrick J. Buchanan Email | Archive
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Pat Buchanan was twice a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination and the Reform Party’s candidate in 2000. He is also a founder and editor of The American Conservative. Buchanan served three presidents in the White House, was a founding panelist of three national TV shows, and is the author of nine books. His latest book is “Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025?”More ↓
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“Second Term Begins With a Sweeping Agenda for Equality,” ran the eight-column banner in which the Washington Post captured the essence of Obama’s second inaugural. There he declared:
“What binds this nation together … what makes us exceptional – what makes us American – is our allegiance to an idea, articulated in a declaration made more than two centuries ago.”
Obama then quoted our 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.”
Our “union,” Obama went on, was “founded on the principles of liberty and equality.”
Nice prose – and transparent nonsense.
How could the American Union have been founded on the principle of equality, when “equality” is not mentioned in the Constitution, the Bill of Rights or the Federalist Papers? How could equality be a founding principle of a nation, six of whose 13 original states had legalized slavery, and five of whose first seven presidents owned slaves all their lives?
What Obama preached in his inaugural was not historical truth but progressive propaganda, an Orwellian rewrite of American history.
Undeniably, the post-Civil War 13th, 14th and 15th amendments established an equality of constitutional rights. And from the Brown decision of 1954 through the civil rights acts of the 1960s, there was established an equality of civil rights. Black Americans were assured equal access to schools, public accommodations, the voting booth and housing. And Congress and the people overwhelmingly supported those laws.
Pat Buchanan’s latest book — autographed! — the title says it all: “Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025?”
But if the nation did not establish equality of constitutional rights until the 1860s and equality of civil rights until the 1960s, how can Obama claim that “equality” has been the feature that “makes us American” and “binds this nation together.”
How can he say that our commitment to equality is what makes us “exceptional” – when every Western country believes in equal rights for all of its citizens, and it was the French Revolution, not ours, that elevated “egalite” to a founding principle.
And when he says equality “is the star that guides us still,” exactly what kind of equality is Obama talking about?
Answer: The equality of which Obama speaks is not an equality of rights but an equality of results, an idea that dates not to the Founding Fathers, who would have been appalled by the idea, but to the 1960s.
This equality is not a founding principle of the republic. It is ideological contraband. For such equality can only be achieved at the price of freedom, our true founding principle.
That idea that “all of us are created equal – is the star that guides us still,” said Obama in his inaugural, “just as it guided our forebears through Seneca Falls, and Selma, and Stonewall.”
Astonishing. The president is here making the brazen claim that the roots of modern feminism and gay rights can be traced straight back to the Founding Fathers and founding principles of our republic.
But how? The sanctum sanctorum of modern feminism is Roe v. Wade, the discovery of a constitutional right to an abortion. Yet, for every generation of Americans before 1973, abortion was a heinous crime.
And can anyone seriously argue that a barroom brawl with cops by homosexual patrons of Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village in 1969 was but another battle in the long war for liberty begun at Lexington, Concord and Bunker Hill?
How could that be, when the author of the declaration Obama cites, Thomas Jefferson, believed homosexuality should be treated as rape, and George Washington ordered homosexuals drummed out of his army?
What Obama was attempting at the Capitol, with his repeated lifts from Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln, was to portray his own and his party’s egalitarianism as a continuation of the great cause that triumphed at Yorktown and Appomattox.
He is hijacking the American Revolution, claiming an ancestral lineage for his ideology that is utterly fraudulent and bogus.
Feminism, the gay-rights movement and the post-1965 civil-rights movement, with their demand for equality not simply of rights but of rewards, cannot be achieved without trampling on the freedoms for which the patriot fathers fought. And they cannot triumph without creating a permanent, mammoth and redistributionist state more powerful, intrusive and dictatorial than anything George III ever dreamed of.
The freedom of all Americans to compete academically, athletically, artistically and economically must inevitably result in an inequality of incomes, wealth and rewards.
Why? Because all men and women are by nature and nurture unequal. Some are talented, ambitious, industrious, lucky. And in a free society, such men and women will always reap a disproportionate share of fame and fortune.
The only way to equalize rewards is to take from those who have earned and give to those who have not. And that requires the kind of redistributionst regime the Founding Fathers would have risen up against.
As Obama’s America rises, the old republic falls.
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25th January 2013 at 10:18 am
sangell says:
There is a substantial amount of interbreeding going on in the US but it won’t lead to a melting pot of the races because it is concentrated amongst the lower class whites, hispanics and the black underclass. The more ideal case of Hawaii where more than 50% of marriages are now interracial and involve all social classes is unlikely to be replicated on the mainland because of the wide chasm in IQ’s between middle and uppermiddleclass whites and Asians and the lower and underclasses.
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25th January 2013 at 11:27 am
KaD says:
There’s a reason I call it divershitty.
This reminds me of an incident years ago where I worked. There was a very intelligent, well dress black woman I worked with. She was leaving, I asked her why. She told me “I want to work with MY people”. Would a white person not have been hung for saying that? Hell, I got hung just for asking a question about the legality of special bank accounts the place had for ghetto dwellers.
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25th January 2013 at 11:47 am
el shaka says:
JJ3 – our first intro to diversity as an organization idea was a lunchtime meeting where the boss had asked his blond buddies, male and female, to read their interpretation of “what diversity means to me”. the people upstairs came by the following year to clarify that diversity means inclusiveness, diversity means that everybody has something to contribute.
” the Hispanics show few signs of assimilating any time soon. Some melting pot…… ”
hispanics do have some cultural preferences but so do many other groups. if we had no defining characteristics, we’d melt into that homogenous blob known as “white”.
“Mexicans, and Uruguayans differ in various ways, but are more like each other than like Europeans. White Americans resemble Europeans much more than they resemble Africans, Moslems, or Mexicans. We really are African-Americans, Mexican-Americans, and European-Americans…..”
there is that attempt to retain some cultural identity to differentiate between cubans and puerto rican hispanics. i know a lot of person who claim to be irish one day and white another day. i am hispanic most days but white on census day.
nice post, i appreciate reading topics on hispanics…
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25th January 2013 at 2:47 pm
JJ3 says:
El shaka – yes we are all different, but at this point and time who doens’t get that? Do we really need a class and a lecture to explain that we are all different because we come from different cultures? That is the root of the problem is that everyone comes up with a bunch of no shit solutions. Want to truly learn about diversity, why don’t our schools come up with more foreign exchange programs, not paid for by the government and or our corporations send whitey over to different countries in exchange for one of their productive workers for a month or even a week.
I never realized how ignorant I was about the world until I went to another country and discovered how other cultures operate and are different. I really like latin american culture, btw, the women are beautiful and everyone knows how to have a good time on the weekends and relax.
And thanks to everyone who liked my links above, I truly hope you had a chance to listen to my lyrics and music and enjoyed it.
JJ3
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25th January 2013 at 3:30 pm
el shaka says:
i was surprised because i expected diversity would be one more affirmative action program. it says that we are one with our gay brothers, our indian brothers and our brothers in whatever physical condition. hmm. someday, the victim mongers and race baiters will fall away and true inclusiveness will flourish.
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25th January 2013 at 4:11 pm
flash says:
’til we out number ‘em.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0MHRu-A_XS0
“Obviously, from avoiding conflict and competition, to single parenting, to low-loyalty to in-group, this r-selected Reproductive Strategy is the psychomotive origin of the Political Left, or as it is known in America, Political Liberalism. It produces a model of human which is cowardly, competition averse, promiscuous, supportive of single parenting, supportive of earlier sexualization of young, and which has no real embrace of loyalty, honor, decency, or any other pro-social trait designed to foster group cohesion and functionality, or success in group competition. Females will become manly, to provision and protect their young, which they raise alone, while men become effete castrati, designed for fleeing and fornication, and capable of little else of meaning. As we see in any society which begins to produce resources freely and copiously, it will gradually begin to trend “r” as time goes on, further highlighting this relationship of resource availability to political psychology, and reproductive strategy.”
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25th January 2013 at 4:21 pm
flash says:
….forward with diversity, comrades.
(CNSNews.com) – Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on Thursday will celebrate the launch of a newly rebranded organization called the “100,000 Strong Foundation,” which aims to have 100,000 American students studying in China by 2014.
Thursday’s event will “underscore the importance of study abroad in China and the benefits to our strategic relationship with China as well as the personal benefits individuals receive through these exciting experiences,” the news release said
She told students, “With every friendship you make, and every bond of trust you establish, you are shaping the image of America projected to the rest of the world. That is so important. So when you study abroad, you’re actually helping to make America stronger.”
http://cnsnews.com/news/article/obama-wants-100000-american-students-study-communist-china
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25th January 2013 at 4:36 pm
ecliptix543 says:
Spending a year studying in China as a high school student would’ve been quite an enlightening experience, regardless of the results. My high school didn’t have an exchange program as such, just a thing for the kids learning German to go for two weeks over the summer.
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25th January 2013 at 11:15 pm
Muck About says:
I did better at cultural travel in high school than most. My sweetie was in French class and I had met her while taking Spanish with her a year earlier.
The French Club was going to New Orleans (a much better destination than France) and I somehow (don’t remember exactly how) conned my way into the French Club trip.. I think I told the principal that I wanted to go along to see if I wanted to transfer into French class or some such absolute BS..
The result was a week long party of superb proportions. We found no less than three stores that would sell a large teenager wine or beer with no questions asked.. (Hid the stuff in a shower). One highlight (of many) of a tipsy trip was dropping a waterfilled trashcan out the 6th floor window of the hotel where we stayed into an alley behind the place to see how high the water would splash after the end of its’ ballistic journey.. It went way high!
You can keep China. Too many Chinese.
MA
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25th January 2013 at 2:27 pm
anotherjuan says:
Mucky – nice anecdote. also “You can keep China. Too many Chinese.” i agree if only because i don’t like to live in a place where there is only one cultural group.
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25th January 2013 at 10:43 pm