Last Monday, Andrew Klaven offered a mini essay that is particularly pertinent at this time of history given the social upheavals witnessed across the country.
I fully expect the numbnuts, wingnuts, and dingbats to immediately condemn his thesis and probably some right wingnuts will immediately applaud it without thinking.
But if we could keep this reasonably civil, I think there are some people who will actually consider whether he is right. Or whether his thesis is flawed and why.
The emphasis is mine and I took some liberties with the paragraphing hoping to make the text more readable.
I fully expect the numbnuts, wingnuts, and dingbats to immediately condemn his thesis and probably some right wingnuts will immediately applaud it without thinking.
But if we could keep this reasonably civil, I think there are some people who will actually consider whether he is right. Or whether his thesis is flawed and why.
The emphasis is mine and I took some liberties with the paragraphing hoping to make the text more readable.
Leftism is bad for people. It makes them awful.
The unwashed, ill-mannered, anti-Semitic, entitled, and now violent mobs littering various parts of the nation under the banner Occupy believe their ideas will lead to a better society but they actually are the society their ideas lead to. Their behavior when compared to the polite, law-abiding, non-racist demonstrations of so-called tea partiers tells you everything you need to know about the end results of statism on the one hand and constitutional liberty on the other.
This is not, of course, to say that every left-winger is a miscreant but rather that the natural, indeed inevitable, result of statism is to produce nations of miscreants. When the state is permitted to make the individuals moral choices, the individual is forced to become either a slave or a criminal; when the state is permitted to redistribute wealth, it chains the citizen into a rigid, two-tiered hierarchy of power rather than freedoms fluid, multi-layered rankings of merit and chance; when the people are taught to be dependent on entitlements, they are reduced to violence when, inevitably, the entitlement well runs dry; when belief in the state usurps every higher creed, the people become apathetic, hedonistic, and uncreative and their culture slouches into oblivion.
I need hardly expend the energy required to lift my finger and point to Europe where cities burn because the unemployable are unemployed or because the hard-working wont fund the debts of the indolent; where violent and despicable Islamism eats away portions of municipalities like a cancer while the authorities do nothing; where nations that once produced historys greatest achievements in science and the arts can now no longer produce even enough human beings to sustain themselves.
Klavan On The Culture » What Leftism Does to People