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From the esoteric and the imperian to the specfic and the political. And then on to aliens! James, Rob and Steve Hayward chat with Patrick Deneen, author of Regime Change: Towards a Postliberal Future. They discuss the deliterious effects of liberty without restraints, the bipartisan quest for progress and consider a reassessment of some of our cherished philosophical forebears. Next fan favorite Andy McCarthy stops by to give his first take on the indictment of Donald Trump.
San Francisco and UFOs are on the docket as well.
Song of the week:
- Sound is Trump responding to the indictments on Truth Social
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The Orks are a serious threat to humanity and we need to embrace genetic engineering and some forms of A.I. to combat them or the Emperor of humanity will end our democracy.
Andy McCarthy sees the equivalence between previous President Trump and current President Biden, but that doesn’t apply to either Senator/SecOfState Clinton or Senator/VP Biden, neither of whom had Presidential authority when they previously were screwing around with national security and documents.
I want to be clear, do they mean Orks, or Orcs?
I don’t think they know.
They need to print more money. Inflationism is good.
The government needs to force people to procreate more W-2 slaves at gun point.
Within 15 years, they invented The Pill, Medicare (without any CBO oversight because they invented the CBO when LBJ lied about the actuarials), abortion, feminism and inflation. By 1973, both parties recognized that it was an actuarial train wreck. Now they are whining about not enough W-2 slaves.
It’s a really fun way to commit national suicide.
What a bunch of geniuses.
100% of UFO conversations go nowhere. It’s a complete waste of time, 100% of the time.
Did you listen? What part of this didn’t you hear?
(Emphasis mine.)
Ork is the planet Mork came from.
Orc is what they call Russian troops in Ukraine because, like J.R.R. Tolkien’s loathsome creations, they’re only good at committing atrocities against civilians.
This is part of what the battle over the public schools is about.
Progressives have few children of their own, which should mean that eventually conservatives would take over demographically, as happened in Israel.
Progressives fight back against this trend by indoctrinating the conservatives’ children away from their parents’ beliefs. (And by opening the border, of course.)
Partly UFOs are honest mistakes by people who are not accustomed to looking at the sky.
Partly, they are hoaxes perpetrated by military pilots, who are mostly young men, and thus prone to this kind of amusement.
Partly they are a money-making scheme.
Hey, welcome back. You’ve been missed!
LOL
I’m only motivated to listen to this one podcast right now.
Oh.
And how did I ever end up in the comment section of a podcast? I should learn to watch where I’m going.
Everyone knows the story of Bonnie and Clyde, how they were ambushed and gunned down on a rural Louisiana highway after two years of robbing small stores and gas stations and committing other crimes, Bonnie at the age of 23; Clyde, 24. It was 1934, years into the Great Depression, and the duo were folk heroes across the country but especially in the sharecropping South, where “the banks” were hated even more than they are today.
What people don’t often know is that Bonnie wrote poems, which she sent to and were published by local papers. One of her poems, “The Trail’s End” (also known as “The End of the Line”), contains the following final stanza: “Someday they will go down together. / And they’ll bury them side by side. / To few it’ll be grief / to the law a relief / but it’s death for Bonnie and Clyde.”
The poem not only foreshadows their bullet-ridden deaths; it also indicates that Bonnie understood that the Barrow gang were outlaws and that, by definition, their lives were a goner. Life wasn’t fair they knew full well, but unlike today, they did not kid themselves into thinking/claiming that they were victims every bit as much as those they robbed or killed were. “They know the law always wins,” Bonnie wrote earlier in the same poem, “but they do not ignore that death is the wages of sin.”
Back then, criminals appreciated that the law was against them. That sense is gone, long gone, never to return. We no longer agree on the rules, much less the framework, and that, it seems to me, is the underlying problem of our age, not the desire for unlimited liberty.
Unlimited freedom can be interpreted as being free from the rules. Unlimited freedom to indulge in promiscuous sex and drugs leads to societal destruction.
Three points:
Yes. It can be interpreted that way, but doing so fails to recognize that true freedom does not mean that one’s preferences, urges, and desires supersede those of others. One is never free to directly hurt others, no matter how compelling one’s emotional dis-ease. IOW, freedom does not work in the vacuum of one’s own musings. Indeed, without the vast middle adhering to the rule of law as intended—or being willing to judge someone’s actions based on that law—freedom devolves into self-delusion, the very thing that’s destroying today’s public spaces. As 18th century American revolutionary poet and pamphleteer Mercy Otis Warren wrote: “True liberty can only result from a virtuous citizenry and cannot be managed or maintained by purely institutional manipulation.” Licentiousness is not freedom gone amuck; it’s character gone amuck.
aka what John Adams said, “Our constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”
Warren was a very close friend of John and Abigail Adams and just as much of a patriot, so you can be sure there were momentous discussions about the need for ethics as the underlying glue of a voluntary collective. You have to have objective, i.e., agreed upon, measures to handle such issues, but our culture/society/polity no longer believes in them, thereby making everyone subject to the erratic whims of others, without meaningful redress, such that chaos rules instead of conscience.
In other words, we’re doomed.
At least until the non-moral and non-religious people die off.
Sergei “Sputnikoff,” who was born in Ukraine when it was part of the USSR and whose parents and brother still live there, says that socialism works only for a moral, honest people. He thinks it might have worked if all people were like his mother, who turned down opportunities to game the system.
I think that this is incorrect, because I think that it is based on a false dichotomy. Please correct me if I’m misinterpreting you.
In my view, private virtue and the legal enforcement of such virtue are mutually reinforcing. This is the Biblical view.
I find Warren’s quote to be nonsensical, in the use of the term “True liberty,” whatever that’s supposed to be. Apparently, it’s something different than letting people do what they want all of the time, which is the true meaning of the term “liberty.” This word “liberty” seems to have rhetorical power for many people. I actually think that it’s the idolatrous false god of the religion of Liberalism.
If by “True liberty,” Warren means “the good society,” then I guess that I agree with the quote, but I find it irrelevant because the word “purely” undermines any significance of this statement to policy matters.
The obvious truth, I think, is that licentiousness — which I’d call wickedness and depravity — is both freedom gone amok and character gone amok. There is no reason to think that it would be one or the other, when it can be both.
It seems to me that the only reason to view these as a dichotomy is to cling to the idea of “liberty” as the preeminent value, rather than virtue and righteousness.
What do you recommend?
I think you should read more of the Bible.
Doesn’t matter how much he reads. His interpretations won’t change. To his defense, almost no one’s interpretation changes.
An interpretation would be an improvement over complete lack of familiarity. You at least have to know something about it in order to interpret it. Probably.
It seems to me that Deneen was attacking a straw man, at least in regard to the classic liberalism of the Founders, when he claimed (around 38:00) that the classical liberalism of the Right views the “problem” as “the exercise of political power”
“and if we could in some ways create a world in which that no longer applied, in which there were an absence of political power, we would see the kind of flourishing of a good society emerge. So it’s kind of in the background like theories of spontaneous order, that in the absence of any kind of public authority, the goodness – the kind of inherent goodness of human beings – would emerge.”
That straw man idea of “the inherent goodness of human beings” bears no resemblance to the classical liberalism of the founding. One only needs to read Federalist paper 51 (“If men were angels, no government would be necessary.” etc). Checks and balances on power are required because humans are not inherently good and “good society” won’t spontaneously emerge from freedom.
Deneen’s fundamental mistake seems to be to suppose that the only alternative is for government’s “political power” to make people good/virtuous. When scrutinized, he has no such solution.
Deneen misses that the Founders thought differently about how to make freedom last (e.g. the quotations already given above). Os Guinness describes their solution as a mutually supporting “Golden Triangle of Freedom”.
Freedom requires virtue.
Virtue requires faith.
Faith requires freedom.
Here’s a great 3.5 minute summary. Also an article, an excellent ~40 minute September 2012 talk (this link skips introduction), and his book A Free People’s Suicide: Sustainable Freedom and the American Future.
What Adams and Warren—both Christians—believed is that the overall framework of a society is dependent on the virtuous hearts and minds of its people, Bible followers or not. I agree.