Month: November 2007

Mind-nourishing food for thought and good discussion on the topic over at Bill Whittle’s place.

I’m back from New York, by the way, and hope to soon make time to post pictures and thoughts from my November 23rd visit to the World Trade Center site. Stay tuned…

I’m iPhone-blogging from the World Trade Center site, a lump in my throat as I write this. This is the first time I’ve been back here since two weeks after the 9/11 attacks, when large debris was still being cleared and one couldn’t get closer than a couple of blocks. Blogger doesn’t yet appear to support image posting from the iPhone, so I’ll have to wait until I her home to add pictures (of which I’ve taken many).

Overall feeling of deep sadness coupled with searching for that glimmer of hope that we will finally rebuild. I just wish it wasn’t taking so long…

Update 9/21/2008: I’ve finally posted my pictures from this day. Click here to view the album.

This recent comment following Dr. Helen’s post “Time for Another Boston Tea Party?”, struck me as aptly put:

There are 24 hours in a day, 7 days in a week. We all get that, rich or poor. What one does with that time is up to that individual. 3% of the population, on average, has a library card. It’s free! The contents of a library are free to borrow! The cumulative knowledge of mankind is at hand, free! There are librarians there to help you, if you don’t understand the Dewey Decimal System. Free!

All men are created equal. After that, it’s up to each and every one of us. The reason one is rich, one is poor, one lives in a huge house, and one lives in an 8×10 cell is what’s between his ears. Always has been, always will be. Emotional IQ as well as intelligence IQ. A fair tax is a killer idea. If it’s fair. That is, as long as fairness is not the same as beauty, being in the eye of the beholder.

I am far and away from being wealthy. I believe in paying the goose that lays the golden eggs. It is good to help those who cannot help themselves. Food, clothing, roof over the head, help to get back on your feet. Then the “training wheels” need to come back off.

I have great sympathy for those who truly struggle, and believe those of us who are better off should do what we can to help others lift themselves up out of debilitating poverty. But if we value this magnificent free society that allows the production of this wealth that we are so fortunate to enjoy, we must do so by means of voluntary good that is consistent with the free society’s principles, rather than by coercive means, and we mustn’t allow the perpetuation of a “victim” mentality, or a soft bigotry of low expectations, to substitute for doing real, practical good.

Bill Whittle eloquently yet succinctly addressed the issue of poverty, what to do about it, and what not to do about it in his 2003 essay “Trinity” — highly recommended, and always worth another reading.

Via Instapundit: Learning to love the prosperous.

The prosperous are a precious thing, and we have tons of them in America. The more, the better. I know that not everyone pursues prosperity: many pursue other goals instead. But the more wealthy people we have, the better.

Wealthy people do not ask the government (meaning their neighbors) for stuff, they live independent lives, they donate time and money to charities, they tend to be civic-minded and grateful, they “ask not what America can do” for them, they educate their kids, they spend money and keep the retail economy rolling, they invest in businesses which grow and create jobs, etc etc.

Without the estate tax, we would have many more wealthy in America than we have now. And if more people had good old Yankee thrift and the backbone to resist every temptation, we’d have even more wealthy people. Wealth is not the most important thing in life, but private assets are the foundation of being a Free Man or Woman.

The goal of American policies should be to help create as many wealthy people and families as possible.

Well said, I thought.

Just in time for Halloween… Scary tales of ideological indoctrination at the University of Delaware (hat tip: Instapundit, with more here).

Many universities try to indoctrinate students, but the all-time champion in this category is surely the University of Delaware. With no guile at all the university has laid out a brutally specific program for “treatment” of incorrect attitudes of the 7,000 students in its residence halls. The program is close enough to North Korean brainwashing that students and professors have been making “made in North Korea” jokes about the plan. The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) has called for the program to be dismantled.

Residential assistants charged with imposing the “treatments” have undergone intensive training from the university. The training makes clear that white people are to be considered racists – at least those who have not yet undergone training and confessed their racism. The RAs have been taught that a “racist is one who is both privileged and socialized on the basis of race by a white supremacist (racist) system. The term applies to all white people (i.e., people of European descent) living in the United States, regardless of class, gender, religion, culture, or sexuality.”

My response, which in hindsight summed up my immediate thoughts on the issue pretty well:

Chilling. And I thought the level of attempted indoctrination was bad when I went to college in the mid-90s. Clearly the situation has worsened since then.

Perhaps saddest of all is that such ideological, thought-police badgering is deeply counterproductive to the ostensibly noble causes of humanity’s advancement that these people claim to champion. Evidently the self-congratulatory thrill of claiming the mantle of moral superiority, and the timeless passion for power over others (I’m thinking here of Lord Acton’s renowned observation), takes precedence for these frauds over the actual achievement of real good or elevation of the human mind and spirit. As a case in point, I consider myself a supporter on classical liberal/libertarian principles of legally allowing homosexual marriage (or civil unions, as may prove a more practical compromise), very much despite the similarly-minded pedantic, sanctimonious cries of “homophobia” that seem to befall most anyone who doesn’t toe the P.C. thought-and-speeh-correctness line to the precise letter these days. (I often wonder how much necessary traction the Civil Rights movement would have gained among mainstream America had the public discourse been dominated by similar scolding cries of “negrophobia” or the like.) The “oppressed” that the academic ideologues who peddle this stuff claim to speak for are done no good whatsoever by such disgraceful, self-serving conduct. They are pushing their extreme agenda farther and farther, and have, I certainly hope, finally reached the point where they’ll begin to be met with a substantial and well-deserved backlash of public opinion and consequential deprivation of funding.

…but, hey, what do I know? I’m just a white heterosexual male-of-European-descent member of the bourgeois-subjectivist-individualist-captilast exploiter class (and probably sexist and racist by default too). Please disregard the foregoing as irrelevant. ;-)

Boo hiss, University of Delaware. Hurrah for FIRE’s steadfast defesne of real, meaningful intellectual liberty. And thank you for publicizing this important issue.

I don’t have any children myself yet, but I can’t help but worry what the state of affairs will be like when my future kids go off to college. I’m glad for the good work that the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education has been doing to help counteract the apparently substantial thought-diversity problem that exists on many U.S. college campuses.