Trivium Talk
Using Logic, Grammar and Rhetoric to combat the Lies of the Cultural Marxist Thought Police
Saturday, November 14, 2015
Collectivism and the Liberal Manifesto: Major Principles
Thursday, November 12, 2015
Therapeutic Alienation in Black America
"The nut of the issue is that these people want neither justice nor healing. What people like this are seeking is, sadly, not what they claim to be seeking. They seek one thing: indignation for its own sake.
"And that means that the alienation that they are expressing is disconnected from current reality. We can only truly understand black America’s past forty years, its present, and its prospects for the future if we grasp that this kind of disconnection is very common, can have seismic effects upon the fate of a group, and can inhabit even the most brilliant of minds.
However, people do not behave this way to seek money or power. The reason this way of thinking has such a foothold in black American ideology is pain.
To black leaders a hundred years ago, the [Mizzou] episode would have looked as anthropologically baffling as sacrificing virgins. There was, however, one area of shared understanding between black leaders of yore and the [Mizzou] protesters. Centuries of slavery and segregation left a stain on the black American psyche, as well-known to blacks in 1903 as 2015. There are so very many books and articles exploring the damage that the White Man did to black Americans’ self-esteem that I will assume that even people far to the left of me will not even begin to dispute this simple proposition. That insecurity about being black is why this kind of alienation for its own sake— curiously exaggerated, melodramatic, and heedless of reason— is so attractive to so many black Americans today. It assuages a person who is quietly unsure that they are worthy or okay, by giving them something or someone to always feel better than. They seek this because slavery and segregation left black America with a hole in its soul— and why would it have not? But the fact remains that there is little connection between today’s America and their alienation . It survives on its own steam.
This is therapeutic alienation: alienation unconnected to, or vastly disproportionate to, real-life stimulus, but maintained because it reinforces one’s sense of psychological legitimacy, via defining oneself against an oppressor characterized as eternally depraved.
Therapeutic alienation is, itself, blind to race, and it was hardly unknown before the late 1960s. Alienation has always sometimes been as much theatrical as proactive. Therapeutic alienation can be as white as Anton Chekhov’s Masha in The Seagull, “in mourning for her life ” mostly because it is an endlessly interesting way of being. Therapeutic alienation is the pigs in George Orwell’s Animal Farm. Even those most sympathetic to the countercultural movement of the sixties know that there was a goodly amount of performance for its own sake involved. It’s part of how human beings are.
Therefore, the question at hand is why therapeutic alienation acquired such a hold on black America only in the sixties. Insecurity alone could not have been the reason. Therapeutic alienation was not as widespread or influential in black America in 1903, or 1943, or even 1963, the year of the March on Washington— at which times black people had plenty of clear and present reasons to feel insecure. Back in the day, the idea that it was progressive to obsessively tabulate black failure and propose that the only solution was for whites to become blind to race was rare to unknown in leading black ideology. Those who purported that blacks were incapable of surmounting the obstacles were generally tarred as defeatist— witness the reaction of much of the black punditocracy to Richard Wright’s work. Most blacks were more interested in fighting the concrete barrier of legalized discrimination than the abstract psychological happenstance of racism.
Two new conditions were necessary for alienation among blacks to so often drift from its moorings in the concrete and become the abstract, hazy “race thing” that whites just “don’t get.”
One condition was that blacks had to be prepared to embrace therapeutic alienation, and ironically, this could only have been when conditions improved for blacks. When racism was omnipresent and overt, it would have been psychological suicide for blacks to go around exaggerating what was an all-too-real problem." John McWhorter, Winning The Race: Beyond the Crisis in Black America
Monday, November 9, 2015
Natural Law, Free Will and the Non-Aggression Principle
1) Racism is ordinary, not aberrational. This falsely assumes that Evil (racism) is ordinary and the norm, not Good. Evil is not necessary. The only people who believe that Evil must exist in order for people to recognize the Good are self-loathing and lack self-respect. Claiming that racism is an ordinary state of experiencing life as a minority encourages blacks to distrust and blame whites. It caters to those who embrace only emotional rhetoric (Right Brain imbalance) and not empirical facts. Critical race theory also serves as a guilt mechanism for whites in order to extract apologies for "invisible" wrongs that they can not perceive due to "White Privilege".2) "Interest Convergence" is when racism advances the interests of both white "elites" and white "working class people" so large segments of society don't do anything to "eradicate" it. This is another false assumption based in a false Reality, for it again, generalizes a whole 'race' of people which is disingenuous and dangerous. This tenant of CRT is based on Gramsci's theory of Cultural Hegemony and belief in Historicism. Cultural Hegemony states that cultural values of the bourgeois are based on folklore, popular culture and religion, therefore those needed to be deconstructed and the the proletariat create their own separate culture. Historicism is the theory that the knowledge of the world is not derived from our relation to objective reality, but rather from social relations between the bearers of those concepts. As a result there is no such thing as "human nature" or "natural law", which segways to the third tenant:3) Race is a "social construction", which purports that race is a product of social "thought" and "relations", not objective, inherent, or fixed. Race corresponds to no biological or genetic reality. This last tenet completely obliterates the entire Left Brain Hemisphere (the Sacred Masculine) and is an example of extreme Right Brain (Feminine) Pathological Imbalance. There can be no truth or balance in a theory if one side of the Brain is completely ignored. For more reading on genetics and differences between race, refer to Taboo by John Entine and The Bell Curve by Charles Murray.
Saturday, November 7, 2015
Is "Institutionalized Racism" the Problem in the Black Community? Part 1: The Family
I now would like to address the contention that black & minority socioeconomic problems are due to "Racism" and that the Criminal Justice System is "Racist".
When one blames Racism (white supremacy) for the issues in the black and minority community such as poverty, crime, poor education, high incarceration rates, one implies several things:
1) One is taking away moral agency for an entire group of peoples and the fact that people make choices because of Free Will, which implies that blacks and minorities are unable to suceed by their own merits
2) It ignores other massive influential factors and imputs into an extremely complicated socioeconomic issue such as single parent homes and an epidemic of fatherlessness.
3) The fact that unjust laws (not racist laws) such as prohibition create abusive enforcers and incentivize arrests and imprisonment for every citizen. The War on Drugs is not inherently "racist".
First, I am going to address problems with the Family and fatherlessness.
Virtually every major social pathology, violent crime, drug and alcohol abuse, truancy, and teen pregnancy is strongly associated with fatherlessness. A majority of prisoners, juvenile deliquents, high school dropouts come from fatherless homes. [1] The prevalency of deliquency among children from broken homes is 10-15% higher. [2] An estimated 70 percent of the juveniles in state reform institutions, 72 percent of adolescent murderers, and 60 percent of America's rapists grew up without fathers.[3] These statistics apply for all races. The connection of social pathologies with fatherless homes is so strong that some researchers have concluded that the likelihood of children's involvement in crime is determined by the extent of both parents' involvement in their children's lives, rather than income or race. [4]
To address the black community specifically, "Unfortunately, many in the black community embraced the liberal/progressive social scientist view, that all the aforementioned negative outcomes are results of external factors, like systematic racism, discriminatory laws, an unjust criminal justice system, and glass ceilings in the marketplace to name a few.
While those factors would have been undeniable in our Nations’ not too distant past, and I cannot deny that they still exist in some small pockets of our society. Never the less; to zero in on them in our post-civil rights era with complete disregard of the glaring internal factors (family breakdown) is socially dishonest and scientifically lazy." [5]
According to government statistics, 72 percent of African-American children are born to unmarried mothers. Compared with 17 percent of Asians, 29 percent of whites, 53 percent of Hispanics and 66 percent of Native Americans were born to unwed mothers in 2008. Nearly 5 million black children, or 54 per cent, live in a one-parent, matriarchal family.
"A report from the Institute for American Values Center for Marriage and Families notes that over the past 50 years, “the percentage of black families headed by married couples declined from 78 percent to 34 percent.”
In the 30 years from 1950 to 1980, households headed by black women who never married jumped from 3.8 per thousand to 69.7 per thousand." [6]
Linda Chavez, the former head of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission argues that the “chief cause of poverty today among blacks is no longer racism: it is the breakdown of the traditional family.” Many studies have shown that single parent households are more likely to be in poverty or close to it because of the splitting of incomes to 2 households instead of 1 family household.
Juan Williams, often accused of “blaming the poor” states: “They say this answer puts pressure on the poor. They say this with a straight face, even though nearly 70 percent of black children are born to single women, damning a high number of them to poverty, bad schools, and bad influences. They say this knowing that in 1964, in a far more hostile and racist America, 82 per cent of black households had both parents in place and close to half of those households owned a business.” [7]
Distinguised black economist Walter Williams said, "It does the poor no favors to blame their problems on racism, which has been diminishing as the pathologies got worse. In 1940, the black illegitimacy rate was around 14 percent. Now, it’s 75 percent. In 1870, right after slavery, 70 to 80 percent of black families were intact. Now only 30 percent of black kids live in two-parent families. Some 51 percent of homicide victims are black, as are 95 percent of their killers. You can’t blame this on white people. The rotten schools black kids attend are mostly in cities where black adults are in control and spending a lot of taxpayers’ money on those schools.” [8]
Faced with these sobering facts it is disingenious to deny the effect of fatherlessness and illegitimacy on the black community and it does more harm than good to ignore these facts because of "Policital Correctness". I will continue this essay in a subsequent email.
For further research and reading on fatherlessness:
1. http://www.fathersforlife.org/fatherhood/fatherlessness_table_contents.htm
2. http://www.ncpa.org/pub/st267?pg=3
References:
1. Father Facts (Lancaster, Pennsylvania: National Fatherhood Initiative, 1996); Cynthia Daniels, ed., Lost Fathers: The Politics of Fatherlessness in America (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998).
2. L. Edward Wells and Joseph H. Rankin, “Families and Delinquence: A Meta-Analysis of the Impact of Broken Homes,” Social Problems, vol. 38, no. 1 (1991).
3. Allen Beck, Susan Kline and Lawrence Greenfield, Survey of Youth in Custody 1987 (U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics, September 1988; Dewey Cornell et al., “Characteristics of Adolescents Charged with Homicide,” Behavioral Sciences and the Law, vol. 5, 1987, pages 11-23; Nicholas Davidson, “Life Without Father,” Policy Review, 1990.
4. Elaine Ciulla Kamarck and William Galston, Putting Children First: A Progressive Family Policy for the 1990s, 1990, Progressive Policy Institute.
5. http://thyblackman.com/2012/06/16/fatherlessness-the-disease-thats-decimated-the-black-community-now-threatens-the-whole-nation/
6. http://www.reengageinc.org/research/IAV_Brief6.pdf
7. "Studies reflect the Damage of the One Parent Fatherless Family", http://www.commdiginews.com/life/studies-reflect-the-damage-of-the-one-parent-fatherless-family-17573/
8. "Walter Williams", http://econfaculty.gmu.edu/wew/vita.html
Thursday, October 29, 2015
Cultural Marxism: Converting "Dissidents"
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2. Guilt - Constantly remind whites about the horrors perpetrated by the colonialists & slave owners in America's past and blame them for poverty and crime in minority communities.
3. Self-betrayal - The person begins to accept the guilt from being constantly reminded of it and surrounded by others who have already confessed.
4. Breaking point - The person finally succumbs to the mental assault and horrible feelings of guilt. They will do and say anything to relieve the pain.
5. Leniency - Now the person has suffered and agonized long enough, they deserve a short reprieve. A reward for suffering.
6. The compulsion to confess - The person is supported by the community to "come out" and "own" his/her "guilt" and be accepted.
7. The channeling of guilt - It's "noble" to admit guilt and now they see it in others.
8. Re-education, logical dishonoring - The person is now taught Critical Race Theory as fact, and embrace the illogical education they previously rejected.
9. Progress and Harmony
10. Final confession and rebirth
To a logical Libertarian conservative or just a regular person who values personal freedom, wants to be left alone, respects others choices and doesn't want to "change" anyone's belief system and thus is not in the thrall of the "progressive" mindset, this mentality is frightening and dangerous. To us, we think, "Who in their right mind could want to police peoples' very thoughts? Who desires more control over peoples lives? How can they not just see and understand the facts I'm presenting" Below is a review of the book, The Liberal Mind: The Psychological Causes of Political Madness.
"For years I have tried to discuss rationally with liberals/socialists. The only result I could get was to doubt my arguments, no matter how solid they were, because reason didn't seem powerful enough to move them. I could see that the liberal agenda was economically unsound and even against the basic facts of human nature. Just when I was giving up any possibility of ever understanding the liberal mind and its irrational assaults on reason and human nature, I came across Dr. Rossiter's book.These are people who literally want to control what you choose to think and do, while at the same time claiming they are the "tolerant" ones, fighting for the freedoms of the oppressed, poor, and minorities.
For the first time I could confirm a long held impression that liberals have some problem in their way of thinking. The Liberal Mind convincingly states that what appears to be just normal people worried about real social and political problems is in fact a neurosis which manifests itself in trying to manipulate those who just want to live their lives autonomously and cooperatively by attacking their freedom. Dr. Rossiter gives a complete description of signs, symptoms and causes of this neurosis. And a didactical one, for he emphasizes and repeats key concepts all through the book, so that when introducing new concepts the fundamentals are never out of sight.
Anyone who still understands man as an autonomous and cooperative being must read this book. The Liberal Mind is a wonderful guide through the sophisms the liberal neurosis creates in the mind of those affected by it, even if the liberal agenda has already dominated the mentality of almost a whole country. "
The Liberal Mind is the first in-depth examination of the major political madness of our time: The radical left’s efforts to regulate the people from cradle to grave. To rescue us from our troubled lives, the liberal agenda recommends denial of personal responsibility, encourages self-pity and other-pity, fosters government dependency, promotes sexual indulgence, rationalizes violence, excuses financial obligation, justifies theft, ignores rudeness, prescribes complaining and blaming, denigrates marriage and the family, legalizes all abortion, defies religious and social tradition, declares inequality unjust, and rebels against the duties of citizenship. Through multiple entitlements to unearned goods, services and social status, the liberal politician promises to ensure everyone’s material welfare, provide for everyone’s healthcare, protect everyone’s self-esteem, correct everyone’s social and political disadvantage, educate every citizen, and eliminate all class distinctions. Radical liberalism thus assaults the foundations of civilized freedom. Given its irrational goals, coercive methods and historical failures, and given its perverse effects on character development, there can be no question of the radical agenda's madness. Only an irrational agenda would advocate a systematic destruction of the foundations on which ordered liberty depends. Only an irrational man would want the state to run his life for him rather than create secure conditions in which he can run his own life. Only an irrational agenda would deliberately undermine the citizen’s growth to competence by having the state adopt him. Only irrational thinking would trade individual liberty for government coercion, sacrificing the pride of self-reliance for welfare dependency. Only a madman would look at a community of free people cooperating by choice and see a society of victims exploited by villains. [From The Liberal Mind; The Psychological Causes of Political Madness by Lyle H. Rossiter, Jr., MD]
[Relevant Links]
Tuesday, October 27, 2015
Lower Taxes = Higher Revenue (No, really!): The Laffer Curve
A lower tax rate on a large tax base generates MORE revenue.
"Supply-side economics was never just about slashing tax rates. As Laffer told me in a recent interview: “We also emphasized sound money, free trade and deregulation. It was a package of reforms to clear away the obstacles to increased economic output.” [2]
[http://www.heritage.org/~/media/images/reports/2004/bg1765/figure5.ashx] |
[http://www.heritage.org/~/media/images/reports/2004/bg1765/figure7.ashx] |
"Prior to the tax cut, the economy was choking on high inflation, high Interest rates, and high unemployment. All three of these economic bellwethers dropped sharply after the tax cuts. The unemployment rate, which peaked at 9.7 percent in 1982, began a steady decline, reaching 7.0 percent by 1986 and 5.3 percent when Reagan left office in January 1989.
Inflation-adjusted revenue growth dramatically improved. Over the four years prior to 1983, federal income tax revenue declined at an average rate of 2.8 percent per year, and total government income tax revenue declined at an annual rate of 2.6 percent. Between 1983 and 1986, federal income tax revenue increased by 2.7 percent annually, and total government income tax revenue increased by 3.5 percent annually.The most controversial portion of Reagan's tax revolution was reducing the highest marginal income tax rate from 70 percent (when he took office in 1981) to 28 percent in 1988. However, Internal Revenue Service data reveal that tax collections from the wealthy, as measured by personal income taxes paid by top percentile earners, increased between 1980 and 1988--despite significantly lower tax rates."
Sources:"Seldom in economics does real life conform so conveniently to theory as this capital gains example does to the Laffer Curve. Lower tax rates change people's economic behavior and stimulate economic growth, which can create more--not less--tax revenues."
1. http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2004/06/the-laffer-curve-past-present-and-future
2. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-laffer-curve-at-40-still-looks-good/2014/12/26/4cded164-853d-11e4-a702-fa31ff4ae98e_story.html
3. Supply-Side Economics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supply-side_economics